John MacLachlan Gray

Profile by Joe Wiebe
posted December 20, 2005
(as appeared in the Victoria Times-Colonist, August 17, 2003)

I meet up with John MacLachlan Gray in his comfortable home in one of Vancouver’s more affluent neighbourhoods. The house, he says, was “paid for by Billy Bishop and renovated by Rock & Roll,” his two most successful musicals. We sit in his tiny, dark office, which is barely big enough for both of us. He perches on a chair with his bare feet tucked under him and his coffee cup within easy reach. The alcove’s walls are lined with books; during our conversation, he periodically reaches around me to find a particular book to show me. This writing room, clearly, is his sanctum.

His desk is empty. He has just sent off the first draft of the sequel to The Fiend in Human, which came out in the spring and has garnered critical acclaim both here and in the UK. Fiend is a thriller set in the back alleys of 1852 London, so approval from British critics is important to Gray, especially since he plans on staying in Victorian England for at least his next two books.

Not bad for a retirement project. A few years ago, Gray, though only in his 50s, decided to quit the theatre after a 25-year career that brought him to Broadway, London’s West End and Canada’s premier stages. Along the way, he earned a Governor-General’s Award, a Golden Globe, and induction into the Order of Canada. His main calling card, of course, is Billy Bishop Goes to War, the world-famous musical revue which he wrote and performed with Eric Peterson.

His decision to give up theatre was “inevitable,” Gray says. “Musicals weren’t selling,” and he had already achieved the sort of success that most theatre artists only dream of. “I don’t want to do Broadway. I’ve been to Broadway and I don’t want to go there again. It was the best thing for me that we didn’t last on Broadway or I’d be an old drunk by now. I wasn’t meant for it.”

While on tour with Billy Bishop back in the early 1980s, Gray wrote a novel called Dazzled “as a solution to staying sane during the day.” He describes it as a media satire that drew considerably from his own life. Following that debut, he tried to write another novel, but was unsuccessful. “With musicals,” he says, “I was quite clear in my mind that I was writing about something other than myself, but with books, I wasn’t for a long time.”

When Gray sat down to write another novel as his retirement project, he set his sights on a genre he genuinely liked to read: the literary thriller. His first attempt, A Gift for the Little Master, published in 2000, was critically well-received but didn’t exactly fly off the shelves. It did, however, impress the publishing world enough that his agent was able to land him a big deal for The Fiend in Human based solely on a hundred pages of the first draft. The way he talks about it, it sounds like he wishes he had returned to fiction sooner.

“You don’t have to ask anyone’s permission for it to be a novel. It may be that you are the only to person to ever read it, but it’s still a novel. You write a script, it’s not a play yet until someone agrees to actually put it on the stage, so you have to get someone else’s permission for it to be what it is.” Now well into his third novel since switching his focus to fiction, he has definitely found his niche.

For the present, that niche is the seedy underworld of 1850s London populated by prostitutes, murderers, and drug-addicted journalists. The Fiend in Human follows Edmund Whitty, correspondent for The Falcon, London’s second-best weekly tabloid, in his quest for “crisp copy” and enough money to hold off his creditors and supply himself with the various drug concoctions and spiced gin he requires to get through the day. Whitty is a talented journalist, but his addictions have forced him to exist on the fine edge of poverty in an era when poverty could shave decades off one’s lifespan.

As the novel opens, a man convicted for several grisly murders of prostitutes awaits the gallows. In the weeks prior to the arrest, Whitty secured himself some modest success by giving the serial killer a name: “Chokee Bill”. With the murderer behind bars, Whitty is desperate for a new story. But the man due to hang for the murders claims innocence, so when Whitty learns that more women have been killed in Chokee Bill’s signature manner, he sets out to unmask the real “fiend in human form.”

Whitty’s motives, however, are not entirely honourable. First and foremost, he seeks a good story that will sell papers. That justice may be served along the way is incidental. In this manner, Gray’s protagonist is a truly modern hero, complete with weaknesses and shortcomings. This allows readers to identify with him, but he is still a man of his era. Indeed, Gray feels “it’s a cheat to create a character who is superior because he has contemporary attitudes.”

That is not a concern here. Probably the greatest strength of The Fiend in Human is the obvious depth of research that went into creating the Victorian England Gray describes. His characters’ attitudes and motivations feel natural, and their words are pitch-perfect. Locales are described so vividly that after some of the book’s more squalid descriptions, readers might feel like showering. Indeed, at one point in our conversation, Gray declares merrily, “I love doing squalor!”

Gray enjoyed researching the era, and modestly downplays his success in re-creating it: “There’s a bit of an illusion. If you get a really good detail, it looks like it’s the tip of the iceberg of what you know, but it’s really the whole iceberg. I know about Portland Place, but don’t ask me about a street over. 1852 I know but don’t ask me about 1853.” Perhaps, but Gray also pored over period maps and books while writing The Fiend in Human; he even travelled to London and “walked the entire book.”

In the Victorian era, Gray sees many parallels with our contemporary world. As an example, he points out the distinct separation of men and women. Women were kept hidden away like precious treasures, only to be discarded like garbage if they were deemed to be “fallen.” Gray claims that “40% of single women had to turn to prostitution in 1852 London to make ends meet, and it would be pretty close to 100% if they had a child out of wedlock.”

Elaborating, he says, “You look at the whole notion of the fallen women, which really imbued the whole thing on the downtown east side which was going on when I was writing Fiend. It wasn’t OK that they were being hurt, but it was seen as a kind of inevitability because they were ‘fallen.’ If it had been in Kerrisdale, it would have been quite a different matter.”

The Fiend in Human should gather an audience as word-of-mouth travels from reader to reader. It is a riveting thriller with strong characters and an engaging plot. It might not get nominated for any literary awards, but Gray is not much concerned about that anyway. “I’ve never quite fit into the capital-A Art kind of thing. Billy Bishop–they call it art now, but they sure didn’t when it opened. You don’t want people to open a book or go into that theatre with that faint depression that you’re about to undergo Art. It’s nice to have that slight anticipation that Dickens gave people. You open the book and off you go.” Gray has not missed this target by much.

If all goes well, a sequel to The Fiend in Human will come out next spring. Once again, the protagonist is Edmund Whitty, though the events take place six years later. Set in Oxford, it involves the advent of photography and the accompanying arrival of pornography, or more specifically, child pornography. As Gray points out, “pornography starts with photography. A drawing is erotica because it comes out of somebody’s head. A photograph comes out of the world. It actually happened.”

The other interesting tidbit Gray reveals about the sequel is that one of its main characters is based on Lewis Carroll, the now-famous author of Alice in Wonderland. The name is changed because “Lewis Carroll was not involved in anything like what he’s involved in here. Everything about it is true to Lewis Carroll, but it’s like I’m casting him in a play or a story.”

Right now, between drafts and waiting for word from his editor, Gray is bereft: “You send it off and it takes a couple of months before it does the rounds, and there’s this deep emptiness, this deep, cavernous kind of feeling.” So, while he waits for his editor’s notes, he will try to keep busy “pounding nails up in Sechelt.” Anything to distract himself from the vividly engaging world that must be so alive in his mind.

Joe Wiebe is a Vancouer writer who is working on his first novel.