The creator of TV's top cop show Luther has written a spin-off novel. Here, he talks about his odd childhood, and why he is mistaken for a psychopat
Neil Cross: 'It's seen as an accolade to be published as a "literary" writer but, actually, it's fake.' Photograph: Karen Robinson for the Observer
There are worse ways to lurch into your 40s than by being Neil Cross at the moment. Bounce might be a better verb: he's quite a bouncy man, and a terrific conversationalist, even at 9am the morning after a flight back from Canada. There, he'd been working on a few scripts for Guillermo del Toro, into whom he'd bumped by chance in his (Cross's) now home country of New Zealand, where he lives with his Kiwi wife and two children in a barefoot idyll. When he's not redoing Hollywood scripts. Or writing Luther, the last series of which was watched by 7 million, won sterling reviews, is becoming cult viewing in America and could soon be a movie. Or bringing out his first Luther book. There are worse ways to hit 42.
Or 43. Or even 41. Neil can't, actually, quite remember. The thing is, this man was never a predestined s
success story; a good bulk of his life was spent bumming off the dole. Only now, with the gothic grandeur of Luther, and the first (frankly eviscerating) Luther book, The Calling, do we see how this was all a massively creative non-waste of time.
He was born in Bristol those numerically inexact years ago to "ordinary white working-class West Country folk, no books in the house, they were football-obsessed; I'd been a late child". His mother ran away when he was five, returned two years later and waltzed him off to Edinburgh with Mr Derek Cross, who was to become his stepfather and an oddly huge influence.
Full pieve at The Guardian.
Or 43. Or even 41. Neil can't, actually, quite remember. The thing is, this man was never a predestined s
success story; a good bulk of his life was spent bumming off the dole. Only now, with the gothic grandeur of Luther, and the first (frankly eviscerating) Luther book, The Calling, do we see how this was all a massively creative non-waste of time.
He was born in Bristol those numerically inexact years ago to "ordinary white working-class West Country folk, no books in the house, they were football-obsessed; I'd been a late child". His mother ran away when he was five, returned two years later and waltzed him off to Edinburgh with Mr Derek Cross, who was to become his stepfather and an oddly huge influence.
Full pieve at The Guardian.
No comments:
Post a Comment