Interview with
Rags Daniels
Author of
Lallapaloosa
Questions:
R. Murry
Can
you tell me a little about yourself?
Rags Daniels was born into a working class
family, the second of four children in Salford, 1944. He migrated South 1956. Wild and curious, he
ran off to London where he met the majority of the characters he writes
about.
The swinging sixties and early seventies
played a major role in his insatiable thirst for adventure, and against a
backdrop of mini-skirts, mod’s, rockers and Muhammad Ali, bore witness to an
era of crazy fads, culminating in Britain’s first ever woman Prime
Minister in 1979, of whom Lord Acton said, ‘Absolute power corrupts
absolutely,’ and by the end of her era.
Thatcher was case in point. And while the
Nation paddled through rubbish, bodies unburied, strikes, power cuts, spiraling
inflation, limited working weeks, abysmal production, etc. etc., the real money
was going into the pockets of fraudulent corporate boards and City Yuppies.
Groomed to Kill, his first book was written against a backdrop of inner city
poverty and tells of lad who became a government assassin.
He worked
in Norway on timber frame construction where he met John Millen a naval architect
who designed Pearl Harbor after the war. Became a ‘minder’ for his
mother-in-law both on and off his motor yacht in which he and his wife toured
the world. Returned home, attended Brunel University and passed
I.O.C.W. (GB) Inc. exams.
Then he worked for
Borough Architects Dept. He resigned, then got married and built his own house
while running several companies. After constructing a steel mill in India
and a tiger compound in Nepal for the World Wild Life Trust.
Widowed, he returned
to writing and investigative journalism…It is from his diaries of the 60’s and
70’s he wrote POLICY, creating a fictional account of one such tale of
political intrigue, and one for which he was interviewed by MI5.
His book Lallapaloosa
is currently being scripted for the silver screen. He now resides with his son,
an A level English teacher, and Roxzan, his 13 year old adopted granddaughter.
Do
you remember the first story you wrote?
‘POLICY’
Because
it remained on ‘ice’ for eight years, I wrote 30sex Hours, taken from the
transcripts of a bdsm trial.
Were
you inspired by someone or something?
I was asked by a local newspaper to do reviews on
local musical talent, and it escalated from having my own entertainment column,
to writing a mixture of fact and fiction….Or ‘Faction’ as I call it.
‘Lallapaloosa’ is a case in point. It took a year to write including very
lengthy research into the subject, and is told in flashback.
What
do you like about writing a story?
I like the solitude. I write facing a blank wall to
avoid distraction and to maintain ‘the
flow.’ Because once I begin,
especially with dialogue, I tend to live the part. I even go to bed with a
notebook in the event I get a flash of inspiration and need to make a note of
it.
Can
you tell us about your book?
October 8, 1967, 'Che' Ernesto Guevara was
executed... Or so the world believed.
Inspired by a true sequence of
events, ’Lallapaloosa’ tells in flashback the story leading up to the
betrayal and 'capture' of the world’s most famous revolutionary and
master of disguise.
Original, fast moving, and atmospheric to the last
whiff of a Partagas cigar, it begins
thirty years after the event with a series of sinister murders against a
fraternity of retired mercenaries who, having fought alongside 'Che' in the
Congo, grouped for one last mission in the jungles of Bolivia.
For thirty years, Richard Strang, thought he shared
the world’s best kept secret with no one. Then one summer evening, the
tap of a blind man's cane, and a nose for the toasted Cuban leaf, changed all
that.
What
genre best fits for the book?
Adventure/crime thriller
Are
you working on something new at the moment?
I’ve been asked to do sequels to two of my books,
and am considering both.
Do
you have any tips for aspiring writers?
I’m lucky, all my kids have grown up (except one)
and fortunately she enjoys writing too, so we both appreciate the solitude and
silence that enables one to concentrate. Never be afraid to edit one’s work and
to go on a crusade of erasing seemingly
cumbersome passages. It’s not the word count that matters, it’s the quality.
Where
can people go to read your work?
In the words of Michael
Caine: ‘Not a lot of people know this’…But I’ve had three strokes, and the
fight backs have kept me compos mentis. ‘Foxy
Lady’ has just been released, and is a rewrite of POLICY with the following
footnote.
Footnote:
It has since been discovered that almost 20
million pounds of Party funds have gone missing, and which I understand are
still in an offshore account controlled by Sir Horace Duncan and the former
Prime Minister. And that the former Prime Minister stood up for Sir Horace
Duncan, when information was passed to the PM by the Security Services in
relation to Sir Horace’s activities. It was only after considerable pressure
was put on the PM that Sir Horace was removed from his post before
information leaked out.
It is now being assessed
for scripting for a two part TV series.
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