Novels

State of Independence, published in 1993, was the first full-length novel I wrote, but before it came a number of novellas, maybe nine or ten if you include my deranged private-circulation-only sci-fi cycle The Life and Opinions of Larry The Dog. I wrote State of Independence, a novel about a boy coming out of the closet, to force myself to come out of the closet, and it achieved this end. I still like it.

I didn’t have an agent and was a bit clueless, so I did the obvious thing, which was to put it in an envelope and send it off to the Gay Men’s Press, who promptly published it without any fuss. If only life were always that simple!

My only quibble was with the cover, a piece of outlandish kitsch by an artist who plainly hadn’t read the novel, and for many years I felt embarrassed by it. Now, of course, I wallow in the authenticity of the whole episode. They printed an edition of five thousand and it was available in bookshops for many years. Certain people were a bit sniffy about the whole gay publishing thing, but you know what? I happen to know it sold twenty times more copies than certain Booker Prize shortlistees of recent years.

Watch That Man was a novella I wrote in 1989 on the eve of my thirtieth birthday, while experiencing what the Germans call Torschlusspanik - fear of options closing down with the advance of the years. It was written to get me a commercial career as a writer, and indeed it turned out to be my most commercially successful venture when it eventually became the movie The Man Who Knew Too Little (see my films page). It was only ever published in Germany, in 1997, as Der Coolste Killer. The style of the storytelling is very simple and laconic; I suspect it reads quite well in German.