Nick Quantrill: Broken Dreams

It is unwise to resort to stereotypes, but there's no denying that accountant Nick Quantrill is good with numbers and a level-headed sort of chap.

Even when it came to something as creative as writing a novel, Quantrill, to borrow a phrase, did the maths.

_____________________

HOW TO LISTEN

Use the links to the right to:

Play the programme now Download it to your iPod or MP3 player Subscribe to receive all our podcasts automatically, as soon as they're available

_____________________

"Rather than just blindly sending off the manuscript to lots of publishers in the hope that someone would pick it up and decide to publish it, I decided to build a readership," says Quantrill.

"That way I could go to a publisher and say, 'Look, there is a readership already built here on the internet', that way I was giving myself the best chance I could."

And so, methodically, Quantrill set up a website and started putting his work on it. Short stories were well received on the web and attracted compliments, and so, when he approached Kent-based publisher Caffeine Nights last year, he was able to also send a whole raft of positive comments about his writing along with a manuscript.

It is an impressively calculated way to go about things.

Even now, first published book in hand and awaiting the official release date, Quantrill is clearly not the sort to get carried away.

"Clearly, the dream would be to give it all up and write full time, but for now the day job is great and it pays the mortgage. It's also very useful that I spend all day working with numbers, it means when I get home I'm not exhausted from working with words and I can crack on with writing."

Quantrill was not always the focused and driven individual whose novel, Broken Dreams, launches next month.

Hull born and bred, he spent his twenties "basically playing football at the weekends for a local team" and the concept of free time for writing was never really on the cards.

As his twenties neared their end, Quantrill, now 35, decided it was time to do something other than spend his time away from work playing football or recovering from it.

"I realised I was never going to play for England, or even Hull, so I decided to set my mind to writing, something which I had always enjoyed," he says.

He began to study social policy and criminology with the Open University, which gave him a huge amount of help when it came to pursuing the dream of being a writer. He had always enjoyed reading crime fiction so he also started writing stories in his spare time, putting them on his website.

In 2006 he won the Harper Collins Crime Tour short story competition and his readership, via his website, started to grow.

"Studying criminology and doing the Open University degree taught me the discipline needed to write a novel and gave me the idea for a character."

Quantrill had started by telling the story of a police officer in the city, but found he couldn't get inside the head of a serving officer, despite spending time carrying out interviews with members of the police force.

"Once I came up with a new character, I knew how to write the story." That character is Joe Geraghty, a private investigator based in Hull. He is the central character of Broken Dreams and Quantrill, and his publisher, are confident enough in the character to see the words "introducing Joe Geraghty" emblazoned on the cover of the book. "I'm already two-thirds of the way through the next book and I hope that readers are going to be interested enough in the character to want to keep following him," says Quantrill. The book, however, is not just about the private detective. Hull is as much a central character as any human who appears in Broken Dreams.

"I realised that I could write convincingly about Hull, having lived here all my life. Rankin does it with Edinburgh, perhaps I can do it with Hull. The book takes in the history of the fishing industry and how it has been decimated and what that means to the people of Hull and looks at the future of the city's regeneration."

With playwrights like John Godber and Richard Bean, screenwriters like Alan Plater and the most famous literary adopted son of Hull, poet Philip Larkin: you may wonder if there's something in the sea air of the city that makes it a particularly inspiring place to be. "There is a very active literary scene in the city," says Quantrill.

"Hull gets a pretty hard time, but it is a fascinating place. Because it's stuck out on the end of the motorway and people rarely pass through it – it's only a place you come to if you have a reason to be here – it gives the people who live there this curious insularity and a way of looking at themselves."