An Interview with Mike Carey

Words: Joel Meadows

We meet in the ordinary North London suburban surroundings of North Finchley, a halfway point between where both of us live. Mike Carey is dressed in a black leather jacket, T-shirt and jeans and we make our way to the obligatory Starbucks in the London winter weather. We get settled and begin our interview.

Carey has only been a fulltime writer since 2000: before that, he was a teacher. But in those seven years, he’s achieved a great deal: after a false start at Caliber in the 1990s, his break came at Vertigo with the three part Sandman Presents: Lucifer series, which led to an ongoing series with the character. Sipping his coffee, the writer seems to be happy with his current position: “On the whole it’s still great but there are times when it gets a bit fraught like last year,” he admits slightly nervously. “I took on too many projects and just about kept abreast of them, so by the time it got to the end of the year, I was really tired. But by and large I love the freedom. I love what I’m doing and I count my blessings regularly.”

2006 saw Carey make the leap from the comic page to the novel with the publication of his first two novels, The Devil You Know and Vicious Circle. Featuring freelance exorcist Felix Castor (John Constantine with better social skills), the switch to prose is something that the writer is very pleased with.

“It felt very good and it was always something I wanted to do. I was writing uncommissioned novels before I ever wrote a comic script, so it was a longstanding ambition. In a weird way, it established my credentials with my friends and family because there’s a lot of people I know who don’t regard writing for comics as proper writing, so suddenly they’re saying to me: ‘Oh my God, you’re a novelist!’”

Published by Time Warner’s Orbit publishers in the UK, Carey had pitched a novel to Orbit’s Earthlight imprint, which had been accepted, and had struck up a relationship with its editor Darren Nash. Unfortunately the imprint had been  cancelled but, it turned out, Nash was a big comics fan which kept the door open for Carey at Orbit as he recalls: “We used to regularly meet up, have a meal or drink and talk comics. In one of those conversations, I was talking about Hellblazer while he was talking about Anita Blake by Laurel Hamilton and we both agreed how cool it would be if there was a UK equivalent.

If there was a book that used the dark fantasy palette of Hellblazer, in that sort of supernatural crime milieu, we both thought that might work. So I pitched Castor as a result of that conversation. The book had a character with noirish overtones: Castor is an exorcist but he’s a gumshoe exorcist. He acts and dresses in many ways like a Raymond Chandler protagonist. So it would be a story that would straddle supernatural and crime fiction in that sort of way.”

So he pitched a detailed breakdown for the first book and more general outlines for the second and third books. Castor has done very well, so well in fact that, with the first three titles out, the publisher has agreed on another two. He’s also being sent on a massive US book signing tour this year to promote the books in the States.

The Castor books are set in London and sometimes it seems as if research can hijack a writer’s schedule but, for Carey, the research is all part of the fun and something that never pushes him off course.

“For me, the research is part of the fun and so I don’t even try to resist the temptation of using places I like to visit,” he tells me between a bite of sandwich. “I write Castor in very much the same way that I wrote Constantine. Largely I write him as me, I give him my back story and my stamping grounds.”

Also, the tight deadline imposed on him for the first Castor books meant that he didn’t have the luxury to go off on a tangent with his research, which emphasises his focus as a writer.

“I didn’t have to make a conscious effort to rein myself in because I had such little time and limits were imposed on me.”

But he does have a theory about the role of research in writing, which he shares with me: “Within that though, there are two kinds of settings or elements that you bring into your story. There are some that are purely incidental, they’re there to establish a mood and then there are others that are essential, like the archive in the first book. That is based heavily on a real archive, which I visited, and I decided that I would use it because it was cool and there were so many things you could do with it in the story. My approach with research is to take as much as is necessary to move the story forward.”

But he hasn’t abandoned comics. Far from it, as Carey writes ongoing series Crossing Midnight for DC’s Vertigo imprint. The genesis of the title lies in material that the writer enjoys watching and reading, as he tells me: “A lot of the influences on it are Japanese cinema and Japanese comic books. I’ve been reading Hideshi Hino, the guy who did Uzamaki, and Junji Ito and I was struck by the fact that these were genuinely terrifying and genuinely disturbing comics. It’s relatively rare in the Western market to have horror comics that are really frightening. Alan Moore famously did it with Swamp Thing and I think Neil Gaiman does it with some of the one-offs in Sandman.”

When he began planning Crossing Midnight, he had very definite ideas for it.

“I wanted a book that would play with some of the more interesting aspects of Japanese folklore rather than Japanese religion. The cultural stuff that we’re talking about is not to do with Shinto, it’s folk beliefs that go back centuries,” he argues. “Because there is this fascinating idea that everything is inhabited and everything has a spirit but also there’s this idea that there are thousands of different kinds of supernatural beings who live with us and are around us all the time.”

It’s obvious that the writer has gone into a lot of detail with his research on the series and he tells me that the title contains clues to the direction it’s going to take: “Crossing Midnight: crossing implies transition and it is a coming-of-age story but it’s also a crossing between the mundane and the fabulous worlds. Also a crossing is a journey and a quest and so it’s going to play out with one of the twins going in search of the other. It’s also about a journey of redemption and self-sacrifice. So it does have a lot of mythological underpinnings.”

Carey has also written two books for DC’s newest imprint, Minx, which is aimed at teenage girls. The first title, Regifters, reunites Mike with the team responsible for 2004’s My Faith In Frankie: Sonny Liew and Marc Hempel. He seems genuinely excited that he got to work with them again, as he explains over another cup of tea: “It was great getting that team together again because the chemistry worked so well with Frankie, so the chance to go back for another pass was irresistible and, I think that, if anything, Regifters is a stronger story than Frankie. It’s a different proposition in that there’s no fantasy elements in it whatsoever, in fact it’s all very much set in the real world.”

Carey has decided to set Regifters in Koreatown in Los Angeles and his central protagonist is a Korean-American girl nicknamed Dixie, who is a Haikkido student. But here he gets to explore a different sort of world to that in Crossing Midnight.

“Haikkido is a big cultural thing in Korea because when the country was occupied by Japan, they weren’t allowed to practice it and so it’s a part of their cultural identity. Dixie wants to go in for this nationwide tournament which costs $100 to enter but she has found another use for that money. But there are free places to be won, so she convinces herself that she can win one of these free places. It’s a martial arts rom com. It was planned as a graphic novel from the start, 144 pages, so it’s a bigger canvas than the 88 pages we had for Frankie.”

The second title that Mike is penning for Minx is Confessions of A Blabbermouth and this time he’s not on his own: his daughter Lou has co-written the book with him.

“The blabbermouth in question is a teenage girl again but this time it’s set in London rather than America,” he says. “Tasha lives alone with her mother and her mother has been bringing home a succession of unsuitable boyfriends. Tasha runs a blog and calls herself a blabbermouth because she keeps no secrets. So one day her mother brings home this guy called Jem. He has a daughter of his own from his first marriage and he wants to be a strong father to Tasha. He reckons that her life is directionless and what she needs is somebody to come in and be the force of order in her life. They don’t hit it off at all and then Tasha meets his daughter, who she doesn’t like either. The daughter is very emotionally unavailable and very prissy but she’s going to Tasha’s school, so that forces them into contact with each other.”

But there is something else going on here, as Carey is at pains to point out. He reveals that Tasha believes her mother’s boyfriend is hiding a dark secret but obviously won’t tell us any more...

Read the rest of the Mike Carey interview in the Tripwire Annual...

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