Kevin Doherty called time on a successful and lucrative career in marketing to make good on his lifelong dream of writing.  Doherty's well-loved historical thrillers range from gripping espionage in Cold War Russia to daring heroism in Nazi-occupied France. 

His fourth book, The Leonardo Gulag, is a startlingly original tale of art and survival in a notorious Soviet prison camp. We spoke to Kevin Doherty about choosing his genre, slow-burning ideas, and the power of fictional woes to escape real ones. 

Kevin, what did you do before you got into writing?

I earned a living! A sensible living! My background is in marketing and at the time I decided to take the plunge I was Marketing Director of Coca-Cola UK, which was one of the best marketing jobs in the world really but there was this itch inside me which had been there for, honestly, a good many years.

So you decided to chuck it all in to become an author…

I agonised over the decision for a long time, talked it over – and over! – with Roz, my wife, and we thought ‘What are we going to do here? I have this wonderful job but there is this unfulfilled dream,’ and we decided to take the plunge. I was very, very fortunate, incredibly lucky, because I really would have felt very daft if it had all come to nothing. But I did end up with a published book to show for my efforts at the end of a year and a half.

How did you break the news to your colleagues at Coca-Cola?

I walked in and said to my boss, ‘I need to have a conversation with you, a very serious conversation,’ and he was very understanding. I think really in his heart he knew where I was coming from but it was a very difficult thing for him to take on board. He wanted to know if I was unhappy with some aspect of my role, if I would maybe be interested in transferring to the US, could he do anything to make me reconsider? All these kinds of things.

Pretty supportive all in all!

When I was maybe about six months into the period I heard from a friend who’d been in contact with a man who was the chairman of a company that I’d been a director of and he was asking, ‘What’s going on with Kevin?’ ‘Well,’ my friend said, ‘he’s gone off to write his novel,’ and the guy said, ‘Doesn’t he have three sons and a mortgage to support?’ and my friend said, ‘Yes … hmmm.’ And that bemusement would have solidified into something more negative if I hadn’t managed to pull it off.

You’d decided to write a novel; how did you settle on writing historical political thrillers?

A shrewd question, and the answer is a marketing man’s answer. I sat down with a blank sheet of paper and said, ‘OK, what are the various categories into which novels can be assembled? Could I be interested in writing a horror story? Could it be a thriller? What kind of thriller? Or could it be a romance? Is that something I could handle?’ I went through all the categories I could think of, then looked at how I thought these various categories were performing. I didn’t have any statistics to go by but mooching around bookshops and talking to people or watching what was on display, what was being promoted – that all helped.

A very analytical pre-writing process then…

Alongside that it wasn’t too difficult to say, ‘Don’t kid yourself, you’re never going to be able to write a romance novel, that’s not the kind of person you are.’ The candidates really were horror and some type of thriller. ‘So does that mean a crime thriller?’ I wondered. ‘Someone gets murdered and it’s about catching the perpetrator? No, I don’t want to do that.’ I realised that what I was really excited about was political thrillers…

And then you homed in on the Soviet Union?

I took the next step, which was, ‘Do I think I could put myself into the shoes of someone completely alien in terms of their society and culture, in other words someone in the Soviet Union – someone powerful and corrupt?’ That was when the fun really started because I knew that I wanted to do exactly that. It was going to be bloody difficult but that was what I wanted to target. The result was Patriots.

Your new book, The Leonardo Gulag, is, as the title suggests, about a Soviet work camp and the artwork of Leonardo da Vinci. Where on earth did the ideas come from for this?

The very original first seed was when Roz and our three sons and I were in a traffic jam in France. I’d picked up some leaflets about places to explore around the city of Amboise. One of them was a Leonardo da Vinci museum and we sat in our traffic jam and looked at our map, and realised we could come out of this traffic jam and not be very far away from this museum. So off we went. The place, Château du Clos Lucé, was where Leonardo spent his last years. At some point it became a museum, housing replicas of some of Leonardo’s inventions. I wandered around looking at all of this – Leonardo has always fascinated me, I have always been interested in art – and I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if I could pull together some kind of story that involved Leonardo’s work?’ That was really where it all came from.

And the Soviet Union dimension?

The whole Soviet dimension didn’t enter into the scheme of things until many years later because I never got anywhere with the Leonardo idea; well, I made the occasional attempt but never really got my head around it properly. I abandoned it and put it in a bottom drawer somewhere. Then other things happened, including the two novels that followed Patriots. It was Roz who said, ‘I think you should go back to Leonardo and have another crack at that,’ and I said, ‘OK – let’s give it a go!’ So if Roz hadn’t said that, who knows – maybe I would never have attempted it again!

How long are we talking about, between visiting the Leonardo museum and publishing The Leonardo Gulag?

A very long while. We are talking in excess of 20 years. A long time.

Yikes! It was percolating away in the background. I think many people imagine novels to be written all in one go, but some really do filter through over years in the subconscious, don’t they?

Yes! And what always intrigued me was that, going back to what I said about that day when I sat down and thought, ‘OK, I’m going to write a novel, now what type of novel is it going to be?’ – that was a brutally rational process, that was the marketing man at work: clinical. Compare that with the fact that this thing was just sitting there – literally as well as figuratively – in a bottom drawer, going nowhere … and then one day, ‘Boom!’

I heard you used Google Maps to view satellite images of some of the book’s settings, to get a sense of the geography of these remote and isolated work camps in the Arctic Circle?

Well, that’s when things came into play like the ice river which the prisoners are driven along to get to the work camp. If you look at the satellite view of the whole Vorkuta region you will see the rivers; black ribbons running along the landscape. Those are the rivers that freeze up once you get into autumn and really don’t unfreeze until about two months in the summer.

Very cool. Anything else you found?

I was well into the writing of the book when I discovered this heartbreaking cemetery, which you can actually find on Google Maps. There are a couple of photographs which show a rough area of land, I wouldn’t even call it a field because it’s all humped and ridged and so on, with these tragic handmade wooden crosses with the extra crossbar of the Russian Orthodox faith, and with handwritten inscriptions – just names and dates. That is really heart-rending to come upon.

It sounds like researching for The Leonardo Gulag must have been bleak and heavy. Was it ever just a bit too depressing?

Let me try and answer it this way. When I’m writing, I’m writing for me first and foremost and then I take a step back and say, ‘Is this going to be of interest to anyone else?’ The readers I try to keep in my mind are not only those who are perfectly happy but also those who may have a sadness in their life, a need – maybe they’re in a dead-end job and have to commute to and from London or some other city every day and they hate it, and they take refuge in a paperback during their train journey; or maybe they’re suffering an illness of some description or have some other sadness or loss, and they take refuge from that in reading. If an author can give people a story that provides the refuge they’re looking for, I think that’s worthwhile doing. Now you could do that by writing something that’s really funny and makes them laugh, but I can’t do that, it’s not my kind of writing. Or you can bring them into a situation which is tense, maybe tragic, frightening perhaps, whatever, and that becomes a refuge that they can go to.

Of course, fiction at its best is escapism.

It sounds weird: escaping into a worse situation than they themselves are in. But I remember my late father-in-law used to have a saying: ‘I was sad because I had no shoes, until I met the man who had no feet.’

That sums it up perfectly!

All this stuff about gulags and how people were treated. It’s all depressing stuff, but should we forget about it? No, I don’t think so. Can it be put to good use so that we can still relate to it today? Yes, absolutely. And besides, perhaps we owe that to the people who had to suffer in that cruel regime. So it didn’t depress me in the way you might expect.

Finally, can you tell us some of your literary favourites and inspirations?

Well, it’s going to be all the obvious ones, isn’t it, and quite rightly too: Frederick Forsyth, Robert Harris, John le Carré, Sebastian Faulks, Robert Moss, Martin Cruz Smith. And many more, from the past as well as today…

And any not-so-obvious literary loves?

Yes – Guy de Maupassant, a 19th-century French author writing about French society of his day. He writes about the middle classes, the bourgeoisie, but he also writes about French countryfolk – often self-sustaining smallholders or ordinary working people, people who are just getting by. In Maupassant’s stories they can be very resilient characters, and very shrewd, sometimes even wily, because they’re used to surviving. There are no flies on them, if I can use that expression. I first read Maupassant when I was a teenager, and I realised that these folk were very like the people I was growing up among. Their language and culture may have been different, and the century in which they lived, but other than that I could see the resonance of them in my Irish compatriots.

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Thanks very much to Kevin for talking to us, and the ongoing pleasure of being his literary agents. The Leonardo Gulag is out now on Oceanview Publishing. Interview edited for clarity.

Rachel Bennett is a Manx writer of Crime and Thrillers whose debut novel The Flood came out in September with Avon Books. The novel takes places in a flooded town where a death in the family unspools into a dark tale of past and present mysteries. 

Here she talks to us about her career in the Isle of Man's criminal courts and pathology department, her work with the Manx Lit Fest, and her love of classic horror.

Rachel, you’ve had some interesting jobs, tell us a bit about them.

For ten years I was working in the criminal justice system; my posh job title was Clerk to the Deputy High Bailiff; she was the first female member of a Manx judiciary so that was pretty exciting, on the same level as a magistrate. I was working in the criminal courts and in the lower criminal courts.

And what did you do there?

You know in movies when you see a stenographer in the court typing away? They do a recording now; it was my job to press ‘record’. And it was all the paperwork that goes along with that. I never personally sent anyone to jail, but I had to complete the paperwork to send people to jail!

So witnessing the daily comings and goings of petty crime?

Yes exactly, we’re such a small jurisdiction you see the same folks coming in all the time and you get to know faces and names and we also worked quite closely with the prison and probation service and everything so I got to know a little bit about the rehabilitation of criminals side of things; I wanted to pull some of that into a book if I could.

So you heard about some interesting criminal stories I imagine?

Certainly, one particularly memorable one was when a farm accidentally released a load of slurry into a river, killing 28 fish and one eel – but the advocate representing the farm insisted that although 28 fish had indeed died, the eel later recovered. This was despite us being shown a photo of the (definitely dead) eel pinned to a board! The eel became known as Lazarus and was forevermore a long-running joke in the office.

Oh right, some pretty off the wall stuff then…

Yeah just have a google of Manx news. I’m not sure if it’s just being on an island that we’re particularly susceptible. And we have our own laws and our own government and everything…

That throws up quite a few interesting linguistic quirks doesn’t it? Isn’t there a law for ‘Furious Driving’?

Yeah there is a charge of ‘Furious Driving’. We’ve got one called ‘Provoking Behaviour’ too, anything that would provoke a reaction you can charge it under ‘Provoking Behaviour’ and get done for it.

Sounds like the kind of open-ended law an authoritarian dictatorship would love(!)

Yeah it’s not an offence you can go to prison for but if someone’s being a bit drunk and shouty, or having an argument with the neighbours, or doing something else weird…

…I’m being provoked!

You are doing an action that would provoke a reaction from me therefore…

Any other funny words or phrases that come to mind?

Yes, we’ve got Deemsters instead of Judges. When they swear them into office they have to take an oath that they will take the law as straight and impartial ‘as the backbone lies within the herring.’

That’s fantastic!

Yeah in the court building there’s a big metal statue of a herring and you can see its backbone down the middle, isn’t that neat?

And along with courts, you’ve worked in Pathology too, is that right?

Yes, before I started in courts I was in the Department of Pathology for about ten years. I was in the office and I typed up post-mortems and stuff.

Yet another great job for someone who wants to write crime books…

The main thing it taught me is that pathologists will not leave their office for anything. When you read a crime book and it’s like ‘the pathologist went to the crime scene’, oh no he didn’t!

So not just an insight into pathology but pathologists too.

It gives you a real insight into the many terrible things that can happen to a human body and how they can fail, stop working, come apart and all that sort of thing – but you do become a bit blase about it.

You have to develop a detachment I suppose?

Yeah I’m not sure how healthy it was, everyone there was quite mad in their own personal ways. But it was very interesting and it definitely got me writing about that sort of thing and the forensic side.

Working as a fly on the wall in pathology and criminal courts, you couldn’t be better placed to write a crime novel!

It’s meant that I’ve had access to people. The number of times I said to someone ‘can I ask you a million questions about your job?’. There are some very nice people on the Isle of Man Constabulary Force who I owe a lot of beer to for some very random questions(!)

Let’s talk about your latest book The Flood. Where did you get the idea to set a novel in a flooded town?

Just from watching it on the news. I’ve fortunately never been in that situation but I’ve always really liked the idea of a locked, enclosed location like an isolated place, and watching the news and seeing towns that are properly cut off; it’s a setting I’ve always wanted to use. I had tried to use it a few times and it didn’t take off… this book came very close to having killer eels in it.
Same setting, some of the same characters, killer eels.

No way! What happened to them? Don’t tell me Leslie made you cut the killer eels?!

No, no, I grew up reading pulp horror like Guy N Smith. My first big love is always going to be monsters and ridiculous scary stuff. It was honestly a real departure to try and write about the real world. It’s relatively easy when there’s zombies or killer eels because if you get stuck you can make a monster appear and they do the hard work for you.

Right! You get to play by your own rules. The reader reads it on your terms. Who are they to say what your killer eels should be doing? You made them!

Exactly: they’re mine! They do what I tell them! I am the Queen of the Killer Eels!

So it sounds like a lot of the details came from different imaginative processes and ideas you had.

Yeah and stealing bits from everywhere to be honest, I’m a terrible pick pocket when it comes to ideas, and things that I’ve seen in various places. I try and write down everything because my memory is terrible. I put everything into my notebook and then I’ll steal bits like a magpie, and try and smoosh them all together into a cohesive story. And sometimes it works and sometimes it really doesn’t. Fingers crossed it seems to have worked ok so far.

Well it has certainly worked for The Flood! Have you enjoyed having the book out?

It’s been great! Everyone’s been so nice about it. People keep talking to me about it and it’s so weird to have something that’s been inside my own head for years, and now suddenly people are talking about it *like it’s a real book*; where they’re up to, which bit they’re reading now, what they think is going to happen. It’s a bit of a surreal experience. I’m very much enjoying it though!

In September you were a part of the Manx Lit Fest, is that right?

Yes, the Manx Literary Festival is our local lit fest and I squirmed my way onto the committee a few years ago. I coordinate their Writers’ Day which is aimed at aspiring authors. It’s been very successful – we’ve just had our eighth year. It’s lead to quite a few success stories from our local authors. Elizabeth Brooks had a book out last year called ‘Call Of The Curlew’, Rona Halsall has just had her fourth book out on Bookoutre, and they all found literary agents through coming to our events!

That’s great to be cultivating local talent.

Yeah we’re so proud of our local authors, there’s a shocking amount of home grown talent over here.

So what’s next for Rachel Bennett? How’s the future looking?

Looking rosy! Book two is with the copy-editor at the moment. Actually it’s just come back from the copy editor, I’m supposed to be doing edits right now, but I’m putting up Christmas decorations and things, I’ll get around to it very soon! They’ve sent me the cover it looks fantastic. Due for release end of May next year, so that’s very exciting. I’m trying to get ahead with book three as well.

Any monsters on the horizon?

Not quite… I’m trying to stay in my lane with this for a moment, I’m trying to stick to the crime and thriller thing, that seems to be what people would like at present.

We’ll see how book two does, and maybe if the publishers get desperate we can pull out the fantastical monsters.

Well, if you need a back catalogue of ridiculous monsters attacking Birmingham I’ve got us covered!

And organising the Manx Lit Fest for next year?

Yes, we’re in the throes of planning it at the moment. We haven’t announced who we’ve got next year but between you and me, [REDACTED]’s coming over next September.

Woah my gosh that’s incredible!

We do quite well to be honest; for such a small festival we’ve had some pretty good names – we got Martina Cole last year. She made everyone come back to the hotel and sit in the bar getting drunk until two in the morning! She kept buying everyone drinks and wouldn’t let them leave, she was an absolute star.

What a legend! Anything else on the horizon?

I’m in a new job now, I’m now a librarian which is amazing and I’m working in the mobile library side of it as well, which means I get to go out in a bus full of books, drive around, it’s like Postman Pat you just go around and distribute books to people.

What a great CV you’ve got, you must never be short of anecdotes!

Yeah I’ve got a lot of stories, I’ve just given you a sample, but I have a lot more. If we ever end up in the pub I’ll tell you some of the others.

Save it for the lit fest after-party!

Definitely. We’ll see if we can get someone like Martina Cole to buy our drinks⬛️

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Thanks very much to Rachel for chatting to us, and the pleasure of being her literary agents. Interview edited for clarity.