John Trenhaile discovered the power of the pen at the age of nine. “I rember reading the “Wind in the Willows”, feeling moved and thinking, I want to do this. I want to be able to give other people the sort of treat Kenneth Grahame is giving me”. Thirty years on he is taking readers by the hand and treating them to his elaborately plotted thrillers “Along the way you can play cat and mouse with the readers, have little jokes and they will forgive you as long as they get all the answers on the last page.”
Before writing thrillers, Trenhaile was guiding clients through the labyrinth of the law. For this charming top-selling author practised at the Chancery Bar for 13 years. Trenhaile read law at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he love the discipline of “setting yourself problems which you then proceed to solve in a cool, classical style”.
Life as a barrister proved more difficult. “You could spend three years working up a case for someone who’d go into the witness box and just fall apart. Or it could be they’d been lying to you all that time or there was some ugly fact that just wouldn’t fit in with your elegant analysis. I didn’t like that. It offended my sense of tidiness” But for writers, as with readers, thrillers provide the satisfaction of puzzles where the pieces always fit perfectly.
As a child, Trenhaile had asked for a typewriter, (“I was absolutely hopeless at football and my mother told me if I could score a goal she’d buy me one”) but it was at Oxford that he first had a stab at a novel. “I’d always wanted to write a novel. Finals were over, I had nothing to do. I thought, if I can manage one page, I can do two. The two pages turned into a chapter and the chapter into a book.” The draft went round the publishers, received encouraging comments, and was promptly forgotten. But Trenhaile continued to write.
Then in 1977, on holiday in Greece, he decided to try his hand at a thriller. Although the resulting manuscript never made it into print, it inspired enough confidence to produce a £2000 commission for his next attempt.
The result, A MAN CALLED KYRIL was televised this year. This was the first of the novels in the Russian “Povin” trilogy concerning a KGB general converted to Christianity – a clever twist on the more usual theme of communist moles in the free West.
Strangely enough the author had never visit Russia. And he’s of the view that there’s plenty of research to do here before a writer need reach for his passport. Initially his material comes from sources as diverse as “Time Magazine” and encyclopaedias. But for the Povin novels it was non-fiction paperbacks, colour photographs and conversations with emigrees which helped create “a Russia in which my general could live”. Was it successful? “I was on an author tour and a journalist stumped into my hotel room and said, ‘I think I should tell you I spent two years in Moscow. And if a man had run out of the metro where you said in A VIEW FROM THE SQUARE, he’d have gone smack into a brick wall.” But then the journalist added that, despite this flaw, Trenhaile’s book was more real, more vivid and true to life than anything else he’d read.
Since then Trenhaile has writtenc Chinese trilogy. The final part, THE SCROLL OF BENEVOLENCE, was published last year. He has, in fact, travelled extensively in the Far East. “I started off in Singapore job-hunting, then visited Hong-Kong, Taiwan, Thailand, Korea, Japan and Malaysia and I’ve been going back ever since.” He is especially fond of Taiwan where he has many friends. Some tell him stories, local gossip, which turn up in his books; this happened with THE MAJONG SPIES, which sold 115,000 copies, making it one of the top 100 selling books of 1987.
Eastern culture fascinates him. “There was supposed to be a time when Confucius walked around, poor and humble, telling kings, no less, what they were doing wrong; and the kings actually took note. Many people in the east still believe that, and behave as if a similarly ideal world is still attainable. And I admire the religions too, because they are immensely practical and forgiving. Very merciful!”
With three novels published and the auction of his fourth in 1985, Trenhaile decided to quit the law. Each morning he’d been rising at 5.40am to catch the train from Haywards Heath, return at 8pm and spend his weekends either poring over briefs or working on a book. “If I’d gone on like that, I would have had my first heart attack.”
He has few regrets. “I wasn’t over fond of the legal profession. Barristers can be very edgy and they tend to be the kind of people who need to score. I can thing of a few barristers – mercifully very few – who’d look out the window to check the weather before acknowledging “Good Morning”. That kind of thing becomes very trying after a while. You know your colleagues are watching every move you make and tension does run high. Suppose you’ve got a client who’s invested his life savings in a case and you go into court and only then find you’ve over looked something vital. It never happened to me, thank goodness, but that was more luck than judgement. The fear was always there. Even some top QCs find it hard to cope with the strain of life at the bar. Some people on the other hand revel in it. They’re the ones who generate a certain genteel, controlled violence with the profession which I found particularly distasteful.”
He believes his own horror of violence – “Hate rugby football, don’t like being hurt, can’t see the fun in it” – stems from the deeply suppressed violence that’s inside most of us, which he finds it’s healthier to unleash in print rather than in person. But thrashing bed scenes leave him “cripplingly embarrassed. I need to have a glass of whisky inside me before I write one. Those American authors who go brazenly on for page after page about bodily fluids, how do they do it?”
Now a full time novelist, he works in a “hutch” in his garden. The walls are the pastel-green of the war room at the Pentagon because “psychologists say it’s very restful on the nerves.” Equipped with a word processor he writes at least 2500 words daily, occasionally many more.
Otherwise, time is spent with his family or travelling, which he does for three months of the year. Now that he has a laptop computer he can work anywhere in the world, and his feet never touch the ground. He is also studying Mandarin which he started to learn to give some authenticity to the Chinese books. And he’s hooked. “I thought I’d master 100 characters, now I know 1600 and can write a two page letter in about 40 minutes.”
