Rohan Gavin
About Author
Rohan Gavin attended Exeter College, Oxford and the American Film Institute in Los Angeles, where he worked as a screenwriter.
After developing a passion for hard-boiled detective fiction and outlandish conspiracy theories, he returned to London to write the Knightley & Son series. His ambition is to start a father-son detective agency, if his son will allow it.
Author link
www.knightleyandson.com; www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCfym5C0Los
Interview
KNIGHTLEY & SON: 3 OF A KIND
BLOOMSBURY CHILDREN'S BOOKS
JANUARY 2016
KNIGHTLEY & SON: 3 OF A KIND is the third in the Knightley & Son series by Rohan Gavin in which a talented young detective, 13-year-old Darkus, has to decide if he wants to continue in the footsteps of his detective father - or choose the life of an ordinary teenager.
When the Knightley's housekeeper is kidnapped, Darkus has little choice but to revisit his detective skills and try to find her. Along with his father, Alan Knightley, and Tilly (another promising teenaged detective), they follow the clues to Los Angeles - but their enemies are waiting for them...
You can watch the book trailer here:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCfym5C0Los
Fans of Sherlock Holmes will devour the Knightley & Son series, although the contemporary settings and the threats posed by a shadowy group of businessmen, the Combination, bring these detective traditions firmly into the 21st century.
We asked author Rohan Gavin to tell us more about plotting detective novels, creating convincing villains - and Area 51.
Q: What draws you to writing detective novels?
A: I think I have always liked the idea of looking at the world in a strange way so I loved detective stories that questioned the world and reality and people's motives. That always seems like a fun way to get into a story.
Detective stories have a built-in mystery that needs to be solved but you can also slip in more complex ideas and emotions, so in Knightley & Son I've also created a rather dysfunctional family. I wanted the family to be a modern one, so you have step siblings and a missing father; the detectives are tidy thinkers in a messy situation.
Q: How hard is it to write a detective novel?
A: There are a lot of things about a detective novel that are fixed. You know that there will be a crime with clues, a suspect, and a resolution.
To keep it interesting you can get away with creating quite unusual situations. I remember learning at film school that everyone has something about them that makes them unique, so your characters need to be distinguishable and memorable. In a detective novel, I think you can push that a bit further so several of my characters are quite eccentric.
The plotting of each novel comes to me as I write because when you're writing a detective novel, it's like you're almost on the investigation yourself. As Darkus opens the door, you're wondering what he'll find in the hotel room. At one point he finds a jar of pickles which I'd not planned at all but it was perfect for that situation.
Q: Why did you make your main villains in Knightley & Son a group of business men?
A: The Combination is a small, elite group that tries to influence governments and commerce in its favour. I decided to have a group of villains because these days it's harder to have just one villain. It's just too arch to have one bad person saying 'I want to have all the money in the world and everyone has to wear green', and I didn't want to limit myself to just one villain.
My villains are indistinguishable from a lot of ordinary businessmen; they don't have a scar on the cheek, they are ordinary-looking people. I thought LA was a good place to play with this idea because there you have powerful figures playing games with the rest of us through film.
Q: Darkus gets some, but not many, gadgets to help him during his investigations. Weren't you tempted to give him more?
A: There are gadgets in the book but I don't like to have a gadget for everything; Darkus even uses his library card to help with one escape.
I think you have to limit yourself to a couple of gadgets and they can only be used once. I also like to make sure that, when the gadget is used, the reader has forgotten all about it, so I leave a good space between introducing the gadget and using it.
Q: Why does the character Tilly, Darkus's stepsister, get a much bigger role in Knightley & Son: 3 of a Kind?
A: Tilly started in the earlier books as a more secondary character but she came alive and began to contribute more to the story and so I wanted to see more of her. So '3 of a Kind', tells the reader that there are now three of them; she is an equal partner in their investigations.
Tilly seems to catch people's imagination. I remember visiting one school, the Isaac Newton Academy in Ilford, where the whole of Year 7 had read Knightley & Son and done some art work around it, which was amazing. There was one girl who had done this picture of Tilly blocking her ears and there are all these questions around her head that really capture the character and predict some of the themes I work around in the third book - which the students hadn't yet read of course. It felt a little like she had read my mind.
Q: Why did you decide to take your characters to Los Angeles in the US during this adventure?
A: I used to live in LA, in Hollywood, when I worked as a screen writer so I know the area, and I enjoyed the idea of taking these very English characters out of their comfort zone.
Hollywood has always been quite fascinating and glamorous but it also has its seedy parts. In the book, I've tried to describe an LA that you don't see every day, so the characters find themselves in a run-down motel and there's a suspect who falls off the Hollywood sign (although in reality that sign is quite hard to get to). I've also taken gentle fun out of US customs like tipping; Darkus notices that every time someone opens the door you have to pay them!
Q: Given how down-to-earth Darkus is, why do you take the family of detectives to Area 51 in LA?
A: Sherlock's author Arthur Conan Doyle became very interested in unexplained phenomena in his later life, so visiting the Extra-terrestial Highway or Area 51 in the States is a nod to that. I've driven down the route myself which was good fun because it really is full of UFO memorabilia; it's the Holy Grail for UFO spotters.
Area 51 does exist but you can't go near it. I tend to think it's somewhere they experiment with new technologies but it would be funny if they had convinced us it was UFO's as a cover for their new developments.
In general I'm a very logical, practical person but I do question things we are told. I don't believe in ghosts but I do sometimes believe in conspiracies. There has been an explosion of conspiracy theories as a result of the internet; you can get thousands of versions of one event so it's much harder now for people to get away with things because there are so many versions of the truth out there.
Q: What was the most challenging part of Knightley & Son: 3 of a Kind to write?
A: I found writing the family situation quite challenging and finding a way to resolve all the different family situations.
I also wanted all the characters to come together at the end so orchestrating that was a challenge. The idea was to get everyone into the same place and resolve the story then. It's called the 'locked room mystery', where you confine all the characters in one place and then have to work out the mystery.
Q: Has being a parent changed how you see the relationship between Darkus and his father?
A: When I wrote the first Knightley & Son book, I didn't have a child but my son is now four and it does change how you see things. I'd never want my own son to get involved in anything dangerous, yet Darkus's father wants his son to develop his detective skills. This exposes Darkus to a lot of dangers; social services certainly wouldn't approve!
So being a father myself has changed how I have written the last two books. In the second book I wanted it to become very difficult between the father and son while the third book, in which Darkus has to choose whether he wants to be a detective or to have a 'normal' childhood, is more of a resolution.
Each of the books can be read on their own but I think it's a richer reading experience to read one after the other.
Q: How do you relax when you're not writing?
A: When I'm not writing, I like to hang out with my son and we play music together; he does drums and I do bass. I'm also teaching him to ride a bike.
Plus I'm always looking out for suspicious characters and crimes to solve, although nothing's happened on my patch yet. I've even bought my son a magnifying glass but I don't think he's quite ready to take on a crime...
KNIGHTLEY & SON
BLOOMSBURY CHILDREN'S BOOKS
JANUARY 2014
KNIGHTLEY & SON, a father and son detective duo, are trying to solve the mystery of a book that drives its readers to commit crimes and to find out who is behind a sinister but mysterious criminal organisation called the Combination.
Author Rohan Gavin, the son of author Jamila Gavin, tells us more about moving into writing for children, his love for detective stories and parent / child relationships.
Q: You've been writing film scripts in LA in the US, so what made you decide to write your first children's novel?
A: I never expected to be doing what I am doing. I became a screen writer after I left university when I went to film school in LA and started working as a screen writer there. It was a great apprenticeship for writing novels because you have to learn things like economy with your story line.
The difference between writing a screen play and writing a novel is that a screen play is a blue print for a film, whereas a novel needs to be fleshed out.
I decided to write my first novel, Knightley & Son, because I wanted more freedom in my writing and I found a world I could spend some serious time in.
Q: What kind of books did you like to read as a child?
A: I loved books like Roald Dahl's Danny Champion of the World, Great Expectations by Charles Dickens - which has a brilliant plot - and Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes.
Q: Sherlock Holmes? Is that why you decided to write a detective novel?
A: I always enjoyed detective stories and was reading books like Sherlock Holmes from a young age. What I wanted to do with my first novel was to create an entertaining series and try to get back to the the things that excited me when I was young.
I loved detective stories and writers like James Bond author Ian Fleming. I love intrigue and mystery but wanted to root it in something real; I chose to focus on the relationship between Darkus, my main character, and his father.
One of the biggest inspirations for that relationship was Roald Dahl's Danny the Champion of the World. I love the father / son relationship in that book and wanted to take that strong relationship and put it into a world I was excited about - murder, mystery and detective work.
Q: Have you based Darkus, your young detective, on Sherlock Holmes?
A: Darkus uses deductive reasoning, like Sherlock, but I also wanted to give him more modern problems to deal with. He's from a broken home and his step father is as opposite of him as you could imagine, and his real father is absent. Doc's way to deal with all this is to read his father's journals about the cases he is following, which is what helps Doc to become a detective.
Q: Authors often get rid of parents early on in a story - why did you decide to keep Darkus' father around?
A: In most children's books you have to dispose of the parents so the children can get on with the adventure, but I didn't want to do that in Knightley & Son. I felt there was an expectation that the parents have to vanish and children have to do everything but I wanted the dad to be around but also wanted him not to be terribly useful.
So Knightley, the father, wakes up from a coma to discover the son is better than he is at detective work and their relationship is turned on its head with the dad helping to facilitate the son, Darkus.
Children are often fascinated by their parents and have a lot of unexplained questions about what their parents. A lot of children have a slightly fantastical view of what their parents get up to, what they do and what they are really like, and so I thought it would be nice to bring this fantasy to life and go off on an amazing adventure with it.
Q: Do you have this sense of mystery with your own parents?
A: Both my parents are very creative. My mum (author Jamila Gavin) was writing from when I was six or seven and my dad was also very creative, he made films. As I got older I started to get to know more about them but it's also one of those hard to solve mysteries; you will never really get to the bottom of everything about your parents.
Q: Why did you set your story in London - was that also because of the Sherlock connection?
A: I started to write Knightley & Son when I came back to London from America, where I had lived on and off for ten years.
I felt that I didn't completely recognise London anymore so I thought I would try to combine the London I knew with a Sherlock Holmes London, and the London I was seeing with fresh eyes.
My favourite part of London is probably Isington, that's where I wrote the book and I spent a lot of time walking the streets there as I wrote.
Q: The main mystery facing the detectives in this story is about a mysterious book, The Code - can you tell us a bit about that?
A: The Code is being sold as a self help book that has a strange influence on its readers. I thought it would be interesting to have a self help book that was doing the opposite of helping...
I have always been interested in the mind and what the brain is capable of. I wanted the book, The Code, to work in quite subtle ways that we may not immediately identify, so I did some research into various things including how we physically read. I wanted what I suggest in the book to be possible in real life. I definitely think that people are suggestable - that has been proven - and some more so than others.
There's also a sinister organisation, the Combination, that's lurking behind the scenes and which has multiple villains. You never know who is linked back to this sinister force.
Q: Can you tell us more about book two?
A: In the first book, I am setting up the characters and the plot. In book two, I really want to try and heighten the contrast in everything, to make it funnier and also scarier. So in book one we are trying to combine mystery, suspense, comedy and action - genres I love - while in book two, we dive straight into the action. It revolves around dogs and werewolves - and potentially werewolves in London - and there's a new man on the team.
Q: What are your top tips for aspiring young writers?
A: To find a subject or a character that you're passionate about and pursue it and, if you're sure of your vision, then to stick with it. Don't give up!
Knightley and Son
K-9
