Colin Bateman on his new book ‘Thunder and Lightning’, how the White Widow Sally Jones doctored his front cover and why ‘Divorcing Jack’ will survive the apocalypse

The former journalist’s latest novel, which was released last week, is a work of fact rather that fiction but listening to Colin chat about his experiences over the years prove that the former can be stranger than the latter.

According to the books blurb, ‘Thunder and Lightning’ is the story of one boy’s journey through the rather soft side of life in Bangor, a town which lacked tough streets but boasted many cul-de-sacs. A town where an occasional terrorist bomb was seen as an opportunity to profiteer and where Colin’s father became a paramilitary by accident.

He said: “This is the first book I’ve published since 2016. It isn’t like I’ve stopped writing novels, I just wasn’t really pushing them. I’ve got three books ready to go.”

Colin is best known for his Dan Starkey and Mystery Man novels as well as ‘Murphy’s Law’ which was made into a TV series starring Jimmy Nesbitt.

Discussing his writing he said: “My middle name is ‘wing it’, I never plan out a book, I just see where it takes me. If I know where it’s going it gets a bit boring.

“When I’m writing for TV you have to plan in advance, no one is going to pay you to make it up as you go.

“A lot of it is down to being a journalist and a sub, I edit as I go. The books are pretty much published as I write them, I’ll re-read it once, but usually there’s no major changes.”

He said that ‘Thunder and Lightning’ came about after he was asked to write a 10-minute true story about Bangor for the Open House Festival.

Colin said: “Kieran (Gilmore) and Allison (Gordon), the people who run it are friends of mine. The festival has revolutionised the town.

“I didn’t think I could even recall enough information for 10 minutes. But then you put one thing down and that leads to another. When I read it at Open House it went down well, there were plenty of laughs – the book was born.

“It came together quite quickly, I still have that journalist thing, you’re expected to write quickly.

“The book goes up to me starting to write ‘Divorcing Jack’ in 1992. All the movie stuff is volume two, three or four. It takes me being in a child up to my 30s. It covers a big enough chunk but there’s more there if required.”

Thanks to the late David Trimble, ‘Divorcing Jack’ will survive the apocalypse.

Colin explained: “Trimble gave a copy to the chief negotiator in Downing Street in order to understand the sense of humour that we have.

“A few years after this a photographer was allowed into the nuclear bunker underneath Downing Street and Whitehall. One of the photos showed a book shelf, there were six books on it and one of them was ‘Divorcing Jack’.

“If civilisation gets wiped out me and cockroaches will survive.”

‘Divorcing Jack’ was to become Colin’s first feature film: “When you first start out making films you’re the golden child for a while, the hot young kid on the block. I made three or four films back at the start, then I wrote ‘Empire State’ and this Hollywood film director heard about it.

“The way it works is the director would never read a novel, he’d read coverage, a three-line version of the novel. This director read the three-line version and phoned me up, he said, ‘this is going to be fantastic – the American president held hostage at the top of the Empire State Building, we’ll get Bruce Willis, this will be huge’.

“I thought, ‘Happy Days, I’m minted now’. Then he read the actual book and phoned me back and said that they will never make this in a million years because it is so politically incorrect.

“That was more of less the end of my film career in 1999.

“If you fast forward 16 years, my agent in London emails me and says there’s this Hollywood director wants to make a movie about Paisley and McGuinness, we think you’d be perfect for it. But she forgot to delete the history of emails underneath. She’d offered it to every other client that they had first and they’d all turned it down.

“It didn’t put me off. Turns out I was working with the same director who had ruined my dream for ‘Empire State’ all those years ago.”

In 2016 Colin took on the task of bringing the first meeting of Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness to the big screen in ‘The Journey’.

He said: “Originally it was going to be Liam Neeson playing Paisley and Kenneth Branagh playing McGuinness. It didn’t work out, it rarely does.

“I wrote the script and went over to meet Liam in his apartment in New York, which as you can imagine is some run down bedsit. Kenneth Branagh came in and they both read the script.

“It just didn’t work out in the end.

“When I wrote the script for The Journey we thought it would be important to do the right thing and go and meet the people it was based on.

“We went up to Sinn Fein headquarters in the Bogside, it was a weird experience for myself, the director and the producer – Protestant boys from North Down and Belfast.

“You’re very aware of what he’s allegedly done in his life. He wasn’t shown the script, we just told him what we’re planning to do.

“It was very much based on the first time they’d met and spoken to each other, it was in a plane rather than a taxi, but you couldn’t set the film on a plane. What they said was fictional but the set up was close to the truth.

“I was keen to know what really happened when they first met. I asked McGuinness how they got on and he said, ‘we just said hello’. What an anticlimax that was.

“The next day we went to meet Paisley’s son, he’d been on the plane. I said the same thing to him, and he said they got on like a house on fire, they were laughing and joking. It was two completely different stories. That validated my approach to it because no one could agree.

“Any film like that is going to divide opinions but I’m very proud of it.”

Following The Journey Colin also wrote ‘Driven’, about John DeLorean. It marked a return to writing for the big screen for Colin who had developed three of his novels in the films in the late 90s – ‘Divorcing Jack’, ‘Crossmaheart’ and ‘Wild About Harry’.

He has also written for stage – most recently ‘Nutcase’, a black comedy about mental illness.

Colin told the story of how the cover of ‘Divorcing Jack’ ending up becoming the calling call of an ISIS recruiter.

He said: “A few years ago I was reading the Times. I opened to page three and there was the front cover of my book. I thought, ‘What have I done, what have they found out about me?’

“The original image was a nun with a gun and a Jack Russell under her arm. It had been adopted by Sally Jones, a punk rocker singer in the midlands who got converted to Islam, she got radicalised, went to Syria and joined ISIS where she became their chief recruiter and in charge of a battalion of female fighters.

“She used the cover of ‘Divorcing Jack’ as her calling card. She was known as the White Widow. She’d photoshopped her face into the nun’s habit, but nobody ever referenced ‘Divorcing Jack’, they just thought she’d come up with this image. They never questioned why an ISIS fighter might have a Jack Russell under her arm.

“She was killed by a US drone. I’ve written an entire novel based on it called ‘White Widow’ which is about to go out to publishers.”

• Open House Festival will be hosting a Q&A with Colin on Saturday, October 29 to celebrate the launch of his novel. It takes place at 2pm in the town newest venue, The Courthouse.