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An insight into the character, personality and passion of the leading figures in the Investigation and Intelligence industry who have shaped the way we gather, analyse and utilise information and intelligence.
I was instructed in a defence case where I was convinced that my client was
guilty because the evidence all pointed that way. And we
discovered during the course of the trial that the evidence had been planted on him
by a police detective sergeant.
So am I right in saying that in the criminal.
At the Criminal bar, you never, ever asked a
client, did you do it? It's like the number one
criminal barristerial practice. Number one, never ask the
question, did you or didn't you commit this offence? Did you ever. When
you were at the bar in the uk, did you ever
have a police station experience? Were you ever the guy
that the client called and said, don't worry, I'll meet you down at. And
you had to engage with the staff sergeant or whatever.
Welcome to the Intelligence Advantage podcast, where I,
Gary Miller, get to talk to the movers and shapers in the investigation
and intelligence industry and find out exactly how they
got to where they are today. I'm absolutely
thrilled to be joined by somebody who
is a man after my own heart, in the sense that he has
transitioned from being a humble
lawyer into being a famous author.
And Simon is a crime
fiction writer, screenplay writer and, I'm
sure, many, many more things. So, Simon, welcome and thank you so much
for joining me. It's a great pleasure. Gary, thank you for inviting me.
No, that is my pleasure, I promise you. So I guess
what I want to. You and I have had a little warm up chat before,
but I want to ask you, what
is it that made you decide that the law
was for you and in particular, being a barrister? Because we've
spoken a bit and I get the feeling that you would have done pretty
well as a solicitor as well. But what made you decide to become a
barrister? I had Jewish parents who had very strong views
on the subject. In fact, I wanted to become a
playwright, writer and maybe an actor. And they said, yeah, you
could do that after you've had a career as a lawyer or a doctor. And
those are my choices. They, you know, they came, they didn't have money,
so they worked very, very hard to get me. Why? Why?
Baristerial. That's the, that's slightly the, the more difficult
barrier to entry. Simon isn't there. I don't know about that. It just looked
more exciting and it, it felt more in
tune with my personality because I'm a Bourne show off.
And I thought that if I wasn't going to go on the stage, I'd better
do something similar. So the bar always appealed to me. Fair
enough. And they do say that barristers are either
frustrated or satisfied thespians.
There's been many occasions when I've been in conferences with
barristers and I'm thinking, I don't see how this person
can possibly command a courtroom. And then you walk into
the courtroom and the whole Persona
changes and you go like, wow, that's amazing. So
did that occur to you? Did you find that as you put on, I
don't know how often you were. I guess if you're an open court in those
days, and maybe now you still wore a wig and a gown, did you suddenly
feel that, that aura of whatever it is come over you and
the eloquent start? No, I.
You do feel, when you're putting your clobber on, that you're
getting into your armor for battle. And I know most barristers feel that
way, but look, this is going to sound terrible and
I apologize if it sounds arrogant. Some people walk into
court and they just don't have the charisma,
the ability to hold an audience.
And some have, and you can tell the difference. And
I'm not even actually sure it's something you can learn. I'm certain as
the more work you do as a barrister, the
better you become. But that piece of magic, that little
something that makes people turn and look at you and listen to you when
you open your mouth, I just think it's something you've either got or
you haven't. And I was always a bit of a
thespian and I think I had it
and have it, but to be honest, it's for others to
judge. So just thinking back to what your mom and dad said,
you did indeed follow their advice. You became a barrister first and then
you went into the playwriting or screenwriting and book
writing industry. So I guess you, you
are a. An obedient and, and
loyal son. After all. It only took
you 30 something years, but never mind. So
tell me about what, if anything, you and the family knew about the
law. You said mum and dad wanted you to become a lawyer, but had they
had any brushes with the law at all? No. As far as they
were concerned, law or medicine, you have to understand,
they came from a relatively impoverished East End
family. I'm not going to over, I'm not going to lather that, you know, they
did. They weren't living on the bread line, but they never had much money. And
as a result of an accident that occurred at my father's work
when I was in my early teens, he was unemployed for some years and he
was disabled by it. So they Were, you know, they were up against it.
And having worked so hard to get my brother and I through
university, they thought that me going
on the stage would just. Would throw it away. And
eventually, after finishing my pupilage, I applied to
RADA and got myself
an audition. The people at RADA said, listen, if you
were insane enough to throw away a potential
career as a barrister to want to be an actor, then all
right, well, come along and show us what you got. Because
I was about to 24 then, so five
years older than the average kid who was applying.
And the. The trouble that got me that my parents,
they wouldn't talk to me for a while. They were furious. Then they tried bullying.
Then my mother, who had a doctorate in emotional blackmail, went
on that tech. And eventually I thought, no, okay, I'm, you know, if I want
any relationship with them, I'm going to have to do as they said. So
what I don't understand. Or maybe you'll say he did. Did your elder
brother also get the same emotional pressure? Younger
brother and. Oh, younger brother, sorry, yes. And he did. Although, I mean,
as often as the case with the eldest, you're the one who fight, who
forges your way through the jungle. You fight the battles and it's always easier for
those following. So he was. He was able to do a
lot more of what he wanted without them. I also think the.
And what does he do? My brother is an entrepreneur.
Okay. He's worked in this country. He's been living
in Australia for quite a while, but. So he was. He was an entrepreneur.
I would say look at that life and think that
that could have been me, that. And you would have liked to have been an
entrepreneur or not really? Absolutely not. No, no, no. I did,
in the end, enjoy my career at the bar. Hugely,
enormously hard work and very long hours.
And I have the divorces to prove it. But nonetheless, I
notice you say is. Divorce is. Oh, dear. Okay.
And we'll come to that in due course. So there's always a bit of.
A. Bit of war wounds on the way. Right. Well,
it's very difficult, I think, for anyone to have a relationship with somebody whose
principal relationship is with their job. And if you're working 60 or 70
hours a week and you keep on breaking social dates and
even on occasion, canceling holidays because a case has run on,
I can understand how it's extremely difficult to live with someone like that.
That's putting to one side all my personal faults, and that's just
the job. So. Yeah, so I. I loved it. I
enjoyed the job hugely, but I always wanted to go
back to the writing. I don't know if you know, but I wrote, I wrote
a couple of books in the 80s. Yes, they did. I'm going to come to,
I'm going to come to the Cutthroat book, the
Cutthroat in a minute, but I'm
gonna try my best to follow a, a little bit of my roadmap
and sort of build up the momentum and the tension.
So as a frustrated thespian, or maybe not
frustrated, as a committed thespian, you quite sensibly
realize that if you wanted to be on the stage on a regular basis, it's
a criminal bar, not the civil bar for you. Right. Because you'd spent
a whole lot amount of time in chambers advising, which is not that much
fun. That was. Right, that was my first thought. But as you know,
crime doesn't pay. And as the legal aid rates were cut
and cut, I had to gradually increase the areas of practice
into a professional negligence contract. Landlord and
tenant. I still. The main body of it for the first 20 years was
still crime, which. How did you go about
selecting. Let's hope that there are young aspiring
barristers who are watching this.
How did you go about selecting the chambers? Because I know from our previous
chat you didn't go for the obvious city, London
based criminal chambers. How did you go about
approaching the selection process? Well, it's usually the other way
around. You take what you're given. I mean
if, I suppose if you have a double first from Oxbridge and
you have relatives in the law, you might get a choice.
But the truth is I applied for a couple of sets of chambers.
I was offered by one. They did a mixture of
common law with the emphasis on crime. And I thought, no, I
can probably make a living there. And for the first 10 years I did
almost exclusively crime, but as you know, the
legal aid rates were cut and then cut again. And it
got to the point where I thought I'd better add
other areas to my practice. So I started doing a bit of personal injury, a
bit of landlord and tenant, a bit of commercial. I did everything,
which is very unusual nowadays because nowadays most people specialize
more or less straight after pupilage. But in my day, when we're talking about
the late 70s, you did everything, everything that came your
way, didn't turn a thing down. So do you remember the very first
court that you ponied up at? I mean, you would have had to do
pupilage, I guess. And that means you're still going to court. But
once you've got your wig and gown firmly tucked under your arm,
do you remember the very first case that you proudly walked in and. And,
and did as a fully qualified barrister? I do,
yes. Okay. It's a good story too. I was representing a
young lady at Tottenham Magistrates Court who was. Who was
charged with soliciting. She. She'd been seen
on the. At the junction at Wood Green, at the traffic lights,
sort of leaning into the windows of drivers
cars as they pulled up to the traffic lights. The police
said she was looking for business. She said, no, I'm looking for
directions. But, you know, it didn't matter to me because I
read the papers, I was only dealing with an adjournment. And so
this was my very first case. I went along on the Monday,
Monday afternoon. It was the middle of February, cold, wet and
gray. Where were you? In the courts of. Where, sorry, the
Tottenham Magistrates Court. Tottenham Magistrates. Okay. And
I met my client, who was charming, very well dressed, very well
spoken young lady. So. And we just drank tea until
we were called on almost last. And then my opponent, he
said I'd read the papers and I didn't have to do much prep because although
I was extremely nervous, I read it appeared that the
police were asking for an adjournment and the defense had agreed.
So I was just being sent along as a body to say my one
line, though the defence have no objections, sir,
so we're going to court. And my opponent stands up and says that
they're looking for an adjournment. And he understood that it was all agreed with the
defense. And I could sense something was wrong immediately
because an agistrate started talking between the three of them. And then the
chairman of the bench spoke to my opponent and said,
you do know this is the third occasion on which we had. This case has
been adjourned because you couldn't go ahead. And he said, no, sir, I didn't know
that this is the first time I'd been instructed. And the magistrate said, well, it
is and frankly, unless you can get your witness here, we're minded to dismiss
this complaint. Can you get your witness? And my opponent said, well,
no, that's why we've asked for the adjournment. So he said, all right, you sit
down, Mr. Michael, stand up. And he said, would you
have any objection if we were to dismiss this complaint? And I basically
read my one line, no, sir, the defense have no objections.
He said, fine, case dismissed. And I won my first case.
Wow. There you go. You Definitely. You were. Definitely
had the luck of. I don't know, whoever it was, but you were
definitely blessed for that one occasion. So did that go down into
folklore in the chambers when you went back home, when you went back
to work? I don't know how much time you got, and I don't know how
near the knuckle I can get to with this, but it had a sequel because
the client was absolutely delighted. And as she was leaving,
she said, you've been paid, haven't you? And I said, no, you're
on Legal Aid. It'll be a couple of years before I'm paid. And she said,
no, I don't think I'm on Legal Aid. And I said, no, you are. And
I opened up the papers again and showed her the carbon of the Legal
Aid application form. And I said, that's your signature, isn't it?
And she said, oh, yes, it is. This has been going on for so long,
I'd completely forgotten. And she said, how much will you get from
Legal Aid? And I said, well, I'm sorry to say, I don't think they're going
to treat that as a trial. I mean, I know you were acquitted,
but they're going to treat it as an adjournment. So it's £4.
And she said, oh, no, that's how much? £4, £4,
1978. So she takes. She goes bends down, she said, that's not enough.
And she picks up the fattest roll of notes I've ever
seen from her bag and she starts peeling off ones and
fives. She's trying to give them to me. And look, I
was a bright kid, but I was very green. And I'm thinking, hang on a
second, if she's eligible for Legal Aid, why does all this money come.
Oh. And so she's trying to give
it to me, and I'm saying, no, no, no, really, I can't take that. And
she said, why? Well, I could hardly say because I suspect it's the proceeds of
prostitution. So I had to come up with something. And I said, no, no, I
can't be paid twice. I'm going to get Legal Aid money. I can't take private.
And she said, well, I won't tell anyone if you don't. And I said, no,
no, really, really, really, but just put your money away. I don't. I don't
want it. And she said, all right, if you're sure. And I said, I am.
And she put the money back into her bag and this then said, you don't
want to come in the back for a quickie, do you? It's on the house.
I was about to suggest, but then I thought a.
My wife would definitely do something to me if I even suggested it.
So it was. It must have been from heaven that you came out with
it. I thought it was like she was either going to invite you out for
a drink or a dinner or whatever. So that. Did she.
I have to ask. Did she ever become your client again,
by any mad chance? No, never did. Never did.
That may have been because I turned her down. I don't know. She. She got
very offended when I said no. Oh, she did, did she? No, she said,
yeah. Why, what's the matter? Don't you fancy me or something? I had to come
up with some excuse. So I said to her, look, I. I'm supposed to
pay my clock 10% of my fee. And I said,
I haven't a clue how I go about calculating that.
So, yes, well, let's. Let's leave it there because I've got all sorts of
weird and wonderful formulas going on in my mind, but I don't think we can
share that with our. With our very
restrained and conventional public. Okay, so that was.
That's interesting, because one of my questions was what was
the first life lesson that you learned
in your early career at the bar? Something about, I
mean, that particular event is a good example of
less is more, I guess. Keep your mouth shut unless you absolutely have to. But
what was the. Was there something more profound that you learned as you were
sort of treading the boards in court? And what was it? Don't trust the police?
It was okay. As simple as that. I lived in
London. My parents had always said when I was a kid and was out, you
know, When I was 15 or 16, I was out in town. And they'd say,
if you're in trouble, speak. You know, go to a policeman. It took less
than six weeks before I realized that you couldn't do that in. In the
Met. The time. At that time, they were institutionally corrupt.
And the trouble was, I'm not suggesting that there were no honest covers, because clearly
there were. But you didn't know which was which. But
the stuff that I dealt with on a daily basis revealed the
level of the corruption in the police at the time.
I've got to pause you and say six weeks is not very long.
So what. What was it? Was there one incident that you.
That must have been something dramatic because it's such a short period of
time. Yeah, well, I Won't go into details, it'll
take too long. But essentially I was instructed in a defence case where I was
convinced that my client was guilty because the evidence all pointed
that way. And we discovered during the course of the trial that the evidence
had been planted on him by a police detective
sergeant. He had just decided that my client looked
prime for it, he had a case to clear up and
they had framed him. And the sort of stuff, I mean, I don't know,
hold on, just pause there. How do you discover that kind of thing? Or does
it take too long to explain? I mean, of course the client says, I didn't
have it on me, but was there something forensic that proved that he couldn't have
had it? Yeah, well, it was all. What they did was they had
planted a thing called a travel warrant. Now, you
probably know travel warrant is the document that allowed, in
those days, allowed people released from prison
to get home. It was essentially like a government issued ticket,
a rape ticket. And they had planted a travel warrant
with his details on it in the place where he
is alleged to have slept overnight in the house that he was burgling. And
it had been planted by the officer who had got a
copy from the prison where he'd been released on the last occasion.
And this, I almost, almost
persuaded the guy to plead guilty because the evidence seemed to me to be
overwhelming. And I said to him, look, with your history, you're going to get 12
years if you get out for this burglary. So, you know, expensive, valuable, burglary. It
was burglary. Was it? And he was a career burglar. And he kept
on saying, but I didn't do this one. And I was saying, well, I'm sure
there are others that you did do that you haven't been caught for, but I'm
telling you, the evidence on this is enough to convict you.
But he would not have it. He said, I know this is my mo, but
that's why they've chosen me, to fit me up. This was not me.
And he got it. He dug his heels in and I kept saying to him,
look, you're comparing 12 years after a fight that you lose
or eight years if you'll plead early. And he just would not
have it. And it was only when we got into court that we realized there
was something wrong with the evidence. And
it's too long to explain the detail, but he was acquitted in the end.
But the staff that came in with PACE, the Police and Criminal Evidence
Act, 1984, it was the first time there'd been ever
any proper rules requiring the police to record
what went on once you go inside the
front door of a police station. Until then, there was a thing called the Judge's
rules, which were more oft honoured in the breach than the observance
thereof. And it
was like the Wild West. It's difficult to describe to people who weren't actually there
down in the trenches at that time. But all this nonsense that you
see, for example, on line of duty, when they're interviewing someone
and they put two cassettes into the machine at the same time and they press
the buttons simultaneously
so that it records the interview, one goes to the interviewee and is
solicited at once kept by the prosecution. None of that happened.
It was well known that a large number of central London police
stations had their own experts in creating verbals. A
verbal is to create a confession that didn't
exist. It never happened. And so
it was quite shocking. I mean, I had clients who were beaten up. I had
clients whose kids were taken into care to put pressure on them to
confess to things they hadn't done. It was.
It was quite an eye opener. What was
the most heinous example that you came
across? I don't think I ever dealt with a case, a
serious case like a murder or anything of that sort, where
the evidence had been tampered with in the same way.
Tended to be more simple cases. But also, I mean, I write
about this in one of the books. There was a guy. Yeah, this is
the fall guy. There was a chap. And this can all
be checked. And I'd put a historical reference and references in the back of the
book so you know where the truth is. This chap,
Sergeant Pilcher, his name was,
was selling licenses to commit crime.
He was. He was a detective sergeant. He was the guy who
actually planted the drugs on the Rolling Stones and the Beatles and then nicked them
for possession of drugs. But he was
granting licenses to commit crime to certain criminals on
the basis that he would get 50% of the proceeds and that
if they got caught, he and his other corrupt officers would
make sure that the documents and the evidence got lost
or they'd simply put them under pressure. They would say, look, you can't nick this
guy. He's one of our grasses and we need an outside. So you're not
going to proceed with this prosecution? That actually happened, Stuff like
that actually happened. I've got hundreds of stories. I deal with
them in the books. Right. So it's
not surprising that you have what you might Call and still do
have a jaundiced view of Her Majesty's police
force. Has it improved, do you think? Oh, absolutely, yes, it's improved a
great deal. One of the problems at the time was that the only
body that was authorized in law, by
statute to investigate the Met, was the Met.
So they could. And did it. They used to cover their trikes, used to
protect their chums. There was no outside body looking in.
Nowadays there is. And also all the
procedures of what goes on in a police station.
As you probably know, somebody who is being dealt with for a
particular crime there, the people responsible for moving them from
toilet to interview room, interview to cell and so on, they
cannot be the officers actually involved with the case. You have
somebody entirely separate and their movements throughout the
police station are all logged and everything is recorded.
So that's helped hugely. And as also. And
the obvious endpoint of this is the
uniform on cameras which record everything that's going
on. So the
widespread criminal corruption which usually
involved money, has largely gone
right. You do still get. Obviously, you still get bad apples,
you know, police officers, as you do with lawyers and
whatever. Did you ever come across. That's an interesting question, a corrupt
barrister, where you. For some reason, you knew that he was
being paid to do something he shouldn't have done, or argue something that
he shouldn't have done. No, there was one. I won't give his name. I
don't know if he's still alive. There was one who was disbarred and he makes
an appearance under a pseudonym in one of my books
and who was supposed to have been rather too close
to the Kray twins. And there were a couple of others
who got themselves suspended for periods for
sharp practice, but who managed to rehabilitate
themselves and had very good careers. But I think one of the
reasons why it happens less at the bar than it
does in other fields by the police, or, for that matter,
solicitors, is that the bar is a very small
profession. When I joined, there was only, I think, 8,000
barristers and the vast majority of them all worked in London
in the Inns of Court. Right. Everyone knew everyone
and so you didn't have much, in a way, of provincial chambers
and things like that. People used to travel up or what? No, in the
early years, there were a couple of small
sets outside of London, but they were looked down upon.
They were considered to be the country cousins. And
if you couldn't hack it in London, then you really weren't good enough.
It's all changed now. The largest set in the country
which I joined, Number Five Chambers started off in Birmingham,
their principal office was in Birmingham. Right. But when I started,
the people in London chambers are very snooty about
annexes or about, you know, sets of chambers outside of
London. They would, you know, these were the boys who couldn't really hack it, you
know, the. And is that the kind of treatment
you got because you joined Number five or not? No. Well,
I, to an extent that it was the case.
Although Number Five at that time was the largest set in,
in England and was building a very, very strong
reputation and now is one of the top sets in the country
and some. It's won, you know, the Chambers of the Year award, I
believe, more than once. Fantastic. So it's, it's, it's
all changed and in fact it had to because the law
doesn't only operate in London. Know there's major commercial centers
in Leeds and Manchester and you know, Nottingham and so on. So
they, they have a need for barristers locally
because they don't want to have to drag their clients all the way down to
London for conferences. That's understandable. So let me ask
you this, which is, I think every,
or, or surreptitiously everyone wants to ask and I,
I wonder whether your kids or your partner have asked you
what do you do as a barrister? Because I'd never really, once or twice
have I been sort of tangentially involved
in talking to a defendant, a client defendant.
But what do you do when you're absolutely bloody, you know, your,
your gut tells you the guy is died in the wall, he did it. And
he's like, no gov, that wasn't me. At what stage do
you just feel unable to or does that not happen?
You just put your game face on and you do what you got to do.
Well, the short answer is read an honest man. And that tells
you exactly what happens. And I'm very proud
of that book. I get a lot of judges and barristers write to
me saying, my God, you nailed what it's like being in the Old Bailey on
a chop. Okay, give me a shortened version and I promise you we will all
weigh and read it. Well, the short version is if they don't,
unless they tell you, if they tell you they've done it, you're not allowed to
put forward a not guilty plea to the court because that's misleading the court.
You cannot be a party to misleading the court. But if
you just strongly suspect, you are obliged to
carry on with a not guilty plea for them because it's not
your job to decide whether or not they're guilty. Your job is to be
their mouthpiece, to put forward their story as well as can
be done. I mean, there'll be many occasions where my client
will give me a story and he will insist it's the truth. And I will
say to him, well, I'm sorry, I don't believe it. It doesn't matter
whether I believe it, but I'm telling you, I don't think the jury's going to
believe that. Is that really what you want me to say? But if
that's what he says and that's what his case is, I will go ahead and
put it. There's such a thing. Sorry, there's such a.
As the cab rank principle. Yeah. And that means you,
if, if a brief comes to you and it's appropriately marked with a fee and
it's within your field, you have to take it. You have to take. And though
it's been weakened in certain areas, when it comes to crime, it's still
there. So am I right in saying that
in the criminal. At the Criminal Bar,
you never, ever asked a client, did you do it? It's like
the number one criminal barristerial
practice. Number one, never ask the question, did you or didn't
you commit this offence? No, I do ask, and I believe
most barristers do, I mean, if they are concerned, if
they're concerned about it. What you do is you
get the prosecution depositions or a state, which is
statements, and you run through them with your client,
asking them when they are, you know, if they're literate, to annotate them
where they agree, where they don't agree, where that wasn't said or
that was said but needs to be explained and so on. So you get
their detailed instructions on what is being said and in a
way, and you can't avoid asking them whether they did it or not,
which is interesting because I've just spent a month in Massachusetts, I've
just been commissioned to write a multi book series about an English
barrister transplanted to Massachusetts, the Cape
Cod. And I followed an attorney around for
a month and met all the judges and went down the steps and so on.
And the attorney who I was with, who is in fact the
president of the Bar association in Barnstaple county,
said, we never ask them whether they did it.
And he said, it is very, very unusual that we ever call
our clients. Our job here is to
destroy the defense, the prosecution's case. That's why we have our
own private investigators. And so on our job is to destroy the prosecution
case so that they cannot make beyond reasonable doubt.
But he said, it's very, very rare for me to have a
call your client. So there's a. Apart from that, did you
pick up any other really stark
differences? Don't ever ask the client whether he did it or
not. You very rarely call them. I
mean, you both have in common. Destroy the prosecution case. Is there anything else
you came across that you felt was interesting? Yeah, there
was. The thing that struck me more forcibly than anything
else in the Massachusetts courts was that the
lower courts, it is bloody
pandemonium. I am used to there being a
certain gravitas, a certain dignity in our courts. Even in the
magistrates court, only one person speaks at a time. You
stand up to talk to the bench or the stipe. You sit
down again. When you've finished, you let your opponent do the same. In the
courts there, it's like Piccadilly
Circus. There'll be people at the probation table all chatting,
going through files. The judge will be talking to his
clerk, the barrister, the attorneys will be talking to their
clients. People are coming in and going out the whole time. It is.
And to my eye, I found it very difficult for the first few
days to work out what on earth was going on, because a
judge seemed to be dealing with cases and they call
them the docket numbers and they call people up and they disappear and they come
back again. There are three or four court officials
in uniform, very often carrying guns and
handcuffs and pepper spray and walkie talkies.
One will be on his walkie talkie talking to somebody down in the cells. Another
one will be playing around on a laptop. Another one
will be escorting someone. It's just pandemonium.
But they really get through work. I mean, the idea
of beautifully crafted
sentences by wealth advocacy, forget it. It's
all. And there was one attorney who I met several times.
He wore a crumpled suit, sneakers
and no socks, and he's wandering around the court, the well of the court, with
his hands in his pockets, talking to the judge and then turning to talk to
his client, and then talking to the judge and turning. I'd never
seen anything like it. Unbelievable. Did any of the judges
you come across say, who's that strange gentleman? Or they were completely
and utterly just, you know, distracted by what else
was going on. I had taken a suit with me because I thought, well, I
knew I'm gonna be in court. And a suit and some clean new shirts
and some ties. I was better dressed than the vast majority of people in the
court, and people were looking at me thinking, who the hell is that guy?
But usually the attorney who I was with, who was an
absolute charmer, he was a wonderful chap, he would take me
backstage to meet the judges afterwards, all of whom were delighted
to meet me, and they asked these sorts of questions. And of
course, they're political appointees in the States, aren't they? Yeah,
they're voted into office. They voted in, yeah.
Which. Is that a good idea, do you think? What's your sense of that? Well,
what do you think? Yeah,
I don't know. The Supreme Court, I guess. But
anyway, so coming back to good old
Blighty, I guess it. It must. I mean, it's been a
while since you were in the cut and
thrust of the criminal bar, but even
so, it sounds as if it was just like being
thrown into a bit of a lunatic's asylum and trying
to figure out exactly who were the man, who were the.
The patients and who were the jailers, as it were.
Did you ever. When you were at the bar in the uk,
did you ever have a police station experience? Were you
ever the guy that the client called and said, don't worry, I'll meet you down
at. And you had to engage with the staff sergeant or whatever?
Yes, very infrequently. But it did happen that
certain firms of solicitors would have arrangements with chambers
whereby when they couldn't cover a police station
attendance, they would ask one of the pupils to go. Right.
That happened to me on maybe half a dozen
occasions. One of them was very memorable, actually, because I
was asked to go down to Bow Street Magistrates Court on a Friday evening
to meet some client. I think it was Bow Street. Yes, it
was Bow street, because the smell. I still remember the smell. I
don't. You've probably not been down in the cells at Bow Street.
No. Well, it's very old
sewage systems and so it's when you then
descend the steps and it's a bit like sort of wading
through Brown Windsor soup. It's really not very pleasant. Anyway,
and this. This chap who I'd never met before, it was a lunatic,
he insisted that I got down on my knees and prayed with him. He had
a copy of the Bible with him. It was heavily annotated, all around the
margins of the top. You know, he'd got pencil commentary
on it, so he was obviously a bit of a nutcase. And I got locked
into the cell with him because there was no available conference rooms.
And I've never forgotten that. It wasn't a big
guy, but he was, he was charged with some offensive
violence. I can't remember what it was now to be honest, but I was very
young and quite terrified. And when he said that he
wanted me to get down on my knees with him and pray I did.
So let's talk a bit about. I think it was your first
book, Cutthroat, wasn't it? Well, yes, I don't often talk
about that because it's a rather plural version of the
one that I wrote as the beginning of the current series. What happened was that
came out in the 80s, writing for 25
years or so for reasons that needn't concern
us today. But when I picked up the career again, I read that
book and thought that could probably be the beginning of a series.
So I rewrote it, I re edited it, I basically made it a better
book. And so that became the Brief, which is the
first one in the 11 book series. So I
don't talk much about the, the Cutthroat. I feel it's a bit unfair on
my, on my fan base. If they've read all the, the Brief,
I don't think it's fair they should go back and read a. A less than
a poorer quality version called the Cutthroat. But
it, that was, that was my second book. So in other words,
you're not going to give me a free copy to read. It's like one of
those things that you feel should be consigned to history.
Exactly. So. Exactly. Anyway, you can't get it. It's out of print. I suppose you
probably can get it on the, on the Internet. Yes, I shall attempt to
do it because it's now a challenge. But, but let's talk
about the underlying defense tactic of
Cutthroat rather than necessarily the
story around it. It's a, it's a really
probably for me as a civil lawyer, one of the most interesting and
challenging defenses available
because it seems to me either way the two or
whoever manages can only be done with two. Has it got to be, he'd said,
she said. Or can be done with a group. It can be done with a
group. I've never heard of it done with a group. It would create certain
logistical issues. But it's a case, correct? It's okay.
All you need is for the prosecution to be certain
that one of the two or more people did the
deed. But they can't prove which. But they can say
to the jury, you can be satisfied beyond reasonable doubt that one of them
did. Now if the jury can't sort that out. They both have to
be acquitted. But usually when a cutthroat
defence occurs, each of them is blaming the other and
usually the mud slung by one of them sticks better than the mud slung by
the other. And the jury comes to the conclusion that one of them did it.
So, you know, the next question has got to be, how many times were you
involved in a cutthroat defense scenario? Very
infrequently. That's one of the reasons I wrote the book, because
it was such an unusual situation. It was a case of
some. It was a robbery on
a security van that was delivering money.
One of the two people involved took a real gun and one
didn't. And they each said, no, it wasn't me, it was him.
And so because it was an unusual case, that's why I decided to use it
as the basis for the book. I can't actually think
of any other case that I did during the course of my
career in crime that had the same factual
matrix. And by definition, and maybe it's still
the case, I assumed that no firearms were discharged.
Oh, yeah, no, the firearms were discharged and someone died.
Oh, and someone died. Sorry. So I didn't get. So it was rather
important that the jury fixated or
were confident that somebody to take the rat for a.
Would it be. Would it have been a aggravated manslaughter kind
of stuff, or what Charged. Who knows? Charges murder, but
murder? A man was dead and someone took a firearm and fired it. So
usually means that that's enough to prove intent. It usually.
Or it should be. So what was the trigger point in
that? Were you the guy that called it first, as it were,
or was it the barrister for the other defendant that called it
first? Well, that's interesting, because what originally
happened is they each said that an alleged
third person had the gun and had
they both stuck to that story, they might both have been
acquitted. But one of them did a deal with the police
and gave them a lot of information about other crimes which
persuaded the police that they were talking to the honest
man of the two. And so
he then went Queen's evidence. The police
accepted his plea to a lesser charge and he gave evidence
for the Crown against my client, who said
he'd only been the getaway driver and had never handled gun at all.
So that's how that one came out. But under normal circumstances, you
can. And these are great fun to prosecute if you're prosecuting,
because you, you know, you call it. You're
quidzine Aren't you? You're quidzin. You can just put them in the witness
box and let them fight it out between the two of them. Exactly. And of
course, when you think about the overall impact with the cutthroat
defense, either way, someone is going to
get the rap. Maybe deserved, maybe not. But then they've
probably made an enemy. The person that
wasn't convicted of that particular offense has made an enemy for
life. And you wouldn't want to bet
too heavily on their prospects of surviving if they went into the same
prison, would you? But I guess that's another story.
So, cutthroat defense, what about
lying and telling the truth? That's, of course, at the heart of
almost every aspect of law, but in criminal law,
it has rather more significance on the outcome than in
civil cases. How did you. Did you
become really good at detecting yourself, whether
both a client and. Or the police or anyone, a
witness was actually telling you? A bunch of.
Of manure? Yeah, I. I think most. Well, I don't know.
I think most barristers begin after some time to
get a sense. I mean, I. No one's infallible. Some
people, extremely good liars and sociopaths and so
forth, they. They can lie with incredible facility and
you don't know and there are no tells. But
in the case of. Of most people, yes,
I could usually know whether or not they were lying
to me and I don't know whether. I'm not entirely sure if it's even
conscious, but I think subconsciously you pick up on
people the way their body language, the
way in which they don't look at you directly, or their eyes flick off to
one side before they answer, or a certain hesitation
which doesn't belong there. So I do think that I got
pretty good at deciding when people were lying to me, both
incidentally, doing the crime and later
when I did a lot of professional negligence, especially medical negligence,
there was enormous amount of, in my day, covering up
by the medical profession when one of their brethren was being
accused. Fortunately, things are beginning to change.
And the duty of candor and the fact that the hospital
trusts want to learn from accidents rather than just bury them.
And although, as you know from listening to the news, this stuff
still happens. You know, there are departments which are deeply
dysfunctional and where people are busy
covering up the truth. But I found that the skills that I
developed as a criminal barrister were very
useful when dealing with certain civil cases
where I knew someone was lying, where the DOT records did not match up
with what the evidence. Well, that Advocacy, that cross
examination experience must have been invaluable. Yeah,
it is. And I sometimes am astonished at the way in which
my career, my. Now my career as an author
has developed as a result of what appeared at the time
to be unrelated accidents. You know, I did a lot of criminal work
which wasn't my first choice career, but it has provided the foundations
and the knowledge of the human psyche which
now supports the books that I wrote. Yes,
all good things come to those who wait, Simon. So clearly you are
now receiving the dividend. Were you ever in a
situation which we see sometimes on this great old
Hollywood screen of ours where the client comes in,
you, you found, or they found a witness
and the judge found in your favor
and then it all the, the cobwebs fall and
you see, the client turns around and says, that was a great job,
Simon. And we all know that that was me. Or
something occurred and you realized, oh my God, here's a serial
crook who has played the system and won.
I refer my learned friend to my previous answer.
That is in an honest man. That's exactly the sort of situation
that my hero encounters where
he has believed in the innocence of his client until a certain
moment and then suddenly realizes that he has been
hoodwinked. All right, so if I am going
to assume that that story
was based on personal experience, then we have to read that book
to know the answer to my question. Correct? Yes. Yes. I mean,
look, it does happen. It does, and I think it must happen to all barristers
because you take your client's instructions, you put the case forward.
Sometimes the prosecution evidence just isn't sufficient
for a conviction and you persuade the jury of that. That doesn't mean your client
didn't do it, it just means that the prosecution evidence isn't good enough.
And so you do walk away thinking, ah, he did it,
but the evidence wasn't there and therefore he was appropriately acquitted.
Yes. So unsurprisingly
for the particular combination of two
sort of died in the war. Lawyers. But you are
a convert, an author. Now, I've spent
so much time on the, on the historical side of
things, but I want to ask you, and who knows, I may be lucky
enough to, to attract you back on to talk in more depth about
the 13 or 16 books you've read, you've written.
But one of the things that, again, a number
of people, and I'm sure every, every criminal lawyer,
certainly, and many civil lawyers, if they've been around long enough, always think they've got
a book in them or at least one book in them. And
I have to confess, probably the first time on podcast that
I have sat down a couple of times in my life and tried to,
to sketch out the, the framework of a book.
And of course it never happens. I get distracted, I get
disenchanted. How long did it take you? I know the first
attempt you were not that pleased with, but how long did it
take you to get from sitting down at the
computer, which I guess you were using by the time you had left
the professional negligence bar from the point
of time of I'm going to write this and then it's on the shelf.
Oh, well, the on the shelf bit is
not under your control. Let's say finish the book. Yeah. So to write that,
that is very much a variable feast. I, I, the, the shortest
period of time it has taken me to write a book is about four months.
And that's when the story arrives in your head or you're given it, you know,
completely entire. And so it's essentially a case of getting out
of the way of, of the writing because it just wants to write itself.
On the other hand, and is that, is that eight to ten hours a day?
What kind of work regime is that, Simon?
When it's going well, I can certainly write for seven or eight
hours a day. And because I dictate into the computer
rather than write by hand or type. Okay, I don't type.
My typing is terrible. It was two fingers at its best.
And they. And have you always done it by dictation? Yes,
always. And so because I do that,
and once I know where I'm going with the book, I can easily write 3,000
or 4,000 words a day. So you see that that doesn't take long
if you keep up that pace. On the other hand, the book of which I
am most proud took me in nearly a year to try
and make the plot work properly. And
the writing process was easy, but I'd get stymied. I'd suddenly think,
ah, no, that's not gonna work. And then I would spend several
weeks, very grumpy, sort of stomping around the
house and complaining that I can't make the damn thing work, and going out for
walks and watching silly films and, and scrolling on my phone because I can't
make it work. And then suddenly the logjam moves and
I'm busy. So which book was that? Which one is the year Odyssey?
The. It's called Death Adjourned. And it's about, it's
about. You probably remember a chap Called Rachman the
slum. Yes, the landlord. Yeah, the slum landlord. Yeah. But based
on. It's not based on him, but it's based on the circumstances and
it's based on another slum landlord who is
killing people to clear them. To clear his buildings. Clear
his buildings. And it also deals with the after effects
of the Holocaust on the next generation. And I'm
very proud of the book because it deals with more than just the crime
involved. But it took a very long time to write that to make the
plot work properly. But according to the reviewers,
it's my best book in terms of. It's got. I think it's got an average
4.9 star rating out of five on audible
and I think 4.7 or 4.8 on
Amazon. And how do you choose, or do the publishers choose who
reads your books on Audibles? Well, people
sign up for an Audible. No, sorry, sorry, I'm going bonkers.
Who is the person that narrates? I should have said the book. So
in this case, I was very fortunate when my original
publishers of the first two books in this series went bust. Before they
went bust, they had taken. They had sold the rights, the Audible rights, the first
two books. And Audible UK got a chap called
Colin Mace to do. Right. And Colin is a very good
actor. But unfortunately, when that company went bust, I had
no rights to. I mean, I couldn't get the rights back. He'd. The publishers had
sold them for seven years and I couldn't get the rights back. But I was
eventually able to track down Colin Mace and say to him,
would you be prepared to narrate the rest of the
series? And he happily said yes. And
we went into a deal. I couldn't afford to pay him because I didn't have.
It's very expensive to pay someone to do that. But we
entered into a deal on the royalties and so he does them on spec and
he makes quite a bit of money out of the royalties. And
he is wonderful, if any of your. And he's narrated all
of your Holborn books. Has he? Yeah. Excellent. And he's
excellent. And the reviews I get
are. They all mention him as well as the writing. But the
one thing I did notice, because, as you know,
your literary agent was kind enough to send me
an Audible version of the French Vendetta. Ah.
Did you listen to it? And I am. I'm in the middle of listening to
it. And one of the things that struck me is that
he. Not so subtly, but when
he's talking and it Is a Lady Isabella playing
the part or whatever. He becomes gentle and timid
and then his French accent gets a little bit more robust
with somebody that's drunk. I mean, it really is an acting
narrative exercise. And it was because not many
of the books I've read are narrated in that way. They're mostly read
in a pretty uniform manner. So I thought that was quite
entertaining. Yeah, no, he's. He's wonderful. I'm
very, very fortunate to have got him and. And I hope he'll stay with me
for as long as I carry on writing the Holborn series. I hope he'll carry
on narrating them. He's a terrific actor and a very nice chat. It so
happens, and I'm sure I know the answer to
this, but have you got enough stories
for another hundred books? Is that the reality?
You don't need to tap up an ex police detective or whatever
and find out what's going on. You've got them all stored away, ready to give
birth to them at a moment's notice. I have definitely one
more at least, because I'm halfway through writing it. I
don't know how many more I'm going to do because of this American
contract I've just entered, which is
very much better remunerated.
It may be that I will move my focus to my English. It's called the
English. There's. I think they call it the English Lawyer, something
like that. I mean, when you're the writer, you get very little
say over the. Over the COVID over the blurb,
over the titles even. I mean, the bigger the publisher,
the less control you have. I've got.
They've suggested half a dozen titles and the publishers are saying, no, we're not like
any of those. And is there. Is there a theme to this, like the
Holborn movies or Holborn Books? Have they already decided
for you? I want you to write about this character, Sam
Spade, who does this, this and this. They gave me a sort
of brief. They said, this is what we think would work, but change any part
of it. You don't like. What they really wanted. They loved the
idea of an English
barrister as a fish out of water in a
completely foreign cistern where he speaks the language, but he is
lost in terms of procedure and so on. But it turns out that
he is, in fact a brilliant advocate. So
what happened was they had decided to take on a book I
wrote, which is coming out at the end of this year under my pseudonym.
It's a science fictiony, a speculative fiction Sort of book. And
they really liked it. And they said, could we have 10 of those? And I
said, no, there's not 10 of those in it. Maybe
two more. And they said, no. Were we thinking of one a
year for the next 10 years? And I said, no, absolutely not. But they then
went away and read the whole Melbourne books and they came back very excited. They
said, how about doing that for us in America? We
want it present day. We. You can choose where you set it. You
can set it anywhere you like in America, but we'd like your English
barrister to be a bit of a fish out of water. So I thought.
Well, I thought. I thought about New York, but there's
plenty of lawyers in New York who. And they're writing this sort of
thing. I thought about Alabama and the southern parts of the states. That's Grisham
territory. I thought about la. That's Michael
Connolly territory. But there was no one doing it about
Massachusetts and Cape Cod. And I love the
fact that they come in Cape Cod. There are people with
phenomenal wealth. Yes. Martha's Vineyard
and Nantucket island, you know, they've got the Kennedy
enclosures and they've got, you know, a lot of big stars live there, but at
the same time, in the winter it's dead. And it's just
a poor fishing community with some artists and so on. I
really love that conflict. So I decided
to set it in Cape Cod and they seem very
pleased with that. And I have made up my own cast of characters.
The only thing I've stuck to, because they particularly wanted it, was that he will
be in court in the same way as Holborn is in London.
So you obviously are going to have to do a huge
amount of learning and watching because, you
know, as you said yourself, the whole
procedure, even the laws are. But certainly the way in which
you advocate, et cetera, totally different in the us. No.
Yep. No, absolutely. I've spent a month over there so far and I've managed to
learn enough, just about. We'll see how
badly I've written it, but just about enough to write the first book.
I've actually thought of myself that the quick way of
learning this might be to study for the bar
in Massachusetts. Now, I have no idea how
long that would take. I don't know if it can even be done remotely from
the uk, but I think the only way I'm ever going to
learn exactly how it all operates is to do it.
What about finding maybe such an animal doesn't exist?
An English barrister who went over There at
some stage. I know one in Miami, but he's gone into civil law.
An English barrister who has done exactly what your
book is being written about. I guess they're one in a million. Right. Well, I
did find a young woman who had gone over there,
but. And I met her while I was there and she was wonderfully helpful
but she's gone into international law and it's really not
the same at all. No, not at all. I'm also. I haven't yet
run this by the publishers, but it seems to me that if
he becomes too familiar with
the legal procedure and so on there, he will lose his
usp. He'll just become an American
lawyer with a British accent. And they don't want that. They
want him to make mistakes and be a fish out of water. And I
think I'm. You like that. Yeah. So we'll see.
I've almost finished the first book in the series. Probably another
week or so to get the first draft finished and I'll send it off to
them and then I'll tackle what's going to happen in subsequent books with
that. Excellent. And what about film rights? Do you
retain those or how does it work in a deal like this? I've still got
the film rights to the Holborn books and they are under
option. Hopefully something's going to come of
that. There's a. There's interest from some British producers who
are very keen to. To produce a TV series.
So far as the Americans are concerned, they kept the rights and they are busy
touting them about at the moment. I heard yesterday who, who, who have you
got in mind before? As one of our last questions, if
this becomes, which I hope it does, a TV series in the
uk, who is the man or the woman that is, I
guess it's got to be Charles. It's because of everything and the structure. Who is
Charles? Which actor? Now that's a very good question. It's a game that
I play often with my mates. I mean, if it was
20 years ago, Ray Winstone would be the obvious
chap because he's an East End boy who can probably
mock up a pretty good accent and he's tough. And Charles
is a heavyweight boxer, so that would be perfect. He's a bit
too old for it. There's a guy called Jonathan. I think his name is
Jonathan Daniel. He was in Bridgerton.
He was in Bridgerton. I don't know if he bought it. He's very good
looking, so he's much better looking than I imagine Charles would be, but
nonetheless, I think he could probably do it. What about.
He might be too old. Stephen Graham. I mean, he's probably too
big as well, but he's too old. Yeah. Two
Liverpudlian, and
he's not big enough. Charles is. Oh, you need someone that's
6 foot 1, 6 foot 2, don't you? Yeah, he's got to be. Well, he's
actually, Charles is 5 foot 11, so he's not enormously tall, but he is
built like a brick shithouse. He's huge. Yes. You know, he's a
heavyweight boxer, so you'd need someone like that.
Okay. Tom Hardy. Tom Hardy. Great.
And he's got. Exactly. I can see it now. That's it. I will sign the
petition for Tom. Okay. Okay. Listen, Simon, the time
has gone just so much faster than I could ever believe
it, and I've got so many more questions in my sheets
here, so if I may just put a
pause in the process of
podcasting with you and maybe grab you on another
day when you feel that you feel like talking about
your books in more depth, I will give you a tinkle. And we will.
We will reappear, probably on Zoom, if Riverside is still
playing games with us. But it's been such a joy talking
to you, and I can't wait to meet you in real life one day when
you come down to London so that we can break some bread together.
Lovely. Thank you very much indeed. It's been lots of fun. It has been fun.
I love it. Thank you for listening and if you enjoyed this
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