I was born in 1954, into a now-vanished world of deference and duty. At 8, I was packed off to a boarding school. It was horrible.
It also ended. We were now in the early 1970s, so I grew my hair shoulder-length, got into Deep Purple, dropped out of an uninspiring college course and joined a band. Great! I was, of course, soon broke, so had a haircut, put away the drumsticks and talked my way into a clerical job in the City of London.
The City was never quite me (though I still find financial markets fascinating), so after a few years I went to uni to study Economics (which made surprisingly little sense, given my actual experience of markets) and Philosophy (which I adored). At college I made a mess of my emotional life, found enlightenment in India during a long summer break and got a bloody good degree which I then wasted by trying to write a PhD on an obscure topic that nobody else was interested in.
I became a writer by accident. I've always been a voracious reader, and as a kid scribbled in notebooks, writing stories about adventurous but accident-prone owls. School knocked that out of me, of course. Then, having failed my PhD, I decided to go to China. This was 1986, and backpackers were a bit of a rarity there then. I think I wanted to test myself. My life hadn't exactly been a success story up to that point. Was I a loser, or could I actually make something work?
It was amazing. I came home desperate to read more stories like mine, and couldn't find any. So I bought an Amstrad word processor and wrote one. Then I got an agent. Then somebody wanted to publish it: the mighty Simon and Schuster. 'Journey to the Middle Kingdom' came out in 1991, and I've been writing ever since.
I kept the China theme going, with four crime novels set in the modern (modern then, i.e. 1990s) People's Republic. The first of these, 'Death of a Blue Lantern', was nominated as Best First Novel at the 1994 World Mystery Convention. I remember sitting at the gala dinner as the announcements were being read out, and waiting for my category... The award went to someone else (the excellent 'Alienist' by Caleb Carr), but it was a great moment.
The novels have recently been spruced up to reflect the fact that they are now pieces of history: modern China is very unlike the world of Inspector Bao Zheng. I have given them new names - 'Death of a Blue Lantern' is now 'The Beijing Opera Murder' - and they are published by Sharpe Books.
As most of you will know, writing is a lousy way of earning a living, so I have also worked as a musician in a functions band and in marketing, writing copy, PR stuff (etc.). My inner rock rebel disapproves of both of these, but they've been fun. As a result of the latter, I was asked to write a business book by an old friend, Mike Southon. We sat down and came up with 'The Beermat Entrepreneur'. It was published by Pearson, shot to the top of the business chart and got us a string of gigs, consultancy work etc. etc. I co-wrote a set of 'Beermat Guides' with experts on the various aspects of starting a business: Sales, Finance and Marketing.
Mike and I made ourselves unpopular in some quarters by saying that entrepreneurship can't be taught. You're either that sort of person or you aren't. You can, of course, learn how to do it better, and if you're not entrepreneur material, you can still work in a start-up and make a huge difference, but no amount of theoretical teaching can give someone the spark and the sheer cussedness needed to start and build a business. Our book was about recognizing that fact and working with it to best effect.
When my dad passed away (smoking his pipe and enjoying his whisky till he was 90), I had to clear out the attic in my parents' old house. I came across a stamp album I'd had as a kid, blew the dust off it, opened it - and fell in love with the contents. Aged 9, I'd enjoyed the fact that stamps took me to places I'd never heard of ('Where the hell is Helvetia?' I'd wondered at the time). Now, I found a new angle. Stamps are tiny rectangular time machines.
The stamp collection was pretty rubbish, actually. At school, someone had nicked the best ones. As an act of gentle revenge, I decided to build the collection up again. As I did so, an idea for a book formed in my mind. A year or so later, 'First Class, A History of Britain in 36 Postage Stamps' was published by Square Peg.
My then agent found me a publisher for it in the USA (Macmillan), who then asked me to do the same for the States, so I did that. Then to make up a trilogy, I thought I should write one about European history - something I feel we know far too little about in the UK (all my history lessons had been about how we Brits put lots of red bits on the map of the world).
I had that thought around May time. In mid-May, Europe goes bonkers for one Saturday evening and holds an amazing song contest... I was watching it with the lovely lady I had had the good fortune to marry, and she turned to me and said, 'You ought to write about history and Eurovision'. So I did.
Trying to sell 'Eurovision! A History of Modern Europe through the World's Greatest Song Contest' was hard. Many publishers were appalled by the idea: clearly their sensibilities didn't extend to the joy of the contest. I self-published first, then the book was taken up by the fab Melville House UK. I now feel part of the Eurovision family, a great bunch of people who love the contest. The ones I meet tend to be liberal, optimistic and life-loving: we applauded loudly when Conchita Wurst won in 2014, because she was different and proud of it.
In 2020, I published a psychology book on the Karpman Drama Triangle. In my forties, I became interested in counselling -- I reckoned I'd made enough f**k-ups in my life: maybe I could use this experience to help other people. It is an interest I have never lost, though my original plan, to become a professional counsellor, never took off. Few of the people on the excellent course I went on at Norwich City College ended up counselling for a living: there just wasn't the demand. (The need, yes, sadly...) Anyway, I became fascinated by Transactional Analysis, the psychological system invented by Eric Berne in the late 1960s. TA is full of clear, simple, insightful models (some people write it off as bland as a result, but depth and obscurity are not necessarily correlated). One of the most fascinating of these models was the Karpman Drama Triangle. This shows how we can all slip into playing one of three roles, Victim, Rescuer or Persecutor. More damaged people do a lot of this, and also switch roles unexpectedly. This gives them a variety of payoffs, including getting attention, a false sense of their own importance and control over other people. I decided to research this in depth, for my own interest initially, but as I'm a writer, this soon turned into a book.
I have also done some ghostwriting and co-authoring, helping other people tell their stories and/or share their expertise in entrepreneurship, coaching and psychology.
I write comic novellas, too. I know, I should have picked a genre and stuck to it. I would now have 73 stories in the Legends of Zorg series... But I have enjoyed trying different tones. 'Unexpected Alien in Bagging Area' plays it for laughs. 'What's the Bloody Point of it All?' is a more serious look at the difficult (and very current) question of identity. What is it, exactly? What does it mean when we blandly quote Polonius and tell everyone 'to thine own self be true'? The story is quite a dark one, but hopefully there is wit in the telling.
Anyway, that's me. Check out my website, www.chriswest.info, and do get in touch if the spirt moves you. Thanks for reading this.
