On Being a Writer in Wales: Dan Tyte

Dan Tyte

Yeah, you’ve had that feeling.

Thinking of someone you haven’t for years and then, ping, it’s…them.  Humming a song you hear and seem to know from somewhere and when the lyrics kick in, they speak straight to the little dilemma that’s bouncing around your brain at that exact moment.  Those irregular glitches that might make you consider a connection to a universal force threading things together, depending on which way you’re wired.

Not God. That’s not where this is going, but synchronicity, according to Carl Jung. That was the theory which sparked off my new novel, Sync.

To some, it might just seem like coincidence, and coincidence can be very convenient for writers when searching for a plot. A neat path from A to B. But contrive one more than once and you’ve likely lost the reader’s trust.

Powerful

Synchronicity isn’t that.  It’s something much more powerful when external events match the interior life. Who am I to argue with a Swiss psychotherapist?

I’d printed off reams of research on Jung’s thinking, neatly ordering the pages in a ring binder faded decades earlier through a Portakabin window.

It sat on the desk of a room in November crisp Copenhagen, the legs of the chair a little closer to the sofa bed than it looked in the pictures on Airbnb. The city’s Vesterbro is a classic trope in itself; where the hookers used to hawk now a hip enclave, former pharmacies serving flat whites, the meatpacking warehouses now small plates spots. Cycling through the wide streets, the cold air preserving my skin as porcelain, the story of Sync percolated.

When it’s freezing outside, my cafe stops speed up.  After a tea, maybe a beer, under a portrait of a whiskered fisherman much better suited to the conditions, I returned to my bike to find it’d been nicked. This wasn’t in the guide book. Copenhagen hadn’t quite gentrified out all the thieves.

That’s how a bike made it into the opening scene of the book.  But that one gets off worse than the one I’d borrowed.

In this new novel, at the exact moment a hit-and-run smashes into journalist Luke, four women who’ve known him at some point in their lives think of him.  Sadie’s having an affair in a Travelodge. Ysabelle’s working with juvenile delinquents in Buenos Aires. Nina’s taking a couple round a semi-detached. Charlie Ray’s mourning her lost music career. Sadie. Ysabelle. Nina. Charlie Ray. Sync.

As Luke’s left in a coma, these four women tied to his past find themselves entangled in a dangerous mystery. As Detective Inspector Charles Graves follows the trail, they work together to uncover the dark secrets buried in Luke’s last investigation. When everything’s at stake, will the truth they reveal free or destroy them all?

Snorting with energy

My two previous novels are not tightly plotted crime thrillers. Instead, Half Plus Seven is ‘a coming of age novel snorting with energy’, if you believe the Daily Mail (unlikely, but a stopped clock is right twice etc etc) and The Offline Project ‘an exceptionally funny, well observed and street-smart book’ according to the more trusted Big Issue.

But, three novels in, it felt like the time to shoot for something else. A plot-driven page turner still full of heart. Heart that comes from the four female narrators. Soul that comes from Charles Graves, a can’t-be-arsed Cardiff copper who gets his groove back thanks to the case.

Although Sync’s story travels the world, Cardiff is its base camp and where, that dry cold Copenhagen trip aside, most of the novel was written. Read it and you’ll find a late night break in at City Hall. Clumsy first date snogging on Womanby Street.  Casual sex on Cathedral Road. An estate agent who keeps the keys and spends the night in the houses on her books, pretending she’s someone else for that split second just after waking.  And a taxi driver called Abdi, who’s only really putting up with his fares so he can buy rare chess pieces for his daughter.

That’s Sync.  And the thing about synchronicity is, now you’ve read this, you’ll have to read that. The universe has sent you the sign.

Sync is available in paperback and Kindle here.