In an extreme manifestation of butterfly theory, Tony Parsons blames Fifty Shades of Grey for changing his life.
British author and journalist Parsons had created and exploited a novelistic niche – “man-lit”- built on his surprise international hit Man and Boy.
But the last of the sequence, Catching the Sun, tanked – among many books, he believes, swamped by the Fifty Shades phenomena. “A lot of careers were completely destroyed by that book, because it completely dominated the industry,” he says.
He needed a new idea. So he cashed in his pension, and inspired by a chance conversation with movie director Sam Mendes, decided to try his hand at crime fiction.
“It was scary,” Parsons says on the phone from London.
“You’re not just gambling with your own future, but your family’s future. It would have been disastrous for me if it hadn’t worked.
“There wasn’t a plan B, that was the scary thing; and I always prefer to have a plan B, C and D. I’m too old and too experienced to think the world owed me a living or couldn’t get along very well without me. I was stepping into a very competitive part of the market and I knew it had to be good. I knew I had only one shot . . . ”
Parsons’ gamble was swiftly repaid. Shown the manuscript of The Murder Bag, publishers Random House immediately offered a three-book deal.
The Murder Bag topped the British bestseller’s list. And he turned down a television deal, in the hope that he would instead sell the film rights.
So he can reflect cheerily on Catching the Sun’s failure.
“It had run its course, and in a way, it was quite good that it was a brutal failure…it was a bucket of cold water thrown right in my cakehole which said ‘it’s time to change, or jack it in’,” says Parsons. At 60, he says, he had no desire to retire – and he had a wife and 11-year-old daughter to support.
British audiences knew Parsons as a former New Musical Express journalist, ex-husband of media commentator Julie Burchill and a vitriolic and very well-paid Daily Mirror columnist (parodied as Tony Parsehole in Viz magazine).
“People can assume if you have a level of success it goes on forever – but it doesn’t,” he says.
International readers would more likely have remembered Man and Boy, a counterbalance to the chick-lit movement that told the emotional tale of a single father and his son, written when he was “very raw” after his mother’s death.
Those novels drew heavily on Parsons’ own life – he raised his son solo after splitting with Burchill – and there’s echoes of that again with the The Murder Bag, which overcomes a clich
