David Young

​Berlin clearly sits at the heart of your work. What first drew you to it?

Yes! I love Berlin. My first visit was part of a little self-booked tour of eastern Germany with my unknown indiepop band, and the fact that we were from the UK was enough to ensure a warm welcome. Between gigs, I read Stasiland by Anna Funder, and that was how it all began. My research trips to Berlin are probably the best part of being a novelist writing about East Germany, but my interest in the Eastern Bloc goes back even further, with my undergraduate dissertation focusing on British attitudes to Stalin’s 1930s purges, so there’s a clear thread running through it all.

“Most debut novels that get a deal aren’t really the writer’s first full-length manuscript.”

Your debut feels very assured, but not autobiographical in the obvious sense. Do any of the characters reflect you at all?

To be honest, probably not. There’s perhaps a bit of my wife in my lead detective, Karin Müller, but most debut novels that get a deal aren’t really the writer’s first full-length manuscript. I had two rejected before Stasi Child was taken up, and both featured a washed-up journalist returning to local newspapers after being made redundant from international broadcasting — and that part, at least, was very much me.

If you’d lived in East Germany at the time you write about, how do you think you would have coped?

I suspect I would have been something like Karin Müller, generally toeing the line and perhaps believing in the socialist dream, but questioning things underneath. I don’t think I would have been brave enough to openly challenge it, but then unless you fell foul of the system, many people had lives they were content with and didn’t necessarily come into contact with the Stasi at all.

“My research trips to Berlin are probably the best part of being a novelist.”

What pushed you from journalism into writing fiction?

Like my fictional character in those early manuscripts, I was desperate to leave the day job. I’d been pretty much sidelined at the BBC — in fact, very much. My assigned desk was just one metre from the entrance to the women’s loo, with just a single door shutting out the smells. If you don’t get the message after that…

Like many journalists, I’d always secretly wanted to write a novel, and after I tried and failed to get published about twelve years ago, I distracted myself with songwriting and playing in a band. But about three years (before I got published), I decided to get serious, got into City University’s first Crime Thriller MA, and Stasi Child became my degree manuscript, which won the course prize and led to representation — that’s when things really shifted.

“If you don’t get the message after that…”

Success came quickly with your debut. How did you process that early momentum?

Aha! I’m glad you’re so confident — I’m not. We’ve already troubled the Kindle bestseller lists, and t reached number four in the Amazon Kindle chart earlier this month, topping Historical Fiction and Police Procedural, which is fantastic, but it’s only if ebook sales translate into paperback sales that I can really look ahead to a career as a novelist. The beauty of being an author, though, is that you can go unrecognised in the street even if you are lucky enough to be a bestseller, and honestly I’m not sure I’d recognise most crime writers myself — maybe Ian Rankin or Val McDermid, and even then I’d probably have to look twice.

What interests you about returning to the same character in a series?

It’s the second book [Stasi Wolf] in the Karin Müller series, set in Halle-Neustadt, an East German new town that was supposed to be an idyllic communist city, though as you can imagine things soon start to go very wrong. It’s a fascinating place — addresses were just numbers, a city where the streets had no names, and it was also the site of the GDR’s most famous murder case. As part of my research I was lucky enough to speak to the detective involved, who’s a great character, and that kind of detail really feeds into the writing because that sense of place is always key.

“Books are weapons for the brain.”

Do you think people read enough anymore?

I agree one hundred percent that they should read more — books are weapons for the brain. I’m guilty of not reading enough myself, but it’s sad that so many teenagers don’t read at all. We never managed to convince my daughter, though my son’s reading range has grown through his studies, and you do feel that something important is lost if that habit isn’t there.

David Young is a British author best known for his Karin Müller series, beginning with Stasi Child, set in Cold War East Germany.

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Interview by Carl Marsh