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<\/p>\nThere\u2019s an unofficial law in publishing: if you have a bestseller, don\u2019t keep readers waiting for a follow-up. So, when JK Rowling broke through with Harry Potter and the Philosopher\u2019s Stone, she only left a year, maximum two, before delivering new instalments.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Terry Hayes, author of the 2014 blockbuster thriller I Am Pilgrim, knows about this law.<\/p>\n
\u2018I\u2019ve utterly broken it, haven\u2019t I?\u2019 he says.<\/p>\n
\u2018It flies in the face of all reason but, after the success of I Am Pilgrim, the obvious business case was to quickly do a sequel. After all, I had two more books planned out. But that would have been typing rather than writing \u2013 I wanted to challenge myself, not just take a cheque.\u2019<\/p>\n
I Am Pilgrim tells the story of an intelligence officer code-named Pilgrim on the trail of Saudi terrorist mastermind the Saracen. It sold 1.1 million copies in the UK alone and was translated into more than 30 languages.<\/p>\n
Nine years later, Hayes, 72, is finally back with a follow-up: The Year of the Locust. Except it\u2019s not one of his planned sequels. Despite being set in the world of intelligence with another spy pursuing another terrorist, Locust has completely new characters.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Terry Hayes, author of the 2014 blockbuster thriller I Am Pilgrim, knows about this law. \u2018I\u2019ve utterly broken it, haven\u2019t I?\u2019 he says<\/p>\n
The British-born former screenwriter is a perfectionist. Publishing insiders say Hayes delivered three pages of Locust at a time, and would often later withdraw them for rewrites. Six years ago executives flew to Sydney in Australia, where Hayes was living, in the hope of coaxing him along. \u2018I had a map,\u2019 he insists.<\/p>\n
\u2018I just wanted to walk it my way.\u2019<\/p>\n
Eventually he sent 300,000 words to his editor between January and July this year. Of that, 75,000 words were cut \u2013 for context, that\u2019s only slightly shorter than Sally Rooney\u2019s novel Conversations With Friends \u2013 but the finished book is still around 700 pages long.<\/p>\n
\u2018I wrote a million words altogether,\u2019 sighs Hayes (Tolstoy\u2019s War and Peace is<\/p>\n
only 587,287). \u2018I went into a dark place at times,\u2019 he says.<\/p>\n
\u2018To write a million words and then throw most of them away is agony. But, as the director Robert Altman said: \u201cYou don\u2019t go to war and then complain about getting shot.\u201d\u2019<\/p>\n
Hayes was born in Sussex to an army family who left postwar UK for Australia in the mid-1950s as \u2018ten-pound poms\u2019 \u2013 immigrants who were offered a sea passage in return for \u00a310. He was a gifted but lonely pupil who found comfort in reading and was hired as a journalist by The Sydney Morning Herald when he was 19.<\/p>\n
\u2018Aged 21, they said: \u201cDo you want to be based in New York?\u201d,\u2019 he recalls. \u2018The day I landed, Alexander Butterfield [deputy assistant to President Nixon] testified to the existence of the Watergate tapes, so I spent two years reporting on that. The paper even gave me a credit card. I thought, \u201cYou\u2019re giving a 21-year-old in New York a credit card \u2013 are you insane?\u201d\u2019<\/p>\n
Hayes became a skilled investigative reporter. On one occasion he was tipped off about two criminals, Alexander and Thomas Barton, who\u2019d fled Australia for Paraguay. Hayes got on a plane to the Paraguayan capital Asunci\u00f3n, walked into a bank claiming to be a friend of the Bartons and was promptly given their home address.<\/p>\n
\u2018They were the Australian equivalent of Lord Lucan or Ronnie Biggs, so it was scary. These guys answered the door and said \u201cYou\u2019re a long way from home, kid \u2013 and we\u2019re very well connected.\u201d I couldn\u2019t wait to get out of there.\u2019 Still, he got the interview and even went to a casino with them for the story.<\/p>\n
Hayes was 28 when Australian film director George Miller noticed his journalism and asked him to \u2018novelise\u2019 the movie Mad Max to coincide with its release in 1979. Having made a success of that, Hayes ended up co-writing the next two Mad Max films (in 1981 and 1985) and established himself as a screenwriter.<\/p>\n
In the mid-1980s, while developing the Australian TV series Vietnam, he met 18-year-old Nicole Kidman in Sydney. \u2018I could immediately see that Nicky was going to be a star and I told her so. She said, \u201cTerry you\u2019re full of bulls***, like everyone else in the movies,\u201d but I knew it was true. She is a great actress and a wonderful loyal friend, which is unusual in the film business. Much later, when I Am Pilgrim was published, I needed a bit of a social media push so I rang her and asked: \u201cWould you read it and then, good or bad, post an online review?\u201d And she did. In return I said I\u2019d buy every album by Keith Urban [Kidman\u2019s husband]. I didn\u2019t say I\u2019d play them, I said I\u2019d buy them\u2026 which I did, too.\u2019<\/p>\n
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<\/p>\n
British-born former screenwriter Hayes (pictured) is a perfectionist. Publishing insiders say Hayes delivered three pages of Locust at a time, and would often later withdraw them for rewrites<\/p>\n
After Hayes wrote and produced Kidman\u2019s breakthrough film \u2013 the 1989 thriller Dead Calm \u2013 he moved to Los Angeles and lived the Hollywood high life. \u2018Tom Cruise took me out driving \u2013 he really is crazy behind the wheel. I\u2019d chat to Brad [Pitt] and went to parties where [Hollywood madam] Heidi Fleiss introduced me to girls from the \u201cPorn Hall of Fame\u201d. But there is a cost to Hollywood decadence \u2013 your creativity suffers.\u2019<\/p>\n
It was after seeing actor Jim Carrey ride a camel through a Beverly Hills party dressed as Laurence of Arabia that Hayes decided he\u2019d had enough. \u2018When you start to worry that your camel isn\u2019t as big as Jim\u2019s, it\u2019s not healthy. I don\u2019t drink. I never did drugs. But there was a lot of cocaine around.\u2019<\/p>\n
So, in the early 90s, Hayes left Hollywood. He continued writing screenplays and moved from place to place: first to New York, then London, Paris, Switzerland and finally Lisbon, from where he is talking today. \u2018It\u2019s the immigrant kid in me,\u2019 he says. \u2018I like trying new places, preferably where the people don\u2019t talk too much bulls***.\u2019<\/p>\n
In the 2000s, he started a family with his American wife Kristen and they now have two daughters (Alexandra, 22, and Stephanie-Marie, 20) and two sons (Connor, 18, and Dylan, 16). But Hayes still harboured a childhood dream. \u2018I loved being a journalist and I got very well paid writing movies \u2013 but I always meant to be a novelist.\u2019<\/p>\n
He submitted 150 pages of I Am Pilgrim to his agent in 2011 and it sold to publishers in the UK, US, Germany and Holland on the strength of this sample alone. Three years later it became a sensation; Hayes achieved his dream, but he wasn\u2019t happy.<\/p>\n
\u2018When critics called it the best thriller since Frederick Forsyth\u2019s The Day of the Jackal, I wanted to believe it,\u2019 says Hayes. \u2018But to me, Forsyth is a hero and I didn\u2019t think I was as good.\u2019 More troubling was that Hayes couldn\u2019t bring himself to write a sequel.<\/p>\n
\u2018I wanted a new challenge so I spent nine years down the rabbit hole. That\u2019s where I found Locust.\u2019<\/p>\n
This latest book bears all of his hallmarks. It\u2019s epic and immersive, new and unexpected, and his research into spycraft is deep and compelling. As for the Pilgrim sequel, work on that begins soon. \u2018I\u2019ve warned the family I\u2019ll be in a bad mood for another two years,\u2019 he chuckles, \u2018but it must be done.\u2019<\/p>\n
And the Pilgrim film? MGM paid millions for the rights in 2014, and planned to turn it into \u2018a major franchise\u2019 to rival Bond and Bourne, but the option is about to expire. Hayes says the studio is keen to renew it, but meanwhile Matthew Vaughn (the<\/p>\n
British producer of the Kingsman films) wants the rights too.<\/p>\n
\u2018Yesterday I had a two-hour call with an extremely significant Hollywood actor in his mid-30s who had a big hit this summer,\u2019 says Hayes. \u2018It\u2019s coming. I feel like I\u2019ve been saying that to various people every day for the past nine years. But it is. It\u2019s on the way.\u2019<\/p>\n
The Year of the Locust by Terry Hayes will be published by Bantam on 9 November, \u00a322*\u00a0<\/p>\n