Could you tell me a little bit about your background, and how social class, if at all, impacted you while you were young?
My dad was a milkman and, when he got injured in a car accident, he then transferred from being a Co-op milkman to being a Co-op life insurance salesman. My mum was a homemaker, and she just used to do casual cash-in-hand domestic cleaning jobs. So I suppose that's about as working class as you can get – a milkman and a cleaning person.
I went to a school in London, Acland Burghley, that has actually got a really interesting demographic. Literally 200 yards from the school one way, there's some really quite dodgy council estates. But then, if you walk two or three minutes in the other direction, you had Hampstead. Lots of left-wing, artsy, but very wealthy parents sent their kids to the school as well. So it was actually quite unusual because a lot of schools have got a very narrow demographic, but Acland Burghley – certainly in those days, I'm less sure about now – had this very mixed demographic.
As you were growing up, did you think that becoming an author and going into literature was an option for you?
I think young people are inherently quite optimistic. They all think “oh, I can be an astronaut” and we always give kids this message that you can be anything. Probably by the time I got to my late teens and my early twenties, I kind of felt less optimistic about it. I didn’t have an uncle who worked for a publishing company or a cousin who was already an author. My family all did these very working class jobs, so to reach out and do something different did feel like quite a stretch in a way that I'm sure it wouldn't have done for some of my more creative friends from wealthier backgrounds.
Were there other working class people in literature who inspired you and helped you go “that is something I can do”?
I don't think in particular there was someone who was working class who inspired me. I think one of the nice things about being a writer is that anyone can have a punt. I think it is probably more open than other fields. There are quite a lot of fairly working class children's writers. Where I don't notice [working class people] is when I go to meetings of publishers. Even now there are relatively few working class [people], particularly in children's publishing. It's predominantly middle class Oxford or Cambridge English graduates. So the actual people who are the filter, who are looking and picking books up, they're very much from a certain, very narrow demographic – even now, 20-25 years after I was first submitting my books.
Robert Muchamore is the children's author behind the CHERUB series
I think literature is actually quite interesting from that respect because, unless you're really engaged, the only idea of the author you might have is their name on the cover, and maybe a picture of them in the back. It's not like an actor where you can see them and hear them.
The degree of anonymity. I think, in the social media age, authors are a bit more visually out there. But still, I was reading a book this morning, and I haven't got a clue what the author looks like, whereas if he was an actor I would obviously know exactly what he looked like. I think I quite appreciate the fact that you can have a degree of success as an author and, unless you're at the JK Rowling megastar level, you can still lead a fairly normal life and walk down the street in your hometown and no one has a clue who you are.
We were just talking before we came on about how I am now approximately the age you were when you published your first book. How did your first opportunity come about?
We were still very much in the analogue age. There used to be a book in pretty much every bookstore and is still published called The Writers' & Artists' Yearbook. It's a bit like a directory of all the agencies and things like that. I discovered that book – I think it was in a library, actually – and I sort of wrote down notes of six or seven different agencies and publishers. They had some quite good articles on the publishing process. I mean, these days, you probably watch a YouTube video that explains it all.
I sent it off to two agencies. I wasn't very strategic. I just did it in alphabetical order. So there was an agency called Darley Anderson who listed that they did children's books, and they rejected me, and the second one was an agency called Eddison Pearson. That was my agent, Claire Pearson, who's still my agent now. So it wasn't a terribly onerous process in terms of getting published. I did do quite well.
There's quite an interesting story about me getting an agent, though, because my agent used to use this quite posh mailing address in Swiss Cottage but, funny enough, she actually grew up in Tufnell Park, where I was born. All the opening scenes of my first book, CHERUB: The Recruit, are set in Tufnell Park, where both me and my agent lived. So it was one of those little accidents where I think the book very much resonated with my agent, because she kind of recognised it and felt it was authentic to the place that she lived as well as me.
Either at the beginning or as your career has gone on, have you found any barriers or challenges because of your class background at all?
I think as I've got older, I've become slightly more polite and a slightly nicer person. I actually think when I first started out as a writer, I was quite arrogant and quite rude to people. It's not necessarily something I'm particularly proud of, but I think I did just have that level of confidence that I was trying to do something different and that I was writing books for a certain market. So I think maybe I upset some people.
I always remember once getting taken aside by my agent because I used to work as a private investigator, and I used to work with quite a lot of retired police officers. It was an environment that was 100% male. They were all smoking, drinking, sexist, and casually racist. And then suddenly, you're working in publishing where it's like 99% female. They tend to be Oxford or Cambridge graduates, usually quite well spoken, usually very polite to each other, and I'd sit in a meeting and just swear or say “well, that's just bloody stupid”, or something like that. From my sort of working class culture, that just seemed completely normal to the place where I'd been working for the previous 10 years.
Robert Muchamore's CHERUB series began 20 years ago with The Recruit
I guess that attitude in some ways comes through in the books, and it’s what made the books what they were. They did come from that unashamedly working class background.
One of the first events I went to, I was with my lovely then-editor Rachel Wade. One of the things we argued about was a scene in the first CHERUB book where the character Bruce stands on a piano that's been pushed into a swimming pool, and then pulls the front of his trousers down and pees in the swimming pool. At the first ever signing I went to, Rachel was there, and I just started asking the kids: “What was your favourite bit in the book? What did you enjoy most?” The first one I asked said: “Oh, the bit where Bruce stands on the piano and pees in the swimming pool.” That’s the classic thing that a boy finds funny, but maybe a person who works in children's publishing is a little bit less comfortable with.
Do you think there's been any sort of shift in terms of social class in children's literature in the 20 years or so you've been doing it?
I find this really fascinating because they're a lot more conscious of it in theory. But in practice, when I look at The Bookseller magazine week to week, they have their pictures of some book launch party, and it's still incredibly white and most of them, when you meet them, are sort of very comfortably lower middle class, if not upper middle class or positively affluent. But I think at least people are conscious of it now.
There's also a fair bit of nepotism. I can't name names, but one person told me a particularly horrible story about how they basically interviewed a couple of people for a junior job in publishing. I think they were both people of colour. A senior person just came in and completely brushed aside the interview process to give the two jobs to a godson and a friend's son, or something like that. This is always the problem when you've got people in powerful positions embedded, even when other people have got the best will in the world. It's pretty universal, I think, and it does make it hard in publishing where certain kinds of people are so embedded in the industry, not as writers, but as the actual people who work in the publishers.
Do you think it affects what does get published?
I very much get the impression that in children's publishing an awful lot of books get published because they're the kind of book that the people who work in publishing would have liked to read themselves when they were younger. Something that’s a bit more prickly, that's going to appeal to boys, that's going to appeal to a more working class audience, does often get overlooked or disregarded.
The other thing that I find really frustrating, and I’ve found this quite consistently, is I've often found that people think teenage boys and young boys are unsophisticated. They always want to dumb the book down and make it more simple. I think the reason is because boys are not very articulate and, when they speak to young women, they're usually a bit uncomfortable and not very open. I think when people who work in publishing meet young boys, they just think they're all a bit dumb. And it's not that we're stupid. We're just not very articulate when we're young and I just don't think they get the kind of sophistication that's actually going on in a young boy's mind, even if they can't necessarily articulate it as well as they can when they get older.
Robert Muchamore has always written books aimed primarily at young, male readers
My perception is that adult literature is more class-diverse than children's and young person's literature. Does that chime for you at all?
I think that's probably true. I would always say I've spent most of my writing career fighting against cosiness in children's books. There is the market for sitting on a rug talking about lovely, cosy stories but, unfortunately, for a lot of people that just completely puts them off reading. People still talk about my books as being books for reluctant readers, but I do find it a bit depressing that there isn't the next generation. There isn't another author who's like me, who's come along and is serving a similar market. I've got my little niche, and it was proved to be quite successful, but publishers haven't followed up with anything.
And on that note, what advice would you give to a working class writer today who is hoping to break into publishing, and children's publishing specifically?
To be honest, the advice I would give to a working class writer is don't let class put you off because, in terms of actually being a writer, I don't think it's a huge barrier. If you've got a reasonable amount of talent and you're sensible, go for it. The one thing I would say to anyone who wants to be a writer is just be professional. Treat it like a job. Don't tell a publisher that you spent five years writing a book, and you’re not sure what you want to do for your next book, and you don't know how long it's gonna take. Just think about what would happen if you approached any other job with that attitude.
It's a business, and you've got to be professional about it, and that's probably the biggest mistake that people make when they want to be writers – just being a bit airy-fairy, and seeing this kind of artistic crusade. I guess I was always more of a commercial author, and saw it more as my job, basically. There are certain people who are wealthy enough that they can just be an author, and maybe their partner earns a lot of money, and they can just casually write a book and earn a few thousand pounds, and it doesn't matter. But for a working class person, generally if you're putting that amount of time and commitment into a book, it's got to be your living. You've got to make money out of it. There isn't someone there who's going to support you through the process.
It's the difference between wanting to be a writer and wanting to write a book.
That’s actually a very good way of phrasing it. The difference between wanting to write a book and wanting to be a professional writer? Yeah, that's very good. I'm gonna write that down.
When that pops up in your next interview, I'll know.
Find out more about Robert Muchamore and his new Robin Hood series by visiting his official website.
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