This April saw the publication of my latest crime novel. By a singular coincidence, it also saw the production of an excerpt of an opera I’ve written the libretto for (at the Linbury Theatre in the Royal Opera House, April 14 and 16). I never consciously set out to be either a crime writer or a librettist, so it’s strange, all of a sudden, to find myself both.

It’s easy enough to retrace the steps that led me to becoming a crime writer. I had a crate full of unpublished manuscripts under my bed – so many in fact that the bed was starting to rise off the floor. My agent told me, more or less, that we were reaching the end of the road. I decided to risk one more throw of the dice on possibly the most ambitious idea for a novel I had yet had (and I have had some ambitious ideas). I proposed to write a detective novel set in nineteenth century St Petersburg featuring Porfiry Petrovich, the investigating magistrate from Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. It needed to work as a mystery story, as a historical novel, but also as a literary homage to one of the greatest books ever written. It was an insane idea, particularly for someone who knew no Russian and had never been to Russia. But I went ahead and wrote it. We found a publisher (Faber) and they asked for a series. And here I am, three books and one CWA Dagger short-listing later, a crime writer.

So how did I become a librettist? Contrary to what most people seem to think, it wasn’t by dint of being an opera buff. It’s true I’ve seen a few operas in my time, some of them I even went to see before I knew I was going to be invited to work on one. (Who knew?) I find the ones that are sung in languages I don’t understand difficult. I am a words person, after all. I like to know what’s going on. I like to know what people are saying, even when they’re singing it. So there have been barriers to my enjoyment of opera.

But what has always appealed to me about opera has been the bigness of it, the spectacle, the overt and unashamed theatricality, the emotional intensity, as well as the extremity. What you might call the lushness. Also, if I’m honest, the sheer barking madness of the project. I mean, these people are, like, singing! How crazy, and wonderful, is that. (Yes, it’s true to say I am not one who necessarily looks for realism in the theatre. Strikes me it’s the wrong place to go for realism.)

My favourite opera is Bartok’s Bluebeard’s Castle, which actually I have never seen live on stage. I saw a film version on TV years ago and it made a tremendous impression on me. I can still see images from the film, even though I have never been able to track down a DVD of that particular production. What I like about Bluebeard’s Castle, as a writer, is the power of the story, the combination of inevitability and surprise that seems to be contained in the telling of the myth. And, of course, the profound psychological truths that are revealed along the way. That’s the ideal of opera storytelling that I aspire to.

The truth is I became a librettist more through good luck than good management. I had the good luck to meet, and become friends with, a composer. No one could have been more surprised than me when he asked me to collaborate with him on an opera.

Our own opera is called Cocteau in the Underworld. As you might have guessed from the title, it is about the French filmmaker, artist, poet, novelist and opium addict Jean Cocteau. Ed Hughes, the composer in question, very much wanted to do an opera about Cocteau, because, to be frank, he is a bit of a Cocteau-nut. Music is very important in Cocteau’s films, and film is very important to Ed – he has written new scores for a number of classic silent films including Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin. At the time he approached me with the idea of doing an opera about Cocteau, I was probably less of a Cocteau-nut than Ed, although by a bizarre coincidence I had written a novel in which Cocteau was a character. It was a rather mischievous and satirical portrayal, and I felt sufficiently guilty about it to jump at the chance to redress the balance somewhat by writing a piece which showed Cocteau in a truer light. Which (apart from the singing) is what I hope we do.

Cocteau made a number of films in which he explores the idea of the underworld, and in particular the myth of Orpheus. It seemed natural to shape our story around similar themes. There was an obvious operatic connection, as Gluck and Offenbach had written operas about Orpheus’s visit to the underworld, and indeed music from Gluck’s Orfeo ed Eurydice features in Cocteau’s film Orphée. We felt as though we would be working in a tradition. However, for me, growing up in Manchester in the sixties and seventies, TV was the formative influence, not opera. (My parents had once taken me and my brother to see the D’Oyly Carte perform Gilbert and Sullivan, but that was about it.) So although Ed Hughes and I consciously looked back to previous operas about Orpheus, looming far larger in my mind as I wrote the libretto was Rod Serling’s legendary TV series The Twilight Zone.

We were also interested in Cocteau’s opium addiction. An early storyline revolved around a stint of rehab in a Priory-style clinic of the day, paid for by Cocteau’s friend Coco Chanel. We moved away from this story but held onto the opium strand, though in a less literal way, exploring how the drug might operate as a key both to unlocking Cocteau’s creativity and to accessing the realm of the dead. Coco Chanel somehow mutated into Princess Death.

Our ideas formed around the death of Cocteau’s lover Raymond Radiguet. We decided to set our story at some time after that, when Cocteau is grieving for Raymond and unable to work. He is visited by a mysterious ‘Princess’ who seems to know the secrets of his past (such as his father’s suicide) and to hold the key to his future.

As our thinking progressed, we were fortunate to receive development backing from OperaGenesis, the programme funded by the Genesis Foundation at the Royal Opera House (ROH 2). Working with John Lloyd Davies, head of opera development at ROH 2, we honed the ‘spine of the story’. The dramatic impetus is provided by a fateful character-defining choice that Cocteau is forced to make between love and creativity.

So I suppose the question is, how does all this fit into my crime-writing? How much of the crime-writer has informed the librettist?

Like opera, crime fiction is interested in the extremes of human behaviour. There is no more extreme act than murder. Even the most realistic procedural novels, by their focus on violent death, embrace an aspect of melodrama that would not be out of place in an opera scenario. And to be honest, my own crime novels, of which A Razor Wrapped in Silk is the latest, are not realistic procedural novels. I freely admit that I am drawn to the more melodramatic and even surrealistic possibilities of detective fiction, which, curiously, may qualify me to write for opera too.

Opera, like crime fiction, needs a good plot. In fact, the action needs to be boiled down to the essentials. The story has to be constantly moving forward, propelled by the working out of a compelling human drama. Death is never far away. Opera’s form inescapably embraces the notion of mortality. It’s both a distraction from the inevitability of death and an acknowledgement of it, often celebrating the life force of the heroine as it moves towards her tragic death.

Crime novels are highly artificial constructions. In the best, we don’t notice the artifice, but it’s there. Crime is a genre that puts story at a premium. And all stories have to be shaped. Opera is even further along the line towards pure artifice. An opera can be pretty much anything it wants to be. It is refreshingly free from the tyranny of realism. It’s hard to achieve realism when you have people singing, so why bother trying?

Cocteau in the Underworld is not a crime story. But it does have elements of suspense and intrigue. The audience, I hope, is kept guessing. There’s an atmosphere of mystery and even danger, as well as glamour. All the elements I like in a story are there: blood, ghosts, magic, death, or should that be Death? We even have a gun, though there isn’t a divorced cop with no friends and a drink problem. Instead there’s Cocteau, a creative artist with a dead lover and an opium problem. His only friends are supernatural beings and characters from myth, and strange friends they turn out to be. It could be argued that the archetypal fictional detective is a metaphor for the writer, trying to construct a narrative that makes sense out of incomprehensible events. So perhaps Cocteau in the Underworld is not so far from a crime story after all.

Where it is very different from any of my crime novels is in the language and writing. Some of it rhymes, for example. This was a big surprise to me, and others. There is a system at work, which is to do with the way the dead speak to the living. Orpheus in particular, I felt, ought to have an excessive rhyming facility, almost to suffer from a form of rhyming Tourette’s. In my mind, I had him coming on almost like a boasting, duelling rapper: the Eminem of 8 Mile descending to Hades. (I should say Ed Hughes sensibly resisted the temptation to write the music that way.) At the same time, I also turned to Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus for inspiration and, well, substance.

Ultimately, what interests me, what drives me as a writer, is the telling of stories. The challenge of telling a story through opera was one I simply couldn’t resist. For me, the thrills came from discovering what I needed to do to make it work.

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