Killing the old image of thrillers

Richard House's four books he wrote that make up The Kills are all out within months of each other, and feature audio and video content and are set in the Middle East.

The Kills is a slow-burn series of thrillers set in the Middle East. Ben East talks to the author, Richard House, about publishing them within months of each other with embedded audio and video

The set-up is classic thriller territory: a massive explosion diverts attention from the theft of US$53 million (Dh195m), and a shadowy character goes on the run, unaware at first that he has been set up to take the blame, but knowing that he must not be caught. What makes Richard House's new book Sutler different is that the landscape is initially post reconstruction Iraq, and this is the first instalment of a four-book series largely set in the Middle East called The Kills, published in monthly intervals this year. The publisher Macmillan is so confident that readers will buy into this complex world of conspiracy, politics and action, they're even giving away Sutler free if you tweet about it. "I do love the sense of propulsion that comes from having them all available so quickly," smiles House.

We're talking in a Birmingham pub, the city in which House teaches at the university. It seems a long way from Iraq, but in a way it was this very distance that compelled House to set Sutler and the series in a post-Saddam world of corruption and reconstruction. Put simply, he wanted to understand why Iraq has turned out the way it has.

"I actually wrote the third book, The Kill, first," he admits. "And that is set in Naples. But as the four books began to gel, it became so obvious that when you pick up a paper or go online, what you're reading about is the Middle East. I wanted to look into that. So I began to read some of the first-hand testimonies of people working in Iraq for the coalition. And they're jaw-droppingly bad. They were giving kids straight out of university command over billions of dollars and Iraqis themselves didn't figure in the decision-making at all. It's so naive and so insulting to think we could just move into a place and 'sort out' a system of government, build new roads and sewage systems and think that people would be really grateful."

It's interesting to note that in the second book, The Massive, there is not one single Iraqi involved in the narrative, despite the book ostensibly being about the construction of a new city in the country by a group of characters who don't know either who they're working for or indeed who each other is. It's a gamble, but House was able to draw on his time growing up on a British base in Cyprus - "it's never thought of as an occupation but that's exactly what it was" - and he's adept at portraying places and scenarios where people don't seem to belong.

And anyway, for all the serious issues, the books published so far are great fun.

"I did want that to come across," he admits. "I think if you picked up Sutler in the airport, you'd think it a thriller - and it is - but the characters do have a little more to them and the situation is slightly more complex and not so mechanically plotted. But there were some lovely things I could do to play with the genre; the character Sutler is actually a man called John Jacob Ford, and when he takes on the Sutler name he becomes a different persona completely - which he rather likes but gets him into trouble."

The other intriguing aspect of The Kills series is the embedded audio and video in the digital versions. House is an artist, too, and the video is fascinating: if the narrative is a thinking-man's blockbuster, the enhanced e-book is much more art-house movie.

"The idea is that the clips can stand alone," he says. "If you're going to add video content it suggests a certain privilege - you have to have an iPad or whatever - so if you were reading the physical book you wouldn't want to feel the novel didn't stand up. So we decided to build on the world of The Kills rather than make the clips integral to the plot - most of them talk about the relationships the characters have had."

It all adds up to a thriller series which, despite its speedy release, has been thought out, rather than just thrown out.

"You know, I was really influenced by the Italian writer Leonardo Sciascia, who wrote about the Italian mafia," says House. "His books are so satisfying - they're engaged with issues, they feel contemporary, they deal with sticky problems and yet as novels, they're really well constructed and hugely intelligent. In terms of thrillers, I don't intend to do anything different to that."

Sutler and The Massive are available to download now, with The Kill and The Hit to follow shortly. Visit www.thekills.co.uk