From soaps to the Booker

Behind the scenes, in cosy private members' clubs and gossipy Soho restaurants, publishing has always been a bitchy, cut-throat business. But it's still unusual for publishers openly to tear a strip off authors signed to other houses. no matter how bitter the rivalries, few are prepared to shatter the veneer of gentlemanly behaviour by picking a fight in public.

That is why the overt criticism of Tom Rob Smith's thriller, Child 44, by Canongate publisher Jamie Byng caused such a sharp intake of breath across the literary world last month. Byng has always been forthright but this was an angry and highly personal intervention. his complaint? The inclusion of Child 44, published by Simon & Schuster, on the recently announced 12-strong Man Booker Prize longlist, and the absence of a Canongate book called The Spare Room, by Helen Garner. In two separate posts on the Booker website, Byng explicitly questioned the decisions of the judging panel (chaired by Michael Portillo): "I cannot respect a judging committee that decides to pick a book like Child 44, a fairly well written and well-paced thriller that is no more than that, over novels as exceptional as Helen Garner's The Spare Room or Ross Raisin's God's Own Country... ," he wrote. He then rubbed it in the next day: "... the credibility of the panel is completely undermined by its decision to include a book like Child 44 ... The idea that this novel could be determined to be a finer piece of fiction than The Spare Room is, I think, ludicrous. And many other people feel this."

Ouch. If Byng was trying to make a point about genre (a book like Child 44) and argue, perhaps, that a plot-driven thriller has no place on a Booker list, well, that's not what most readers understood him to mean. Many thought it was simply a case of sour grapes.

But what did Smith think? I meet him in one of those Soho publishing clubs, and for a while he grapples with an answer that properly expresses his crossness but also retains an element of diplomacy. The truth is, he's pretty deeply offended.

"I was surprised," he says, wryly. "I mean, I was surprised when I found out that I was on the longlist, so in the end it was kind of a double whammy. First, the Man Booker announcement - and then Byng. "It's common for publishers to champion their authors, that's what they do and it's kind of wonderful in a way. But I guess it's less common to badmouth other authors, and of course you can do one thing without doing the other... The first time he blogged I thought, 'That's fine, I like the fact that you're championing your author, it's kind of endearing.' But the second time he did it, I was like, 'OK, that's enough.' It felt odd to me. I wasn't expecting an apology, but I didn't expect him to be rude all over again."

Yet the (surely unintended) result of Byng's comments was merely to increase the buzz around 29-year-old Smith. A book that provokes such different opinions - little more than an airport novel on one hand, and a Man Booker candidate on the other - is intriguing in itself. Who is this upstart young novelist, and why is his debut ruffling such highly-preened feathers? If you know anything about Smith, it might be the fact that he won a colossal advance for his first two books - Child 44 and its sequel, The Secret Speech, which is now finished. Simon & Schuster paid £220,000 and he got a further $1 million for the US rights. He repeats the figures with a sheepish smile but he's not giddy about it. Smith's self-confidence never quite tips over into arrogance, but in some senses he views his writing career as a business rather than an artistic vocation - and Child 44 is nothing if not hugely commercial. In any case, he used the money to buy a very modern garret in the funky Jam Factory development near Tower Bridge. He has also sold the film rights to Ridley Scott, which clearly shortens the odds of the book actually making it onto the big screen some time soon.

Yet Child 44 is not a "classic" Booker Prize book. It is not self-consciously literary nor even particularly stylish. What it does, however - with great expertise and efficiency - is engross you utterly in its finely spun plot.

Set in 1950s Stalinist Russia, it follows the journey of anti-hero Leo Demidov, a morally compromised member of the Moscow security services who undergoes an epiphany and then devotes his life - in the knowledge that he is almost certainly sacrificing it - to the capture of a prolific child-killer.

The novel's atmosphere of paranoia and delusion owes something to Orwell and Kafka but the action is as violent and fast as James Ellroy or Dan Brown. Indeed, the phrase "action-packed" hardly does it justice - you could not want for more danger and drama; miss a page and you've missed yet another hair-raising cliff-hanger or plot twist.

Though he does have an English literature degree from Cambridge, Smith first learned how to construct his cliff-hangers while working on the slushy, now defunct, TV soap opera Family Affairs. His background was not hugely bookish - he grew up in Norbury, south London, where his parents, antique restorers and dealers, sold books by the yard - but he was always "a dreamer" as a child.

"I was into movies and TV as much as books. I'd say that my influences then were Roald Dahl and Steven Spielberg. I loved that escapism, I suppose, and I don't mean that in a frivolous sense. I literally loved escaping into another world."

As a teenager at Dulwich College he became "more readerly and less sociable". He winces slightly. "It wasn't about striking a pose. It was slightly forced on me, I guess, because I wasn't very popular at school. I still lived in a sort of dream world. You can get away with that as a young kid - it's seen as fun and kind of cute - but as a teenager it's much more isolating. It looks odd."

The obsession with stories, with other worlds, translated into a desire to write, but Smith urgently needed to make a living too. "It was a struggle at first, and there were lots of humiliations along the way. You turn up to pitch an idea to a film or TV company, and you're a nobody, and they say no. Simple as that. Family Affairs was a life-saver: it was my first job and it was a huge learning curve.

"I'd never thought about how soaps were put together before. You don't have a big budget and you've got to get that alchemy - that combination of character and situation - exactly right or you get into trouble fast."

A six-month writing project in Cambodia, working for a BBC team on the country's first ever soap, was followed by spells on Bad Girls and Sky's football soap Dream Team.

Smith's success with Child 44 has been picked up with particular enthusiasm by the gay press - he is gay - because, it's alleged, the hard-boiled thriller is not the natural territory of the gay male writer. But when I ask whether his sexuality has ever impacted on his career, it's his time on Dream Team that he cites.

"I remember someone I was working with saying, 'Oh yes, you're very good at emotion,' which was a code, meaning 'You can't write the football scenes because you're gay, but you can deal with the love story.'" He laughs. "Of course I could do the action as well as anyone else. And it's obviously ridiculous to say that straight men can't do emotion ..."

When Smith first had the idea for Child 44, he proposed writing it as a film - by now, he'd already written several full-length film scripts - but his agent, wary of the big-budget subject matter, advised him to turn it into a novel instead.

Several reviewers have commented on the slick and rather filmic resolution of the book, as though he were writing for Hollywood rather than Waterstone's. "I think that's a compliment in a way," Smith says defiantly. "There's definitely a fusion of skills going on in this book. There's no doubt in my mind that my screenwriting experience has had an effect on the way it's written."

He expresses confusion at the different ways in which the literary and movie worlds treat the thriller genre. And we are back to the Man Booker controversy. "I think I was very uneducated in how the publishing world works," he says. "The thriller label in film is very specific, but it doesn't come with all the baggage literary thrillers seem to carry. Thrillers win Oscars, they have amazing casts. They're just great vehicles for a story. In the publishing world, by contrast, there's this assumption that they go in their own special section and, yeah, they don't win prizes - or only their own special prizes." Indeed, Smith has already won the 2008 Crime Writers' Association Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award, a prize for thrillers.

But he is sounding, of course, like that contemporary master of the popular thriller, Robert Harris, who has never been short or long-listed for the Man Booker, and who, in direct opposition to Jamie Byng, has frequently criticised the award for choosing "grim and unreadable" novels that "are utterly offputting for many readers".

"It's true the term 'page-turner' has become derogatory," says Smith. "And that's ridiculous. Every book should be a page-turner. The purpose of any page, after all, is to make you want to read the next one, and there a million different ways of doing that. I'm ruthless when I read books. If I'm not happy by page 100 I'm prepared to stop and give up. I'm not into book slavery, where you've really got to finish a book because it's somehow good for you to struggle ... At the same time, I'm not sure I'm convinced by the line that only difficult books win prizes, and easy ones don't."

Of course we have only to wait until next month, and the announcement of the shortlist of six, to find out whether Smith's novel - most definitely in the "easy" bracket - stands a real chance of proving him right.

Is he ready for a scrap with the antithriller Booker traditionalists if Child 44 is chosen? "Ha," he says, "if you'd asked me that question a week ago, I'd have said completely not. We were really caught off guard [by Byng] but now, well, I guess I'm steeling myself for either eventuality. If I don't make the shortlist, they can all say good riddance [to Child 44]. And if I do, I suppose there'll be some people up in arms about it. I don't mind the debate at all. As long as it doesn't descend too far into, you know... blogging."

Child 44 is published by Simon & Schuster. ¦