When Malorie Blackman became a writer she was told she should write about racism because she was black. Blackman believed that 'issue novels' have their place – she’s since written some – but baulked at the idea nevertheless.
‘My initial reason for writing was to write the books I’d missed as a child: mysteries and thrillers and adventure stories, which just happened to feature black children and had absolutely nothing overtly to do with race.
I longed to read books like the Narnia books, Chalet stories, adventures stories – whatever – which were culturally diverse. But they weren’t! So when I started writing, it was with a deliberate eye to writing that sort of book.
49 books later, she decided she was unlikely to be pigeonholed if she did broach the subject of race in a novel. She considered writing about slavery, but when she mentioned the idea to friends, their reaction was decidedly lukewarm. ‘Before I’d written a word, it was as if friends, white and black, had already read the book. They already knew the story. So I thought I needed to come at it from a different angle.
It was around the time of the Stephen Lawrence case. I started thinking: what if I turned it on its head so that white people were the minority and the status quo was working for black people in society?
The result was book number 50, Noughts and Crosses, about the doomed romance between Sephy, a Cross, and her childhood friend Callum, a Nought. The novel makes mention of black and white as little as possible, and Blackman still gets e-mails from readers confused about which of them is which.
Of all the characters she has written, Callum’s personality is closest to her own, she says, and she based some of the racism he is subjected to on incidents from her own life.
That’s what made him really interesting to write, but also kind of painful; having to deal with those issues, which I’d buried. I remember coming first in a test and getting a C- and asking the teacher why and being told I didn’t deserve any higher.
'So I used that in the book. Things like going into a shop and being followed because people think you’re going to nick something.
'I remember the first time I scraped enough money to go first class on the train and the ticket inspectors came on and wouldn’t believe I’d bought my ticket and were giving me all kinds of grief. Again, that’s something I put in the book. So writing for me is like my psychiatrist’s couch!’
Eventually, Callum’s disillusionment causes him to join a terrorist group, the Liberation Militia, with tragic consequences. ‘I wanted people to empathise with Callum in that they could put themselves in his shoes and say “There but for the grace of God go I, and maybe in his situation I might be driven to do similar things and go down a certain path”, but that’s not to say that I want people to sympathise with him, because I don’t.’
When the book was published, Blackman worried that its unflinching portrayal of race and class divisions would get her into trouble.
‘I thought “Oh, God, this is me raising my head above the parapet; I’m going to get my head shot off, but I’m going to do it anyway.” But it’s funny, but it seems that the things that have worked the best for me have been the things I’ve taken risks on: things like Pig Heart Boy and the Noughts and Crosses series.’
‘I don’t believe in presenting young adults with books that are always “and they lived happily ever after”, because it’s not true. But I don’t believe in presenting them with books that say “life is s*** and then you die.” Because I don’t believe that. When everything else is gone, you still have hope.
'There are some adults that have problems with Noughts and Crosses because they think it’s a hopeless book, but I don’t believe that. They both made the decision that their hope for the future would rest with their daughter.’
That daughter, Callie Rose, is the focus of the third book in the series, Checkmate. Sephy has hidden the truth about her relationship with Callum from Callie, who is being secretly groomed to join the Liberation Militia by Callum’s brother Jude, whose story is told in the bleak Knife Edge.
After Checkmate, Blackman's daughter asked her to write another book in the series, this time with a happy ending. At the same time, a minor character from Checkmate resurfaced. ‘Tobey started whispering in my ear; he wouldn’t leave me alone.’
The resulting novel, Double Cross, has another teenage relationship at its heart, this one between Tobey and Callie Rose. The book moves away from issues of race to focus on gang culture. ‘I wanted to write about the hierarchy of gangs, from street gangs to organised crime, and this whole thing about peer pressure. In western society it’s about what you’ve got. Everyone’s checking you up and down to see what label you’re wearing.
We can’t then turn around to our children and tell them not to be materialistic when everything they see as far as adults are concerned is about what you’ve got, hanging on to what you’ve got and trying to get more. Double Cross is also about retribution and redemption.
The books tell the story from a range of perspectives, including those of Sephy and Jude as adults, Sephy’s mother, Jasmine, and Callum and Jude’s mother, Meggie.
Unusually, the characters of the adults are drawn in as much detail as those of the children. ‘There’s this view that teenagers aren’t interested in reading about adults; they want to read about their peers.
'But I just felt that teenagers, while they might be very scathing about adults, know sooner or later they’re going to be one. It’s about the influence adults can have on teenagers’ lives. In that kind of story, where the things Callum and Sephy and Tobey go through are part of a world that the adults have set up for them, it would have been strange not to show adults within that world. For me it was a natural part of the story.’
Of all the characters in the series, Callum and Tobey are probably the most consistently appealing, and they are Blackman’s own favourites.
‘Maybe I just find it really easy to get into the head of teenage boys. Some other characters I had to really get to grips with. Jasmine got easier as I was writing her. She wasn’t the same person at the end of the books that she was at the beginning. I don’t think any of them were.
Even Jude started off in a certain place and ended in a certain place. That’s what I think is interesting about people; that capacity for change. Whether it’s for better or worse, life is about change and you have to try and embrace that. I try to get that in my book. I do like stories about moral dilemmas and consequences and cause and effect. It took me a while to realise that a lot of my plots follow those lines about cause and effect: okay, you’ve made a decision, let’s look at the consequences of that decision.
Blackman originally expected to write the story in a single book, but once she reached page 450 she realised that there was much more to tell. Three books later, she believes that, finally, the tale is complete, but although she has no plans to continue the series, she will never say never. ‘At the end of Checkmate I thought I was finished. By then it had taken five or six years of my life. Then Double Cross came along and it was seven or eight years! So I feel the story’s told, but then, I said that at the end of Checkmate…’
