Meet the Author: Robert Dinsdale

Robert Dinsdale is a novelist whose works include The Toymakers (2018), Gingerbread (2014) and Little Exiles (2013). His latest book, Once a Monster, reimagines the legend of the minotaur, transplanting the story into London in 1861. You can find Once a Monster and Robert's other books on our catalogue.

Who were your heroes as you were growing up?

If I hadn't become a writer, I would have found work in nature somehow - and that has its roots in the books I adored when I was growing up. Colin Dann's epic series about a group of animals searching for a new home, beginning with The Animals of Farthing Wood, coloured my childhood - as did Richard Adams and Brian Jacques with their own animal fantasies. The idea that these worlds and odysseys might be happening just beyond the end of the garden was, somehow, inspiring to me. It made me look for stories in the everyday, worlds that might exist just out of our line of sight.

What was your journey to publication?

I knew I wanted to be a writer from a very young age. I'm not sure if a desire like that has its origin in any specific moment, but my father - who sadly passed away this year - was a natural storyteller, and when I was small he span me my own legend: that he and my mother had found me in the woods, and decided to raise me as their own. (I should say - I knew this was only a story, but I loved it all the same!) Books were everywhere when I was younger - an old chest of my father's books from his own childhood were like a treasure trove at my grandparents' house - so perhaps it was only natural that I should want to write my own.

I started sending novels to publishers and agents when I was quite young - but, of course, never got anywhere with them. But the joy of writing and being rejected was, for a time, enough - and I still treasure the first rejection letter I got, when I was about 12 years old, dearly. By the time I was in my early twenties I had quietly resolved that I wasn't ever going to progress as a writer, and I flirted with working in the publishing industry instead. I saved up money, lived in a youth hostel in London, and jobbed around - but this only reignited my desire to push forward with writing.

Eventually, I was lucky enough to see my first novel in print. It sold next to nothing, the second novel fared even worse, and I rather limped along until, with a second new publisher, The Toymakers clicked with readers. It was a long, bumpy ride that, several times, I thought about jumping off altogether (you know, before I was pushed) - but I kept on going, and eventually some readers began to pick up my books. I always come back to another piece of advice passed on by my parents, in their resolute Yorkshire way: 'just keep muddling along.' Muddling along has helped me a lot over the years.

In The Toymakers you created the magical world of Papa Jack's Emporium. Do you think there is still magic in the world if we look for it enough?

The Toymakers is really about the dying of fantasy, imagination and magic when the real world comes knocking. That novel, about an unwed pregnant runaway who answers an advertisement for winter help at an illustrious Mayfair toy shop, was inspired by becoming a father, and watching the first flourishes of wonder and amazement in my very young daughter when we played together. But its real theme is how the horrors of the adult world will inexorably draw us forward, how we can't stay children - with all the wonder and magic that that entails - forever, and that, sooner or later, we must find ourselves turning from the safety of magic to the peril of reality.

Like the characters in The Toymakers, though, I like to think that the way we anchor ourselves, the way we remain good, is by remembering that that magic once existed - and that, even though it might now only persist in the edgelands of life, it's forever there. These days I find enough magic in being a father to sustain me - and I couldn't help reaching that same conclusion in the novel that came next, PARIS BY STARLIGHT, either.

Your latest book, Once a Monster, takes the minotaur legend and relocates it to Victorian London. Can you tell us a little about it and how it was to write?

Since Once a Monster has started being reviewed by readers, a lot of people have commented on how unusual a novel it is. Honestly, I had no idea! The image of the Minotaur standing in the streets of fog-wreathed 19th century London had been in my mind for a long time, and at some point I began to figure out how to anchor it in a story.

Once a Monster opens as winter approaches in the year 1861. A young mudlark named Nell, foraging in the tidal mud flats of the Thames as it turns through Ratcliffe, comes across the body of a bestial man, his body a lattice of scars, a great Labyrinth tattooed across his back, his matted hair covering calcified patches that give the impression of horns. Perhaps, we begin to think, this may be something more than a man. Somehow, his story is linked with the Minotaur of ancient Knossos. Somehow, Minotaur and man might be the very same.

Once you have a beginning, I think, you have a story. Writing it required burying myself in 19th century London, but that's a landscape I have always loved reading about, and immersing myself in its seamier side, especially via Henry Mayhew's classic piece of reportage, 'London Labour and the London Poor', was fascinating. It was important to me that the London in which the novel is set feels completely authentic, because when you're crashing something mythic or fantastical into the real world, it only truly works if the world is real enough to support it. That mingling of the real and the imagined is such a fertile place - I can't imagine writing outside it.

The minotaur legend has featured in a lot of fiction in the past. How did you first hear the legend and did it feel daunting as a writer to find a new angle on such well known source material?

Across the last few years, and certainly since writing The Toymakers, I have come to realise that everything that fires my imagination has its roots in childhood, and the genesis of Once a Monster was no different. When I was a boy, one of the old threadbare books in our house - which, if I'm right, belonged to my mother in her own 1950s childhood - was a book of Greek myths rewritten for children, and in those pages a particular picture - a depiction of the Minotaur, ravenous, raging, blood covering his maw - leapt out at me. I've no idea where that book is now, but the image is imprinted upon me.

I'd known about the Minotaur's story, then, ever since I was small - and it had always seemed unfair to me that this creature had been imprisoned in this cruel labyrinthine prison. Call it the innocence of children, but I can distinctly remember feeling the unfairness of it; after all, it wasn't the creature's fault that it was born so monstrous. It seemed to me that what was being depicted was nothing but a man trapped inside monstrous form, his animalistic rage the same rage of a hospital patient locked into a body that no longer works. I'm not sure why I came to this conclusion - and there are obviously less forgiving interpretations of the myth out there - but it stayed with me, and I always knew that this was the Minotaur I wanted to write about, that my story would acknowledge the creature's humanity as well as its monstrosity.

So, while it's true that the Minotaur is well trodden ground in fiction - I love Mary Renault, for instance - a story that reconsidered the Minotaur and began thinking about him as part man, instead of entirely beast, seemed a new way of approaching it.

Is there anything you can share with us about your latest project?

I'm going to be an absolute spoil sport on this question. I can tell you that the new project, like the ones before it, will be grounded in real history but move from there into a place where the fantastic is possible; but, beyond that, I'm keeping the door closed. Sorry! Over the years I've found that, if I talk about a project too early - even to my agent or publishers - it somehow disintegrates on me. So, for now, it's just me and the book...

One book, piece of music or work of art that everyone should experience?

Everyone, whether adult or child, should read Watership Down, and reach that place where Woundwort has gone off to legend, and Hazel is meeting his proud, dignified death - with his life's work, in safeguarding future generations, about to be acknowledged by an invitation to join the Black Rabbit's council. It's just sublime, and I grapple after the same bittersweet feeling in the conclusion of everything I've ever written.

We're always looking for recommendations of new things to read. What have you read lately that you would recommend to Suffolk readers?

Since my father passed away, I've been working my way steadily through that same treasure trove of books we used to pore through when we were children. A particular children's writer, Malcolm Saville, feels somehow synonymous with my father's childhood - I have enjoyed getting lost in the wild lonely places of Shropshire which became the backdrop for so many of his stories: real places, with just a hint of darkness around them.

In terms of more contemporary novels, I couldn't recommend Mat Osman's The Ghost Theatre more highly - its evocation of Elizabethan London is hallucinatory; you couldn't hope for a more vivid novel, and I found the way it touches on magic and superstition truly affecting.

What is the best piece of advice you were ever given?

I'm not sure this is advice for everyone, but it worked for me and it keeps me just about sane enough as I'm writing: don't think too much, don't plan too much, just dream. It's the only way I know how to write - planning in too intimate detail just kills it for me, so I just wade into it and follow it wherever it's going.

Can you tell us one thing about yourself that your readers may not know?

I once spent a night lost in the Australian outback. Would not recommend.