"Before the electric light was invented, it was easy to people the night with all kinds of terrors…"

Jon May is the author of the Divers: From Piper Alpha to the Gulf War, and Salvage: From the South China Sea to the Caribbean Coast, the stunning true life accounts of his work and experiences as a dive medic. He has also published a cold war thriller and a fictionalised account of a ferry disaster under his own name and is a Harvey regular, writing dark urban fantasy based on local Cornish folklore under the pen name Jack Pentire.

We catch up with Jon as his latest book The Dumb Supper, the first in a new series of modern-day supernatural thrillers entwined with Celtic witchcraft, is released. 

Q: Divers and Salvage are acclaimed as “unpretentious and raw accounts of commercial diving operations” that are “immersive”, “tense, sad and humorous”. You write about some horrific real life events. Was it difficult recalling them in such detail and how did you go about writing these books?

A: I had been writing for some time before I joined the offshore industry, mainly stories about the occult. At the time, the fashion in such things was for pure gothic horror as in Hammer Films. The market to be honest was scarily tough. When I joined the diving industry, my very first offshore assignment was as a life support tech on a platform called the Ocean Victory. A few days into the job, the Piper Alpha platform exploded and burned, and we were one of the nearest sources of help. It was a baptism of fire almost literally and the main problem in writing about it was not so much recalling the detail, but trying to stay true to the spirit of the response crew. If there was a single lesson that night, it is that there are no heroes – there are only people responding as best as they can to an event. It was a story that had to be told. Memories might be painful but the idea of forgetting them and all of the men who died that night is much more troublesome.

Q: How did you find making the switch to fiction when you were writing Night Watch and Smoke on the Water?

A: Well, this is an odd one. ‘Nightwatch’ is a fictionalised blend of many of the stories that sailors tell on the long ‘Down On Weather’ watches when there nothing to be done other than wait for things to improve. What I find most liberating in writing fiction is that there are no constraints, no need to stick to facts, simply the need to tell a good story.

As to ‘Smoke on the Water’, when I first graduated I was employed as a fisheries biologist on the docks in Hull. During that time, I was introduced to a good many fishermen and skippers operating the distant water fleet. Along the way, I was also introduced to a Royal Naval intelligence officer who was embedded in the fishing fleet. It wasn’t exactly secret, nor was it talked about much but ‘Brookings’ in ‘Smoke on the Water’ is loosely based on that man, though of course the level of official deceit is purely imaginary. (Honest!) 

Q: You then changed genres completely and switched to writing dark urban fantasy (as Jack Pentire). How did that come about, and what is it about this genre that draws you in as a writer?

A: I love the way people have always imagined stories about ‘the other world’. Before the electric light was invented, it was easy to people the night with all kinds of terrors… I think that the stories reflect the need to experience, safely in fiction, terrors that might just be too frightening to face in real life. Of course, there is always the scary possibility that these things are more than dark fiction. Given that, what writer could resist?

Q: You live in Cornwall and are surrounded by a rich and fascinating history. How do you go about researching the real life places and folklore that you write about?

A: The real life places are the background to a free ranging childhood and young adulthood in Cornwall. As for the legends, when I was a kid, my parents ran a hotel in Falmouth and several of the older staff were quite willing to talk about the old ways and the old beliefs. Most of the material I use was absorbed by a sort of osmosis. The ‘Grimoire’ stuff on classical Witchcraft is really just the research that any writer might do. I must admit that most of the ‘dark secrets’ are more sedative than frightening but there are odd nuggets of really scary material.

"Memories might be painful but the idea of forgetting them and all of the men who died that night is much more troublesome."

Q: If there was an era in history you could go back to, when and where would it be?

A: It probably reflects badly on me but if I could go back in time and interview someone, it would probably be Elizabeth the First’s spy master Francis Walsingham, who by all accounts was more devious that Machiavelli and more intelligent that Isaac Newton. And I would really love to experience Shakespeare’s plays in their original performances.

Q: What are you working on now and what’s the next book we can expect?

A: The next one will be a sequel to the Dumb Supper. I left a lot of loose ends at the end of that one and I’d like to finally tie them up.

Q: What short story ideas are you working on for future Harveys?

A: I have a creepy idea, inspired by a ‘mortsafe’ tomb just up the road from where I live, regarding the ‘resurrection men’ who provided bodies for dissection in the later nineteenth century.

Q: What advice would you give anyone starting out on their writing and publishing adventure?

A: Go for it. In some ways it has never been easier. Word processors and electronic submissions have relaxed the constraints of paper copies and the need to re-write thirty pages to edit a few words. But remember, ease of committing something to paper doesn’t absolve you of the final responsibility to tell a good story. Above all, write what you know, believe in yourself and listen, really listen, to constructive critics – they aren’t out to get you (or a least most of them aren’t). And believe in yourself.

Find the Dumb Supper by Jack Pentire on Amazon:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dumb-Supper-AFTER-DARK-SHADOWS/dp/191417058X/