A POTTED (AND RATHER RAMBLING) BIOGRAPHY

I was a home baby, born in Slough, on the Britwell Estate, front bedroom of No.3 Magpie Way on March 5, 1969 at about 5pm (too much detail?). My mum gave me a slap to welcome me to the world and didn’t stop for the next 16 years. I was the difficult middle child of Dorothy and Michael King, with two brothers, Ralph (two years older) and Robin (five years younger) and I loved tearing about looking for mischief. I spent most of my early life up trees, on top of garage roofs or staring blankly at blackboards in confusion. I was just a typical estate kid really, always walking around with bleeding kneecaps and nits, and always rifling through my mum’s purse when she wasn’t looking or walking dog shit through the house.

I liked Slough and I liked the estate. I had plenty of friends and I was even doing alright at school (by age nine, I could even write my own name, almost). Unfortunately, my mum and dad bought, then quickly sold, their council house and at age ten, we moved to this little town in north Hampshire called Yateley, near Camberley. Now, I could see straight away that me and Yateley weren’t going to get along. There was greenery everywhere and all the kids talked like Worzel Gummidge and called me townie. They went over the park to play, rather than the dump (as we had done in Slough), and there was a great deal more one-up-manship than I’d ever encountered before; clothes, shoes, houses, your dad’s car, all these thing were compared like trump cards and I could care less about any of them. Me and my National Health glasses would eventually come to be collectively known as Pikey by most of my classmates and that just about sums up my time at Yateley Comprehensive.

I left school early at 16 with one CSE and an overhead projector. My CSE was in Drama and I only got this because it was the only exam table before we broke up for study leave and I simply didn’t bother going back afterwards. Well, there wasn’t much point. I was in all the bottom classes (the ones they let me stay in) and I hadn’t done a stroke of work in two years. I wasn’t really interested, to be honest. I much preferred messing about and having a laugh. I hadn’t even taken a book in for over a year. I just used to ask the teacher for a pen and a bit of paper, draw a few tits and cocks while he was banging on about something, then sling the whole lot in the bin when the bell went. It was hardly Mr Chips.

One thing I did like doing, however, was writing funny stories. I’d been writing tales like Willy Wankers Trip to the Seaside and Savage Snail since I was 13 and a lot of the lads thought they were pretty funny. I had a collection of about 20 of them by the time I was 17 and wrote off and tried to get them published. No takers, though one publisher did write back and say she thought my story Pansy Man was the most offensive thing she’d ever read. Well, that’s the sort of sense of humour kids have when they’re teenagers, isn’t it? Trouble is, mine never really sophisticated.

I also used to like making movies. I badgered my old folks into buying me a Super 8 camera and eventually got one when I was 13. For the next couple of years I spent my whole time writing, shooting and editing little three minute movies and was utterly convinced this was what I’d do when I left school. I’d be a filmmaker. What an idiot!

At 16 I got a full-time job stacking shelves in Gateways (later to become Somerfields). It was easy work, I got £40 a week (at the time, I couldn’t work out how I was going to spend it all) and I got to steal loads: Mars bars, fags, Pot Noodles and light bulbs, you name it, you could usually find it down my pants when I knocked off work at 6pm.

It was about this time that my old man, a bricklayer, saw that my life was going nowhere, so he offered to teach me a trade (his, to be precise) and took me onto the sites. Scary places for a 16 year old, full of hard work and hard geezers. I laid a couple of bricks here and there, most of which had to be taken up and relayed by professionals, before being handed a hod and told to try my hand at loading out. Overnight I’d somehow become a hod carrier; this murderously hard job which involves nothing more than carrying bricks and blocks up ladders or through muddy footings. How had that happened? I might’ve hated school but it was a piece of cake compared to the nightmare job I’d landed myself. I spent every day praying for rain so I could go home, yet somehow stuck it out for seven years, working on building sites around Reading, Camberley and Southampton, sometimes with my old man, sometimes with other gangs, simply because I didn’t know what else to do.

Around the age of 17 I started nicking motors and joyriding with mates at night. It was a bit of excitement in an otherwise dull town and we all got a big kick out of being the Big Men. Silly twats. This progressed onto shoplifting, then on to burglary (residential and business) and then a little further still, though I’ll let sleeping jobs lie if you don’t mind. Anyway, the more serious we got, the more lads dropped out until there was just me and a mate called Darren. We knocked around together and spent a couple of years liberating tellies and videos from shops and houses in the area to supplement Darren’s dole and my winter-time wages, which always dried up in when the snows came. More than anything though we got a buzz from it. It’s a terrible scummy thing to admit, but it was true. It got the heart racing and the senses sharpened and when we got away with it we felt euphoric. Most people do something stupid when they’re young; some people do drugs, others have sex with anything in bras, others pick fights; me and Darren robbed.

Anyway, eventually (and inevitably) we got caught and charged with Aggravated Burglary and Going Equipped and so on and were committed to be tried at Winchester Crown Court the following summer. Both of us were put on curfews and barred from leaving our houses between the hours of 10pm and 8am, but seeing as I started work at 7am and the pubs were open until 11pm, the whole thing proved unworkable. A year later, despite being assured we were certs for prison, we both received hefty fines and were banned from burgling anyone for a year. We were much relieved and I celebrated that night by pulling out of the pub car park straight in front of a passing police car. I had my licence taken away for 15 months and managed to stay out of trouble for 15 months and 5 days but was then arrested for drink driving again, this time in a stolen car. I was banned for 3 years, convicted of Taking and Driving Away, Criminal Damage (breaking into the motor) and Escaping from Custody (I was at large for 30 seconds before being recaptured). Once again I got a hefty fine and a stern warning from the bench that my life heading for wrack and ruin if I carried on the way I was going. Well, I finally came to my senses and realized I had to sort myself out, so I saved up some money and flew off to see what America had to offer.

In the States, I met a woman called Pamela who I fell head over heels in love with in that cringingly embarrassing puppy dog way that all 20-years-olds do. Pamela was 27 lecturing marine biology at Tulane University, New Orleans, while studying for her Master’s. I was an unemployed hod carrier with convictions for burglar and car theft. How could things not work out between us?

Anyway, while I was there, I got to meet a lot of Yanks who were all in their mid-twenties and had yet to leave school. I’d been slogging my guts out since I was 16, while these square-heads were chewing on pencils and sleeping in until midday well into their twenties. I wanted some of that and had the idea about returning to Britain to get a few qualifications so that I could be a Marine Biologist with Pam (or, I don’t know, anything – anything other than hod carrier). The moment I left America, Pam sobered up and disappeared off the face of the earth and I signed and saved for college.

A year later I took an Access Course at Farnborough College of Technology and a year after that, a one-year journalism course at The London College of Printing, in the Elephant and Castle, which was great. Unfortunately, when I graduated, I applied to over 100 newspapers and magazines but got absolutely nowhere, until finally one magazine offered me a job.

Model Railway Enthusiast. Honestly, what a prospect, but what could I do? I was desperate and my old hod carrying boss had started ringing me with offers of work (“just until something better comes along”) so I took it. I thought I’d give it 18 months just to get a bit of experience on my CV then get another job. This proved harder than anticipated, well who’s going to hire some bloke off Model Railway Enthusiast? I wouldn’t. I hated it, it was utterly soul destroying in the worst way possible. Hod carrying had been hard, but at least I’d had pride at the end of the day, writing about OO gauge trains was just misery on a stick. In the evenings I drank too much, I smoked dope, I ate kebab after kebab after kebab and abused myself non-stop, anything just to blot out the futility of my day. There were a few nice people there who I still see from time to time, but most of them were from another planet.

The one silver lining about my job was that I did absolutely nothing all day. I just sat around reading the paper, doing the crossword or playing chess with my mate Clive across the server (Clive was a mate from The London College of Printing who’d had about as much luck finding work as me so I managed to get him a job on Park Homes & Holiday Caravans, another of Link House’s winning titles). So, just to fill the time, I started writing again. Short stories at first, and scripts and funny poems and so on, and sending them off to publishers. No luck. So, I thought I’d have a go at writing a novel and knocked off this south London detective novel called Do Killers Dream of Angels, which registered a little interest from a few publishers but ultimately lead to nothing. I then wrote a few films scripts, some more shorts stories and a play, before deciding to dip into my past misdeeds for inspiration. I started out with a title, The Burglar Diaries, and the thing practically wrote itself.

I was pretty chuffed with it when I finished and thought I’d have publishers biting my hand off, but when the same old rejection letters started dropping through the letterbox, I was ready to chuck in the towel and disappear abroad again. I was having a particularly miserable time at work, I hated living in bedsit land and I was feeling extremely sorry for myself. More than that, I was still working on Model fucking Railway Enthusiast after five years. Ridiculously, I even started thinking about going back to crime and found myself working on more and more ludicrous ideas for funding my travels.

Then, out of the blue I got another job. It was on a porno mag, Club International. I’d only applied because I thought the interview might be something I could tell my mates about, I never thought I’d actually get the job, but I did and so in 1999, I started in the adult industry. The place was full of a load of piss-head and sarcastic bastards that had even fewer morals than me. I fitted in straight away, made loads of good mates and took to the work like a dyke to water.

Better still, one of the publishers that had given The Burglar Diaries a good sniff the year before had a change of heart and offered me a publishing deal when I proposed two more crime diaries – The Bank Robber Diaries and The Hitman Diaries.

I worked on Club International for two and a half years as sub, then deputy-editor, then landed the editorship of Mayfair. I only lasted a year on Mayfair though and got the bullet in 2002 for falling sales (though I blame the internet for that and/or everyone else except myself).

I now work and support myself writing full-time and have published a novel a year since 2001. I also wrote the 2007 BBC3 sitcom Thieves Like Us and am currently adapting the rest of my books into either TV or movie screenplays. I live in Stoke Newington, North London with my lovely wife Jeannie King, who insisted on getting a mention somewhere on my website.

My older brother Ralph is a serving CID officer in Cambridgeshire while my younger brother Robin is an actor and video editor who appeared in The Bill, Casualty and Thieves Like Us, and is currently carving out a career for himself as a filmmaker.

Well, that’s my story. Bit long wasn’t it? Sorry about that, I hadn’t meant to bang on so much but once I got started it just kept coming. I should like to take this opportunity to point out that while The Burglar Diaries and The Pornographer Diaries were inspired from past experiences, both books are purely fictional.

Danny