Spotlight: Tom Cain's break into the media





Tom Cain Assassin



Tom Cain is the pseudonym for the author of thrillers Assassin, Accident-Man and Dictator. The award winning journalist tells me how he got his break in the media.

By pure chance...



In the summer of 1979, when I was still at university, my parents were living in the States. So I spent a lot of my vacations living with my girlfriend and her parents. But then we broke up and I had nowhere to live. I was literally out on my arse in the street. The only person I knew in London was a guy whose brother was married to my half-aunt (tenuous, huh?) I called him up and asked if I could have a bed for the night. He said, sure, but he warned me that his flat was about to be used as the office for a bunch of Times and Sunday Times journalists, temporarily without work owing to a printers’ strike at the paper, who were about to do a spoof newspaper called Not The Times. To cut a long story short, I ended up being the Not The Times tea-boy and dogsbody, got to know a bunch of journos and 18 months later, when I was an unemployed graduate, one of them gave me a day’s shift as a researcher on the Sunday Times. And I was off …



The hardest struggle was simply getting my foot in the door. It took about 18 months and I got very, very low at times along the way – also very, very broke – but once I got my foot in the door I was very lucky and things happened fast. I was Young Journalist of the Year and a professional magazine editor within three years of my first paid day’s work. But it’s still a struggle, perhaps of a different kind. It’s a very, very tough world right now for journalists and authors. I’m having to work much harder and hustle much more fiercely to get less well paid. And 99% of writers would say the same.



I was writing non-fiction and humour books right from the start of my career. Back in the 80s it was much easier to get a publisher to take a punt on a silly idea. The money wasn’t big, but it gave you experience and a track record. I was also very lucky in that I had a mate who came from a very powerful family who ran a big TV/radio/literary agency, so I also got a couple of TV gigs. The agent fired me when I turned down the chance to be on ‘That’s Life’ which was a very popular, but very cheesy BBC show starring Esther Rantzen … But by then I had enough of a CV and enough contacts that I could get another agent. I kept publishing stuff over the years. And so when I had the idea for The Accident Man, my first Sam Carver novel, I had no trouble getting an agent interested in the idea. Turning the idea into an actual book, though ... well, that was a whole other matter …





Tom Cain Accident Man