The Story Behind A Wanted Man by Robert Parker

I think, when discussing the origins of A Wanted Man, it is important to establish a timeline. I’m now 34, and I first put pen to paper on a crime story set in Manchester when I was 17. I was a cinema nut, a real action movie junkie, and I loved to write. My English teacher at the time told me that my prose was too description heavy, and my writing was suffering because of it. That got me thinking about screenplays, and the economical style in which screenplays are written – I felt that the best way for me to tell stories, given my problems with over-description, was to go down that avenue. So age 17 I wrote a screenplay called Murder In The Name, which was a crime caper set in Manchester, with a family at war within itself.

The big problem with it was that it was…