Patrick Doyle writes queer fiction, ranging from romance to mystery, to thrillers and science fiction to just playing fiction. His stories depict gay men facing the challenges of living and loving in today’s world. His upcoming book, Bill and the Kid, comes out on October 1st.
Watch Our Interview
Interview with Patrick Doyle
John Parker:
All right. Well, let’s start with Bill and the Kid, shall we? What can readers expect when they turn to page one of your new novel?
Patrick Doyle:
First of all, can I give a word about the title?
John Parker:
Well, yes, it’s actually a really long title, so maybe you can give the full title.
Patrick Doyle:
It’s a mouthful. Sorry, didn’t swear. When I was writing it for the last year and a half, in my mind it was called Bill and the Kid. The main character is Bill. And the secondary character, but also main character is a 14-year-old boy. So he’s the kid. So we did all that, all this done, big novel, all these themes. Put it up on the databases of Amazon and Goodreads. And guess what? Can’t find the search. Because when you type in Bill and the Kid, guess what you get? Billy the Kid. You get 8,694 books on Billy the Kid. So I said, “Well, we can’t have that.” So I added that long subtitle.
And the long subtitle is A Queer Family, a Troubled Child, a Secret, a Crime. And I think that helps not only in searching the book, but it also helps give the book some kind of meeting because somebody doesn’t know the book looks at it and goes, Bill and the kid. What’s that? So I give it a bit of a mystery edge here.
I give a bit of a, whatever you see in that. And the other thing is when you go to search it on Amazon or book reads or wherever, you don’t have to type in the whole damn thing. Oh, sorry. All you had to do is type in Bill and the kid queer.
So page one. Okay. Right. Bill is a retired school teacher in his 50s. Anton is his long-term lover who’s a nurse. Anton is not retired. Little friction there because Bill is on his own, misses his students, misses his classes, starting to miss Anton. So where’s the queer family?
The queer family, they’re the queer couple, but the queer family, by the way, they have a great life. They have a great romantic life. They have a great sexual life, and it’s all in the book. So sex, yes. But to find the queer family, you have to go back to Bill’s past because he was raised by a gay man who was not related to him. It’s a long story. It’s another book also available. And later in life, and they had a traditional relationship, he and his adoptive father. It wasn’t a romantic thing. It was paternal, son, filial, all that stuff. So when he got older and started teaching, he fell in love with another teacher named Liam. Liam had a five-year-old daughter named Ruth from a previous relationship. And after a few years, Bill, Liam, Ruth, and the adoptive dad were all living together in a family.
And they lived that way for a long time. Another book.
So now we go to this book, and it opens with Bill and Anton at the airport waiting for Liam to come because in the meantime, Ruth has also grown up. She was the five-year-old daughter of Liam, Liam, who has passed away. And since then, Ruth has become an engineer. She’s got married. She had a kid. And after six or seven years, because she’s an engineer, she got a job offer in London, she took it. So there’s a separation there. Not between Bill and Ruth, because they’re always very close. They could FaceTime anytime.
The separation was between Bill who loved Liam as a kid, loved Liam as a baby, and misses him. He and Anton were the world’s greatest babysitters.
One day, Ruth gives him a call. Something’s wrong with Liam. It’s been wrong for a long time. He’s uncommunicative. He’s withdrawn. He’s no longer interested in his friends or school or anything. He has transformed himself into a black hole. They talk to him, they talk to his teachers, they talk to his counselors. No one can break the wall that this kid has set up. Whether he means to or not, we don’t know. So she says to herself, “I’m going to ask Bill and Anton if they can take him for the summer because they’re in London and Bill and Anton are in Minneapolis or Montreal or somewhere over here. I don’t specify. I don’t care. Sorry, it doesn’t really matter.”
Bill is thrilled. This is Bill’s dream come true to see him again and all this stuff. And he’s sure he can break through to him, but they go to pick him up at the airport, and from the very first moment, Liam’s a dud. He doesn’t respond. He doesn’t make eye contact. He has his hair down over his eyes. He dresses in drab black. He just doesn’t engage with anyone.
So a lot of the book is Bill trying to make friends with Liam. It’s tough. It’s not that Liam is hostile. Liam just isn’t there. But Bill has an ASAP his card, four ACEs actually. He’s pleaded with a few of his ex-students to befriend Liam around the same age. Maybe it’ll work, maybe they’ll be friends. Probably not. No friends at home. Why would there be friends here? And they’re called Tisha, Layla, Joy, and Anthony. And they love their ex-teacher.
They always loved him. He’s a beloved teacher. And so they say, “Sure, we’ll give it a try.” And they come over and they make him bowling. He has a great time. And they take him out again and he has another great time. And every time that they talk to Bill about Liam, they’re impressed. He’s fun, he’s witty. And Bill is like, “What the hell?” Because back home, whether it’s home in London or whether it’s home with Anton and Bill, he’s still the black hole.
Jim Pounds:
One of the things that struck me, Patrick, when I read the description was you talked about Liam’s darkness. And I remember earlier in my life thinking about adopting a child. And my fear was immediately it came up when I heard this description. I’m like, that was my fear was that somebody would come into my house that didn’t want to be there or didn’t act like they wanted to be there and that I couldn’t help them or reach them or have a parental relationship with them. So that description alone just made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. That’s the fear of anybody who thinks, oh, I’ll bring somebody in my house and I’ll be able to help them. It’s a great setup in my opinion, my non-writer.
Patrick Doyle:
Thanks. And especially for somebody who’s got experience with kids like Bill and like you who has experience with people and is very persuasive. That’s why I’m here, giving all the credit to Jim. And yeah, so you’re right because Bill doesn’t get it, right?
Jim Pounds:
Well, he hopes for the best and he gets the worst, it sounds like.
Patrick Doyle:
He gets the worst, but he gets the real kid. He gets the real kid now. And one of the things that the gang who likes him so much says is sometimes when they say something or do something, Liam takes it wrong. Liam gets his back up. Liam walks away, so there’s something going on there. And the other thing with Liam is there’s a whole brand new Liam when he goes to bed because he has nightmares. He wakes up, he sleepwalks. He doesn’t remember what happened. He has conversation at night with Bill because Bill wakes up with him. Bill is on him all the time. Liam is safe with Bill and Anthony. Safety is the issue. And the scariest thing for Bill is sometimes he wakes up and he finds Liam eyes closed, fast asleep, standing up in front of his bedroom window. What is that?
What is that? What is that? Wow.
Jim Pounds:
Well, so would we call it a mystery?
Patrick Doyle:
Yeah, we call it a mystery because Bill kind of opens an investigation. He’s committed to this kid. Something’s wrong. He has skills. And as a gay man who had a tough childhood, he’s sensitive to kids that don’t fit in. He’s not making any presumptions about Liam either way. But it’s a skill that I think, generalization, hello, the gay man had. Because been there, done that. It’s never easy for anyone. So yeah, it’s a mystery and there is a happy ending, believe it or not. And there’s a bad guy.
There’s always a bad guy in my books. And the bad guys are bad guy, bad girl, bad neither of the above. It’s a bad guy. And Ruth enters a scene and Ruth, his mother is someone to deal with. This is a formidable character. No one screws with Ruth. And with Bill and Anton and the kids from school and with Ruth, they figure it out.
They make it better and this happy end.
John Parker:
You shared with us in your description of your writing, and Jim and I read this before the conversation today, you wrote, “Everyone’s out in your writing. Being who they are isn’t the issue. The issue is how gay men with their networks of friends and particular talents fight to discover the truth or unmask a villain or bring a bad guy down.
The subjects are sobering, but the banter is not. Neither is the sex that peppers every story.” And I just really appreciated that philosophy. How did you come to that? Because you’ve written a number of books now. How did you come to having that be your MO for your writing?
Patrick Doyle:
I got old. I mean, the coming out books, they’re no longer in me. There’s no specific homophobia in this book, but sometimes there’s homophobia in the other books. And actually there is a nasty scene toward the end where there are homophobic slurs, so you’re warned. But they got on with their life. They made the life and they made the life what they wanted. And Bill had a hard time as a teacher, not with the students, but with some of the parents being gay, being openly gay. And I think it’s tough for everybody, and it’s especially tough for some people now like Americans to be queer. And it’s always going to be tough. You can never let your guard down, as you know far more than I do. But in your private lives, here you are, both of you, public, The Gaily Show, couldn’t have done that 50 years ago.
John Parker:
Or maybe on a transistor radio or something, like underground radio.
Patrick Doyle:
Yeah. In your bedroom under the sheet.
John Parker:
At one o’clock in the morning.
Patrick Doyle:
1:00 in the morning. Yeah. So yeah, to me, it’s a given. My characters are queer, they’re gay, they’re homo, whatever you want to call them. Sometimes in other books, they’re not in relationships. Sometimes they are. Sometimes they’re screwed up, sometimes they’re not. Sometimes they’re looking for love, sometimes they can’t stand it. But in themselves, they’re generally okay.
Jim Pounds:
That’s great.
John Parker:
Patrick, you said something earlier, and I want to make sure I caught that right, because I think you said the location that Bill and Anton lives is nondescript. It’s not named.
Patrick Doyle:
Right.
John Parker:
Okay. So talk to me about that because a place can be such an important part of a novel and how it impacts characters and themes, but also nondescript places can be that as well. So I’m curious about the choice that you made there to say, “Hey, the location doesn’t necessarily need to be named here of where Bill and Anton live and where Liam is going to live with them.”
Patrick Doyle:
Good question. And yeah, my first three books were really site specific. It took place in specific places that I knew and had lived in, and I named the streets and all that stuff. But the more I wrote, the more the books became kind of about Montreal because I live, but I didn’t name it because I’m not interested in. I know people love details and
I know people love reading about the setting and the place. And in the book, there are places, very specific places, a park, a home, a school. These are very specific places. I made them up, but they’re specific. And the characters really relate with everything around them. This isn’t some cloud they live in. They live in the real world. It’s really the real world. They go to the bathroom, they go shopping. It’s the real world. But if I put everything in, it would be 600,000 words long because already my books are like 90,000, 120,000.
And all I can say to that is my interest isn’t the geography. My interest is the emotions and the interaction between people and what that produces. And I try to make it in a realistic world. I think it’s a realistic world, but I don’t want to become the Montreal writer.
There are a lot of Montreal writers, good for them. I just want to be out there. Anybody can identify. Anybody in our hemisphere can identify with what they’re going to read.
John Parker:
I mean, I like that because it gets to this idea that the queer experience can transcend boundaries. You know what I mean? That’s something that I like about doing this show. I mean, we’re unique in that we occupy this space on the radio that nobody else is in. So we’re able to talk to a lot of people across the country and show this is how the experience is across the country. It’s not just this is how folks are experiencing it in Chicago or Minneapolis or Phoenix.
We’re all sort of dealing with this right now regardless of the border that we’re living in. So I really thank you for sharing that because I found that, I was like, oh, I want to ask him about that because it’s a very interesting take. And frankly, I wish more people would do it. That being said though, I have to ask, because you are in Canada, you are in Montreal, and I guess, should we apologize, Jim, on behalf of America to what our country is doing to yours right now?
Jim Pounds:
Let me tell you. I was going to ask if we could just move in with you. Maybe that’s too loud.
Patrick Doyle:
Listen, we’re nobody’s 51st state. No. And we would love to have you as an 11th province.
John Parker:
Please. Please. Minnesota’s ready. Please. Oh
Patrick Doyle:
Yeah. We have LGBT rights enshrined in federal law for decades. Decades. So yes, anyway, let’s go back to fiction.
John Parker:
Yeah. Okay. I also wanted to ask, because there are other books with some of these characters. Do folks need to read other books of yours to be able to read this one or is it a standalone? Can folks just jump in?
Patrick Doyle:
Okay. I have a pad answer for that.
John Parker:
Oh, good.
Patrick Doyle:
Okay. If it was a TV show, it would be a spin-off.
John Parker:
Oh, okay, great.
Patrick Doyle:
Okay. So you don’t need to read the previous books because all the story is new. And the last time we saw these characters was in their lives many years ago. And a lot of the characters are new and never been seen before. And there is some background, as I said in the intro, but by the time you finish chapter one, you’re up to scratch. So you read it on your own. And if you really like it, you know what to read the other ones.
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The book is The Bill and the Kid: A Queer Family: A Troubled Child: A Secret A Crime. It comes out on October 1st. You can connect with Patrick at patrickdoylewrites.com.
