Neil Mackay: Why Children Kill

All The Little Guns Went Bang, Bang, Bang isn't, technically, Neil Mackay's first novel. "I can remember my gran got me an old typewriter - I think I'd been babbling in her ear about wanting to be a writer," says Mackay. "She got me a sheaf of pink paper, because there was no white paper left at the stationery office, and I remember sitting down and battering out a little 12 page vampire story. When I was eight years old!"

Life, however, sort of got in the way. Coming from "a relatively poor working class background" in Northern Ireland, Mackay says he was lucky enough to go to a good grammar school, where he worked hard, earned a scholarship to university and then embarked on what became a busy career in investigative journalism and broadcasting. And yet... "Though I had wonderful opportunities, which make me feel really humble about being able to present radio shows or make documentaries, it still wasn't really fulfilling," he admits.

"So in my mid-thirties, when my children were getting a bit older, I just said to myself: 'Look, what you have always wanted to do is write a novel - make space,'" he explains. "So I made myself sit down and actually do what I'd always wanted to do, to write a book about Ireland - particularly Northern Ireland, and to do so in a a literary manner, to write a book which didn't obsess about the Troubles but kept them as background static."

"I made myself sit down and actually do what I'd always wanted to do, to write a book about Northern Ireland, and to do so in a a literary manner, a book which didn't obsess about the Troubles but kept them as background static" – Neil Mackay

All The Little Guns Went Bang, Bang, Bang tells the darkly comic and truly horrific story of two 11 year olds, Pearce Furlong and May-Belle Mulholland, who meet one summer in Antrim, Northern Ireland. It's the early 1980s, and their games and shared fantasies quickly spiral out of control, with theft, arson and violence eventually leading to murder. Given that Mackay has been a crime reporter for decades, and spent a lot of his career in Northern Ireland covering the Troubles, did his journalism help him write his novel?

Yes and no. "As a crime reporter I covered the aftermath of the James Bulger murder case," he says. "One abiding image that burned itself into my mind - not as a journalist, but just as a human being - was the mob of people outside the court wanting to drag those boys out and murder them, like some Alabama lynching in the 1940s. I could not believe that I sat on a planet with people who couldn't realise that for children to get to the point where they committed such a horrific killing, something dreadful must have happened to them. What those two boys did was monstrous, but surely we can think deeper than they are just little imps who went out one morning to kill?

"So, by the end of the book, after they've done all the terrible things that they've done, I wanted readers to still empathise with Pearce and May-Belle - to recognise that they've done bad, not that they're evil," says Mackay. "You've seen the things that made them the people they are, so you'll understand the cruelty that they carry out; also, it's a love story - a very sexless love story - and I wanted at the end for you to think that has a redemptive element."

But did his journalism help him to write the novel? "It teaches you to stay 'on task,' it teaches you precision and deadlines, but I think each style of writing is different; newspaper reporting is as different from writing a novel as poetry is to playwriting," Mackay says. "I was watching some John Updike interviews on YouTube recently and he said that it's only writing a novel that teaches you how to write a novel."

The novel's subject matter and dark comedic tone made it a hard sell, especially with London publishers, but Mackay is pleased it has found a good home with Glasgow-based Freight Books. "What I want to do now is write novels," he says. "I'll always be a journalist, keeping a hand in the newspapers and broadcasts if people will have me, but what I want to do is write, because that's what fulfills me as a human being."