If one wasn’t aware of the graft required to produce a debut novel as assured, controlled and expertly executed as The Twelve, one might be tempted to dub Stuart Neville one lucky little bugger. The book comes bearing a blurb from James Ellroy (the two writers share an agent: “I’ve exchanged a couple of emails with him, and even the emails are very James Ellroy!” Neville says, “my agent absolutely adores him as a person”), there’s talk of a serious film deal, and the book was selected not just as one of HP’s novels of last year, but the best crime book of 09 in a straw poll conducted by Declan Burke on his excellent Crime Always Pays blog.

But luck has damn-all to do with it. Talent will only get you so far, the rest is sheer tenacity. Scratch the skin of most first-time writers and they’ll admit to aborted projects in the bottom drawer.

“I’d tried a few times over the years to write a book,” Neville admits, ” the usual process of getting a chapter or two in and then finding something more interesting to do instead. Then about two or three years ago it dawned on me that if I ever wanted to write I had to do it now or never bother. I actually wrote one novel previously to The Twelve and pretty much as soon as I finished it I realised it was crap and immediately started another, so I think The Twelve benefitted a lot from the momentum I had, and not to make a lot of the mistakes I’d made previously.”

Now 36, Neville admits that he always wanted to write, but the trick is to keep that desire alive until one has discovered exactly what it is they want to say.

“I can remember even trying when I was eight or nine years old,” he recalls, “it was a story about dinosaurs I think. But I think you need a few miles on the clock as well, just to have some perspective on life, to be able to write about things convincingly. And to have the maturity and gumption to sit down and the finish the thing, the force of will it takes to write a novel. I just finished my second book a couple of weeks back, and it was an even harder slog than the first book, and it still takes that self discipline to just sit down and get on with the bloody thing.

“Obviously different people have different levels of maturity, and some people might be capable of writing in their early 20s, other people haven’t started writing until their 50s and 60s, like FX Toole who wrote Million Dollar Baby, based on the short story collection Rope Burns. He was 72 when he was first published, his real name was Gerry Boyd, and he sold his first short story to a small literary magazine in LA and my agent happened to be one of the subscribers. He’d been writing all his life but it wasn’t until he was into his early 70s that he finally made that break.”

Chief among The Twelve’s many assets is its extraordinary forward momentum. The central premise – a twist on the standard thriller revenge saga where a former paramilitary killer is tormented by the spirits of the twelve souls he’s slain during the Troubles and driven to systematically execute the witnesses and bystanders who allowed the murders to take place – lends the book some serious narrative traction. So is he one of these writers who draws intricate plot graphs before sitting down to write?

“No, The Twelve was written flying by the seat of my pants, just a matter of starting at the start and keeping going. A book that helped me an awful lot as I was actually writing was Story by Robert McKee, the idea of a story having a spine, knowing where I was going to end up. The Twelve started as a short story but as soon as I knew it was going to turn into a novel, I knew exactly what the last few words were going to be, so it was pretty much a charge to the end. I think that’s where the momentum comes from, the fact that everything was building to that one moment, a climax.”

Indeed, the venerable Mr Poe said all stories must anticipate their end. Even if the denouement is surprising it must also feel inevitable.

“I think that’s a good way to look at it. The lesson I learned is if I don’t know where I’m heading then I’m gonna get lost. I think that”s one of the biggest pitfalls: writing and writing without having a direction. There are too many books that I’ve read, you can tell by two thirds of the way through that the writer doesn’t know where they’re going, they’re scrabbling for a destination.

“I think there’s a contract of trust between the reader and the writer. If you pick up a book, you’re putting your trust in the author that you’ll be rewarded for your investment of time. And I feel the writer has to honour that. Certainly as I get older and come to the realisation that there’s only so many more books I’m going to read, I have a lot less patience. My first drafts tend to be very, very lean, it tends to be all dialogue and action. There’ll be very little description, very little internalising of anything. I tend to let the characters reveal themselves by putting them in a situation and letting them do what they do. Most writers will cut from their first draft, I think in revisions The Twelve gained about 12 to 15,000 words. In the second draft I’ll put flesh on the bones.”

Can he recall the moment he hatched the book’s mouth-watering concept of revenge saga as pschological-slash-paranormal thriller?

“I can recall it quite clearly, it was a Sunday morning and I just woke up with this image in my head of a man sitting in a bar surrounded by all the people that he killed. It was just that picture that became the opening pages of the book. And I had a mobile phone sitting beside the bed that has Microsoft Word on it, and I started tapping out the first few paragraphs of the story on the phone, transferred that to my computer later and finished the short story that day, which is essentially the first chapter of the book. It was one of those bolt of lightning moments. And I knew there was a bigger idea there: the last line of the short story was, ‘One down, eleven to go’, which obviously set it up for up for a further story. It just nagged at me until I sat down and worked it into a novel.”

A bit like the overture of a symphony which is a piece unto itself but contains all the themes which will later be explored.

“Yeah, I think I was just lucky that whatever antennae I have picks up an idea like that. Ideas like that can be slippery, you can lose your grip on them and forget them if you’re not careful. Which is why I’m glad I had my phone to hand.”

While rejoicing in the hard bitten bullet prose style of an Ellroy or David Peace, The Twelve’s clammy atmosphere also draws on noir and horror. William Hortsborg’s Fallen Angel (filmed by Alan Parker as Angel Heart) comes to mind.

“There is a grey area between thriller and horror than Thomas Harris has occupied very well – when he can be bothered to write decent books. And John Connolly. In a different way I think The Twelve probably sits in that grey area as well. Some people have been absolutely adamant that the book is either psychological or paranormal, there’s no shifting them on it. They’re dead set. I think to an extent people will bring their own perspective, whether they want to look at it in a more rational or fantastical way.”

Where does he stand on that ratty old literary fiction versus genre argument?

“I had a bit of a rant about this recently. People falsely use all those labels as a measure of quality, when really they’re for bookshops to know what shelves they put books on. There’s this kind of caste system in the literary world. I’ll admit to maybe a certain amount of reverse snobbery in this as well. A friend pointed out to me that even within genres there can be a bit of snobbery where people will look down on romance fiction or chick-lit and that kind of thing, and it’s exactly the same as the literary crowd looking down on the crime crowd. Genre for me is just a way of organising things. It’s the quality of the work itself that either stands up or it doesn’t.

“But I think very often what can be seen as the most pure genre pieces can say an awful lot more about difficult issues than literary fiction can. A good example is Cloverfield, which is about as silly and as daft a science fiction monster movie as you could ever see, but it’s really about 9/11 in the same way the Japanese dealt with Hiroshima with the Godzilla films.”

The Twelve is published by Harville Secker.