He grew up gay in a working-class community, before becoming a criminal barrister, then moving into television. Now he has written his first novel
Rob Rinder had fantasies about the kind of novel he would like to write. Something the literary giants, whose books lined his study, might create; something inspired by his life as a barrister, that said something big and important about justice, and who gets it. He is, he says with a laugh, someone who “disappears into their own imagination while they’re on a treadmill and has a deluded sense of their own cultural grandeur. Then I tried to sit down and write that earnest book, and it wasn’t emerging.”
For years, he says: “I’d overprojected value, even humanity, on the great writers, forgetting the greatness of the books that I’ve read and loved. It takes such talent for you to disappear into a joyous afternoon. Jilly Cooper!” He almost shouts her name in evangelical praise, when we meet at his publicist’s office. “I mean, tell me Riders isn’t a work of art.”
