Mr EL James is 50 Shades of discretion

Niall Leonard, husband of the erotica novelist who has taken the world by storm, is reticent about his private life. He’s happy to discuss his new book but not Christian Grey, writes Stefanie Marsh.

IT IS for entirely puerile reasons that I find myself interviewing Niall Leonard. Besides that, he has just written his first book. It isn’t bad, the book: a dark thriller aimed at teenage boys. It is sure to do well — he’s been commissioned to write three in a row, which suggests his publisher is confident that they will all be hits.

So, in a whitewashed photographic studio where Leonard is having his picture taken, we talk for some time about the scourge of computer games and the absence of readable literature aimed at the over-12s.

Leonard could talk for Northern Ireland, which is where he is from, and he describes elegantly how, as a boy, he loved Martin Scorsese, and how the pure dullness of what was on television at the time encouraged him to work towards a career in film.

A witty, not unattractively rumpled, very intelligent — but shortly to be somewhat irritated — man in his fifties, he wears a small hooped earring in each ear: coming-ofage gifts to himself and reminders that he never, ever wants to work in an office. So we talk about earrings and films and teenagers. But there’s a problem: the only thing I want to talk to Leonard about is Christian Grey.

Until two years ago, if you’d googled Niall Leonard, you would have found out, simply, that he was a successful screenwriter: if you loved early Ballykissangel, Monarch of the Glen or the Val McDermidderived crime thriller Wire in the Blood, you very possibly have Leonard to thank for your viewing pleasure.

What you would not have learnt, and what Leonard himself may not have sussed straightaway, while it was hatching in her brain, was that, some time around 2009, Erika, his wife of many years, mother to the couple’s two teenage sons, had caught the writing bug. She took to her computer. The result, published under the name EL James, was Fifty Shades of Grey, a pet project turned publishing phenomenon turned movie spin-off and merchandising extravaganza (she has already signed three merchandising deals, including one for Fifty Shades hoodies) that has earned her who knows how many millions of pounds. US newspapers refer to the “Fifty Shades economy”.

So I want to know what it is like to be married to the queen of mummy porn. What a surreal turn of events that must have been for her husband, how life must have changed. Some men might hate such a radical shift in their relationship, but Leonard is quite cheerful on the subject and tells me about countless other husbands falling over themselves to thank Erika for having turned around their sex lives. “Their wives read the book and just jump on them.”

Less enthusiastically, he tells me about the unflattering picture of him that a tabloid swiped off Facebook a few months ago and published. It is certainly a misrepresentative photograph, Leonard smiling gormlessly behind a three-quarters empty pint glass; an unflattering paparazzi shot of the couple then appeared not long after this was printed. He was annoyed, too, by some chuggers who knocked on their door in West London. Ten minutes later they reappeared, tipped off by a treacherous neighbour: they wanted an autograph. But returning to the subject of cash — what are they doing with theirs?

“Erika has bought a new car,” he says, tightly.

There is, as is immediately apparent to both of us, an unresolvable conflict of interest at the heart of this interview. I want to talk about Leonard’s relationship with his wife, and he very much does not. Also, there is the small issue that I hate his wife’s books, though I liked the shy, cautious woman who wrote them when I interviewed her in her agent’s office a few months ago.

Leonard, dressed in the grey tie and matching suit that he has agreed to wear for the photoshoot, is clearly reluctant to talk at all about his marriage. The grey tie, admirers of the Fifty Shades trilogy will immediately be able to tell you, is an allusion to the grey tie that Christian Grey wears all the time in his books, except when he’s busy tying up or stalking 22-year-old Anastasia Steele.

Erika, says Leonard rather proudly, fought hard with the American publishers to get the grey tie image on the front cover. He clearly makes excellent stand-by-your-woman material. It is annoying, though, that he is so discreet. His dimpled cheeks reconfigure themselves into a disapproving clench-jawed stare when he thinks I’ve reached my allocation of Fifty Shades questions.

Does their house in West London have a dungeon?

“What?” says Leonard, insulted, as if he hasn’t got a clue what I’m on about. Put it another way: is the “Red Room of Pain” (where Christian and the prim Anastasia spend most of their time, beating each other up) a strictly fictional concept? Leonard looks weary.

“The room where the ironing is done has got one red wall. Erika and I absolutely hate ironing with a passion. I suppose it counts as torture, but it’s not anything to do with the book.”

Does he mind his wife having spent the past two years fantasising about a fictional American 28-year-old entrepreneur with no sense of humour?

“Everybody has got fantasy figures and daydreams,” retorts Leonard, crossly. “Everybody has. Anybody who hasn’t got any fantasy or imagination — I would pity them, really. If people are stupid enough to mix up a fantasy with reality…”

I worry that Leonard is about to start shouting.

“Christian Grey! I’m glad I’m not him because he’s actually damaged. I wouldn’t have liked to go through what he went through.” (Spoiler alert: Christian has mother issues.)

I persist. Do he and Christian Grey have anything in common?

“Well, we’re both blokes,” he says flatly. “That’s about it, I think.” But he’s not the best person to ask about possible similarities between him and the man that, last he heard, was going to be played by Ryan Gosling in the film: “You’ll have to ask someone else, possibly my wife.”

He suggests I get in touch with her publicist.

To return to the story of the evolution of Fifty Shades. The writing bug bit Erika one evening at the cinema. She’d gone to see Twilight (about the relationship between a teenage girl and a male vampire); her husband wasn’t with her.

She had, by that stage in her career, built up a solid reputation as a television producer, “with a CV as long as her arm”, says Leonard.

She had worked on Comic Relief, with Ant and Dec and Vic and Bob, but felt creatively unfulfilled. What she really loved doing was immersing herself in a romantic novel as she travelled to and from work on the Tube. Her passion for kinky sex scenes seems to have found creative expression the night she watched Twilight. In 2009, Erika began to exhibit behavioural changes.

Suddenly, she was getting up before dawn to write fan fiction: Twilight-inspired, but with “sexy bits”. She began toiling away in the evening as well when she came home from work. Soon she had a following. She was working day and night, in the shed in the garden that her husband had built as his office. There is something fittingly suburban about the revelation that mummy porn was born in a garden shed.

“Sexy bits”, by the way, is an understatement. There’s a wonderful clip of Newsnight you can watch on YouTube where you’ll see a Fifty Shadesrelated discussion in which Paul Mason wrestles with the term “fisting”.

(The Crown Prosecution Service classifies fisting as “extreme pornography”, although Leonard, and Erika’s publishers, still hopefully refer to Fifty Shades as “contemporary romantic fiction”.)

A lot of people, many of whom admit they don’t normally have the patience to read a book, claim that Fifty Shades is both well-written and empowering for women. Others like it for being “trashy unputdownable shite” (the phrase “Christian Grey-flavoured popsicle” still haunts my dreams).

But its sales are quite extraordinary — literally phenomenal.

It is the bestselling book in British history; the trilogy has sold more than 12 million copies in the UK alone. In addition, since it was published, sales of sex toys for couples, specifically the Ben Wa balls that feature in the first book (page 362), have gone through the roof, say their manufacturer.

Frankly, it is impossible to meet either Leonard or Erika without imagining their home strewn with sex toys and contracts and dressing-up boxes. Leonard admits his sons don’t want to read the book. “It’s a bit like finding out your parents have sex.” I don’t blame them. It must be odd to have the whole world speculating about your sex life, I say. “I think people are going to speculate,” says Leonard. “If they’re going to speculate they can speculate. I can’t stop them.”

When you’ve been married more than 20 years, it seems you really don’t care about such things. The couple met at film school. Leonard was in his late twenties and carrying an armless dummy for a film that Michael Caton-Jones was directing.

“It was a naked female mannequin with no arms, and Erika stuck her head out the window and said, ‘She looks armless.’ I couldn’t think of a snappy reply and had to ask her out.”

It is time to talk about his own book. It is called Crusher and Leonard produced it as a challenge during National Novel Writing Month. Leonard’s chosen protagonist is Finn, a streetwise 17-year-old who gets involved with the underworld after he becomes the prime suspect in his stepfather’s murder. It is funny and gritty in a three-dimensional way and Leonard hopes it will lure computeraddicted teens away from their Xboxes.

It’s interesting that his wife, not a woman one would think of as squeamish, considered the book too graphic and wanted her husband to take out some of its (not to my mind particularly) gory scenes — “Erika found the book too violent.” But he ignored her suggestions.

Were it ever to be discussed on Newsnight, feminist Fifty Shades champions would undoubtedly get into a huff about how much less squeamishly the male presenters were discussing, say, the violent bludgeoning of Finn’s dad (“There was blood coming from his mouth and clotting in his beard”), rather than pondering the still unanswered question of why the women of Britain have, all this time, been secretly harbouring fantasies about sadomasochistic sex and nipple clamps.

Leonard had intended to self-publish his book, but that changed at a book fair. He was standing with Erika at the publish-your-own-book stand when the chief executive of Random House, Gail Rebuck, saw Erika and nearly had a heart attack at the thought that their bestselling author might be considering a return to independent publishing.

Of course, it was Leonard considering this route, but Rebuck’s intervention smoothed the path to a book deal: Random House turned the book around with unusual speed (the deal was only announced at the end of June and Crusher comes out in just two weeks).

When news of Leonard’s contract emerged, many unpublished writers screamed, “Nepotism!” They need to get over themselves, says Leonard. “It wouldn’t have made sense to turn it down.”

Leonard had been talking for ages about writing a book in much the same way that the father figure in Crusher bangs on about writing a screenplay that never materialises. The character, incidentally, “is me”, says Leonard, albeit a divorced loser who can’t pay the rent and spends most of the time staring out of the window hating his more successful friends and tearing up the screenplay he will never finish. The teenage boys to whom I gave copies to read thought it was great. I can’t imagine it won’t be turned into a television series.

Having invented a new genre of her own, come September could Erika take credit for an explosion of “teen thrillers”? It was she, in the end, who encouraged her husband to sit down and write Crusher. Leonard attributes this partly to her lack of cynicism.

“Some of the frustrations of working in the television industry are you’re constantly whittling down your ideas or compromising them in order to answer to executives. So I’d always moan about how awful it was and what a good idea that was and how they wouldn’t let me do it. And Erika would say, ‘If you want to write stuff for yourself, then you write a book; if you want to write for television, you take orders. It’s as simple as that.’ ”

Leonard was always playing around with ideas for a novel. “But I’m lucky because I had quite a successful career in the TV industry — there was always another job coming along, so that allowed me to put it off and then put it off again. At the end of last year I must have had four or five projects sitting there in various stages of gestation.”

We talk about integrity in fiction. Leonard is a stickler for accuracy and we digress for some moments, discussing how irritating he finds it when less talented screenwriters win awards for sloppily researched scripts. I wonder whether factual precision has an equal place in romantic novels.

Warily, he says that it does, with the caveat that: “Any fictional novel is, by definition, fiction. In novels and fictional stories things get resolved in the end in a way that they aren’t in real life. In any work of art you’re chasing the stuff of real life and focusing it and moulding it into a story, so you know all artists take what they experience and what they see and what they read about and what they understand and what they consider, and mould it into how they feel about life or feel about the nature of life, the nature of existence. So everybody does that to an extent and Erika has done that to an extent. And that’s what I find inspiring.”

But hang on. Has Leonard just described Fifty Shades as a work of art? I can’t believe he thinks that it is. Fifty Shades of Grey contains — somebody’s counted them — 101 utterances of the word “crap” and 58 mentions of Anastasia’s “inner goddess” (it’s possible she means her vagina).

When Anastasia isn’t exclaiming, “Holy cow!” at the size of Christian’s penis, Christian is force-feeding her oysters, taking her to masquerade parties and pulling off his “boxer briefs”, allowing his erection to “spring free”. Are these really the words of an artist?

I’m beginning to feel brainwashed. Another man might feel overwhelmed or even overshadowed by his wife’s sudden literary success. Not Leonard.

“I may be strange, but I wasn’t envious at all. I just really admired her work ethic and I do find it inspirational.”

So, he was inspired by her success, but what did he think of the concept? I suspect that Leonard wouldn’t have written a book like his wife’s in a million years, much less read one, but his insistent “I’m not going to talk about our marriage” and the fact that his wife dedicated her first book to him (“To the master of my universe” — is it a joke or a private sexual reference, one doesn’t really want to know), would imply that it wasn’t just her private sex musings that went public.

If Erika found this embarrassing, which she says that she did, it is unlikely that her husband did not at least flinch when, on New Year’s Eve, 2011, Erika got an email which made it clear that the book was about to go nuclear in Britain and that the film rights were to be sold.

Yes, the money is a big deal, but does a talented, successful, intelligent, high-minded man like Leonard necessarily skip for joy at the news that his wife’s previously confidential fantasies about blindfolds and horsewhips are about to become known to every person in the land?

I doubt it. Besides, admiring another person’s success and admiring their work are two different things, and Leonard seems far too cerebral to have much truck with trashy sex books. And yet he is insistent in his admiration.

“She worked all day in her job and she’d come home and she’d start writing. She had that joy in writing. People like me sit around moaning, pretending it’s awful when in fact it’s what we love to do. And she would never pretend it’s awful. She enjoyed doing it and I envied her that lack of cynicism. Working in the TV industry for 20 years — you do form this carapace where you expect to be messed around and screwed over. She was writing for herself and she never had that problem.”

In September last year, Erika caught her husband poring over the National Novel Writing Month website, “and she said, ‘Why don’t you do it?’ So I looked at the things that I had started and ‘Dad Dead’ looked the most promising. I felt I could do it, so I did it.”

The day after the interview I speak to Leonard again on the phone. Some of the tape recording has been corrupted, but my real problem listening back to it is that Leonard is an excellent digresser and wriggles out of answering anything he doesn’t want to by moving the subject on to whether or not, say, Woody Allen has made too many films. Leonard does not enjoy this phone call and neither do I. “I told you, Stefanie, I am not going to talk about my marriage,” he says angrily as I press him on answering the questions I would rather not ask.

I especially hate asking them because Leonard makes them sound so deeply inappropriate — as if his wife were not in the process of making millions from the sale of a book that women cheerfully admit that they masturbate to, not to mention branded knickers and God knows what else the merchandising people come up with.

No, he says, none of his extended family have ever had the remotest problem with the content of Fifty Shades — even his father, a Catholic former marriage counsellor, loves it. Their friends and neighbours love it.

He’s so convincing on the subject of his wife’s literary achievement it’s easy to start thinking of Erika as some kind of genius, and it’s only when I get home, and look again at the text and all those erections “springing free” of trousers, that I remember what kind of book this is.

I wonder whether Leonard is simply angry at me or whether, despite his loyalty, he’s also rather embarrassed by the cult of mummy porn that his wife has unleashed. It’s good news that he’s written his own book.

It distances him from the suspicion that the couple are getting greedy, sitting back and cashing in on a branding exercise that seemingly knows no bounds.

The thought of hundreds of women dressing up in Christian-Grey-themed pants in order to turn on their husbands makes me feel depressed. But I like Crusher. I hope it does well.