Tom Lee must be a happy man. His debut collection of short stories, intriguingly entitled Greenfly, has just been published in hardback (no less) by Harvill Secker (no less).

‘Yes, I’m very pleased,’ he said. ‘The situation for short stories is still not good. I have been labouring at it a long time so it is exciting to see the final result. And Harvill have done a beautiful job on it (in my opinion).’

Lee admires the writing of Peter Carey, Ian McEwan (particularly the early stories) and ‘a lot of Americans’ – Flannery O’Connor, Tobias Wolff, John Cheever. Salinger’s Nine Stories ‘completely blew my head off’, and ‘you can’t beat Chekhov, Mansfield, Maupassant etc.’

Despite these influences, Lee’s stories have a voice of their own and unfold in a rich variety of settings and decades: a dusty Latin American-seeming border town; Denver, Colorado; contemporary Britain and Berlin; an unnamed island atoll. Given that the stories were written over a long period of time (half of them originally appeared in magazines or anthologies),  I wondered whether this reflected Lee’s specific interests at specific times, or his more general interest in writing about different subjects. Or both – or neither.

‘Probably neither!’ he said. ‘There has been no particular method or scheme to it although I am glad that as a whole the collection is diverse in settings and subjects. As you say, they were written over quite a long period, so inevitably they do (in whatever warped way) reflect where I was or what else was going on besides writing.’

Several of the stories comprehensively skewer middle-class pomposity (a by-the-numbers stag night; a dinner party that threatens to go off the rails). Was this intentional? ‘Again, there’s no deliberate plan here – but you’re right, it does seem to be a recurring theme. In a way I think this sort of thing is an easy target but I suppose, as a member of the pompous middle classes, it must represent some kind of self-loathing.’

Weddings come in for some stick as well. ‘I have been to a lot of them over the last five years,’ Lee said, ‘and the dramatic potential is obvious. ‘The Starving Millions’ and ‘The Good Guy’ were written back to back so I must have been particularly obsessed with them at the time. I was best man on one occasion and the high anxiety and neurosis of that definitely fed into ‘The Good Guy’.’

Lee is also very good at exploring the unbridgeable gaps which can open up between men and women. A grey sense of disappointment pervades these stories. ‘I do seem to return to this sort of subject over and over again,’ Lee admitted, ‘quite extreme versions of man-woman unhappiness. But then I guess it’s the oldest story there is.’

I noticed that sometimes the reader sometimes has to wait a while before finding out the sex of a story’s narrator – it takes three pages in ‘Border’ and eight in ‘San Francisco’. ‘There was no deliberate intention to make this ambiguous (that I can remember) and I was always sure of the sex of the narrators in my own mind. It may be a result of the fact that the stories are fairly spare – not much is spelled out – and that is just one of the details that the reader isn’t given very obviously.

‘A couple of people who read early drafts of ‘Cerology’ assumed the narrator was a man and found it confusing when that didn’t turn out to be the case later in the story. There was no good reason to leave it ambiguous so I inserted something early on that made it clear.’

How and why did Lee start writing short stories?

‘I really started writing stories, as many people do, because it seemed a good way to learn how to write. The stakes are much lower on a story. Even if it goes wrong or you can’t finish it, the chances are you haven’t spent years on it and driven yourself half mad. You can try things out, experiment, start again.

‘Also, when you start out I think you are very easily influenced by the people you read. So one minute you want to be Ernest Hemingway and the next you want to Angela Carter. It takes a while for this stuff to settle down and writing stories is maybe a good way to process it.

‘But then,’ he continued, ‘I just got stuck on stories. I never wanted to be ‘a short story writer’. Like everyone else, I wanted to write novels and novels were what had made me want to write. I suppose stories must suit my style and my mind in some way – I do like sparseness, concision and claustrophobia – and I have found it hard to move on to longer pieces.

‘As a beleaguered and impoverished short story writer you are supposed to be evangelical about the form but to be honest I write what I can and in a way the novel still feels like the big prize.’

Maybe Lee hopes to emulates the success of James Lasdun.‘Of people writing stories now, James Lasdun – who I came across after he won the first National Short Story Prize – is probably my favourite. His two novels are fantastic too.’ If Lee can do as he would like and follow up Greenfly with a novel, he will be well on his way. If not, we’d be more than happy to see another collection of stories from him.

James Smith, February 2009

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