In the opening section of his new novel, P-P Hartnett gives us the blueprint for a publicity interview. Freelance journalist Oona Khan meets 19-year-old rock star Max at his record company’s offices, and finds him stroppy, intense and disdainful. He has “a horrific glamour – broadly built, but frighteningly thin .. simultaneously bloody awful and bloody fantastic”. simultaneously bloody awful and bloody fantastic”.
Though I meet Hartnett in the similarly corporate setting of his publishers’ HQ, 15 flights above a grim, rainy London, the similarities end there. I am faced with a softly spoken, polite and well-turned-out man of 44, though his placid, unlined face knocks a decade off that age. He is wearing a sharp brown suit, impeccable charcoal-grey shirt and polished shoes. Is this the “uncompromising, provocative and downright shocking” author of books such as Call Me and I Want To Fuck You, detailing the world of gay contact ads and male prostitutes in London and Tokyo, respectively? Only a chunky pair of glittering, gold-and-silver cufflinks in the shape of skulls-and-crossbones suggests that it might be.”Don’t go all shy on us now,” says his PR as she closes the door She needn’t worry.

Hartnett speaks at times quite frankly about a novel that he describes as “my best book so far” and, later, “very damaging to write”. Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide (Sceptre, £14.99) is in part the story of Max, the archetypal leather-trousers-and-spiked-lyrics teen idol, who plans to celebrate the completion of a 40-date tour by opening his veins in his parents’ bath. At the last moment, paring knife to forearm, he finds that he cannot go through with it, and goes into hiding in the flat of Angela, an obsessive fan in the habit of cutting and burning herself. The brief idyll of their “lost weekend”, and its tragic aftermath, is the other half of the story.An inquiry into what rock stars mean when they sing about suicide, and what fans take from those songs, could not be more timely. This month saw the release not only of Kurt Cobain’s journals, but also Greatest Hits albums from both Nirvana and Manic Street Preachers, whose lyricist Richey Edwards famously carved “4 REAL” into his arm during an interview and then, on 1 February 1995, went missing.His car was later found near the Severn Bridge, a popular destination for suicides. These sure-fire stocking fillers, with their songs such as “Lithium” and “From Despair to Where”, are destined to provide the soundtrack to tens of thousands of family Christmases next month.Max may be a fantasy amalgam of such figures as Edwards (whose lyrics pepper the novel) and Richard Ashcroft, but Hartnett is not interested in merely replicating their fashionable angst.

He engaged in extensive research for the book – his hallmark as a writer. “I placed a series of adverts in the back of the NME, asking for people to contact me if they had erotic dreams or fantasies about a certain rock star celebrity,” he explains. Each of the 50-odd e-mails he received each week got a reply, some grew into correspondences, and Hartnett eventually met some of his mailers, even visiting one girl in a specialist hospital unit for anorexics. His conscientiousness throughout the process is evident.Although he admits to having been a fan himself (“the gloom of Joy Division filled my bedroom for three years”), Hartnett is more in thrall to the notion of fandom itself. It is a strange kind of curiosity that breeds confessions such as the one that starts: “In the Eighties I remember visiting the homes of Barry Manilow fans…”Rewind to the Seventies, and there he was, one of five boys at a Bay City Rollers gig, despite not actually liking them, because “I couldn’t believe this group was causing such hysteria all over the UK”. And then, back again, to the original epiphany: aged six, he visited the friend of a sister, whose bedroom was a shrine to The Beatles “I remember at the time being taken aback. I thought that kind of adoration only existed for Jesus Christ.”Even when Hartnett began to make a name for himself as a photographer on the punk scene, he was after something different to the usual guest-list liggers.