After leaving university and spending time travelling overseas, Jones became a sports reporter at "The Evening Post", and began writing fiction. His first novel, "Gilmore's Dairy" (1985), was a satirical novel about a young man growing up in a small New Zealand town, and was followed by "Splinter" (1988), a novel set in Lower Hutt with two primary narratives (one about an early immigrant and the other about a magazine editor). Like his later work, these two early novels blended suburban realism, black comedy and originality.