I still think fondly of the day I interviewed the author at his then-home in Oxfordshire: spotting red kites on the drive there; the warm welcome Rachel and I received from Price and his late wife, Ann, when we arrived, exemplified by the salmon lunch we were served; and Price's candour during the interview in his study, including the revelation – which I left out of the transcript at his request – that the reason he never wrote the 20th David Audley novel after 1989's The Memory Trap was because Ann had fallen seriously ill.
Something else I haven't since revealed is that following the interview, Price and I corresponded for a little while, exchanging the odd letter and Christmas card. When his wife died in 2012 he wrote of the funeral and his memories of Ann, and when Rachel and my daughter Edie was born in 2013, he commended the choice of her "lovely Anglo-Saxan name", and shared the news that he'd moved to Blackheath in London and had just been to a "wonderful, but terrifying!" Leonard Cohen concert at the 02. ("All those people!") I regret that I didn't keep up the correspondence past that point – I didn't want to pester him – but I shall always treasure my small stash of letters.
I'll also treasure the firsts of The Labyrinth Makers, The Alamut Ambush, and Our Man in Camelot he inscribed to me. And I'll continue to make my way through the David Audley series, which I'm ashamed to admit I'm still not even halfway through. Tomorrow's Ghost is next up for me, even though Price somewhat spoiled the fate of its protagonist during our interview. I wouldn't have it any other way though.
When I was drafting my post on Kingsley Amis's The Riverside Villas Murder (1973) last week I came across an interview with Amis which is germane to another Amis
book that, like The Riverside Villas Murder, I bought and read bloody ages ago but hadn't got round to blogging about properly (until now). The interview dates from 1973, so not too many years after the book in question:
The Green Man, was published, in 1969 by Jonathan Cape under a dust jacket designed by Colin Andrews – this copy of the first edition of which being a 2009 eBay win, nabbed for four quid; prices have evidently crept up since then, as on AbeBooks at present you'd be looking at more like forty quid for a decent copy of the first (from a UK seller; there are slightly cheaper ones available from US sellers). Anyway, conducted by Amis scholar Dale Salwak – who interviewed Amis six times in total and corresponded with the author for over fifteen years – the Q&A was published in Contemporary Literature 16, No. 1, 1975, and ranges across a variety of topics, from the well-worn – Lucky Jim, the "angry young men" – to more interesting (to me) subjects like human nature, morality and God, both in relation to Amis's work – The Anti-Death League (1966), say – and his life.
In regard to The Green Man Salwak inquires, "How earnestly should we take the supernatural in [the novel]?" To which Amis replies:
As earnestly as possible, I would say. It all really happens; none of what is recounted happens only in the hero's [Maurice Allington, landlord of the Green Man inn, Hertfordshire] mind. It's all literal in that sense. I think we can fit the supernatural part into the natural part by saying that the hero is made aware of his deficiencies by finding out that the reason he's being picked on by the dead wizard [Dr Thomas Underhill, "notorious seventeenth-century practitioner of black arts and sexual deviant suspected of two particularly savage murders", as the jacket flap copy has it] to fulfill his designs is that the wizard feels Allington's character is essential for the wizard's purposes, Allington being a man who doesn't care for people and manipulates them for his pleasure. That's the link between them. I think it should be taken very seriously; I took it very seriously. And naturally I enjoyed doing it, and brought in some devices that had been in my head for years. I'd always been interested in the supernatural in fiction; here was a chance to do a ghost story.
And a ghost story, or a horror story, is in essence what The Green Man is – in other words another of Amis's experiments with genre – see also the aforementioned The Anti-Death League and The Riverside Villas Murder, and The Alteration (1976). (It's also an expression of his desire to, as he puts it in the interview, "elude categorization" and avoid "repeating oneself... the most dreadful thing in the world is that you're writing a book and you suddenly realize you're writing a book you've written before".) Although as with his other dabblings in genre it's many other things besides, in this case a very human account of a functioning alcoholic and his dysfunctional relationships with, well, pretty much everyone, but especially his teenage daughter.
God is tackled too, in a rather different manner to the way in which He's tackled in the earlier The Anti-Death League. In one extraordinary scene towards the end of the novel, shortly after Maurice has participated in a disappointing
and ultimately abortive – on his part – threesome with his wife and
mistress, God makes a special guest appearance, stopping "all molecular motion" outside the confines of the dining room of the Green Man (so as not to be disturbed) and manifesting before Maurice as a smartly dressed young man to explain why He has chosen Maurice to combat the malefic ghost Underhill. In the Dale Salwak interview Amis addresses this scene and his portrayal of God in both The Green Man and The Anti-Death League:
These are two very different incarnations. In The Anti-Death League, it isn't an incarnation at all in a sense. This is a view of the malignant God, who is very well described in Empson'sMilton's Godwhere he states practically, I think, that the orthodox God of Christianity is very wicked, and gives reasons for this. He sees God playing in Paradise Lost not altogether a dissimilar role from the role God plays in The Anti-Death League (although, of course, Empson's book was written before my novel ever appeared). I think if you were to look at that, this would throw some light on The Anti-Death League. In the novel, God is showing his malicious, malevolent side.
The Green Man takes a rather different view, and I'm not sure if they are really reconcilable. The Green Man's God is slightly malignant, doesn't at all object to inflicting suffering, but that is not his main concern. He's running a game that's much more complex than that. He's admitting that he's not omnipotent, and that what may strike Allington as very arbitrary is in fact forced upon him because of the rules of the game. The chap in The Green Man does get tempted occasionally (let's throw down one dinosaur into Picadilly Circus and see what will happen), and that's the sort of thing with the being in The Anti-Death League (let's give her a cancer, smarten them up a bit; so that priest thinks he's in communication with me does he – all right, let's sort out his dog). Of course I incarnated God in The Green Man as a young man simply because he can't be an old man with an enormous white beard. The idea of a young, well-dressed, sort of aftershave lotion kind of man, I think, made him more sinister. That was the intention, anyway.
Amis made his own feelings about God clear in an essay entitled "On Christ's Nature" – originally published in the Sunday Telegraph in 1962 (on Easter Day, appositely enough) and reprinted (with a postscript) in What Became of Jane Austen (1970) – setting out his stall as an atheist before stating, "I am one of that company (large and rapidly growing, I hope) which says: 'I think the traditional God of Christianity very wicked.'" (Amis notes that he is quoting Sir William Empson, who he also references in the Salwak interview.) The God of The Green Man may not be wicked per se – as he tells Maurice, "It's not that I want to be cruel, not that so much as finding that's what I seem to be turning out to be" – but he's a memorable creation nonetheless, his cameo an unexpected highlight in what is by any measure a remarkable novel.
NB: Val Biro passed away last month, at the age of 92 (Guardian obituary here). I've written about Val and his terrific dust jacket designs a number of times on Existential Ennui – follow this link to previous posts, or take a look at the examples of his dust wrapper work on this page – and last year had the opportunity to interview him in person about that work. The resulting article, an edited version of which appears below, was initially intended forIllustrators Quarterly, who in the wake of Val's passing will instead be running a more substantial feature on Val's life and art (drawing in part on my interview) to appear late this year/early next year. In the meantime, Illustrators have graciously given me the go-ahead to publish my original piece, which I present as my personal tribute to Val and his work, illustrated with wrappers and roughs from my own collection.
If you spend any amount of time browsing the hardback fiction shelves in secondhand bookshops – as I do, whenever I get the opportunity (and probably more than is entirely healthy) – chances are you'll have unwittingly encountered the work of Val Biro. Not as an author: for that aspect of Val's career you'd be better off heading to the children's section, where you'll doubtless find a selection of the 37 picture books he wrote and drew from 1966 to 2001, all starring Gumdrop, a vintage 1926 Austin 12/4 motorcar. No, the Biro work you'll see in the fiction department is of a different stripe. It was created both prior to and parallel with his children's titles, and the books it was made for number in their thousands.
From the early 1940s until the late 1970s Val Biro designed an estimated 3,000 dust jackets – more than any other jacket designer of the era. His artwork wrapped books by C. S. Forester and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; Nevil Shute and James Hadley Chase; Iris Murdoch and Geoffrey Household – from crime thrillers to romance, literature to non-fiction, and for every major publisher. It's a remarkable body of work, encompassing not only the finished jackets but the preparatory roughs too – sometimes multiple roughs for a single wrapper – the vast majority with hand lettering painted directly onto the artwork.
His covers are instantly recognisable: a striking central image – evoking the feel of the novel overall rather than a particular scene – done in dry brush (gouache), often restricted to just two or three colours, i.e. three-colour line, "which in those days was quite popular because it was cheap to reproduce", as Val himself explained to me when I pinned him down for a chat at a book fair he was a guest at. He created his first wrapper as a freelance designer in 1942, for the Collins edition of Rex Stout's The Broken Vase (for which he was paid five guineas); at that time he was also employed as an assistant at Sylvan Press – illustrating interiors and covers – having spent three years at the Central School of Art after emigrating to the UK from Hungary in 1939. But by 1953, after a stint with John Lehmann Limited, Val was ready to take the plunge and go fully freelance.
In common with other jacket designers of the era, Val was rarely given a brief; instead he would read each novel he was designing the cover for, a practice virtually unheard of these days. "It would be: here's a manuscript, come up with a good design," he recalls. "They'd tell me whether it's full colour, or three-colour line, and the size. Then I'd do the roughs, which I put a lot of work into. Occasionally I would do two or even three roughs to give them a choice. I worked hard in those days!"
Val reckons his work rate in the very early days of his freelance wrapper designing would equate to "about four jackets a month – one a week. But when I went big time with it, I would have about fifteen commissions at any one time. At one point I did almost nothing else but book jackets." After reading a book he would produce a rough – which would take about half a day, working at the same size as the eventual wrapper so the publisher could see how the finished book would look (the final artwork would be produced at a quarter- or half-up) – in which he would "try to reflect the character of the whole story, not based on one particular scene but... encapsulating a whole book in one design". That rough and any variants Val had come up with would then be sent in to the publisher for approval – a process which was not, it seems, always straightforward...
"I remember, Mr. Walter Hutchinson himself, the eponymous publisher, he insisted on seeing a rough but it had to be twice up, full colour, everything. I was told he usually received the art editor in bed – well, he was in bed, because he liked the late mornings. The art editor would come in and say, Mr. Hutchinson, this is the cover for so-and-so, and give it to him. If he didn't like it, he would get out an indelible blue pencil, and with a 'no', put a line through it, ruining the picture."
Thankfully the pencil-wielding Mr. Hutchinson was in the minority; other publishers and art editors weren't quite so physical with their criticisms, and many of Val's roughs survive today. Indeed, Val has fond memories of most of the publishers he worked for, whether it be Michael Joseph, who commissioned him to design the wrappers for the first half-dozen Hornblower novels by C. S. Forester, or Hodder & Stoughton, who not only sent plenty of dust jacket work his way but also, from the 1960s on, published his own Gumdrop books (under their Brockhampton Press children's imprint). And admirers of his work didn't just number publishers and art directors; Nevil Shute, for whose novels Val designed the wrappers for In the Wet (1953), Requiem for a Wren (1955) and others, was certainly impressed by what he saw. "We received a letter from Mr. Shute from Australia," Val recalls with pride. "He said to the publisher, 'Thank you for employing an artist who evidently knows Australia well.' I'd never been there in my life!"
Val was just one among a multitude of book jacket designers beavering away in the '40s, '50s and '60s, all offering their own take on the restricted palette style – largely unsung artists like Donald Green, Peter Probyn, John Rowland, Roy Sanford and sisters Barbara and Eileen Walton (not to mention the rather better appreciated likes of Denis McLoughlin and Brian Wildsmith). Of his contemporaries, Val singles out Hans Tisdall, perhaps best known these days as a painter but back then also a book designer (his most famous wrapper probably being for Lampedusa's The Leopard) "who worked in a style not unlike the three-colour line which was typical of me in those days. I never met him but I admired his work. To an extent my lettering is influenced by him."
A greater influence came courtesy of Val's time at Central
School. A number of Val's wrappers are reminiscent of woodcut prints –
his jacket for Victor Canning's 1961 novel A Delivery of Furies, say – which, it turns out, was no accident: "I started as a wood engraver. At art college my tutor was John Farleigh
– great name in his day. I did some, I think, very good engravings
under his influence. But when I came to book jackets I realised that the
timescale – I usually would get about a couple of weeks at most from
rough to finish – was very tight. An engraving would take me about a
fortnight to do!"
Towards the end of the 1970s Val's time as a jacket designer "as a main activity" drew to a close. "I became so involved in children's books and my own Gumdrops that I didn't have time or, actually, the interest. The problem with a jacket is, it's basically the same, isn't it?" he muses. "To encapsulate a whole book in one design. Which is interesting. But there came a time when I was much more interested in writing my own stories and developing my own books."
Working methods in jacket design had changed too – the introduction of Letraset and greater use of separations and superimposing – and this was also a factor in Val's decision to move on to other endeavours. While he, of course, as a professional, adapted to these changes, he much preferred his original way of working, "because it was very much integrated – I mean the design and the lettering was all one piece, whereas if you superimpose it it's not quite the same thing." As for more contemporary dust jacket design, it must be said that he's not overly keen: "A lot of it is computer-generated... I can't see today the individual hand, the person who's done it. It's often done in-house rather than by a freelancer, some of it by computer, and the concept is usually the concept of a committee rather than a single mind."
Instead, Val has continued to carve out a place in publishing history as an in-demand children's book author and illustrator. Now in his nineties, his most recent project has been a series of 200-page fully illustrated hardbacks for Award Publications, retellings of Aesop's Fables and Grimm's/Hans Christian Andersen's/Charles Perrault's Fairy Tales; the latest volume, based on the Arabian Nights, was in-progress when we spoke, but Val expects that "will probably be my last book because I can't imagine taking on a big commission like that again, at 91."
Even without all of his children's titles, his astonishing body of dust jacket work must surely stand as one of the greatest achievements in book design – 3,000 covers in less than 40 years. An incredible amount of work, agrees Val, but his only explanation for this prodigious output is as matter-of-fact as one would expect of this softly spoken, unassuming man: "I was probably the busiest jacket designer at that time in the country."
Val Biro on His Dust Jacket Designs
Geoffrey Household, A Time to Kill (Michael Joseph, 1952, sequel to A Rough Shoot): "This is two-colour line, dark red and black – the white is the paper – so it's two colours. This could be reproduced on line blocks without a screen, and therefore not art paper but ordinary cartridge. Very effective."
Nevil Shute, In the Wet (Heinemann, 1953): "This isn't based on a particular scene but on the feel of the flooded landscape."
Victor Canning, The Burning Eye (Hodder & Stoughton, 1960): "I used dry brush because it had to be reproduced by line rather than halftone. You had to be careful that you worked in such a way that it reproduced well."
James Barlow, The Hour of Maximum Danger (Hamish Hamilton, 1962): "An artist keeps his eyes open to what's happening in the art world, and I was quite taken by this kind of abstraction. But after the abstract era I left the conceptualists and so on totally aside because that's not me at all."
I've posted a handful of interviews on Existential Ennui over the years – with Jeremy Duns, Christopher Nicole, Jeff Lindsay and AnthonyPrice – and I've hosted a further handful of guest posts; but I've never combined the two and hosted a guest post which is also an author interview. In a first for Existential Ennui, then, I'm immensely pleased to present a guest post by Paul Simpson (of Sci-Fi Bulletin fame; Paul was responsible for another Existential Ennui guest post back in 2011 on the Big Finish Sherlock Holmes audio plays): a brand new interview with bestselling crime and thriller writer Jeffery Deaver. It's a brief(ish) but illuminating chat, not merely for those looking for insights into Deaver's Lincoln Rhyme series especially, but for anyone interested in the wider process, in how writers write; Deaver is forthcoming on where he gets his ideas (at least some of them), how and why he maintains an emotional distance when writing, the expectations of his readers – and his expectations of them in return – and how he's settled into a rhythm with Rhyme.
Over to Paul.
An Interview with Jeffery Deaver, by Paul Simpson
Multiple award-winning American novelist Jeffery Deaver has written over thirty novels, many featuring his quadriplegic detective Lincoln Rhyme, who, assisted by his partner Amelia Sachs, solves seemingly impossible crimes from his New York apartment. In recent times, he's introduced Kathryn Dance, one of America's leading experts in interrogation and kinesics (body language to you or me) who has spun off into her own series of stories. The pattern of Rhyme/Dance alternating was interrupted by his contribution to the 007 continuation saga, Carte Blanche, in 2011, and this month sees the arrival of his latest novel, The Skin Collector. Deaver visited the UK to promote the book, and sat down with me at publishers Hodder & Stoughton to discuss the series so far...
PAUL SIMPSON: The Skin Collector is another Lincoln Rhyme story; I was expecting a Kathryn Dance story next...
JEFFERY DEAVER: In theory, yes; my theory is to alternate books and characters and Kathryn's turn had come around. However I was getting some information from fans saying they were curious about certain plot elements that I had built into the [Lincoln Rhyme] books, and I thought it was probably time to resolve those.
The story sort of presented itself. I had plenty of ideas; inspiration is not really a problem for me. I thought as long as it was there, I would write it. Fans tend to like Lincoln Rhyme of all my characters the best, so out came The Skin Collector.
Kathryn is under way; I was actually writing it for a couple of hours this morning before I went to a signing at Waterstones. You've taken inspiration for your stories from real crimes; is there any specific thing that inspired this one?
A waitress. I knew I wanted to write a true sequel to The Bone Collector, I wanted the themes that I intentionally left open in The Bone Collector, and some characters I originally left open in The Bone Collector to come back. I was not quite sure how to do it, and I wanted a theme that echoed The Bone Collector.
I remain a bit like a sponge. I was having lunch with my assistant, and a waitress came up to us. We knew her – she's a very charming young lady – and she had a tattoo on her bicep with a rather cryptic message in some Asian characters that I was not familiar with. Interesting... That gave me the idea: "Tattoo: message on victims". I got involved with the tattoo world: I have to learn a little bit about that as Lincoln Rhyme has to put together the message. The next step then, the logical extension of that idea was "rather than using ink he uses poison". Then I sat down and wrote the book.
You make it sound so easy...
There was a little more to it than that, I will admit!
When you're researching something like the tattoo world, do you keep a note of things which may assist with later projects, or do they go to the back of your mind and percolate?
Probably both. I tend not to write things ripped from the headlines. For instance, my book of last year, The Kill Room, was inspired in large part by the drone killing by the CIA of Anwar al-Awlaki, a US citizen, who had fled the country and was preaching jihad from Yemen. He was killed in a drone strike along with his associate, also an American citizen. That happened some years ago, and I always had it in mind that I would write a political book about some of the moral issues, and some of the technical issues, of a government extra-judicially taking the life of someone in a quasi-combat circumstance. We are not at war with Yemen, but it could be argued that we are at war with al-Qaeda, and he was an al-Qaeda affiliate, so there was some legitimacy to that. But it's not my job to make a point; my job is simply to ask the question, to make the book more resonant. That came from the headlines certainly.
My book The Burning Wire, about a man who uses the energy grid to kill people, started when I thought, 'If I touch the wrong switch in my fuse box on my circuit breaker, I'm going to die... I like that idea.'
So to answer your question, some yes, and some no.
In every book there is a gross moment, perhaps something which Amelia finds when walking the room; do you ever find, like Stephen King, that you gross yourself out?
In terms of viscera?
Or in terms of character, a revelation of "evil"?
In a more general sense then. First of all, I'm extremely unemotional when I write. I like Wordsworth's comment that poetry is emotion but it's emotion recollected in tranquility. Your heart really cannot be too invested in the story because you need to keep a distant view, a dispassionate view, so that the readers will be engaged.
It's my job to create scenarios that will scare the hell out of my readers, and will shock them, but I need to be pretty aloof from that so I can have my hand on the control. It's like when a pilot can see a thunderstorm; he doesn't care about them. He's flown through a thousand of them. There's no danger – even though we are terrified in the back. he just has to be a bit more vigilant, that's all.
I take that approach so no, I'm fairly detached when I write the books, and I'm very suspicious of scenes that I write and feel emotional about. I tend not to put those in. I think that's inartful, a weakness on my part, to be too engaged in the story.
So you're almost a conduit for the story in that respect?
Exactly. I might say more of a craftsperson, a builder, a joiner. That's the analogy I like to use.
The Lincoln and Kathryn books deal to an extent with the same sorts of ideas, although obviously the approaches are very different. Are there stories that you find you would only tell as Lincoln or Kathyrn, or you'd have to write as a short story?
Exactly – a very good observation. The books which tend to be more scientific in nature tend to be Lincoln's story, because he's of course a scientific individual. The books which are purely psychological, or in which the psychology of evil or psychology of the crimes takes precedence over the technical aspects, those would be Kathryn books.
Of course you can never divorce either of those from any type of crime now, but psychology is marginalised in Lincoln, and forensics is marginalised in Kathryn. The book which I'm working on now – the Kathryn book which I don't want to talk about – there's very little scientific information. There will be fingerprints, there will be fibre evidence, but relatively little of that. Mostly it's the mind of the villain that Kathryn has to get into.
The new Lincoln book which I'm working on for 2016, there will be some sick and twisted psychology on the part of the bad guy but basically it's really about a number of what I find quite interesting, and what I hope the readers find utterly terrifying, aspects of technology. That's what Lincoln has to deal with to solve the crime.
As far as short stories go, they are appropriate when there is basically a twist – usually one surprise, maybe two surprises – which take precedence over the characters so that the surprise at the ending can be revealed in the fact that our hero, the person we've been in love with the whole time, is utterly despicable. I can't get away with that in a novel; some authors do, but I don't like to do that. I want my readers to like the characters that I create and to have a connection with them. In a short story, forty pages, who cares? I'm not going to be spending any more time with this person. They can be utterly reprehensible.
Lincoln is changing: he's worked with Kathryn, he had the operation at the end of The Kill Room. How much of that change derives from the people around him, and how much of it is through what's happening physically?
He certainly has mellowed a bit. People like his curmudgeonliness but he is a bit less edgy than he was in the early books. For one thing he has regained some facility, some physical mobility, which is about as far as the state of the art medicines can go now; there can be no miracles here. The fact is, he has also had some really interesting cases, and he is never so happy as when he's dealing with an intractable criminal situation.
What I find is I've settled into a rhythm with Lincoln where I have to prove him less and less. He's less the centrepiece than he is a traditional Sam Spade detective: we love Sam Spade's personality, we love Philip Marlowe's personality in the Raymond Chandler novels, John D. MacDonald has his character of course, but we focus a little less on the arc of those characters. Now that I know that Lincoln is going to be a long time character, I'm a little less worried about that.
I'll make him real: there will be tragedies. He and Amelia may not be together forever; there certainly is that possibility. Amelia's ex-boyfriend will be returning in one of the future books, and that stirs the pot quite a bit. But I've settled him into a certain place physically and I'm happy to really concentrate on getting a long series of knockdown, drag out thrillers.
Many years ago I read the Nero Wolfe books, and occasionally there's a Nero Wolfe/Archie Goodwin vibe to Lincoln and Amelia which makes me recall William "Cannon" Conrad as Nero. Do you have anyone in mind now when you're thinking of Lincoln, or is he such a fully formed character in your mind that you know who he is?
It's helpful for authors to envision an actor, so long before the book was bought by Universal Studios, I saw Harrison Ford, the physical archetype of Harrison Ford. Not necessarily his personality, as that does change from movie to movie. The personality was, and always has been, Jeremy Brett from the Granada TV Sherlock Holmes series, who was cranky, impatient, brilliant; he did, in that series, use cocaine – Lincoln drinks too much – he has a temper, and does forge a difficult and complex relationship with individuals round about him. So that's the personality I continue to look back at.
For Kathryn Dance, Cate Blanchett has always been one of my all-time favourite actresses. She can do anything; she can be funny, austere, sever, and a bit ruthless depending on the role. I'd always pictured her as Kathryn. Perhaps Americanized a bit: she takes the kids to soccer, she stops for fast food. I can't see Cate Blanchett stopping by McDonald's. (And I apologise on behalf of my country since I see them all the time over here, and Burger King, not to mention Starbucks! You have such good pub food here with the gastropubs. And Costa Coffee is excellent – I get no kickback from this, it's a genuine honest feeling.) I imagined a younger Kate Mulgrew perhaps?
I don't know her, but I will look her up.
And for Amelia?
My era, hands down Julia Roberts. Now Lincoln does not at all look like Denzel Washington, but Angelina Jolie was not a bad Amelia [in The Bone Collector movie], I have to say. More vulnerable, at least at first, than Angelina Jolie, but remember the books were created sixteen/seventeen years ago, Julia Roberts was the one I had in mind. There are any number of really strong women characters nowadays. Sandra Bullock if they wanted to make a fun version of it... Thanks to Ellie Cheele and Kerry Hood for their assistance in arranging this interview at short notice.
With Violent World of Parker proprietor Trent currently otherwise engaged – literally – it falls to me to provide an update on the Donald E. Westlake non-fiction anthology Trent and I blogged about back in April of last year. Edited by University of Chicago Press' Levi Stahl, and due for publication by UCP in September, the anthology has now gained both a title and a sub-title: The Getaway Car: A Donald Westlake Nonfiction Miscellany. The full table of contents is available to view on the UCP site, but Levi has kindly agreed for it to be reproduced on VWoP and Existential Ennui:
CONTENTS
Foreword by Lawrence Block
Editor’s Introduction
1 My Second Life: Fragments from an Autobiography
2 Donald E. Westlake, a.k.a. . . .
Hearing Voices in My Head: Tucker Coe, Timothy J. Culver, Richard Stark and Donald E. Westlake
Living with a Mystery Writer, by Abby Adams
Writers on Writing: A Pseudonym Returns From an Alter-Ego Trip, With New Tales to Tell
3 So Tell Me about This Job We’re Gonna Pull: On Genre
The Hardboiled Dicks
Introduction to Murderous Schemes
Introduction to The Best American Mystery Stories, 2000
Don’t Call Us, We’ll Call You
4 Ten Most Wanted: Ten Favorite Mystery Books
5 Returning to the Scene of the Crime: On His Own Work
Introduction to Levine
Tangled Webs for Sale: Best Offer
Introduction to Kahawa
Light
Hooked
Letter to Howard B. Gotlieb, Boston University Libraries
6 Lunch Break: May’s Famous Tuna Casserole
7 The Other Guys in the String: Peers, Favorites, and Influences
Lawrence Block: First Sighting
On Peter Rabe
Playing Politics with a Master of Dialogue: On George V. Higgins
On Rex Stout
Introduction to Jack Ritchie’s A New Leaf and Other Stories
Foreword to Thurber on Crime
Introduction to Charles Willeford’s The Way We Die Now
On Stephen Frears
John D. MacDonald: A Remembrance
8 Coffee Break: Letter to Ray Broekel
9 Anything You Say May Be Used against You: Interviews
An Inside Look at Donald Westlake, by Albert Nussbaum, 81332-132
The Worst Happens: From an Interview by Patrick McGilligan
10 Midnight Snack: Gustatory Notes from All Over
11 Side Jobs: Prison Breaks, Movie Mobsters, and Radio Comedy
Break-Out
Love Stuff, Cops-and-Robbers Style
Send In the Goons
12 Signed Confessions: Letters
To Judy ?
To Peter Gruber
To James Hale
To Stephen and Tabitha King
To Brian Garfield
To David Ramus
To Pam Vesey
To Gary Salt
To Henry Morrison
To Jon L. Breen
13 Jobs Never Pulled: Title Ideas
Crime Titles
Comic Crime Titles
14 Death Row (Or, The Happily Ever Afterlife): Letter to Ralph L. Woods
Acknowledgments
Credits
Name Index
I must say it all looks fascinating: I've read (and written about) Westlake essays like "Don't Call Us, We'll Call You", "Peter Rabe" and "Break-Out" before, but there are plenty more besides I haven't read; I'm especially keen to take a look at the autobiography fragments and the personal letters Levi (and his glamorous assistant Ethan Iverson) dug out of Westlake's files. I'm also intrigued to read Levi's introduction and Lawrence Block's foreword, a single sentence from the latter of which is previewed at the UCP site, along with a quote from Hard Case Crime's Charles Ardai and some more info about the book. Go take a gander.
The interview was conducted by Violent World of Parker proprietor Trent and myself, and covers all manner of topics, from the particular challenges adapting The Score presented, to Darwyn's history with Westlake and Parker, to which Parker novel he'll be tackling next; there's even a heretofore little-known piece of info concerning how Westlake came close to writing Batman comics. Darwyn only does one big interview each time he publishes a Parker graphic novel – previously he spoke to Tom Spurgeon at The Comics Reporter for The Hunter (Parker #1) and Tucker Stone at Comics Alliance for The Outfit (Parker #3) – so it's a huge honour that Darwyn chose The Violent World of Parker to be his platform this time out, and, on a personal level, for me to have had some small involvement (witness this post and this post for a taste of my boundless enthusiasm for Darwyn's endeavours on the Parker books). Darwyn told us he's a lurker on both TVWoP and Existential Ennui, and while I'm sure the former is true, even if he was just being kind on the latter, it was still nice to hear.
For the grand finale of this series of posts on spy novelist Jeremy Duns – whose third spy thriller starring British double-agent Paul Dark, The Moscow Option, was published in the UK on Thursday (it'll be out in the States on 29 May in an omnibus edition alongside the first two Paul Dark novels) – something rather special: an exclusive Q&A with Mr. Duns. The interview was conducted over email earlier this week, and those familiar with Existential Ennui will doubtless be unsurprised to learn that the questions are very much books-orientated – partly because books – reading, collecting, publishing – are indeed the focus of this blog – and Jeremy is, after all, an author – but also because I believe that what we read as a child and what we read as adults can offer insights into who we are as people. In that respect, then, I feel Jeremy's answers are quite revealing, as he discusses the books he read as a kid, his schooldays, and where and how he discovered spy fiction.
But we also examine the Paul Dark novels, along with where Jeremy writes, how he writes, the music he listens to whilst writing, and his research for his books – and not only that, but Jeremy kindly provided some specially photographed shots of his book collection, which you'll see dotted about the interview. So, without further ado – except to say thank you to Jeremy for being so forthcoming and generous with his time – on with the interview...
NICK JONES: What is your earliest reading memory? Either being read to, or reading for yourself?
JEREMY DUNS: My earliest reading memory is of my mother reading me I See Sam
and Dr, Seuss books. She was an English teacher so she was keen to teach
me to read early. My earliest memory of reading for myself is
discovering a cupboard at home that had boxes of spare books from my
mother's class. One box was filled with pristine copies of a book called
Emil and the Detectives, and I took it out and sat on the carpet and
read through the whole thing,
entranced. I don't remember much about the book except for that feeling
of being swept away in a story, and wanting to read more as a result.
Can you recall the first book you bought yourself? Or at least the earliest one you can remember – what it was, where you bought it, why you bought it?
I feel I should remember this, but I don't. It might have been Curtain
by Agatha Christie. When I was eleven or twelve I started reading Christie's
novels because my parents had a few, and I quickly became addicted to
them and began seeking them out. I've never been a book collector, but
at that age I was determined to read all of Christie's work, and she had
written dozens of books. I didn't read all of them, but I read all of
the Marples and Poirots, and Curtain was the last Poirot to read. I loved Christie's twists, and Curtain didn't disappoint.
I did a lot of my reading as a kid at the local public library. I know you grew up in Nigeria and Malaysia and so forth, but I believe you went to boarding school in England. Did you have access to a library? Were you an avid reader?
I was a total bookworm as a boy – I had enormous round glasses and
looked like Harry Potter. I went to prep school at eight, a place called
Horris Hill in Berkshire, and one of its alumni is Richard Adams. I
remember being told that the seeds of Watership Down had been
sown at the school when he told other boys stories about the rabbits on
the nearby down after lights out in his dormitory. I didn't tell stories
after lights out, but I did read long into the night with my torch
under my blanket, usually things like Jennings and Darbishire and Just William,
then Agatha Christie when I got a little older. At thirteen I went to
Winchester – after I'd talked at great length in my interview about
Hercule Poirot – and there was a library in the boarding house that
seemed to have stepped out of Tom Brown's Schooldays. It had a
copy of that book, which I read, as well as P. G. Wodehouse, John Buchan
and dozens of comic legal thrillers by Henry Cecil, which I chomped
through. It also had several paperbacks with distinctive yellow spines
and the name of the writer in thick black lettering: Dennis Wheatley. I
was too young for his occult stuff, and have never really been
interested in horror anyway, but I loved his Gregory Sallust spy
thrillers, despite their rather dubious politics. I reread them a few
years ago and it was like travelling back in time to my fifteeen-year-old
self.
Incidentally, I thought it was interesting that Song of Treason, your second Paul Dark thriller, hinges in part on a past, painful humiliation at boarding school. Was that informed by personal experience?
I don't have much in common with Paul Dark – I can't kill someone with
my bare hands, even if they're guilty of plagiarism. But I realized when
writing Free Agent that his background would most likely mean
he went to a public school. As I went to one, I thought it made sense to
capitalize on that and use what I knew about its peculiar ways and
customs to bring him more to life. I enjoyed my schooldays, but I was
fascinated by aspects of it, such as the power prefects held – I
remember there was a rumour that under the previous housemaster the
prefects had occasionally run amok and destroyed people's possessions
overnight. I watched Another Country at school, and felt that the
basic dynamics of life in such a place hadn't changed for decades. I
didn't realize until years later that Julian Mitchell had gone to
Winchester, so there were probably reasons it seemed so familiar.
When
it came to Song of Treason, I thought it wouldn't be too
difficult to insert some of my knowledge into an earlier era without it
seeming anachronistic – it had already seemed anachronistic when I
experienced it. My own Notions test was unremarkable, but it had quite a
build-up, which I suppose is vital with any initiation ceremony. You
heard, and imagined, all sorts of things. The parts about waiting in the
library in his dressing-gown and being disoriented as he is led around
the house are from my own memories. Much of the rest is imagined, and
some is from hearing others' experiences. There was an incident with
someone getting Deep Heat in his eyes, and although it wasn't damaging
in the long term, at the time it seemed monumental. I tried to take
these experiences and make them real for Paul Dark and the other
characters in an earlier time, in a
more dramatic way. The idea of someone carrying over humiliation at
school into adult life is not uncommon in thrillers (or perhaps life),
but I thought the 'local knowledge' I had would make it more vivid and
interesting. Although it might not get me invited back for Sports' Day.
While we're on the subject of Song of Treason: you also put Paul Dark through a torture sequence, in the grand tradition of Ian Fleming's Casino Royale, Len Deighton's The Ipcress File, Adam Hall's (alias Elleston Trevor) The Berlin Memorandum and others. Bit of a weird question, but were you keen to have your own torture sequence in one of your novels? And how do you think your one stacks up?
There's a great conversation between Raymond Chandler and Ian Fleming
that was broadcast by the BBC in 1958, in which a rather sozzled
Chandler asked Fleming why his novels always included a torture scene.
Fleming replied that he grew up reading Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu and
Sapper's Bulldog Drummond, and that in those stories it was traditional
for the villain to capture the hero and drug him or make him suffer in
one way or another. My first exposure to this sort of scene was in
Dennis Wheatley's Sallust novels, where there's a recurring villain, a
senior Gestapo officer called Grauber, and the torture scenes were often
horrific. I had written an interrogation of sorts towards the end of Free Agent,
but I thought it was time I had a proper spy thriller torture scene. It
fitted into some of my research about the political situation in Italy
at the time, but I
also felt that a torture sequence that played with public school
initiation ceremonies would make sense for the novel. I'm proud of the
scene, but I don't think it compares to the ones in those three books,
of course – they're classics of the genre.
Back to books and reading. What were you reading as you entered your teens? For me, books took a bit of a back seat for a while as I got more into music. Was it a similar thing for you? I know we like some of the same bands...
I did get into music a lot more, but I carried on reading. As well as
Agatha Christie and Henry Cecil, I remember reading John Christopher's Sword of the Spirits
trilogy, which I loved. This was in the library, I suppose because it
was set around Winchester, which made it more interesting, of course.
But it also had a fantastic twist, which I'll spoil now so be warned: it
seems like it's set in the past, in some Arthurian England, but partway
through you discover that it is in fact set in a post-apocalyptic
future, where the priests are secretly controlling technology. I guess I
like twists. As well as Dennis Wheatley, I read a lot of Alistair
MacLean, Desmond Bagley, Frederick Forsyth and Jack Higgins. Jeffrey
Archer, of course: copies of Kane and Abel were handed round like samizdat
(and always seemed to open on the same page). There were a lot of
thrillers from the Sixties and Seventies floating around: Hammond
Innes, Geoffrey Jenkins, Duncan Kyle, that sort of thing. In my late
teens, I read a lot of Julian Barnes and Iain Banks, and became more
interested in literary fiction.
I read in an interview that you didn't really discover spy fiction until you were in your twenties, when you chanced upon some spy novels in an Antwerp bookshop on a journalistic assignment. Were they paperbacks? Can you remember what they were?
I did read spy novels when I was younger – my parents had a rather obscure novel, The Left-Handed Sleeper
by Ted Willis, which I enjoyed, and after that I discovered Len Deighton and John le Carré. But I did a degree in English literature and
read very few thrillers at university. So when I walked into that
bookshop in Antwerp I hadn't read any spy novels for a few years, and
wasn't especially interested in them. But there was a whole bookcase
of second-hand thrillers in English, and a lot of them were spy novels. I
picked up The Quiller Memorandum by Adam Hall. The title
was vaguely familiar and I saw it had been made into a film. It cost
next to nothing. I picked out three or four other books – I don't
remember what they were – bought them, and went to do an interview with a
fashion designer. I was impressed by The Quiller
Memorandum, but it didn't blow me away. But I found another
secondhand bookshop in Brussels that had several more books in the
series, and The Tango Briefing had me hooked. I'd never read
anything like it. I'd never imagined a spy novel could be so exciting
but so beautifully written. So then I started reading a lot of spy
fiction.
I can usually recall where I bought the books that are most important to me. Is it the same for you? Where are some of the places you've bought books?
I lived in Brussels for several years, and there's a wonderful
second-hand bookshop there called Pêle-Mêle – anyone who knows me has
heard me rhapsodize about it. It used to have an extraordinary
collection of secondhand thrillers in English, but I suspect it doesn't
anymore as several hundred of them are now in my bookshelves: sorry! I
just cleaned the place out over the course of a few years. I mainly buy
from
second-hand bookshops. I always visit the Charing Cross Road area when
I'm in London, although the pickings are a lot slimmer now. I'll stop at
any flea market, in any country, and check their selection. There are a
few good places in Stockholm, where I live now, but these days I do
most of my book shopping online, which is less interesting but means I
get what I'm looking for. Physical bookshops are for the discoveries.
I've got a silly amount of guidebooks I've bought 'just in case': if I
ever want to write a thriller set in Mauritius in 1976, I'm prepared.
There are a couple of fantastic second-hand bookshops in Rome, which I
mention in the author's note for Song of Treason: I remember being in the back room of one over a decade ago and finding a copy of Encounter
from 1965. It had an article in it by John le Carré in which he wrote
about James Bond being a capitalist hyena and ended by suggesting that
the Russian Bond was on his
way. That was an important find for me, and I still read the article
every now and again to remember the effect it had on me.
I'm reading Adam Hall's The Ninth Directive at the moment, which I believe is your favourite Quiller. Why is that, do you think? And when did you first read it?
The Ninth Directive probably ties with The Tango Briefing for my favourite spy novel full stop. I read both in 2000, I think, one after the other. I love The Ninth Directive
because it's both very pulpy in terms of plot – assassinate the
assassin – but simultaneously seems extremely authentic. While reading
the novel, you really believe that this is how a secret agent would
think and act. It predates The Day of the Jackal by five years,
but has much of that feeling of peeking inside a hidden world. I loved
the way the target is never named, making it almost an elemental
struggle to survive. Beyond that, I don't know... Sometimes you just
connect with a book, or the voice of an author. I've connected with
many, but with Adam Hall it was like a jolt of lightning through me.
One thing that occurs to me as a possible reason for why you like The Ninth Directive is the setting: Thailand. You grew up partly in Asia – do you think that might be why the novel had such an impact on you? I've never been to Thailand but Hall's vivid description of the place strikes me as authentic.
I guess part of my love of The Ninth Directive is due to the
location, although I've never visited Thailand. Then again, I don't
think Hall/Trevor had, either! I was surprised to read an interview with him in which he revealed that he very rarely wrote about locations he
had visited, because he found he lost the magic when he did that. Quite
an astonishing thing to do, really. For the most part I think it's
impossible to tell, and he makes locations come alive. Hall was an
expatriate for much of his life, so even in the Seventies some of his
characters are from an England he had long left behind – as I've
spent most of my life as an expatriate, perhaps I identified with that
feeling in his writing as well.
Which of the books you own are you most fond of? I'm guessing there might be a battered paperback or two you prize, so do please tell me about those. But are there any first editions you;re pleased to own? Am I right in thinking you own perhaps the scarcest Adam Hall book, the final Quiller, Quiller Balalaika?
I own two copies of Quiller Balalaika, but they're less rare
than when I bought them. I have a couple of first edition Quillers which
are dear to me because they were gifts, but although I love books, and
often love the designs of them and the feel of them, I'm not usually
that sentimental about them as physical objects. I cherish books that
have been given to me, and am lucky enough to have a few from other
writers: The Bright Adventure by Geoffrey Rose, Lights in The Sky by Philip Purser, Silver by my friend Steven Savile... I sometimes pinch myself that I own these.
All the books I got in that Antwerp shop were paperbacks, incidentally, as are both my editions of Balalaika
(the same one, with the jacket art featuring Quiller holding, clanger
of clangers, a gun). Most of my books are paperbacks, in fact. Something
I just remembered is that I managed to persuade the editor of the
magazine I worked for in Belgium to let me do a feature article on
Pêle-Mêle, so I toddled off to interview the owner. And after we had
chatted away for a bit he led me through locked doors down to the
basement, where there was a whole room stacked floor to ceiling
with second-hand English paperback thrillers – their overflow room. It
was like Ali Baba's cave. So I didn't just clear out the shop of every
last Household, Hall, Hone and so on, I also raided their secret stash. It was
geektastic.
Where do you usually write? Do you have a study at home in Stockholm?
Yes, I have a small study that is basically a computer, a leather chair,
a sofa-bed and several bookshelves. I have a few small objects about.
Adam Hall's son sent me a Soviet militia badge a couple of years ago,
and I quite often pick that up and
fiddle with it. It's my executive toy!
I'm assuming you write on a computer. Have you always done so? I
actually wrote on a typewriter when I started out as a music journalist
twenty years ago, and when I switched to a computer I found it changed
the way I wrote – instead of writing from beginning to end, I'd write
bits of an article and then sort of stitch it together. I guess what I'm
asking here is, how do you write your novels? Plot them out? Write from
start to finish and make it up as you go along? Or write bits from
across the novel and put them together?
I mainly write on a computer, and always have done, although I also
carry a notebook with me to jot ideas down. I don't have a set method,
but I do tend to write a short synopsis and that gives me a basic
structure. I try to figure out what sort of mood I want the book to
have, what kind of book I want it to be. With The Moscow Option,
I knew going in that I wanted it to be set in the Soviet Union and the
Åland archipelago, that it would take place in winter, and that it would
involve the threat of nuclear war. I wanted the mood to be bleak, but
frantic. I also had some ideas of set scenes, so I started writing them
in basic form first and then worked from there – I wrote part of the
ending first. My structure tends to change as I go along, as I discover
that ideas I liked don't work or think of something better. I find if
I've worked everything out too much in advance it starts to feel stale. I
like to surprise myself, and that involves some tricks to keep myself
on my toes. So it's a mix between planning in advance and improvising.
Do you listen to music whilst writing? What, if so?
Yes, I almost always write to music, as I find silence too imposing. I
put a lot of thought and time into what music I write to, in fact. Some
writers obsess about Moleskine notebooks or where they place their pencil
sharpener, and I guess this is my little obsession. I find it difficult
to write to music with lyrics, so I mainly listen to instrumental
music, or music in which the lyrics are fairly minimal and so are less
likely to distract me from my work. I love Leonard Cohen, for instance,
but I wouldn't try to write while listening to him. I've got several
playlists that are 200-400 songs long so I don't feel like I'm listening
to a loop and I also refresh them quite frequently for that
reason. The basis for most of them is electronica, often taken from
compilation albums with 'Ibiza' or 'Chill' in the title. Particular
favourites are Waiwan, The Flashbulb, Bliss, Snooze, and two collections
called The Jazz House Sessions and Chill House Sensation,
both of which sound absurd but which work very well for me. I find I'm
enjoying the music, but can also stay sharply focussed. I also throw in
some oddities, especially stuff from the Sixties that will help me feel
like I've stumbled into the score of the book I'm writing: a few
Emotions songs, some Persuaders, that sort of thing. Then I have some
jazz – Grant Green and John Scofield – and this all helps make what, in
my fevered mind, is an endless soundtrack. I'm imagining I'm the spy
novel equivalent of David Holmes.
I started this approach with my first novel, but have varied it since, trying out new music
and adding quirks depending on the book. With Free Agent,
I listened to a lot of afrobeat, some of which goes on for a long time
and is quite meditative. In particular, Fela Kuti's early band Koola
Lobitos helped me get into the mood of Nigeria in the late Sixties.
I wore out a haunting Marvin Gaye song, Dark Side of the World, which was recorded at around the time the book is set but not released until fairly recently. Alice Russell's song Hurry On Now
was an important song for me: it sounded like it was from the Sixties
but gave a fresh twist to it, and I was trying to do something similar. I
also listened to a lot of early Rolling Stones, Gimme Shelter and Play With Fire
in particular: I wanted the book to feel like those songs. I found it
interesting when I read an early draft of a screenplay for the BBC that
the script began with Sympathy for the Devil
playing over a Lagos traffic scene. It's such a simple idea, but of
course that song is perfect for Paul Dark, and for the series as a whole
in fact.
For Song of Treason, I downloaded several albums of soundtrack
music from Sixties Italian spy films, and mixed them in with my other
music – a lot of Ennio Morricone and his contemporaries. I also listened
to Eve of Destruction by Barry McGuire several hundred times –
that was the key song for the book, an alternative title for it, and
briefly features in it.
For The Moscow Option, I listened to a lot of Sibelius – Finlandia
comes up in the first two books and this one's the pay-off for that,
as Dark is in Finland – as well as a lot of more recent spy scores. I
love John Barry's work but can't write to him as I start imagining Sean
Connery or Michael Caine or George Segal
instead of Paul Dark. Ditto John Powell's work on the Bourne films. I
realized that that sort of sound helped my writing, but I associated it
too much with Jason Bourne. So I spent a few hours on iTunes, using the
preview feature, buying individual songs from spy thriller scores. I
picked a lot of films I haven't seen, so I know I have stuff on my
playlists from The International, Shooter, Spy Game (which
I've seen, but years ago) and several other films from the last couple
of decades. But I don't look at the stereo when they play, and I have
enough of them, on a long enough random-order playlist, that none of
them ever push themselves to the forefront enough to stand out. So
instead of being Track 4 from The International, Track 6 from Shooter and so on, they became part of the soundtrack to The Moscow Option. Just the other day I found a great album to fit in to my playlists for
my current book: Themes for an Imaginary Film by Symmetry. It fits my purposes perfectly, and I've written a lot to it already.
I realize that all makes me sound slightly mad, but when you want to
write a book I think it's worth making yourself comfortable to do it. I
spend some time setting up music so I don't have to think about what to
listen to on a daily basis.
Do you write on the move at all? Do you have a laptop?
I don't have a laptop, though I sometimes use my wife's if we're
travelling, and I also use a notebook. But most of my writing is done in
my study at home.
Do you have to stay away from the likes of Twitter and Facebook when you write, or are you able to dip into them as you write?
It varies. I've gone off Facebook in the last year or so and don't use
it all that much anymore, but I am an avid Tweeter. Sometimes I find
that when I'm writing a lot I also tweet a lot, because I become almost
hyperactive with ideas, and very flighty. But sometimes the opposite
happens, and I just hunker down without any need to go online at all. On
the other hand, I also find I can get overly distracted by the net, and
to get work done I have to switch it off with Freedom – sometimes
willpower isn't enough. It's something I wrestle with quite a bit, as I
imagine many writers do now. Radio silence can recharge your creative
energy, and can be vital. But interacting with people, reading articles
and so on can also reinvigorate and inspire you. It's a balancing
act. The most important thing is getting the work done. You do whatever
it takes.
All three of your Paul Dark novels draw on real historical events, but
in The Moscow Option, not only do Brezhnev and other well-known Soviet officials make cameos, but
Donald Maclean plays a fairly crucial role, too. Why did you choose to bring
Maclean in? Paul's reasoning for seeking out Maclean rather than, say,
Kim Philby, is logical, but from your point of view, it must have been
very tempting to have Philby play a part as well...
You're right – it was tempting, and Philby was my first idea. I wrote
several scenes featuring him, but abandoned them. The scene with
Brezhnev near the start of the novel originally had Dark and Philby
around the table. I also wrote a long scene with Dark in Philby's flat,
and did a lot of research for it. There were several reasons I decided
not to go with that idea. Some of them are to do with that logic – if I
were in Dark's shoes, knowing what I knew of Philby and his career in
Moscow, I wouldn't have risked appealing to him. I also found it very
hard to do because although I feel like I can imagine
Philby quite well, there are a lot of traps there. Philby has appeared
in a lot of spy thrillers, either under his own name or loosely
disguised. So now it's almost too obvious, and it kept ringing false to
me. If I had the stutter it was cliched and almost parodic, but without
it he didn't quite feel like Philby, and so on.
I thought about it for
several weeks, trying different things and doing some research, and
eventually decided that Maclean was not just more likely, but more
intriguing. I thought it was interesting that he had associated with
dissidents in the way he did, and the small incident that forms the
basis of Dark's appeal to him really happened. Most literature about the
Cambridge spies centres on Philby and Burgess, but I found
Maclean equally fascinating, partly because he's harder to read. He was a
handsome man – you can imagine Rupert Everett playing him, I think –
but towards the end of
his life he became rather ghoulish looking. He also had a very screwed
up relationship with his father, as of course Dark does. Philby did,
too, but I thought it would be interesting to encounter someone who had
done what Dark had done, a real historical figure who had lived with the
consequences but who would also condemn Dark for his actions. I
thought this would confuse our feelings about Dark more, in that you'd
both see Maclean's point but also be on Dark's side – after all, we've
come to know him while Maclean is a stranger, and one seen through
Dark's eyes. But if we forgive Dark, why don't we forgive Maclean? Dark
has done more damage. My motives weren't quite as clear-cut as that,
perhaps, but this is the general area I was circling.
As with the two prior Paul Dark novels, the Author's Note at the back of
The Moscow Option is most illuminating as regards the research you do
for your novels and how
you weave real events into them. But I have to say, The Moscow Option
note is rather alarming, in particular what it reveals about President Nixon's "Madman Theory". And the
novel as a whole often sees Paul ruminating on the nuclear nightmare
he's trying to prevent. I vividly recall being terrified of nuclear war
in the 1980s; did you have similar fears growing up?
I'm glad you found that note alarming, because that's why I decided to
use it. I remember the idea of nuclear war scaring me as a teenager, and
of course that fear has faded with the end of the Cold War and the
emergence of new threats, although the risk is perhaps greater today
than it has ever been. Despite that, to most people nuclear war now
seems an abstract idea: in thriller terms, we know the secret agent will
defuse the warhead, but it means very little to us. But it meant
something to me when I was fifteen or sixteen. So I wanted to bring back a
thriller with those stakes, but I also wanted
to remind or perhaps introduce people to what they really meant, and
how fragile the situation was. I was lucky to come across a guy called
Mike Kenner, who is a campaigner for freedom of information, and he very
kindly shared with me thousands of documents he has managed to have
declassified from the National Archives. A lot of these are from the
British government's contingency plans for nuclear war during the
Sixties, and they're chilling. So I used some of that information and
the events of October 1969 to try to craft a thriller that recaptured
some of the feel of the books I read growing up, by Frederick Forsyth
and Desmond Bagley and others, but which I hoped would also hit home now
because of the reality behind it.
Last question: something you find with many writers of fiction is that they don't seem to read
much fiction – when asked what they're reading, it's usually
non-fiction. (This isn't always the
case, of course; Kingsley Amis read a lot of fiction, especially genre fiction.) I guess that's partly down to not wishing to be influenced by
other people's novels when writing your own, but I also suspect it's
that 'busman's holiday' thing: when your 'job' is to write novels,
reading them as well can seem a bit much. What do you think? I know you
read a fair bit of non-fiction, but do you still read much fiction
besides? What are you reading at the moment?
Unfortunately, I fall into this camp – I hardly read any fiction these days. I'm reading Ordinary Thunderstorms
by William Boyd at the moment, but it's one of the very few novels I've
read recently. I'm always looking for new information to use in my
books, and I find that much as I enjoy fiction it mainly contains lots
of ideas I can't use. At the moment I'm writing my first
non-fiction book, about Oleg Penkovsky and the Cuban Missile Crisis, and
as a result I've read around a hundred non-fiction books for research
in the last year – if you think my music selection sounds obsessive it
doesn't even compare. I guess the busman's holiday comparison is right –
for some reason, I often find it very difficult to read fiction now,
and get antsy after a few pages. I happily listen to music and watch
films, but when I'm reading a novel I become very conscious that I'm
taking time away from creating my own
books.
For previous Existential Ennui interviews, click here for a Q&A with Christopher Nicole, alias Andrew York, author of the Jonas Wilde spy novels; here for short Q&A with Jeff Lindsay, author of the Dexter crime novels; and here and here for a two-part interview with Anthony Price, author of the David Audley spy novels.
