This was definitely a big weekend for news about various crime-fiction prizes. First up are the winners of the 2013 Derringer Awards, presented by the Short Mystery Fiction Society:
Best Flash Story (up to 1,000 words): “The Cable
Job,” by Randy DeWitt (Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, September
2012)
Best Short Story (1,001-4,000 words): “Getting Out of
the Box,” by Michael Bracken (from Crime Square, edited by Robert J.
Randisi; Vantage Point)
Best Long Story (4,001-8,000 words): “When Duty Calls,” by Art Taylor (from Chesapeake Crimes: This Job Is Murder, edited by Donna Andrews, Barb Goffman, and Marcia Talley; Wildside Press)
Best Novelette (8,001 – 20,000 words): “Wood-Smoke Boys,” by Doug Allyn (Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, March/April 2012)
In addition, the Portland, Oregon-based fan organization Friends of Mystery has let it be known that its 2013 Spotted Owl Award goes to Seattle author Mike Lawson for last year’s House Blood (Atlantic Monthly Press), the seventh installment
in his Joe DiMarco series of thrillers. Click here to see the tally of runners-up.
And all day long, Spinetingler Magazine has been rolling out lists of nominees for its assortment of 2013 awards. Click through to these categories to see which authors and works are in contention:
As hard as this is to believe, it was a full five years ago next month that Derringer Award-winning short-story writer Patricia “Patti” Abbott suggested it might be fun--and perhaps even a bit enlightening--for the Web’s growing ranks of book bloggers to recommend, each Friday, “books we love but might have forgotten over the years.” That proposal has since generated many thousands of posts about unjustly neglected works of fiction and non-fiction, including 122 such write-ups (so far) in The Rap Sheet.
With the fifth anniversary of this meme coming right up, on April 25, Abbott mentioned to me that we really ought to celebrate. And the best way, of course, would be to produce a plenitude of brand-new posts building on the original idea. So, here’s an invitation: If you’ve never contributed your opinions to the Web-wide “forgotten books” series, or even if you have done so many times before, we hope you’ll take the opportunity next month to write about an unjustly neglected or insufficiently championed book from the past. The optimum time to post your contribution would be between Monday, April 22, and Friday, April 26.
If you don’t have a blog of your own in which to publish, Patti Abbott says she’ll be happy to accept any and all submissions along these lines; simply drop her an e-mail note explaining your intentions here. I would also be glad to receive new “forgotten books” posts for The Rap Sheet, though I prefer that those focus on works of crime, mystery, or thriller fiction. Please contact me here with specifics on which book you would like to address, but try to do so by Friday, April 19.
A complete list of fifth-anniversary additions to the “forgotten books” series will be posted in Abbott’s blog, Pattinase, on April 26.
Finally, to give you a sense of the variety of treats this meme has produced since April 2008, here’s a rundown of The Rap Sheet’s contributions, the first of which appeared on May 2, 2008. Following each book title and author name, I’ve identified (in parentheses) the person who commented on the work:
It was 50 years ago today that Alfred Hitchcock’s 1963 suspense/horror film, The Birds, premiered in New York City. The screenplay was written by Evan Hunter, aka Ed McBain. Modern filmmakers comment on the picture’s enduring significance here.
Author Wilson offers background on his latest thriller.
Last week we announced that The Rap Sheet had three copies available of Capital Punishment--the new thriller by British author Robert Wilson--to give away. Today, through the process of random selection, we have the names of our three winners. They are:
• Walter A. Herbert Jr. of Upper Marlboro, Maryland
• Linda Newman of North Gower, Ontario, Canada
• Paul Dunstan of Salford, England
Wilson’s U.S. publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, will send these lucky Rap Sheet readers their copies i short order. I hope they enjoy this first installment of Wilson’s new series as much as I did.
Oh, and if you didn’t win Capital Punishment? Don’t fret. We have yet another book drawing slated for early April. Keep an eye out for it!
There will apparently be no Bloody Words mystery conference held this year in Toronto, Canada. However, there will still be a presentation of the second annual Bony Blithe Awards, celebrating traditional, feel-good mysteries. Winners will receive their prizes during a gala celebration in Toronto on May 29. Here’s the short list of contestants.
•Threaded for Trouble, by Janet Bolin (Berkley Prime Crime) •Food for the Gods, by Karen Dudley (Ravenstone) •A Small Hill to Die On, by Elizabeth J. Duncan (Minotaur) •A Private Man, by Chris Laing (Seraphim) •Blood, Bath & Beyond, by Michelle Rowen (NAL Obsidian) •The Mastersinger from Minsk, by Morley Torgov (Dundurn)
Watch a short video introduction to these books here.
This morning brings word of the Barry Award nominees for 2013. These prizes are sponsored by Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine, and it’s readers of that periodical who will determine the winners. An announcement of Barry recipients will be made on September 19 as part of the opening ceremonies at Bouchercon 2013, to be held in Albany, New York. Here are this year’s contenders.
Best Novel: • Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn (Crown) • The Blackhouse, by Peter May (Silver Oak) • Trust Your Eyes, by Linwood Barclay (NAL) • Defending Jacob, by William Landay (Delacorte) • Live by Night, Dennis Lehane (Morrow) • Dead Scared, by S.J. Bolton (Minotaur)
Best First Novel: • The Yard, by Alex Grecian (Putnam) • A Killing in the Hills, by Julia Keller (Minotaur) • Sacrifice Fly, by Tim O’Mara (Minotaur) • The Dark Winter, by David Mark (Blue Ridge Press) • Black Fridays, by Michael Sears (Putnam) • The Professionals, by Owen Laukkanen (Putnam)
Best Paperback Original: • Pago Pago Tango, by John Enright (Thomas & Mercer) • Mr. Churchill’s Secretary, by Susan Elia McNeal (Bantam) • Blessed Are the Dead, by Malla Nunn (Washington Square) • The Other Woman’s House, by Sophie Hannah (Penguin) • Bloodland, by Alan Glynn (Picador) • Beneath the Abbey Wall, by A.D. Scott (Atria)
Best Thriller: • The Last Refuge, by Ben Coes (St. Martin’s) • The Right Hand, by Derek Haas (Mulholland) • The Fallen Angel, by Daniel Silva (Harper) • A Foreign Country, by Charles Cumming (St. Martin’s) • House Blood, by Mike Lawson (Atlantic Monthly) • Red Star Burning, by Brian Freemantle (Minotaur)
Congratulations to all of the nominees!
By the way, you might notice that this selection of awards categories seems strangely limited. Deadly Pleasures editor George Easter explains that “We have eliminated two: The Best Short Story (lack of interest/votes by fans) and Best British (changing times, most good British writers are now published in the U.S., and it was a confusing award especially when an American or an Icelandic won). The awards ceremony got to be too long. Now it will be just right.”
• Leave it to Andrew Nette, author of the spirited blog Pulp Curry, to bring
to market this project: Lee, a new e-book anthology of stories--some fictional, others more biographical--about tough-guy American film and TV actor Lee Marvin. According to Crime Fiction
Lover, Nette and his fellow editors have “assembled 17 stories from the
cream of the crop of recent pulp writers. The stories trace Lee Marvin’s career
from his time in the marines during WWII through all of his best loved movies: The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Point Blank, Paint Your Wagon--and the movie Marvin didn’t join, Jaws. ... This anthology aims to take the larger-than-life mythos surrounding Lee Marvin and make it even bigger.” It all sounds like fun. Nette offers some of his own thoughts on the work here.
• Last October I wrote on this page about the syndicated small-screen private-investigator series The Brothers Brannagan (1960-1961), of which I had not then previously heard. Now, Mystery*File’s hard-working television historian, Michael Shonk, has posted more background on that program, plus comments on three of its 39 half-hour episodes (including one written by Columbo creators Richard Levinson and William Link).
• Wouldn’t you know it? I finally find on YouTube a full video of Las Vegas Roundabout, the rarely seen pilot for Switch
(1975-1978), CBS-TV’s con man/detective series starring Eddie Albert and Robert
Wagner, and it turns out to have been dubbed in French!
• And author Max Allan Collins laments the desire of so many
crime-fiction fans for “a murder in the first chapter. Better still, the first page.” He
continues: “Didn’t any of these readers and reviewers ever read a Perry
Mason novel or see the classic TV series? Maybe not. But Erle Stanley Gardner
took his sweet time killing the murder victim, whose identity was almost always
obvious to the reader. Murders frequently don’t occur till a third of the
way--sometimes half of the way--through many great mysteries by the likes of
Agatha Christie and Rex Stout.” I agree with Collins: It isn’t at all necessary
to exercise an act of homicide early in a story. Heck, one of my favorite
gumshoe yarns of all time, Stanley Ellin’s The Eighth Circle (1958), doesn’t have a killing in it at all, and only one instance of a gun being pulled--a weapon that contains no bullets.
Gerald So, editor of The 5-2: Crime Poetry Weekly, reports that “there is now at least one entry scheduled for each day” of his
site’s fast-approaching observance of poetic malevolence. As we mentioned
previously, this annual blog tour invites writers to browse the
5-2’s archive of
poems, choose a favorite, and then post something about that work (or its
author) during the month of April. You’ll find the schedule of this year’s
participants here.
Even though he has every day of next month covered, So says that other writers can still participate in this revelry: “I’m fine with multiple entries on the same poem or the same day.” If you’d like to add your voice to all the rest, simply drop an e-mail note to So here, or tweet @poemsoncrime.
This “30 Days of the 5-2” tour will begin on Monday, April 1.
(Editor’s note: In the essay below, British editor and critic Barry Forshaw briefs us on the roots of his passion for crime fiction, as well as on his latest
non-fiction work about Nordic crime fiction.)
It’s the Americans that got me started.
My lifelong love of crime fiction certainly began with such Brits as Arthur Conan Doyle, Graham Greene, and Eric Ambler, but I found myself perfectly able to resist (for quite some time) the cozy charms of Agatha Christie and her comfortable, unreal world; a qualified appreciation came later. Ah, but the Americans! I know I’m not alone among British crime-fiction aficionados in finding my first acquaintance with such writers as Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett to be like a bolt from the blue--prose written with such pungency that the British variety seemed rather thin-blooded. And then I discovered Ross Macdonald ... and never looked back.
By the time I began reviewing crime for a variety of newspapers, though, I was covering writers from all points of the compass--and I realized that even among people who knew me, my initial enthusiasm for the American writers was actually something I hadn’t written about (this was before I began to publish books on crime fiction). After all, I was rather too young to have reviewed The Big Sleep when
it first appeared. Or even The Galton Case.
I’m more likely these days to be covering Jo Nesbø or Jussi Adler-Olsen.
And the result? American and British writers I meet can bridle whenever the words “Scandinavian crime” are mentioned. After an otherwise amiable evening spent with a well-known writer recently, I was asked, with a tight smile just this side of friendliness: “Why the hell do you continue promoting these Nordic writers in book after book--and in review after review? What about the Americans and the British? Don’t we deserve a mention now and again?” I can only protest, feebly, that if (after I’m pushing up the daisies) anybody cares to tally the nationalities of the crime writers I’ve covered, the Scandinavians would be massively outnumbered by, say, the Brits (I do, after all, have three books under my belt with the same word in the title: British Crime Writing, British Crime Film, and--shortly--British Gothic Cinema). But perhaps every writer on the planet feels that he or she is not receiving enough attention. (Gone, I suspect, are the days when writers would, like Kafka, suggest that their agents burn their complete output.)
I’ve ruefully come to an accommodation with myself: I just have to ride with the punches while the “Scandi Crime” wave continues to roll over everything--and I continue to be seen as one of its spokesmen. After all, my new book is Nordic Noir (Oldcastle/Pocket Essentials).
I was musing on this recently, after being asked to interview the great Krister Henriksson--most
viewers’ favorite Kurt Wallander--for a new magazine called (like my tome!) Nordic Noir.
* * *
“My career as an actor,” Krister Henriksson tells me (as London taxis creep around the eponymous Seven Dials obelisk below his hotel), “could have been very short-lived. During a performance of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt in my 20s, I fainted onstage--and when I came to I was in hospital. They told me I had fainted because of stage fright--not the best thing to happen to a young actor early in his career, was it?”
Henriksson, who is best known for playing detective Wallander in a widely
praised Swedish TV series based on Henning Mankell’s best-selling novels, will make his West End debut in Doktor Glas, which transfers to London following its acclaimed run
at Sweden’s National Theatre. Adapted from the classic novel by Hjalmar Söderberg (and performed in its original Swedish with English surtitles), it will preview at Wyndham’s Theatre on April 16.
(Right) Actor Krister Henriksson
But I’m here, principally, to talk about his role as Henning Mankell’s dour and intuitive Swedish copper with the troubled private life. As we sip aquavit, I tentatively bring up with Henriksson the tricky subject of which, among the three actors who’ve portrayed Wallander (Rolf Lassgård and Kenneth
Branagh being the other two), is Mankell’s favorite--and point out
how the novelist always gives a diplomatic answer when asked this question.
Henriksson smiles; he’s also been asked this before.
“Yes, Henning is always diplomatic when he’s asked this question--and I appreciate that. After all, what else could he be? When he was in London recently with Kenneth Branagh, he wasn’t going to say, ‘Of course, Krister is my favorite!’
“Although speaking for myself, it wasn’t a part I instantly leapt at. When it was first offered to me, I said firmly no, no, no. I really didn’t want to do it, not least because of the length of the production. I simply
didn’t want to make the kind of commitment that filming a series like that
would involve--I have lots of things I want to do in the theater, and I was
genuinely resistant to taking the part. Of course, this had one corollary
effect--every time they came back to me, the proposed salary was being adjusted
upwards. But this wasn’t why I was resisting--I genuinely wanted to do other
things. And I had always described myself as a theater actor first and
foremost.
“And then they sent the man himself to persuade me. And Henning Mankell is a man it is very difficult to say no to. He asked me why I kept declining--and I told him one of the reasons was quite simply that I hadn’t read the books.” Henriksson laughs. “But when I read them--I read three of them--I thought to myself: ‘Why the hell didn’t they offer me this part first, rather than Rolf Lassgård?’”
So what finally persuaded Henriksson, after all this pleading, to accept the role? Was it really just reading the books? “No,” he replies, “it was something else. Actually, to be frank, it was that meeting with Henning Mankell. We instantly established contact and had this strange sensation that we had known each other for a long time, even
though we had just met.
“I’m glad that Wallander was so popular in the UK--not least because I had a hand in writing the scripts; that was, in fact, part of the reason why I said yes.”
* * *
So, back to the coffee machine and a cool London dusk outside my window, as I write up my interview with Henriksson. And, meanwhile, put the finishing touches to Nordic Noir. The latter is sub-titled The Pocket Essential Guide to Scandinavian Crime Fiction, Film & TV, and attempts to be a compact and
authoritative trawl through a phenomenally popular genre, from Maj Sjöwall and
Per Wahlöö’s highly influential Martin Beck series and Henning Mankell’s Wallander (as mentioned above), to Stieg Larsson’s The
Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and cult TV hits such as The
Killing, The Bridge, and Borgen, up to the hugely successful books and movies of the current king in this field, Norway’s Jo
Nesbø. (I’ve tried this before with Death in a Cold Climate, but Nordic
Noir is a more compact, accessible guide--and shopping list--collecting all
the new novels, films, and TV series that have appeared since the last book was published.)
I’ve tried to anatomize the nigh-obsessive appeal of this subject, meeting virtually every key practitioner in every corner of the field. If that means a few more British crime writers will cross me off their Christmas card list, well, I suppose it’s a price I’ll have to pay ...
In the video above, Wallander star Krister Henriksson and author Henning Mankell talk about the character of Ystad, Sweden’s favorite fictional detective.
I was out of town over the weekend, celebrating my birthday, so I missed seeing the announcement of award winners at this year’s Left Coast Crime convention in Colorado Springs, Colorado. As my first effort to catch up, here’s that list of fortunate recipients.
The Lefty (for the
best humorous mystery novel): The Girl Next Door, by Brad
Parks (Minotaur)
Also nominated: Cruising in Your Eighties Is Murder,
by Mike Befeler (Five Star); Swift Run, by Laura DiSilverio (Minotaur); December
Dread, by Jess Lourey (Midnight Ink); Trail of the Spellmans, by
Lisa Lutz (Simon & Schuster); and Fit to Be Dead, by Nancy Glass
West (Southwest Publications)
The Bruce Alexander
Memorial Historical Mystery Award: Dandy Gilver and an Unsuitable Day
for a Murder, by Catronia McPherson (Minotaur)
Also nominated: The Twelve Clues of Christmas, by
Rhys Bowen (Berkley Prime Crime); A
City of Broken Glass, by Rebecca Cantrell (Forge); Live by Night,
by Dennis Lehane (Morrow); and Elegy for Eddie, by Jacqueline Winspear
(HarperCollins)
The Rocky (for the
best regional mystery novel): As the Crow Flies, by Craig Johnson
(Viking)
Also nominated: Buffalo Bill’s Dead Now, by Margaret
Coel (Berkley Prime Crime); Hush Money, by Chuck Greaves (Minotaur); Wicked
Eddies, by Beth Groundwater (Midnight Ink); and Sonora Crossing, by
Darrell James (Midnight Ink)
The Watson (for the
mystery novel with the best sidekick): Bruja Brouhaha, by Rochelle
Staab (Berkley Prime Crime)
Also nominated: In a Witch’s Wardrobe, by Juliet
Blackwell (Obsidian); Taken, by Robert Crais (Putnam); Fun House,
by Chris Grabenstein (Pegasus); and When the Past Haunts You, by L.C.
Hayden (CreateSpace)
Congratulations to all of the victors!
If you would like to attend Left Coast Crime next year, it will be held in beautiful Monterey, California, March 20-23, 2014. More info and registration details can be found here.
Don’t forget, The Rap Sheet's contest to give away three free copies of Robert Wilson's dramatic new thriller, Capital Punishment, will end at midnight this coming Tuesday, March 26. To have a chance at winning one of these books, all you have to do is send your name and snail-mail address to jpwrites@wordcuts.org. And be sure to write “Capital Punishment Contest” in the subject line. Winners will be chosen at random, and their names listed on this page the following day.
A weekly alert for followers of crime, mystery, and thriller fiction.
Helsinki Blood, by James Thompson (Putnam):
You’ve got to wonder how Finnish homicide inspector Kari Vaara--introduced in Snow Angels (2009)--manages to keep going. He’s been battered and bruised, shot and suckered, and had to undergo surgery to take care of a brain tumor. His wife, Kate, is suffering the debilitating effects of post-traumatic stress disorder as a consequence of her recent actions, and she’s left their infant daughter, Anu, in his uncertain care. Yeah, sure, Inspector Vaara did make a mint off his last case, in Helsinki White (2012), screwing drug dealers out of their ill-gotten profits; but that black-ops scheme put a target on his back the size of Cincinnati. Is it any wonder that our hero has turned to medicating himself? This is a guy in desperate need of good news and redemption. Cue the approach of a woman from Estonia, who pleads with Vaara to find her teenage daughter, Loviise, who has Down syndrome and has gone off the radar after being promised a better life in Helsinki. The detective’s search for Loviise takes him on a wild ride from ritzy clubs to the rank depths of his country’s white-slave trade, and leaves him vulnerable to enemies with even fewer scruples than he can still claim. All the while, he prays that this effort to do good will demonstrate to Kate--and himself--that he hasn’t really turned into one of the bad guys. The Kentucky-born, Finland-living Thompson knows how to
pen emotionally riveting crime stories, as dark as a Nordic winter. But it’s a
welcome surprise to find a ray of actual hope in the closing pages of Helsinki Blood. It seems Kari Vaara will live to be maltreated another day.
Tonight’s opening festivities at the Left Coast Crime convention in Colorado Springs, Colorado, included the announcement that British-born Canadian novelist Peter Robinson has captured this year’s Dilys Award for his 2012 standalone novel, Before the Poison (Morrow). The Dilys is presented by the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association (IMBA) to “the mystery title of the year which the member booksellers have most enjoyed selling.”
Also nominated for this commendation were Grandad, There’s a Head on the Beach, by Colin Cotterill (Minotaur); Broken Harbor, by Tana French (Viking); Mr. Churchill’s Secretary, by Susan Elia MacNeal (Bantam); andThe Expats, by Chris Pavone (Crown).
Left Coast Crime will continue through this coming Sunday, March 25, and include the presentation of four more literary prizes.
I am sorry to have to report this news, but acclaimed American illustrator Mitchell Hooks--who created so many memorable paperback crime-novel covers during the latter half of the 20th century--apparently passed away this last weekend at age 89. I’ve posted some of his more noteworthy book covers, plus links to additional information about his career, in my Killer Covers blog.
• Scottish crime writer Denise Mina (Gods and Beasts), who penned the Vertigo graphic-novel version of Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, has also signed up to adapt the other two books in Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy. Mina says she already “halfway through the script for The Girl Who Played with Fire and moving on to The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest.
I’m loving it.” I don’t see any release date yet for that latter couple of works.
• Did you know that Boston, Massachusetts, will be hosting a Nancy Drew Sleuths
Convention, May 28-June 2? Included in the events schedule is a walk
amongst locations mentioned in The Secret of the Wooden Lady (1967) and The
Case of the Vanishing Veil (1988). If you would like to attend, note that
registration ends this coming Monday, March 25. (Hat tip to Criminal
Intent.)
• Wow, that’s quite a project! Pornokitsch bloggers have taken on the task of reviewing all 77 (so far) releases from publisher Hard Case Crime, “one every week.” The latest entry focuses on David
Dodge’s Plunder of the Sun (1949). You can keep up with this series here.
The Way Some People Die is a masterpiece, and I wish more people would read it. One of the ways that Macdonald’s work influences mine is the understanding that the main character is carrying around wounds from the past that could split open at any time. Don’t get me wrong: Lew Archer is a cipher
compared to Lily Moore, and you have to read several books in Macdonald’s
series to get a strong sense of him. But once you do, you realize that Lew
Archer has been damaged, and there are hints at physical abuse in his past and
a dark cloud of depression that follows him. It’s something that evolves over
the course of many books, and Macdonald handles it beautifully. Archer, for all
of his world-weariness, cares deeply about people. There’s a lot of pain in
him, and a surprising amount of empathy. If Lew Archer met up with Detective
Bruxton, I think they’d have a lot of common ground.
There’s also an intensity to MacDonald’s best work that I love. Many of his novels are set over the course of two days. That was something I did with Evil: most of the book is compressed into a 36-hour period.
• Speaking of covers, the London literary mag Libro asked me to pick my 12 favorite vintage crime-novel fronts. Those selections are now posted here, with another eight runner-ups to be found here.
• Writer Vince Keenan and his wife, Rosemarie, have
won the 2013 William F. Deeck-Malice Domestic Grant for Unpublished Writers.
The award, given annually by the organizers of the Malice Domestic conference
to new novelists, is for their comic mystery, Design for Dying. The pair will
pick up their prize during the Malice
Domestic convention to be held in Bethesda, Maryland, from May 3 to 5.
• Two deaths in need of reporting: Henry Bromell, a TV writer and producer who served as an executive producer on Showtime’s CIA drama, Homeland, and before that worked on Homicide: Life on the Street, I’ll Fly Away, and other programs, died this week at age 66; and
Harry Reems, notorious for his starring role in the 1972 porno flick Deep Throat,
succumbed to cancer yesterday at 65 years of age.
• Oh, and I forgot to mention earlier that character actor Malachi Throne, who was so
memorably featured in such classic small-screen series as It Takes a Thief, Star Trek, and Batman, died last week--on March 13, to be exact--at age 84. An extensive rundown of his professional roles can be found here.
• The program schedule for CrimeFest 2013, set to take place in Bristol, England, from May 30 through June 2, has been released. (Hat tip to Omnimystery
News.)
• Rolling Stone has published a very fine (and sometimes frightening) article about the Republican Party’s “real agenda.” It seems we can forget about anything such as political moderation or honest appeals to minority voters from the GOP.
• And among the nominees for this year’s Dr. Tony Ryan Book Award, designed
to showcase “the best of [horse] racing literature,” is Sasscer Hill’s 2012
“Nikki Latrelle Racing Mystery,” Racing from Death. See all of the contenders here.
Earlier today, Kirkus Reviews posted the first portion of my recent interview with British crime and thriller novelist Robert Wilson, whose Capital Punishment--the opening installment in a new series--will be officially released in the United States next week. (It has been on sale in the UK since January.) You can enjoy that piece here.
Asking questions of Wilson, via e-mail, was a tremendous privilege for me. Although I have somehow never gotten around to reading his earliest three novels, all of which featured West African “fixer” Bruce Medway, I have relished Wilson’s subsequent eight books, beginning my explorations with A Small Death in Lisbon (1999). That was a propulsive,
haunting tale that offered parallel stories: one set during World War II and
focusing on a German industrialist who’s sent to Lisbon, Portugal, by the Nazi
SS to corner the market on wolfram, a mineral used in the manufacturing of
munitions; and a second narrative thread that follows the modern murder of a not-so-innocent teenage girl, investigated by Inspector José “Zé” Coelho, whose delving into the deceased’s past sparks resistance from his supervisors at the same time as it reveals a family’s longstanding heritage of secrets.
Wilson followed Small Death with an espionage novel titled The Company of Strangers (2001), and then produced The Blind Man of Seville, which brought readers into the company of Inspector Jefe Javier Falcón, the originally troubled commander of the homicide division at Seville, Spain’s police department. I added Blind Man to January Magazine’s “Best Books of 2003” selection and went on to read its three sequels, concluding with The Ignorance of Blood (2009). Last year, those four novels were adapted as a short-run UK television series, appropriately titled Falcón.
Now, in Capital Punishment, the author debuts his third series protagonist, a British ex-homicide cop-turned-“freelance kidnap consultant” named Charles Boxer. This book
finds Boxer and his quondam inamorata, London police detective Mercy Danquah, hunting
for Alyshia D’Cruz, the fetching 25-year-old daughter of a crooked but
influential Indian businessman, who has vanished in London after a night out on
the town. What’s most worrisome about this “snatch” is that Alyshia’s mysterious abductors don’t seem all that interested in monetary gain; instead, their
goal appears to be psychological intimidation, with perhaps a hint of revenge
on the side. Just when Boxer thinks he might finally be getting a good sense of
the kidnappers, Alyshia suddenly falls into the clutches of two other,
less-experienced captors, who become targets not just for Boxer and assorted
law-enforcement types, but also for foreign criminals with much more dangerous
agendas than kidnapping.
Boxer is a tightly wound and captivating loner, a man whose professional ethics can be fluid (for instance, he compromises his goals here by engaging in an affair with Alyshia’s mother, and he isn’t above the occasional clandestine killing of “bad people”), and whose relationships with Danquah and the headstrong teenage daughter they share promise to undermine whatever semblance of a settled life he may think he’s achieved. This is a character well equipped to carry a series. Capital
Punishment’s sequel is due out in 2014.
(Left) Robert Wilson, photographed by Gabriel Pecot
Wilson and his wife of 27 years, Jane, moved to Portugal in 1989. Two years later, they purchased “a ruined farmhouse” in the south-central part of the country and went about restoring it. Nowadays, Wilson--who will celebrate his 56th birthday this coming Saturday, March 23--splits his year between Portugal and England. He generously carved a good few hours out of his work schedule to answer my questions about how he became a writer, his literary influences, his various characters, his thoughts on Spain and Portugal, and the future of his Boxer series. I could only use a small segment of that conversation in Kirkus; the larger part is presented below.
J. Kingston Pierce: Is it true that the first time you thought about becoming a writer was during your teenage years? Was there something in particular that led to you interest?
Robert Wilson: We were asked to compose a poem for a double English class--to write it in the first half and then read it out in the second. I was known as a sportsman, not a writer. So when I volunteered to be the first to read out my piece, which was a love poem, a coming-of-age poem, there was a lot of jeering from my
classmates until I started reading. The silence was immediate and profound and
continued for a minute after I’d finished, until the English teacher said: “That
was really very good.” It was the quality of that silence that made me want to
become a writer. It just took another 20 years to work out what to write.
JKP: After graduating from Oxford University, you took jobs with a shipping company and an advertising agency; later, you worked for somebody who built public works in Ghana, West Africa. How many other positions did you take before you realized that a career writing fiction was really the right fit for you? And why did it take so long for you to make that decision?
RW: Yes, I took a degree in English language and literature at Oxford. I got my first job through a friend at another college, who was studying Modern Greek and was working in Athens. His name is Paul Johnston and he also became a crime writer, and he also did a stint in shipping. Bizarre parallel lives. I ran an archeological tour company on the island of Crete for a year, during which time my father died, which had a big impact on my life. Before I left for Greece we’d just had our first proper
adult conversation in which he told me what he’d done in the war. He was a bomber
pilot flying missions from North Africa over Italy and the oil fields in
Romania. He’d joined when he was 18, trained in the USA, instructed for a year,
and then flew for three years at a time when the survival rate for bomber
pilots was very poor. He was visibly distressed when talking about it,
something that I’d never associated with him. He was always the great
raconteur, the life and soul of a party. It shook me to see him struggling to
relate his experiences and it drew me closer to him. So when he died before I
could get back to even speak to him on his deathbed, it left me bereft. This is
probably why one of the common themes in my books is “absent fathers.”
I decided to stay in the UK to be closer to my mother after
my father’s death. So I took the first job I could find in London with a
shipbroker. I knew nothing about shipping, but I learnt about it all through
working in the legal and demurrage department before graduating to become a
broker. After three years they wanted me to open a U.S. office in Houston, in
Texas, but I had already tired of the work by then and decided to go cycling
around Spain and Portugal instead--and that was the start of a lifelong love
affair not just with Iberia but with my wife, Jane. I returned from there to
work in an advertising agency where my sister was employed. They wanted to
start a video production company and knew nothing about it, so I started that
for them and wrote a sales training video for some ex-IBM execs who had moved
into that world. I remember sitting with the actors at the read-through and one
of them said: “Hey, this is different. This dialogue is actually good and there
are jokes.” The video business didn’t last, as bigger players moved in and I
became the managing director of the agency.
By this time I was married to Jane and we’d decided to go on
a big trip to Africa for a year. So I ran away again and drove a VW van through
the Sahara, around West Africa, and then across the mud holes of Zaire to
Kenya. We came back from that trip and worked to pay off our debts and then
realized that we needed to get out of London, which was when we moved to
Portugal.
We lived just outside Lisbon for a year, and I wrote travel
stories and started a couple of novels before going to Ghana to set up a sheanut-exporting
business. Sheanut grows wild in the northern part of those West African states.
Its butter is used as a substitute for cocoa butter in the making of chocolate.
I did a couple of six-month contracts in the following years, one in Accra,
Ghana, and the second in Cotonou, Benin, but I was traveling all over West
Africa and learning a lot about how those countries worked.
In between those two jobs, I went on holiday with some old
friends, one of whom was married to a screenwriter, who was writing some crime
novels at the time. He read my travel stories and thought they would make great
crime scenarios, and that was when I started writing my first two Bruce Medway
novels.
JKP: So you gave up plans to become a travel journalist?
RW: I had always assumed, after my travel experiences, that I would be a travel writer. However, no sooner had I decided that than the travel-writing genre collapsed. After an era, which had seen great writers such as Wilfred Thesiger, Eric Newby, and Redmond O’Hanlon, suddenly nobody was interested in travel writing and it died until it was revived in different form by Bill Bryson a decade later. I was
lucky to meet my screenwriting friend who pointed me in the direction of crime
by recommending the classics like Raymond Chandler and the more contemporary James Lee Burke and Elmore Leonard. Those writers were a revelation to me. I had been brought up on Agatha Christie, Alistair MacLean, and Hammond Innes and had given up on them when I was about 11. So to read writers that appealed to my adult sensibilities was very exciting. I had the scenarios and the characters and, after my African experiences, I had the perfect platform to develop a unique noir style, which I called Afrique Noir.
JKP: Your first four novels featured Bruce Medway, a “fixer” and investigator in West Africa. For people who haven’t read them (yet), how would you characterize those books? And why was Medway an ideal protagonist for those stories?
RW: Those African novels are written in the noir style, first-person singular, with the world seen through the eyes of Bruce Medway, an Englishman who’s crossed the desert on a travel adventure and ended up in West Africa trying to find a way to make a living. In the Sahara he was rescued at one point by a Berliner, called
Heike, who has become his girlfriend. She has found employment in an aid
agency, an NGO [non-governmental organization], while Bruce is toughing it out
with the lowlifes who are only ever an elbow away in any bar you’d care to
enter. The “hero,” Bruce, has a dangerous fascination with oddballs and
hoodlums and finds it easy and even, at times, enjoyable to get into trouble.
He gets corrective treatment from Heike, but also a Beninois detective called
Bagado, who is a man of unimpeachable moral probity. Bruce Medway, as well as
being morally ambiguous, was also a great vehicle for humor and the books are
powerfully descriptive of West Africa, which in some ways is not so far from
1940s California. They are most successful with people who’ve lived in Africa
and, interestingly, American readers who have a deep understanding and affinity
for noir.
JKP: Indeed, the Medway yarns are quite Chandleresque, making clear your affinity for the creator of Philip Marlowe.
RW: The books were definitely inspired by my reading of Chandler and Leonard, the two greatest exponents of classic and a more contemporary noir. Both of them are phenomenal writers, who have inspired many crime writers before me. I could
never find a way of developing a believable noir voice in an English setting,
possibly something to do with place names (Acacia Avenue in Canterbury?), so
the African scenario was crucial and it allowed me to develop my own voice
whilst paying homage to Chandler and Leonard.
JKP: My first experience with your writing came in 1999 with the publication of A Small Death in Lisbon, about the demise of a young girl in modern Portugal and Nazi machinations in the same country during World War II. That book went on to win the Crime Writers’ Association’s Gold Dagger Award. What motivated your move from the Medway series to this first standalone?
RW: I’d always assumed that people would be as fascinated by foreign travel as I was, and if they weren’t they would be spellbound by reading the experience of others through a well-written crime novel. That was not the case with my UK audience, who found the African setting and voice of the books too alien.
By then I’d been living in Portugal for about 10 years and the English have always had an affinity with the Portuguese. We have the longest-standing treaty in history (dating to 1386), and the English have always had a yearning for the sun-soaked beaches of the southern region of the Algarve. It seemed more likely that they would respond to something set in Portugal than they would to the African scenario--and especially the grittier side of Africa I’d been writing about. It was interesting to see Alexander McCall Smith some years later winning readers with his gentler books about life in Botswana.
JKP: Did you think, going into it, that Small Death might be your “break-out book”?
RW: No. It was an enormous amount of work. My publisher had given me a delivery date in the contract, but later admitted that if I didn’t finish it by September 1998 it would not get published until the year 2000. I had a year to research and write the book, which was a massive undertaking and it wiped me out. The last thing I was thinking through all this was whether it was going to be a “break-out” book. I just wanted to get the damn thing finished. When it came out, nobody thought it was going to be a break-out book either. HarperCollins were stunned
when it won the Gold Dagger. The managing director of the time said: “Who is
this guy?” There were no books available when I won the Dagger because
everybody had assumed that Val McDermid’s book, A Place of Execution, was going to win. What it did do was break me into the U.S. market and launch me into my European markets, where the book has always been successful.
JKP: Am I correct that part of the inspiration for Small Death
was a small guidebook you put together about south-central Portugal’s Alentejo region in the
mid-1990s?
RW: Doing the guidebook gave me an insight into the historical background and an idea of what the local people had endured under the [António]
Salazar regime. But what inspired me to have a look at this era was all the
journalism being written about Nazi gold at the time. I knew some of that gold
had ended up in Brazil, having come through Spain and Portugal, and I was
sniffing around that end of things when my wife came across some research about
Portugal’s gold reserves, which had gone up seven fold during World War II by
selling wolfram. We had
no idea what wolfram was. Some more reading told us that it was a mineral used
as an alloy for hardening steel to make tank armor and armor-piercing shells.
When the Nazis had invaded Russia they’d cut themselves off from the world’s
largest supplier of wolfram--China. The next biggest supplier closer to home
was Portugal. When I read that I knew I had the hook for my story.
JKP: Don’t you still reside part of each year in the Alentejo? Put your travel-writing hat back on for just a moment and tell me what makes that area so special.
RW: Yes, we still do half and half between England and the Alentejo. I’ve always loved writing in our farmhouse up in the hills in the rolling countryside a couple of hours east of Lisbon. The initial attraction was to the tranquility and the space. Traditionally it is a farming community where the old Roman latifundios, consisting
of farms with vast tracts of land, supplied Rome with wheat at the height of
their empire. Now it has become primarily sheep, beef cattle, and pig country,
although the Dutch have brought dairy cattle to the area in the last 20 years.
What drew me to the area was how much it reminded me of Africa. The heat and
the gently rolling terrain with pasture dotted with cork oaks made it
reminiscent of parts of the African savannah with its thorn trees. There is
also something biblical about it at times, with clusters of whitewashed
villages at the foot of hill forts surrounded by the verde gris of endless olive groves. The people are very accepting of foreigners, too, and it has the best cuisine in Portugal, with excellent slow-cooked lamb, superb marinated pork dishes, and a long tradition in chorizos and cured ham. There’s nothing much to do except walk, drink some of the most outstanding red wine in southern Europe, eat well and, of course, write.
JKP: You’ve now penned a couple of standalones--A Small Death in Lisbon and The Company of Strangers (2001). But you seem much more comfortable writing crime/thriller series. Is that the case?
RW: The standalones were standalones because they didn’t lend themselves to further development very easily. It would have been difficult to find as big a story for Zé Coelho to follow A Small Death in Lisbon, and there was nowhere else to go at the end of The Company of Strangers. The series books were conceived as series. Not that I knew every story before I put pen to paper, but rather I had the psychological arc of the main character mapped out in my mind. Having done four police procedurals set in Seville with Inspector Jefe Javier Falcón, I needed a new challenge and Charles Boxer, kidnap consultant and finder of
missing people, offered me a new way of investigating the psychological make up
of a more dangerous character. I like the series novels because you can go
deeper into character, not just of your protagonist, but also the supporting
cast as well.
JKP: 2003 brought the publication of The Blind Man of
Seville, introducing Inspector Jefe Javier Falcón. What were you hoping to
accomplish as a storyteller with that novel?
RW: The main aim was to write a psychological thriller with psychology in it, where the reader was as concerned about the inner state of the character as he was by the story. I wanted to write a crime novel that didn’t just deliver an investigation and a solution but also demonstrated how dependent our inner workings are on relationships and especially familial relationships. I knew from the beginning
where Javier Falcón was and where he was going to. I had always been frustrated
by series characters who never seemed to change and I determined that Javier
would be a different man by the end of Book Four. There are good reasons why
series detectives don’t change and that is because senior policemen tend to be
middle-aged men who are not inclined to change. That was why I gave Javier this
monumental psychological catastrophe to deal with in The Blind Man of Seville. It would be the only way in which a middle-aged
man would be forced to develop. In looking at Javier in depth I also intended
to show how important it is, not just as an individual, but also as a nation,
to face your past, remembering the terrible civil war that
Spain suffered in the 1930s. The rewards are great but the failure to [change]
results in perpetual denial and an inability to progress.
JKP: Do you have a particular fondness for Seville, or for Spain, in general? Is that why you set your four Falcón novels in and around there, rather than in Portugal?
RW: I loved Spain from the moment I arrived on a bicycle in 1984. The first time I sat down in a restaurant and started chatting with a waiter I knew this was a great place. Once you start looking at the incredible creativity of the Spanish over the ages you just can’t help but admire them. I think all aspiring writers, or even artists, should go to Barcelona and take a walk around the works of [Antoni] Gaudí and then reassess
their talent in that light. Spain is an amazing country and the Spanish are
continuing a long line in explosive creativity.
The reason I chose Seville was because of its most obvious
qualities. It is one of the most beautiful cities in Spain and the world. It is
recognized as such by everyone. It has a very powerful image. Tourists flock to
Seville not just because of its entrancing beauty, but also because of its
people, who seem to have cracked the problem of the human condition. They love
life. They love nothing better than to get out into the street, drink some
beers, eat some tapas, dance, sing and clap hands, and it’s not just every now
and then but all the time. This became the most powerful possible setting for
examining that wonderful Shakespearean theme and the bedrock of crime fiction:
appearance and reality. Anybody who has spent any time there will know that
just below the surface of Seville it’s no different to anywhere else. They have
the same social problems with domestic violence, drugs, and the related crime.
There’s homelessness, joblessness, racial unease just as you’d expect in any
big city. The perfect image belies a more uncomfortable reality. The reason I
live in Portugal is that I like the Portuguese character. I feel very
comfortable with them. They are more contemplative, less frenetic. The Spanish
think the Portuguese are depressed. I call them melancholic but with a particular
eye for the beauty that life has to offer.
JKP: In what recognizable ways must a work of fiction set in Spain differ from one set in Portugal?
RW: I’ve mentioned their character differences ... and these were demonstrated in their history, too. Despite similarities in their histories--both [countries] suffered lengthy occupation by the Moors between 711 and 1492, and even shared monarchs at various times--the Lusitanians, who look out towards the Atlantic, and the Iberians, who look both ways, to the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, couldn’t
be more different. They even had dictators at more or less the same time in the
20th century and it was in this dimension that their essential character showed
its difference. The way in which these two dictators gained power was an indicator.
(Right) Portugal’s António Salazar in Time, July 22, 1946
[Francisco]
Franco, an army officer, used force and the extreme violence of the Army of
Africa to bring the country under his control. There was a brutal civil war
(1936-39), with which Americans are very familiar because of Ernest Hemingway’s
work. The divisions of that civil war are still alive today. Every time a
ruling prime minister tries bringing about some kind of reconciliation,
normally by the uncovering of a mass grave on the outskirts of a village, he is
met with powerful resistance and it never happens.
Salazar, an economics professor at Coimbra University, was
given [the opportunity to run] Portugal, which in 1928 was in a terrible
economic state ... Gradually over time he consolidated power and built an
apparatus around him to maintain total control. He had an accident in 1968,
which incapacitated him, and in 1974 disgruntled elements of the army, the
Young Captains, who were unhappy fighting the colonial wars in Africa, staged a
coup. There was resistance from the State, the secret police, and senior army
officers, but through negotiation a bloody outcome was avoided. I think this is
the crucial difference: the Spanish have a tendency towards aggression, while
the Portuguese have an instinct for tolerance and compromise.
JKP: Acting the role of book critic for a moment, I have to say that I thought the first couple of Falcón novels were the most enthralling--in large part because they found your protagonist at his most troubled. Did you see any risk in allowing him firmer control over his life as the series progressed? Or did you, as his
creator, need to set his life back on a steadier course before you could let
loose of him as a character?
RW: Possibly this is the mistake I make as a writer, which is that I only ever consider the project when I’m writing my books and rarely the book market. As I said earlier, the one thing that was in place before I started the Falcón novels was the psychological development of the character. Falcón’s reward for facing the
difficult truth about his family and past is firmer control over himself. I’ve
always referred to him privately as “the hero of the inner life,” In the first
two books he has discovered this deep humanity in himself, but there is still
one dimension missing from The Hidden Assassins[2006], and that is his capacity to love again. Having taken responsibility for his involvement in the death of his mother, he finds there are obstacles he has to overcome in his love life. A Spanish film producer asked me what was the most important element of The Ignorance of Blood, the final book, and I told him that it was how Consuelo [Jiménez] and Javier find the way to reveal themselves to each other so that they can fall in love. He was surprised. He hadn’t expected that from a crime writer. He was possibly expecting an extraordinary plot twist and, yes, I did develop a tense situation in which Javier and Consuelo were able to do that, but it was provoked by integrity to the characters.
JKP: Your protagonists seem prone to angst, loneliness, and a sense of pointlessness. Have you found those characteristics among many law-enforcement types? And are they characteristics that you share?
RW: None of the law-enforcement types I have met have ever exhibited any of these characteristics. The real Inspector Jefe de Homocidios de Sevilla was a very
grounded man with firm ideas about his approach to crime. After our first
meeting in his office we always subsequently met in bars over beers. He was a family
man, career-minded, and definitely not operating in any way at a dramatic
level. I couldn’t have written a word about him. The only chink he showed me in
any of those meetings was that I realized he was a man who always had to be
right. But then you need that sort of self-confidence to lead a serious
investigation. I would also disagree with you about pointlessness. Javier is
only in danger of being overwhelmed by this in The Blind Man of Seville, and that is as a consequence of his failure to face up to his family horrors. Once he’s confronted them and come to terms with them and given himself the possibility of forming meaningful relationships, then the sense of pointlessness recedes.
Interestingly enough, I used to be a far happier person
before I started writing. This incessant dwelling on my characters’
difficulties has left me prone to suffering angst and of course the nature of
being a writer is to be lonely. It is something that can only be done alone.
You have no recourse to colleagues. Nobody can offer you advice or help. All
the problems you create are of your own making and only you can solve them. If
you’re looking to be a happy, integrated member of society, then maybe writing
is not the job to go for. So, in short, the fact that characters suffer from
angst, loneliness, and a sense of pointlessness is more a reflection of the
writer’s difficulties than the nature of law enforcement, which in my
experience attracts a very different type of individual.
JKP: Others have made comparisons between your Inspector Zé Coelho, from A Small Death in Lisbon, and Javier Falcón: both men long for their lost wives, they both discover that past relationships are quite different than they’d seemed, etc. Were you conscious of such similarities at the time of your writing?
RW: I disagree. They are very different characters. For a start, they are both products of their countries’ very different histories. It’s true that they both go through similar journeys of peeling back the layers in order to discover that, but then that is the nature of storytelling. Zé Coelho finds it difficult, as many widowers do, to move on from the loss of his wife. His story is about him
emerging from that acute state of loneliness. Javier Falcón has divorced Ines
because he is psychologically paralyzed and unable to love her. He only thinks he longs for her, but the truth is later revealed to him. His loneliness stems from his inability to face up to his past and a terrible sense of responsibility he feels for his part in the deaths of his mother and stepmother. Even on a superficial level they are different. Zé Coelho loves his food and drink and is even partial to the occasional spliff. He also has a daughter, which adds a different dimension to his
behavior. Javier Falcón only eats when he has to, has never been a drinker, and
is shocked at himself when he resorts to alcohol to suppress his psychological
angst. He never takes drugs. They are only similar in that they are unafraid to
examine that which lies beneath the surface, but that is the nature of being a
homicide detective.
JKP: Just as with the Medway books, you wrote four Falcón novels. Why did you stop there? And what did the Falcón books teach you, either about writing or yourself?
RW: I stopped there because I had achieved what I set out to do, to develop the complete psychological arc of a complex character who goes through a process of profound change. I had nothing more to add to him. I learnt a great deal about character development, about psychological motivations and probably a bit too much about the police procedural and Spanish justice system. I taught myself the history of Spain and realized that what I’d known about the country and its people up
to that moment was just a snapshot in time. To really understand a people and a
nation you have to look at their history, what they have suffered. I also
realized that I was revealing the process of a writer, how we set about
understanding character. In playing out the historical background and Falcón’s
analysis at the hands of his blind psychologist, I was showing the inner
workings of the writer’s trade. This is how to set about building character.
And I suppose it was understanding that which led me to my next challenge: How
could I set about revealing character through pure story with little or no recourse to history or psychology?
(Right) Falcón TV Trailer, 2012
JKP: I have to ask about Sky Atlantic’s Falcón TV series of last year: Were you pleased with the results? Had you been at all consulted on how you thought your books should be translated for the small screen?
RW: I was happy to a certain extent. I thought the films looked great. Seville was ravishing and the feel of the movies was very different, unlike any cop show I’d ever seen, which was right. The performances were generally very good. I had been concerned that Hayley Atwell was too young to play Consuelo, but she
really did a fantastic job on the part. My main difficulties came with the
screenwriting. The first problem being that there wasn’t enough time. The
stories were so compressed in order to fit into the 90 minutes available per
book that it was difficult for viewers to understand what was happening and
made it difficult to get really involved with the characters. Many people
couldn’t understand why Falcón was so tormented; he was in Seville, for God’s
sake, go and have a beer and a tapa and cheer up. I disliked the shorthand for
Falcón’s psychological problems, which was represented in the television series
by his drug-taking. That was too much of a cliché. I was vehemently against him
being made into a murderer, too. That was a total desecration of the character.
I was consulted on the screenplay but only up to the point when Sky took over. [Production company Mammoth Screen] were very good. They did everything in their power to maintain the integrity of the books, but it just wasn’t possible with the time and budgetary constraints, and with the demands from the major financier. Such
is life in the film business ... a compromise, which rarely works out.
JKP: And were you satisfied with Marton Csokas in the title role?
RW: I thought Marton certainly looked the part. He was not my idea of Falcón, but he persuaded me that he was. I thought he pulled off that rather difficult trick of being appealing whilst tortured by his inner life. There were times when he didn’t quite convince me that he was a homicide cop leading an investigation, sometimes the drama in his back story got the better of him and he didn’t stamp his authority on a situation, but on the whole I think he did a very good job.
JKP: Are there any plans to bring Falcon to America?
RW: My agent tells me there has still been no U.S. sale, so it will not be aired across the pond for the moment. I say ‘for the moment,’ because Marton is currently co-starring in a U.S. drama [DirectTV’s Rogue, set to premiere in April], which, if it’s a success, might make Falcón saleable in the U.S. market. I think the only DVD on Amazon UK is PAL format, so no good for you NTSC guys.
JKP: As you see it, how is the character of Charles Boxer, in Capital Punishment, similar to your previous series protagonists?
RW: There is a similarity with Bruce Medway in that Boxer has an interest and attraction to the dark side. He has, however, gone several strides further than Bruce in embracing it. He also has an association with an African detective who is firmly in the camp of the good, but in Boxer’s case Mercy [Danquah], his ex-partner, is not close enough to be able to influence his behavior. He’s
similar to Falcón in that his particular psychological flaw has developed as a
result of an absent father. In Boxer’s case, it was because his father was
wanted by the police for questioning in relation to the murder of his mother’s
business partner. Unlike Falcón, whose father died leaving the horror behind,
Boxer’s father had vanished leaving a terrible hole in the life of his, then, 7-year-old son.
JKP: All of your series leads are flawed in their own ways. Is Boxer more flawed than most, do you think?
RW: Boxer is more flawed in that he has taken some definite steps towards the dark side, but there are some complex issues around his reasons for being more decisive in engaging with it. He’s not a fool, nor is he mad. He knows what he is doing and he believes he has powerful motivations. Boxer and his father had been very close, whereas the relationship with his mother is distant. After his father
absconded, Boxer was sent away to boarding school from which he’d escaped twice
in two attempts to track down his father. The first time he got to Spain, the
second time to West Africa. He never did find his father, but he returned from
Ghana with Mercy, who he’d helped to run away from her disciplinarian father,
and she has become an important figure in his life. They have a daughter
together, Amy, but no longer live with each other. The teenage Amy has become a
big problem and this has meant that Boxer has left his salaried job, as a
kidnap consultant with one of the biggest private security companies in London,
and gone freelance. This move has had a psychological effect on him as he is no
longer in the company of like-minded colleagues who can provide a support
mechanism. The result is that Boxer’s dark side has gained a foothold in his
psyche, but he mitigates his behavior firstly by only “dealing with” bad guys,
and secondly by using the money he earns from the “after-sales service” he now
provides to finance a missing persons charity called LOST. The reader might
think that Boxer understands his motivations, but as the series develops,
questions arise in the readers’ mind. So he’s every bit as complex as Javier
Falcón, but his psychological arc is very different.
JKP: Boxer, like Javier Falcón, has a father whose absence from his life is palpable and motivating. What is it with you and missing/betraying fathers?
RW: A father is as important to his son in a powerful but quite different way as a mother is to her daughter. A good father can give valuable direction to a son in terms of how he “sees” people and in the kind of moral code he develops in order to deal with the world. My own father, for instance, was very firm about prejudice. He impressed upon me at a young age that I had no right to judge people, that it didn’t matter what people looked like, what politics they believed in, or where they came from, they should be treated as equal. It gave me a very strong platform from which to operate.
As I said earlier, I had that first adult conversation with
him and then he was gone, and it left me feeling particularly bereft, as if a
great chunk had been taken out of my rudder. In order to cope with it I went
into a state of denial, I tried not to exaggerate his importance to me. But
over the years his importance has crept up on me, and I think about him more
and more and admire him greatly. He was an air force officer and a sportsman
and he knew nothing about the world I went into. He had never been to
university and he was not particularly a reader. I told him I wanted to be a
writer and I knew it worried him, but he never told me to forget it. He just
told me to read the business pages of the newspaper, which I still do. I was
giving a talk at Evora University in Portugal a few years back, and I’d
prepared something about the experiences that made me into a writer and I
started talking about the loss of my father and caught myself off guard. Even 30
years after the event, I found myself broadsided by the emotion and had to
breathe it back down.
This is where I believe writing comes from. It doesn’t
emanate from research or writing classes or a fascination with people and
things. It emanates from an inner conflict, a great struggle to come to terms
with the incomprehensible.
JKP: You take some care in naming your protagonists. You once said, for instance, that you chose the name Falcón “because the intention of the books was to be all about ‘seeing.’” Why did you give your man in Capital Punishment the name Boxer?
RW: I’ve always liked the name for a start. It’s both noble and pugnacious. The reason I called him Boxer is very simple: he is engaged in that most tremendous of struggles ... with himself.
JKP:Capital Punishment is a wild ride, to be
sure, and I have no intention of giving away your story’s ending. But I will
say that you leave the door open to further exploration of Boxer’s troubled
parental relationship with Amy. Is that a large part of what the sequel to Capital Punishment will be about?
RW: Yes.
JKP: And do you have a title for this sequel?
RW: The title of the next book is the last line of Capital
Punishment.
JKP: How many sequels to Capital Punishment can you see yourself writing? Is this going to be another case of “four and out”?
RW: It could be, but it is by no means certain.
JKP: After penning three series, can you see yourself going back to writing standalones? Have you had any specific ideas for such books?
RW: I had an idea for a China book set both in the modern day and the 1930s. I did a lot of work on it, but my agent advised me not to write about China just yet, as the interest in the scenario was still extremely limited. I didn’t believe him. I thought the 21st century was all about China. I conducted research and found that he was right. I suspect people are afraid of China. The Chinese are an
unknown quantity and yet very powerful. There’s a tendency to put your head in
the sand under those circumstances. That was one of the reasons why there was
such a delay in the Boxer [novel] coming to market. The China book cost me a
year’s work.
JKP: There’s been an explosion of crime fiction over the last three decades. What do think have been the favorable as well as the negative results of that?
RW: The Americans and the British had the market to themselves for the 20th century, and perhaps a bit of complacency leaked in because the Scandinavians got their foot in the door and levered it wide open, and so far this century has been theirs. Henning Mankell started it and Stieg
Larsson has taken their dominance to new heights (he single-handedly
created a million crime readers in Spain with his Millenium Trilogy). They’ve
combined this with a complete cornering of the UK TV market with some excellent
series coming out of Denmark such as The
Killing, The
Bridge, and the outstanding Borgen,
which has made British TV product look pedestrian and mediocre.
I recently went to Denmark and was taken to a crime-writing
festival in an old prison in Horsens. That opened my eyes. I was one of three
non-Nordic writers (Karin Slaughter and Simon Beckett were the other two), and
the interest was without doubt focused on the local writers, of which there
were hundreds. All the queues to have their books signed were for those
Scandinavian authors. I was astonished. This can only be a good thing. There
are those who write this off as a fad but, having seen what I saw in Horsens,
this is a fad that’s going to run and run. What’s [the Scandinavians’] secret?
I think they went back to basics and concentrated on good storytelling and
strong character development in believable scenarios. It’s quite possible that
the Brits and the Americans lost their way by concentrating on the serial-killer
thriller, which gradually, over a couple of decades, slipped into the realms of
the ludicrous.
One of the difficulties in the English-speaking market is
the publishers’ accountants’ concentration on the bottom line: why don’t we
just market the successful writers and drop the ones that don’t sell? This
means that the talent pool dries up and the publisher ends up following the
market rather than leading it.
JKP: Finally, if you could have written any one or two books that don't already appear under your name, which would they be?
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