“Heads” and Other Tales

Chances are it’s escaped your attention until this moment, but I have devoted my new Kirkus Reviews column to an interview with Paul Johnston, the Scottish-born author of Heads or Hearts (Severn House), the sixth entry in his award-winning series starring near-future Edinburgh investigator Quint Dalrymple. The fact that Heads or Hearts exists is a real treat for Quint fans, most of whom probably thought Johnston had given up on this sardonic ex-cop after 2001’s House of Dust. That Heads or Hearts is also an excellent thriller portending the release of still more Quint tales is further good news.

It’s not necessary that you be familiar with the previous five entries in Johnston’s series before tackling Heads or Hearts; the author provides ample background to help newcomers understand the fictional world in which this story’s action takes place. But reading those earlier works--Body Politic (1997), The Bone Yard (1998), Water of Death (1999), The Blood Tree (2000), and The House of Dust--would still be worthwhile, if only because Johnston clearly had fun imagining what Edinburgh might be like as a corrupted utopia. On his Web site he provides a bit of background to this series, which starts off in the year 2020, the setting for Body Politic:

The United Kingdom (and much of Europe) has been torn apart by drugs wars in the early years of the twenty-first century. Gangs of criminals run wild in most areas, but Edinburgh is different. In the last election of 2003, the people vote in the Enlightenment Party, a small grouping of university professors that promises to get rid of crime. They succeed in doing so, forming themselves into a Council of City Guardians backed up by a powerful force of auxiliaries (policemen and bureaucrats)--their ideas came from Plato, that well-known thinker and proto-fascist.

The ordinary citizens, as the bulk of the population is termed, benefit from guaranteed work, housing, welfare, and lifelong education. They also attend a compulsory sex session every week. On the downside, the regime has banned cars, computers, smoking, television, private phones, and popular music--and your partner in the weekly sex session is chosen for you by the authorities. Of course, things are not what they seem in this supposedly benevolent totalitarian system. Far from doing away with crime, the guardians have only pushed it underground. They are too busy looking after the tourists who come to Edinburgh for the year-round festival, the gambling, the licensed brothels, and the marijuana clubs. And where there’s sex, drugs, and rock-’n’-roll, you can be sure that crime will raise its ugly head …

Enter our hero. Quintilian--Quint, for short--Dalrymple is a former senior policeman who was demoted after refusing to accept orders. At the start of the series he works as a laborer, handling missing-persons cases in his spare time. He is tolerated by the guardians because he takes some pressure off the overworked City Guard--and because he’s good at what he does. Quint is a maverick who gets up the regime’s collective nose, a lover of whisky and the blues. You can trace his roots back to [Philip] Marlowe and Sam Spade, to the Great Detective Sherlock Holmes, and to any hard-nosed cop you care to name (Bullitt, Popeye Doyle, whoever)--though he has a softer, more intellectual side to him.

With all of that in mind, here’s my brief synopsis from Kirkus of the plot offered in Johnston’s new novel:

As Heads or Hearts opens, the year is 2033. The guardians have loosened some restrictions: citizens can again listen to blues and rock music, watch previously banned movies and acquire “half-decent coffee.” There’s also a referendum in the works to reconstitute Scotland. That reunification might be endangered, however, by a rash of crimes beginning with the discovery of a human heart in the middle of a football stadium. When a headless corpse is later found close to another playing field, the guardians summon Quint’s help. Once more paired with his old police colleague, the violence-prone Davie Oliphant, Quint sets out to determine whether these grisly finds are linked to a rise in local gang activity and sports betting, black-market dealings that implicate the guardians themselves or perhaps the upcoming referendum.

If Quint is a multifaceted character, his creator seems hardly less so. As Johnston explained in this top-notch 2003 interview with January Magazine contributors Ali Karim and Simon Kernick, he studied ancient and modern Greek at Oxford University, worked in the shipping industry, did a turn as a newspaperman in Athens, Greece, and taught English before embarking on a career penning fiction. For years he divided his time between the UK and Greece, but is currently residing in London. He’s now 13 years into his second marriage, his wife a Greek civil servant (“that much maligned breed”) named Roula.

Although Johnston started his career as a novelist turning out Quint yarns and winning awards for those works, he has since branched out into two other well-known series--one starring Alexandhros “Alex” Mavros, a Scots-Greek private eye based in modern Athens, the other featuring Matt Wells, a crime writer turned P.I. In addition, he’s composed a police procedural under the nom de plume Sam Alexander and is planning to launch another pseudonymous series.

Being an enthusiastic and curious interviewer, I tend to ask authors many more questions than I have room to accommodate their answers in my Kirkus columns. I followed that same path in my recent e-mail exchange with Paul Johnston and wound up with plenty of extra, intriguing material, covering everything from his interest in science fiction and his thoughts on Greece’s financial bailout to his author-father’s help in getting him started as a storyteller. Consider what follows to be Part II of my interview with Johnston, Part I being contained in this week’s Kirkus column.


Oxford friends-turned-authors Robert Wilson (left) and Paul Johnston at CrimeFest 2014. (Photograph by Ali Karim.)

J. Kingston Pierce: Are you still dividing your time between homes in southern Scotland and southern Greece’s Peloponnese region?

Paul Johnston: No, I’ve recently moved back to the UK to set up base camp in advance of getting my kids out of Greece in the next few years--no future for them there. I’ve also disposed of the Scottish house and have the use of the family flat in Edinburgh from time to time. Not sure where I’ll end up yet as I’m looking for a university creative writing job. Which does not mean that I’ll stop writing fiction. It was useful to have two homes in the past. Often I’d write about Scotland when in Greece and vice versa--there was a degree of objectivity that was advantageous. My family--and my 5,000-plus books and 1,500 CDs--are still in Nafplio so I will be back …

JKP: It would be understandable to regard the Quint Dalrymple series as science fiction, since it is set in the future--or at least a dystopian future as you imagined it in the 1990s. But do you think of it in that way? And are you a big SF fan?

PJ: The House of Dust was actually shortlisted [in 2002] for the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel, a major SF award. The thing is, anything that’s set in the future, even a few years hence, is classified as SF, whether you like it or not. So the Quint novels were crossover crime/SF, not a great place to be in terms of marketing. I do read SF--more now than I did when I first came up with Enlightenment Edinburgh--and I love it because it’s full of ideas; much more than crime fiction. On the other hand, I’m no scientist, so hard SF is beyond me. I also have to say that the pulp origins of much SF, primarily American, led to poor writing. There are plenty of exceptions--[Philip K.] Dick and [Kurt] Vonnegut are favorites. I think Slaughterhouse-Five is one of the 20th century’s greatest novels. I also have a high regard for Nineteen Eighty-Four, even though it’s a problematic novel. The Time Machine and The Island of Doctor Moreau are also great--and unusually short for [H.G.] Wells. But my favorite SF novel of them all is my fellow Scot David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus [1920], an almost forgotten, highly original, hugely poetic and doom-laden masterpiece. Oh, and I love SF movies. Blade Runner and the Alien series (even the rickety ones) are hardy perennials.

JKP: A variety of things have changed in your imagined Edinburgh since the story told in Body Politic. For readers who haven’t yet discovered or at least haven’t been keeping up with this series, could you describe the city’s evolution over the period about which you have written so far, 2020-2033?

PJ: Generally the regime--protectors of an independent and supposedly benign totalitarian city-state--has veered between tight control of citizens’ lives and more liberal periods. At the beginning there was no TV, phones, smoking, popular music, cars, or photos (too egocentric); this was balanced by guaranteed work for life, housing, lifelong education, and a compulsory weekly sex session with the partner chosen by the Recreation Directorate (lovely…). Ten thousand auxiliaries enforce the City Regulations and make sure the tourists attending the year-round festival are treated like royalty. Many of the auxiliaries are police officers, known as guardswomen/-men. By 2033 the Council has become unable to maintain its hard-line stance and citizens are treated more humanely--they can wear their hair and facial hair how they like, start (small) businesses, listen to blues and rock music (for your information I’m currently listening to the magnificent American band WhiskeyDick’s “Fallen Heroes”) and watch previously banned movies. The result is an increase in crime and gang activity. So much for the original Council’s proud--if self-deceiving--boast that there was no crime in the city.

JKP: And in what respects has Quint himself changed over the course of these now half-dozen books?

PJ: I find that difficult to answer as I have very little objectivity. Last year, before writing Heads or Hearts, I reread the five earlier novels. I couldn’t remember a lot of the action or characters--and some of the jokes really grated. I’d like to think that Quint develops as a character. He has some pretty awful experiences so it would be weird if he didn’t. But deep down he remains the maverick with the big mouth that I first envisaged and people enjoyed reading about. He’s more in touch with his emotions now, I think, but still smells a rat every time the Council involves him in a case. Trust no one in authority is his--and my--motto.

JKP: Heads or Hearts has much to do with murders and cover-ups and Quint’s investigation, but while all of that is going on, there are votes scheduled to determine whether the Scottish city-states should begin gathering again into a larger country, for the benefit of all. This seems an intriguing turn, especially in light of last year’s Scottish independence referendum. You must’ve been writing Heads or Hearts in the midst of that political debate. Did it inspire or flavor your plot?

PJ: Yes, it’s my take on the referendum for Scottish independence. I was writing the book during the debate and after the result. [In Heads or Hearts] Edinburgh citizens have to decide if they want to rejoin Scotland, though the referendum doesn’t happen in the book. The plot revolves around certain factions’ opposing views on independence, so I used a lot of elements from the real debate. In a novel, though, everything comes down to character. My position in Heads or Hearts is that people get overly committed to single positions and are unable to empathize with those of others. Coalition is a way forward, but not in my Edinburgh. In any case, (some) Scottish politicians are as flawed and avaricious as those in other countries. Satire is still essential, which is how I present things in Heads or Hearts. The title refers, among other things, to whether you allow your emotions free rein or whether you apply reason to problems--very enlightenment. There’s too much emotion in public affairs and political parties need to become more intellectually coherent.

JKP: Did you support the 2014 independence referendum?

PJ: I was fine about there being a referendum, but I imagine your question is really directed at what result I wanted. I was hugely conflicted. Most Scottish writers--including myself--were pro-independence because the country is culturally very different from the rest of the UK, especially southern England. On the other hand, I spent time in business and I wasn’t--and still am not--convinced that the Scottish National Party’s economic plans are credible. It’s a rough world for small countries--see what’s happening to Greece, which has more than double Scotland’s population--and being part of a larger state may be more secure. More recently the Nationalists won a huge majority in the Westminster election, doing the Labour Party no favors at all. The advantage is that Scotland will get more devolved powers. That may well lead irrevocably to independence, especially if the rest of the UK votes to leave the European Union; Scots are in the main great Europeans. Economics aside--which is, of course, ridiculous--I would be happy with a Scottish passport. So, I’m on the fence …

JKP: Although the Quint yarns are set in the near future, you enrich them with Scottish history. Is history a prime interest of yours?

PJ: Yes! I studied British (not Scottish) history at school, but my main concern was ancient Greece and Rome. I’ve since educated myself about Scotland’s past, although it isn’t an easy task for an atheist. The church--or rather, different churches--played such a large part in Scottish history that I needed to suspend my disbelief, so to speak. There are many cracks about the deleterious effects of organized religion throughout the series. The Council runs an atheist regime, though churchgoing is permitted. As in modern Britain, no one much cares to go.

JKP: Following the publication of your fifth Quint Dalrymple novel, The House of Dust, you turned to composing two other series, one set in Greece and starring P.I. Alex Mavros, the other led by a crime writer named Matt Wells. What did those ventures teach you about storytelling that you didn’t know from working on the Quint books?

PJ: The Mavros series--starting with the original trilogy of A Deeper Shade of Blue (later republished as Crying Blue Murder), The Last Red Death, and The Golden Silence--was very educational in terms of the narrative. I went to third-person [viewpoint], thus distancing myself from the narrator, and I also cut from Mavros to other characters, making the texts more complex and multi-focal. Which I learned a lot from. That distancing was also important because, unlike the slightly futuristic Quint books, those novels dealt with a society I’d experienced, that is with “real” history (in quotation marks because everyone has their own reality). I needed a hands-off approach to maintain some objectivity and the third-person did that.

As for the Matt Wells quartet--The Death List (easily my most successful book commercially in the UK, U.S., and several other countries), The Soul Collector, Maps of Hell, and The Nameless Dead--it went back to the first-person, with crime novelist-turned-hard-nosed P.I. Wells talking the talk, but again there were sections from other characters’ points of view in the third-person. So I was learning how to combine multiple ways of presenting material, and I hope I became a more rounded writer as a result.

JKP: Are you also working on another Alex Mavros novel?

PJ: No. I’m taking a break from Mavros, mainly because I’m out of Greece now and, frankly, have been ground down by the country’s problems. I imagine he’ll be back, though.

JKP: Since you have brought up Greece and its current financial difficulties a couple of times now, let me ask what you think of the country’s recent bailout referendum and the eurozone’s subsequent deal giving Greece money in exchange for pension cuts and tax increases. Do you think the Greek people got as good a result as they could’ve expected?

PJ: It’s a nightmare, but one that’s been going on for five years now. Many extended families [in Greece] live off one salary or pension. Many people work without being paid in the hope that their companies will survive. My wife’s civil-service salary has gone down by 40 percent and will be cut further soon. The lenders clearly decided that Greece was going to be punished for its reluctance to apply the austerity measures that many renowned economists see as discredited and completely unrealistic. There’s bound to be debt relief, so it should happen sooner or later. The crisis is partly Greece’s fault--it should never have joined the eurozone--but foreign banks lent very irresponsibly. The irony is that Germany has destroyed the markets for its goods in southern Europe and will be in crisis itself in a decade. The Chinese and other tiger economies will be laughing all the way to their highly profitable banks.

JKP: I asked earlier about the future of the Mavros series. But what of novelist Matt Wells? You left him behind in 2011’s The Nameless Dead. Will he be resurrected sometime in your fiction?

PJ: Wells was always the wild card in my “oeuvre.” The first two books were very successful, but then the publisher stopped promoting them, so the best one--Maps of Hell, which is set in the U.S.--withered on the vine. The conceit of turning a mild crime writer into a freelance Black Ops specialist appealed to my self-mocking side. Never say never. Quint and Mavros both came back from the realm of Hades, and so might Matt.

JKP: Are there other books you’re working on that have nothing to do with any of these three series?

PJ: Last year Carnal Acts, a quasi-police procedural that I wrote under the pseudonym Sam Alexander, was published by Arcadia Books. I say quasi, because I was really taking the tropes of the subgenre and of my own writing past and playing with them as much as I could. The hero is a female, mixed-race cop who moves from London to northeast England, where she joins a police force that I invented in a town that I invented. I like cop movies and TV series--well, the offbeat ones--but I have absolutely no interest in obsessing on procedural issues. Joni Pax isn’t a drinker or one-night-stand type, though she does have issues. The book is really about people-trafficking and an Albanian sex slave, Suzana, who kills a pimp and escapes. I link this to the landed gentry, whose families made a fortune from the 18th-century slave trade. Big themes, as usual … At least the novel and the lengthy critique I wrote about it got me a Ph.D. in creative writing. “Always look for something different to do” is another of my mottoes. I’ve started yet another series, but I can’t talk about it yet, sorry.

JKP: Will that new series also be by “Sam Alexander”?

PJ: No, but it will be under another nom de plume, decided upon but as yet still secret.

JKP: Your father happens to be Ronald Johnston, the author of such popular thrillers as The Black Camels of Qashran, Paradise Smith, and Sea Story. Is he still with us, and how influential has he been in shaping your development as a fiction writer?

PJ: No, he died in 2009, aged 82. He was a great help and mentor, always the first reader of my drafts. He was very practical and gave me a lot of useful advice about publishing. He had no time for purple prose and believed firmly in page-turning stories. He would write comments on my printouts. The best I ever got was a single word for The Last Red Death: “Wow!” I treasure that. I’m not sure how much he influenced me. For my sins, I’m much more of an intellectual than he was (he trained and served as a master mariner). But he kept my feet on the ground and extolled the virtues of simple plots, strong characters and convincing settings. Two out of three ain’t bad …

JKP: I also want to inquire about your health. As I understand it, you’ve already survived two different cancers, but are not free of cancer concerns in the future. How is your health now? And how have your cancer scares affected your fiction?

PJ: Thanks for the concern. I’ve now had four different types of cancer, thanks to a malformed gene that makes me more vulnerable. Three of them required major surgery and two needed chemotherapy afterwards. The last was thankfully pretty minor. But the threat is always there. I’ve come to terms with it to some extent--it’s 12 years since the first one so, like Ripley’s alien, cancer seems to have been my companion for a long time. I’m OK now, which is something to drink several glasses to! My view of life has changed completely since pre-cancer. Dark thoughts and impulses prevail. I still don’t know what drove me to write a novel about the fate of the Greek Jews in Auschwitz (Alex Mavros’s sixth case, The Black Life). I still haven’t recovered from opening that Pandora’s Box. I’m on the trail of Hope, who supposedly was hiding under all the ills that flew out, but she’s proving elusive. Still, anyone who thinks crime writing’s easy isn’t taking it seriously enough.

JKP: Finally, I want to ask you a question I have posted to other authors in the past: If you could’ve written any book that doesn’t already carry your byline, what would it have been?

PJ: How long have you got? I know--Aristophanes’ The Birds. Bet no one else gave that answer …

Paul Johnston: Inconstant Star

I’ve followed British author Paul Johnston’s work ever since he debuted in 1997 with Body Politic--a book that went on to win the Crime Writers’ Association’s prestigious John Creasey Memorial Dagger for Best Debut Novel. Body Politic was the first in a series of highly acclaimed crime-fiction works, all featuring maverick former cop-turned-private eye Quintilian Dalrymple, and all set in a near-future, low-tech, and crime-averse Edinburgh, Scotland. (The other four installments were The Bone Yard [1998], Water of Death [1999], The Blood Tree [2000], and The House of Dust [2001]). I remain quite fond of that quintet of tales, with their amusing insights into human nature and their dystopian elements. Johnston (shown at left) describes the series’ set-up this way:

The United Kingdom (and much of Europe) has been torn apart by drugs wars in the early years of the twenty-first century. Gangs of criminals run wild in most areas, but Edinburgh is different. In the last election of 2003, the people vote in the Enlightenment Party, a small grouping of university professors that promises to get rid of crime. They succeed in doing so, forming themselves into a Council of City Guardians backed up by a powerful force of auxiliaries (policemen and bureaucrats)--their ideas came from Plato, that well-known thinker and proto-fascist. The ordinary citizens, as the bulk of the population is termed, benefit from guaranteed work, housing, welfare and lifelong education. They also attend a compulsory sex session every week. On the downside, the regime has banned cars, computers, smoking, television, private phones and popular music--and your partner in the weekly sex session is chosen for you by the authorities. Of course, things are not what they seem in this supposedly benevolent totalitarian system. Far from doing away with crime, the guardians have only pushed it underground. They are too busy looking after the tourists who come to Edinburgh for the year-round festival, the gambling, the licensed brothels and the marijuana clubs. And where there’s sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll, you can be sure that crime will raise its ugly head ...

Enter our hero. Quintilian--Quint, for short--Dalrymple is a former senior policeman who was demoted after refusing to accept orders. At the start of the series he works as a laborer, handling missing-persons cases in his spare time. He is tolerated by the guardians because he takes some pressure off the overworked City Guard--and because he’s good at what he does. Quint is a maverick who gets up the regime’s collective nose, a lover of whisky and the blues. You can trace his roots back to [Philip] Marlowe and Sam Spade, to the Great Detective Sherlock Holmes, and to any hard-nosed cop you care to name (Bullitt, Popeye Doyle, whoever)--though he has a softer, more intellectual side to him.

Then, in 2002, Johnston launched a new, modern-day series, this one set in Greece (to which the author himself had by then moved) and starring a private eye named Alex Mavros. The character’s surname is an in-joke, since “mavros” is Greek for “black” or “noir.” But the books are serious, and eminently readable. There are three of them so far: 2002’s A Deeper Shade of Blue (recently retitled Crying Blue Murder), 2003’s Sherlock Award-winning The Last Red Death, and 2004’s The Golden Silence (2004). Crime novelist Simon Kernick and I interviewed Johnston back in 2002, and he talked at length about using the Greek backdrop in his Mavros adventures:

I think [location is] part of the whole make-up of your writing, and you can’t separate these segments: character, setting and plot. They are all organically linked. But I’ve always had a particularly strong feeling for landscape. I think that, part of the reason why I’ve been involved with Greece is that it’s such a beautiful, but a hard landscape--very unforgiving, even more so than Scotland, where the hills are soft and covered in heather. In Greece, it’s a killer landscape. So it’s something that I’ve always been interested in. In fact, I did some academic work when I was in Oxford on the works of D.H. Lawrence, which touched upon the importance of landscape in fiction writing, as Lawrence wrote with one eye on his location at all times.

I also feel that landscape is something that is not always given enough attention in general fiction, while one of the wonderful things about crime fiction is that landscape/location is highly important in this genre. ... I think also that landscape can often act as a character, as landscapes have been affected by human beings in their shaping, mining, building; or, alternatively, [the landscapes] may not have been affected but can still potentially impact the lives of the humans around them. Like if you’re in a mountainous landscape, there are certain dangers associated with that, so you can’t but help bring that into the story.

But still, Johnston wasn’t satisfied. In 2007 he started yet a third series, this one hyper-violent and centered around a crime writer named Matt Wells, who is originally based in London, but eventually relocates to America. The first Wells thriller was The Death List (2007), followed by The Soul Collector (2008), Maps of Hell (2009), and his latest, The Nameless Dead--a novel I tore through. Reviewing The Nameless Dead, I wrote in the e-zine Shots:

Partway through the book, I swore I smelt cordite as I whipped through the pages, as it has no let-up in the action. There are myriad twists, with an interesting insight into the banality of the deranged. As Wells and the FBI search for Hoffmann, we get philosophical insights into the history of evil with mentions of the philosophers, the artists who captured the context and workings of Hell ...

Despite the violent and action-orientated trappings of The Nameless Dead’s plot, there is an existentialist air to the proceedings that provokes thought and introspection. I would also watch out for Wells’ improvisation in a violently amusing final act. In fact Johnston’s sense of humor peppers the darkness of the narrative, making Wells’ journey bearable in a world filled with hate and evil. Highly recommended, but a warning to the faint of heart: Matt Wells’ world is a dark place.

After running into Paul Johnston at Bristol, England’s CrimeFest in May, I cornered him in a bar and recorded a short interview for The Rap Sheet. During our exchange, we talked about The Nameless Dead’s backdrop, his fondness for paranoiac 1970s conspiracy thrillers, his recent brush with the big “C,” his interest in confronting the existential questions about life and death, and why he’s back now penning a fifth Alex Mavros detective novel set in today’s troubled Greece.

Ali Karim: There are plenty of plot strands in the fourth and latest Matt Wells novel, The Nameless Dead, that can be traced back to the previous books. Had you planned this series well in advance?

Paul Johnston: Absolutely not. I wrote The Death List in a fit of extreme anger about the behavior of my former agent and publishers, with no contract or advance. When it was picked up for publication, I decided to go on in self-reflexive fashion, although very few people have noticed this. The books are really exercises in genre-questioning and reader-challenging. For a start, Wells is a crime novelist. Would you believe anything he says? So, he’s the classic potentially less-than-reliable narrator. The Soul Collector was an attempt to jam as many genre tropes in as possible--crime novelists as murder victims (and murderer), gang warfare, Satanism, aristocrats as baddies, sibling rivalry, a serial killer also as a professional assassin. Oh yes, and Agatha Christie-style crossword clues. I like ideas and think that there aren’t enough of them in the average crime novel.

AK: I have found the Matt Wells books to be the most violent and disturbing of your works, when compared with the more cerebral Quint Dalrymple novels or the later Alex Mavros series. However, the Wells stories are also filled with dark humor. Would you care to comment on the links between noir and humor?

PJ: Well, it’s a pretty obvious one, from cops’ gallows humor to Chandler-esque one-liners. My take on humor is that it’s much more important to our lives than we think, especially in times of difficulty (which most crime novel protagonists are now undergoing). I’d even go as far as to say that humor fulfils some of the functions that religion, especially rituals, did in the past--catharsis, redemption, alternative takes on the human condition. That doesn’t mean feeble jokes in the writing, rather it’s a philosophical underpinning--that life is so shit, that we are nothing if we can’t laugh at it. In that respect, humor is (a) very serious and (b) heroic.

AK: How did the plots of Maps of Hell and The Nameless Dead distill in your mind, vis-à-vis Nazi occultists and their plan to make Matt Wells and his lover-turned-wife, Detective Chief Inspector Karen Oaten, into “Manchurian candidates”?

PJ: Er, by reading [Richard Condon’s 1959 novel] The Manchurian Candidate (along with The Bourne Identity--boy, [Robert] Ludlum’s prose style is glutinous) and pushing those ideas to the extreme. What really attracted me to the situation Wells finds himself in at the beginning of Maps of Hell--no reliable memories, not even of who he is; locked up, abused, forced to undergo a fake firing squad--was the idea of him having to find himself: in effect, to reinvent himself from scratch. Beyond that, he’s against a deadline, as he’s being framed for killings, so the tension gets ratcheted up even more. I love reading and writing pacy fiction. There isn’t enough of it. By the way, although both film versions of The Manchurian Candidate are interesting, the novel is something else--amazingly sexually frank for its time (mother-son incest, anyone?), and a brilliant political satire. Predictably, it’s only available from a small press, at least in the UK.

AK: Have you also watched other 1970s political paranoia movies, or read the books on which they were based: Winter Kills, Three Days of the Condor, The Parallax View, and All the President’s Men?

PJ: Oh yes. Except Winter Kills, which has escaped me (the book, too). The last three were all classic ’70s paranoia thrillers, and that was the time when I grew up as a cinephile. They’re all brilliant and daring--and, of course, few movies of that sort are made these days, at least by major studios. Still, we don’t need them, given that the global financial/political system is an open conspiracy now, and so is not attractive to creative types. Hang on--that means we need them even more!

AK: The plot of The Nameless Dead, like all of your work, is complex and convoluted, with many twists and a very wide array of characters (some of whom boast multiple identities), so I assume you are a detailed plotter. Is that right?

PJ: I fall somewhere in the middle. I do have an outline--for Maps of Hell and The Nameless Dead, they were more involved than I would normally do as that’s what my then-editor wanted. But I tend to go off-message whenever I can--not deliberately, but because that’s how the story develops.

AK: You refer in your Wells books to artists such as [Pieter] Bruegel, [Hieronymus] Bosch, and [Hans] Memling, as well as many philosophers. So how much research did you do into the ideological world that your author protagonist confronts?

PJ: A lot, but most of it was unnecessary. I’m an academic manqué (whence the Ph.D. in creative writing that I’ve been doing for years) and tend to do far too much research. There’s an argument that the research gets into the text in some indirect way, as if by osmosis. I think that would apply more to my overtly political novels than the Wells books. The bottom line with novelists is “make it up.” I certainly had fun inventing the Antichurch of Lucifer Triumphant (donations gratefully received). My basic feeling, first made clear in the Quint novels, is that everything in life is to do with power structures--family, friendship, school, university, workplace, government, etc. The ways we are encouraged to think about death (particularly by organized religion)--involving redemption, eternal life, paradise, etc.--all contribute to highly unequal power structures. Crime novels often take this on board without questioning it. I think that alternative approaches to how we think about and handle death (and serious injury and/or illness) are essential if we are to live full, in every sense of the word, lives.

AK: And the authenticity of the American backdrop?

PJ: I’ve been to the vast majority of the places I write about. For the rest, there’s plenty of info on Websites and in guidebooks. If in doubt, make it up ... I had the good fortune of having an American editor, so a lot of basic stuff was sorted out by him, especially as regards American English expressions, etc.

AK: I know you have had some health concerns. So I’m delighted to hear that you’ve overcome those. And I presumed that one of the reasons the Matt Wells books were so violent and filled with anger was related to that difficult period you traversed. Am I correct?

PJ: Health nightmares would be more accurate: two different cancers, which turned out to be linked by a faulty gene, which I may have passed on to my kids and means that I have a lifetime of intrusive tests ahead of me (better than being dead, of course--marginally). The anger is doubtless at least in part related to that. I have a different take on the human body, post-cancer, and to be honest not a particularly uplifting one: We are just lumps of meat, though I don’t go the whole hog, so to speak, and think that our minds and/or souls are run by our nerve synapses, or whatever. I have a different take on death as well, but that would take a very long time to go into. It’s in the weave of both Maps of Hell and The Nameless Dead. The latter, in which Wells has to come to terms with the deaths of people he cares very much about, is a kind of meditation on death in its many guises and tries to raise some major existential questions under the surface. How far should revenge be taken? Are killers different from other people and thus deserving of different deaths? What is hell and where is it? In the underdeveloped southern states of America? In Washington, D.C.? In Boston? Or in an underground training center modeled on the Inferno and run by a private army, that just happens to be owned by a minister who believes in the Rapture?

AK: The ending of The Nameless Dead gives you something of a fork in the road. So, will Wells return, or are you taking a break from his adventures? I heard on the grapevine that you’re busy penning another Greece-based Alex Mavros thriller.

PJ: I’ve nearly finished the fourth Mavros novel, The Silver Stain, which will be out in January 2012. Never say never, as regards series characters. I’m definitely not doing any more Wells in the immediate future, but might reanimate Quint Dalrymple.

AK: Are you still alternating residences between Greece and the UK? And can you tell us what it is like to be in Greece now, given all its economic austerity, civil disorder, and Euro crisis of the moment?

PJ: I spend more time in Greece--thankfully, no longer in Athens--than I used to, though I’m still a UK/Scottish resident, technically. Our little seaside town, Nafplio (for which spell check suggests “Nipple,” instead), hasn’t had riots or anything of that sort, though people are definitely beginning to feel the squeeze. My wife’s civil -service salary has been slashed by nearly 30 percent, and we’re waiting for more cuts and price rises. Personally, I think the leaders of Europe know perfectly well that Greece will, in effect, default and are just papering over the cracks in the Euro. What they call the “scissors” here--the gap between rich and poor--will cause enormous social unrest, a large increase in crime, and a huge amount of unhappiness. Unchecked global capitalism has a worm of corruption in it and tends towards entropy. We live in worrying times.

AK: Are the Greeks a nation of readers? And do you read Greek or any other languages?

PJ: The Greeks read a lot of newspapers, but only the upper middle-classes have the time to read books, in general. I read Greek (and have a couple of degrees in the language and literature), but I couldn’t say I see much good stuff around, either prose or poetry, at this juncture. Still, one can always fall back on the greatest poet and thinker of them all, Aristophanes.

AK: It’s good seeing you here at CrimeFest. What all have you been up to during your visit to Bristol?

PJ: Er, I can’t really remember. Wasn’t there a bar? It’s always great to catch up with fellow writers and with fans, plus to meet new ones. I’ve done a couple of panels, came second in the pub quiz ...

AK: You also won the CrimeFest “Criminal Mastermind” challenge. Can you tell us why you chose Sherlock Holmes as your “specialist topic”? And to what do you attribute the enduring appeal of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Victorian sleuths, Holmes and Dr. John Watson?

PJ: I chose dear old Holmes because I grew up with the stories and actually regard them as under-rated works critically. Conan Doyle was a much more complex man than he’s often given credit for, and this is visible if you scratch beneath the surface of the stories--Holmes is a paradox: a dope-head and a paragon of the establishment; a musician and a scientist; a cold fish but clearly deeply “in friendship” with Watson. There are also a lot of contradictions--the roles of women, opium dens, dysfunctional families, etc. The [Holmes stories] are actually great and challenging literature if you dig far enough. On the other hand, two of the novels--you know which ones--are structurally unbalanced, while one other is actually a novella and, The Hound of the Baskervilles, though great fun, is all over the place technically. The man was a short-story writer of genius, but no novelist. No matter. I still love him.

AK: I heard that you were considering penning an “overt” science-fiction novel, the Quint Dalrymple books having been more futuristic than hard SF. What’s the truth behind that?

PJ: I’ve been thinking about doing an SF book for years--largely because SF is full of ideas, as mentioned above. I might still do it, but the science side of it is beyond me. Dystopias are my limit, and there’s plenty of material for those in the current economic climate.

AK: You are a bit of a film buff. So what films you have enjoyed lately?

PJ: With small kids, I rarely get to the cinema. I recently saw Duncan Jones’s Source Code, starring Jake Gyllenhall and Vera Farmiga, and thought it was well done. Thor, on the other hand, was embarrassingly awful (I won’t reveal here which top-ten crime writer talked me into going to see it).

AK: And what books have passed over your reading table recently that you’ve especially enjoyed?

PJ: I’ve been reading a lot of ghost stories recently, which might give you a hint of what I’m thinking about doing--or might not. The problem is, I just don’t get scared by them. Michelle Paver’s Dark Matter is a beautifully written account of the Arctic winter, but the supernatural aspect of it I thought very weak. Ditto the ghostly stuff in Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger. Even Susan Hill’s work doesn’t chill me, while Kingsley Amis’ The Green Man has one of the nastiest protagonists in all literature--you can see where his son got that aspect of his writing from--but isn’t very scary. It may be that sustaining a ghost story to novel length is technically impossible. The best crime novel I’ve read recently is Malcolm Pryce’s Don’t Cry for Me, Aberystwyth, which is brilliantly funny and bursting with bonkers ideas. I liked Philip Kerr’s Field Gray too, but it’s less of a novel than a large amount of back-story being filled in. Great if you’ve read all the previous [Bernie] Gunther books.

AK: What are your plans after completing the fourth Alex Mavros novel?

PJ: A “mystery” mystery project, so to speak, and then Mavros #5, which I’ll be starting in January (when The Silver Stain will be out in hardback). I also have my World War I Gallipoli novel to do for my Ph.D. Some deity (Chronos?), please give me more hours in the day ...

The Devil Made Him Do It

It’s been a rather long while since we last heard from Scottish thriller writer Paul Johnston. Which made me rather irritable, as I loved his Quintilian Dalrymple novels, set in a futuristic Edinburgh, as well as his Alex Mavros books, set in modern Greece. But then, pretty much out of nowhere, comes The Death List, Johnston’s rip-roaring new serial-killer opus that takes place in contemporary London. This novel (the first installment of a third series) is set to be released by Mira Books in the UK in June, and then in the States a month later. Let me warn you, though: The Death List is a brutal and disturbing, but nonetheless witty and literate tale.

The plot builds around Matt Wells, a struggling crime writer, struggling father, and generally struggling man in a world that seems to have conspired against him. Add to that base an obsessive and deranged fan who’s stalking Wells, and you have all of the ingredients for a tense thriller. Evidently, this unhinged fan is a budding serial murderer who calls himself the White Devil, and who ensnares the hapless Wells in a deadly cat-and-mouse game that leaves a trail of torture and murder all over the historic British capital--many of the crimes based on scenes in Wells’ fiction. At first, the White Devil punishes people who did him harm during his traumatic childhood: his priest, a teacher, and a school bully. But when the killer begins targeting people from Wells’ world, the police begin to take greater notice. It’s clear that Wells is being set up, given the appearance of being a murderer himself. Also apparent is that the White Devil knows in advance every move Wells makes, adding to the latter’s frustration.

Johnston’s increasingly angry protagonist sends many of his loved ones--his daughter, his ex-wife, his mother, and his lover--into hiding, and simultaneously calls forth some of his old rugby friends to help him fight back against the White Devil. Using high-tech methods as well as brute force, Wells & Company go hunting for the hunter. Meanwhile, in the background, a contingent of Special Air Service (SAS) troopers roam London’s back alleys, searching for answers from people familiar with the White Devil. And as both the good guys and the baddies are dispatched with a dash of the Grand Guignol, the stakes in this chase are dramatically heightened.

So pleased was I to find a new Johnston novel on my shelves, that I tracked down the author as he came through London recently to learn more about what he’s been up to since the publication of his last novel, The Golden Silence, in 2004.

Ali Karim: Been a while, Paul, and I hear you’ve not been well.

Paul Johnston: Yeah, I was hit by cancer over four years ago. I had an operation and then four months of chemotherapy. It’s taken me more time than I initially imagined to get back to writing.

AK: So glad to know that you’re better.

PJ: Many thanks. Most people in the crime-writing and -reading world have been fantastically supportive. It really has helped. As have the facts that I married a wonderful Greek woman and became the father of our beautiful daughter, Maggie, within the space of two weeks, a year and a half ago.

AK: So should I assume, by the fact that you’ve moved on to a new protagonist, that you’re done with Mavros and Quint?

PJ: Never say never, as James Bond would have said. Body Politic [1997], the first Quint novel, has recently been optioned for a film, so the series might get a kick-start from that (if it ever makes it to the shooting stage). I’m still interested in most things Greek (although the social inequalities and the revolting corruption get me down), so Mavros might still find his missing brother, Andonis.

AK: The Death List is a very exciting book. Can you tell me a little about its genesis?

PJ: It was written quickly and revised at leisure. I have what might seem to be a facile belief that page-turning books should be written at speed. The genesis of [The Death List] was my own difficult situation after cancer. For various reasons, I parted company with both my publisher and my agent. I was also going through a divorce. More important, though, was the idea of putting a crime writer in situations that normally only occur in his fiction. What would he, or anyone, do if a child was under threat? How far would he go to protect his daughter?

AK: This new novel just exudes anger. In fact it bristles with it, as well as with the need for retribution and revenge.

PJ: I guess the anger comes from the various personal situations I mentioned. As for revenge, I’ve toyed with it as a motive in previous novels, but never as the main theme. The desire for revenge seems to me to be a salient feature of human beings--animals don’t do revenge, whatever Herman Melville and Peter Benchley might think. It’s also an urge that is rarely satisfied--we all want to kill our boss at some stage, but we sublimate that emotion and abide by the rules of society. Well, what do you do if you come up against an antagonist who doesn’t care about those rules? It’s a big question and one that was paramount during the last century, given that Hitler and Stalin didn’t exactly pay much attention to the rule of (normal) law.

AK: So I assume Matt Wells will continue as a character in your fiction?

PJ: Yes, I’m writing the sequel. The provisional title is The Collector of Souls.

AK: So what will Wells be up to next?

PJ: There’s a threat left over from The Death List, but he also comes up against a group of Satanists and a killer with very dubious tastes in music.

AK: Were you disturbed at all by the level of violence that peppers this work?

PJ: Ah, ye olde violence question. I suppose The Death List lacks the political dimension that all my earlier books could use as justification for the large numbers of dead people. This is a more personal book. I suppose I let my emotions go, and look what happened. ... More seriously, the modern reader is deadened by the nightly visions of death from Iraq and elsewhere on the news. Crime writers need to up the stakes just to grab readers’ attention. So the answer to your question is a qualified yes, I guess. But disturbance is an essential part of crime writing, isn’t it?

AK: Are you interested in Grand Guignol?

PJ: If you mean the 19th-century French theatrical mode, no. But I’ve been a devoted viewer of trashy horror movies since I was a wee boy. I was looking at Body Politic (published exactly 10 years ago) recently and I saw that I’d used the phrase “the poetry of violence.” (I can hear my friend John Connolly saying “pretentious twat,” even as we talk.) There is something aesthetically interesting about violence, which the Jacobean revenge tragedians tapped into in a big way; as did such disparate talents as Homer, [Sam] Peckinpah (I always wanted to mention those two in the same breath), most major painters, and, of course, William “Titus Andronicus” Shakespeare.

AK: Despite your recent illness, your sense of humor seems to be intact, and your books contain large doses of it.

PJ: Where would we be without humor? Interestingly, my brush with death seems to have heightened my essentially comedic view of life and d-- (no, I don’t want to mention it twice in the same sentence). Of course, humor’s a very relative thing. What I would say is that humor and revenge are closely linked. Given the vileness of many people’s lives (I’m thinking of Afghanistan, most of Africa, and the poor in Western countries), I find it amazing that they can face life. A sense of humor really does seem to help. Anyway, what else are you going to do when confronted with the Grim Reaper? After spitting in his face, you laugh ...

AK: I see you’ve switched publishers. So tell me about Mira Books.

PJ: I have to tell you that I had become very cynical about publishers, not least because my previous outfits in both the UK and the U.S. were about as good at selling my books as George Bush is at spelling. But [the folks at] Mira in the UK, U.S., and all over the world are a complete revelation. They are endlessly enthusiastic, capable, and inventive. I recently spent a week doing various activities they had organized in London, and it was the most successful and enjoyable time I’ve ever had in the business. (No, they’re not making me say this.)

AK: I’ve heard its whispered about that you are considering writing a book in a different genre under a pen name. Is that true?

PJ: Yeah, I thought I’d try a legal thriller under the name “Scott Grisham.” Wait a minute, where did you hear that? It’s true that I’ve recently been extending my reading into genres that I avoided in the past. And I would like to write in some of them, but it’s too early to say which yet.

AK: So, are you still living in Greece?

PJ: I’m based in Scotland, but I do spend a lot of time in Greece. My wife, Roula, is a civil servant there. I always spend the summer in the UK, not least because I do a slew of chairing events at the Edinburgh International Book Festival--the biggest and best in the world. People should come. There are plenty of crime writers every year, not all of them Scottish and called Ian.

AK: Last question: What have you been reading recently?

PJ: Oh, very cunning, Ali. You’ve found a way to get me to disclose the genres I might move into. All right, fair enough. I’ve been reading Philip K. Dick, Gene Wolfe, Philip Kerr, and David Gemmell. Plus a lot of history and David Thomson’s fantastic New Biographical Dictionary of Film. Oh, and Aristophanes--for the jokes.

Paul Johnston will appear this coming July at the Harrogate Crime-Writing Festival. Click here for more details.