and another thing...

THE PUBLICITY TOUR

2010-02-07T11:15:00.001-08:00

Sunday

Off to the airport for a publicity trip to Barcelona. I know, I know: tough old station. Perhaps to atone for this failure to suffer more for my art, I've been trying to learn Spanish by using Michel Thomas language CDs. I've only managed to get through four hours of the initial eight-hour foundation course, though, so I'm a little limited in what I can say, but it's the principle of the thing. Each time I go to a foreign country to promote the books, I try to learn a little of the language, or just enough to be polite. There's nothing ruder than arriving in a foreign country and expecting the locals to understand you if you just. Talk. Very. Slowly. In. English. And. Occasionally. SPEAK VERY LOUDLY.
I'm also one of those people who like to get to the airport with plenty of time to spare for my flight. Unfortunately, Aer Lingus has decided to delay the flight by an hour and a half, so I have a little more time to spare than I might like. Still, it gives me a few precious extra minutes with Michel, and I can now differentiate -ar verbs from -er and -ir verbs. I am, though, still living entirely in the present tense, which might be useful philosophically, but rather leaves one yearning when it comes to elements of discourse.
When we eventually board our flight, some two hours behind schedule, the pilot alludes darkly to 'incidents in Geneva', which sounds a bit like the title of a Len Deighton novel, and suggests a far more interesting explanation for the delay than the reality might provide. The result is that I check into my hotel close to midnight, not having eaten since breakfast. Using my newfound Michel Thomas-derived language skills, I inform the hotel receptionist that "I want to eat something now", which, linguistically speaking, is the equivalent of banging a spoon on the desk and pointing at my mouth. Still, he gets the picture and, rather sweetly, insists upon giving me directions to various restaurants in slow Spanish, only some of which I understand. He doesn't know the way to Velodromo, a classic tapas bar supposedly nearby, which is a bit unfortunate as I want to go there, but using my map and my Tontoesque sense of direction, aided by gnawing hunger and a desperate desire for red wine, I find it, albeit after heading off in the opposite direction for a time, although the upside is that I find a street that I recall from my last trip here half a decade ago, so I now have my bearings. No English menu at Velodromo, but I can remember enough Spanish to ask for Iberian ham, some toast, patatas bravas, and the crucial glass of vinho tinto. Red wine is my friend. I read my book, and am happy.

MONDAY
My Spanish publishers had given me two options: I could either get up at 4AM to catch a flight to Barcelona today, or I could leave on Sunday and have Monday to myself. Not being insane - or, indeed, much of a morning person at the best of times - I now have a day in Barcelona to myself. I decide to do some things that I didn't get to do on my last trip, so the first half of the day is devoted to the architect Gaudi. It was summer when I was last in Barcelona, and the queue to visit La Pedrera, the apartment block that he designed, stretched for hours. Today, there is no queue, so I get to wander around the terrace and the wonderful attic, while feeling grateful that I never had to live in the apartment, which looks like somewhere my Gran would have been happy. From there, it's on to his playful Park Guell, where I have the obligatory coffee (in a city of coffee shops, one rather ends up feeling like a caffeine-fuelled Pavlov's dog) and read my book for a while, then take the Metro to the Barri Gotic. I had planned to return to the Picasso Museum but, like most museums, it's closed on Mondays, so I pay a second visit to the city's main cathedral and take another look at St Eulalia's crypt, which is decorated with scenes of her martyrdom. St Eulalia was, apparently, torn apart with hooks, and then set on fire. Upon her death, a white dove was reputed to have flown from her mouth and ascended to heaven. Nasty business, martyrdom, regardless of the involvement of doves.
The rest of the afternoon is spent drinking outrageously cheap red wine (Two Euro a glass! How does anyone get anything done?) and reading bits and pieces. Although I have my laptop with me, and should be starting the next book - which will probably be a sequel to The Gates - I've just finished editing The Whisperers, and, quite frankly, the last thing I want to do right now is start writing again. Instead, I read some manuscripts for which I've been asked to offer quotes. Arlene Hunt's Blood Money is particularly good. I know Arlene a little, but we haven't spoken much about her work. I wonder if she's read Dennis Lehane, as Blood Money reminds me of the best of the Kenzie and Gennaro books? Although not yet well known outside Ireland, I think Arlene is destined to go far, and it's quite a pleasure to continue reading her manuscript over dinner in the lovely Set Portes restaurant, aided by a fine bottle of Torres wine. (Twelve euro! I may have to move here!)
Lest you think that my life is one long jolly, the schedule for tomorrow is waiting for me back at the hotel, along with a very fetching book on Barcelona's cemeteries, a gift from my publshers. I'm here for the BC Negra crime festival, and tomorrow I have eight media interviews, and a formal event, in a language that I can't speak in anything other than the present tense, and then only to ask for wine, the bill, or more potatoes. Somewhere in the city are Don Winslow, Ian Rankin, and Arnaldur Indridason, all of whom I am fans of, but I have no idea where they might be. Ian I've met before, and like a great deal; Arnaldur I've shaken hands with, although he had no idea who I was, even though I'd given his American publishers a quote for his book; and Don is big in the Snake River Penitentiary in Oregon, if only because I've sent some of his books to one of the prisoners there, and he's passed them around. It would be good to meet up with them all. For now, though, my bed is calling . . .

TUESDAY

On which I begin justifying my presence here. The plan is that the interviews will start at 10.00 A.M. and continue until close to 7.00 P.M., at which point we leave to do a book club session at a new local bookstore.
I have an interpreter, Yannick, who is very good, but there is a lingering sense of frustration at not being able to express myself directly. It's my own fault: I should be able to speak Spanish, but then I should be able to speak Italian too, and German. I can muddle along in French but, in an ideal world, I would be able to answer each interviewer in his or her own tongue. Thankfully, though, Yannick is on hand, and the journalists are, without exception, kind and tolerant. Furthermore, they have all read the book - in some cases, they have read a number of my books - and I am both flattered and touched by the effort they have put into the interviews. In the US in particular, I'm used to doing interviews where the publicist's summary is the sole contact that some journalists have had with my book. Here, every question has been considered carefully, and I feel slightly guilty that my answers aren't more intelligent. Still, it's hard to shake off the lingering sense that I am inevitably engaged in a variation on the game of Chinese Whispers: I answer the question; Yannick translates it from English to Spanish, or Catalan; the journalist makes notes of what Yannick says that I've said; and then the journalist filters all of that through his or her consciousness to create the final piece. And that assumes that my original answers made sense in the first place, which I fully accept may not always be the case. Then again, I've given interviews in English to English-speaking journalists, and the final printed piece has included quotes that were completely unrelated to what I actually said.
The day is broken up by a lovely lunch with my publishers (if you're ever fortunate to be published, make sure that Tusquets is responsible for your Spanish translation, and Bromera for your Catalan) and then off for photographs with two Scandanavian crime novelists at Negra Y Criminal, Barcelona's quirky, superb mystery bookstore. By a stroke of luck (or, rather, thanks to the efforts of my friend Mark Hall in Maine, who is a big fan of Scandinavian mystery fiction) I've read both of the writers in question, Camilla Lackberg and Asa Larsson, but we're ships passing in the night. They haven't read me, but that's okay. Next time we meet, they'll either have read my stuff or I can hold over their heads the fact that they haven't, and make them buy me booze.
Back to the hotel. More interviews that make me feel like I know less than the people who are interviewing me, then on to the spectacular Bertrand bookstore for the book club meeting. Whenever I enter a bookstore as good as this one, I want to hug the staff. Everyone is spectacularly welcoming, and I'm acutely aware of how little, in real terms, booksellers are paid. Any writer who behaves like a jerk towards booksellers deserves to be taken out and beaten with remaindered copies of his own novels. My books are everywhere, even displayed in a glass case with a miniature severed arm, the work of one of the staff. Javi, who chairs the session, knows more about my books than I do, and again I feel that sense of frustration at not being able to speak directly to the audience, aligned with an overwhelming sense of gratitude towards all those involved. In addition, a number of the sweet people from my publishers have come along to offer support, and I want to hug them too, except some of them are blokes and might feel that I'm being a bit forward.
The room in which the session is being held is decorated with photos as part of the festival. The photographer, Josep Maria, has created images based on novels by the participating authors. It's flattering to see one's work provide inspiration for an artist, and I decide that the least I can do is to buy one of the prints. I feel a bit embarrassed paying for it, though. I suppose that, once again, I'm conscious the print costs more than most of the booksellers make in a week or more. Booksellers just aren't paid enough anywhere. It's a noble profession, and it behoves writers to remember that.
The staff from Tusquets offer to join me for dinner, but they've all had a long day. There are husbands, wives, girlfriends, boyfriends, cats and dogs that should enjoy their company for a while, and they have assorted dinners and lunches to get through with me before I leave. I change my shoes at the hotel, find a kind of oriental tapas bar named Balthazar nearby (twelve euro for a fine bottle of Rioja - are these people mad?), and read a little more Arlene Hunt.
Off to bed.

WEDNESDAY
With Marta, the publicist for my Catalan publishers, I depart first thing in the morning - well, nineish, but it's the principle --for a recorded interview at a Catalan television station. It's for an arts programme, Millennium, and everyone involved, from Ramon, the presenter, to the make-up ladies, is sweetness personified. For the purposes of the interview, I have an earpiece through which an interpreter translates Ramon's questions into English for me, then simultaneously translates my replies into Catalan for Ramon and the eventual viewers. Once again, I have to trust in the interpreter to make sense of my replies and, once again, I wish I was as smart as people seem to assume that I am. To borrow a phrase from the world of entertainment: I'm not really a philosopher, I just play one on TV.
More interviews back at the hotel, and then I have a couple of hours to myself in the afternoon. I had intended to visit the Egyptian Museum nearby, but instead make the mistake of trying to catch up on e-mail, and my free hours disappear. I have enough time to grab a quick cup of coffee, having now forsaken lunch, and then it's off to the main event for the BC Negra Festival. I'm interviewed in a former church by Antonio Lozano, a journalist and writer whom I met on my last visit to Barcelona, and whose company I enjoy; and Laura Fernandez, another journalist, and also a crime writer. Her new novel, Wendolin Kramer: A Novel of Superheroes, Villains, and Depressed Dogs, sounds like great fun, and I look forward to reading it when it is published this year. I sit between them as they take turns to ask questions, and the audience of 200 or so listens through earphones to a simultaneous translation of what I say. It seems to go well, and people even laugh at some of my jokes in translation. This is quite an achievement, as most people don't laugh at my jokes even when they understand English.
A word on the two writers, Antonio and Laura. It takes a certain generosity of spirit for writers on their home turf to interview a visiting writer, or even to accept his or her presence at a festival without reservation. I was at one continental crime festival where a number of the home writers made it very clear that the visiting - and, in some cases, certainly better known - writers were not particularly welcome. This is not the case in Barcelona, and both Antonio and Laura are very complimentary about me and my books, to the extent that, halfway through Antonio's introduction, I cease to recognise the person he's talking about, and begin to wonder if I might not be at the wrong event.
Dinner afterwards with my publishers, including Beatriz de Moura, the director of Tusquets. I am slightly in awe of her, for she knew Salvador Dali, not to mention most of the major Spanish and international writers of recent years. I would happily spend an evening listening to her talk about the trade, and the future of books, and the writers that she has met. And, thankfully, that's precisely what I get to do.
When I return to my hotel, I sit down to write a speech for a booksellers' lunch the next day. Yannick has kindly agreed to translate it into Spanish for me, and I will then attempt to read that translation instead of giving my speech in English. It turns into a bit of an epic, to be honest, but I'm too tired to cut it back. It will have to do as it is.

THURSDAY
I have the morning to myself, so I find a wine shop and get a crash course in Spanish wines. After that, it's off to the Tusquets office, which is in a lovely old house in its own grounds. There's even a resident dog, Gunther, for whom I've bought a dog toy on La Ramblas. Gunther seems rather pleased with the gift, in that sedate way that elderly Labradors have. I do an interview for Spanish television, although it's kind of warm in the room and I seem to be basting in my own juices, which can't be a good look. After that, I sign a couple of hundred books, and then Yannick and I go over his translation of my speech, with me marking the more difficult words and adding a phonetic spelling beside them. The speech turns out to be two pages long, and we only have time to go through it twice. At the restaurant, the very good La Balsa, I somehow manage to muddle through the speech, and nobody throws bread rolls at me for mangling the Spanish tongue. Very tolerant people, the Spanish. Afterwards, I'm tempted to knock back as much wine as I can take, but I have an event that evening, so I restrain myself. Most of the booksellers and distributors have at least a little English and, aided by Yannick, I get to chat with most of them. It's on occasions like this that I feel particularly grateful for my profession: they're all interesting people, some of them with decades in the book business behind them, and it's fascinating to talk to them. We also get to flip through the restaurant's guest book, which includes the signatures of Nastassja Kinski, Roman Polanski (!), Haruki Murakami, and assorted European royalty. Oh, and now me. In each case, the restaurant has kindly identified the signature in question, just in case it's not entirely legible. For me, I suspect that they'll add "John Connolly. Writer. Under the misguided impression that he can speak Spanish . . ."
Return to the hotel with time only to change my shirt, and then six of us pile into a people carrier and make our way to the town of Terrassa, some 30 km from Barcelona, for a bookstore event. The people at Bertrand's have made a fantastic window display, there's a good crowd, and the store gives me a beautiful book on Barcelona Art Nouveau as a thank you gift for visiting. It's completely unnecessary, but a lovely gesture.
Into the people carrier for the journey back to Barcelona. I'm starting to fade a little, but there's a cocktail party to celebrate the festival, and I feel that I should show my face. I thank Paco, who owns the Negra Y Criminal crime store and has masterminded the festival, and his wife, Montse. They make a great couple, as it's hard to decide which of them is the nicer, so it's best just to give up and love them both equally. I have a drink and a chat with Ian Rankin, who continues to wear his fame lightly, and remains good company; and Arnaldur Indridason. His new novel, Hypothermia, is probably his best yet, which is saying something given the quality of the preceding books. By this point, though, I'm barely awake. I say my farewells, head back to the hotel, eat some ham and drink a glass of wine at the nearby La Bodegueta, then go to bed. Home tomorrow, and back to writing, but it's been a good week, and I've made the best of it, I think.

So there you have it. Not a bad way to make a living, is it?

This week John read

Blood Money (uncorrected proof) by Arlene Hunt
But Enough About Me by Jancee Dunn

And listened to

The Courage of Others by Midlake

On Submitting

2010-01-18T03:16:00.000-08:00

ON SUBMITTING

THE WHISPERERS, the next Charlie Parker novel, was delivered to my British and American editors shortly before Christmas. Well, it should have been, but the courier company was shoddy to the nth degree, and so at least one of my editors didn't receive the manuscript until early in the New Year. To cover myself, as it's due for publication in Ireland and the UK at the start of May, I gave a copy to one independent reader to check for errors, and a second copy to a friend of mine who had agreed to check that the details of military service were accurate. With a further copy sent to my agent, this meant that five people were reading the manuscript at the same time.

Delivering a manuscript is a source of mixed feelings for me. To begin with, there's a sense of relief in that I've somehow managed to write another book in the face of the usual obstacles, including, but not limited to:

1) doubts about the quality of the book;
2) doubts about the quality of the writer;
3) generalized doubts about everything not immediately connected to the book but still capable of impacting upon the writing;
4) writing another book entirely - The Gates - before embarking upon this one;
5) touring that other book, as well as the book - The Lovers - that had already been delivered and scheduled for publication in 2009;
6) other projects demanding time - short stories, reviews, newspaper articles, and the reading of other people's books at the request of writers and editors in the hope that I might be moved to offer a supportive quote;
7) eating, sleeping, and generally trying to balance living with the fact that each day begins and ends with an internal voice nagging about the book in hand.

Allied to this sense of relief, there is the faint hope that this book might be better than the last one, just as I hoped that the last one might be better than the one that preceded it, and so on back to DARK HOLLOW, which I hoped would be better than EVERY DEAD THING. As a writer, you have to feel that you're moving forward, and trying to do something different with each book. At least, I have to feel that way, although as I stumble through increasingly formulaic pieces of genre fiction as part of my reading material I start to wonder if I am not, perhaps, simply making life harder for myself than I should be. After all, isn't it in the nature of genre fiction to be generic? It's certainly in the name.

The danger in this, of course, is that one may alienate the very readers who liked the last book, and were rather hoping for the same thing again, albeit with some of the names changed, and with a bit of adjustment to the plot. THE WHISPERERS, though, is a departure from THE LOVERS, and certainly from THE GATES, although it contains one very deliberate echo of that book and, indeed, of "The Reflecting Eye", the Parker novella contained in the NOCTURNES volume of short stories. In part, that's because I feel that there should be some consistency, even across genres, to the universe of my books. After all, they come from the same imagination, and the rules applicable to one should probably be applicable to the rest.

To return to THE WHISPERERS: I think, from the start, I thought of this book as one that was almost dreamlike in its narrative, although 'nightmarish' might be a better word to use. One of my editors felt that it was fragmented, and it is, but it is fragmented in the sense that a dream may be fragmented, but contains within itself an essential consistency. There is no single character in the book who is entirely certain of what is happening, and that includes Parker himself. We flit from consciousness to consciousness, each one providing a piece of the puzzle without that individual being sure of where that piece fits into the overall picture. All are tormented by what they know, but also, in the case of the soldiers at the heart of the story, by what they have endured. It is, on one level, a book about the aftermath of war, and its effect on those who have survived conflict.

That element of the book has proved slightly contentious, and raises an interesting question about the limits, or otherwise, of genre fiction. Some years ago, the always interesting Deadly Pleasures magazine printed an article on the work of George Pelecanos, taking him to task for social commentary in his novels. It remains, I think, one of the worst pieces of critical writing that otherwise estimable magazine has ever produced, failing every basic critical test, including the one that suggests it's a good idea to critique the book that has been written and not the book that the critic thinks should have been written. Worse than that, though, it exposed the 'inferiority complex fault line' that runs through sections of the mystery community like pink writing through a stick of rock. (Witness the degree of genuflecting and grateful hand wringing from within the genre that occurs when a literary writer deigns to pen a mystery novel, and then 'fesses up to it, like the bitter, fawning Uriah Heep welcoming David Copperfield into his 'ever so 'umble' abode.) Mystery novels should concentrate on, well, a mystery. It's about the plot, dummy. Leave the social commentary to proper novels. Know your place. Another murder, please, and be quick about it.

Thankfully, there are plenty of authors out there who are happy to ignore such attempts to place strictures on their work, and the last year alone has seen Val McDermid engage with the legacy of the miners' strike in Britain, and Steig Larsson tackle the sex trade in Sweden, although Larsson (and, as a reader, I have some reservations about those books, finding them a bit long and undisciplined, but I appear to be in the minority) has a 'Get out of Jail Free' card because he is no longer with us, and also because he has become the most recent Adopted Genre Author ®, the genre writer picked up on by those who don't ordinarily read, in this case, mystery fiction because they feel that it's beneath them, are then kind of surprised by how good it can be, but don't believe that the regular stuff is usually this good and therefore don't bother to read any more of it until the next AGA comes along.

So it may be that THE WHISPERERS will be more divisive than some of my previous books, and it has been interesting to receive the responses of my editors, agent, and the two readers to the manuscript. The parts that one disliked, others have loved. Where another suggested changes, three others wanted no changes at all. Now, as the writer, it is up to me over the next week or so to consider the arguments of each, to decide what points are valid, what points are open to dispute, and where to draw the line at altering the manuscript. There will be arguments, and agreements to differ. It's what makes the post-submission process at once challenging, frustrating, and ultimately beneficial to the work that will eventually appear on bookshelves later this year.

Without such input, my books would be poorer offerings.

THIS WEEK JOHN READ

Wicked Prey by John Sandford

AND LISTENED TO

Twelve Songs by Owen Pallett
Mayday by Peter Von Poehl
Hospice by Antlers

AND DESPAIRED AT THE FOLLOWING

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/world/2010/0116/1224262473287.html

On The New Daughter

2010-01-11T19:34:00.000-08:00

Last month, as James Cameron's AVATAR seemingly swept into every cinema in the world, determined to show us what the smurfs might have looked like if they were taller and the smurfettes had proper breasts, the movie of THE NEW DAUGHTER crept out on limited release. Starring Kevin Costner and Ivana Baquero, it's based on a short story (a very short story) that first appeared in the NOCTURNES collection some years ago. I still haven't seen it, which is a pretty good metaphor for the position of the writer of the source material for a movie. Generally speaking, the novelist or short story writer upon whose work the film is based is required to do little more than take the check and keep quiet, unless, of course, he has been drawn into adapting his own work, in which case he will actually have to earn that check instead of merely banking it and leaving the hard work to someone else.

It's odd seeing something with which one is at once both intimately, and peripherally, involved make its way into the world. I wanted the film to do well, mainly for the sake of all those who were responsible for its creation. The success, or otherwise, of the film was never going to make a great difference to my sales, I don't think, given that it was a short story, not a novel, that provided the initial idea, but my brief glimpse of the moviemaking process showed me just how many people have to work phenomenally hard for a film to make it as far as the screen. Some of those involved with THE NEW DAUGHTER had worked on Polanski's CHINATOWN and Michael Mann's MANHUNTER, among others, and they applied themselves just as willingly to our little film as they did to those fine works. I wonder if, while making those movies, the crew and the producers knew how good they were going to be. I suspect that they might have had some inkling, but it could not have been more than that. History determines what is and is not of value. It requires the passage of time to allow a perspective to emerge on a book, or a film, or a painting.

Even if I had seen THE NEW DAUGHTER, I'm not sure that I would comment upon it. In a way, I feel that it's not for me to do so, and I get annoyed when I see writers either criticizing films of their work, or basking in the acclaim when those works are applauded. Bad books have made good movies, and vice versa. I'm currently reading the director Bruce Beresford's book JOSH HARTNETT DEFINITELY WANTS TO DO THIS, a diary of his attempts to get various movies made during the last decade, and some of the most interesting moments concern the tension between source material and scripts, as Beresford picks up on flaws in novels that might present difficulties on the screen but are less problematical for the individual reader. Sometimes, when it comes to movies, I think books and short stories are merely concepts, ideas scribbled at varying lengths on pieces of paper. The two art forms, literature and cinema, are so distinct that the relationship between source and film is tenuous at best. THE NEW DAUGHTER, for example, is only 16 pages long in its short story form. To turn that into a feature length film requires the addition of so much new material that only a hint of the original can possibly be discerned in the finished movie. If the film is great, it's great because a whole lot of other creative individuals made it that way. If it isn't great, then generally it's not for want of those individuals trying to make it as good as it can be. Nobody - except, perhaps, the producers of MEGA SHARK V GIANT OCTOPUS, which I happened to catch on TV recently and caused pieces of my brain to leak from my ears - sets out to make a terrible film, just as no writer sets out to write a bad book. I suspect that all creative work secretly aspires to the condition of art.

So, I guess I'll be waiting for a while to see THE NEW DAUGHTER, unless the production company sends me a DVD. As Hollywood experiences go, it has all been rather positive so far. The film was made. Everybody involved with it was a pleasure to deal with. I've made at least one good friend as a consequence of it. The film was released. Everybody got paid. By Hollywood standards, that's almost as good as it gets. The rest, to quote Raymond Carver, is gravy . . .

This week John read

BLOOD OATH by Chris Farnsworth (uncorrected proof)
THE MANAGER by Barney Ronay
THE GUARDIANS by Andrew Pyper (manuscript)

and listened to

hours and hours of the wonderful Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo talking about movies on their Radio 5 podcast. Brilliant, just brilliant . . .

ON EDITING, AND BEING EDITED

2009-08-31T13:46:00.000-07:00

An interesting question cropped up on the forum recently regarding editing. I found the Straub story particularly interesting: the idea that an author would publish an unedited version of his manuscript alongside (albeit with a different publisher) the edited, mainstream version of the book. I don't know Peter Straub, but it made me wonder about the relationship between Straub and his editor, and whether he views his unexpurgated version as superior to the edited version. Did he make the cuts reluctantly, and did he feel that they compromised his vision of what the novel should be? All quite fascinating.

My experience of being edited has always been overwhelmingly positive, and I don't say that simply to ensure that my editors don't drop me like a hot stone on the grounds that I'm not sufficiently fawning, although it would be nice if they didn't drop me, and I can be more fawning if that helps. Like many authors who are published on both sides of the Atlantic, I have two editors. When I finish a book, I send the manuscript to both of them on the same day, then wait for their responses. Usually, one will reply sooner than the other, but eventually I'll have the responses from both. Curiously, they're never the same. I don't mean that one may like a book while the other doesn't: that's never happened, thankfully. Instead, one will spot weaknesses, or suggest small changes, in areas that have not troubled the other editor at all, and vice versa. By and large, I think that I've only declined to follow one or two editorial suggestions over my entire career, as they tend to be eminently sensible.

I'd like to think that I help my cause by not delivering a book until it has been rewritten a number of times, a hangover from my time in journalism. Then, if a piece was handed back to you for changes, it was because you'd done something wrong, and it was a badge of shame, like getting lots of red marks on your homework. By the time the book goes to my editors, and my agent, I've usually reached the point where there are few major alterations that I feel can be made to it. Actually, this only lasts as long as it takes for the manuscript to arrive in London and New York, as by that time I've had a day or so to think about it and have already started making further alterations, on the grounds that a book is never finished. What I'm saying, I guess, is that the relationship with my editors is not adversarial in any way. Oh, I want them to have to make as few changes to my deathless prose as possible, largely on the basis of the homework analogy used earlier, but I'm quite happy to have my work improved by them, especially as it's still my name on the cover, and readers will then assume that I'm brilliant all by myself instead of, in reality, not being terribly bright but being ably supported by some very bright people.

Thinking about THE GATES, it was one of my editors who suggested that the demons should be a little more threatening at some point. In my manuscript, they were largely inept, with the exception of Mrs Abernathy, the chief villain. It was my agent and my principal foreign rights agent who suggested altering the footnotes in the main chapter so that they were integrated more fully into the main body of the text, which, visually, made a lot of sense. My agent, too, wanted more made of the relationship between Sam and Nurd, and he was right about that as well. Mind you, those suggestions come in the form of a single line. "Why don't we have more of Sam and Nurd?", my agent might say. "Brilliant", I think, followed by, "Hang on, how do I do that?" I then spend a couple of days fretting about it, dismissing it as impossible, or so difficult as to be nearly impossible, before sitting down and just getting on with it. Rarely will I ask my editors or my agent HOW something might be done. They make a suggestion, and then I figure out how to make it work. After all, it's my book, and I'm the writer. Often, what seems quite hard to achieve when first raised in an editorial letter can usually be achieved quite easily by a bit of tweaking, but despite having written twelve books now, I still get that anxiety attack when I'm asked to make a general change to the text, rather than a specific change to a line or word.

I wonder, too, if the fact that I write up, not down, is a help. By that I mean that my first draft tends to be short, the second draft a little longer, and so on until the book is ready to be sent. I write by accretion, so the chances are pretty slim of of me delivering, say, a book like THE STAND to which, some years later, I might choose to restore 200 pages of cut text. There is very little pruning done to my books. It's just not the way that they're written.

For now, though, I'm between edits. THE GATES, to which I was making changes right up until production, is done. THE WHISPERERS is on one of the early drafts, and it will be December before my editors see it. At this stage, I am my own editor, and I'd like to think that I've written enough books by now to be able to spot when something is drastically wrong, and correct it before it has to be pointed out to me.

I'd like to think that, but I suspect my editors will prove me wrong.

This week John read:

BAD BOY DRIVE by Robert Sellers

and listened to:

TAMPER by Jim O Rourke
LATE NIGHT TALES by Air
SING ALONG TO SONGS YOU DON'T KNOW by Múm

OF MAINE, AND MOVIES, AND 'THE NEW DAUGHTER'

2009-05-27T12:23:00.000-07:00

Greetings from Maine, where I am currently sequestered in an effort to get some writing done. The word‘sequestered’ is carefully chosen, as I’ve largely cut myself off from human contact: I don’t have an answering machine switched on, and I’m generally ignoring e-mails that don’t come from my editors or my agent with exclamation marks appended to them, and warnings that my contract/home/ life may be in danger if I don’t answer.

I’m working on THE WHISPERERS, the next Parker novel, and trying to make up for the time that I spent writing THE GATES. In a sense, THE GATES was an indulgence: it wasn’t part of a contract, and there was no guarantee that my editors would like it, but it was a book that I desperately wanted to write. Now I’m paying for the time I spent writing it, to some degree. I’ve holed myself up in Maine, and set a target of 10,000 words over the next ten days to add to what is already done, even allowing for the fact that THE LOVERS is due to be published on day seven, with the three days after that devoted to signings.

The curious thing is that, less than three days into my stay here, I have 7000 words written, mainly because I have no routine beyond that which I set myself, and no immediate obligations to other people. It’s selfishness, admittedly, bordering on rudeness, but necessary selfishness, and it brings with it a certain amount of annoyance to other people, particularly friends who might have anticipated some degree of contact. On the other hand, it does mean that when the mood strikes me to write beyond the day’s immediate target, I can do so without a trace of guilt. Ultimately, I need to get some writing done.

Take today, for example. Up in Brunswick, which is about a 30 mile drive from Portland, the Frontier Movie Theater was showing, for one day only, Alfred Hitchcock’s TORN CURTAIN. Now, TORN CURTAIN isn’t a great Hitchcock movie. To be absolutely fair, it’s a bit of a misfire, although it does have one brilliant, excruciating murder scene. No Hitchcock movie is entirely bad and, anyway, how often does one get the chance to see one of his films on the big screen? I was sitting in the parking lot out at the mall, having stocked up on supplies, when I began to think about THE WHISPERERS. I’d written about 1500 words that morning, but I knew where I was going with the plot, and there was a coffee shop across the street that offered bottomless cups of coffee. So, instead of heading out to Brunswick, I sat down in the coffee shop, took out my laptop, and began writing. Admittedly, the coffee shop didn’t make much money from my presence there, but 1500 words eventually became just over 3000, and I didn’t feel guilty as I ate a quiet dinner over a book in a restaurant that night.

A digression: I seem to be having a vintage movie week. In New York last weekend, Robert Vaughn, the last surviving member of THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN, was introducing a screening at Lincoln Center as part of a festival of Steve McQueen movies, and I went along. I sat two rows behind Vaughn, who was gracious and funny in his introduction, and found myself watching his responses to a movie that he claimed not to have seen in many decades. As I did so, I wondered at how it must feel to be watching the ghosts of these men that he had known flicker upon the screen. There was McQueen, stealing the movie by constantly performing bits of business whenever the camera was on him, even at the risk of upstaging and antagonizing its nominal star, Yul Brynner. Rarely can a movie have provided so many stars of the future–McQueen, Charles Bronson, James Coburn, Vaughn–with such iconic roles. Even Brad Dexter, the forgotten member (ask any pub quiz team to name the original Seven, and Dexter is the one with whom its members will generally struggle), shines, and I felt a particular pang at the sight of Horst Buchholz, brimful of energy and bravado. I thought, too, that I saw Vaughn respond to the sight of the young actor, now, like all the others, gone from this life, yet still with this enduring memorial to him in his prime. The audience applauded when Vaughn’s character, a gunman tormented by the fear of death, eventually overcomes his dread and kicks in the doorway of a makeshift prison cell, gun blazing, to rescue the farmers imprisoned within. There is a unique joy to be gained from the communal experience of watching a classic movie in a theater, surrounded by people who feel nothing but love for the movie and its stars. I imagine that the experience was very moving for Vaughn; he was there not only in his own capacity, but as a representative of those who had gone before him.

Afterwards, I stayed on to watch another McQueen western, NEVADA SMITH, which I had never seen before. While by no means a bad movie, it seemed relatively minor after THE MAGINFICENT SEVEN, grim, and overlong, and one-paced. THE MAGINFICENT SEVEN is brilliant, NEVADA SMITH merely competent.

Such matters have been on my mind recently, for THE NEW DAUGHTER, the first movies to be made from my work, is nearing completion. Last week, John Travis, the movie’s very talented screenwriter, saw it for the first time in a small screening room, or at least saw 98 per cent of it, as the last fine-tuning is still being done.

John, who is a harsh judge of his own work, emerged hugely enthused. I’m sure that he won’t mind some of his comments being reproduced here:

It's an adult, very well acted and directed, beautifully shot movie with a real sense of dread the whole way through ...smart, well. In fact, it's almost a little Spanish.

Or

maybe it’s like David Cronenberg directed it. It's kind of like A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE, but with monsters instead mobsters...

I’m relieved, to be honest. I wanted it to be good, not only for my sake but for the sake of the people I met on the set of the film, all of whom were kind and talented and deeply committed to the work in hand. Furthermore, the film seems to be a throwback to an earlier era of movie-making, as it has been made without recourse to CGI. Instead it relies on make-up, and actors, and the use of light and shade. I’m looking forward to seeing it.

In the meantime, there’s THE WHISPERERS. Next Tuesday, June 2nd, THE LOVERS is published in the US. I have one TV interview to record this week, and then I leave Portland on a research trip. With luck, I will have the bones of THE WHISPERERS in place when I get back to the city.

Mind you, it still would have been nice to have seen TORN CURTAIN on a big screen...

This week John read

The Secret Speech by Tom Robb Smith
Men of Men by Wilbur Smith
Hundred Dollar Baby by Robert B. Parker

and listened to

Vecatimest by Grizzly Bear
Manners by Passion Pit
Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix by Phoenix

PS
Just a reminder that I'll be signing copies of THE LOVERS at The Great Lost Bear, Forest Avenue, Portland, Maine, from 7pm on Tuesday, June 2nd, the day of publication. Every book bought on the night will receive a special limited edition t-shirt, and will be specially stamped. Advance orders will also receive a t-shirt, as long as stocks last, and a stamp on the book. Further details are available from Books Etc at bookhappenings@gmail.com, or 1-207-781-3784. And check out more tour dates here.

ON STARTING AGAIN

2009-04-20T12:37:00.000-07:00

It’s a curious thing, but when it comes to writing books I seem to have no long-term memory. I don’t mean that I can’t remember what I wrote yesterday, or that I have trouble keeping track of what I’m working on (although if you asked me where I was at, say, 3pm last Thursday, then I might struggle to tell you. I’m a shoo-in for having a crime pinned on me at some point, simply because I won’t be able to offer a convincing alibi unless I can hold on to all of my bus tickets, movie stubs, and coffee receipts and produce them as evidence of my movements.)

No, it’s rather that, having written twelve books now, I’d expected the process of starting a new one to become a little easier. I’d know that a certain pattern emerges at the beginning: a good run at the prologue, and maybe the first chapter, then a certain confusion as I try to maintain my momentum over the chapters that follow. There would be a certain lack of confidence in the worthiness of the idea, and my ability to carry it through to a conclusion over 100,000 words or more. Eventually, I’d have a draft done, and then I could begin revising, honing, finishing.

Having written all of that down, it may seem like I have a handle on what I’m doing, but even after expressing it in those relatively clear terms, there’s a part of me that doesn’t believe any of it. It’s as though the earlier books were flukes, somehow, works that were completed and published despite my best efforts rather than because of them. This new book will be my undoing. This is the book too far, the one that will expose me for the fraud that I am.

I started THE WHISPERERS earlier this year, while I was in Maine. At the same time, I was working on a new draft of THE GATES, and one book kind of provided a breather from the other. Perhaps, on one level, I didn’t believe anyone would want to publish THE GATES, and I thought that I’d better try to make some progress on the novel that my publishers would want. Well, probably want. Then, as I became more and more intent on making THE GATES as good as it could possibly be, regardless of whether or not it would be published, I had to put THE WHISPERERS aside. This week, at last, I returned to it.

Was progress as slow in the early stages of THE LOVERS, or THE GATES? Did I have these doubts? I suppose so. I can’t really recall. It must have been the same in each case, but I forget all of those difficulties once the draft is done and it becomes clear to me that there is at least something there with which I can work. It may be disjointed, and rough, but it has some form of beginning, middle, and end. There is a plot, even if it may have gaps in it. There are characters, even if some are as yet little more than cyphers. There is some good writing, even if it is outweighed by the bad.

Most of all though, the potential has become the actual: the idea has taken concrete form. From now on, the element of craft kicks in, which may have something of the same pleasure to it as a carpenter feels when the shape of a cabinet emerges from what had previously been a collection of wood, glue and nails. (I sometimes wonder, too, how important the original idea actually is. This thought struck me with renewed force after reading an interview with a famous American writer who farms out his ideas for others to write. It seems to me that there is no shortage of ideas for books; after all, I don’t know how many times each year I’m told that someone has a great idea for a book, if they can only get around to writing it. That’s the thing of it: writers write. The idea, if written down, might only take up a line or two, but what determines the worth of it is the act of taking that idea and expanding upon it. It may be that there is no such thing as a bad idea for a book, just one’s inability to bring it to fruition, for whatever reason…)

In the end, I got about 5000 words of THE WHISPERERS written this week, to add to what I managed to get done in Maine. Yesterday was good, today not so good. I eked out a thousand words, then left myself with a kind of cliffhanger as a character continues to tell his story. I know what’s coming next – or I think I do, which is better than not knowing at all, I suppose - and I’m hoping that writing it will provide me with some momentum when I return to the draft. I tell myself that it’s early days. The book will come. I just need to stick at it.

I only wish that I could remember how I did it last time...

This week John read:

Who Goes There by Nick Griffiths

The English Assassin by Daniel Silva

and listened to:

Sounds of the Universe by Depeche Mode

THE GATES

2009-03-29T07:34:00.000-07:00

My editors, and my agent, have now read THE GATES, and everybody seems very enthusiastic about it, which is a relief. It's always a bit of a risk taking time out from the books that I know will sell in order to write something that no one may be particularly keen on when it's done. It's also a matter of finding the time, or making the time, to pursue such experiments. I've written before about the demands on a writer's time, of which the actual writing of books is only one, and of how I find writing a book a year as much as I can generally manage.

And yet, and yet . . .

Some years ago, probably around the time that I was touring THE KILLING KIND in the United States, I was asked what I planned to do next. I can remember answering that I wanted to write a strange children's book about a small boy who… well, that remains to be seen, or read. At that point, I'd been thinking about the book for a year, but the problem was that I couldn't quite figure out how to write it. I mean, I knew what it was going to be about, but I really had no idea how I was going to make it work.

Then, perhaps three years ago, I made a start on it. I got three chapters in, and abandoned it, because it just wasn't right. I still have two of those chapters, and they're on my desktop as I write. They're entitled "The Singing Rock" and "The Lady Maresin". Neither of them made it into the finished version of THE GATES. In fact, nothing of those original chapters remains in the book that I eventually wrote.

Part of the problem, I think, was magic. I just didn't want to write a book about magic. There were too many books about magic out there already, and magic gives the author an easy 'out'. How was that done? Well, it was magic. Magic is like playing the joker in a card game. It can be anything that you want it to be, but it's kind of a cheat, and it gets irritating very quickly, which is why there's only one joker in a pack of cards.

So I didn't want to use magic, and I couldn't work out how to write the book that I wanted to write, and anyway there were all of these other books to write, and maybe it wasn't an idea that was ever going to come to fruition, just something that might have been. But it just kept nagging at me, because it was such a lovely idea, and I could almost see the boy who would be at the heart of the novel. He was quirky, and eccentric, and he had a small dog on a leash…

And then, early last year, I had a flash of inspiration. I don't get them very often, as I don't think my mind works in quite that way, but when it came it unlocked the book. What's more interesting than magic? Well, I thought, science. Science is interesting. No, strike that: science is fascinating and, what's more, it's real.

Let's be clear on something here: I'm no scientist. I studied physics in school, and passed it, but not with any flying colours, and subsequently no scientific institutions were knocking on my door desperate to recruit me for their secret projects. But the most jaw-droppingly amazing things that I've read about over the last few years have all come out of the realm of science, and the more I've read about it, the more I've come to realise that I know only a fraction of the things that I should know, and want to know, about the nature of the universe, about quantum physics, about how stuff is put together.

After finishing THE LOVERS, I worked flat out on THE GATES. It was a labour of love. I so wanted to write it, and I didn't care if it was going to be picked up or not. Oh, it would have hurt a bit if it had been rejected by my publishers, but I wouldn't have regretted a moment of the time that I spent writing it. I was able to let my imagination run riot, while at the same time retaining a thread of pure science. At times, it felt like a bit of a balancing act, and I've asked the physics department of my old university to check the science to make sure I haven't mangled some very complicated stuff too much, but I hope that the enthusiasm behind it is communicated to those who read it. We'll see.

So THE GATES is a book that combines quantum physics and, well, Satanism, I suppose. It's littered with odd little footnotes, and the occasional drawing. Some of the footnotes are just little nuggets of information about the universe, while others contain pieces of advice, or short essays on, say, the word "the" as it relates to historical figures. Mostly, they're funny, although I hope that they're kind of curious and interesting as well. The kids who've read it have really loved it but, thankfully, so too have the adults. If THE BOOK OF LOST THINGS was a children's book for adults, then THE GATES is, in a way, an adult book for children. It will probably appear everywhere in time for Halloween.

Now you know, sort of. More to come over the next few weeks and months. As for me, it's back to THE WHISPERERS.

This week John read

Nice To See It, To See It, Nice: The 1970s in Front of the Telly by Brian Viner
The Power of the Dog by Don Winslow

and listened to

Fever Ray by Fever Ray (which is just stunning)

WHAT FRESH HELL IS THIS?

2009-03-17T14:27:00.000-07:00

I sometimes think that my publishers don't pay me for writing, which I kind of enjoy most of the time, despite what my peers sometimes say, but for all of the other stuff that goes with writing. (And if you're wondering what that means, the rather good Irish novelist Colm Toibin recently opined that the only pleasant thing about writing was the money, which was a bit unfortunate and did him no favours at all . . .)

Anyway, this week was a period of copy-edits and proof reading for THE LOVERS, both of which are horrible things to have to do, although checking copy-edits rather shades it in the horrible stakes. Basically, the copy-edit is the stage that follows editorial suggestions. Someone has gone through the manuscript very carefully, checking punctuation, grammar, and looking out for inconsistencies in the narrative. It's a job that requires terrifying degrees of knowledge and concentration, and also, I think, requires one to be fairly anal. Basically, it's the equivalent of those times in school when your teacher sat you down and went through your homework with a red pen. It's awful.

Proof pages, meanwhile, are what the author receives once the book has been typeset. It's a last chance to check for errors, but also requires the author to go through the proofs, line by line, looking for misplaced commas, absent periods, and the odd word that has just been mangled somewhere along the way. It's tedious, and you can only do a chapter or two at a time before you need to give it a break, as otherwise you start skimming.

The whole process was complicated to a head-wrecking degree this week because the British publisher's copy-edits, and the American publisher's page proofs, arrived at the same time, with the same delivery date. Now, I'd already done the American copy-edit in Maine, and I'd photocopied the manuscript so that I would have a record of the changes I, and the copy-editor, had made in order to apply them to the British version. (I've noticed over the last decade that having two copy-editors is a mixed blessing: each one spots errors that the other one missed, but the result is that I have to juggle manuscripts, and publishing schedules, in order to make sure that the same changes are made to both editions, which is difficult at times.) So, using my dining table (as my desk wasn't big enough), I had the photocopied American copy-edited manuscript in one corner, the British copy-edited manuscript in another, and the American proof pages in a third.

Then, to further muddy the waters, I had an early copy of the manuscript that had been marked by Peter English, the very helpful, patient, and tolerant ex-NYPD cop who has been advising me on police matters for THE LOVERS, so that ended up in the final corner. I think you can see where I'm going with this...

The US copy-edits needed to be added to the British copy-edit. The British copy-edit needed to be added to the US proofs. Peter's changes needed to be added to both editions. Changes made to the US proofs needed to be added to the British copy-edit.

The word you're looking for is "Ouch!"

Meanwhile, I discovered that a major character in THE LOVERS shared a surname with a recurring character from the series, so that had to be altered. Since it was all on paper rather than on a screen, the only way to do it was to carefully hunt down each reference to the new character, and alter the name by hand on two separate editions. Alongside all of that, I did a final rewrite of THE GATES, and sent it off to my agent and editors, which provided a welcome break from agonizing over THE LOVERS. My agent liked it, so now it remains to be seen if my editors want to publish it.

To be honest, my head still hurts a bit, but it's all done. Tomorrow, I'll get back to writing THE WHISPERERS.

And do you feel sorry for me?

Sigh. I didn't think so...

This week John read

Dracula by Bram Stoker

Pictures At A Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood by Mark Harris

and listened to

The Best of Laura Nyro by Laura Nyro

Zidane (Original Soundtrack) by Mogwai

Friday Night Lights (Original Soundtrack) by Explosions In The Sky

The Falcon And The Snowman (Original Soundtrack) by Pat Metheny

LOST IN MUSIC

2009-02-05T02:28:00.000-08:00

This week, we concluded filming on the documentary. It's been a pleasure, I have to say. I was probably more than a little cautious at the beginning, but the crew and the producer couldn't have been kinder - or better company - and, in the end, I appreciated the opportunity to explain myself and what I've been doing for the past ten years or so. In addition, Maine came up trumps, and everyone and everything (including the weather) smiled upon us, including the various law enforcement agencies, and the people who agreed to let us film in their bars and restaurants and houses.

Still, when I returned to Maine from Washington yesterday I was grateful to be able to resume writing. I was intent upon finishing THE GATES, the odd little book upon which I've been working since last year (and about which, in truth, I've been thinking since the second or third book), and so I sat down this morning and didn't move from my desk until the draft was done. By the time I sat back in my chair, the light had changed and I had almost 4000 words written. I still don't know if anyone will want to publish it, but I've enjoyed every minute of working on it, and it has made me smile.

As a reward, I went to see GRAN TORINO, the new Clint Eastwood movie, and, once I'd managed to get over what felt like Clint's early mugging for the cameras, I enjoyed it a lot. Nevertheless, even in the midst of the action I found myself thinking about the next book. It's something that I discussed with the documentary crew: how, at various points in a book, it becomes impossible to concentrate properly on anything other than the novel in hand.

For months, I've been trying to figure out how to start the next Charlie Parker book. I think I know what the catalyst will be, but I've been struggling to find my way into it. As I sat watching GRAN TORINO, I realised out how the novel should begin. Actually, I was working it out as I walked down to the movie theatre in Portland, but it came together as I sat in the dark, watching Clint utter racial epithets about his new Asian neighbours. What I was watching had no connection with what I intended to write, but there was something about sitting in the darkness, watching the film unfold while my mind sought to accommodate what it had been considering earlier with what it was now confronting, that brought everything together, and I knew how the next book should begin.

Actually, I've been a bit distracted of late, and not just because of the documentary. THE REAPERS came out in paperback in the UK recently. This was its first full week on sale, and I wanted it to do well. I was worried that it wouldn't make the top 10 list, mainly I was trying to finish one book and start another, and my confidence was in need of a boost. I probably made life very difficult for my beloved agent as a result, but I think he understood that it wasn't simply a matter of sales but of giving me the impetus that I needed to keep going at a moment of transition between two very different projects. Thankfully, the book seems to be doing okay, and I can almost feel some of the tension easing from my body. After all, if it hadn't been doing well, then what business did I have working on something that might never appear in print? Shouldn't I have been trying to get my career back on track? And what would be the point, if the mysteries weren't being read? The same thing happens twice every year: the first time when the last paperback appears, and the second time when the new novel is published in hardback. Perhaps, after a decade of publishing, such matters shouldn't concern me, but they do. I want my books to do well so that I can keep writing them and, in truth, so I can buy a little leverage to pursue odd experiments like NOCTURNES, THE BOOK OF LOST THINGS, and THE GATES.

Something did put a smile on my face yesterday, though. I was browsing in the wonderful Bullmoose music store in Portland, and saw a CD by a band named The Loups. Hmmm, I thought, that's a good name for a band, perhaps because it reminded me of the villainous wolf hybrids in THE BOOK OF LOST THINGS.

Then I saw that the band's EP was called Holding Hands with the Crooked Man, and wondered if it might possibly have anything to do with my book. Via MySpace, I sent a polite email to the band, asking just that question, and got a very lovely email back from the band's lead singer enthusing about my work. It was just a nice piece of snyergy, and now I'm the proud possessor of the EP, the first inspired, however peripherally, by something that I wrote. Even better, The Loups are a local Portland band so, with luck, I'll get to see them live before I head back to Dublin.

Now, I must finish re-reading HAWKSMOOR for the book club.

Tomorrow, I begin the new book. I think it will be called THE WHISPERERS...

This week John read

Twelve by Jasper Kent
School Days by Robert B Parker

and listened to

Temple of Low Men by Crowded House
Blood Bank by Bon Iver
The Beatles by The Beatles

BUSY DOING NOTHING . . . ISH

2009-01-20T11:54:00.000-08:00

I have been very remiss about this blog lately, even by my fairly lax standards. There are good reasons, though (he says, vainly flicking through a large book marked ‘Excuses’).

To begin with, I’ve been filming a documentary entitled THE HONEYCOMB WORLD, which was commissioned by RTE, the Irish national broadcaster, and will be broadcast early next year. Well, I say filming, but I largely sit around talking about myself while other people film me, so I’m not sure if I qualify for the verb ‘filming’. Next week it all gets a bit busier, though, as the crew and I head over to Maine to do a week there. Cue pictures of me looking thoughtful, or perhaps just trying to remember what my feet feel like, as it’s rather chilly in Maine at the moment.

At the same time, having finished the fairly minor edits for THE LOVERS, I’ve returned to an odd book that I’ve been humming and hawing over for quite some time. Basically, I set aside three months to get it finished, with the intention of having it done by the end of February. It may never see the light of day but, if it does, it’s likely to appear between THE LOVERS and the next Parker novel, which is due in the middle of 2010.

That urge to experiment, to try new things that may fail, is one that’s becoming increasingly difficult to indulge as time goes on. The will is there, but the time simply is not. By taking a few months to work on this book, I’ve set back the next Parker book by a similar amount of time, and I expect that I will be looking for a certain degree of indulgence from my editors when it comes to delivery dates later this year.

Nevertheless, it was important to me to work on this project. There was no way that I could start work on the next Parker book immediately after finishing the last one. I just didn’t want to, and I was finding it impossible to keep ideas for it straight in my head. At the same time, I didn’t want to not write. Time is too valuable, and there are all sorts of ideas that I’d dearly love to pursue. I’d feel guilty just sitting around, waiting for some set date to approach on which I’d promised myself I’d return to Parker, so instead it seemed appropriate to start something else.

The first result of this is that I have a clear head of sorts, and I’m about ready to start on the next mystery novel. The second result, and the bad news, is that I’ve had a near constant headache for three months, mainly because the focus on this other book has been so intense that it’s taken a bit of a toll, I think. Don’t get me wrong: I’ve enjoyed doing it, and even if it never appears in print the pleasure of it has been enough, but I seem always to be aware of a ticking clock somewhere in the background; or rather, a series of ticking clocks, each set to a different time, as the various demands and requests pile up.

There are invitations to festivals, some of them so far in the future that I’ll be able to travel to them by teleportation, or in a rocket ship, but I have to make a decision on my attendance NOW!; there are publishers looking for publicity tours, sometimes in different countries at the same time, so that along with teleportation I’m starting to take an avid interest in cloning; I promised to write an introduction for a book of short stories, and then found that the subject matter required something close to a thesis, which made my head hurt more; three requests for contributions to short story collections have come in already this year, even though I don’t really write many short stories, and anyway I’m already semi-committed to delivering a story to a collection by March, even if I haven’t written it yet; I’ve promised to write an essay for a book on Irish crime fiction, and I haven’t written that yet either; someone sends me an interview to be done by e-mail, with over 50 questions (e-mail interviews are one of the reasons that I curse the Internet, because essentially, if I agree to do one, I end up writing it myself; as a journalist, I tend to avoid them like a plague, as they’re an unfair imposition on the person being interviewed), yet he’s a nice guy, and I know I’ll end up doing up, but 50 questions is a lot; I have three books on quantum physics that I’m trying to read (don’t ask), and quantum physics is guaranteed to make my head hurt even more than it does already because of the odd book, and the thesis-type introduction . . .

And it’s still only January!

Then there’s the small matter of starting the next Parker book, which I’d rather like to do. For the first time, I’m very much inclined to take a year away from all of the ancillary stuff, and just write. After all, that’s what I’m supposed to be, isn’t it? A writer. And writers write. If there comes a point when the extraneous, associated things are taking too much of a toll on writing time, then that’s probably the point at which the writer needs to sit down and figure out some alternative arrangements. But the business of being a published writer has changed so much in the past decade that, increasingly, writing is only part of the job description, and the challenge is to find a way to keep all of these sometimes conflicting demands in, if not a perfect balance, then an imperfect balance that constantly threatens to fall apart around your ears but somehow does not.

Oh well. Even in the midst of all of this, I still occasionally take a moment and think, well, there’s nothing else that you’ve ever wanted to do more than be a writer, and you’re very fortunate to be doing it at all. And so, given the day that is in it as I write, with Barack Obama trying on various ties in order to pick just the right one for the occasion, it’s worth recalling, once again, James Thurber’s wonderful observation:

"There is, of course, a certain amount of drudgery in newspaper work, just as there is in teaching classes, tunnelling into a bank, or being President of the United States. I suppose that even the most pleasurable of imaginable occupations, that of batting baseballs through the windows of the RCA Building, would pall a little as the days ran on."

Now, it’s back to work for me . . .

This week John read

A Death In Vienna by Daniel Silva
The Damned United by David Peace
All The Dead Voices by Declan Hughes

and listened to

To Lose My Life by White Lies
Rocking Horse by Kelli Ali
Laughing Stock by Talk Talk

THE FINAL DAY

2008-11-24T12:39:00.000-08:00

The new book, THE LOVERS, has finally gone to my editors, and my agent, and it was only three days late which, under the circumstances (lost early sections; last minute rewrite; the insertion by hand, using gum and scissors, of sections of the Enochian alphabet), I consider to be quite an achievement.

Printing off the book always tends to be the most stressful part of the act of constructing a book, for a number of reasons. To begin with, as I've mentioned here before, I never print off the book until I'm ready to send it to my editors. Printing it off is, for me, an admission that, for now, I have done all I can with it. True, I could continue to rewrite until hell froze over, or until my publishers sent some big guys around to reclaim the furniture that I purchased with their advances, but the changes that I might make would become increasingly minor until, in the end, even I might cease to notice them, or to remember why it was so important to make those changes to begin with. When I begin to print off the book, it becomes a manuscript, rather than a potential manuscript, or a work-in-progress. Depending upon the responses of my editors, and my beloved agent, I may make further changes before the novel is sent to the printer, but these will be changes brought about by the actions of others. My feeling, at this point, is that I've probably done, if not everything possible to improve it, then nearly everything, and the best solution for everyone is probably just to let the book go and see what happens.

But that day of printing . . .

It began at 11.30 A.M., shortly after I'd returned from a pair of dental appointments, and concluded shortly after 1.30 A.M. the following morning, with one break to eat, and watch a little of the Ireland V Poland match. I suppose that I could have spread the process of printing the book off over a number of days, but for some reason I never manage to do that. It may be a hangover from journalism, and the urge to keep writing and changing right up until the deadline, in the hope that a burst of inspiration on the home straight might result in dramatic improvements to the text.

On a more practical level, though, it's also the first - and last - time, that I will ever go through the book, chapter by chapter, over the course of a single day. The intensity of that examination, although exhausting, means that I'm a little more aware of the need to catch inconsistencies, and I'm more likely to spot them if I'm reading the last chapter hours, rather than days, since I've read the first. In addition, the knowledge that the manuscript will be read by others for the first time occasionally spurs me on to solve minor problems that have nagged at me for a while, or simply recognize the existence of flaws that had, perhaps, eluded me before.

While printing off the middle section of THE LOVERS, I discovered one small detail that I suspected didn't quite gel with something I wrote in the first book, EVERY DEAD THING, more than a decade ago. I think that I'd been putting off returning to that first book simply because I find it difficult to go back over work that I have written years before. It's a bit like exposing oneself to one's youthful indiscretions, and the critic in me fears that I won't be able to forgive myself for failings, either real or imagined, in those books that I wrote when I was younger. Nevertheless, knowing that the manuscript would be sent off to my editors the following morning, I overcame those doubts, found (with some difficulty) the relevant section, and realized that changes would have to be made in light of it. Better to deal with them now rather than later, when the manuscript has been typeset, or, worse, to dismiss those concerns as unfounded and find, when the book has been published, that the whole delicate balance of the series has been undone by my lack of care.

I suspect that I also felt it was particularly important to get these details right for THE LOVERS, which delves so deeply into Parker's past, and which, if I've managed to do what I intended to do, sets up the series for what is to come later. It's a novel that pretty much puts its hands in the air and says, Look, these are not simply independent novels, but are coming together to form part of a larger whole, and some of the hard spadework for that attempt at unifying them is being done here. Meanwhile, the last chapter hints at a possible direction for the final book, and a character from one of the non-series novels makes a reappearance. All of that had to be done while permitting new readers to begin with THE LOVERS, if they chose, without alienating them entirely by giving them the uncomfortable sensation that they had arrived late to a party that had been going on for some time.

By 11 P.M ., I was sitting on the floor of my office, painstakingly cutting out small rectangular boxes, each containing symbols relevant to the book, and pasting them into the manuscript, since my word processing program steadfastly refused to allow me to transfer them directly on screen. I did that for three separate manuscripts - one each for my American and British editors, and one for my agent - before I realized that it might have been more sensible just to do all of those pages once, and then photocopy them three times before reinserting them into the printed manuscript, since I now fear that the symbols may come off when the manuscript is being photocopied and gum up my publishers' expensive photocopiers. (I'm not sure if my agent has an expensive photocopier. He doesn't seem like the sort. Anyway, I've never been to my agent's office, an admission that tends to surprise some people. It's not that he hasn't invited me; it's just that it's always seemed more civilized for us to meet over lunch, or a glass of wine. Anyway, I'm now superstitious about the whole matter. I'm afraid that, if I do visit, the building will fall down, or my career as a writer will come to a sudden end with everyone confessing that it was all a big mistake, and they'd meant to publish someone else with my name but had been too embarrassed to admit to their error until now . . .)

By midnight, my head was hurting, and I was struggling to keep on top of what I was doing. I was trying to paginate, and forgetting what page the last chapter had ended on. I had discovered that changes made to two early chapters had not been saved, for some reason, so I needed to go through them again while trying to remember what I had altered earlier in the week. The paper holder from my copier fell off and ended up behind my desk, which is against a wall and sits almost flush with the side walls, meaning that I had to shift the desk from side to side until I could lie on top of it and, with the aid of a ruler and a plastic folder, haul the paper holder up until I was able to reach it.

That took a while.

Then, when all the chapters were laid out on my office floor, I put the manuscripts together, making sure that I hadn't forgotten to print a chapter off, and that the pages all appeared to match. Finally, I went to bed, but as I was about to go to sleep I thought of three things that should be checked or changed, so I had to turn on the light again, find a pen and a piece of paper, and write a note to myself reminding me of what those things were when I woke up.

After that, I couldn't go to sleep.

But is was worth it, in the end, and not just because the manuscripts were printed and could be handed over to Peter at Postnet to be entrusted to the courier later that afternoon. It meant that I had one glorious, guilt-free day to myself: one day when I felt that I could breathe easy and do something frivolous, and not feel guilty about not working on the book; one day during which the book existed in a state of suspension, not being worked upon but not yet being judged, a secret thing that might be wonderful or might be awful, one that had not yet entered the next stage of its existence and become part of the editing and publishing process; one day spent wandering around bookstores, drinking coffee, reading a book for the sheer pleasure of it without the nagging feeling that this was time stolen from my own book; one day between the completion of one novel, and the commencement of another.

That's how long that state of bliss lasts: one day. It's the same with every book that I write. I get one day, and after that I start worrying, and feeling guilty again.

But that one day is a great one . . .

This week John read

Bleed a River Dry (uncorrected proof) by Brian McGilloway
Mad Dogs by James Grady

and listened to

Belle & Sebastian: The BBC Sessions
Ladyhawke by Ladyhawke
God Is An Astronaut by God Is An Astronaut
Car Alarm by The Sea and Cake

THE OLD ARGUMENT

2008-11-06T09:24:00.000-08:00

It strikes me that, as time goes on, the gap between these ‘weekly’ columns grows longer and longer. It’s not deliberate, I hasten to add; instead, it’s simply the case that I find I have less and less to say that I haven’t said already, and the time in which I have to say it grows shorter and shorter. There are books and stories to write (and books and stories to read), and I realize that some of those who glance at these occasional pieces might well feel the same way. I don’t want to waste their time with thoughts jotted down simply for the sake of it...

I’m writing this in an Italian restaurant in Portland, Maine. I’ve retreated to the city to finish revising THE LOVERS, as there are few distractions here, and I find it easier to slip into a routine in which writing and rewriting take up the bulk of my day. But, prior to arriving here, I spent a week doing a number of literary festivals in Canada, and it was an enlightening, if sometimes frustrating, experience.

For the most part, mystery writers tend to spend most of their time with other mystery writers. There are dedicated mystery conventions during which we can consort with like-minded souls, and even when we do venture into the more rarified atmosphere of literary festivals, we tend to be corralled with our own kind, which is unfortunate and reflects a tendency among festival organizers to assume that a) mystery fiction is of no interest to anyone other than hardcore devotees; and b) that mystery authors have nothing to add to larger discussions of literature and writing, due to general ignorance of anything beyond mystery fiction, and a lack of interest in anything other than who was murdered, and how.

Thus, the Canadian experience, although very pleasant in many ways (almost without exception, everyone involved in organizing these Candian festivals was unfailingly kind, polite and well-read, and I have rarely been treated better anywhere as a writer), also proved to be remarkably disheartening in others, if revealing of an attitude towards mystery writers and mystery fiction that some of us had hoped was largely a thing of the past.

1) At a literary salon – I know, I know, but I’d agreed to attend, and I am, if nothing else, a man of my word, most of the time - I listen as a young Canadian writer expresses the view that mystery fiction has no business being nominated for literary prizes on the grounds that, well, it just sells too many copies, and therefore mystery writers have no need of the acclaim and the (often modest) financial rewards that accompany such prizes. When I point out to him that such an argument would also exclude, say, Salman Rusdie from consideration for the Booker Prize, he smirks and responds: “But Rusdie wasn’t nominated for the Booker Prize this year…”

And everyone in the room laughs.

2) A fellow Irish author enquires how I go about constructing a mystery narrative, given that it requires the farming out of information at certain intervals. I reply that I don’t plan it at all, and instead the revelations in question occur in part both naturally in the course of the initial draft and are also subject to revision during the process of rewriting as the heart of the narrative gradually reveals itself. I make the point that it is no different from the way in which a literary author approaches a book, and note the fact that his own most recent novel depends upon a series of revelations about an act of startling violence that has occurred many years in the past, so the difference between our texts is hardly as significant as he might believe. He doesn’t even answer, but simply turns around and walks away, as if appalled that I might suggest any degree of commonality between us.

3) A British novelist, a first-time author, admits that he has never, until recently, read a mystery novel, but having read one he now understands the appeal of the genre. It’s like being on a rollercoaster, he suggests. It’s about excitement, and nothing more. He doesn’t tell the audience which particular mystery novel he has read, or why he considers it representative of a
genre of which, by his own admission, he knows nothing.

4) A young American novelist, one whom I can only hope was drunk at the time, commences a spectacularly ignorant attack on genre fiction. Even allowing for any possible intake of alcohol, she is quite stunningly rude. Her basic argument, if I understand it correctly, is that mystery fiction works according to a basic template: in her immortal words, “something happens ...”

Once I have managed to lock my jaw back into place, I try to follow her argument to its logical conclusion. If the criticism of mystery fiction is that something happens, then the defence of her particular brand of literary fiction must be that nothing happens. I try to recall the last time I enjoyed a narrative in which nothing happened, and, eventually, admit failure. Even Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (a play of which it was famously remarked that nothing happens – twice) is full of incident, and that is as close as I can get to an apparently uneventful narrative that works.

Before I can raise this point, an individual involved at the highest level with the organization of the festival in question intervenes. He is someone whom I rather like, but as I listen to what he has to say I have to make a conscious effort to separate the individual from his words. He posits that mystery fiction is inferior to literary fiction because literary writers “hone” their work. They fret about it, reworking it time and time again, whereas genre writers simply churn out novels. With each book, literary writers are forced to reinvent the wheel, discarding all that went before in favor of an entirely new construct. They are original, while genre writers are essentially imitative.

Eventually, I just give up and go to bed. Life, I feel, is far too short, and I've heard so much of this before. The tension between literary and genre fiction, however spurious those labels may be, will continue not only long after I go to bed on such occasions, but probably long after I'm dead, too.

Which brings us back to Maine, and an Italian restaurant. Today, I have spent seven hours working on the draft of THE LOVERS. I will do the same tomorrow, and the next day, and the next day. To give myself a break, I have begun writing something else, but my concentration upon this second book is not complete. Even when I am not working on THE LOVERS, it seems to occupy the bulk of my time. I am now on my sixth start-to-finish draft of the book. Before it reaches my publishers, I anticipate that I will have gone through it twice more. Even after it reaches them, I will act upon the suggestions of both my British and American editors (two more drafts); I will read the copy edited manuscript, and make changes there (one draft); and I will make the final changes to the typeset work, even if I have to pay for the resetting of the alterations myself, when it is eventually presented to me (the final draft).

I make that twelve drafts. By any stretch of the imagination, I think that counts as honing my work, and I will do so beset by all of the doubts about its worth that, I assume, trouble my literary colleagues. I manage to fit all of these drafts into one year (the original starting point for that unfortunate discussion about the value of genre v literary fiction) because, quite frankly, I work hard. I come from a journalistic background, and I believe that art and craft are not mutually exclusive. One works at one’s craft, and one hopes that, along the way, art may possibly emerge. Even if it does not, one can still take pride in the fact that one has done one’s best.

So to hell with all of the rest. When THE LOVERS eventually appears, I will know that I have done my best, despite its inevitable flaws. And I will learn from those mistakes, and I will apply what I have learned to what I do next. I know that I value what I do as much as any literary writers, and I put my heart and soul into it, just as much as they do.

And besides, I’ll probably sell more copies than most of those writers will anyway, even if it does render me ineligible for prizes in the new world order being planned by Canadians . . .

This week John read

The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga

and listened to

Still Crooked by Crooked Still
Shrink by The Notwist
Cardinology by Ryan Adams

On Books, and Being a Blurb Whore

2008-10-02T14:27:00.000-07:00

Every month, the English novelist Nick Hornby produces a very wonderful column entitled “Stuff I’ve Been Reading” for The Believer magazine. (The columns have been collected in an anthology entitled The Polysyllabic Spree, and it really is worth seeking out if you have any fondness at all for books and reading.) Anyway, Hornby routinely starts his column with a list of books bought and books read each month, with the former always exceeding the latter by some degree.

It’s the book lover’s dilemma in a nutshell, really: there are so many books, and so many new ones being published each week, yet there is only so much time in which to read them. Recently, one of my friends vowed that he was going to stop buying books entirely until he had read all of the ones on his shelves, an ambition at once both entirely logical yet also rather sad, as well as being rather impractical if one is a true reader with enough money in one’s pocket to be able to afford the odd book. I can’t even walk past a bookstore without browsing, a particular curse for me as walking, or even catching the bus, from my gym to home requires me to pass at least four bookstores along the way. This week alone I’ve bought four books, or one for every bookstore. I’ve managed to read one that was already on my shelves (Death By Leisure by Chris Ayres, a kind of prequel to War Reporting for Cowards, but not really as good and, less forgivably, bedevilled by so many typos that one wonders if anyone bothered to read the book at all after it had been typeset, or if the job was simply delegated to the nearest passing child. Actually, I suspect that a passing child would have done a better job, or would at least have been more conscientious about doing it.) and have now started on a second, J.G. Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur, which won the Booker in 1973 and, according to many critics and commentators, might well be worthier of the recent ‘Best of Booker’ title than the actual winner, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. I’m halfway through Farrell’s novel, and it is very good indeed.

What you will notice about both of these books is that neither is a mystery. In addition, I bought them with my own money, which is something that occasionally elicits an expression of surprise from the booksellers who recognise me as I pay for stuff and, indeed, from my own publishers, who are always offering to send me things. The problem is that I’m less inclined to read something that I haven’t bought, or chosen, for myself. It’s almost as if, by spending money on the book, I’ve already begun the process of reading it. I’ve made a financial commitment to the book, which will be followed by a similar commitment of time and concentration. Free books just don’t do it for me in the same way. Don’t get me wrong: it’s lovely to receive them, and occasionally I’ll be sent an advance copy of a book that I’ve really been looking forward to reading, but it’s still not quite the same as choosing a book from the shelf of a store, bringing it to the counter, and then paying for it. Even purchasing books online doesn’t match that satisfaction.

Which brings us to a related issue. While I bought four books this week (not counting two research books for The Lovers, which has reached the stage where I’m filling in little historical details that require me to read huge historical tomes, an imbalance that I’ve never quite been able to work out) I also received three more in the mail. All of them were novels seeking approving quotes, or ‘blurbs’, for their covers. One of them was unsolicited and came from a publisher, and the other two were manuscripts, only one of which I could remember agreeing to read. Over the last month I’ve blurbed two books, I think, although it might be three, and I’ve been asked to consider two more. The more books that one blurbs, the more one is perceived as someone who blurbs books, and therefore the more books one will receive looking for blurbs. It’s a vicious circle. Eventually, if one isn’t careful, one gets the reputation of being a ‘blurb whore’, which is less financially rewarding than being a real whore and starts to appear a little self-serving, as though having one’s name on one’s own books isn’t enough and one now needs to have them on other people’s too.

In addition, I only ever seem to be asked to blurb mysteries. It’s not surprising, really, given that’s what I’m best known for writing. Occasionally, someone will send me something that isn’t a mystery, and it’s like manna from heaven, but those books are comparatively rare. As far as publishers and other authors are concerned, it’s mysteries all the way for me.

But mysteries aren’t the only books that I read. In fact, horror of horrors, mysteries are the exception rather than the rule for me now. Oh, there are mystery writers whose books I love, and I’ll seek those out as soon as they’re published, but I like to read non-fiction too, and, for want of a better term, literary fiction, and most of my reading is comprised of books from those categories. I’ve also just spent two weeks reading only mysteries, as I was interviewing two mystery authors and reviewing a new book by a third. I’m mysteried out. Hand me a mystery now and my eyes will glaze over. My toes will turn up. I don’t want to read any more for a while. I can’t do it.

It’s a stupid complaint, right? After all, being asked to read books is no great burden. And yet, when reading becomes a chore, something is terribly wrong. I’ve come to realise that, if I allow it to be the case, I might spend most of my time reading nothing but new or forthcoming mysteries, and all of those other fascinating books on my shelves, both old and recent, will start to move out of reach. It’s just the nature of things: I’m more likely to read new books, the ones that are fresh in my memory, than the ones I bought a year ago or, worse, a decade ago. But I want to read those older books too. I chose them. I wanted them on my shelves, and I wanted them to be read. I made that commitment to them and, in a strange way, I don’t want to renege upon it.

And so, for the next couple of weeks, I’m going to treat myself a little. I’m going to read only my books, the books that I chose and for which I paid, and nothing else. I’m going to read obscure film books, and a couple of Penguin Classics, and Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim, which I should have read in college but never did. And I’m going to finish The Siege of Krishnapur, but not too quickly, because I’m enjoying it and I want to make it last for a while.

It’s a luxury, I know, but a small one.

And it’s the small luxuries that make life liveable.

This week John read

Doors Open by Ian Rankin
Death by Leisure by Chris Ayres
and will finish The Siege of Krishnapur by J.G. Farrell

and listened to

The Hawk is Howling by Mogwai
Dear Science by TV On The Radio
Way to Normal by Ben Folds

THE LOVERS

2008-09-01T10:13:00.000-07:00

As of today, I am 24 chapters into the latest draft of THE LOVERS, the Charlie Parker book that will, with luck, be published next year. It's always a slow process for me, this act of rewriting. I tend to limit myself to one chapter each day, even as I am aware that the clock is ticking and my delivery date is looming. If I work faster, I skim the material. One chapter a day is the most that I can do while still maintaining concentration. At the moment, I'm trying to make sure that there are no gaps in the narrative (or rather that I'm aware of the gaps that do exist, and can work to plug them on the next draft), while also adding texture to characters and scenes that were sketched instead of fully drawn in the earlier drafts. I like this part of the writing process, even if my progress is frustratingly slow. This is the book coming together, flawed and incomplete yet moving gradually toward something that will ultimately, I hope, be less flawed.

I'm also trying to get a handle on what kind of book THE LOVERS is. In a recent interview, I said that each book I write seems to be a reaction to the one that preceded it, and I suppose that's true of THE LOVERS. Where THE REAPERS was fast and linear, with a very straightforward narrative, THE LOVERS is more complex, more allusive. A lot of it concerns events that have happened in the past, and a large part of the second half is taken up with one character revealing, over the course of a single evening, the truth behind the death of Parker's father. I want to see if I can retain the reader's interest by juggling the desire to find out 'what happens next' with gradual revelations about what has gone before.

In THE LOVERS, Parker is working in a bar in Portland, as he no longer has a PI's license. (The bar, incidentally, really exists. It's called The Great Lost Bear and maybe, when the book is eventually published, it might be fun to have an event there.) Parker uses his enforced retirement from the PI business to begin a different kind of investigation: an examination of his own past and an inquiry into the death of his father, who killed himself after apparently shooting dead two unarmed teenagers, an investigation that eventually leads to revelations about his own parentage.

Meanwhile, a troubled young woman appears to be running from an unseen threat, one that has already taken the life of her boyfriend, and a journalist-turned-writer named Mickey Wallace is conducting his own investigation into Charlie Parker in the hope of writing a non-fiction book about his exploits. And, haunting the shadows, as they have done throughout Parker's life, are two figures: a man and a woman, the lovers of the title, who seem to have only one purpose, and that is to bring an end to his existence. Eventually, the lives of all these individuals will intersect. At least, I hope that they will. That's where the rewriting comes in.

The plan is to have the new draft finished by the end of this week, and then I'll take a couple of days to do some other stuff. I've agreed to write a regular column for a South African called Something Wicked, mainly because I like the guy who edits it, and he's agreed to pay me in beer next time I'm in the country. I have a short story to write for The Irish Times, to be delivered at the end of September, and I've also agreed to do at least one interview with another writer for the paper. After that, I travel to the US and Canada to do three festivals (Toronto, Calgary, and Vancouver) and Bouchercon in Baltimore, and while I'm on the road I'll keep working on THE LOVERS, fitting in some final interviews with the professionals who have been helping me with my research. All things going well, THE LOVERS will be delivered at the start of November.

Then I'll just have to figure out what to do next . . .

This week John read

Gentlemen of the Road by Michael Chabon

Christopher's Ghosts by by Charles McCarry

and listened to

The Lady and the Unicorn by John Renbourn

Lay It Down by Al Green

The Week That Was by The Week That Was

When One Is Not Enough

2008-07-28T15:01:00.000-07:00

It's good to be home. I had almost forgotten what my desk looks like after being away from it for so long, and now I can get back into some kind of routine and complete work on The Lovers. The demands of touring and publicity seem to take increasing amounts of writing time away from me, and already I'm being asked about my plans for next March, which tends to bring out the Irish fatalist in me. ("March? I might be dead by March . . .")

Perhaps it's because I'm so aware of time, and the relative lack of it, that I was struck by comments made recently by a fellow writer, one whom I like and admire a great deal but with whom I differ occasionally, as writers will, on our approaches to what we do. Since his readers were asking for two books a year, he said, this was what he was going to give them. Ask, it seems, and thou shalt receive.

(By contrast, Terry Pratchett was interviewed in the latest issue of the quarterly magazine of the book chain Waterstones, and he commented that the worst thing an author can do is give his readers what they want, since a lot of readers, like a lot of people, generally want the same thing that they got last time. That's fine if you're McDonald's, or Starbucks, but doing the same thing over and over, even with slight variations, tends to result in the slow death of genuine creativity. Anyway, that threatens to move us into slightly different territory, and doesn't apply anyway in this case since we're not talking about repetition but responding to the demands of readers, yet since I read both statements in the same week the sound they made as they collided is still ringing in my ears as I write.)

What interested me about the 'two books in one year' approach was that it seems to be a growing trend in mystery fiction, and a worrying one. Then again, it may simply be the case that because I can't do it, I wonder how anyone else can do it, which may be a fallacious approach to an argument. After all, I can't juggle either, or not terribly well, but I can appreciate a juggler's skill, even if I still don't quite understand how he or she manages not to drop the balls on the ground.

But this isn't juggling: this is writing. As things stand, I can just about manage to write a book annually, in between touring, additional publicity, and the not unimportant pastime of simply having a life. I do write relatively slowly, I suppose. I'm happy with 1000 words each day, although I sometimes write more, but let's call it 5-6000 words each week, just for the sake of argument. My first draft will probably clock in at somewhere between 80 - 100,000 words, and then I write up, rather than down, elaborating on scenes, characters, and dialogue. Resting on the belief that there are no great writers, just great rewriters (or even no adequate writers, just committed rewriters) I keep going over the manuscript from start to finish until I'm reasonably happy to show it to another human being. That process of editing and rewriting is the difference between a book and a draft. I believe that the more rewriting that is done, the better the book will be. And I don't just believe that about my books. I think it's true of every book.

It doesn't take a genius in mathematics to figure out that, if two books a year are being written by the same person, then the time available for each is considerably less than it would be if the writer were simply writing one book annually. It's not halved, exactly, since most writers probably do spend a certain amount of time pfaffing about, and can probably find a little more time to write by cutting down on the hours spent not actually writing. And yet I don't believe that's a good thing either. A lot of writing, or at least the preparation for writing, is done when the writer is not at a desk. Crucial elements of a book, in my experience, often come together in the spaces between the actual physical act of typing it out. It's that time that will be sacrificed in the writing of additional books.

More to the point, there will be less time to edit, fewer days to leave the latest draft to stew on the back burner. I think it was Hemingway who suggested that a writer should place a manuscript in a box when it was completed and not look at it for a year. Increasingly, though, there are barely enough hours to put the manuscript in a box and leave it overnight before mailing it to the publisher. There will also be less time for the editor to consider the version of the book that is finally delivered. The pressure on the publisher - even if it's a welcome pressure, since a second book in a year by a successful writer will do wonders for the publisher's bank balance - increases. The whole process accelerates, to the detriment, I can't help but feel, of the finished novel.

Those who seek to defend such profligacy might point to Dickens, or Trollope, or even, if they're really without shame, Shakespeare, who were no shirkers when it came to churning out manuscripts. The simple answer, as in most such situations where their names are mentioned, is that most of us are not in that league. In fact, when it comes to Dickens and Shakespeare in particular, nobody is, and it's unlikely that anyone will ever be again.

At the other end of the scale, the prolific in our genre might point to the pulp writers of the twenties and thirties, who produced huge amounts of work on a weekly basis. Fine. Name them. More particularly, name the ones who are still in print, whose books and stories have survived, whose tales are regarded as significant or valuable, who are, not to put too fine a point on it, still widely read. In general, when it comes to writing, quantity is inversely proportionate both to quality and longevity. The exceptions are precisely that: exceptions. There is no rule to be proved by them, because they tend to be exceptional in many other ways too. That's not to say that a writer will not, occasionally, be able to produce two works of quality in a short period of time. We may, if we're lucky, be struck by flashes of inspiration. We will sometimes have burst of energy and creativity that astonish even ourselves, but that's all they are: bursts. By their nature, they can't be sustained.

Mystery writers in particular are already regarded as prolific, given the widespread expectation of a book a year among readers and publishers, and a certain element of peer pressure; after all, if one's fellow writers are producing a book a year, then one's instinct is to keep up with the pack. The prolific nature of the genre's practitioners is probably one of the reasons why it has always struggled to achieve the kind of critical approval given to literary fiction whose practitioners tend, by their nature, to produce fewer books.

Increasingly, though, there does seem to be an additional subtle pressure on mystery writers to increase output. It comes from readers, to a degree, as is clear from the response of the writer mentioned in the first paragraph. There is the historical precedent, based on those early writers who were paid, in many cases, by the word or by the story, and were paid poorly. One might also point to the example of, say, James Patterson - although there arises in his case the distinction between someone who is intimately involved in the process of producing a book, and the physical act of writing every word of it - or a writer like Tom Clancy, who effectively licenses his name so that others can do the manual labour. The question of authorship becomes blurred in such cases, and deliberately so, sometimes to an absurd extreme. How many readers, one wonders, still believe that Virginia Andrews is alive and writing in an attic somewhere? What is the connection, apart from the Bourne brand, between the late Robert Ludlum and the books now being produced with Ludlum's name rendered conspicuously large upon the cover?

Financial issues also arise. After all, most writers don't make a great deal of money from their work, and many support themselves with a regular job. Two books means twice the income. Then again, if someone is holding down a regular job, the task of writing even one book a year, and editing it properly, is likely to be difficult. The natural conclusion, then, is that one needs to be a full-time writer to produce more than a book each year, if one is to do it even reasonably well, and if you're a full-time writer then you probably don't need the money that much. Don't get me wrong: everybody needs money, and everybody would like a little more than they have. Some people just need it more than others, that's all.

But, as I've said already, it may be that, because I really do have to put a great effort into sticking to that target of a book each year and meeting the other demands on my time, I expect others to struggle too. Every writer is different, and I may just be among the slower, or more painstaking, of the pack when it comes to creating a book. For someone with more discipline than I have, or with greater talent or tenacity - and all three qualities apply to the author who made the statement that sparked this column - two books a year may not be such a great burden.

But three books a year? Four? It's being done by some, but at what price in terms of quality? Can a writer producing three or four books each year really be delivering little more than a first draft? Questions, questions. Which reminds me: I have a book to write.

Slowly.

This week John read

Phantom Prey by John Sandford
Night by Elie Wiesel
The Last Hero by Terry Pratchett

and listened to

Pacific Ocean Blue by Dennis Wilson
Fleet Foxes by Fleet Foxes

A Work of Incandescent Beauty

2008-06-13T14:58:00.000-07:00

Greetings from sunny Albuquerque, New Mexico, and the most difficult part of the current jaunt: four flights in four days, each of them early in the morning, and each taking me to places that are a little warmer than I might prefer. Nevertheless, today is an easier day than most: three bookstores in the city visited, and now a little time to catch up on e-mail, drink coffee, and watch the world go by while I, for a moment, stay in one place.

I've been trying to resist buying CDs as I go, mainly because my check-in bag weighs exactly 49.5 lbs at the moment, and I've jammed as much stuff as I can into my carry on luggage without doing myself an injury. Still, one CD hasn't been far from me since I picked up a promo copy a couple of weeks ago, and the more I listen to it, the more I think that it may well be one of the finest albums released so far this century.

The album is called To Survive, and it's the work of Joan Wasser, who records under the name Joan as Police Woman. Wasser was the violinist with Anthony and the Johnsons (and was the late Jeff Buckley's lover). Her debut album, Real Life, was very fine indeed, but To Survive is an incredible leap forward, reminiscent of the best of Laura Nyro, Joni Mitchell and the cream of the 1970's female singer-songwriters. From its first song, "Honor Wishes", through the haunting strings and heartbreaking restraint of the title track, to the ambiguities of "To America", the final song, it is almost without flaw; or, rather, what flaws there are are intensely human, and add to the beauty of the work rather than detract from it.

Quite simply, Wasser's album makes the work of most of her peers seem rather mundane by comparison. If there is any justice in the world, it will become a huge word-of-mouth success. I plan to contribute, in my small way, by pressing as many copies of it as possible on friends and strangers. Buy it. I'd say that you won't be disappointed, but that would be selling this wonderful album short. Better to say that your life will be a little richer for having heard it.

This week John read

Six Days of the Condor by James Grady

Lords of the Bow by Conn Iggulden

and listened to

To Survive by Joan as Police Woman

On Nostalgia

2008-05-16T15:06:00.000-07:00

Let me start by saying that I'm not proud of myself for what I've done. In retrospect, it was the wrong thing, but I couldn't help myself. I'm a man, and I have needs. There was a woman involved, of course. In these kinds of confessions, there always is. She was blonde, and I'd always believed that she was unattainable, but suddenly she was unattainable no longer. I could own her. I could possess her. She would be mine, and nobody could ever take her away from me again. So I stifled my doubts and my qualms. I smothered my feelings of guilt. I suspected that there would be regrets, but I was prepared to take my chances. To hell with common sense. Chances like this didn't come along every day.

So I paid my money, and I bought a box set of The New Avengers, starring Joanna Lumley.

For those of you too young to remember, or too old to care, The New Avengers was shown on ITV between 1976 and 1977 , and starred Patrick Macnee, the aforementioned Ms Lumley, and a clothes horse named Gareth Hunt, who was charming but wooden, like a primitive children's toy. It was an updated version of a 60's show named The Avengers, hence the cunning inclusion of the word 'New' to denote all that was flash and modern about the 1970s: flared suit trousers; Ford Capris; male perms; legwarmers . . .

The New Avengers wasn't very good, even in the 1970s, and it hasn't improved terribly with age. It had a budget so limited that the crew probably packed their own sandwiches before they came to work, which might explain why Joanna Lumley spent its two series wearing a minimum of clothing. ("Sorry, Joanna, but money's tight so it's the short skirt and bare legs combo again. Mind the snow, love . . .") The best thing about the show was the theme tune, all brass and wah-wah guitars, but then that's true of just about every 70's cop show one cares to mention.

I knew, even as I forked out my O40, that The New Avengers wasn't going to be much cop, so why did I buy it? Well, to begin with there was Joanna Lumley who, along with Elizabeth Sladen (Sarah Jane Smith to Tom Baker's Doctor Who), caused peculiar, and possibly inappropriate, sensations to erupt in my pre-adolescent body. Mummy, the lady makes me feel funny . . .

Then again, it may be the same impulse that caused me to buy Dusty's Trail on DVD, a show that reunited the cast of the bewilderingly popular US TV hit Gilligan's Island to slightly less amusing effect, which is like saying that a fire in an orphanage is funnier than a child's open grave, and was a staple of RTE's afternoon schedule when I was a child. It might also explain why my shelves groan beneath DVDs of Doctor Who from the 1970s (even the ones without Elizabeth Sladen), Michael Bentine's Potty Time, Willo The Wisp, and the original three series of Star Trek. They betray my deep-seated desire to recapture something of my youth by viewing again the TV shows associated with that time in my life, as though, by immersing myself in them, I can somehow regain other elements of my lost childhood: innocence, optimism, and a sense of wonder that could not be shaken by dodgy set design and cardboard monsters.

As my fortieth birthday looms, I realise that I have become a prime target for the nostalgia market. I can no longer describe myself as 'young' without being guilty of massaging the truth to an unconscionable degree. When I visit my doctor for an annual check-up, he is obliged to rummage in orifices where, in the manner of Star Trek, no man had gone before, at least until quite recently. I wonder if my jeans are too tight for a chap of my age, and if it's a bit sad of me to wear Converse sneakers or shop in clothes stores where all of the assistants are two decades younger than I am. I listen to the music of the 1980s, and try - and fail - to justify having Howard Jones alongside . . . And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead on my iPod.

As the world moves relentlessly forward, I find myself retreating further into the past. I still buy new music, and read new books. I watch new TV shows, and I go to see new films, but my heart, like that of a man who always hankers after his first girlfriend, is lost to earlier loves, even if I have given them a stature that they do not fully deserve. The New Avengers is less important, then, for what it is than for what it represents, and even in all its naffness I find myself willing to forgive it a great deal. The past may be another country, but I can still visit occasionally.

And, for the record, Joanna Lumley still makes me feel funny.

This week John read
The Price of Blood/ The Dying Breed by Declan Hughes

and listened to

Here Is What Is by Daniel Lanois
Narrow Stairs by Death Cab For Cutie

On THE CHILL by Ross Macdonald

2008-04-28T22:26:00.000-07:00

Ross Macdonald, or Kenneth Millar, to give him his true name, described The Chill (1963) as having "my most horrible plot yet". It is, in many ways, an angry, haunted book into which he channeled his unhappiness at the time: disappointment at his best friend's divorce; his inability to get his book on Coleridge published; his dissatisfaction with academia; and his hurt at comments made about him by Raymond Chandler.

Chandler's presence has fallen like a shadow over Macdonald's posthumous reputation in much the same way that it did while he was alive. Chandler, the older writer, clearly saw Macdonald as a rival, and did his very best to belittle the younger novelist whenever possible, not recognizing that Macdonald was part of a progression, drawing on Chandler to create something new and move the genre forward, just as Chandler had earlier drawn on Hammett. After Chandler's death, Macdonald became aware of letters against him that Chandler had written, including one to James Sandoe published as part of Raymond Chandler Speaking that described Macdonald as a "literary eunuch" and criticised the "pretentiousness" of his phrasing. It's unlikely that Chandler would have been quite so vituperative had he not felt threatened both by Macdonald's writing and the critical acclaim he was receiving. (I would argue that Macdonald was the better novelist of the two, and certainly the better plotter. Chandler's rather haphazard approach to plotting is generally excused on the basis that he was more interested in character than plot, but that is to ignore the fact that it is not an either/ or relationship between the two elements. Or, as Macdonald once said: "I see plot as a vehicle for meaning.")

Macdonald/ Millar was born in Los Gatos, California in 1915, but was raised in Ontario, Canada. His father abandoned the family when Macdonald was young, leading to an itinerant early life spent living with his mother and various relatives. This probably explains something of his fascination with issues of family and domesticity in his novels, especially the prevalence of troubled young men. (Later in life, his own daughter, his only child, would prove to be similarly troubled, and he was cursed to outlive both her and his grandson.) The first full-length Lew Archer novel, The Moving Target, was published in 1949, but it would be fair to say that Macdonald initially viewed his mystery novels as a way to earn money and be published while he prepared to write a more literary novel about familial strife. It was probably only with the publication of The Galton Case in 1959 that Macdonald realised the Archer novels would enable him to pursue the themes that interested him the most, and were thus destined to be the body of work upon which his reputation would rest. Macdonald died in 1983, almost certainly of Alzheimer's Disease. One of the most moving moments in Tom Nolan's excellent biography of the writer sees Macdonald, his mind failing, struggling to use his typewriter, and being able to type only the word "broken" over and over again.

Originally entitled A Mess of Shadows, from a line in the W.B. Yeats poem, "Among School Children", The Chill takes some of its structure and imagery from Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner": a sad story told by a character seeking release and deliverance; a mist-shrouded environment; and the death of a bird, in this case a pigeon rather than an albatross.

Like all of Macdonald's work, this is a novel obsessed with the impact of the past upon the present. As Archer tells Mrs. Hoffman, "History is always connected to the present." Again and again, we are reminded of the resonance of old acts. Dr. Godwin's voice is "like the whispering ghost of the past". In Alice's house, Archer thinks that he looks like "a ghost from the present haunting a bloody moment in the past". And, in a wonderful image, Archer describes the questions raised by Mrs. Delaney as sticking "in my mind like fishhooks which trailed their broken lines into the past".

I would describe this book as a 'nearly perfect' crime novel, although this implies that Macdonald erred in some way in its creation. I don't think that's true. Its imperfections are deliberate, a testament to Macdonald's courage as a writer and his absolute refusal to fall back on sentimentality. While Alex Kincaid is another of Macdonald's troubled young men, tainted by the actions of an earlier generation, he is also something of a jerk, and it's difficult to feel a great deal of sympathy for him. By contrast, Macdonald kills off one of the book's most attractive characters disturbingly early, and in doing so accentuates the horror of the murderous figure that stalks the novel.

Arguably, Macdonald is the first great psychological novelist that the genre produced. While Chandler tends to look for sociological explanations, Macdonald instead looks inward at the dynamics of families, and in particular the wrong done to children, especially by overprotective mother figures. In this sense, The Chill falls into a group of Macdonald's books that touch upon Oedipal nightmares.

And then there is Lew Archer himself. He remains one of the most enigmatic of detectives. Throughout the series, we learn almost nothing about his past, apart from the fact that he was once married, which gives him a sense of loneliness and dislocation. We are offered few, if any, of the little day-to-day details of his existence which have become the stock-in-trade of the modern detective hero: no cute sidekicks, no dogs, no quirky tastes in opera or cars. For Macdonald, such elements would have served only as a distraction from the central fact of Archer's existence: he is a profoundly moral being, with a near-limitless capacity for pity and empathy. He is neither as tough, nor as cynical, as Chandler's Philip Marlowe. In The Barbarous Coast (1956), Archer notes: "The problem was to love people, to serve them, without wanting anything from them." It is an extraordinary statement of intent, perhaps even more so now than it was over fifty years ago. In many ways, the society that he inhabits is unworthy of Archer, although he never sees himself in those terms. He is not self-interested. Instead, his interest is directed at the lives of others in an attempt both to understand their actions and undo the harm that has been done to them by others. His innate goodness may explain some of the hostility that has been directed toward him by subsequent critics and writers who mistake cynicism for realism, and confuse sentimentality with genuine emotion.

I chose this novel to start the Book Club on my website for a number of reasons. First of all, there's Macdonald's huge influence on me as a writer, and Archer's influence on the creation of Charlie Parker. I would not be the novelist that I am without the influence of Macdonald.

But I also chose it because I think it is one of the great American mystery novels, worthy to stand alongside the best of Chandler, Hammett, Highsmith, or any other mystery writer that one cares to name, with a killer twist at the end almost unequalled in the genre. Others may argue for The Galton Case, or The Underground Man, or The Doomsters as the apogee of Macdonald's work. I think they're wrong. The Chill is the finest jewel in Macdonald's crown.

Flashbacks

2008-04-14T12:17:00.000-07:00

First of all, thank you to all those who offered suggestions as to how I might retrieve the chapters of The Lovers that I accidentally overwrote last month. Unfortunately - or fortunately, depending upon how one looks at it - I only managed to retrieve two. Curiously, this was something of an anticlimax, as I'd already begun to rewrite the lost material, and part of me didn't want the older stuff back. It was gone, and I had resigned myself to it. It was a bit like keeping a bedside vigil on a terminally ill relative, and then finding that they hadn't died after all but insisted on clinging on to life, even after everyone else had progressed from worrying about them, to grieving for them, and, finally, to getting on with life.

In the process of attempting to retrieve the lost files, the programme that I used was obliged to dig up all sorts of stuff that I thought was long gone. As none of the files had a name, I had to open each one and examine the contents in order to discover if it contained the material that I was looking for. I found sections of old books, early drafts containing characters whose names subsequently changed, or who ultimately simply disappeared from the finished narrative. There were chapters-in-progress, false starts, even part of a chapter from a children's book that I started once and then never quite got around to finishing. Oddly, there were few deletions, a consequence of the way that I write, where each draft builds on the next in a slow accretion of detail. Still, it was, in a strange way, a kind of alternate history of the last ten years, a junkpile of might-have-beens.

I've spent a lot of the last two weeks dealing with the past of the novels, now that I think of it. File retrieval apart, I put together a 5,000 word piece on the origins of Parker and the novels, which may be published by Otto Penzler of the Mysterious Bookstore in New York as part of an ongoing series. It was appropriate to do it now, I think, as the publication of the tenth book approaches. Ten books. Ten years of being published. I'll be 40 next month. Lots of anniversaries with a zero at the end of them.

So, with that in mind, thanks to all of you who have supported my work over the past decade. I'm very grateful.

By the way, did I mention that I met Kevin Costner last week? Well, I did.
But that's another story . . .

This week John read

Wolf of the Plains by Conn Iggulden
The Devil's Guide to Hollywood: The Screenwriter as God by Joe Eszterhaus
AIiens by Bryan Appleyard

and listened to

Oracular Spectacular by MGMT
It's a Shame About Ray (Collector's Edition) by The Lemonheads
Rosemarie by Thistletown

HELL

2008-03-22T08:48:00.001-07:00

While computers have done a great deal to make a writer's life easier, there is one way in which words on a screen can never improve on paper. Barring a fire, or a careless spring clean of a room, words on paper can't be easily lost. But words on a screen are only one mouse click away from oblivion.

Yesterday, I began transferring, from laptop to desktop, the work on The Lovers that I had done in the US. The delay in the transfer was due to travel, and the completion of my office, in which I am, or was, happily established. I had about 25,000 words from the US, and before I left I'd managed to get about 30,000 done on my desktop. Due to the vagaries of builders, painters, and assorted other distractions, I'd failed to back them up.

I know, I know. My fault, right? I always back up what I write, but moving house tends to result in routines falling by the wayside. I've been struggling to find my feet, let alone a place to work, in the new house. I think I was just glad to be getting any work at all done while strange men were trooping through equally strange rooms.

So yesterday, in my nice little office space, I transferred one file marked 'The Lovers' to my desktop and, when asked if I wanted to replace the older file with the same title, I immediately clicked 'OK'.

Bang. 30,000 words gone. The prologue, the first five chapters, all gone. As I write this, I'm sitting in a state of near shock. That's three months of hard grind down the drain, and I've undone all that I managed to achieve in the US. A frantic call to the nice, clever computer man who services my Mac gave no joy: I'd overwritten the files, not deleted them. They're gone, and they're not coming back.

This is the first time that I've ever lost so much work. It's beyond frustrating. I was on target to complete the book in October, allowing for time spent touring The Reapers, and now I'm not. I'm not sure that I can even remember what I wrote: I can recall characters and situations, but not the dialogue. The prologue was good, I felt, and a long encounter between a girl and the parents of her murdered boyfriend was moving and more than a little eerie, but trying to reproduce it exactly will be like trying to snatch at smoke. Right now, I want to bang my head against the wall. It's my own stupidity that's caused this to happen.

So what to do? Start again, that's what. Open a new file, entitle it 'Prologue', and begin writing.

And yet that's so much easier said than done.

Damn. Damn, damn, damn . . .

THE BLACK BOOK

2008-02-21T11:26:00.000-08:00

I'm in a rented apartment in Maine, trying to get some work done on THE LOVERS before returning to Europe and the various commitments that will keep from writing as much as I might wish during the weeks to come. Beside me is a small black notebook, a Moleskinne, one of those little hardback jobs witha pocket at the back. It's the latest in a line of such notebooks dating, I think, back to DARK HOLLOW, when it began to seem like a good idea to have something easily transportable into which I could jot notes for the novel in hand. Although it has only been in use since the start of the month, it already includes:

1) Twenty pages of interview notes from a conversation with a former NYPD cop whoused to work the 9th Precinct, an area that will play a crucial role in the next novel. He was extraordinarily helpful, so much so that I'm hoping to pick his brains at least once more before I deliver the book. My only regret is that I didn't have my little tape recorder with me to capture the rhythms of his speech. Next time, maybe. The pocket at the back of the book also includes a map of the precinct in question, drawn on a bar napkin, as well as three newspaper articles concerning, respectively, cars, Jews, and Peruvian death squads.

2) My own initial notes from a walk through Alphabet City, including the first of many poorly drawn maps in my own hand, this time of the area around Tompkin's Square Park. There's also a written description of the 9th's precinct house, and some details of the menu from a nearby Greek restaurant, as well as casual observations jotted down in almost illegible script. Someone once suggested to me that I should use a little recorder for myself, but I'd feel like an idiot walking down the street and talking into a metal object. I don't even use Bluetooth on the grounds that, when I was growing up, the sure sign of a lunatic was someone who talked to himself on the street; that, and tying a coat with string. Now everyone seems to be talking to themselves while walking down the street. I don't want to add to the confusion. Incidentally, I do not tie my coat with string. Yet.

3) More poorly drawn maps and scribbled notes, this time concerning Pearl River in New York. Pearl River is very Irish indeed. Being born there may well entitle one to play for the Irish football team. Even standing still for too long may affect one's nationality.

4) Various plot notes, some of them written under the influence of wine. Ditto supposedly humorous comments, snippets of dialogue, and the odd metaphor and simile. Many of these will not find their way into the finished novel, since they didn't seem half as interesting/useful/funny when I sobered up, leading to the alarming prospect that I may not be half as entertaining as I think I am when I've been drinking.

By the time the novel is eventually delivered, the notebook is likely to be close to full. When I'm done with it, I'll add it to the pile of notebooks that I've already used. I think I've kept them all, but only very occasionally do I return to them. I try not to repeat my research, and part of the pleasure of writing the books lies in finding new subjects and places to explore. Still, in these days of computers, word processing, and the electronic delivery of manuscripts, there is something reassuring about the presence of these little black notebooks. They help to remind me of how the novels were formed, and to chart my own progress through the world of my books.

PS This week, filming began on THE NEW DAUGHTER, with Kevin Costner and Ivana Baquero, based on the short story of the same title in NOCTURNES. For those of you curious to know, principal filming is taking place in McClellanville, South Carolina, under the guiding hand of director Luis Berdejo. I still haven't read the script, which is a matter of choice (although someone who has read it was very impressed with it) but one interesting snippet of information reveals that a casting call went out for a thin, almost emaciated actor to play a "creature" role in full make-up, suggesting that John Travis, the screenwriter, has stuck to the original story's central idea of something very nasty indeed hiding in the burial mound on Costner's property. The film is due to be released in 2009.

This week John read:

The Quest by Wilbur Smith
The Naked Jape by Jimmy Carr and Lucy Greaves

and listened to:

Vampire Weekend by Vampire Weekend
Phoenician Terrace by Bevel
The Pearl by Harold Budd and Brian Eno

ON WRITING, AND DISTRACTIONS FROM WRITING

2008-01-14T11:07:00.000-08:00

Five chapters into THE LOVERS, the new Parker book, and just as I'm starting to hit my stride, I realize that I'm now going to be sidetracked for a while. In an ideal world, there would be one book upon which to concentrate, so that each day time could be spent on that novel and a little progress could be made. In practice, though, that's just not possible. The list of distractions has begun to lengthen, and while some can be dismissed quickly, others cannot.

THE REAPERS is now four months from publication. Even though, in theory, it is finished, in practice it is not. The copy edited manuscript is due to arrive this week - or, rather, the first copy edited manuscript, as the UK publisher has reached that stage in the process before the US publisher - and will need to be returned by the start of February. It represents the final opportunity to make significant changes to the book, but as I have already moved on to the writing of the next novel it will be much harder for me to think myself back into THE REAPERS than it was before I submitted it. Reading the copy edited manuscript means trying to juggle a number of balls at once: checking the copy editor's changes; trying to spot any errors that I might have missed myself, but which might not be familiar to the copy editor; and keeping the overall narrative in mind at the same time with one eye on areas that might be improved. It's like trying to look at a tree and a forest simultaneously.

By the time I've finished the UK manuscript, the US manuscript will have arrived. I'll then have to apply the changes that were made to the UK manuscript to the second manuscript, while also trying to keep a note of any useful changes or errors that the US copy editor might have spotted that should be applied to the UK manuscript at the proof stage. This will be complicated by the fact that I have to travel to the US at the start of February for meetings and research, so I won't be at home surrounded by my research books and notes when I'm doing the American edits. The solution, in all probability, will be to photocopy the UK manuscript and bring that along as well, and hope any further problems that arise can easily be checked on the Internet, or can wait until I return home.

In the meantime, THE UNQUIET has just been published in Ireland and the UK, and I'm trying to do stuff to keep myself in the public eye in the hope that it will raise awareness of the novel by a kind of osmosis. Thus I've taken on some reviews for radio and TV, including ploughing through a long, if fascinating, history of the CIA. (I'll also be worrying about how THE UNQUIET will sell in paperback. Writers, upon publication of their own book, start looking at what else is out at the same time, and what kind of competition it constitutes. We also start fretting about the possibility that our time has passed; that everyone who wanted to read the book has already bought it in hardback; and that bookstores have somehow neglected to unpack the boxes containing our books, and they are now languishing under the Christmas returns. This is compounded, in the case of the UK, by first week jitters, and the fact that, although books now officially go on sale on the Thursday of each week, thelists are compiled from sales commencing earlier in the week, so that a book's first week on sale is effectively a half week for the purposes of the bestseller lists. Complicated, isn't it?)

Other little things also crop up: the first chapter of THE REAPERS is too long for inclusion as a teaser in the US paperback of THE UNQUIET. Should the prologue be used instead? The cover comes through, adapted from its first incarnation to more closely resemble the original US hardback. I like it, but there's a minor issue of font size to be addressed. Meanwhile, the US cover for THE REAPERS is now being looked at again, and is likely to change significantly from earlier suggestions. The UK publishers have been working on ideas for additional content, or 'added value', to go with THE REAPERS. If that is to be written, then I'll need to know soon, as it will represent a significant investment of time.

The script for THE ERLKING needs further work, and I'm due to meet the producers at the end of January to discuss progress. I'll need to set aside some time over the next week or two in order to do a rewrite, and then I'm going to hand it over to the director, who is also the co-writer, as I won't have time to do anything else with it until the summer, if then. I find it hard to keep one part of my mind thinking about that project while the other tries to keep THE LOVERS simmering. It's also alien territory to me, as I've mentioned before. I'm not comfortable with the process, and that has contributed to delays in tackling the script.

Various requests to contribute to anthologies, etc. keep arriving, but I really don't have time to do them. I have an idea for a short story, but I still haven't managed to write it. Two books have arrived seeking approving quotes, but I'm still working on the review books, and I also have a pile of stuff that I was rather hoping to read for pleasure. There's an author I'd like to interview, but I don't see how I can. It's disappointing for her publisher, and I'd like to help, but the dates don't suit, even if I could find time to read her latest book and do the research for the interview.

Tour dates are being lobbed around. I'm losing most of the first two weeks of March, all of May and June, and probably part of July or August as well. April is problematical too, as I have a minor, if nasty, 'procedure' to undergo, and am likely to be out of sorts, and out of circulation, for a week to ten days afterwards. Suddenly, the prospect of delivering THE LOVERS by next October comes to seem less easily attainable.

Still, I managed to get almost 2000 words written today, and this column. The frustrating part is knowing that I may not get as much work done again on THE LOVERS for a couple of weeks at least, and I'm kind of enjoying the writing of it. I also know that a structured approach to its writing - a routine, by any other name - is essential if progress is to be made. Sometimes, 'having written' is better than 'writing', but writing, for all the times that it can be
difficult (or, perhaps, because it is often difficult), is still immensely fulfilling.

Unfortunately, the business of being a writer occasionally gets in
the way.

This week John read

Voices by Arnaldur Indridason (and some of The Truth Commissioner by David Park, and a little of Legacy of Ashes by Tim Weiner

and listened to

In Rainbows by Radiohead (bought, like a good Luddite, on CD)
May Your Heart Be the Map by Epic 45
Autumn Fallin' by Jaymay

The Response

2007-12-21T22:07:00.000-08:00

My American and British editors have now read, and offered their opinions on, THE REAPERS. The manuscript went out to them last month and, as is usually the case, my British editor read it first, and then my American editor followed with her response a little later.

Waiting to hear what they think of a manuscript does nothing to contribute to a stress-free lifestyle on my part. As I've said before, I have a nagging fear that I'm a bit of a fraud, and that the latest novel will be the one that at last exposes my fraudulence and ineptitude to my editors. That fear is compounded when a book deviates in any way from what has gone before, as THE REAPERS does. It's not quite an 'entertainment', to borrow Graham Greene's description of his less tortured novels, but it is lighter than, say, THE UNQUIET. As soon as it went out to the editors, and my agent, I think I began tensing for the blow to come.

As it happens, though, no blows have landed. Both of my editors - and my beloved agent - seem very happy with the manuscript, and have sent it straight into production. That doesn't mean the book is already rolling off the presses, but it has gone to copy editors, and when the copy edited manuscripts are returned to me they will have my editors' comments included. There will be problems to be addressed, questions to be answered, but I won't have to tear the book apart, and tear my hair out in the process.

It is a relief. While my editors are delicate about such matters, and diplomatic in their approaches, I'm certain that, were there significant problems with my manuscript, they would let me know, even to the extent of postponing publication if necessary. (In fact, I asked one of my editors that very question, and she made it quite clear that I didn't have some authorial 'get-out-of-jail-free' card if problems arose.) It was reassuring to hear. Sometimes I will read a book by a big-name author and wonder just how much editing was done, if any. It doesn't do the author any favours in the long run, even if it allows him, or her, to do a little less work in the short term.

So now I have a worry-free Christmas, relatively speaking. Actually, that's not true. Instead of worrying about THE REAPERS, I'm just worrying about the next book instead. I'll probably make a start on it over the Christmas holidays, as my diary for next year is already filling up and I'd like to get a little writing done before I start travelling again. I think I even have a title for the new book, although it may change as the writing progresses. I'm quite looking forward to writing it. Although Parker figures in THE REAPERS, it's not told from his point of view. It will be good to inhabit his consciousness again. Troubling, but fulfilling . . .

This week John read:

Shakespeare by Bill Bryson

and listened to:

Kurr by Amina

To Be, or Not To Be (A Classic)

2007-12-19T14:28:00.000-08:00

I've been wondering what constitutes a 'classic' of fiction. I hasten to add that this isn't some random problem to be addressed, in case readers are entertaining visions of me seated in my smoking jacket, puffing on a pipe and thinking 'deep' thoughts as a matter of course. I don't own a smoking jacket, and I don't think I'd have the patience to smoke a pipe. (My grandfather was a pipe smoker, and seemed to spend large portions of his day either preparing to light his pipe, or trying to keep it lit, but very little of it actually smoking the pipe itself.)

Anyway, the question of when, or why, a book comes to be considered a classic arose in the context of the book I have just finished: Ken Follett's The Pillars of the Earth. The novel in question, which deals with the building of a cathedral, among other things, is adorned on its front cover with the words 'THE CLASSIC MASTERPIECE', which would seem to indicate that someone, somewhere, even allowing for the usual overenthusiasm of publishers, feels that The Pillars of the Earth is both a classic and,indeed, a masterpiece.

Now I had never read a Ken Follett novel before this one. In fact, my only knowledge of Ken Follett is that he is the archetypal 'champagne Socialist', a wealthy supporter of the British Labour party, and that he wrote The Eye of the Needle, which was made into an okayish film starring Donald Sutherland. I picked up The Pillars of the Earth because I'd seen the media coverage of its recently published sequel, and because I'm kind of a sucker for a good historical novel.

And here's the thing: The Pillars of the Earth is a well-researched, very entertaining read. I flew through its 1100 pages in under a week, and, the odd scene of rape or attempted rape apart, enjoyed it immensely. But is it a classic? Well, no, I don't think so. Follett isn't the world's greatest prose stylist, and some of the characterisation is a bit perfunctory. If a book is truly to be considered a classic, then issues like prose style and characterisation come into play. It's not enough simply to be able to tell a good yarn. Classic, or masterpiece, status demands something more than that.

Is it a masterpiece? Well, that's a different matter. A masterpiece,in the context of art, is an artist's greatest piece of work. As I've said, I haven't read any otherbooks by Ken Follett, so I can't say that The Pillars of the Earth is his greatest achievement. From what I've read about the novel, and Follett, I suspect that it is. If he's proud of it, he has good reason to be. It's a fine read.

I'm just wondering if The Pillars of the Earth actually needs to be a
classic. It does what it does exceptionally well. It keeps the reader turning the pages. I now know a lot about cathedral building: not enough to attempt to build one myself, obviously, but I understand a little more about the thinking behind the construction of cathedrals. I also know that I'm very grateful not to have lived during the period in which the novel is set (roughly the middle of the 12th century). I also recognise that, at some point in the future, I'm going to read the sequel, and I'll probably thoroughly enjoy that too.

But it seems to me that the urge to confer classic status upon The Pillars of the Earth rather does Follett an injustice. It raises expectations that the novel itself simply can't fulfill. This is not War and Peace. It is not Bleak House, or Vanity Fair, or any one of the other books that spring to mind when the words 'masterpiece' and 'classic' are used to refer to a work of fiction. I just don't think it's in that league, but then very few books are.

The use of the terms 'masterpiece' and 'classic' in the context of The
Pillars of the Earth also suggests a certain inferiority complex on the part of one or more people involved with the publication of the book, although not necessarily Follett himself. It's clearly not enough that the book is gripping, and well-researched, and eminently readable. It has to be something more than that, something greater. Its status must be elevated, even if that elevation threatens to undo the writer, and the novel, in the process. That seems to me to be a bit of shame . . .

This week John read:

The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett

and listened to:
Going to Where the Tea Trees Are by Peter Von Poehl (one of the best 'lost' records of the year, I think . . .)

THE ERLKING

2007-11-25T12:22:00.000-08:00

This week has been spent attempting to get to grips with the script for the proposed film of The Erlking. I've never attempted a script before, and it's been a frustrating task at times, largely because my way of writing isn't easily compatible with the process of putting together a script, and a film.

Initially, I wrote an outline set in England shortly after WW I, a period that I find fascinating, as someone on the discussion forum pointed out recently. As I
said in my reply to that posting, I think my interest may be due in part to the sense that this was a country in shock, trying to come to terms with a loss of innocence, perhaps, as well as the more immediate loss of a generation of young men. Anyway, the outline incorporated a number of the other stories from the Nocturnes collection, told as tales within tales.

That version didn't quite work. I'm not sure why. It was interesting, but it wasn't The Erlking, and something of that story's mood was lost in the translation.

The second version returned the original short story to its fairy tale
roots. Essentially, it took up the tale two generations' later, and again included some of the other stories from Nocturnes, but this time they were integrated a little more smoothly into the overall narrative. The outline was 16 or 17 pages long, and included snatches of dialogue, mainly for my own benefit as they allowed me to move the story forward. I sent it off to the various parties involved in the film, and then the problems started.

When I write a novel, or a short story, it is an essentially solitary exercise. I write alone, with no input from others along the way. I slowly write a first
draft, usually over a period of six months or more, and then go back to the beginning and start rewriting. I do this, over and over, until the agreed deadline for the book is imminent, and then I deliver it to my agent and my British and American editors. They are the first people to read it, and only then will anyone else start to have any input into the book.

Other writers approach the process of writing, and delivering, a book
differently. Some will deliver a manuscript after only one or two drafts, trusting in the editing process to sort out any problems at an early stage. I know of one very famous writer who finishes a chapter and sends it out to his editor the following day, so that the novel arrives in bits and pieces, and is edited along the way. Another writer of my acquaintance will deliver very rough, even incomplete, chapters to her editor, so that a strong degree of intimate collaboration between writer and editor occurs.

The difficulty with scriptwriting, or any other aspect of film making, is that it is merely one part of a whole, and a whole that is very much dependent upon
co-operation and collaboration between a number of different people, each with his or her own views on what the finished artefact should resemble. Basically, the writer isn't the sole creative arbiter right from the start. There are a lot of creative people involved, and creative people have opinions. Thus, scriptwriting invites 'notes', which are suggestions from the producers or others about how the script should proceed.

So, shortly after I sent out the initial outline, the notes began to arrive. I was a bit bewildered, to be honest. I hadn't even written the script yet, merely suggested an outline, and already that outline was being tugged in all sorts of (sometimes contradictory, I felt) directions. It was like being presented with editor's suggestions based on a first draft, but that, as I've already said, isn't the way I write. It wasn't that the notes were bad. It was just that the whole idea of being guided at such an early stage, however well-meant that guidance might have been, was utterly alien to me.

Okay. Hand on heart, I also didn't really understand the notes. My bad. I tend to respond better to very specific suggestions, like the notes my editors, or copy editors, scribble in the margins of my manuscript: 'What does this mean?' ; 'Should this be mentioned earlier?'; or, my particular favourite, courtesy of an older American copy editor: 'What is a Siouxsie and the Banshee?' By contrast, the notes on the script were very general. They also, when I tried to think about them, appeared capable of being summarised as: 'We like this, but why don't you do something completely different instead?', which wasn't entirely helpful.

I made an executive decision. I decided to ignore the notes. That sounds more arrogant than it is meant to be, but the notes had caused me to freeze up.
All work on the script ceased as a consequence. I returned, instead, to The Reapers, and a writing process that I understood and with which I was comfortable.

But with The Reapers delivered, I decided to return to the script, but not to the notes. Over the last week, I've worked on it in assorted coffee shops (and here I should give a hearty round of applause to KC & Peaches, which is a very lovely coffee shop/ wine bar/ restaurant at the top of Pearse Street in Dublin, close to the canal. If you happen to be passing that way, be sure to drop by.) and the first draft proper is almost complete. On Monday, I'll probably send it off to Lawrence, a bastion of goodness in a harsh world, who is destined to direct the film should the script find approval (Lawrence directed the short film on Sedlec that appears on my website). We'll meet on Wednesday evening to discuss it (oh, and to watch the Liverpool game) and, with luck, he will have liked the direction in which I've gone.

Mind you, then the notes will start again. Oh dear. And it was all going so well . . .

This week John read:

Fawlty Towers by Graham McCann
Let The Right One In by John Ajvide Lindqvist

and listened to:

Tacks, The Boy Disaster by Tacks, The Boy Disaster
Raising Sand by Robert Plant and Alison Krauss
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