In the second of a series of conversations, author William Ryan talks to author M J McGrath.
© Patricia Grey
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MJ
McGrath is an award-winning journalist and author of fiction and
nonfiction books, based in London. The
first novel in her Edie Kiglatuk mystery series, White Heat, was nominated for the CWA Gold Dagger. The second, The Boy in the Snow, has just been published. She is currently working on a third. The series has been translated into 18
languages and is being developed for TV.
For more information, visit her website - www.melaniemcgrath.com.
William Ryan is the Irish author of The Holy Thief (2010). The Bloody Meadow (2011) and The Twelfth
Department (to be published in May 2013),
novels set in 1930s Moscow and featuring Captain Alexei Korolev. William’s novels have been shortlisted for
The Theakstons’ Crime Novel of the Year, The CWA New
Blood Dagger and the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award. He lives in London with his wife and son and
you can find out more about him and the Korolev novels at www.william-ryan.com.
WR
Not many detective stories, or novels for that matter, are
placed inside the Arctic Circle - what drew you to it as a setting?
MMcG:
For me, it was just so obvious. I have
been lucky enough to be able to travel to the Arctic a few times and I really
wanted to try to capture its fierce, uncompromising beauty. The Arctic is rapidly changing and as
companies, countries and organised criminals look to the Arctic as an area ripe
for natural resource development and exploitation it is becoming the focus of a
new kind of Cold War. At the same time,
the human and social problems are more like the kind we associated with inner
cities. In the Canadian Arctic territory
of Nunavut, crime has doubled over the last decade. Homicide is now 1000% of the Canadian average. Moreover, there is only one investigative
police officer covering an area about 25 times the size of Britain. Which is what keeps my heroine, Edie
Kiglatuk, so busy!
WR: I
think I understand what you mean by the beauty and the remoteness - I made a
brief foray to Greenland a few years back and it felt like being on the very
edge of existence. It is not an
environment that feels safe in any way - awe was the emotion I felt most. Edie strikes me both ruthlessly pragmatic
and, at the same, quite emotional – in a very understated way. Is she a product of the environment in which
she lives, do you think?
MMcG:
Aren't we all? The inspiration for Edie
came from a woman polar bear hunter I met up in the Arctic but I've often said
that in part she's the me I'd be if I thought no one would tell me off. Though Edie isn't me, obviously. For starters, my polar bear hunting skills
aren't up to much and I won't be trying seal or walrus meat again in a hurry.
But Korolev is shaped by his
environment too, no?
WR: Oh - I
don't know, I can see you tracking down a polar bear - you have that steely
look about you. I'll let you off eating
seal meat however. But I suppose every
character has a little bit of the writer in them - Korolev certainly has elements
that seem all too familiar.
But the most interesting thing for me is that his
situation inevitably results in his having to compromise to survive - the
Soviets had a tendency to criminalise friends and families of perceived
enemies, so he walks a very fine line. The
question is how far he’ll go and at what point, he sticks.
Do you think internal conflicts then are something
that successful crime characters have to have?
Edie's a character that really resonates with people - is that one of
the reasons? Did she develop during the
writing or did she come fully formed?
MMcG: Edie
Kiglatuk and Alexei Korolev are both outsiders, wouldn't you say? It's a very common trope in crime fiction but
I think it's sometimes harder to be a female outsider than it is to be a lone
wolf kind of a guy. A female outsider
such as Edie is much less likely to be tolerated in her own community. It's rich territory, and not all that much
explored, so I see Edie as a kind of pioneer there. To make things more complicated, Edie's a
maverick in a culture, which is itself outside the mainstream, a culture, which
doesn't have much tolerance for independent-minded women. In traditional Inuit society, oddballs were
either classed as shamans or, sometimes, simply killed. So Edie's both a survivor and a kind of worker
of magic. Not that she sees herself that
way. To Edie, she's just a misfit.
Everyone has internal conflicts about their roles
in the family and in society, but also about how to be a good person. Edie is constantly struggling with that stuff
too and, like most people, she doesn't always get it right. But she does try really, really hard and
unlike me, she never lets herself off the hook.
She's a striver and I think readers respond to that.
WR: I think
you're right that crime fiction often focuses on individuals who stand outside
society - usually for moral reasons of one sort or another. In fact, as I think we've discussed before,
crime fiction is nearly always about morality.
But you've written very successful non-fiction and social history in the
past - the best selling Silvertown and Hopping that vividly
recreated London's East End and Motel Nirvana, about the New Age
Movement in the US, which won the John Llewellyn Rhys prize. What drew you to crime fiction?
MMcG: As a
writer, crime fiction allows you to do almost anything. It's such a flexible genre. It's also one in which, as you pointed out,
you can really explore some of the big existential and ethical themes, like
what it means to live with the knowledge that you're going to die, and what
constitutes good and evil. I studied
philosophy at University and I guess I've always been very taken up with those
kind of questions in my writing. Who was
it who said, Goodness writes blank. There's
plenty of goodness in crime fiction but it's always offset by its opposite. I enjoy surfing the very unruly boundary
between the two.
It probably helps having had a petty criminal for a
grandfather and having been a witness to an attempted murder.
WR: That's
true - crime fiction is often about the interesting grey space between good and
evil - the Korolev books are about trying to be a moral person in a society
where that's very difficult. But tell me
about your grandfather and this attempted murder? That sounds pretty - well - interesting.
MMcG: I'm not
sure I believe in evil though it's true that some people do very, very bad
things! But I agree with you that it's
always much harder to be good in a society or in a community which has the seed
of rottenness at its heart, like the Stalinist Russia in which Korolev is
operating or even like the current Arctic, beset as it is by social problems,
lawlessness and profiteering.
Speaking of which...my grandfather was a ducker and
diver in the East End of London. He
operated in precisely that grey space we're talking about. Black marketeering during and after the war
mostly. By the late 1950s, he had some
extremely fancy American cars, a kennel full of racing greyhounds and even,
I've heard, a racehorse, much of which he must have come by through dodgy
dealing since his only legitimate business was a greasy spoon whose customers
were mostly London dockers. I've heard
talk of connections to the notorious East End crooks, the Krays, though I've
never quite been able to get to the bottom of that.
The attempted murder happened a couple of years
back, in broad daylight, in my street. An
axe attack. The victim's arm was
partially amputated; he received a number of stomach wounds. The perpetrators' weapon dog chomped off part
of his nose. The whole street was sealed
for about 5 hours; we had an armed SWAT team, police helicopters, the lot. I ended up being one of the principle
witnesses, which felt extremely uncomfortable.
I didn't realise just how traumatic the whole thing had been until I was
at the docs six months later for a minor complaint and when he asked me how I was
feeling, I burst into tears.
I've seen plenty of violence in my time but never
before witnessed two people attacking a third with the absolute intention of
killing him. Or heard the screams of
someone who thinks they're about to die.
The energy around that is like nothing else. And it really informed my writing. I now have a good sense of the astonishing
intensity of the killer impulse and also how powerless, guilty and angry you
feel as a witness. It's a profoundly
violating thing.
WR:
That sounds terrifying. I’m not
surprised you were affected afterwards. It’s
one of the strange things about a crime – it often has a whole series of
unforeseen consequences for people other than the direct victim. My great aunt was murdered by a burglar when
I was 18 and I was, very briefly, a suspect.
I was fingerprinted and questioned and so on - but as I was a hundred
miles away at the time, I was off the hook pretty quickly. My uncles however were given a hard time of
it and I think it was tough for them - and probably still is. Another curious thing about that business was
that when the police finally caught up with the murderer, his barrister wanted
him to plead insanity but his family didn’t want to have that stigma attached
to them. I never knew people were far
less tolerant of mental illness than murder.
Incidentally, what do you think your
grandfather would have thought of you writing crime fiction?
MMcG: It's so
interesting that you too have some real life experience of violent crime. I wonder how many crime writers share this? Quite a few I suspect. I'm very interested in the ripple effects of
serious crime. The story I'm working on
at the moment (another Edie Kiglatuk mystery) centres around the multiple
ramifications of a murder.
You’re right about mental illness sometimes being
more of a stigma than murder. I have
experience through a friend of serious mental illness and the effects are
sometimes not dissimilar to those of murder in the sense that both can blow
whole families and communities apart. There's
a character in The Boy in the Snow who suffers from post-natal psychosis with
far-reaching consequences.
I can't think my grandfather would have approved of
my crime-writing career. He tried to
stop his daughter, my mum, from reading on the grounds that she'd get above
herself. ‘Above him’ was what he really
meant of course.
WR: I wonder
if, more often than not, murderers aren’t in full possession of their senses
when they kill. Many of the reasons for
killing people - fear, intoxication, rage, jealousy, greed and so on – seem
almost like temporary forms of mental incapacity that override instinctive
revulsion at the act and fear of the consequences. And then, of course, there are the killers
who really are insane.
I’m pretty sure the man who killed my aunt panicked. She was a Captain with the Eighth Army in the
Second World War – running hospitals and so on – and could be quite
intimidating. I believe she threatened
to hunt him down which, knowing her, I suspect she probably would have. So I think it all got too much for him. I don’t have any sympathy for him– he went
out to steal from an occupied house so he is responsible for everything that
happens after that point – but I think I understand why things happened the way
they did. And I suppose that kind of
understanding is useful for someone who writes about crime.
The story you’re working on at the
moment – is that Edie Kiglatuk’s Christmas, which I just read about – or
something longer?
MMcG: Edie
Kiglatuk’s Christmas is a short and snappy seasonal story with a nice little
twist at the end, but I’m actually about to finish another book-length Edie
Kiglatuk mystery. This one is set around
SOV PATS or sovereignty patrols, the huge summer exercises carried out by the
Canadian Military each year to assert Canadian sovereignty in the Arctic. Most crime in the Arctic happens over the
summer. NASA discovered that 10% of
subjects on Arctic patrol suffer serious psychological problems adapting to Arctic
conditions and a third of those go on to develop psychiatric disorders. So that’s the starting point for a mystery,
which begins in the present, and eventually reaches back to the Cold War. It’ll also be the first Edie Kiglatuk mystery
in which Edie takes on a formal law enforcement role and has her first affair
with a qalunaat, or white man.
WR:
That's something to look forward to and I, for one, will be curious to find out
how someone as independent and - well - stubborn as Edie will get on in law
enforcement. It'll be an interesting
clash of cultures, I suspect! Thanks for
your time, Melanie, and best of luck with The Boy in the Snow - it's a great
read and I hope it does well.
You can currently download MJ McGrath's
short story, Edie Kiglatuk's Christmas, for free on Kindle.
White
Heat and The Boy in the
Snow are published by Viking Penguin in the US and by Mantle in the UK.
Shotsmag review of The Boy in the Snow can be found here.
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