Earlier this year, the Shots Team were invited
with our colleagues from the crime/thriller reviewing community to the Penguin
Annual Crime Fiction Party. One of the questions on my mind as I walked to
the venue in Soho was “who the heck is
Jack Grimwood?”
As book reviewers, we are always on the lookout
for new and interesting work, and the name Jack Grimwood was unfamiliar, but I soon
started to laugh when Publisher Rowland
White mentioned it was actually Jon Courtenay
Grimwood, using a pen name. Firstly I kicked myself, as it was an obvious
variation on the name of the renowned journalist and award-winning writer, but
one more closely associated with the Science Fiction / Fantasy [or Speculative]
subgenre [under his real name]. Incidentally Jon is married to fellow Writer
and Journalist Sam
Baker.
It had been a while since I met-up with Jon
Courtenay Grimwood, but recalled with vivid clarity his moderation of a panel
entitled Future Noir, at the
Dead-On-Deansgate Convention[s] in Manchester. If memory serves, it was at that
panel that fellow SF/Dark Fantasy writers Michael Marshall
Smith, and Richard
Morgan first indicated their interest in Crime and Thriller Fiction with
work such as The
Straw Men and Altered
Carbon.
So armed with a review copy of MOSKVA by Jack
Grimwood, I was most intrigued to read Jon’s first foray into Thriller writing;
so what were my thoughts?
Grimwood layers on subplots and observations,
many as bleak as the austere days of living in the repressive regime that is
Russia, as well as the hidden secrets of that era that dates back in time,
revisiting the horrors of the past. There is convolution, detailed
introspection with the Russian backdrop becoming a character amongst the
machinations of corruption and fear. We have glimpses to the siege of
Stalingrad, the Russian assault on 1945 Berlin, the shadow of Stalin right up
to the corruption and infiltration of criminals clothed in the uniforms of the
elite, all leading Major Tom to traverse an alien land, a Fox among wolves with
no one to trust.
Moskva is
peppered with memorable characters, carved with precision, as well as an
exciting and scary landscape, where the past and present may affect Tom Fox’s
future and that of others.
Read the full Shots Review HERE
I was delighted to bump into Jon again, this
time at the Crimefest
Convention held last month in Bristol, where he was on a panel entitled “Power,
Paranoia and Political Machinations” with fellow writers, Caroline C.J.
Carver, Ruth Downie, William Ryan and moderated by Luke McCallum. As I’d just finished
reading the dark tale MOSKVA
by Jack Grimwood, I had a few questions related to this change in literary
direction. Jon [aka Jack] kindly obliged telling Shots Readers a little about
Moskva’s origins, the research in Russia, the future for Grimwood as well as a
little about his work that others unfamiliar with his earlier work might find
of interest.
Moskva is highly recommended, but a warning;
it is indeed a very dark tale, and one that will see you reading late into the
night.
Ali So
the most pressing question first; how did Jon Courtenay Grimwood turn to
writing such a dark, historical thriller?
Jack Moskva
came out of an image that came into my head. A naked boy lying, as if asleep,
in the snow in Red Square. And a second image of a train carrying missiles
coming off the rails a thousand miles away, and the local Soviet authorities scrambling
to cover up the disaster. I wanted to write the novel that linked them. I'd just
finished a literary novel set in the run up to the French Revolution, and a
trilogy of alternate history novels set in Renaissance Venice before that, I
read a lot of crime anyway, and thought, 'Right, who solves this…?'
The book was called “Wax Angel” first,
and was briefly “Resurrection Gate”, before Penguin's Rowland White bought it
and its sequel, and we settled on “Moskva”.
Ali And
I know you’ve used nom-de-plumes in
the past, so can you tell us where the name Jack Grimwood originated?
Jack In an
ideal world, you'd write a book, get it published if you were lucky, and write
another and they might be similar or they might not. It doesn't work like that though
and publishers are, understandably enough, keen on branding. Luckily I'm
represented by Jonny
Geller at Curtis Brown, who basically said, you write what you need and
we'll decide who wrote it. I'd already written a number of slightly strange
speculative novels as Jon Courtenay Grimwood. So we decided that The Last Banquet (for
Canongate) should be written by Jonathan Grimwood. And if I really wanted to write
thrillers, and I really did, we'd needed another me.
So Jack Grimwood was born.
I liked Jack as a name. It's short,
sharp, louche and sounds drunken and slightly dangerous. It was also the name
my father used in the last war. He was christened John but his family knew him
as Ivan. I'm not sure how he got from Ivan to Jack... Maybe Ivan was too
complicated if you're dealing with Russians. I asked my father if he'd mind and
he said no.
Ali Though
you’re better known for your Science Fiction / Fantasy work, which has won or
been cited in numerous awards, as well as your journalism, tell me about when
you sat down to turn your hand to Thriller Writing?
Jack I've
been a fan of crime novels forever.
There are a handful of writers I buy in
hardback that I've been buying in hardback from long before I could afford
hardbacks. The main one is James Lee Burke, who I consider one of the American
greats and I'm always shocked he's not better known in the UK. I bought all of
Dibden's Aurelio Zen novels in hardback when they came out, then transferred my
loyalty to Donna Leon's Brunetti. We have a complete collection of John Connolly's
Charlie Parker novels. A complete set of Ian
Rankin, obviously. Ditto Andrea Camilleri. Also Carol O'Connell. Not to
mention Carl Hiaasen. And a fair few of Lindsey Davis' Falco novels. There are
others, in paperback, many in translation.
Jack Grimwood [centre] at Crimefest Bristol
It's not hard, reading Moskva, to identify
my thriller influences. I bought Gorky Park when it came out. (I bought the
follow ups too.) There's an obvious debt to Le Carré's spy novels, and a less
obvious but deeper one to Troy Kennedy Martin's utterly brilliant 1980s BBC TV
series Edge of Darkness, which changed my ideas about what was possible from
fiction. The novel that began it all for me though, was Desmond Bagley's
Running Blind. I read it at an impressionable age and long before I'd begun
thinking about plotting or thriller templates. So the idea of an ex-spy,
innocent but mistrusted, alone in a strange country, betrayed by his betters,
seemed revolutionary!
Ali So
did you have a detailed plot in mind, with characters or just a sketch, and
allow your imagination [with the muse] to do the work?
Jack I was
in Moscow briefly in 1986, and in New York a few months later. The contrast
between Gorbachev's USSR and Reagan's America was so striking it stayed with me
and influenced everything in this book.
I had the boy in the snow, the teenage
girl in a dinner jacket at the embassy party, the Soviet veteran who'd lost his
leg in Afghanistan, and the beggar woman who carved figures from candles, but I
had no idea how they fitted together. The first draft was discovering what
happened and the second told me how what happened fitted together. The third
changed my ending to something slightly less weird, which in retrospect was a
necessary decision. Rowland White at Penguin kept hammering at my instinct to
spin off into side alleys. And I hammered hard at myself to keep my tendency to
make things ever weirder in check.
That said, the end of the book was
written on the fly once I reached a point where Major Fox was so deeply in the
dirt I had less than no idea how I was going to get him out of it! He got
himself out though, for which I was grateful.
Ali I
know you’ve travelled a great deal, so please let us know what appealed about
Cold War Russia as the backdrop for your first thriller and how much research
was required as there is much fascinating detail and observation in Moskva?
Jack The
line between “Them and Us” is less clear cut these days. The cold war was a
simple and brutal thing. We were good and they were bad. And for them, it was
the other way round.
It was never that simple, of course. (I
remember someone who'd know telling me he had more in common with his Soviet
counterparts than he'd ever have with the civil servants in Whitehall.) But for
a while it looked as if the world was in an uneasy and dangerous balance. Things
are more complicated now.
This year's ally in the Middle East is
next year's enemy, and vice versa. No one's really got a grip on the global power
shift towards China, except perhaps Beijing and they're not saying. The last
war was fought with rifles, the current ones are being fought by kids in call-centre
barns piloting drones, and the next one will probably involve seeing how much
of a country's infrastructure you can turn off from five thousand miles away
using son of suxnet and a computer screen.
As said, I was in Moscow briefly in 1986
and had friends working there. I had family based in Helsinki, had lived myself
in Norway in the 70s, and in the early 80s drove to Nordkap in Finmark (1017 km
by road from the Arctic Circle. Less if you're a crow). So, when I started
writing Moskva, I had a fairly clear idea of what Moscow was like at that time and
the levels of Politburo watching and paranoia in the countries bordering the
USSR. What I wanted to do was look at the rise of Gorbachev, the hope that was
Perestroika and the tipping point for the fall of the Soviet Union. We know the
USSR is going to be gone within ten years. The characters in the book don't.
The research was fairly basic. I bought
a number of 1980s guide books to the Soviet Union and read them avidly, I
talked to people who'd been there and spent a lot of time pouring over the
biographies of Soviet leaders, Soviet timelines and histories of Stalingrad,
the fall of Berlin and World War Two in general. I also watched Soviet films,
listened to Soviet music and bought a Soviet cook book.
L-R Mike Stotter, Jon Coates [The Express] and Jack Grimwood
Ali Tom
Fox is a very interesting protagonist, and I’m interested in his genesis in your
mind; but specific mention should also be made of the array of secondary
characters such as bar owner Dennisov
and many others, so tell us about the task of creating Fox and the secondary
characters inhabiting the bleak world of your Moskva?
Jack One strand of Tom Fox's life is based on a
couple of people I knew who did stints in Northern Ireland. Mostly, though,
he's made up. I like him but don't, as yet, really know him any more than he
knows himself, which swings between altogether too well and nothing like well
enough.
Dennisov
kicked his way into the book drunk, unshaven and fully formed. He's a bit of a
marmite character. At the first draft stage I had men ask me why he was in
there and a woman say don't you dare remove him. Wax Angel was also born fully
formed and I knew, and know, more about her than any of the other characters.
For me she is a manifestation of the spirit of Moscow. I'd disagree that Moskva
is bleak, or at least entirely bleak, I think it has a certain graveyard humour
and those who need redemption are sometimes offered it; which, I suspect, is
all that most of us can hope for.
Ali There are some very exciting action
set-pieces, as well as much brutality in Moskva. Many years ago when speaking with Dennis Lehane about his work, he mentioned how much he enjoyed writing the
actions scenes, and the cathartic feeling he had when he approached the
gunfire; so tell us how you approach writing action scenes, and violence?
Jack I try to be as cold as possible writing
violence and as humane as possible in describing its after effects. Violence is
a jagged stone thrown into a pond, the ripples spread and keep spreading until
they reach the edge. The hardest scene to write, and the only one I really had
to make myself write, was the autopsy. I took photographs from an autopsy, and
a walk-through of a typical autopsy on a known crime victim, locked down in a
small room in Paris and told myself I couldn't go home until it was done. When
it was, I went for a very long walk indeed. Right the way up one bank of the
Seine and then back on the other. Writing the murders and assorted nastiness in
Moscow and Stalingrad wasn't nearly as hard.
Ali Though
published over a decade ago, I still recall the Arabesk trilogy with fondness, so are you still writing
Fantasy / SF work, and also what about your journalism?
Jack The Ashraf Bey novels remain some of my favourites.
They're standalone crime novels featuring a half-Berber detective set in an
Ottoman Empire that survives because the First World War never happens. I had
huge fun writing them. And I really want to go back and write another three at
some point. At the moment, as well as writing the next Tom Fox novel, I'm
revisiting a sprawling fantasy I wrote a few years ago set in Heaven, Hell and
Mexico City.
Ali And recently what books passed your
reading table that you found had merit?
Jack Too be honest there are far too many to
mention. Six Four by Hideo Yokoyama had a slow burn quality that dragged me in.
I know a lot of reviews felt it too dense but I thought that was one of its many
virtues. Karim Miské's Arab Jazz I adored. Maybe it helped that it was set in
Paris and I know the areas but it was also emotionally complex, neatly plotted and
politically honest. `For me, Ian
Rankin's Even Dogs in the Wild, and Donna Leon's Waters of Eternal Youth
were their best books in a while. (And that’s from a bloody tough benchmark
already.) I have the new John Connolly stashed for holiday reading as a treat.
So I can tell you what I think when I get back!
I don't get
much chance to go to the cinema these days but I loved Trapped, and thought it the
most interesting TV crime series I'd seen in ages. Happy Valley was grimly
watchable; and obviously enough, having lived in Scandinavia, I'm a complete
sucker for The Bridge, The
Killing, and pretty much anything else shot in half light with sub titles.
Ali We
hear rumours of a follow-up Jack Grimwood novel “Nightfall Berlin”, would you care to tell us a little about what
might be in store for your readers?
Jack Nightfall
Berlin opens about six months after Moskva ends. Tom Fox is on holiday in the
West Indies with his family when he's told that a famous British traitor, who
defected to the Soviet Bloc, has written to The Times to say he wants to be
allowed to return to the UK and is prepared to stand trial for his crimes.
Tom's been chosen to bring him back.
Needless to say, nothing goes as planned.
Ali Thank
you for your time and the scary ride that is Moskva
Jack Pleasures
all mine
Shots Ezine would like to thank Jack
Grimwood and Penguin-Random House for their help in organising this interview.
More Information about the work of Jon Courtenay
Grimwood as well as Jack Grimwood is available here
and Shots Ezine have discounted copies of MOSKVA available from our online
bookstore here
Photos
© 2016 A S Karim
