Jason Webster's The Spy With 29 Names

Today's guest blog is by crime novelist, travel writer and critic Jason Webster.  Best known for his

Chief Inspector Max Cámara series.  The first book in the series Or The Bull Kills You (2011) was long-listed for the CWA New Blood Dagger. His novel Duende: A journey in search of Flamenco (2003) was long-listed for the Guardian First Book Award.

Some stories have a haunting power - they seep into your dreams and become a part of you. And those kinds of stories may be ‘true’ or ‘untrue’ in the ordinary sense - it really doesn’t matter. The fact is, once you have come across them, you will never be the same again.

The life and achievements of the Spanish WWII double agent Juan Pujol have resonated with me for a decade, ever since I first learned of him. An ordinary-looking yet complex man, Pujol played an indispensable role in the success of D-Day and the Normandy campaign. And he did so by telling stories and inventing larger-than-life characters - fictional members of his supposed network of Nazi spies based in Britain and around the world, feeding disinformation to Hitler and German high command.

His tale was a perfect example of the pen being mightier than the sword.

Pujol himself was from Barcelona - a dreamer and a liar, and yet a deeply noble and kind man. He comes across as a character from a picaresque novel - a saintly rogue and compelling fantasist with unorthodox ideas about truth, someone who defies simple labels of ‘good’ and ‘bad’: at once innocent, like Don Quixote, and wily, like Sancho Panza.

And through his stories, and the powerful grip that they had over German commanders, Pujol became the greatest double agent in history, changing the course of the Second World War. Without him and his extraordinary imagination, the Allies would almost certainly have been defeated in Normandy in June 1944.

I knew that I wanted to tell his tale, but circled around it for years, not knowing quite how to tackle it. In the meantime I wrote other books - travel and history books about my adopted homeland Spain, the first novels in my crime series about Chief Inspector Max Cámara of the Spanish National Police. But Pujol always returned to my thoughts, as though calling to me.

In the end I decided to write something about him, and to tell his tale ‘straight’ - or at least as straight as possible: it’s a story that gets to the very heart of the problem with strict distinctions between ‘fiction’ and ‘non-fiction’.

Having written a crime series, I wanted to flesh the story out - much like a novel. Pujol had affected the lives of millions through what he did and so I brought to life a handful of those most directly touched by his deception work: a brutal and effective German commander whose tanks were re-routed away from Normandy thanks to Pujol’s ‘intelligence’; British soldiers landing in Normandy and fighting their way through northern France; a Spanish lieutenant with the Free French who was the first Allied soldier to reach central Paris in August 1944; Hitler himself, reading Pujol’s reports and making crucial decisions based on information from someone he wrongly believed was ‘his man in London’.

My accounts of all these people were based on historical research, but I treated them as far as possible as characters in a story, weaving them into the narrative of Pujol and the great web of deception that he cast over the spring and summer of 1944.

And I pieced together Pujol’s life and work, running in parallel. As great battles were being fought in Normandy, he was sitting in a tiny office near Piccadilly, often spending the night there, dreaming up stories with his brilliant MI5 case officer, Tomás Harris - half-Spanish half-Jewish, a fluent Spanish-speaker and gifted artist as well as intelligence genius. Occasionally, when work permitted, Pujol managed to make it home to a modest house in Hendon where his wife, Araceli, was looking after their two small children, suffering multiple breakdowns as she coped with the language and cultural challenges of living in wartime Britain, far from her native Spain. Not only was Pujol battling Hitler, he also had a crumbling marriage to cope with on his personal home front.

It has been a richly rewarding book to write, delving into the archives both in Spain and Britain in order to piece together Pujol’s life, unearthing some gems along the way. It was not surprising, perhaps, that in a tale about the secret world there should be more secrets to be uncovered.

And a personal connection to his story developed the more I explored it: as a Brit obsessed with Spain I could hardly fail to be engrossed in this curious - and rare - example of Anglo-Spanish cooperation and harmony. And as a writer and story-teller I felt a link of sorts with the man himself.

He told stories in order to change the world. The Spy with 29 Names is my version of his tale - and a homage to one of the most important story-tellers who has ever lived.

You can find more information about Jason and his work on jasonwebster.net and specifically about The Spy With 29 Names at thespywith29names.com.  He can also be found on Twitter @jwebsterwriter and you can also follow him on Facebook.

THE SPY WITH 29 NAMES is out now and is published by Chatto & Windus.

William Ryan in conversation with D E Meredith

In the third of a series of conversations, author William Ryan talks to author D E Meredith

D E Meredith is the author of Devoured and The Devil’s Ribbon, set in Victorian London and featuring pioneering forensic investigators Professor Adolphus Hatton and his assistant Albert Roumande.  Meredith has travelled far and wide to some of the remotest places on earth, which has fuelled her imagination and continuing lust for travel.  After reading English at Cambridge University, she became a campaigner for the World Wildlife Fund, and spent ten years working for the environment movement.  She has flown over the Arctic in a bi-plane; skinny dipped in Siberia, hung out with Inuit and Evenki tribes people and dodged the Russian mafia in downtown Vladivostok.  Meredith also became Head of Press and Spokesperson for the British Red Cross, spending six years travelling through war zones and witnessing humanitarian crises.  The experience strongly influenced her crime writing, with its themes of injustice and inequality.  She currently lives on the outskirts of London with her husband and two teenage sons.  When not writing she runs, bakes cakes and does yoga to relax.  For more information, visit her website www.demeredith.com

William Ryan is the Irish author of The Holy Thief, The Bloody Meadow and The Twelfth Department (to be published in May); novels set in 1930s Moscow and featuring Captain Alexei Korolev.  His novels have been translated into fourteen languages and shortlisted for The Theakstons’ Crime Novel of the Year, The CWA Specsavers Crime Thriller Awards New Blood Dagger and the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award.  He lives in London with his wife and son.

WR: Your Hatton and Roumande novels are set in a very vivid Victorian London, full of sights and smells and atmosphere.  I’m always curious as to the methods, other writers use to go about reconstructing a particular time and place...

DM: A journalist called Henry Mayhew provides the Tardis for most nineteenth century-ists and he certainly helped me immerse myself in the sights, sounds and smells of mid Victorian London.  He was a journalist who wrote a series of newspaper articles about the rookeries - or slums - during the 1850s.  He hung out on the streets and interviewed mud larks, toshers, muck shifters and the costers of London.  He chatted to the flower girls, dressmakers and chimney sweeps who struggled to survive what were dangerous and turbulent times.  Life was incredibly tough.  Londoners had to be tough too, to survive - just like the Soviet peasants in Korolev’s world.  In addition to Mayhew, I’ve read numerous histories of Victorian London.  Professor Jerry White’s my favourite and I dip into his work regularly.  As an ex-English Grad, I’ve read pretty much all of Dickens, and nobody does swirling fog, murky alleyways or the dangerous, turbulent waters of the Thames quite like him.  I also spent a lot of time walking around Smithfield and other bits of London where my books are set.  Then, like most writers, I just close my eyes and imagine.

 

One of the things I find really impressive about your books is the overwhelming sense of paranoia you create especially around your main character, Korolev.  Russia in the 1930s feels incredibly real to me as I read your work.  Did you deliberately try and instil your sense of place via creating a feeling from the off or is this something that gradually created itself through the process of writing your books?

WR: I’m not sure I worked too hard on atmosphere per se – I think it just came along with the research and understanding the circumstances Korolev finds himself in.  Like you I read social history and contemporary accounts - whether fiction or non-fiction - and I look at photographs a lot.  As for how it all comes together, I think that there’s a breakthrough moment in a novel when you begin to get a good feel for the time and place and your research, to a certain extent, becomes less visible.

When I am writing the Korolev novels, I always try to aim it at someone who lived in the Soviet Union during the 1930s - so I try not to explain anything this imagined reader would know as a matter of course.  Of course paranoia would be something this imaginary reader would expect – the late 30s wasn’t called the Great Terror because people were worried about the weather – but I try not to dwell on it too much, just have it in the background even if always present.  When I do have to explain things, I try to slip my explanations in quietly, so that they don’t weigh too heavily on the flow of the story.  Otherwise, I hope that most readers are comfortable with not being entirely familiar with the period – I tend to think that’s part of the attraction for them.  Certainly when I read Dostoyevsky, for example, I don’t expect to understand every little thing - although it’s also interesting how little research-type information there is in novels that are written for a contemporary audience.  They don’t have to describe streets, people’s clothing and so on – because their original readers knew all that already.

That having been said, one of the really interesting things about research is how it can change plots – I often come across something I like and then work it into the novel.  The football game in The Holy Thief came in for that reason and likewise the scene set in the Odessa catacombs that features in The Bloody Meadow appeared after I’d crawled around them for longer than I’d ideally have preferred – generous tots of vodka notwithstanding.  I wonder if that’s the same for you - with both The Devil’s Ribbon and Devoured I felt you took a bit of a mischievous delight in bringing certain things to the fore.

DM: Ha, ha.  Yes.  I think a classic example of that is Inspector Grey’s delight in chewing opium bonbons or swigging pints of laudanum at every opportunity.  I read a huge amount about drug addiction but then ended up with something camp and ridiculous, rather than mournful and sad, because it fitted with the character.  I also wanted to lighten up Hatton in the second book because he is a bit of a prig so it was great to see him get “shit faced” or as the Victorians say, “absolutely ran tanned” in a French restaurant.  I laughed out loud when I wrote that scene which is always a good sign (I hope!). 

WR: I suspected you were fond of Inspector Grey - he is dissolute and corrupt but definitely entertaining.  I also liked his Italian assistant Tescalini who seems to have his own very dark presence.  Do you look for contrasts when you come up with characters?

DM: Yes, I do think about the balance between Hatton and Roumande a great deal.  My novels are written in style indirect libre so we do shift between different characters’ perspectives.  Indeed, in Devoured it switches between two different narratives – one in London and another via a series of letters written two years earlier in Borneo.  However, in The Devil’s Ribbon I built up Roumande’s character because readers wanted more of him and I’m glad I did because he’s such fun to write.  It is very tricky to get the balance right however, when you have “a couple”, and whilst Hatton will always be the main protagonist, Roumande can’t be left in his wake as a sort of “Lewis” to “Inspector Morse”.  They solve the crimes together and are pretty much equal partners in the morgue.  I am keen we spend a great deal more time with Roumande in future books, learn more about his family, his background and some of his hidden skills which haven’t really been explored yet – he’s an excellent shot, for example.

With Korolev, the narrative for your first two books is (more or less) seen totally from his perspective.  This makes the protagonist very empathetic.  Did you deliberately decide to do this?  Because initially I was drawn to a multi-perspective approach although I pared that back in later re-writes.  In addition, I wondered if we will also see more of his rather sassy new sidekick, Silvka, who we meet in The Bloody Meadow in future books?  Is that your intention?

WR: I write pretty much solely from Korolev’s point of view and, while that can be limiting, it does, as you say, allow readers to get very close to him as a protagonist.  I did toy with the idea of using multiple points of view in The Twelfth Department, the new Korolev novel, in which his sassy sidekick Slivka does indeed reappear - but I wimped out.  Maintaining a single camera angle is the easiest way to write a novel and once you’ve started that way with a series, it’s difficult to change.  Being stuck inside one person’s head can be a limitation but then I just have to be a bit more creative - and that’s a good thing.

For example, I really work on dialogue and visual imagery to give the other characters depth – given I can’t tell the reader what they’re really thinking because I’m stuck inside Korolev’s point of view.  As it happens, my wife likes to know exactly what a character looks like - and I’ve come to realise that not describing characters is missing a trick.  Sometimes, because it’s a thirties novel, I go a little over the top with the good guy/bad guy imagery but then I try and subvert that - and twist things back to wrong foot the reader.  It actually helps that Russian names can all sound the same to non-Russian readers - it means I have to make the characters individually distinctive.  I know you use multiple characters to tell the story - but curiously, I don’t recall Roumande’s point of view being used very much.  Once or twice in Devoured, I think.  Is that something you’re going to try more in the future?

DM:  There will be more Roumande but it’s a balancing act.  Writing is a bit like experimental cooking.  You put things in, have a taste and think “Hmmmm too salty” or you hold things back and then think “Damn.  I should have put more tarragon in this”.  But you don’t know what’s going to work unless you try it.  So I’m going to give Roumande more space as I move from book to book and see how it goes.

I think the technique you chose underlines Korolev’s sense of isolation.  If you veered off into a multi-perspective approach, it would perhaps, undermine the intensity of the world you’ve created.  Trying new things is tempting but it doesn’t always work for a series although, at the same time, it’s vital for me to keep challenging myself, either by trying new structures or picking difficult themes.  I spent quite a bit of time writing my current book entirely from Roumande’s perspective just to see what would happen.  In the end, I decided not to go down that route but it wasn’t wasted time.  Writing is a constant learning process.

On the issue of description, I love the filmic quality of your characters.  There’s a lot of post-modernist stuff about “letting the reader do the work” and not describing the physical qualities of a character in any depth but it only works sometimes.  You have to be a writer of rare talent to pull it off.  David Peace’s Red Riding Trilogy is a great example of this, being all about the language, pushing the genre to its absolute limit.  The characters are secondary to the terrible beauty of his prose.  Nevertheless, as a writer, I occupy a far more traditional detective landscape and as such, description of character and place is key.  And more to the point, descriptive prose is fantastic fun to write.  It puts a smile on my face whenever I do it.  I know it’s considered a “no, no” by some but I can’t resist writing about weather.  In fact, one day, I am going to write a book entirely about the weather (I have it plotted out already set in 1899 - the year of a great storm).  For me, weather and Nature has its own dramatic narrative, its own “voice”  and it will always feature heavily in my books so bah sucks to all the naysayers who say “Rule 1 – don’t open a paragraph with a description of the weather”.  Who says and why the devil not?

WR: Rules are almost always an individual’s personal preference at a particular moment in time.  I don’t mind if Elmore Leonard chooses to carry every piece of dialogue with “said”, because it works for his style of writing - but he’s wrong when he says it’s an invisible word.  Only using “said” often sounds clunky – to my ear anyway – particularly because so many crime writers follow Elmore Leonard’s rules these days (and they follow them a lot more closely than he does, I’ve noticed).  It’s like Hemingway - a great writer but I can barely read him now because of endless bad imitations of his very individual style.  If I had my way, there’d be an international moratorium on bad Hemingway imitations.  I’d also insist on occasional use of the much-maligned adverb as well – another victim of writer’s rules.

Anyway – he says, counting to ten - when it comes down to it, every writer has to work out their own style - and if that involves promiscuous use of adverbs and vast batteries of adjectives, then fine.  Adverbs and adjectives were invented for a purpose and it makes sense to use every tool in the box.  As for weather – I’ve opened two novels with a description of weather and I’ve no doubt I’ll do it again.  I come from a country that’s obsessed with weather – well, mainly with rain – so for me not to look up at the sky and say, “ah, more rain coming, I see” would be odd.

Probably wrongly, I think there’s nothing better than weather for conveying atmosphere, in my opinion at least - but I’m not going to go round telling everyone else they have to think that.  Well, I might suggest it - but anyone sensible would ignore me.  And at the end of the day, that’s what works for me and what I feel comfortable with.  And if I’m enjoying myself and not worrying about my style too much – that’s probably good for the book and the reader.  I very strongly believe when a reader opens a book there’s a conversation between the writer and the reader - with the writer doing most of the talking, of course.  If that’s right, then the reader is more likely to enjoy the conversation if they feel the writer is enjoying writing the story as much as they’re enjoying reading it.

DM: Yes, I agree.  It’s horses for courses and you’ve put your finger on the button in terms of why I write and what I write about.  It’s all about an emotional connection at some sort of level with the reader.  I want to amuse them, shock them and convey something I feel very strongly about.  I’ll admit I cried great gulping tears (dear oh dear) when I wrote one of the scenes in The Devil’s Ribbon.  It involves a bomb blast and I based it on something I had experienced in real life.  It was something I could never talk about because it was too personal but as I wrote it, I felt I was finally letting go of something.  Passing my experience to another person to think about if you like – maybe even sharing the burden.  But now I’m getting into the minefield territory of “writing as therapy” and I’m not a fan of that.  I went down that route with a book I haven’t yet finished.  It turned out to be the opposite to therapy and I couldn’t get control of the narrative.  However, I do tap into my own feelings, memories, and experiences for certain bits of my work - what writer doesn’t?  But ultimately, I am creating an imaginary world, Hatton’s world, which I hope will delight and amuse.  He is very much a man of the mid-Victorian period.  I haven’t overlaid him with my own desires and angst.  Well, perhaps just a little.  On the issue of readers, nothing gives me a bigger buzz then when people get in touch and ask me questions about my lead characters.  They want to know more about them, what the future holds for Hatton and Roumande, their family, their love lives and so on.  I spend my life with Hatton and Roumande, they are always with me, and so it’s such a kick to know the stories have made a connection with others.  It’s such an isolating profession - writers work alone; writing requires complete withdrawal.  It requires huge amounts of time digging deeper and deeper into the murky, bizarre world of your own imagination.  It’s great to know I’ve managed to take people on that journey with me and more importantly, that they want to come back for more.  

WR: I didn’t know you’d experienced a bomb blast - I had a similar conversation to this with MJ McGrath a while back and she mentioned that she’d witnessed a man being attacked with an axe.  She felt it had very much influenced her decision to write crime fiction - do you think maybe it’s the same for you?

DM: Perhaps.  In my head, rather more prosaically, I always thought if I ever wrote anything it would be a whodunit because I devoured Agatha Christie and PD James when I was young.  There was nothing else to do in the suburbs in the 70s except read and ride my bike.  I used go  for miles all over the place with a notebook and a pair of binoculars and pretend I was a detective, spying on (entirely innocent) people I considered to be “suspicious”  I used to long for a dead body to turn up, so I could solve the case.  It’s amazing I didn’t go into the police force.  What a nerdy kid!  Nowadays, I love a good detective yarn on the telly - Midsummer Murders to The Killing you name it and I’ve watched it.  As far as my old job is concerned, yes, I witnessed the extremes of life and death when I worked for the Red Cross but I am not sure it led to me writing about crime as a genre, per se.  But the injustice of things I saw and the terrible, unspeakable things people do to each other, I am sure has fed my imagination.  Little shocks me.  But it was the agony of young war victims and the terrible anguish of the parents, which had the biggest impact on me.  I travelled to many places where there were few drugs, shells reigning down and so on and saw medical work literally at the front line.  After six years with the Red Cross, I felt sad, angry but also weary about the world, corruption, power and the evil in men’s hearts.  I certainly explore some of those issues in my books and at the same time, I have a huge, romantic admiration for surgeons and doctors who work in difficult circumstances.  Nobody works in harder or in more arduous situations than the ICRC and MSF in my view.  Maybe I’ve transferred some of that stuff I saw into the world of Hatton and Roumande.  The books are definitely on the bleak side in parts.  I look at political themes and revenge themes a great deal - it’s core to what I’m inspired to write about.  Currently, I’m reading the diaries of a war reporter who worked in The Crimea and what strikes me from his reports, which feel so modern, is that war never changes.  Famine - which I look at in The Devil’s Ribbon - has always been a weapon of war.  Violent death never changes.  There is nothing good to say about it in itself.  What’s interesting is the personalities which emerge from that experience.  And their altered state of mind.

 

WR: I find it fascinating that you’ve chosen to set your novels in Victorian London and yet your inspiration comes from your personal experiences with the Red Cross, the World Wildlife Fund and the like.  A lot of writers would have used that experience to something more contemporary.  Is it perhaps that writing historical fiction gives you a bit of distance on the themes you want to address - or is it something else entirely?

DM: Exploring difficult themes within the framework of historical fiction certainly gives me some distance.  I based a scene in The Devil’s Ribbon on a shell attack in Kabul where I saw three people decapitated and where I was only maybe a metre or two from where an RPG landed.  I transferred that image and those feelings of shock and despair into Hatton’s mind and world.  Did it make it easier for me to revisit that moment?  Absolutely it did because it wasn’t war-torn Kabul in 1995.  It was make-believe London in 1856.  It wasn’t too close to the bone.  I did try to write about the genocide in Rwanda, which I was a witness to.  I even went back there to research the book a few years ago courtesy of an Arts Council grant but it triggered a kind of delayed PTSD, which was bizarre and unexpected, fifteen years after the event.  I couldn’t control the story or my feelings about the material and so I put the novel in a pending tray.  But that’s not to say I won’t write contemporary fiction in the future.  I almost certainly will but it has to be at the right time for me as a writer.  For me, it’s not about “historical” verses “contemporary”.  It’s all about the story.  If the story is strong and if it’s demanding to be written, “calling me” (because that’s what it feels like when you  have a story in your head – it won’t leave you alone), then I will attempt to write it as best as I can.

WR: I’ll look forward to reading it, if you do get round to it – although I’m also hoping you keep the Hatton and Roumande stories coming in the meantime.  Thanks for talking with me, Denise – it’s been an absolute pleasure.

William Ryan in conversation with MJ McGrath

In the second of a series of conversations, author William Ryan talks to author M J McGrath.

© Patricia Grey

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.