We were delighted to recently bump into the Renaissance
Man
of Mystery Quentin Bates at both Crimefest Bristol as well as Capital Crime.
Quentin is a prolific author, a Publisher, Translator, Fisherman, and
generally an all-round interesting bloke, with an interesting life. He recently
founded a publishing company called Corylus
Books.
Their first acquisition ‘Broken’ by Jón
Atli Jónasson caught our eye.
Two
broken cops.
One
irretrievably damaged and the other an outcast.
Dóra
struggles to cope with life after taking a bullet to the head. Rado is the
child of refugees, his career shunted off the tracks due to his family
connections to an organised crime gang. But they’re the only ones available
when a troubled teenager vanishes from a school trip, and the trail gets darker
the further they pursue it.
Broken
takes place in a side of Reykjavík no visitor would ever want to see, as the
mismatched pair tread on all the wrong toes in the search for the missing
youngster. This takes place against the backdrop of a vicious vendetta and
price on Dóra’s head. A brutal turf war embroils Rado’s family as he and Dóra
follow the threads of corruption higher and higher, to the top of the exclusive
apartment block on the outskirts of the city.
The
first novel by award-winning screenwriter Jón Atli Jónasson to appear in
English, Broken is the first of a razor-edged crime trilogy shot through with
black humour and characters who leap off the page.
We reviewed Broken on its Hardcover release earlier this
month, writing at the time -
This
extraordinary crime novel debuted 2022 in the authors’ native Iceland, but is
now finally available in an English Language translation. Broken is a deeply thought-provoking
narrative, written in an urgent present-tense style making the reader pause to
collate and evaluate the proceedings as well as to take a breath. Written from
multiple viewpoints, terse dialogue with deftly placed social commentary - its
narrative pace is measured, but zings along with the velocity of the bullet
that impacts Dora’s head in Broken’s opening chapter.
Dora
works for the police in Reykjavík, shielded from ‘real’ police work by her boss
Ellioi, instead she’s left to manage administration / office work, though she
longs to return to working on the street. Ellioi hides his guilt [from the
assignment they shared and which left fragments of a bullet lodged in Dora’s
skull], by keeping her in the office, deskbound on minor cases - and away from
further danger. The cranial injury still causes Dora physical pain, constant
operations, and strict regime of medication - affecting her cognition and
distorting her personality.
Read the Full Review HERE
So on the eve of Broken’s Paperback release in August, we
decided to have a chat with Quentin for our readers.
A
Karim: Could
you tell us a little about yourself and where the fascination for Iceland and
Icelandic culture / literature stemmed [and stems] from?
Q
Bates: It’s a long story… I had the opportunity for a gap year,
and a friend of my Dad’s said I could come and work in his net loft in Iceland
for a few months. The 17-year-old me couldn’t shake off English suburbia fast
enough. It didn’t quite work out as planned, as my A level results were pretty
poor. So I just stayed in Iceland and the gap year became a gap decade. During
that time I did several different jobs, went to college and started a family,
so some very deep roots were put down there. We relocated to England after a
while, for a variety of reasons. These days my wife and I try to split our time
between the south of England and the north of Iceland, as we have children and
grandchildren on each side of the ocean.
It was while I was at college that I started reading
Icelandic properly, and the book scene was very different back then. There was
practically no crime fiction other than translated mostly from English, and
Icelandic literature was mostly very literary, plus there were loads of worthy
biographies of captains of industry, political figures and whatnot, as well as
nautical stuff – I’ll come back to that further on.
AK: And reading, did you come from a bookish
family or was it your schooling?
QB: There
were always books at home and my parents didn’t push us in particular
directions, at least, we were never discouraged from reading anything. We were
just encouraged to read whatever we wanted. Dad gave me two Asterix books for
my (I think) eighth birthday, and that was probably a pivotal moment. I just
fell in love with the village of Indomitable Gauls. One of those two books was
Asterix in Britain, and I still think it’s the best one, gently and
affectionately skewering the foibles of the Rosbifs across the Channel with
their warm beer and terrible weather. It was much, much later that I figured
out that the translator was the brilliant Anthea Bell.
Of course I pillaged the parental book shelves. Dad liked
weighty 19th century literature (heavy going!) but that left me with an
appreciation of Hardy and others. He also loved Norse mythology, the ancient
sagas and Tolkien, and I inherited that. Although I read the Lord of the Rings
pretty much every year for a long time, it must be 20 years since I last read
it and I’m not sure I dare pick it up now. No, I haven’t seen the movies and
don’t want to… Mum’s tastes were broader, and ranged from Ruth Rendell and Ed
McBain at one end to Trollope and Maugham at the other. My first brush with
Nordic crime fiction was picking Sjöwall & Wahlöö from Mum’s
shelf, intrigued by the weird name, and I must have been 13 or 14 then. But
there was no more! There was no other Nordic crime fiction in English for
another couple of decades! By late teens I was reading George Orwell, Jack
Kerouac, Douglas Adams (loved HHGTTG!), Solzhenitsyn, Anthony Burgess, Evelyn
Waugh, Robert Graves. After S&W came Maigret, and fortunately there was no
shortage of Simenon in English.
AK: And pivotal books that influenced your
desire to write your own work?
QB:
Maybe it’s more about the breadth than any particular author…? But, while I was
living in Iceland, English books weren’t always easy to get hold of. I think I
was at sea one time and had a few books with me, including a major bestseller
by an author whose name I’ll keep to myself. It was terrible, a truly dreadful
book. That brought home to me then than if that’s the kind of stuff that could
get published, then I might be in with a chance after all.
Much later on… it was the books of the brilliant French
author Dominique Manotti that showed me just how sharp, incisive, smart and
politically aware crime fiction can be at its best. I don’t think she’s writing
now, as she must be quite elderly. I got to meet her and shared a panel with
her at a festival, and I was like a star-struck schoolboy.
AK: I read your first published book was a
nonfiction work about fishing in the North Sea?
QB: That
was fun! I was working as a journalist, writing about maritime stuff, and
mainly to do with fishing – as that’s my professional background. I did trips
on five different boats and that book contains those accounts. One was supposed
to be four days on a Scottish mackerel boat that turned into twelve, another
was a four-day trip from Newlyn and the others were easier, just one-day trips
to sea. It was great fun, but the small publisher went out of business about
half an hour after the book appeared. So it was never going to be a bestseller!
I also wrote a book with the skipper of the Gaul – a trawler that disappeared
off the Norwegian coast in 1974. He had been on a trip off when the ship sank –
and I got to know him well. There had been all kinds of rumours of the Gaul
having been a spy ship, none of which held water. That was a labour of love…
The book took ten years, during which the wreck of the Gaul was located,
surveyed and an inquiry was held, so all that had to be built into the
narrative. That was quite an adventure. That book is now virtually impossible
to find and second-hand copies go for 100+ quid!
AK: And what made you write fiction? And why
Crime thrillers?
QB: It had always been at the back of my mind, along with
the thought that fiction was a mug’s game, the chances of being published so
slim that it was hardly worth trying. So I had to give it a go. That first book
came out of a creative writing course I took as a way of getting a weekly
afternoon off work… I later on found out that the deputy editor and the
advertising manager were also working on novels of their own, but that’s
another story. I expected to come out of the course working on non-fiction. But
one of the tutors was a serious Noir aficionado, and so Sam North was very
encouraging, and bears much responsibility for the decision to give crime
fiction a try – and it was obvious that it would be nuts to not make use of all
that knowledge of Iceland. Gunnhildur grew out of that – seven novels and two
novellas.
AK: And how did you start working in
translating Icelandic work into English?
QB: I
had translated a book while I was at college in Iceland – one of the set texts.
That was a seafaring tale, and the author (Guðlaugur Arason) became a very dear
friend. Working on a nautical trade magazine, I worked a lot with material from
other languages in one way or another, so I found myself translating a lot of
technical and news material. It was at one of the first Iceland Noir festivals
that Karen Sullivan of the then-brand-new Orenda Books was considering the
unknown Ragnar Jónasson and asked if I
could translate Snowblind. So I did… And then others came along looking for
translation, so I’ve been pretty busy with that over the last few years.
AK: Please tell us about how you discovered
Jon Atli Jonasson and deciding to not only translate his debut novel BROKEN,
but also to venture into publishing?
QB:
Corylus is me, translator Marina Sofia and Romanian publisher and author Bogdan
Hrib. We wanted to publish some new voices, authors we could see who weren’t
getting translation and publishing deals. It has been quite a learning curve!
Some of our authors – Sólveig Pálsdóttir, Óskar Guðmundsson and Stella
Blómkvist – have done well, while others have unfortunately done less well. We
have published a couple of absolute crackers, fantastic books that have sold
just a few dozen copies… All the same, I’m intensely proud of publishing Jérôme
Leroy and Elsa Drucaroff in English. Their books are amazing, even if we may
have caught a bit of a financial cold there!
AK: Did Jon Atli Jonasson’s screenplay for THE
DEEP and
your own background in North Sea fishing resonate?
QB: I haven’t seen The Deep. I was working as a fisherman
in 1984 in Iceland when Hellisey was lost and Guðlaugur Friðthórsson performed
that astonishing feat of endurance to swim to land. When a boat is lost,
especially when there’s a loss of life, the whole fleet (and the whole country)
feels it, takes it personally, as it could have been any one of us in the
water. I think every fisherman has a brown-trouser moment or two – I know I
do… At that time we all hung on the
radio. It was the first question when you came on watch – ‘any news?’ So I’ve
never been able to bring myself to watch it.
AK: And what’s next for [a] Quentin Bates and
[b] Jon Atli Jonasson [c] Corylus Books
QB: Well
to answer sequentially -
[a]
Translation has tailed off a bit. There are a few more translators at work now,
and it seems that larger publishers are becoming more reluctant to commission
translations, especially for new authors. Then there’s the whole AI thing, but
let’s not go into that here… The upshot is that I’ve had some much-needed elbow
room to get back to my own stuff, and I have a new lead character and a cast of
supporting characters in something new that’s now coming to completion, plus
draft outlines for what could become a series. I don’t want to jinx it by
saying too much, except that the setting is Nordic and the lead character was
once a cop...
[b]
There’s a sequel to Broken, Venom, which I’m reading at the moment, and it’s
every bit as meaty as Broken. From what Jón Atli has told me, this is a trilogy
and he’s at work on the third novel now – although I’ve a feeling this could
turn into a trilogy in four, five or more parts. This is powerful stuff with
such strong characters, so I hope it does. We have UK & Commonwealth
(excluding Canada) rights to Broken, so it’s sadly not available to readers in
North America. We’ve tried to find a partner publisher on the other side of the
Atlantic, but none of the ones we’ve approached has bitten. So if there’s an
interested publisher in the US or Canada, please step this way…!
[c] We
have a third novel (Murder Tide) by the mysterious Stella Blómkvist coming out
this summer, and the translation of the fourth (title not yet finalised) is
complete, so that’ll be out next year. And we need to have a chat with David
Headley about Venom for next year! Sólveig Pálsdóttir is hard at work, so her
next one could be for next year. We also have a second novel by Catalan author Teresa Solana for next year.
We’re weighing up options for authors from other countries… We see so many
proposals for what look to be fabulous books from around the world and it
genuinely hurts to have to turn them away. But Corylus is a tiny, tiny
publisher and there’s only so much we can do.
BTW, Corylus believes very firmly in artisanal translation
by human translators with passion for language, nuance and idiom. We’ll shut
the shop before we resort to AI translation.
AK Good for you - let’s keep literature
human not AI Technology - and thank you for your time.
More information about Quentin’s publishing venture – Click
HERE and
about his writing Click HERE
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