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.
The Romanov Code by Gavin Collinson is published by Welbeck, £8.99 paperback. Also available in ebook.
