Sarah Pinborough at the 2019 Celsius 232 Festival, Spain.

Another exclusive interview via Shots' Spanish office by John Parker the academic, writer, reviewer, teacher and citrus fruit enthusiast. John spoke with John Connolly earlier which is archived HERE.  

We now present an exchange with Sarah Pinborough, which includes some interesting insights regarding her Netflix excursion as well as her upcoming new work.

So over to John Parker -

Sarah Pinborough is a name that will be familiar to Shots readers. Her most recent novels include 13 Minutes, Cross Her Heart and the internationally acclaimed, NYT bestselling and Sunday Times #1 thriller, Behind Her Eyes.  Sarah visited Celsius 232 in Avilés for the first time after having to cancel her visit last year due to unforeseen circumstances last summer, but she promised to come over in 2019 and she was as good as her word. It was certainly worth the wait.

John Parker: Here I am in the NH Hotel in Avilés with Sarah Pinborough. How are you, Sarah?

Sarah Pinborough: I’m fine, thank you. Very happy to be here.

John: And how are they treating you here at Celsius 232?

Sarah: Good, yeah! All I’ve done is eat! And drink!

John: I guess the most interesting thing to talk about at the moment is, Detrás de Sus Ojos or Behind Her Eyes, your latest novel.

Sarah: No, that’s my one before last but it’s my latest in Spain.

John: Yeah, that’s what I meant, sorry. And it’s going to be adapted into…

Sarah:  A Netflix 6-part series which is filming as we speak.

John: Do you know anything about it?

Sarah: Yeah!  I’ve been very involved. I went to the read through and I know the producers quite well because we are going to work on some other stuff so, yeah, they’ve done a pretty good adaptation. A man called Steve Lightfoot has adapted it and he’s done Hannibal and The Punisher so he’s written quite a lot of stuff with some weird in it. He has written it with another female writer (Angela Lamanna) and they have kept it quite true to the book. 

John: Do you know when it’s coming out?

Sarah: I think about June next year, June or July next year.

John: So, everyone get your Netflix subscriptions!

Sarah: Please do. And watch it all at once cos’ I’ve learned that about Netflix…

John: Bingeing…

Sarah: Yeah, they renew things on the binge…

John: Really!?

Sarah: It’s all about how many people will watch it in the first two weeks.

John: Right, got you! Are you watching anything now?

Sarah: I have just what have I done………….? I’ve done loads of things recently. Obviously, all the Villanelle stuff (Killing Eve), um, Dead To Her?  No! Dead To Me!  I should say Dead to Her is the name of my next book.

John: OK! Is that an exclusive?

Sarah: (laughs) Yeah, it is actually. They’ve just getting some proofs at HarperCollins But, yeah, loads of stuff. I inhale Netflix. I inhale it.

John: And HBO as well, I suppose?

Sarah: Yeah, everything. I’ve got a Now TV stick now. The world is my oyster.

John: Yeah, I suppose there’s a lot of potential with all these new platforms that are coming up.

Sarah: Yeah, there is.

John: Disney taking over the world

Sarah: Yeah, but they kind of kill everything as they go.

(Laughter)

John: So, let’s talk about your influences. I mean, I’m sure this is old ground for you but for new readers, they’d like to know.

Sarah: I think early influences, obviously Stephen King, anyone of my age has that. Daphne de Maurier. You know, I loved Rebecca.  I think it’s the first example in modern times of a really good domestic thriller. You know? Like Girl on A Train, Gone Girl, that kind of book? Rebecca did it first. Um, John Connolly definitely showed me how you could mix genres, blend them, you know?    

More recently, I’ve loved Liz Nugent’s writing. She’s written a couple of really good books. I think she just won the Irish book of the year… Megan Abbott, you know, I like anything with a good thriller-y twist.  But it changes in that everything you read that is good, you think, oh, you know, I could do something with that or try something like that so it does all change. You know, now I’m kind of influenced book by book rather than by authors, you know what I mean?

John: Yeah. So, when you were younger, were you were a voracious reader?

Sarah: Yeah! And I was at boarding school so there was nothing else to do! (laughs) But I think when you’re young, you read much more widely than you do as an adult so I would read all kinds of rubbish! Well, I say rubbish but not … you know, Wilbur Smith, Dracula, through to all those Pan Books of Horror, you know? Like, all of those…

John: It’s amazing how many people have read the Herbert Van Thal horror books. John Connolly mentioned them yesterday in his interview.  I’ve read them…

Sarah: Yeah! And I used to think that I hadn’t .You know I sort of started in horror and there’s a real sort of bunch of people who are really proper fans of horror and I’d say, “ No, I’ve not read that, I’ve not read that.”  And then I’d pick up one of the Van Thal books and I’d go, “Oh, I read this when I was about 10 or something!”  But I just didn’t pay attention to who it was.

John: Some of them mark you as well and stay with you forever.

Sarah: Yeah. And some of those old Twilight Zones and stuff, those have stayed with me too. But yeah, I read historical fiction and all sorts of things. I remember going through all of Graham Greene when I was about 13. Now when I’m reading I think, “Oh! This is a bit wordy!”  But I think you just read better when you are younger.

John: You’ve written a lot of stuff!  You could be considered prolific!

Sarah: I’m less prolific than I used to be. I remember someone saying… I think it may have been Michael Marshall Smith who said to me, “Sarah, prolific is not the best.” Because I used to say that some people were so prolific and he’d say it’s not the best adjective to describe a writer, you know? It’s not always the best one. So now I’m about a book every year, year and a half. I went through a little phase of, like, two books a year but I was trying to make a living.  You know? And I’ve never bought into the starving artist thing so I worked as long as I needed to and then I took six months out to write a book. I saved some money. I thought, well, I’ll take six months out of teaching and then I’ll go back but I wanted to try and be more ambitious. Which was… it became A Matter of Blood which was the first of a trilogy. So once I had gone full-time, it took 2 books a year to make 35 grand a year. (Laughter). So that was what I did. 2 books a year.

John: So, before you were a writer, you were a teacher?

Sara: I was for about 6 years.

John: What did you teach?

Sarah: English. I was Head of English in secondary.

John: Did you enjoy it?

Sarah: mmm, enjoy is a strong word. I liked the kids but teaching is boring.

John: (Defensively) Well... [editors note, John Parker is a teacher, and runs a teaching academy in Spain]

(Laughter)

Sarah: It isn’t if you’re a natural born teacher, then it’s not boring. But when you are teaching the same thing, you know, I just found that I wanted to be writing. When I am in the right frame of mind, I’m a really good teacher, if I’m not in the right frame of mind, I’m not.  It’s not the best way to be.

John: Yeah, I can understand that. Ok. You wrote books under the pseudonym of Sarah Silverwood…

Sarah: They were fantasy for children and I would have done them under my own name but my editor at the time decided a different name would be better. I don’t really know why. I think because I was writing adult crime fiction at the same time, she thought people would pick them up and get confused but as it turned out, just no one bought them because they were out under a different name. So I’ve never done a different name since.

John: I saw an interview with you online recently and you spoke about Michael Marshall Smith and you mentioned you were a fan of his book Intruders.

Sarah: Oh, yeah. I loved the book.

John: I loved the book and I liked the TV series too.

Sarah: Oh, I loved the book so much that I couldn’t get into the TV series. I thought it was a bit slow. But I probably didn’t give it the full chance.

John: It was where Mille Bob Brown started out. Have you been watching Stranger Things?

Sarah: Yeah, I’ve started Season 3 but I think it’s …

John: It’s awesome

Sarah: Is it!? You see, I’m a bit like …it feels a bit tired now.

John: I liked it more than Season 2.

Sarah: Oh, really?  I’m only two episodes in so I might have to give it a chance.

John: I recommend it. I don’t want to go into it too much but there is one scene which you have to avoid spoilers of. It’s a marvellous moment towards the end of the series which will appeal to your generation especially.

Sarah: I’m a native. I’m recognising everything so far. I was 10 in 1982 so it’s made for me.

John: So, you mentioned a new book. When will that be coming out?

Sarah: In February. It’s called Dead To Her. It’s set in Savannah, Georgia and it’s rich people being awful to each othe , with some voodoo.  I’m calling it Midnight in The Garden of Evil meets Big Little Lies. There’s that kind of vibe. Everyone seems very happy with it. It’s coming out in America at the same time. We’ve already sold the television rights.

John: That sounds great. We look forward to it. Thank you so much for your time, Sarah.

Sarah: Not at all. It was a pleasure.

Shots Magazine pass thanks to Jorge Iván Argiz and the organisers of the 2019 Celsius 232 festival, and to Sarah Pinborough for their time, insight and the soft fruits provided.

More information on her work is available from > https://sarahpinborough.com/ if you’ve not read her work, we’d urge you grab her work at the first available opportunity.

And thanks to our Spanish representative, writer, reviewer and editor John Parker, who is a Graduate-qualified English/Spanish Teacher, owner and director of CHAT ENGLISH, an English Language Centre in Avilés on the north coast of Spain John is a voracious reader, and has loved horror fiction for many, many years.

Photos (c) 2010 - 2019 John Parker, Ali Karim, Sarah Pinborough, Quercus Publishing and HarperCollins UK

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 Jason Webster

In the first of a series of conversations, author William Ryan talks to author Jason Webster.

WILLIAM RYAN is the Irish author of THE HOLY THIEF, THE BLOODY MEADOW 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 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.

  

JASON WEBSTER was born in California and was brought up in England and Germany.  After living in Italy and Egypt, he moved to Spain in 1993, where he wrote a number of highly acclaimed travel books including DUENDE: A JOURNEY IN SEARCH OF FLAMENCO and SACRED SIERRA: A YEAR ON A SPANISH MOUNTAIN. His first crime novel, OR THE BULL KILLS YOU, was long listed for the CWA Specsavers Crime Thriller Awards, New Blood Dagger and was followed by the equally acclaimed DEATH IN VALENCIA. The third in the series, THE ANARCHIST DETECTIVE, will be published in 2013. Jason lives near Valencia with his wife, the flamenco dancer Salud, and their two sons.

WR: Your first novel, OR THE BULL KILLS YOU, came out last year and introduced an appreciative readership to Max Cámara, a non-conformist Spanish detective with a penchant for food, women and marijuana - in no particular order.  Your second novel, A DEATH IN VALENCIA, finds Max investigating the death of a famous Paella chef as his world, literally, crumbles around him.  Can you tell me a bit about how you developed Max as your protagonist - did he come fully-fledged or did he change as you wrote him?

JW: It's funny that you call him 'Max', as that's what I usually do when I'm thinking or talking about him, as though he were a real person (of course he is...).  It's a little strange, then, when I come to write about him to refer to him with the more formal 'Cámara', as though putting him at a certain distance.

In answer to your question, he came more-or-less as a fully-fledged character.  I deliberately made the decision not to be too cerebral or rational about who my main character was going to be.  I allowed myself to sit back, as it were, and let him reveal himself.  And that's how he emerged.  Physically I saw someone resembling the actor Javier Bardem, with a powerful presence about him but with a sensibility and certain fragility as well.

And then the drinking, the food, the dope smoking...  These are all pretty normal attributes in a Spanish context.  I remember my UK publishers at Chatto & Windus balking at the idea of him smoking home-grown marijuana at first, until I explained to them that a high ranking contact of mine in the Spanish legal system did exactly the same… 

Certain aspects of Max reveal themselves to me as I'm writing, however.  It's not all clear-cut.  I remember a comment by Michael Dibdin saying something similar about his character Zen, that throughout the books he was exploring the personality of his main detective.  I feel the same - as when you discover greater complexities about a friend the more time you spend with them.  Max is out there, somewhere, and I allow him to show me which way the series should be going, and to reveal something more about himself as we progress. 

WR: You mention Michael Dibdin whose Aurelio Zen series is, of course, set in Italy and who you've been compared to more than once.  Were the Zen novels an influence?

JW: Yes, I think Dibdin was/is an influence.  I remember reading his books and feeling that he had really nailed Italy.  I'd lived there myself for a few years, and it felt as though he were taking me back, as though I were walking the streets alongside Zen.  So perhaps that was the moment when the seed of an idea was planted - that good, thoughtful crime novels could be set in a contemporary Mediterranean country. 

The thing with the influence of other writers, though, is that it tends to work on some subconscious level.  You don't think, Oh right, I'm going to do this bit like so-and-so, unless it's a deliberate pastiche. 

And then there's the whole question of how much you should draw from other books when it comes to your own writing.  I've always been impressed by a comment by Keith Johnstone in his book Impro: 'Writing comes from life, not from other writing.’  He realised this when reading drama scripts sent to the Royal Court Theatre during the 60s.  Most of them went into the bin and were never staged, because, he thought, they were pseudo-Pinter, pseudo-Beckett and so on.  Only the writers with original voices got their plays done, and they were the ones who drew their inspiration from the world around them more than from what they had on their bookshelves.

And so it is with novels or any other kind of writing.  What you read obviously has some bearing on what you write.  But at the same time it needs to be kept at a distance, never influencing too much.  Or at least that's my experience.

Does that chime with your own writing?  Have there been obvious influences for the Alexei Korolev novels?

WR: I've certainly read a lot of fiction and non-fiction set in the period I write about and most of it was very useful.  But as I was born in 1965 and the Korolev novels are set in 1930s Russia, I probably didn't have much choice.  Even understanding how the Soviet Union worked was a challenge given the closest contact I'd had with communism was riding a bicycle the length of Vietnam - an experience which probably wasn't that useful when it came to describing a Moscow winter, or understanding Stalinism for that matter.

The good thing about reading a lot, and doing a great deal of research as well, is that individual influences and sources tend to disappear into the crowd – if that makes sense.  So while I'm probably a bit of a magpie, particularly when it comes to period details and dialogue, it all gets blended into the fictional world I construct for my readers in the Korolev novels.  And that fictional world is, I hope, something that feels real to a reader and gives them a unique insight into what life was like during Stalin’s Great Terror.

But you live in Spain and you've written widely about Spanish culture and history – about the legacy of the Spanish Civil War, flamenco and Spain’s Moorish history.  It’s probably why the Camara novels feel so authentic and why there’s such a sense of Spain’s past running through them, even if you seldom address it directly.  With four non-fiction books about Spain - were the Cámara novels the logical next step?

JW: In hindsight the Cámara novels were a logical step, you're right.  I find Spain to be an endlessly fascinating country, one which I've lived in now for most of my adult life.  And there is so much to explore and get to know about it that I think you'd have more than a lifetime's work if you wanted to.  So writing about flamenco, the Spanish Civil War, the Moorish legacy etc. was all part of a process of discovery for me.  This then continued into the crime novels in many ways, particularly with the first in the series - OR THE BULL KILLS YOU - which takes a look at bullfighting.  Also, by that point I'd been living in Valencia for about ten years, but had never written about it, and so I wanted to say something about my adopted home town.  It has been largely ignored by other writers on Spain and was even dubbed 'the world capital of anti-tourism' at one stage because it was so uninviting to foreign visitors.  That has changed, and it's now very colourful and pretty.  But the recent face-lift its undergone has come at a heavy price.  Local politicians are notoriously corrupt, and now, with all the recession and economic crisis, Valencia has become a by-word internationally for all that has gone wrong with the country.

And with everything that's happening in Spain at the moment - there is a palpable sense as I write these words that the place is falling apart - I do tend to see things in their historical context - the 'long view' as it were.  History weighs heavily here: the same tensions, the same narratives seem to be played over and over again, whether it's the Left-Right divide that was so apparent in the Civil War, or the various regional identities pulling away from Madrid and trying to create independent mini-states, as Catalonia is now trying to do.  This kind of thing has been going on in Spain for well over a thousand years.  Even the Moors suffered the same kinds of internal problems.

As for addressing these things directly - they're in the background for the first two books in the series.  The third one, however, which will be coming out next year - THE ANARCHIST DETECTIVE - deals with the past in a much more head-on way.

WR: It seems to me that that being an outsider helps you a great deal when describing Valencia - your descriptions of the place and its people feel very real but, at the same time, you have an objectivity, which makes them seem fresh as well.  I'm curious that your next novel THE ANARCHIST DETECTIVE deals with Spain's past "head-on" because it seemed to me that the first two novels, even though very modern, have plots that stem from Spain’s history - the bull-fighting and its traditions and values in OR THE BULL KILLS YOU, of course, but also the Catholic church and Spain's very recent fascist past in DEATH IN VALENCIA.  I suspect you're going to tell me that you don't work out themes for your novels in advance and I don't either, as it happens, although many writers do.  But I wonder if, looking back now, you're aware of a direction that the Camara series is heading in and of a general theme or themes - and how deliberate they were.

JW: I certainly did have a theme in mind when I wrote OR THE BULL KILLS YOU - it was bullfighting (obviously).  After I'd finished, and my mind was turning to what came next, I fell into the trap of thinking that all I needed to do was come up with some other big Spanish theme (say the Pilgrimage to Santiago) and then base a novel around it.  In fact I even drew up some ideas for a Cámara novel around that very subject.  But it felt wrong, very forced.  So I left it for a while.  Then my editor gently and wisely said, Why don't you let your characters tell you what comes next?  So I did, I listened to Max, essentially, and where he wanted to go.  And that was how A DEATH IN VALENCIA came about, or certainly much of it.  The whole subject of abortion (which is a very live issue in Spain at the moment, by the way) comes directly from what happens to him at the end of the first novel.  So I hope I learnt my lesson - don't put the 'theme' first.  In the end your characters are what drive things - that's the human truth that holds up the narratives.

That said, I did put in some information about paella in A DEATH IN VALENCIA, because it's so fundamental to understanding the culture of the city.  But perhaps in some ways that was the character of Valencia itself telling me what it wanted included in the second book.

I'm very interested to hear that you don't work out your themes in advance.  I'm sure it's the right way to go about things - 'listening' rather than dictating - but the temptation must surely have been there, given the time and place that you're writing about - Stalin's Russia in the 1930s?

WR: Certainly there are themes but I don't think I consciously thought about them - I suppose the setting and the fact that THE HOLY THIEF was a crime novel meant it was inevitable I'd end up writing about the nature of justice and truth in a society that considered them subservient to the State's political needs - and the ways an ordinary person might have to compartmentalise their life and compromise their beliefs in order to survive.  It's an interesting thing about series though - I think the themes probably recur through the novels because the settings and characters remain the same, more or less, but I think it's also true that successful series focus on different sub-themes in each novel, as you've done incidentally.  I don't know how you feel about bull-fighting, probably the way Camara feels I suspect, but I found the history and tradition around it that you describe absolutely fascinating, and how modern pressures were undermining what hadn't changed much in  centuries.  In fact, I wonder if it isn’t a theme that runs through both novels.

And then I think it's interesting what you do with buildings and the role they seem to have in the books - the police station, for example, that was meant to be an art gallery and seems ill-designed for either purpose, the old parts of the city that are threatened by shiny new developments, the apartment block Camara lives in that's falling down around his ears, even the final chase scene in DEATH IN VALENCIA takes place across disintegrating roof tiles.  It seems as if the old and the new are crumbling around Camara and I was wondering whether it was something you'd planned or if it just came about in the writing.

JW: That's a really interesting observation.  I hadn't noticed it myself - certainly not about the disintegrating roof tiles.  But now you mention it, yes, I think buildings probably are important.  Certainly, when I was writing about Max's flat falling down, it was meant as a metaphor for his internal world crumbling as well - the structures that hold his identity in place.  In many ways there is an arc stretching over the first three books in the series concerning Max's quest to discover who he really is.  So A DEATH IN VALENCIA revolves around him losing a superficial, conflictive identity he's built up for himself so that he can find something more substantial and real in the following novel. 

Similarly for the police HQ in what was meant to be an art gallery - firstly it wouldn't be beyond the realms of possibility here.  But also I wanted to create a sense of dislocation, of a country that on the one hand admires institutions like the police, yet on the other feels uneasy with them.  You only have to see recent footage of riot police attacking demonstrators to understand how fraught the relationship between the authorities and the people can be.  Also art and culture are incredibly politicised here - to an extent that I could never have imagined before.  So the police taking over a museum... there's another metaphor in there somewhere.

It comes back to your point about a clash between history and the present.  Something similar is happening to Spain as a whole right now - it's effectively going through a kind of identity crisis.  For a long time after the Franco dictatorship that question was taken care of - a sense of identity came simply through a rejection of what had come before.  But Franco has been dead for almost 40 years now, and rejecting what he represented isn't enough anymore.  So what is Spain?  Where is it going? 

Max is asking himself very similar questions, and it's largely to do with a failure to digest events in his past.  Too many people in Spain refuse to contemplate what happened in the Civil War, while others only want to reopen old wounds for political gain.  Few, it seems, are talking about being honest about the past in order to learn from it and get over it.  So, sadly, I think this country will soon be repeating its history.  Perhaps not a fully blown civil conflict, but conflict of some sort.  I think that's a possibility.

WR: You must have started writing OR THE BULL KILLS YOU in 2009 , if not before, and if we look back at that time period in Spain, it's been pretty traumatic and it sounds as if you think it's likely to become even more traumatic still.  How do you think that's going to influence your writing?

JW: What’s been happening and what will happen in Spain will certainly feed into the future Max Cámara books – it’s inevitable.  There was always a sense that things in Valencia at least were about to change – there was a stench of corruption about the place that gave the impression that sooner or later it was all going to blow up.  But I don’t think I could have seen quite how bad things were going to get.  Or that they would fall apart on a national level so dramatically.

             

Things are moving so fast, however, that there’s a danger that if I were to write something about the situation today, by the time the book finally came out it might feel out of date.  So I think you have to be a little predictive if possible, imagining how things are going to develop.  For example, when I wrote about abortion being a hot issue here in A DEATH IN VALENCIA it was actually off the news agenda.  By the time the book came out, however, it was back again, with a new right-wing health minister proposing a restriction of the practise.

So I think the question now is no longer ‘What’s going on in Spain?’, but ‘What will happen?’  The fault lines in society here are so great and so deep that some of the possible answers are really quite chilling.

WR: You've mentioned THE ANARCHIST DETECTIVE, the third in the series, is already finished.  How are its predictions holding up so far and, more importantly, when will we see it in our local bookshops?

JW: The book holds up well, I think.  I've just finished reading the proofs and there was nothing there that felt out-of-date.  But there's little specifically about the current situation in it - Max is busy dealing with old wounds from the past, and the killing of his great-grandfather in the Franco period.  All that is still relevant - perhaps more so now given the present political and social tensions.

I'm assuming the book will be coming out in the UK in June of next year, then hopefully in the US the following September.

One thing I wanted to ask you - I've always had great respect for historical novelists.  Not just because of their command of the physical details of their period, but also the way in which they get inside the mindset of that time as well - something I think you pull off incredibly well.  How do you research this more invisible side of the history?  Has your understanding of the period grown with each book?  Does THE TWELFTH DEPARTMENT differ in this respect to the previous books at all?

WR: Certainly my understanding of the period has grown with each book – probably because with each book I add another layer of research to what I started out with.  But the invisible side - the atmosphere, the way people interact and how everything connects to create a believable world – that’s where the creative side of historical fiction comes in.  You can’t write believably about a period unless you’ve done the grunt work but, at the same time, as long as you know what you’re talking about, most readers doesn’t necessarily want to have too much explained to them as it gets in the way of the story.  But, if you’ve done the right kind of research into how people interacted during your period then at a certain point the characters start to become real of their own accord.  That’s probably not a very good explanation – but I really do believe that if you have a good fictional character, there’s only one way they can think, talk and behave.  In other words they begin to live, at least on the page.

As for THE TWELFTH DEPARTMENT, it deals with the murder of two scientists and Korolev soon finds out they were both at the forefront of Soviet experimentation into mind control and brain-washing.  It’s a little different from the others in terms of plot and probably has a more depth to it, largely because Korolev’s son Yuri becomes involved in the investigation and, as is the way with these things, ends up in great danger.  I’ve enjoyed reading it while I’ve been writing it and I hope readers will enjoy it as well.

Anyway, it’s been a pleasure talking to you – and keep the Cámara novels coming.  They’re cracking reads.