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.
