My Nonna, the Storyteller…

Today's guest blog author is Luca di Fulvio an Italian born writer.  He studied dramaturgy at the Accademia d'Arte Drammatica Silvio D'Amico in Rome under Andrea Camilleri. He spent 6 months as a member of The Living Theatre, where he worked in London together with Paola Bourbons, Sergio Graziani, Mario Maranzana, Andrzej Wajda and Julian Beck. Since 1996, Di Fulvio has also worked as a writer. Some of his novels have been published in German. In 2008 he published the novel "La gang dei sogni".  In the novel The Boy Who  Granted Dreams he focuses not only violence against women, but also processes the lives of immigrants in New York City in the 1920s, where he was close to Martin Scorsese's epic Gangs of New York-based film.

I think it's always difficult for writers to explain (honestly) where the spark of an idea for a story came from. One thing I can say with some certainty is that, as they write, they gradually discover that the story was already inside them, waiting to get out. At least that's how it works for me. I recognise it.

In the early days of my career, when I was asked where my passion for writing came from, I would reply with some pseudo-intellectual waffle. Then, a few years ago, I realised the answer was really very simple: I wrote because of my grandmother, and the example she set me. When I was little, I used to go and stay with Nonna every September. She was a very special lady who lived in the north, in Piedmont, in an old farmhouse among the rice fields which had a huge fireplace, so big that we used to sit inside it when it was cold, as people did in the days before central heating. And there, in the evenings, as we sat on the creaking rush seats, Nonna told us stories. Scary stories, funny stories, adventure stories, love stories. She made them up on the spot. And we children listened intently. And our mouths would slowly drop open and our eyes widen as we entered the worlds she had conjured up, having forgotten we were sitting in a blackened fireplace in a farmhouse in Novara. So now, when I'm asked why I write (or more aptly, why I tell stories), I reply that it's because I want to feel once more, and to make my readers feel, that childish sensation of being transported to another place, into worlds that don't exist but which arouse such real emotions.

I believe that The Boy Who Granted Dreams was born in that fireplace. When I was a boy. And I think I carried it within me for years, until the moment I discovered it as I was writing the story, which allowed me to reconnect with that sense of childlike amazement.

The main character, Christmas, is a storyteller. The boss of the New York Jewish mob, Arnold Rothstein (a real-life character of the time), says to him: 'So, ya go around tellin’ lies.'

And Christmas replies: 'No, Mister, I just know how to tell stories. It’s the only thing I’m good at. Stories people believe in. People like to dream.'

That, right there, is the heart of my novel. And that's how it was born (even if I had to learn this along the way). It grew out of the excitement and amazement my grandmother instilled in me. And this is why, when I'm asked what kind of writer I am, I usually reply that I'm not a writer but a wandering minstrel.

But Nonna plays another vitally important role in the birth of this novel. When she wasn't telling stories, she made me listen to the radio.

'Can't we watch TV?' I'd ask.

To which she would respond: 'What's the point in something you put nothing into? The pictures scroll by and all you can do is watch them. And they're the same pictures for you as for millions of other people. No difference. But if there's nothing to see, like when you're listening to the radio, you can make up pictures which are yours alone.'

What she was talking about had to do with dreams. And that's precisely why the book describes the early days of radio, in the roaring twenties. Which is how Christmas becomes a peddler of dreams. Because Christmas represents what my grandmother taught me (without being aware of what an incredible gift she was giving me). He is a kid who knows how to dream big. Who knows how to dream up a life for himself. Who knows how to dream dreams that can come true, whatever they may be. And the only way to make it happen is to never stop playing.

The third gift my grandmother gave me was love. When she was young, she was engaged to the wealthiest jeweller in Novara, who bought her an extravagant ring so jam-packed with precious stones that she used to say it looked like 'a garish bowl of sparkly minestrone soup'. But the match had been made by the families, as was the norm once upon a time. Then Nonna met Nonno and this time it was love at first sight. True love. An apparently impossible love. My grandfather came from an old family, his father was a general in the army of the kings of Italy, the Savoys, and his brother was the king's equerry. My grandmother, on the other hand, was a nobody, beneath him. But my grandfather didn't give a damn about anything or anyone, was cut off, disowned by his family, and took a job as a chemist at a pharmaceutical company to scrape together enough money to marry my grandmother. And Nonna went to see the jeweller to give him back his minestrone, that is, the ring. But he proudly refused to take it. 'No really, take it. I'm not attached to it,' my grandmother told him. Still he refused. And so Nonna took the train to Milan, made her way inside the great, majestic cathedral, walked up to an alms box and threw the ring inside.

This sequence of events might sound like a storyline from a soap opera, but it really happened. It's about love, true love. The eternal story of Romeo and Juliet, of two young people whose kiss wipes out a long-fought feud between two families, breaks the chains of hatred, overcomes social barriers and conventions. 'With love's light wings did I o'erperch these walls; / For stony limits cannot hold love out, / And what love can do, that dares love attempt,' wrote Shakespeare.

And this is precisely what guided me as I wrote the tumultuous love story between Christmas, the scruffy Italian kid from the Lower East Side, and Ruth, the rich Jewish girl from Fifth Avenue.

I could say that the opening pages of the book (set in a depressed and violent Calabria) were inspired by Sherwood Anderson's novel Dark Laughter. And that the name Christmas is an homage to Faulkner's Light in August, whose protagonist, Joe Christmas, isn't black but nor is he white, and is seeking an identity, much like my Christmas. And of course I could state in all honesty that Christmas reads Martin Eden by Jack London, of which my novel might be read as a retelling with a happy ending (and it's no coincidence that Ruth is also the name of the girl Martin is in love with). And in the same way I could tell you that Cetta, Christmas's mother, reads him another Jack London book, White Fang, whose eponymous hero is neither wolf nor dog, just as Christmas is neither Italian nor American, and manages to get by because of the love of Weedon Scott. Or else I could talk about a life in the New York ghetto built on 'great expectations', to quote my beloved Dickens.  

But, true as they may be, these would only be the intelligent explanations of a writer, whereas I, thanks to my grandma, am simply an enthusiastic minstrel.

The Boy Who Granted Dreams by Luca Di Fulvio is published 23rd March by Bastei Entertainment, price £4.99 in eBook.       

Stephen King's Joyland - Coming in New Illustrated Edition

Hardcover Edition from Hard Case Crime to Feature Never-Before-Seen Art by Glen Orbik, Robert McGinnis, Mark Summers and Pat Kinsella.

Hard Case Crime, the award-winning line of pulp-styled crime novels from editor Charles Ardai and publisher Titan Books, announced that in September 2015 they will publish a new illustrated hardcover edition of their bestselling title of all time, Stephen King’s JOYLAND. The acclaimed coming-of-age story set in a possibly haunted small-town amusement park spent more than 25 weeks on the New York Times Best-Seller List in paperback and ebook format. Aside from certain extremely limited editions for collectors, however, no hardcover edition of the book has ever been published.

The new edition will feature a brand new cover painting by popular Hard Case Crime artist Glen Orbik, whose other covers for the series include books by Gore Vidal and Michael Crichton; a map of the Joyland amusement park illustrated in the classic ‘mapback’ style by Susan Hunt Yule; and more than twenty interior illustrations by acclaimed artists Robert McGinnis, Mark Summers and Pat Kinsella.

Since its publication, JOYLAND has won raves worldwide. The Washington Post called it “a moving, immensely appealing coming-of-age tale” while Canada’s National Post called it “a small marvel of a book, a novel of loss and heartbreak, of growth and discovery…one of the writer’s finest works.”  Entertainment Weekly called it “some of King’s most graceful writing”; the New York Times wrote, “The book delivers chills [and] a mournful sense of life’s fragility”; and the Guardian in the U.K. called it “a far gentler, deeper, more thoughtful book…and all the more intriguing for it.”

About Hard Case Crime

Called “the best new American publisher to appear in the last decade” by Neal Pollack in The Stranger, Hard Case Crime has been nominated for and/or won numerous honours since its inception including the Edgar, the Shamus, the Anthony, the Barry, the Spinetingler, and the Ellery Queen Award.  The series’ books have been adapted for television and film, a TV series based on Max Allan Collins’ Quarry novels in development by Cinemax and the TV series Haven in its fifth season on SyFy.  Recent Hard Case Crime titles include James M. Cain’s lost final novel, The Cocktail Waitress; eight lost novels written by Michael Crichton under the pseudonym “John Lange”; and Brainquake, the final novel of writer/filmmaker Samuel Fuller. Hard Case Crime is published through a collaboration between Winterfall LLC and Titan Publishing Group. www.hardcasecrime.com

 

About Titan Publishing Group

Titan Publishing Group is an independently owned publishing company, established in 1981, comprising three divisions: Titan Books, Titan Magazines/Comics and Titan Merchandise.  Titan Books, nominated as Independent Publisher of the Year 2011, has a rapidly growing fiction list encompassing original fiction and reissues, primarily in the areas of science fiction, fantasy, horror, steampunk and crime. Recent crime and thriller acquisitions include Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins’ all-new Mike Hammer novels, the Matt Helm series by Donald Hamilton, and the entire backlist of the Queen of Spy Writers, Helen MacInnes.  Titan Books also has an extensive line of media- and pop culture-related non-fiction, graphic novels, and art and music books. The company is based at offices in London, but operates worldwide, with sales and distribution in the U.S. and Canada being handled by Random

House.  www.titanbooks.com  

PRESS CONTACTS:

Ella Bowman 0207 803 1906 - London

ella.bowman@titanemail.com

Cara Fielder 0207 803 1839 - London

cara.fielder@titanemail.com

media@hardcasecrime.com

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Ben McPherson on What I don’t know about criminal psychology

I was in Oslo on 22nd July 2011; the day Anders Behring Breivik committed the worst peacetime atrocity by a single gunman, ever. We heard the bomb go off. The glass in the windows shook. We thought it was thunder.

Breivik murdered seventy-seven people. His bomb destroyed a government building in the heart of Oslo, killing eight. After that he calmly drove to the Island of Utøya and murdered a further sixty-nine, mainly teenagers, at a summer youth camp. This remains the worst peacetime killing committed by a single gunman, ever.

As a fiction writer you have a responsibility not to turn the suffering of others into entertainment. Breivik ruined the lives of countless people, and the bravery of those who testified against him, while he stared at them unblinkingly across the courtroom, was unforgettable. Yet the problem of Breivik continues to gnaw at me.

My first novel is called A Line of Blood. It has nothing to do with Breivik, and yet Breivik’s influence seeped into it, almost without my knowing it. The book is about a marriage, and a family, placed under intolerable pressure by the death of the man in the house next door. It’s also about a crime committed “in good conscience”, as Breivik’s was.

I covered the trial for a small Internet newspaper. I sat for six weeks in an Oslo courtroom watching Breivik, and listening to expert testimony about him, and his crime, and his state of mind. I did not then — and do not now — understand what would push a man to plan and commit an act of such barbarity. And yet Breivik told us, repeatedly.

Breivik claimed he was firing the first shots in a great European war against Islamisation. He was, he said, a military commander and a Knight Templar. The children he killed were “enemy combatants”.

I already had a very clear rule when writing: no psychopaths. Psychopaths change the rules of the game; they act outside the rules of our day-to-day interactions with the world, from a set of rules that most of us don’t understand.

Of 34 mental health experts who examined or observed Breivik in the months between the murders and the trial, only two concluded that he was insane. Breivik, in other words, is not a psychopath. He is more complex, and more worrying, because of this.

I have never sat across a table from people who will not repent and cannot be reformed, so I have to make things up. I base what I write on my own experience, on observing other people’s behaviour, and on talking to experts who are cleverer than me. My writing brings me into contact with criminal psychologists. These people work with some very dangerous men and women; they are highly trained and ferociously intelligent. I do not have their training, nor their professional insight.

I make things up, and then ask experts to tell me where I am wrong. And I have the luxury of not having to be right about criminal behaviour. When I get things wrong, no one dies.

None of the characters in my book is evil or psychopathic, but all of them have done bad things. One has done a very bad thing indeed. It’s domestic, it’s at the other end of the scale from what Breivik did and again — and this is worth repeating — I made it up. But I learned two very important lessons from the Breivik trial and those lessons made their way into the book.

Breivik was convinced, and is to this day, that he acted in good conscience. “It was horrible,” he said, “but necessary.” That belief — that fantasy, perhaps — seems to be necessary if a murderer is to live with what he or she has done. It’s there in my novel; it was the psychological key I needed to make the act believable.

The second lesson is this: listen to what the killer is telling you. During the trial a professional witness told me that he couldn’t understand why the court was wasting time discussing Breivik’s sanity; he felt he was clearly sane. “Why can’t they see what he’s trying to tell them? That he’s a modern European fascist… that this is a political act.” Sometimes you miss the obvious truth, because it’s too hard to bear.

I plan one day to base a book on Breivik. I am not yet ready. The man who ruined so many lives did not ruin mine, but he left a tiny marker on it that I cannot be free of. I think his may be a crime that cannot be forgiven. The attack was an attack on the values of a modern and enlightened country; those values were heroically defended by Norway in the aftermath. And on a personal level, 22nd July was our wedding anniversary, and now that day forever carries Breivik’s taint, and I can’t forgive him for that.

You can follow Ben McPherson on Twitter - @TheBenMcPherson.  You can also find him on Facebook.

A Line of Blood

A chilling psychological thriller about family – the ties that bind us, and the lies that destroy us. You find your neighbour dead in his bath.  Your son is with you. He sees everything.  You discover your wife has been in the man’s house. It seems she knew him.  Now the police need to speak to you.  One night turns Alex Mercer’s life upside down. He loves his family and he wants to protect them, but there is too much he doesn’t know.  He doesn’t know how the cracks in his and Millicent’s marriage have affected their son, Max. Or how Millicent’s bracelet came to be under the neighbour’s bed. He doesn’t know how to be a father to Max when his own world is shattering into pieces.  Then the murder investigation begins.

A Line of Blood by Ben McPherson is out on 26 March £12.99 (Harper Fiction)

Raymond Chandler, George and Sonia Orwell

Over on The Orwell Society website there is an interesting article by L(ee) J Hurst on Raymond Chandler, George and Sonia Orwell. A brief snippet can be read below.

“I’m an English Public School man myself and knew these birds inside out. And the only kind of Public School man who could make a real detective would be the Public School man in revolt, like George Orwell" Chandler wrote in a letter in October 1951.

When Chandler came to Britain he reported "Sonia somebody [Orwell] … said that I was the darling of the British intellectuals and all the poets raved about me and that Edith Sitwell sat up in bed (probably looking like Henry IV^th, Part 3) and read my stuff with passion."

The rest of the article can be read on The Orwell Society website.