All About Eve

I’m way behind the curve on Deborah Lawrenson’s latest offering, THE LANTERN, which has already been chosen as a TV Book Club pick in the UK. Still, better late than never, eh? To date Deborah Lawrenson has written historical dramas spiced with mystery - THE ART OF FALLING, the Lawrence Durrell-inspired SONGS OF GOLD AND BLUE - and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed both. THE LANTERN is being pitched as a Gothic take on the historical drama, with the shadow of REBECCA falling across the Provence landscape. Quoth the blurb elves:

When Eve falls for the secretive, charming Dom, their whirlwind relationship leads them to purchase Les Genevriers, an abandoned house in a rural hamlet in the south of France. As the beautiful Provence summer turns to autumn, Eve finds it impossible to ignore the mysteries that haunt both her lover and the run-down old house, in particular the mysterious disappearance of his beautiful first wife, Rachel. Whilst Eve tries to untangle the secrets surrounding Rachel’s last recorded days, Les Genevriers itself seems to come alive. As strange events begin to occur with frightening regularity, Eve’s voice becomes intertwined with that of Benedicte Lincel, a girl who lived in the house decades before. As the tangled skeins of the house’s history begin to unravel, the tension grows between Dom and Eve. In a page-turning race, Eve must fight to discover the fates of both Benedicte and Rachel, before Les Genevriers’ dark history has a chance to repeat itself.

  THE LANTERN was published last month in the UK, and will be published in the US in August. If it’s anything like Lawrenson’s previous offerings, it’ll be a cracker. You have been forewarned …

On Writing As Wasteful Self-Indulgence

I’ve written in these pages before about Deborah Lawrenson, author of the very fine THE ART OF FALLING and the Lawrence Durrell-influenced SONGS OF BLUE AND GOLD (and the forthcoming THE LANTERN) - indeed, it was the Lawrence Durrell hook that drew me into her novels first. She isn’t a crime writer by any stretch of the imagination, even if there is a crime lurking at the heart of SONGS OF BLUE AND GOLD, which is why I’m doubly pleased that she not only agreed to read the m/s of THE BABY KILLERS, but offered the following blurb:

“THE BABY KILLERS is surreal rollercoaster of a read, full of the blackest humour, and yet poignant – an outrageously funny novel that’s also deadly serious about the pain of being a contemporary writer. The joy is in the writing itself, all sparky dialogue and wry observation, so smooth that when it cuts, it’s like finding razor blades in honey.
“Here’s the agony that underpins the novel: the writer – as opposed to the real-life human being who is father, husband, son, brother, friend – only truly becomes what he strives to be when he is on this own, wrestling with his creations on the page. Yet, at certain times in life, when there is a new baby for example, or publishing hits the economic buffers, guilt for all those stolen hours sets in and those fictional creations become demons.
“In THE BABY KILLERS, Declan Burke hasn’t just written another comedy crime novel (at which he excels) but has used it as a getaway vehicle to peel away the layers of the writing process itself, howling with anger at the state of the world and sparing himself no punishment along the way.” - Deborah Lawrenson

  I thank you kindly, ma’am.
  THE BABY KILLERS, for those of you new to these pages, is a novel which will be published later this year, and which has already received a number of humbling blurbs from some very fine writers. As such blurbs by definition come from fellow writers, I’m a tad concerned at this point that the book, which is in part concerned with the process of writing a novel, will be more interesting to other writers than it will to readers who aren’t writers. And there’s always the danger that a reader with no interest in the process of writing, or the struggle to get published that most writers experience, will simply feel that that aspect of the novel is at best self-indulgent.
  All I can say to that is that this book captures a particular frame of mind, an especially profound time and space in my life, and that I wanted to incorporate that into the story itself. As a challenge, as an experiment, as a once-off peek behind the curtain of the writing process, to expose myself as a pathetic ‘wizard’ furiously pulling on levers in a vain attempt to convince the world of my ‘magical’ powers. Perhaps it’s because so much of the publishing industry - leaving aside the actual writing for the moment - is an exercise in smoke and mirrors, one in which too many writers swan about offering lofty guff about genius and the creative process and dropping broad hints as to how they occupy a different plane entirely to their readers, when the truth is that they are every bit as desperately seeking truth, inspiration and meaning as the people who read their books.
  Most writers, if they’re honest, struggle with the same issues (financial and otherwise) as are dealt with in THE BABY KILLERS; most writers, if they’re honest, lose the battle, although very few, thankfully, resort to blowing up hospitals in frustration.
  Maybe THE BABY KILLERS is an exercise in self-indulgence - at this point I’m still too close to it to offer any kind of balanced opinion. That said, and for those writers who aren’t earning a decent living from publishing novels, which is most writers, the very act of writing, that of stealing away time, effort, income and emotion from your nearest and dearest in order to invest it in a tissue of lies, all for the sake of satisfying ego and ambition, is as self-indulgent a process as can be imagined. But can you imagine how much poorer the world would be without it?

Abzorba Da Greek

Not long before he died, Kingsley Amis was asked in an interview what he’d do differently if he could live his life over again. He thought for a while and said, “Well, I wouldn’t read THE MAGUS again.”
  I love THE MAGUS. I know it’s not fashionable anymore, and that no one seems to read John Fowles these days, but I’ve read THE MAGUS three times (maybe four, I’ve started leaving out the last bit), and I’m gearing up to read it again. Which is a bit of a commitment, it being a re-read of 656 pages (554 if you stop where I generally stop: I was marooned; wingless and leaden, as if I had been momentarily surrounded, then abandoned, by a flock of strange winged creatures; emancipated, mysterious, departing, as singing birds pass on overhead; leaving a silence spent with voices. Which seems to me to be an excellent way to end a novel, and the experience of reading a novel, and writing one). Anyway, THE MAGUS is set on a Greek island, and Greek islands are the literary equivalent of cat-nip for yours truly.
  I’m also partial to a good private eye, and fine writing, and Paul Johnston combines all three in A DEEPER SHADE OF BLUE, which features Alex Mavros. Quoth Mr & Mrs Kirkus:

Famous for his Quintilian Dalrymple series based in 2020s Edinburgh, the first of which won the John Creasy Memorial Dagger in 1997, Johnston changes location for this thriller, set on a Greek island. Trigono is breathtakingly beautiful and seemingly peaceful. But is there an evil hidden beneath its paradisiacal exterior? Rosa Ozal, a young Turkish-American beauty, has gone missing and the clue to her last known whereabouts is a postcard from Trigono. Alex Mavros is the private detective hired to find her. But when he reaches the island he discovers a community intent on hiding its secrets, and the task of finding any information regarding Rosa is not an easy one. The sudden deaths of a young island couple, found naked in a fishing boat with terror on their faces, make the atmosphere even more sombre. And is there a connection with the dreadful events that took place on Trigono during the Second World War? The plot moves on apace and soon Alex is confronted with a terrifying murderer. This is a high-class thriller, tautly written with the contrast between the idyllic surroundings and the shadow of violent danger adding to the charged atmosphere. Johnston's plotting and characterization are just as adept as they are in his Dalrymple books, and this is a novel to be enjoyed by anyone who loves thrilling prose and action-packed storylines.

  Nice. The good news is that the Mavros trilogy is (are?) being republished in April, with A DEEPER SHADE OF BLUE renamed CRYING BLUE MURDER. I prefer the original title, but there you go. THE LAST RED DEATH and THE GOLDEN SILENCE complete the triptych, but neither of them are set on Greek islands (the Peloponnese and Athens, respectively), which is a total bummer.
  Anyone got any suggestions for Greek island novels? The last one I read was the very fine SONGS OF BLUE AND GOLD, and I need my fix.

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?”: Deborah Lawrenson

Yep, it’s rubber-hose time, folks: a rapid-fire Q&A for those shifty-looking usual suspects …

What crime novel would you most like to have written?
A FATAL INVERSION by Barbara Vine (aka Ruth Rendell).

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
Charlotte Gray, eponymous heroine of Sebastian Faulks’ wartime novel, for sheer bravery and guts, with a yearly sabbatical as Daisy in THE GREAT GATSBY: how utterly relaxing to be that shallow and careless of others while remaining adored …

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
Not who but what: arty picture books of houses in the South of France.

Most satisfying writing moment?
Selling the rights to my fourth novel THE ART OF FALLING to Random House after having published it myself ten months earlier.

The best Irish crime novel is …?
THE STATEMENT by Brian Moore. Hope that counts. I love the way he writes sparingly yet lyrically, as tension builds.

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
Well, genuinely, I’d like to see THE BIG O make it. With Billy Bob Thornton as Frank.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
Worst: sitting at my desk and realising I’d be better off on a ten-mile run before sad case of Writer’s Bottom becomes irreversible. Best: sitting at my desk for hours playing around with words.

The pitch for your next book is …?
A cycle of interlinked stories set in Provence, exploring themes of age and experience, youth and innocence, reality and imagination - and a cold murder investigation.

Who are you reading right now?
THE LEVANT TRILOGY by Olivia Manning, alongside the biography of Olivia Manning by Neville and June Braybrooke.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
Reading – without hesitation.

The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Evocative, sensuous and derriere-enlarging.

Deborah Lawrenson’s SONGS OF BLUE AND GOLD is published by Arrow Books.

A Pleb Writes

The world’s dumbing-down continues apace, and we can but weep. The latest example is Deborah Lawrenson’s novel SONGS OF BLUE AND GOLD, a fictionalised version of Lawrence Durrell’s complex love-life during his time on the island of Corfu, which is being marketed without any reference at all to Lawrence Durrell on the basis that the plebs won’t have heard of him. Blummin’ plebs, eh?
  Happily, Ms Lawrenson herself is more than happy to wax lyrical about the inspiration for SONGS OF BLUE AND GOLD over at her interweb malarkey, with the gist running thusly:

“Inspired by the writer, poet and traveller Lawrence Durrell (1912-1990), this is a novel about love and memory, identity and biography.
  “It sparked into life one gloomy winter afternoon when I rediscovered PROSPERO’S CELL on the bookshelves of a bedroom at the top of the house. Opening it and starting to read was like injecting the grey with vivid blues and emeralds. A richly evocative account of Durrell’s life in Corfu in the 1930s, it was first published in 1945 and purports to be a diary in which he is a serious young writer living blissfully in the sun, deeply in love both with his new wife and with the idea of Greece.
  “Durrell states that PROSPERO’S CELL is a “guide to the landscape and manners” of Corfu but it never quite becomes this. It is a lyrical personal notebook, and what he leaves out is as poignant as what he includes.
  “Its content is almost unrecognisable as the same ground his younger brother, the zoologist Gerald, covers in his famous Corfu book MY FAMILY AND OTHER ANIMALS, in which ‘Larry’ lives with the family (which he never did) and is the ‘diminutive blond firework’ by turns pompously literary and hilarious.
  “And by the time he wrote PROSPERO’S CELL, Lawrence and his first wife Nancy had separated. He was already sadder and wiser, and living in wartime Egypt with Eve Cohen who would become his second wife.
  “I was intrigued. Further researches and a reading of several biographies soon revealed a complex and contradictory character - and a further two wives. His work, over a period of nearly sixty years - most famously in The Alexandria Quartet - was concerned with duality: love and hate; truth and fiction; memory and misinterpretation. And running through it all, the transfiguring effect of time …
  “Durrell aficionados might be disconcerted by the way I’ve played fast and loose with his chronology, compressing and altering his travels and his wives’ biographies to give an impression of the author’s life without providing in any way an accurate portrayal. In this, the book has more in common with his fictional characters, his use of dualism and reinterpretation, than with real people. “All these writers [in my books] are variations of myself,” he said a few years before he died. So, on one level, Julian Adie is another fictionalised version of Lawrence Durrell: what he might have become if certain events had taken place …”

  Incidentally, Deborah tells us that the Folio Society is publishing a new edition of Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet this month, the introduction to which can be found here …