 Recorded on 19 April 1999.
AK - The whole world of crime fiction, mystery, detection, whatever, is a very broad church. How in your mind do you distinguish, when you're writing your current novel, let us say, what do you think you are actually writing?
PDJ - I'm writing, I believe, in a very English tradition of what I see as the classical detective story and it's a very controlled form. Some would say it's an artificial form. You do have conventions and of course the main one is you have a central mysterious death; a closed circle of suspects with means, motives and opportunity for the crime; a detective who can either be amateur or professional and who comes in rather like an avenging deity to solve it. By the end of the book there is a solution which the reader should be able to arrive at by logical deduction from clues in the novel, inserted there with essential fairness but deceptive cunning, and some of course would say that it is formula writing. I think it need not be formulaic of course in the actual writing.
AK - I suppose if I were actually to look at this from a totally different point of view I would say yes, but this is only the scaffolding. What you are really doing is tackling large issues of good and evil, right and wrong. You're looking at and revealing all sorts of character. You're examining and perhaps exposing professions and vocations, like publishing, the law, hospital medicine, the National Health Service. In other words, this great structure is being used to reveal truths of quite a different kind. Indeed one might well argue that genre writing, formulaic writing, or whatever you wish to consider these books, is less important than the fact that they are really not only addressed to a highly literate audience. They are in fact novels, but novels within certain confines.
PDJ - That is absolutely so. I think it is ridiculous to say that you can't write a good novel within the constraints of genre fiction. It would be to say that you can't write great poetry in the sonnet form when, after all, you are restricted to 14 lines divided into eight and six, in a strict rhyming sequence. All fiction is to an extent artificial. It is the rearranging of our internal reality in a form we hope will be attractive to the reader. So you are absolutely right. I think what I find particularly fascinating is using this form and examining human beings under the trauma of a police investigation for murder, a unique crime, to try and say something that I believe to be true about men and women and the society in which we live.
AK - I think probably why I find myself moving away from the world of detective stories, the world of straight forward murder mystery and more towards, for want of a better description, a thriller that is vaguely connected to spy thrillers, is that in my case I've spent so much of my life involved journalistically and editorially with current affairs, news and politics, in parts of the world where terrible things are going on. So this seemed to be the kind of formula that I was more suited to, and found my characters more suited to. I'm still not altogether sure why this seemed to be a better way of writing a particular novel than any other way.
PDJ - I think that the orthodox detective story can be very limiting, certainly, and many modern writers do in fact reject it in favour of something which is freer, and the spectrum of crime writing, as you say, is extraordinarily wide. It embraces the fast action thriller, the novel of espionage, and it can even embrace historical novels, and I thought of that when I read The Forwarding Agent. It seems to me to be basically a novel of espionage. It's a thriller with nevertheless some detective interest because we are absolutely intrigued to know who these villains are who are pursuing the heroes so assiduously. But the world is one of international espionage and international danger. And it's a world with which you are obviously very familiar. I imagine that is because for very many years you ran the BBC World Service and this must have given you an immense amount of personal experience about the Middle East, and indeed all parts of the world. I think you have used that with tremendous effect. Do you think it was that personal aspect which drew you to this kind of crime writing?
AK - Yes, I think my own sort of apprehension of the dangerous world in which we live, which is well exemplified by what is happening at the moment in Kosovo, has made me feel that we are always on the edge. Here we are living in apparent safety in a civilised background and a civilised foreground. For indeed most of the Western world, we are living in comfort. Yet just over the borders, just over the horizon, there are the most terrible disasters happening. It is only a matter of luck, chance and serendipity on which side of the safe line we fall. And that, I think, as much as anything, is what draws me into this particular kind of book.
PDJ - Yes, and of course all these horrors and all this danger is brought into our sitting rooms by television in a way of course it wasn't when I was a girl. So we feel at once removed from it because we live in comparative safety and yet very much part of it. And there is this feeling that it could engulf any of us. But of course, in The Forwarding Agent your hero, Ben, isn't in a safe job himself, is he? How did you come to create him? Because in a way his world, and he is a soldier, and the job he now does, is very much part of the world of danger, isn't it? Of espionage, of, if you like, deceit.
AK - It is an attempt to put things right, perhaps through some fairly subterranean processes rather than overtly. Yes, it is deceit, but only deceit of the enemy.
PDJ - It is perfectly justifiable deceit - that possibly isn't quite the right word, but he is not going daily to the bank, is he? He's not going daily to his safe office.
AK - No he's not.
PDJ - And I think this is a huge advantage when you are writing a thriller, because in one way he is at ease in this world. He knows this world.
AK - Yes, he knows that world, but on the other hand he is at the end of one phase of his career. He is in a sort of valetudinarian mood. He's feeling that he's over the hill. He is going to be 40 any moment and he is no longer really wanted as an active, front-line, derring-do Royal Marine Commando, SBS and the rest of it. He is reinventing his life, still feeling that he wants somehow to be a part of the action: of doing good for people. He also realises that it is very difficult to do any of this on your own. When you have a marvellous team behind you and the whole of, in one sense or another, Whitehall backing you up, it's a different matter from being isolated, on your own, and finding yourself being pursued, and having your mother attacked. He's put into a position where he really seems even doubtful about his own ability to correct this. To improve on it. To save people. And I thought this was an interesting kind of situation to find yourself in at a changeover point in your life.
PDJ - It is a fascinating situation and you make it very alive and very real for the reader. Of course, Ben is a hero, and with a thriller we do indeed need a hero. It is impossible really to empathise with anyone who isn't basically well meaning and on the side of right, and he is. And the mother, you talk about his mother, Eleni, and I think she's a marvellously realised character. How did she come about? Have you ever known anyone like that? Can you give me, and this is a ridiculous question to ask a novelist I know, because we're always being asked how we create a character and nine times out of ten we have to confess that it is just as much a mystery to us as it is to the reader, but I wonder if you could give me any insight as to how she came into your mind and how she was created. She comes alive in this marvellous way and you have given her an extraordinary background.
AK - I don't know, but I think I read somewhere a very short paragraph in either a book or a newspaper, I can't recall now, in which a Jewish child from Northern Greece had been left in a church during one of the ghastly periods when all the Jews were being rounded up. The Greek Jews were almost entirely wiped out in Salonika by the Nazis and I suddenly had a picture of this small child clutching her doll in an empty church, and being taken on by a local priest who brought her up as one of his own. I was thinking about how she would feel later on when and if she remembered, or was brought to remember, that she was in fact Jewish and that all her family had disappeared. There she was, in a very loving environment in which she had been brought up, a protected environment in which the priest and his family had looked after her, knowing that if any German SS or Gestapo had been told they were harbouring a Jewish child they might well have been sent off themselves to the concentration camps or shot. And obviously the child had been brought up, baptised as an Orthodox Christian, and then suddenly later a relative pops up and claims her. I was just imagining how the rest of her life would go. She grew until she became what I hope is indeed a rather interesting character.
PDJ - Oh she's a marvellous character. An absolutely wonderful character. And what you've said is very interesting because I believe a character very often does start with a mental picture. With something which is so intriguing, so unusual, and which so captures the imagination that one learns, as I did, to develop it. She does remain both Christian and Jew. She has taken on both religions really, and in fact, how could she fail to do so?
AK - She sort of doubles her allocation of guardian angels!
PDJ - Yes, she's got twice the protection that anyone else has, and my goodness, she needs it! The scene in which they torture her is very horrific. You haven't, thankfully, described the scene in actual detail. By the time her son arrives it has all happened, and in some ways I think that makes horror more real and more horrible, because we relive it in our imaginations. I think so often graphic description of horror pales. The reader somehow doesn't vicariously experience it in the same way. Your book really has moments of great horror, but beautifully realised.
AK - Yes, I think I agree with you. I react rather badly to having too much blood and guts there on the page. I always feel it's better when it is in some way removed. I feel it is more powerful.
PDJ - I think the same goes for sex. It is more erotic when writers don't make an attempt to describe the sexual act in great detail. It never really works, I think. And we do here feel a very strong love and affection between the hero and his girlfriend. Elo se is an extraordinary and mysterious character. I never felt entirely happy about her motives or what her background was, and obviously you didn't intend that I should.
AK - No, indeed not.
PDJ - To that extent it is very very successful. Austen, how long did it take you to plot this book? It is carefully plotted. I think so much of it impresses. The plotting is one thing, and then we can go on really to the various settings, which as one might expect from someone with your experience, are wonderful. Did it take very long before you were able to start writing, or did you begin writing before it was fully plotted and then see what would happen to the characters, as some writers say they do? What was your method in writing this book?
AK - I knew the beginning and the end, so in that sense there was an outline plot. But I did let the characters develop a bit before doing any further plotting. I rewrote quite considerably as I went along, whilst still having the end always in mind.
PDJ - Yes, that's a very interesting way. We all obviously have our different methods. I plot in immense detail before I even begin writing, and yet the book does change sometimes in very unexpected ways during the writing. And I've known other writers, or read of them, Simenon is one, who apparently chose the names of characters from the international phone directory and put them into a situation, a room, a town, a small village, and let them get on with it. He wrote it in about three weeks of intensive writing in which the characters literally took over. You seem somewhere between the two. You do know where you are going to start. You do know where you are going to end. But you let your characters have very considerable freedom between those two points.
AK - I think so, but it took two years at least, so it was hardly the sort of three-week Simenon version. It would be lovely to do so, I'm sure.
PDJ - I couldn't possibly do it. It's a very extraordinary way and I don't think anybody else has done, quite like that. I feel, and perhaps I'm a little prejudiced because I write slowly, that a book that is so written has a peculiar richness about it because it has lingered for so long in the writer's imagination. I think that care and that knowledge which the writer has of this world and his characters is shown in the finished book. You say this took a long time to write and I can well understand this. What about the research? Much about the Middle East and Cyprus you must have known. Did you revisit any of these places again to refresh your memory about them?
AK - Some of them. And some of them I just happened to have been in fairly recently too. Others, possibly intentionally; I didn't want to get too close to complete reality and complete identification because then I think you run into all sorts of other problems. You are in a sense always making a semi-idealised place. My Cairo is not necessarily exactly what every traveller, visitor and tourist to Cairo is going to see. It is an amalgam of several visits, and what I believe to be an essence of the place as I know it. I'm not sure precision of identification is either necessary or good for the kind of book that I was writing. I don't particularly want people to identify a particular hotel or street, because it seems to me that it would take away from the imaginative creation or whatever you have got in mind. I've created my own hotel, whatever building it may or may not be, but the background will be roughly accurate.
PDJ - Yes, this setting interests me profoundly. I think it is tremendously important in a crime novel as it obviously establishes atmosphere. It adds credibility if we can feel that we are in a real place. It roots the sometimes bizarre events of the plot in the firm soil of a place that people can know, or feel they know, and have a symbolic interest. I think you're right. With this kind of novel, which moves so effectively from one location to the other, to spend too much time on detailed descriptions of particular locations is not only going to hold up the atmosphere, but perhaps it would make it too important, so the book is really rather out of kilter.
AK - To go to one of your books ("Original Sin"), that marvellous house you created for the fictional publishers on the river - was a creation: it wasn't really an identification, was it?
PDJ - No, it wasn't. But what one wants to do, and I think you have done this, is that you need to have enough of a real place that people will know. The scenes of, say, Cairo, so that when you have a hotel it should be your hotel and it should be designed to meet the services of your plot. I think it is much more fun to devise your own hotel and describe where you are going to put it, what the rooms are going to be like and what people can see when they enter it, than it is to go back to an actual scene and find a real hotel and describe it. I think the settings are extremely well used and the book does move from country to country, doesn't it?
AK - I suppose in that sense it is picaresque. We move on all the time.
PDJ - Yes, we move on all the time, but we also feel that we know the place where we are and that is very important. What about the love interest? The heroine? Did you feel that this is a thriller, it's going to be an exciting book, a commercial book, and why write if you don't want to be read, and that therefore there should be a love interest? When did the heroine come into your mind? I can see about the mother, but what about the heroine and the love affair?
AK - Well, I think it would have been very incomplete without. I can't envisage any sort of red-blooded heterosexual ex-Royal Marine not having some kind of relationship. And being the sort of man that he is, and he is rather complex, I think his relationship is likely to be complex too. I think I've seen the girl a bit like this in my mind for some while, and was then working out why she was quite the way she was. Eloise was just the sort of girl I thought he would both fall for and also in a sense have trouble with. This is partly because she is a little bit like him. She's independent minded. She comes from quite different traditions. And she herself has this strange lacuna, the absent father. It's unexplained. Her mother never really talks about him. And then suddenly he appears and disrupts her life totally. I would not like to have done the book without that sexual-romantic element, but I found it very difficult to resolve in a manner in which I thought they would both be moderately happy.
PDJ - Well I think you felt that they deserved to be happy, and in the end they should be happy. In a sense one is really dealing with death, which is one of the great absolutes, and love is another. Certainly, as a book combining them, I think it does present problems. And yet, if the writer doesn't, then the book is incomplete because, as you say, particularly with your hero, he would have had a relationship with a woman. It would have been pretty dull if she had been staying at home looking after the three children in Surbiton. It's not that kind of a book, but it's quite tricky I think. Well, I find it so, perhaps you didn't. Because really one can believe in this love affair absolutely, and you combine it with excitement, murder and death and somehow hold the balance. Technically, it seems to me that's one of the interesting problems of writing a thriller. Sometimes the love interest dominates, and I think that's wrong. But here it is woven into the rest of the story. She is a most intriguing and extraordinary woman, and one can believe in her beauty and in her attraction for the hero.
AK - I don't think I found it easy, I agree with you, but then there were lots of things I didn't find all that easy. After all, this is a first novel. I think it is very difficult if you're starting off in a slightly idiosyncratic mode, and perhaps a rather eccentric one too. There is no direct following of someone else's pattern, but with issues like how much violence and how much sex, I agree with you. I think they are much more effective when they are understated. How much time do you need to give to emotions other than fear, hatred, derring-do, courage and horror? It's difficult when one is starting off.
PDJ - I think it's incredibly difficult, and of course I always want to feel that I am with the characters in the real world in which they get up in the morning, they wash, they shower, they eat, and what they eat, the ordinary everyday things which we experience. If they are not there, then the book does lack reality. It's can't just be a succession of horror, excitement and derring-do, and there you are absolutely right. But that is a great problem of structure. One only learns, I suppose, by doing it. It seems to me that there is nothing at all that is amateurish or first novelish about this book. It is a remarkably assured piece of writing, and maybe in the end that is because you did take time over it. Did you revise as you went along? Or are you one of those writers who actually does a draft and then goes over it all again and produces a second draft or maybe a third? Or do you, as it were, revise chapter by chapter? I would be interested to know how you actually work.
AK - Well, I certainly revise chapter by chapter because I don't like finishing with a chapter until I think I've done it as well as I can. But then I also did revise the whole thing through another draft with fairly substantial changes and revisions in it, because in a way I suppose that by the time I got to the end there were things that I had to go back to the beginning to change, if only in emphasis. So I think probably a bit of both therefore. Although probably the overall revision was of the second draft. It wasn't so much of a revision as the major rewrite of each chapter as it went on.
PDJ - Yes, I do that. I have the same feelings when I finish a chapter. I want it to be as perfect as I can make it, so I tend to revise then. But of course, with a book that is very very carefully plotted and planned in advance, I know at each stage where I am going. Whereas if you are writing and coming under the influence of the inspiration of the moment, then it does become rather more complex and more difficult. I am rather interested in those writers who say to me Oh I'm doing my third draft." They obviously just go on writing to the end and then they start again and go on revising. Obviously both of us do something in between, because at the end there has to be that final read-through, doesn't there? And that's really where problems of structure can come out, as well as some duplication sometimes.
AK - You might find that there is a particular thread in the character that needs to be pulled out, or needs to be pushed back in. You may have just mentioned it in two or three chapters and never really developed it. Either you want to get rid of it altogether, or you want to make more of it. But you can only see that when you read the whole thing through.
PDJ - Yes, I think to that extent you have to be fairly ruthless. If you decide that it isn't working, then it has to go, and I must say that I hate that. I think it is one of my weaknesses as a writer and I hope it doesn't show in the completed book, but during the writing I loathe to let go of anything I have actually written. I try to avoid writing anything that I'm not in fact going to keep. But I think we just have to be prepared to say "No, that thing doesn't work" or "that scene isn't right here and it's got to go." And if one has taken a lot of trouble over writing it, it is like throwing out ones children in a cruel and callous way. It's quite painful, I find.
AK - Yes, it's a kind of infanticide.
PDJ - Absolutely. It is a kind of infanticide. What about the title, Austen? I think anyone would agree that titles are immensely important. What we are aiming at surely is a title, which tells the reader essentially what kind of book it, is, is original, is appropriate to the particular plot, and will of course remain in the memory. Yours, I think, is a brilliant title. Did it come to you quite easily, or did you have various alternatives and finally decide on this? How did you find the title?
AK - I think titles are terribly important and awfully difficult, and I was discussing titles years ago with a variety of people. I think it was actually Leon Garfield. We were talking about titles like The Secret Agent and so on, and somehow either he or someone else said "What about The Forwarding Agent?" I thought about it for a long time and I thought this is precisely the sort of title I wanted. This is what this man, with his friends, has done. They have set themselves up as a kind of glorified travel agency that does other things as well. And what they are really doing is forwarding. They are not forwarding parcels, they are forwarding people, and therefore I plucked it out of the conversation from years ago and thought that was the right title.
PDJ - Yes, I've done that. It is interesting, isn't it, that you can be told a title or come across a phrase or a quotation, and feel that would be a marvellous title for a novel. It may be years later that you actually write it. It is weird because the very word ëagent' immediately suggests that this is a world of espionage. Even more important, I think probably more important than deciding on a title, is deciding on the names of the characters. They have to somehow again be appropriate and then there is the problem of using names of real people. How did you go about that?
AK - With difficulty. You've got to get names that you can live with and that your characters can live with and seem real. But then, as you say, as soon as one enlarges the cast, particularly in my case where there are lots of people from different parts of the world and therefore all different sorts of names, you run into other kinds of problems, such as are they easy to pronounce? Can anybody recognise them? Or is it a bit like those Russian novels where you need to have a sort of crib beside you all the time to know who is who? I think names are terribly difficult.
PDJ - Yes, I think they are difficult because, as you said, being able to memorise them is so important. Sometimes readers say to me "Why don't you begin the book with a list of characters?" Now this seems to me to be a terrible failure. I would hate to do that. I just have never done it. But nevertheless, with a book with a large number of characters, including subsidiary characters, there is this problem of "have I met this one before? Should I know him, or do I look back?" I think you very cleverly avoided that, but I do think it is difficult. This is a very crowded canvas that you have, with not only the chief characters, the hero, his girlfriend and the wonderfully drawn mother, but also many many people, as it were, coming in and out of the story and in and out of his life. Not only naming them, but making them real people for their brief appearance, I think is quite a challenge for a novelist.
AK - Oh I'm sure it is, and getting the right name has got an awful lot to do with that. It may sound silly, but I think if you get the wrong name then you might very well find yourself in a position in which you haven't achieved in a few brief paragraphs that character's entry and exit. All you have achieved is confusion.
PDJ - Yes exactly. It is odd though, isn't it, that I suppose you would never think of calling him Cyril Bloggs, but it is perfectly reasonable in life that a Cyril Bloggs would be a brave captain in the Marines and perform all this derring-do. In a book one would never suppose he could. It is really quite extraordinary. It's like naming your children in a way. You're not only giving them a name that you really like, but you are trying to say something, I suppose, about the kind of people they are or are likely to be, and I agree with you absolutely. It's incredibly difficult. If you find, as I have occasionally, that I have used a name which is the name of a real person, and this of course could happen when you have doctors or lawyers, and you have to look through to make sure there isn't a doctor or lawyer of that name - when you have to make the change, somehow that's very disconcerting. You lose your character for a little time. I hate that. I've had to do that about twice and I now take jolly good care before I begin that I choose names that I'm not going to have to change.
AK - That's a real horror, because in a way it's a reversal of what happens when naming children. You may give all the thought in the world to getting the right name for the child, but subsequently the child becomes the name and the name becomes the child, so you forget what it was you had in mind with that name. But in a book it's the other way around. If you get it wrong it doesn't merge. It becomes more and more offensive, and more and more standing out and looking funny and wrong.
PDJ - Yes it does. I think you've been brilliant about your hero's profession. That is such a clever idea, not only because it is contemporary, it's totally believable; and it's exciting. But of course you can go on using him and I very much hope you will. This is the kind of novel where I want to know more about the people afterwards, and there are not many novels about which one can say that. I'm waiting for Ben Bolton's next adventure, and I do hope that both his mother and his girlfriend will reappear.
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