The Intel: Anders de la Motte

Identity and memory have long held a fascination for authors and readers alike — we can’t get enough of characters who have to discover who they are. If we’re lucky, they’re in big trouble — and Swedish author Anders de la Motte’s latest protagonist David Sarac is up to his neck in it.

Anders hit the big time with his hi-tech Game trilogy and his latest thriller MemoRandom is out just in time for Christmas. It’s a gripping thriller in which police officer Sarac wakes up from a car crash and remembers nothing, except the he’s done something unforgivable and that he needs to protect his informant Janus. Natalie Aden is the only person he trust to help him piece the clues together. But others will go to desperate lengths to get to Janus before them…

Anders de la Motte was formerly a police officer and then director of security at one of the world’s largest IT companies. The telly rights to MemoRandom have already been snapped up — by the guy who brought Homeland and 24 to the screen.

So Crime Thriller Fella is thrilled that Anders is gives us the intel on his amnesiac copper, how his own career in law-enforcement has fuelled his books, and how as an author sometimes you’ve just got to kill your darlings…

Tell us about David Sarac…

David Sarac works for the intelligence unit at the Stockholm police. His job is to recruit and handle secret informants within the criminal world, assess the information his sources provide and funnel it into other departments in the police. If you ask him what he does he would say that he is a collector of secrets. Sarac lives for his job and he is very good at it. Bribes, threats or blackmail, anything goes as long as he gets results. His only work-tool is a notebook with encrypted information that he keeps very close to his heart.

Since Sarac’s results are excellent his commanding officers conveniently look the other way and does not question his methods and his star within the police community is on the rise. His prize source is a top-secret informant code named Janus, located somewhere in the top level of the organized crime structure in Stockholm. Janus provides Sarac with extremely useful information and people on both sides of the law are very eager to find out Janus’s identity, either to use him for their own purposes or simply to eliminate him. But Sarac is very careful. He is the only person who knows Janus’s true identity, how to contact and control the reluctant informant who for obvious reasons has everything to lose.

But when Sarac suffers from a stroke in the middle of a high-speed pursuit and violently crashes his car he also loses part of his memory. And suddenly he finds himself being just one of the participators in a chase for his own secrets. A chase with a deadly outcome.

What was the inspiration for MemoRandom?

I wanted to write a dark story revolving around police-officers and criminals but lacked an interesting angle. In 2013 my father suffered from a light amnesia and initially lost a year of his life. The gap closed within a few days, first to months, and then weeks but to this day there is still one day he does not remember. As I watched his frustration in dealing with this fact, as well as the various tools he used to backtrack his steps and decrypt his own brain I got increasingly interested in how the brain processes and stores memories and why we sometimes remember things incorrectly.

From there I started thinking of a policeman losing his memory and what would be the most important and dangerous thing to forget. So I came up with David Sarac and his elusive, top-secret and quite dangerous informant code-named Janus. Sarac’s journey is actually the opposite of the tormented-cop-heading-downhill character as he starts out in a pretty bad shape but gradually recovers.

Why are we so fascinated by characters who suffer from amnesia, or find themselves without an identity?

Everyone lives in their own little universe, our own bubble with environments we recognize, people we know and where we feel reasonably safe and in control. I think the whole idea and horror of one day waking up inside an unfamiliar bubble is something most people can relate to and be fascinated by. To your point, the amnesia theme is quite popular and therefore I’ve tried not to overexploit it. Like my father, Sarac suffers from a partial memory loss. He remembers who he is and where he lives, he has “just” lost about two years of his life. Two very important years filled with crucial information he is no longer privy to.

How has your own experience as a police officer and a director of security at a global IT company fuelled your writing?

When working in law-enforcement and private security you constantly deal with problems, mainly those created by others and that you are supposed to try to solve. Your work is dealing with things that are really not supposed to be happening. I’ve been in that business for almost 20 years and by now I have quite a bank of experience that I draw from. It could be scenarios like the “micro kidnappings” that Natalie Aden is orchestrating, events like the dead man in the snowed-over car found in the middle of Stockholm (true, I was first officer on site) or small details like how police officers (and criminals) talk, methods or equipment they use and so on. Like Sarac I have a vast net of contacts, the difference is my secret sources volunteer their help if I need it.

MemoRandom could be coming to TV as an American series – which actors do you see in you mind’s eye as Sarac and Natalie?

Wow, difficult question. Sarac is a tormented, complicated character, rather than a tough guy. Natalie is both smart and has lots of attitude. I’m open to suggestions. Tom Hardy perhaps, and why not Swedish actor Rebecca Ferguson who starred in the latest Mission Impossible?

What’s the hardest lesson you ever had to learn about writing?

Sometimes you have to take out whole scenes or even characters because they slow the story down and do not add any value. Many hours of research and writing gone in just a couple of clicks… In writing this is called “kill your darlings” and sometimes that is how it feels.

Who are the authors you admire, and why?

I admire many authors for many different reasons. Norwegian author Jo Nesbo is always on the top of my list. He is really great at building intricate plots as well as using the tormented-cop-heading-downhill cliché without making it sound in any way like a cliché.

I also admire the fact that he writes stand-alones in different styles than his regular. This is something I would like to try, as a way to develop as a writer.

Give us some advice about writing…

Get started. 99% of all aspiring writers for various reasons never start, mainly because they think you have to have the perfect story ready in every detail first. This is not the case, your story will develop once you start typing, as will your storytelling skills. Every word you write is a small step towards reaching your goal so get started!

What’s next for you and Sarac?

UltiMatum, the sequel to MemoRandom, was released in Sweden in September and is currently being translated to English by brilliant translator Neil Smith. It was awarded the very prestigious Best Swedish Crime Fiction of the Year Award by the Swedish Crime writers association and I’m off course very happy and proud over this.

Currently I’m in New York promoting MemoRandom which is being released here at the same time as in the UK. MemoRandom has gotten some pretty spectacular pre-reviews here and I’m very eager to hear what both the American and British readers think of it.

I hope you like the book and the characters as much as I do.

***

MemoRandom is available right now in paperback and as an ebook, published by Harper Collins.

M.J. Arlidge on Six Degrees Of Assassination

So we’ve talked about books, we’ve talked about a fair few of them. And we’ve talked about a bit of telly. And movies, we like our crime thriller movies, and radio. So let’s move on and talk about this here audio drama. An audio drama is, like, radio without the shipping forecast, right? You can listen to it anywhere — in the car, while you go for a run, while you’re on a stakeout.

Six Degrees Of Assassination is a gripping thriller about the murder of the British Prime Minister which is available to download from Audible.co.uk to a host of devices. The action follows an MI5 investigation into the assassination of the British Prime Minister. Six people, from assassin to mastermind, are unravelled from a web-like, complex chain of command — each of them a vital step towards uncovering the truth. It’s action-packed and, because it’s pumped right into your lug holes, unbearably tense.

Six Degrees stars Andrew Scott, him from Sherlock, and Freema Agyeman, her from Doctor Who, and Hermione Norris, her from all sorts.

And the writer M.J. Arlidge is quite the person at the moment. A television scriptwriter — Silent Witness, Torn, The Little House and Undeniable are among his credits — Arlidge became this year one of the biggest novelists in the business with his procedural Eeny Meeny.

Arlidge took time out from his packed writing schedule to give us the lowdown on Six Degrees…

Tell us about Six Degrees of Assassination…

Six Degrees is a ‘What If’ thriller about the assassination of the British Prime Minister. It introduces a new MI5 hero – Alex Cartwright – and is a cross between 24 and Homeland.

Someone once famously said the pictures on radio were better – are you able to let your imagination off the leash doing an audio drama?

Absolutely!!! I work in TV for my day job, but could only dream of doing what we do in Six Degrees. Explosions, car chases, assassinations, helicopters – it’s got the lot.

What’s that feeling like when you hear actors bring your words alive?

Amazing. We were so lucky to have such a stellar cast – Andrew Scott, Freema Agyeman, Hermione Norris — and they were uniformly brilliant. Andrew and Freeman make such a thrilling but charming pair and Hermione is so intelligent and sophisticated. I couldn’t have asked for more.

Why do we love conspiracy thrillers so much, do you think?

Because they produce a pleasurable paranoia! We love Russian Doll thrillers in which you are never sure who to trust or which agenda to believe. They are a great ride and always keep you guessing to the end. What’s not to love?

You’re both a scriptwriter and novelist, these days – how do you fit it all into your writing schedule?

It’s a juggling act, but it’s very refreshing — and challenging — to go from one medium to the other. It keeps you fresh and each informs the other. You never stop learning!

The Intel: Mark Allen Smith Reloaded

Crime Thriller Fella is taking a much-needed summer break. But fear not, devoted readers, we’re going to meet up again right here very soon. However, do keep coming back. Over the last year there’s been all sorts of stuff we’ve enjoyed plonking on the internet, and which you may have missed, such as this Intel interview with Mark Allen Smith, whose anti-hero Geiger is not the kind of man you’d want to meet while strapped to a chair…

Mark Allen Smith is the creator of one of the most eye-catching protagonists in crime fiction – the torturer known simply as Geiger. So far Geiger’s appeared in The Inquisitor and The Confessor. You can read Crime Thriller Fella’s review of The Confessor, available in bookshops now, further down the page. Or – tell you what – you can click here.

It takes a hell of an author to make us cheer for the bad guy, so I’m absolutely delighted that Mark Allen Smith gives us The Intel on Geiger, torture, and banging out a tune when you should be writing.

Geiger, the protagonist of The Confessor and its predecessor The Inquisitor is a professional torturer – where did you get the idea for such a singular hero?

In 1980, as an investigative news producer, I became involved in a story about a brutal political torture/murder by the secret police in Paraguay. The victim was the 17 year-old son of a political dissident. It was a shocking awakening. Then, in 1987, the murder of 6-year Lisa Steinberg in New York City after years of torture by her adoptive father became a national outrage. More stories about parental abuse started to emerge.

I had become a father, and remember holding my sleeping 3-year old son in my arms and trying to put myself inside the head of a man who tortures his own child. Then another thought came: If a child survives years of torture, who do they grow up to be? How do they anchor themselves in the world? That’s when Geiger was ‘born.’

Torturers are not going to be everybody’s idea of a sympathetic protagonist – how do you go about making Geiger someone the reader can root for?

That was certainly the big risk, wasn’t it? How do I introduce a monstrous character, Geiger, not hedge on his ‘reality,’ and get the reader to keep reading? I didn’t expect someone to care for Geiger at the start – but I wanted the reader to have just enough of a sense of his buried humanity that they would wonder – How does somebody turn into this? – and hang in there with him instead of tossing the book. There were three keys.

1) Tap into his tragic nature – to give a sense (but not too much) of it as the plot unfolded and hope it drew the reader to him, and

2) create a detailed picture of the controlled life he has meticulously constructed in order to function in the world. I think it helps make clear, from the start, that Geiger is a far more tortured individual than those he tortures, and

3) give Geiger a subtle ‘childlike’ aspect. I think people picked up on that, and were brought closer to Geiger because of it. His lack of guile and irony are reminiscent, I think, of a child, and create a kind of sympathy – and the truth is, in many ways (as we discover) Geiger is still a child.

What kind of a research did you do?

Years of reading, pre- and post-internet. Thank god for Google. The sad truth is that there is a ton of stuff about torture on the web – the history, its evolution, techniques, legal aspects. You could spend a year just boning up on the Spanish Inquisition…

The concept of torture is now in the mainstream of popular culture – popping up in the likes of 24, Taken and Zero Dark Thirty. Do you think we have become desensitized to the awful reality of it?

At this point that may be true. When I started writing The Inquisitor it was not the case – the Bush Administration’s post-911 ‘enhanced interrogation’ agenda was just being exposed and had yet to become a frequent and contentious topic of conversation. One of my reasons for writing The Inquisitor was to bring the issue into the public consciousness – but not just in a political context. As I wrote –

‘…Geiger had come to understand that the practice of torture was not an aberration…(that) immeasurable time and effort had gone into creating and perfecting methods for inflicting pain in the pursuit of what a person or group considered indispensable information or truth…’

– but what I also wanted to share was the belief that torture was not some rare atrocity committed by entities – political, religious, militaristic – with well-developed agendas. To look at it that way is almost comforting. ‘Well… That torturer guy is crazy…evil…not like the rest of us…not like me…’ I wanted to draw a connecting line from the ‘professional torturer’ to the ‘average’ person and the abuses they/we commit.

I wanted to make the case that the desire to torture is part of the human psyche – something we are quite adept and creative at – and needed to be considered as such in order to better understand it and deal with it. So… Desensitized? Probably. If so, it is a shame, and dangerous, because the conversation needs to continue – but in today’s sensory-bombardment world it is almost inevitable – almost the norm – that any ‘hot topic’ issue eventually (with alarming speed) turns cold, and many grow numb to it.

What’s your writing process? What comes first – plot or character?

Most often it’s character first, but for me that is a multi-tiered thing. A character will come to life in my head, but he/she brings along a predicament and an issue that usually gives me a jump-start for the plot. Once a character becomes alive and vibrant to me I often end up following them as they head into the ‘story.’ Which is to say – yes, life is somewhat weird when I’m writing. I tend to live with my characters 24-7. I follow them, listen to them, try and guess what they’re thinking and what they’ll choose to do. Another way of answering the question ‘What comes first – plot or character?’ Character is plot.

Take us through a typical writing day for you?

At my desk by 9.00 AM with coffee and a wistful desire for the cigarette I shall not smoke. I re-read the last ten pages of the work-in-progress to get my brain up to speed. I eat little until dinner, so except for trips to the coffee pot for refills I usually stay planted at my computer all day. When I get stuck – alas, not infrequently – I swivel in my chair to my Yamaha Motif and play for a few minutes, until I start to feel guilty, and then I swivel back to my ‘job.’

I stop when my wife Cathy gets home around 7.00 PM, we cook a good dinner and eat it, then I go back to work with my wine until 11.00, or later. Some days, up to six pages – some days, half a page. Perhaps my best description of the writing process is the rhyme by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

When she was good
 she was very very good

And when she was bad she was horrid.

Who are the authors you love, and why?

I could list dozens, but to be brief…

John Barth – for his outrageous arrogance and courage at pushing the envelope.

Herman Melville – for changing the way I looked into myself and others by writing Bartleby The Scrivener (and yeah, some other stuff, too).

J.P. Donleavy – a great musician of prose, and a lover and chronicler of all that is melancholy.

How do you deal with feedback?

I get pleasure from reading critical praise, humbly underplaying that pleasure to those around me, while secretly agreeing whole-heartedly with said critics, bless them all. I pay grim attention to the damning thoughts of others, underplaying that displeasure to those around me, while secretly wishing those that would wound me an eternal stay in Hell, damn their blackened, presumptuous souls.

How have your own experiences shaped your writing?

I will answer this question with a few lines from my new work-in-progress – spoken by a dying novelist to a group of college creative writing students.

…Every choice, to a degree, is a reflection of who the author is.

Each act we make a character commit, each uttered word, everything

they feel. Whether great art or wince-worthy production of a hack –

the work is an offering, consciously or not, with the stamp of one’s

inner self on it. ‘Hey… I’m in here somewhere. Do you see me?’

Give me some advice about writing…

Don’t wait to start writing until you think you’ve got the ‘whole story’ in your head. Not having the whole story in your head is half the fun.

Take chances. Go with an impulse, something you hadn’t considered up to that point – you can always go back and change it, or scrap it.

Don’t read someone else’s fiction when writing fiction. It’s the only kind of celibacy that is beneficial.

Last… I’m embarrassed to admit I can’t remember who said the following – Tennessee Williams, maybe – but its message has served me very well, time and again. I’m probably doing it a great injustice – but it goes something like this.

‘I get up in the morning, have coffee, and at ten o’clock sit down at the typewriter and put a fresh sheet of paper in. I take the bourbon from the desk drawer, pour a glass and put it on the desk, and start thinking. At four in the afternoon I finish whatever is left in the glass, and leave my desk. It doesn’t matter if I wrote ten pages…or the page I put in the typewriter is still there, blank. I’m a writer. I put in a day’s work.’

What’s next for you?

I have personally paid for Geiger to go on vacation. He needs a rest and so do I. Dealing with him is exhausting. During our break, I am writing a picaresque tragicomedy about a revered, 40-year-old novelist who discovers he has a rare, incurable disease and decides he must write one final book before he kicks. But fate and chaos and global forces have other plans for him. Death, god, pharmaceuticals, incest, terrorism… I’m really enjoying the work – when it isn’t making me miserable.

Binary Witness – Rosie Claverton

If you’re introducing to the world a singular new heroine, both eccentric and damaged, you may want to consider mixing in a cake bowl the DNA of Lincoln Rhyme and Lisbeth Salander. You may want to add a dash of Holmes and the scowling vulnerability of Chloe from 24. Dribble in a tot of Gregory House and then season with a pinch of Rear Window – and just the merest hint of the shabby tech of Torchwood. Let the recipe stew in a darkened flat for a lifetime and – voila – what you have is the first of the Amy Lane Mysteries.

Rosie Claverton’s fast-paced novel Binary Witness is an unashamed geeky mash-up of crime references. Her protagonist Amy Lane is an agoraphobic computer genius, wracked by anxiety attacks, who solves crime from her bolt hole somewhere in Cardiff. And, of course, we’re not talking parking violations.

Boot up the blurb:

Police detectives rely on Amy Lane to track the digital debris of their most elusive criminals—when she’s not in the throes of a panic attack. After two students disappear in Cardiff, Amy uncovers photographic evidence that they’ve been murdered. From the safety of her computer, she looks through the city’s digital eyes to trace the steps of a killer.

Amy’s investigation requires footwork, however, and the agoraphobic genius can’t hack it alone. She turns to her newly-hired cleaner, ex-con Jason Carr. Jason is fascinated by both Amy and the work, and can’t refuse even when she sends him into situations that risk returning him to prison.

The killer strikes again and again, and Amy and Jason are the only investigators closing in on him. But Amy’s psyche is cracking under the strain, and Jason’s past is catching up with him. To stop the next murder, they must hold their unconventional partnership together at any cost.

There’s plenty to like in Binary Witness. It has an offbeat geeky charm – fun and knowing and full of sly crime and pop culture references. The set-pieces – a couple of long sequences in a hospital and at a train station – are really exciting, and Claverton really nails Cardiff’s vibrant cityscape, its young tribes. Its street gangs and students, the bars and clubs, the social media hubs. Claverton’s eventual revelation of the identity of the killer is a terrific sleight of hand.

What Claverton does really well is give a real sense of how people exist in two worlds now: in the real world, rarely hidden from the CCTV that follows their every move in public, and online, where they can be increasingly tracked and traced, hunted from afar like prey in the jungle. It’s great fun watching Amy doing her thing in the dark nest of her flat, on a computer called Aeon with which she has an oddly romantic attachment. Bringing up public records, plucking information from online forums and analysing sound waves, watching the world in her own fortress of solitude.

The author is also a scriptwriter and her gallery of characters, such as Amy and Jason, the police detectives Bryn and Owain, and her visiting profiler Eleanor Deaver – you see what she did there? – enjoy the kind of easy relationship you’d perhaps see in tightly-formatted cop series on Sky Living.

I would have liked to have seen more conflict among her cast, maybe. The relationships are touching and ring true, and Amy is an enjoyably flinty character – both imperious and vulnerable, like all our favourite geniuses – but Jason is perhaps less well-defined, to my mind. He’s an ex-con supposedly with a history of violence in street gangs, but he’s also a pussycat who loves his mum and his sister, is devoted to Amy and the old ladies he cleans for.

After some initial suspicion, Jason seems to work happily alongside Cardiff’s finest and charm his way in just about anywhere. He gets hit over the bonce, and gets into the sack with a victim’s flat-mate, he takes part in chases and, as Amy’s representative on earth, races across the city – but a few more rough edges would maybe give him more bite.

Amy, enclosed in her flat, humming with the sound of servers, remains something of an enigma at the end, her backstory not fully explored, but with another book called Code Runner on the way, you get the feeling that Jason’s going to be running around Cardiff for quite some time yet.

Binary Witness is out now, published on the Carina Press, which means you can download it right now.

You may also remember that a few weeks back Rosie did one of Crime Thriler Fella’s hugely-prestigious Intel Interviews. To find out more about Amy, Binary Witness and the book’s path to publication, go here.

The Intel: Mark Allen Smith

Mark Allen Smith is the creator of one of the most eye-catching protagonists in crime fiction – the torturer known simply as Geiger. So far Geiger’s appeared in The Inquisitor and The Confessor. You can read Crime Thriller Fella’s review of The Confessor, available in bookshops now, further down the page. Or – tell you what – you can click here.

It takes a hell of an author to make us cheer for the bad guy, so I’m absolutely delighted that Mark Allen Smith gives us The Intel on Geiger, torture, and banging out a tune when you should be writing.

Geiger, the protagonist of The Confessor and its predecessor The Inquisitor is a professional torturer – where did you get the idea for such a singular hero?

In 1980, as an investigative news producer, I became involved in a story about a brutal political torture/murder by the secret police in Paraguay. The victim was the 17 year-old son of a political dissident. It was a shocking awakening. Then, in 1987, the murder of 6-year Lisa Steinberg in New York City after years of torture by her adoptive father became a national outrage. More stories about parental abuse started to emerge.

I had become a father, and remember holding my sleeping 3-year old son in my arms and trying to put myself inside the head of a man who tortures his own child. Then another thought came: If a child survives years of torture, who do they grow up to be? How do they anchor themselves in the world? That’s when Geiger was ‘born.’

Torturers are not going to be everybody’s idea of a sympathetic protagonist – how do you go about making Geiger someone the reader can root for?

That was certainly the big risk, wasn’t it? How do I introduce a monstrous character, Geiger, not hedge on his ‘reality,’ and get the reader to keep reading? I didn’t expect someone to care for Geiger at the start – but I wanted the reader to have just enough of a sense of his buried humanity that they would wonder – How does somebody turn into this? – and hang in there with him instead of tossing the book. There were three keys.

1) Tap into his tragic nature – to give a sense (but not too much) of it as the plot unfolded and hope it drew the reader to him, and

2) create a detailed picture of the controlled life he has meticulously constructed in order to function in the world. I think it helps make clear, from the start, that Geiger is a far more tortured individual than those he tortures, and

3) give Geiger a subtle ‘childlike’ aspect. I think people picked up on that, and were brought closer to Geiger because of it. His lack of guile and irony are reminiscent, I think, of a child, and create a kind of sympathy – and the truth is, in many ways (as we discover) Geiger is still a child.

What kind of a research did you do?

Years of reading, pre- and post-internet. Thank god for Google. The sad truth is that there is a ton of stuff about torture on the web – the history, its evolution, techniques, legal aspects. You could spend a year just boning up on the Spanish Inquisition…

The concept of torture is now in the mainstream of popular culture – popping up in the likes of 24, Taken and Zero Dark Thirty. Do you think we have become desensitized to the awful reality of it?

At this point that may be true. When I started writing The Inquisitor it was not the case – the Bush Administration’s post-911 ‘enhanced interrogation’ agenda was just being exposed and had yet to become a frequent and contentious topic of conversation. One of my reasons for writing The Inquisitor was to bring the issue into the public consciousness – but not just in a political context. As I wrote –

‘…Geiger had come to understand that the practice of torture was not an aberration…(that) immeasurable time and effort had gone into creating and perfecting methods for inflicting pain in the pursuit of what a person or group considered indispensable information or truth…’

– but what I also wanted to share was the belief that torture was not some rare atrocity committed by entities – political, religious, militaristic – with well-developed agendas. To look at it that way is almost comforting. ‘Well… That torturer guy is crazy…evil…not like the rest of us…not like me…’ I wanted to draw a connecting line from the ‘professional torturer’ to the ‘average’ person and the abuses they/we commit.

I wanted to make the case that the desire to torture is part of the human psyche – something we are quite adept and creative at – and needed to be considered as such in order to better understand it and deal with it. So… Desensitized? Probably. If so, it is a shame, and dangerous, because the conversation needs to continue – but in today’s sensory-bombardment world it is almost inevitable – almost the norm – that any ‘hot topic’ issue eventually (with alarming speed) turns cold, and many grow numb to it.

What’s your writing process? What comes first – plot or character?

Most often it’s character first, but for me that is a multi-tiered thing. A character will come to life in my head, but he/she brings along a predicament and an issue that usually gives me a jump-start for the plot. Once a character becomes alive and vibrant to me I often end up following them as they head into the ‘story.’ Which is to say – yes, life is somewhat weird when I’m writing. I tend to live with my characters 24-7. I follow them, listen to them, try and guess what they’re thinking and what they’ll choose to do. Another way of answering the question ‘What comes first – plot or character?’ Character is plot.

Take us through a typical writing day for you?

At my desk by 9.00 AM with coffee and a wistful desire for the cigarette I shall not smoke. I re-read the last ten pages of the work-in-progress to get my brain up to speed. I eat little until dinner, so except for trips to the coffee pot for refills I usually stay planted at my computer all day. When I get stuck – alas, not infrequently – I swivel in my chair to my Yamaha Motif and play for a few minutes, until I start to feel guilty, and then I swivel back to my ‘job.’

I stop when my wife Cathy gets home around 7.00 PM, we cook a good dinner and eat it, then I go back to work with my wine until 11.00, or later. Some days, up to six pages – some days, half a page. Perhaps my best description of the writing process is the rhyme by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

When she was good
 she was very very good

And when she was bad she was horrid.

Who are the authors you love, and why?

I could list dozens, but to be brief…

John Barth – for his outrageous arrogance and courage at pushing the envelope.

Herman Melville – for changing the way I looked into myself and others by writing Bartleby The Scrivener (and yeah, some other stuff, too).

J.P. Donleavy – a great musician of prose, and a lover and chronicler of all that is melancholy.

How do you deal with feedback?

I get pleasure from reading critical praise, humbly underplaying that pleasure to those around me, while secretly agreeing whole-heartedly with said critics, bless them all. I pay grim attention to the damning thoughts of others, underplaying that displeasure to those around me, while secretly wishing those that would wound me an eternal stay in Hell, damn their blackened, presumptuous souls.

How have your own experiences shaped your writing?

I will answer this question with a few lines from my new work-in-progress – spoken by a dying novelist to a group of college creative writing students.

…Every choice, to a degree, is a reflection of who the author is.

Each act we make a character commit, each uttered word, everything

they feel. Whether great art or wince-worthy production of a hack –

the work is an offering, consciously or not, with the stamp of one’s

inner self on it. ‘Hey… I’m in here somewhere. Do you see me?’

Give me some advice about writing…

Don’t wait to start writing until you think you’ve got the ‘whole story’ in your head. Not having the whole story in your head is half the fun.

Take chances. Go with an impulse, something you hadn’t considered up to that point – you can always go back and change it, or scrap it.

Don’t read someone else’s fiction when writing fiction. It’s the only kind of celibacy that is beneficial.

Last… I’m embarrassed to admit I can’t remember who said the following – Tennessee Williams, maybe – but its message has served me very well, time and again. I’m probably doing it a great injustice – but it goes something like this.

‘I get up in the morning, have coffee, and at ten o’clock sit down at the typewriter and put a fresh sheet of paper in. I take the bourbon from the desk drawer, pour a glass and put it on the desk, and start thinking. At four in the afternoon I finish whatever is left in the glass, and leave my desk. It doesn’t matter if I wrote ten pages…or the page I put in the typewriter is still there, blank. I’m a writer. I put in a day’s work.’

What’s next for you?

I have personally paid for Geiger to go on vacation. He needs a rest and so do I. Dealing with him is exhausting. During our break, I am writing a picaresque tragicomedy about a revered, 40-year-old novelist who discovers he has a rare, incurable disease and decides he must write one final book before he kicks. But fate and chaos and global forces have other plans for him. Death, god, pharmaceuticals, incest, terrorism… I’m really enjoying the work – when it isn’t making me miserable.