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13/04/2009Books: 'real police work is phenomenally boring'

Books: 'real police work is phenomenally boring' Jessica Dorrance talks with British crime writer Robert Wilson about writing, violence and life as an expatriate.

You have said that you didn’t grow up reading crime fiction although you cite your later influences as Elmore Leonard and Raymond Chandler. How did you teach yourself about detective work?

The problem with police work, real police work, is that it’s phenomenally boring. You’re doing tremendous amounts of work to make tiny little breakthroughs. So in fact all you’re doing as a crime writer, really, is concentrating on the breakthrough moments, rather than on all the really boring, grinding work that goes on before those moments.

And it’s surprising how little you need to know about actual police work. I did speak to the real chief inspector of the homicide squad in Seville. When I met this guy, the interesting thing was that he wanted to tell me about how he cracks cases. And I was saying, “Well, thanks very much but what I’m really interested in is the whole mechanics of it all.” You know, who goes to the crime scene, who’s in charge of the crime scene, how many people are there? What happens first, what happens next? Where does the body go? When do you lift the body away from the scene? All that sort of stuff which actually makes the writing feel quite real.  

Once you know what actually happens in these circumstances, then you just start constructing stories around that – little insights into it. You’re always thinking of your bigger story and then coming down to the little bits of detail that make it feel real. So it’s a good question actually because it’s kind of curious how little you need to know to make a story work.

You’ve said in the past that one of the fundamental themes of your crime fiction is to distinguish between appearance and reality -- to uncover what is truly going on. Do you, as a writer, view yourself as a kind of detective figure, bringing aspects of society to light that we don't normally see?

Photo © jtloweryphotographyI suppose my whole attitude towards crime fiction is not that of a lot of these crime writers – who are primarily there to tell a story and to offer you a very nice piece of entertainment. I find that I’m quite happy for that to be an element of the writing because in the end, I’ve got to get a plot together and that is the engine that is going to make you turn the pages and read the book. But I am also interested in going into other departments, whether it be politics or history – especially that of Spain and Portugal which is where I’ve been writing recently.

So I suppose my intention, as a crime writer, is to get people to think while they’re being entertained, which is a tricky act. But I reckon in most cases, I achieve it. And if you just look at the titles of the books, like The Blind Man of Seville and The Vanished Hands or The Hidden Assassins, there’s always this sort of feeling of stuff being hidden or secret or unseen.

Your novels have dealt with such diverse themes as the Holocaust, terrorism, religious extremism and the violence of post-independence Africa but ultimately, it seems like the central preoccupation of your books is perhaps the same: human morality. In this way, your writing seems to be connected to 19th century authors who took society’s struggles with good and evil as their main subject.

Yeah, well, there’s an element of that. When I was at university, I was a great admirer of Charles Dickens and he was very much one of those sort of writers. He was probably one of the greatest crime writers that was never actually featured as a crime writer.

And yet, you yourself seem very comfortable with this term “crime writer.”

Yeah, I don’t mind it. It’s become an interesting problem in England because up until about 1970, readers would float out of literary fiction and into crime fiction and back out again. If you think about someone like Graham Greene, for example, he wrote sort of six or seven basic thrillers that he called “entertainments.” And then you got to somewhere like Brighton Rock, which is where it started to become more literary, and then he drifted off into literary fiction. There was much more of a crossover in England during that time.

And now, it’s really unfortunate because it has become much more demarcated. So now, there’s crime fiction and literary fiction and they’re in completely different parts of the bookstore and you just don’t get that kind of melding together any more. And I suffer a bit from that, I think, as I tend to work better with people who would normally read literary fiction. And that’s why I work very well in places like Germany and Norway, where you’ve got a very broad literary readership who have a “go” at all sorts of different things.

I was wondering whether coming to the genre you’re working in so late in life somehow allows you to have a more detached relationship to the genre or better adapt it to the goals you want to meet? Rather than following in the line of other authors?

Photo © youtube footageYeah, I think that’s a valid point actually, which I haven’t particularly thought of before. I certainly wasn’t interested in the British crime writing tradition. That was not my first love. I loved the American noir writers – Raymond Chandler and later on people like Elmore Leonard and James Elroy. So I never found myself bound to the British crime writing tradition. And, I suppose, I’ve taken it a step further by being a Brit that writes outside the UK. These days that is even more unusual. People like Henning Mankell or Karin Fossum, who are Scandinavians, write about their own country but are also being published in the UK and are well-liked. But I don’t know how many English writers there are taking Spanish characters and putting them in a Spanish location and writing about them in English.

Your characters are generally outsiders. In some ways, you too have been an outsider in your life. You’ve talked about feeling like an outsider as you moved from army base to army base as a child. You’ve also been an expatriate for a lot of your life. I was wondering if you are somehow drawn towards these characters that always have one foot in and one foot out of their contexts?

That’s definitely the case, I think. Someone like Javier Falcón, for example, was born in Morocco and brought up in Seville. He soon moves away from Seville and later comes back after a long break and finds that, although he’s Spanish, although he’s technically Sevillian, he’s an outsider looking in – all the while conducting this internal examination of himself.

So what is it about this in-between status that makes him a good detective, or do you think that has anything to do with it?

I think it does have something to do with that. When I lived in London, for instance, I never really saw London. I just lived in it. And went to work in it. And it’s the same when you’re an outsider in a city. You see things very differently. You notice things that local people don’t notice.


When I was living in Portugal, I said to a journalist who was interviewing me: “The Portuguese are always talking about food.” He said, “No we’re not!” I said, “Go and listen. I’m not prepared to accept that.” He came back to me three years later and said, “Absolutely true. Never realized it before.”

So yeah, I think it does help if you’re an outsider and you’re not prepared to accept things as given. And so you’re always challenging from the outside and forcing people to confront things and think about things.

Setting is central to your novels, be it Lisbon, West Africa or Seville. You’ve also said that setting is usually what inspires your books and where you begin to write them. I was wondering why you feel such a profound connection to space, as opposed to character or plot?

I suppose it’s just the newness. You know, when you get off a plane from somewhere and the first thing that happens is that door opens and you’re met by the air. And it has always struck me that you learn something from that first sniff. You learn a tremendous amount of what you’re going into. The first whiff of Africa is something that really does stay with you for a long time. That smell of the wood smoke and the smell of the cooking that they’re doing and what they’re cooking. It has a very strong and immediate impression.

When you think about how difficult it is to actually get behind the culture or actually get to meet people and understand them – all that takes you quite a lot of time. And in the meantime, what I find is you build up this phenomenal picture of the wonderful strangeness of a place.

Some places I go to, I just have no feeling about them at all. I don’t dislike them. I just don’t have a response to them. All I can say is that when I first went to Seville, I had a very powerful response to it. It’s just a gut feeling. You think, “This place is going to get inside of me, I can feel it.” And it was the same with West Africa. Once I have that feeling inside of me, I know that the characters will come.

One of the universal characteristics of your protagonists is that they are all flawed. Bruce Medway is a major drinker whose morality often fluctuates. Zé Coelho is a bit of a loner who, in his own words, few people understand. Javier Falcón has had problems dealing with his emotions. Why is it important for you for your protagonists to have chips on their shoulders?

Photo © youtube footageI think that most crime fiction heroes do. It’s their vulnerability that makes them interesting to readers. The problem is, is that it gets a bit clichéd at times. For instance, almost all detectives, because it is the reality, have drinking problems because of the nature of the work. It’s highly stressful. You’re doing very long hours. You drink to get over some of the very nasty things that you have to deal with. Then you find that your marriage starts suffering. So the classic is the hard-drinking detective who is divorced.

But it also makes them interesting characters because they’re suffering the cold face of their work and they’re suffering internally as well. The idea of somebody like Javier Falcón is that I’m not sure there has ever been a detective who has had a nervous breakdown while investigating a serious crime. But that was the whole idea of those books – that they have more to do with Javier Falcón than with the various mysteries he gets involved in. What is actually driving the books is the development of Javier Falcón.

In your books, such as A Small Death in Lisbon, sex and violence are inherently intertwined. Women get raped, abused and slapped around by men. Can you talk a little bit about the way you use sex and violence in your books?

I think very carefully about the way in which I use sex and violence, especially with the Seville books. Some people say to me that some of the violence in the books is absolutely outrageous, that they are almost like horror books at times – especially the beginning of The Blind Man of Seville. And I’ve said, “Well, go back and read the beginning of The Blind Man of Seville and tell me if you can actually see any violence on the page.” And they always come back and say, “Well, actually….” The idea is I can’t actually implant the horror images in your mind that will make you particularly horrified so what I’m doing is teasing your imagination into doing it for me.
Robert Wilson
I think that’s a much more powerful way of doing it than giving people gruesome detail. People find it very easy to switch off from gruesome detail. You see people, they go to horror movies and they laugh. So actually to really jolt people, you’ve got to somehow find a way to just twitch their brain into action. And also, I don’t really like the idea of people getting a thrill out of reading violence. I think people should be made to feel uncomfortable about it.  

Robert Wilson was born in 1957. After getting his degree from Oxford University, he worked in shipping and advertising in London and trading in West Africa before settling in Portugal. Wilson is the author of the Bruce Medway series, set on the Gold Coast of Africa, and the Javier Falcón series, set largely in Seville, Spain. His fifth novel A Small Death in Lisbon, set in WWII Berlin and 1990s Lisbon, won the prestigious CWA Gold Dagger award.
 
Robert Wilson was interviewed by Jessica Dorrance

 


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