Mark Thwaite: Black Diamond is the third of your Bruno books – what fascinates you so much about him?

Martin Walker: There seems to be a fashion these days for flawed and miserable protagonists, who are often alcoholics with failed marriages and difficult relations with their children. I prefer the Raymond Chandler rule that “Down these mean streets a man must go who is not afraid and who is not himself mean.” We need heroes, and Bruno has grown during the books into an idiosyncratic kind of hero, who lives and works by his own rules and his own code of honour and justice. I’m not sure that is what I set out to do, but that is what he has become. So even though he began as an inspiration from a good friend of mine, the local policeman of my small village in France, he seems in my head and in my books to be becoming something more, and that fascinates me.

Mark Thwaite: To recap, what has Bruno been up to before this novel and where does the story take us now?

Martin Walker: Bruno began by investigating the murder of an old Arab and all the evidence seemed to point to some members of a local far-right and anti-immigrant group, but Bruno knew enough about one of the accused, a boy he’d taught to play tennis, to have doubts. So he pursued his own investigation, which took him back into the dark and usually hidden history of France under Nazi occupation in World War Two, and the internal battles in the Resistance between the Gaullists and the Communists. Then in the second book, he was trying to find a way for his town of Saint Denis to survive in the modern economy without selling its soul to a big American wine corporation, whose owning family had their own vicious feuds that spilled over onto Bruno’s doorstep. The third book takes us into truffles, the heart of French gastronomy, and the frauds in the truffle trade and the growing rivalry in modern France between Vietnamese and Chinese immigrant gangs. I’m now writing the fourth book, which combines the environmentalist campaigns against the local delicacy of foie gras with some of the pre-historic archaeology and modern terrorism.

Mark Thwaite: What was the most difficult aspect of writing Black Diamond Martin and how did you overcome it?

Martin Walker: I had to do a lot of research into the truffle trade, and into the history of the French in Vietnam and their wars in the 1950s against Ho Chi Minh and the Vietnamese nationalists. There was a secret war for influence between French Intelligence and the CIA, and the French were broke and raised money through the opium trade and made unsavoury partnerships with Vietnamese criminal groups. Just as I had done a lot of research in the resistance archives for the first Bruno novel, I had to do a lot more in France and Vietnam for this one, and was helped a lot by a local friend, now retired, who used to be a senior figure in French Intelligence. But in the writing, the hardest part was dealing with Bruno’s complicated relationships with women.

Mark Thwaite: Did you know how Black Diamond would end when you began, or is writing a journey of discovery for you?

Martin Walker: The best part of writing a novel is when the characters suddenly start doing things that surprise you. It is that moment, when your characters start to take on lives of their own, that is the most rewarding and yet most challenging part of being an author. So although I draft a detailed synopsis, chapter by chapter, the book always changes in the course of writing it as Bruno and his friends take over.

Mark Thwaite: How long have you been writing for Martin?

Martin Walker: I have been writing since I was a little boy, usually writing something every day. And then as a Guardian journalist for many years, sending reports from all over the world, I was always writing something. And I have written books on history, on politics, on economics and globalisation, on political cartoons, on the media and on war, along with the novels and some poetry. And my journalism has never stopped; I still write a weekly column, ‘Walker’s World,’ that is syndicated on the United Press wire. Writing for me is like breathing; it’s automatic and I don’t think I could live without it.

Mark Thwaite: How did your first manage to get published?

Martin Walker: Between winning a place and Oxford and going up to start life as an undergraduate, I had a period of nine free months and talked myself into a job as a cub reporter on a newspaper in Africa. Since I could speak some French, they started sending me to cover wars and dramas in French-speaking Africa. Then when I went to graduate school at Harvard, I started sending articles back to the Guardian, which published them and offered me a job. My first book, The National Front, came shortly after that, on the history and structure and ideology of the extreme right in the UK.

Mark Thwaite: How did working with an editor help you to shape your work?

Martin Walker: One of the really useful aspects of being a journalist on a daily paper is that you are accustomed to having your work cut and changed by a sub-editor. It comes as a shock at first, but you soon learn that your own deathless prose is not holy writ, and can always be improved. I have to say that Jane Wood, my editor at Quercus, is extraordinary. I have been edited by some of the greatest in the business at the New York Times, Washington Post, the New Yorker, Die Zeit, The New Republic and at the Guardian, along with book editors at Knopf and HarperCollins and Pantheon. But Jane is the best. Her sense of structure and character and pace are amazing. When I say in my acknowledgements that she whips my books into shape, it’s true. I don’t know what Bruno would do without her.

Mark Thwaite: Is there anything you feel you can’t do well as a writer that you’d really like to be able to do?

Martin Walker: There are so many writers I envy, and while I try to learn from them I don’t think I could ever match the skill of my old friend Christopher Hitchens with political argument, or Martin Amis’s way of making you feel a grudging admiration for his villains, or Alan Furst’s ability to conjure up a mood of time and place with a few deft words. Furst’s evocation of the febrile and flaccid pre-war Europe that Hitler conquered is an object lesson in the way fiction can bring history to life.

Mark Thwaite: What do you do when you are not writing?

Martin Walker: My day job is running a US-based think-tank on the global economy, its prospects and its challenges, so I spend a lot of time with policy-makers around the world, with economists and senior business people and with other think-tank researchers and with NGOs. Right now, because of the impact of the Great Recession, it’s probably the most intellectually challenging and exciting thing I have done since covering a US presidential election, or covering Gorbachev and Perestroika for the Guardian when we lived in Moscow. To relax, I cook, weed my garden, swim, play tennis and ski, and I’m always reading something.

Mark Thwaite: Did you have an idea in your mind of your “ideal” reader? Did you write specifically for them?

Martin Walker: Other than my Quercus editor Jane Wood, my first readers are my wife Julia and our two daughters. Julia is herself a published novelist and a food writer. Our elder daughter writes a daily blog on Grand Prix racing cars and the younger daughter is a slam poet who was in the last UK finals for champion poet. So one way or another we are all in the writing business and they can be tough and honest critics. My daughters found going through school and university that my book The Cold War: a history was a set book for their exams. I’m not sure they ever forgave me for that, but I always have them in mind when I write. And the more I go to different countries where Bruno has been translated and give readings or talks, I get to meet more and more Bruno fans and they seem to congregate in the back of my head as a kind of attendant chorus who will let me know when Bruno is doing something out of character.

Mark Thwaite: How do you write? With pen or pencil? Straight onto a screen? Revision after revision or spontaneously?

Martin Walker: I write directly onto my laptop. But when I’m planning the book and while I’m writing it, I have a bunch of index cards, one for each chapter, on which I scribble down ideas or snatches of dialogue or little details, whether I’m on a plane or in the tube or walking my dog. If I don’t write it down, I can forget it.

Mark Thwaite: What are you working on now?

Martin Walker: I’m working on four things at once. The first is on the fourth Bruno novel. The second is an assessment of medium-term global economic prospects for a paper I’m writing for the Global Business Policy Council, my think-tank, and the third is a column I’m drafting on the eurozone’s proposed financial reforms. The fourth is an account of two conferences I organised recently, one in London on the banking system and another in St Petersburg on Russia and the global economy. And down at the tennis club I’m working on my backhand.

Mark Thwaite: Who is your favourite writer? And who is your least favourite?

Martin Walker: There are so many writers I admire for different gifts, from Mark Twain’s sense of humour to John Le Carre’s extraordinary depictions of the British bureaucracy and its class system, from Trollope on politics to Dickens on description and Patrick O’Brien on sailors. But the master, the writer who had all the gifts and could spin a rare and timeless tale from the lost commonplace of themes, is Balzac.

Mark Thwaite: Who is your favourite (and least favourite) fictional character?

Martin Walker: I came across my first favourite fictional character in boyhood. It was Alan Quartermain in King Solomon’s Mines by Rider Haggard. A crack shot and an explorer who was not wholly fearless but forced himself to try to be brave, he was short and wily and somehow far more credible to me than the dashing giants and usual heroes. And I loved his African nickname – ‘he who sleeps with one eye open.’ He was soon followed by Conan Doyle’s Sir Nigel, that glorious medieval romance, and C. S. Forrester’s Hornblower. I still re-read them all for pleasure.

Mark Thwaite: Do you have a favourite quote?

Martin Walker: It comes from Shakespeare’s The Tempest: ‘We are such stuff as dreams are made on and our little life is rounded with a sleep.’

Mark Thwaite: What is/are your favourite book(s)? What is the last book you started but didn’t finish!?

Martin Walker: I once did the Australian version of Desert Island Discs and while it was hard to limit myself to ten pieces of music I never had a moment’s pause about the one book I’d take: Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

Mark Thwaite: Do you have any tips for the aspiring writer?

Martin Walker: Write every day. It doesn’t matter what. Just write and get into the habit and keep on writing and always stop for the day when you know how you’re going to go on tomorrow.

Mark Thwaite: What do you think of e-books?

Martin Walker: Since Amazon in the USA made the latest Bruno novel into a preferred read for their Kindle reader, I’m much more in favour of e-books! But I was being won over anyway. I travel a lot by plane, often on extended trips, and I used to break my back and burst my shoulder bag with books. But now I can carry an e-book reader loaded down with reading matter, from old favourites to new one that sound interesting from the reviews. I much prefer books, but for the usefulness of travel, e-books are terrific.

Mark Thwaite: Are you optimistic about the future of books and reading?

Martin Walker: Absolutely. We now have 5,000 million cell phones in use around the world, for a global population of 6,800 million people, along with billions of people connected to the Internet and they all want material to fill that vast electronic flood. The internet needs content and people have always needed tales and stories and love and drama. Whether they read through books or newspapers, electrons or audio-books, people want to share in the imaginations and feelings and experiences of others. I suspect storytellers may be the real oldest profession.

Mark Thwaite: Anything else you would like to say?

Martin Walker: A big thank you to all my readers, now in ten languages as well as English, and I hope that Bruno and his (and my) friends and neighbours in Saint Denis continue to interest and entertain you all.

http://www.quercusbooks.co.uk/blog/interview-martin-walker/