ConnexionFrance interview
Rarely has a Brit been so well integrated into French society as Martin Walker, author of the Bruno, Chief of Police series. Jessica Knipe visits him at home in Le Bugue to talk Brexit, basset hounds and truffled brie
“Come for lunch! I’ll just throw some pâté, cheese and wine onto the table…” The invitation could not have been more French, despite the fact it was extended by Martin Walker, a Scot who has lived in Russia, Washington DC and Brussels.
We are in a wing of Walker’s home in the heart of the Périgord, Le Bugue, to be precise. We sit at a long wooden table facing a roaring wood-burning stove, surrounded by hundreds of books, most of which are historical.
This interview was originally published on ConnexionFrance. Click here to read the rest.
Female First- exclusive interview
The Resistance Man begins with the death of an old Resistance fighter, who took part in the world’s greatest train robbery, the theft of 2.3 billion French francs, worth about 250 million of today’s pounds. This real event took place in July, 1944, when the German army realised that they could not defeat the D-Day invasion and they were likely to lose France to the allied British and American forces. The Germans tried to seize the French bank reserves but the Resistance took it instead. The money disappeared, and my hero Bruno starts to track its fate while dealing with a brutal murder, the burglary of retired British spymaster and his own complicated love life.
Please tell us about the character of Bruno.
Bruno Courrèges is 40, the most eligible bachelor in the small and charming French town of St Denis. An orphan who spent 12 years in the French army, Bruno was invalided out after being wounded at Sarajevo where he served with the UN peacekeeping forces. He became a policeman in the peaceful Perigord, the culinary heartland of France, famous for its truffles, its foie gras and its prehistoric Lascaux cave paintings. He spends his mornings teaching the local schoolchilden to play tennis and rugby, tries never to wear his gun and hates to arrest anyone. He hunts, raises chickens and ducks, grows his own vegetable and is an expert cook. Bruno is devoted to his basset hound, Balzac, and his horse, Hector, and while he yearns to have children, he keeps falling for independent and spirited women whose priority is career rather than family. He believes in justice rather than the letter of the law, and his loyalties are to his friends, his town and to his somewhat old-fashioned love of France, which often means defending St Denis against the incursions of the modern world and the globalisation it brings.
How much has your background in journalism helped you to write fiction?
Being a journalist, writing daily news stories and analyses, means constantly meeting people, interviewing them and trying to understand what makes them tick, all useful skills for a novelist. It also means you never get writer’s block! I spent most of my career as a foreign correspondent and I enjoy diving into different cultures, but writing about rural France has been a real challenge, so different in pace and priorities from Paris. In any new country, I always began by reading its history, and French history is a constant theme in my books, from the Nazi occupation in World War Two to France’s more recent colonial wars in Vietnam and Algeria. In my fifth novel, The Devil’s Cave, I went back to famous witchcraft trial involving a mistress of King Louis XIV. In The Resistance Man, I delve back into the history of the British agents and wireless operators who fought with the French Resistance.
This is the sixth novel in the series so what can you tell us about the previous instalments?
The first novel began with the murder of an elderly Arab veteran of the French army, apparently by young right-wing extremists whose arrest provokes riots, but Bruno digs deeper for the real truth. The second, The Dark Vineyard, deals with militant environmentalists trying to sabotage genetically modified crops and the attempts of a giant American wine company to buy vineyards around St Denis. The third novel, Black Diamond, deals with fraud in the market for truffles and a murder that is linked to France’s colonial wars. The fourth, The Crowded Grave, combines animal rights activists trying to stop the production of foie gras and an archaeological dig that is looking for a Neanderthal burial but finds a very modern corpse buried alongside. The fifth, The Crowded Grave, starts with an unknown but naked dead woman floating down to St Denis in a boat, and her body bears signs of a satanist ritual.
You live in Washington DC yet have a house in Dordogne, so what made you want takes your summers there?
I’m spending more and more time in France because I enjoy my life there so much with my French friends and neighbours. There are wine-growers, cheesemakers, hunters and experts in finding truffles and mushrooms so with our own chickens and vegetable garden we eat and drink like kings. The climate is delightful and the countryside enchanting, full of history from the prehistoric cave art to the castles of the middle ages. We’ve had a house in the Dordogne for fifteen years, and the Bruno books (now in 15 languages) have brought so many tourists to the region that I’ve been made an honorary Ambassador. This means I’m asked to helped promote the region at international tourism and wine exhibitions across Europe, and to present the traveling exhibition of the Lascaux cave in the U.S., Canada and Japan. They also made me chair of the jury for the Prix Ragueneau culinary prize and last autumn I was made a chevalier of foie gras, which meant dressing up in medieval robes at a formal ceremony in the old town square of Périgeux and being baptised with a duck.
Why is the Dordogne such a perfect setting for a crime novel?
The valleys of the rivers Dordogne, Vézère and the Lot have everything a novelist needs: great wines and glorious food, wonderful village markets, history from the distant past to the Hundred Years War and the Resistance, a powerful regional culture with its own patois version of French and a large expat community of Brits, Dutch, Belgians and others. The local politics are intriguing, with towns run by Communist mayors and a thriving far-right National Front along with militant Greens and passionate hunters. The curious French inheritance laws make wills, heirs and property into a fertile field for the mystery writer. The Perigord itself is a magical region; in the old legend of King Arthur and Knights of the Round Table it was the province given by Sir Lancelot to his son, Sir Galahad. And in an area filled with artists, a writer is never stuck for ideas.
What is your writing process?
I start with a detailed synopsis of about thirty pages, one for each chapter, to get the plot right along with notes on characters, scenes and dialogue. Once I start writing, I have to produce at least a thousand words (around three pages) a day. It doesn’t matter if I’m on a plane, in a train, attending an international conference or on a book tour, those thousand words have to be written. But sometimes things happen while writing that throw out the plan. I had one novel where a femme fatale was supposed to seduce Bruno with her wiles, but when it came to writing the scene it was as though a force field came from my laptop to prevent my typing and I could almost hear Bruno saying, “I’m not going to drop my trousers for this woman….” At one level it was great, feeling that this character had developed a life and will of his own. But it also meant throwing out the plan and starting all over again.
What is next for you?
I recently finished the 7th Bruno novel, Children of War, and am now starting work on the eighth. I’m currently on a book tour in the U.S. and will then do another tour in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. This summer a Franco-German production team starts filming the Bruno TV series on location in the region and I’m looking forward to my Hitchcock moment, the right to a token appearance in each episode, walking onscreen with my dog or being a customer in a café. Later in the summer I’ll be in Canada to launch the Lascaux exhibition and this autumn we launch the Bruno cookbook at the Frankfurt book fair.
Please tell us about the character of Bruno.
Bruno Courrèges is 40, the most eligible bachelor in the small and charming French town of St Denis. An orphan who spent 12 years in the French army, Bruno was invalided out after being wounded at Sarajevo where he served with the UN peacekeeping forces. He became a policeman in the peaceful Perigord, the culinary heartland of France, famous for its truffles, its foie gras and its prehistoric Lascaux cave paintings. He spends his mornings teaching the local schoolchilden to play tennis and rugby, tries never to wear his gun and hates to arrest anyone. He hunts, raises chickens and ducks, grows his own vegetable and is an expert cook. Bruno is devoted to his basset hound, Balzac, and his horse, Hector, and while he yearns to have children, he keeps falling for independent and spirited women whose priority is career rather than family. He believes in justice rather than the letter of the law, and his loyalties are to his friends, his town and to his somewhat old-fashioned love of France, which often means defending St Denis against the incursions of the modern world and the globalisation it brings.
How much has your background in journalism helped you to write fiction?
Being a journalist, writing daily news stories and analyses, means constantly meeting people, interviewing them and trying to understand what makes them tick, all useful skills for a novelist. It also means you never get writer’s block! I spent most of my career as a foreign correspondent and I enjoy diving into different cultures, but writing about rural France has been a real challenge, so different in pace and priorities from Paris. In any new country, I always began by reading its history, and French history is a constant theme in my books, from the Nazi occupation in World War Two to France’s more recent colonial wars in Vietnam and Algeria. In my fifth novel, The Devil’s Cave, I went back to famous witchcraft trial involving a mistress of King Louis XIV. In The Resistance Man, I delve back into the history of the British agents and wireless operators who fought with the French Resistance.
This is the sixth novel in the series so what can you tell us about the previous instalments?
The first novel began with the murder of an elderly Arab veteran of the French army, apparently by young right-wing extremists whose arrest provokes riots, but Bruno digs deeper for the real truth. The second, The Dark Vineyard, deals with militant environmentalists trying to sabotage genetically modified crops and the attempts of a giant American wine company to buy vineyards around St Denis. The third novel, Black Diamond, deals with fraud in the market for truffles and a murder that is linked to France’s colonial wars. The fourth, The Crowded Grave, combines animal rights activists trying to stop the production of foie gras and an archaeological dig that is looking for a Neanderthal burial but finds a very modern corpse buried alongside. The fifth, The Crowded Grave, starts with an unknown but naked dead woman floating down to St Denis in a boat, and her body bears signs of a satanist ritual.
You live in Washington DC yet have a house in Dordogne, so what made you want takes your summers there?
I’m spending more and more time in France because I enjoy my life there so much with my French friends and neighbours. There are wine-growers, cheesemakers, hunters and experts in finding truffles and mushrooms so with our own chickens and vegetable garden we eat and drink like kings. The climate is delightful and the countryside enchanting, full of history from the prehistoric cave art to the castles of the middle ages. We’ve had a house in the Dordogne for fifteen years, and the Bruno books (now in 15 languages) have brought so many tourists to the region that I’ve been made an honorary Ambassador. This means I’m asked to helped promote the region at international tourism and wine exhibitions across Europe, and to present the traveling exhibition of the Lascaux cave in the U.S., Canada and Japan. They also made me chair of the jury for the Prix Ragueneau culinary prize and last autumn I was made a chevalier of foie gras, which meant dressing up in medieval robes at a formal ceremony in the old town square of Périgeux and being baptised with a duck.
Why is the Dordogne such a perfect setting for a crime novel?
The valleys of the rivers Dordogne, Vézère and the Lot have everything a novelist needs: great wines and glorious food, wonderful village markets, history from the distant past to the Hundred Years War and the Resistance, a powerful regional culture with its own patois version of French and a large expat community of Brits, Dutch, Belgians and others. The local politics are intriguing, with towns run by Communist mayors and a thriving far-right National Front along with militant Greens and passionate hunters. The curious French inheritance laws make wills, heirs and property into a fertile field for the mystery writer. The Perigord itself is a magical region; in the old legend of King Arthur and Knights of the Round Table it was the province given by Sir Lancelot to his son, Sir Galahad. And in an area filled with artists, a writer is never stuck for ideas.
What is your writing process?
I start with a detailed synopsis of about thirty pages, one for each chapter, to get the plot right along with notes on characters, scenes and dialogue. Once I start writing, I have to produce at least a thousand words (around three pages) a day. It doesn’t matter if I’m on a plane, in a train, attending an international conference or on a book tour, those thousand words have to be written. But sometimes things happen while writing that throw out the plan. I had one novel where a femme fatale was supposed to seduce Bruno with her wiles, but when it came to writing the scene it was as though a force field came from my laptop to prevent my typing and I could almost hear Bruno saying, “I’m not going to drop my trousers for this woman….” At one level it was great, feeling that this character had developed a life and will of his own. But it also meant throwing out the plan and starting all over again.
What is next for you?
I recently finished the 7th Bruno novel, Children of War, and am now starting work on the eighth. I’m currently on a book tour in the U.S. and will then do another tour in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. This summer a Franco-German production team starts filming the Bruno TV series on location in the region and I’m looking forward to my Hitchcock moment, the right to a token appearance in each episode, walking onscreen with my dog or being a customer in a café. Later in the summer I’ll be in Canada to launch the Lascaux exhibition and this autumn we launch the Bruno cookbook at the Frankfurt book fair.
Countdown… by www.crimereview.co.uk
Ten words to sum up your working life to date …
Writing, writing, writing: essays, then news articles, books, now novels.
Nine things you can see from where you're sitting …
Eight minutes to prepare a meal. What’s it going to be?
Omelette aux truffes with petit pois, fresh baguette and a bottle of Chateau de Tiregand, 2005.
Seven people you'd like to go for a drink with …
A) Dead: Trotsky, Edward Gibbon, Kaiser Bill, Shelley, Virgil, Vasari, Horatio Nelson.
B) Alive: Hilary Mantel, Bob Dylan, Ian Rankin, Jancis Robinson, Paul Simon, John Le Carre, Helen Mirren
Six things you can't live without …
Five favourite words …
Four places you'd run away to…
Three books you've bought recently…
Two things that make you rant …
One thing you'd tell your teenage self …
Life is short, the world is big; see as much of it as you can.
Writing, writing, writing: essays, then news articles, books, now novels.
Nine things you can see from where you're sitting …
- My basset hound
- Family photos
- My tennis raquet
- One of my wife’s paintings
- Bottle of my own home-made vin de noix
- iPhone
- Ripe tomatoes in my vegetable garden
- Chess board
- Two pears just plucked from tree.
Eight minutes to prepare a meal. What’s it going to be?
Omelette aux truffes with petit pois, fresh baguette and a bottle of Chateau de Tiregand, 2005.
Seven people you'd like to go for a drink with …
A) Dead: Trotsky, Edward Gibbon, Kaiser Bill, Shelley, Virgil, Vasari, Horatio Nelson.
B) Alive: Hilary Mantel, Bob Dylan, Ian Rankin, Jancis Robinson, Paul Simon, John Le Carre, Helen Mirren
Six things you can't live without …
- Wine
- My dog
- Books
- My Citroen deux chevaux
- Skiing
- My wife’s cheese soufflé
Five favourite words …
- Mellifluous
- Contemplation
- Twilight
- Susurration
- Munificence
Four places you'd run away to…
- Isle of Mull
- Capetown
- Maui
- Domme-en-Perigord
Three books you've bought recently…
- Philip Kerr, A Man Without Breath.
- Julian Jackson; France, The Dark Years, 1940-1944.
- Antony Beevor; The Second World War.
Two things that make you rant …
- Confusing discrete and discreet
- Ryanair’s endless extra charges
One thing you'd tell your teenage self …
Life is short, the world is big; see as much of it as you can.
Quercus interview
Black Diamond is the third of your Bruno books – what fascinates you so much about him?
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.
To recap, what has Bruno been up to before this novel and where does the story take us now?
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.
What was the most difficult aspect of writing Black Diamond Martin and how did you overcome it?
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.
Did you know how Black Diamond would end when you began, or is writing a journey of discovery for you?
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.
How long have you been writing for Martin?
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.
How did your first manage to get published?
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.
How did working with an editor help you to shape your work?
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.
Is there anything you feel you can’t do well as a writer that you’d really like to be able to do?
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.
What do you do when you are not writing?
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.
Did you have an idea in your mind of your “ideal” reader? Did you write specifically for them?
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.
How do you write? With pen or pencil? Straight onto a screen? Revision after revision or spontaneously?
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.
What are you working on now?
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.
Who is your favourite writer? And who is your least favourite?
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.
Who is your favourite (and least favourite) fictional character?
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.
Do you have a favourite quote?
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.’
What is/are your favourite book(s)? What is the last book you started but didn’t finish!?
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.
Do you have any tips for the aspiring writer?
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.
What do you think of e-books?
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.
Are you optimistic about the future of books and reading?
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.
Anything else you would like to say?
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.
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.
To recap, what has Bruno been up to before this novel and where does the story take us now?
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.
What was the most difficult aspect of writing Black Diamond Martin and how did you overcome it?
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.
Did you know how Black Diamond would end when you began, or is writing a journey of discovery for you?
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.
How long have you been writing for Martin?
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.
How did your first manage to get published?
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.
How did working with an editor help you to shape your work?
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.
Is there anything you feel you can’t do well as a writer that you’d really like to be able to do?
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.
What do you do when you are not writing?
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.
Did you have an idea in your mind of your “ideal” reader? Did you write specifically for them?
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.
How do you write? With pen or pencil? Straight onto a screen? Revision after revision or spontaneously?
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.
What are you working on now?
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.
Who is your favourite writer? And who is your least favourite?
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.
Who is your favourite (and least favourite) fictional character?
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.
Do you have a favourite quote?
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.’
What is/are your favourite book(s)? What is the last book you started but didn’t finish!?
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.
Do you have any tips for the aspiring writer?
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.
What do you think of e-books?
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.
Are you optimistic about the future of books and reading?
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.
Anything else you would like to say?
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.
The Savvy Reader interview
Prosecast host Cathi Bond spoke with Martin Walker, author of the utterly charming Bruno, Chief of Police about his influences, the global politics of immigration, and the love he has for the country of France. These are just the first few questions, head on over to Prosecast.com to listen to the entire episode.
Cathi Bond: I thoroughly enjoyed Bruno, Chief of Police. I’m curious, after everything else that you’ve achieved in your career, why did you want to write a crime novel about a policeman in France?
Martin Walker: For many years now I’ve had a small house in France, in the Dardone, in the countryside and my local chief of police is my tennis partner, and a great friend. We eat and play tennis together — he’s even taken me hunting. I’ve always thought my particular chum was one of the wisest men I’d ever met and an extraordinarily gifted policeman who understands it’s his job to stop trouble before it starts. Because I love this area of France, and I’ve become kind of an adopted person there, and because I’m so fond of this character it seemed to me that it was crying out to have the novel written about him and about the place. Equally some of the issues I raise about immigration, the Arabs who live here, and the effect of the Second World War, are also things that impinge upon you once you become a part of this culture.
CB: And then now I guess we should also talk about the crime. An elderly Muslim man is found murdered in a very very grizzly fashion. Why did you choose a Muslim victim in France?
MW: I’ve been a journalist for many years, and one of the assignments that I had, almost by accident, was [covering] the wave of riots across France that you recall happened two years ago, particularly in the areas all around Paris, and the Bouliere where so many of the North African immigrants and Muslim immigrants live. It lasted for nearly three weeks and it spread to over 300 towns and cities across France. Tens of thousands of cars were burned, there were a lot of arrests, and a couple of deaths. It was a really shattering thing for France and it brought out into the open two things: first of all the increasing importance of the Front nationale, that’s a very right wing — extreme right wing — anti-immigration party. So there’s this long, powerful subterranean political force of anti-immigration, plus in terms of the numbers, something like six million people in France are now either immigrants or children of immigrants of North African or Muslim origin and inevitably that’s a very, very powerful issue politically.
And second of all, socially it’s something people talk about all the time; it’s a very constant theme. I wanted to bring that into the novel because one of the problems about writing about the charm of France is it’s almost too [easy] and sweet to write about the wines, the foods, the weather, and the traditions. The truth is crime happens everywhere, and it happens here in Rural France. There was a killing of an elderly Arab immigrant that took place a couple of years ago not too far from where I live.
CB: You’ve been talking a lot about France, but are you seeing this in other parts of the world? Do you see it as something that’s a more profound global human condition?
MW: I think it is. I mean you certainly see it elsewhere in Europe. You see it in Britain, you see it in Germany with the Turkish minority, you see kinds of xenophobia of different forms in China and Japan, and you see a great concern on immigration in the United States. It seems to be a global reaction to both globalization and this huge migration pattern that we’re seeing all across the world these days. There’s an undercurrent running through my novel as well, another tension, and that is one that dates back to the Second World War and which side you were on during the time when France was occupied by the Germans and run by Vichy. And in my village there are still families who don’t talk together to each other because one side was for Vichy and the other side was for De Gaulle and the resistance. And that’s another current that I bring into my novel, which is one that I think most French people understand is a very powerful political dynamic to this day.
CB: Why did you do it?
MW: On the one hand I’m deeply fond of France, deeply attracted to it, I love spending time here. On the other hand, for many years I’ve been a professional journalist, and I’m a professional foreign correspondent. I’ve reported from all of the world’s continents. One thing I’ve always automatically set myself to do is to understand something of the history of the country where I’m based. You can not understand France without realizing there is still a division between the France that was for the revolution and the France that was against the Revolution. This is the revolution of 1789! The France that was for the Catholic Church and the France that was deeply anti-clerical. The France that was for the monarchy, the France that was against it. The France that was for De Gaulle, the France that was against De Gaulle. And these traditions continue almost unbroken throughout French history.
Listen to the rest of the interview at Prosecast.com.
Cathi Bond: I thoroughly enjoyed Bruno, Chief of Police. I’m curious, after everything else that you’ve achieved in your career, why did you want to write a crime novel about a policeman in France?
Martin Walker: For many years now I’ve had a small house in France, in the Dardone, in the countryside and my local chief of police is my tennis partner, and a great friend. We eat and play tennis together — he’s even taken me hunting. I’ve always thought my particular chum was one of the wisest men I’d ever met and an extraordinarily gifted policeman who understands it’s his job to stop trouble before it starts. Because I love this area of France, and I’ve become kind of an adopted person there, and because I’m so fond of this character it seemed to me that it was crying out to have the novel written about him and about the place. Equally some of the issues I raise about immigration, the Arabs who live here, and the effect of the Second World War, are also things that impinge upon you once you become a part of this culture.
CB: And then now I guess we should also talk about the crime. An elderly Muslim man is found murdered in a very very grizzly fashion. Why did you choose a Muslim victim in France?
MW: I’ve been a journalist for many years, and one of the assignments that I had, almost by accident, was [covering] the wave of riots across France that you recall happened two years ago, particularly in the areas all around Paris, and the Bouliere where so many of the North African immigrants and Muslim immigrants live. It lasted for nearly three weeks and it spread to over 300 towns and cities across France. Tens of thousands of cars were burned, there were a lot of arrests, and a couple of deaths. It was a really shattering thing for France and it brought out into the open two things: first of all the increasing importance of the Front nationale, that’s a very right wing — extreme right wing — anti-immigration party. So there’s this long, powerful subterranean political force of anti-immigration, plus in terms of the numbers, something like six million people in France are now either immigrants or children of immigrants of North African or Muslim origin and inevitably that’s a very, very powerful issue politically.
And second of all, socially it’s something people talk about all the time; it’s a very constant theme. I wanted to bring that into the novel because one of the problems about writing about the charm of France is it’s almost too [easy] and sweet to write about the wines, the foods, the weather, and the traditions. The truth is crime happens everywhere, and it happens here in Rural France. There was a killing of an elderly Arab immigrant that took place a couple of years ago not too far from where I live.
CB: You’ve been talking a lot about France, but are you seeing this in other parts of the world? Do you see it as something that’s a more profound global human condition?
MW: I think it is. I mean you certainly see it elsewhere in Europe. You see it in Britain, you see it in Germany with the Turkish minority, you see kinds of xenophobia of different forms in China and Japan, and you see a great concern on immigration in the United States. It seems to be a global reaction to both globalization and this huge migration pattern that we’re seeing all across the world these days. There’s an undercurrent running through my novel as well, another tension, and that is one that dates back to the Second World War and which side you were on during the time when France was occupied by the Germans and run by Vichy. And in my village there are still families who don’t talk together to each other because one side was for Vichy and the other side was for De Gaulle and the resistance. And that’s another current that I bring into my novel, which is one that I think most French people understand is a very powerful political dynamic to this day.
CB: Why did you do it?
MW: On the one hand I’m deeply fond of France, deeply attracted to it, I love spending time here. On the other hand, for many years I’ve been a professional journalist, and I’m a professional foreign correspondent. I’ve reported from all of the world’s continents. One thing I’ve always automatically set myself to do is to understand something of the history of the country where I’m based. You can not understand France without realizing there is still a division between the France that was for the revolution and the France that was against the Revolution. This is the revolution of 1789! The France that was for the Catholic Church and the France that was deeply anti-clerical. The France that was for the monarchy, the France that was against it. The France that was for De Gaulle, the France that was against De Gaulle. And these traditions continue almost unbroken throughout French history.
Listen to the rest of the interview at Prosecast.com.
