The Godfather

Man, this one proud day for PULP PUSHER ... the Godfather hi'self Frederic Lindsay, stoppin' by Pusher Towers. Respect is due! DAVID LEWIS gives the Godfather of Tartan Noir and author of the classic Brond the questions ... all you gotta do is sit back and enjoy. Bruddas and sistahs, you is frickin' lucky!

  

By DAVID LEWIS

HE MIGHT be 75 this year, but Frederic Lindsay hasn't even considered retirement. The eighth novel featuring the Edinburgh Detective Inspector, Jim Meldrum, The Stranger from Home, is out on February 25th...and Frederic's already busy on another, non-Meldrum, title he hopes to release before the year's end. His work has successfully been transferred to screen. His perhaps most-notable book, the 1987 Brond, which starred the late Statford Johns (yes, he of Z-Cars fame) and John Hannah, was a Channel 4 hit. In 2005, Brond was named in The List's top 100 Scottish books of all time.

DAVID LEWIS: In some ways, you're like the Godfather character of Scottish crime fiction, do many authors, even established ones, come to you for advice?

FREDERIC LINDSAY: I'd be a little suspicious of any established author who came to another writer for advice - apart from the name of a good agent. Over the years, I've run some writing classes, and always enjoyed them, particularly the Arvon ones at Hebden Gorge and Moniack Mhor, where I've worked in tandem with such different writers as Candia MacWilliams and Val Macdiarmid. You meet talented students - and get paid for it.

DL: What do you make of the 'Tartan Noir' genre that's burst out in recent years?

FL: It is a marketing tool. If it helps to sell books, that's to be welcomed, but any writer who set out to write a 'tartan noir' thriller rather than a book about people who interest him involved in intriguing events probably wouldn't produce anything worth a few hours of your life.

DL: Who were your influences when you started writing?

FL: I wrote six novels -two of them unpublished - before I wrote Kissing Judas, my first crime book. Everyone who writes starts off as a reader. I was a voracious one. Thinking of crime fiction, Raymond Chandler comes to mind - because he is a stylist and had a wonderful ear for American demotic.

Dashiell Hammett is always paired with him, but for me his influence would be transmitted through John Huston's wonderful film of The Maltese Falcon which he directed from his own script. That script is a narrative model - and to it the medium adds the physical presence of the actors to create the total effect of Elisha Cook Jnr, say, as a sexually ambiguous killer or the chuckling malevolence of Sydney Greenstreet. The moment when Greenstreet recovers almost instantly from an ecstasy of greed as he realises he's been given a fake instead of the falcon calls to mind Long John Silver looking down into the empty pit from which Ben Gunn has taken the pirate treasure.

It reminds us that we make books not just out of real life but from all the books we've ever read; and that we need both and have to get the balance right.

DL: Who are your favourite current authors?

FL: Frustratingly, in as much as I'm a contemporary Scottish urban writer,

I tend to avoid some writers I admire because I don't want my version of

reality to be influenced too much by theirs. This holds for the genre novel

rather than general fiction, because you already have a number of givens

in a genre which make it that much harder to get the books/real life balance

right. There's probably something to be said, then, for reading Continental

or American crime fiction and then applying what makes an impact to your

own milieu.

DL: Why do you think crime writing has exploded over the last decade, in terms of both writers and readers?

FL: There was a time when Westerns dominated films and television. Not any more and not for a long time. There is only so much sagebrush you can take. In contrast, the appetite for crime fiction seems insatiable. It can be set against any background, from a Glasgow pub to an Indian reservation; it can be as simple or complex as you want to make it, just a puzzle or an attempt to make sense of good and evil.

As for why it should be more popular than ever in the last ten years - the incoming century looks like being an even more desperate case than the last one.

DL: What are your future plans at the moment, how many more books are in the pipeline?

FL: The Stranger from Home, the eighth book about Edinburgh detective Jim Meldrum, is out this month. At the moment, I'm busy with number nine, using the working title Bad Blood. In addition, a couple of years ago I published two books in the same year, The Endings Man, a Meldrum title, and My Life As A Man, a non-genre novel. I would like to do that again, so I am also working on a non-crime book called The Limping Boy.

DL: Do you think crime writers get the recognition their popularity suggests they deserve, especially when it comes to awards?

FL: It is hard to get published now, but easier if you write crime novels rather than literary fiction. At the moment, the crime series may be the most promising route to 'popularity'. If in addition, you can get awards so much the better. As to whether a crime novel will win the Booker any time soon, I wouldn't hold my breath.

DL: You've shown that crime writing doesn't have to stick to murder-investigation-retribution. Is it the range of issues you can explore from a criminal act that makes the genre appeal to you?

FL: Interesting question. The short answer is yes. I can't think of any background that couldn't give rise to a crime novel; even a hermit on top of a pole in the desert can have a knife in his heart. In the same way, no issue or theme would be barred as a matter of principle. If there is a price to pay for that freedom, it is that the reader will bring a set of expectations to a genre novel. The writer can play with those expectations, expand them perhaps, but to do without them altogether would be to court disappointment.

DL: Having been born in Glasgow and living in Edinburgh, do you reckon there's much difference between east and west coast crime writers?

FL: Glasgow still seems to me a big city environment in a way that Edinburgh isn't. My most violent book, Jill Rips, the nearest to an American city-as-nightmare story of a serial killer, is set in Glasgow. On the other hand, Edinburgh is the capital and now it has a parliament, and that is an enormous advantage which brings new themes and opportunities to the crime writer. Whatever his politics, for any writer of ambition independence knocks devolution into a cocked hat. It may well be then that considered as a group, leaving aside individual interests and talent, over the next twenty years the divide between one coast and the other in fiction might be between the study of private murder and public conspiracy.

DL: Finally, at Pulp Pusher a lot of the work is by aspiring crime writers. Do you have any advice for us?

FL: If you have any thought at all of aiming for the long haul, make your central character someone who will hold your interest over a series This doesn't mean he has to be strikingly novel (a one-legged homosexual with a gambling problem) but that he has the capacity to evolve from however seemingly stereotypical a starting point into being a real person. Worth saying too, that the best crime books have the best villains. As for the writing itself, try to avoid a progress from A to Z. A novel isn't a route march. Make it a dance and listen for the music.

DAVID LEWIS David Lewis is a journalist living and working in Edinburgh. He's written for many newspapers in the UK and magazines in the US and Canada. Currently, he's working on what he hopes will soon be his first novel. Contact him at: davidflewis@hotmail.co.uk