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An Interview with John Lawton

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About a dozen years ago, browsing through the fiction in my local library in Seattle, I came across a book by John Lawton. It featured a London policeman named Troy and was set during World War II. Worth a chance, I thought, and took it out. Two days later I was back to hunt for more of the Troy novels. Lawton had me hooked. He was immensely readable, the book filled with fine period knowledge that dragged the reader into the time and place. Every character, even the minor ones, was completely three-dimensional, a mix of fictional and real people. The plot was part-mystery, part-thriller. And the icing was Troy himself, one of the great creations. Clever, the son of a Russian émigré who’d smuggled a fortune out of the old country and become a publisher. Troy – Frederick – was British in name, upper-class by education. And an outsider by nature.

Over the years, after moving back to England, I’ve bought all Lawton’s fiction, all of the Troy series and Sweet Sunday, his novel set in America (he’s one of the few English writers to really capture the rhythm of American speech). He’s become one of my favourite writers, and one from whom I regularly learn – I read the Troy canon ever couple of years. Now he’s come out with a new book, Then We Take Berlin, featuring Joe Holderness – or Wilderness, as he’d nicknamed. For those who know the Troy books, there are several familiar faces, Eddie Clark, Tosca, even Troy himself very briefly. It is, as someone has noted, a Troy novel without Troy. Well, yes and no…

“Every so often you reward yourself with a break,” John Lawton explains. “I’d written two Troys in a row. I don’t know where it came from but it wasn’t a Troy. I started kicking around Eddie Clark.” But although Clark might be a deep and profoundly interesting character, he wasn’t the stuff of leading men. “I made the lead as different from Troy as possible. When I was at university in the 1960s, two of my teachers were from working-class backgrounds. When they’d gone through National Service (Britain’s version of the draft) they’d been offered the choice between square-bashing or learning Russian. So I decided on a working-class background for him; I’m more comfortable dealing with that. I lived in Stepney in the 1970s (an area of London that’s featured in many of his novels, here as where Holderness grew up) and it still looked like World War II. I put on my blog that I was writing about Sidney Street and someone from there responded. I asked him to tell me everything. I put it all in the book and gave him an acknowledgement.”

Although much of the book (whose title comes from a Leonard Cohen song, for those who don’t understand the reference) takes place in Berlin, there’s also a section in Hamburg, just after the war ends. The city, like much of Germany, is a sea of rubble.

“I ran out of ways to describe rubble,” Lawton says with a laugh. He restricted the descriptions of destruction to Hamburg, figuring that “it was a given for Berlin. The hardest part was imagining Berlin just before the Wall. I had to make it up and hope no one picked me up on it. Tony Le Tissier’s book, Berlin Then and Now was very helpful. I was there when the Wall came down, but not in 15 or more years until I went to do my homework.”

One of the key locations is a particular Flak Tower in Berlin, and Lawton struggled to find pictures of it when demolished. Books and documentaries didn’t help, until he chanced up a Montgomery Clift film shot on location that contained a scene with the ruined tower. “He goes past the Flak Tower. You almost get a 180. It was a godsend, better than any other movie.”

The ending of Then We Take Berlin begs the question of whether there’ll be a sequel – will this be a new series for Lawton?

“I told the publisher I would write a sequel,” he says. “I can see a second book. After Blackout (his first Troy novel), I couldn’t see another.” And that series now stands at seven books.

For much of the ‘90s, in addition to being a writer, John Lawton was also a television producer, working extensively with Channel 4, and people as diverse as Harold Pinter and Gore Vidal (in Mississippi, of all places). In fact, his writing and television careers seemed to begin in parallel.

“I was just starting at Channel 4 in the late 80s and my agent put me in touch with a publisher that was looking for a study of 1963. I agreed, as the book was something I could pick up and drop. In the end it was published by Hodder & Stoughton in 1992 and 1963: Five Hundred Days (now long out of print). It was a gift. Because of that book I’m well-versed in the culture of the US and the UK from 1945 onwards.”

1963, of course, was when it all changed. Kennedy was killed, the Beatles and others brought Britain into Technicolor modernity. It was, really, when the Sixties that everyone remembered kicked into gear. The year it all went boom. And the year that’s the cut-off (so far) for both Troy and Holderness.

“It’s my cut-off point,” he agrees. “I stop when the ‘50s end in any sense but the chronological.” It was a time he can recall, although he was never part of himself. “Everyone was out doing drugs and fucking and I was studying maths!”

Of course, no rules are hard and fast. Lawton’s just-published short story, Bentinck’s Agent, takes place in the 1980s. But in Troy he’s had ample chance to examine the 30s, 40s and 50s, and even take a jaundiced view of the 1960s. The character changes over time, of course.

“In Blackout he’s an idealist. Then he’s taught to shoot properly and once he learns he’s lethal. And at the start he’s an innocent. I kept that in the two prequels, but from there he leads a precarious sex life.” Sexually, though, Troy is quite passive – it happens to him, rather than especially involving him. “By 1963 he’s in bad shape. He’s a drug addict, popping Mandies (Mandrax) and he lets himself get picked up by a 15-year-old. He hits a low point when Val, the mother of the girl (who knows on some level what’s happened as is another old lover of Troy’s) slaps him around. But the lowest point is at the funeral for Anguse – I liked writing his character – when his widow Anna (also an on-off lover of Troy says ‘Hold me, Troy.’ ‘Now fuck off, Troy.’ It’s the complete failure of his relationships.”

He’s the antithesis of Holderness, and that’s intentional.

“Troy isn’t a nice man,” Lawton insists. “He doesn’t belong.” And because he doesn’t belong, whatever he does, which is a great deal, can’t be betrayal. “Wilderness can appreciate betrayal.” He’s the outsider who comes inside “and when he’s accepted, he will accept.”

These days, although often described as a producer and a writer, Lawton admits that “I haven’t made a programme in 15 years. It’s time to admit that I make a living from my writing – and it’s a privilege to do so.”

Although lauded by critics and those who’ve discovered his work, Lawton has yet to become a household name on the order of, say John Le Carré. Why remains a mystery, although perhaps Then We Take Berlin (which will be published in December), which is more direct than the Troy novels, might help him vault higher in the public consciousness. That it’s good enough is beyond question.

But he hasn’t forgotten Troy and he’s not ready to give up on him yet. Although he has a couple of shorter things in his head, there will be another Troy, “set in 1958. This is between Old Flames and Blue Rondo. It’s what my characters are asking of me.”

And that, as any writer knows, is a summons that must be obeyed.

Many thanks for Rhian Davies for putting me in touch.

Words Like Cream

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I was saddened to hear of Elmore Leonard’s death this week. The man had reached a good age, and after a stroke who knows if he’d have ever written again. But he left behind a body of work that will be enjoyed for many, many years to come.

I can’t claim to have read all his books, probably not even a majority. But every time I’ve sat down with an Elmore Leonard novel, I’ve devoured it. He had everything in balance, the humour and the action, the surprises and the twists. His dialogue was superb, always so natural. His writing was like cream. All you had to do was sink into it.

It was only fair when he was lauded as more than a crime writer. A good novel is a good novel, not matter the genre. And has he showed so well, literary fiction doesn’t have the monopoly on style. And because of his stories, there’s one of the best shows on television – Justified (Raylan is based on a character Leonard created).

He was a writer for others to measure themselves against and know they’d come up short. A good and salutary lesson.

But he’s far from being the only one. I’m currently reading The Guts, the new book by Roddy Doyle. It’s has everything that made me fall in love with his work in the first place – the laughter, compassion, family love and craziness (and music). And, of course, the dialogue. Again, so natural, so perfect that it seems to leap off the page with a Dublin accent. Like Leonard, his dialogue is an art form, it can bring beauty of the mundane. Again, words like cream.

They’re not the only two, of course. Other writers are available. But these are the pair in my week.

The Dog Days Of Leeds

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August is in its slow crawl towards closing. At some point in the next few weeks – and that point is still undetermined, even after three months – we’ll have a moving date, load up all the boxes that are packed and head up to a new life in Leeds.

So perhaps the dog days of summer, that last sigh, will be spent in my hometown. After so long in hurry up and wait mode, it would be welcome. I want to have the luxury of time to explore the place again, fully. I want to see those nooks and crannies, to dig deeper into the history and mystery. I want to be involved with the place.

God knows that I was glad to move when I went off to college all those years ago. But I came back after a year and ended up staying until 1976 when the lure of America drew me. And now I’m going back again to enjoy those dog days. And quite a few more years, I hope.

Each time I’m there I see something new to fascinate me. It might be the date on a building, the promise of a Cloth Hall restoration, the intakes for the old water engine (pointed out to me by someone else). In those dog days and beyond I’ll have the chance to discover, if not everything, then a good chunk of it.

Lyrics? Poetry? Both?

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I hit my teens and became interested in music in  1967. That was the year that progressive rock – prog rock to most of us now – really began. Music changed. Pop became Art. As well as groups making music more complex (until it would eventually disappear up its own arse), there came the advent of the singer-songwriters.

And with it, to my young ears, the realisation that song lyrics could be poetry. Of course, I didn’t know then that Leonard Cohen had already enjoyed a distinguished career as a poet and novelist, for instance. But that first album of his hit me – an aspiring musician and writer – as a revelation. Then add in some others, the Joni Mitchells, the Nick Drakes, who seemed to distil experience and feeling into lines and verses in the manner of the best poets. It says a great deal that even now I’m more likely to quote a lyric than a poem or a line of Shakespeare.

That’s not to say poetry couldn’t be pop. The Liverpool Poets showed that, Pete Brown crossed between one world and the other as lyricist for Cream, and the A.A. Alvarez Anthology of New Poetry was as vital as the newest Beatles album. I groped my way into culture as I grew.

Of course, not all attempts at poetic lyrics worked. Pete Sinfield’s work with King Crimson was often nothing short of embarrassing, while Yes was twee and post-Syd Barrett Pink Floyd was 6th form solipsism masquerading as profundity. But when things worked, and it always seemed to be the singer-songwriters who made it work, it could be beautiful.

Not that pop couldn’t use words well, as popular song had for decades. But there it was a case of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. A marriage of words and music that was generally less effective when taken apart. While it could very powerfully pinpoint a time, a place, a mood, a romance or a breakup, it wasn’t the same.

It wasn’t poetry.

That was what I truly believed back then. I tried to make the songs that I wrote into poetic gems. I polished my poems. I was a pretentious little git.

These days I know better. I can still appreciate old Leonard as a rare talent, and Joni’s Blue stands as a near-perfect record even after all these years. But I’ve hopefully grown out of my leanings towards Art. Maybe, just maybe, I’ve come to understand that what’s important is that it moves me, whether it’s “Suzanne,” “Anarchy In The UK” or Bobby Bland singing “Two Steps From The Blues.” It was always that way, of course. I simply chose to be too blind to see it.

My Son

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Yesterday my son flew home to Seattle at the end of his annual summer visit. It’s never the easiest day for either of us, but by now we’re used to it. After all, this is the eighth year in a row. But there was something a little different about this trip. It might well be his last for a few years.

In 2005 I moved back to the UK from America. My wife and I had divorced, and for many reasons I chose to leave the US. I’d weighed things out very carefully before coming to a decision. After all, my son was there, just 10 when I left. But he could spend every summer here with me, we could talk every day – I’d bought him a cell phone and there was MSN for chatting, onscreen and even with a webcam.

We were lucky. As a writer I’d been able to work from home since he was born. We’d had the chance to spend time together, to form a real bond and become close. That made a huge difference. I believe that I could move away and that bond would remain strong.

I remember picking him up at Heathrow Airport in 2006, having to sign for him like a package. He’d flown on his own, looked after by cabin crew and escorted through the airport. I’d never, ever been happier to see someone. We took the train into London, then the underground, and finally another train north. He was tired – it’s a nine-and-a-half hour flight – but still wide-eyes and marvelling at how large and just how green England was.

The parting that year was tearful, on both sides, the journey back to my flat bleak and empty. Next year was better, even with the adventure of the 2007 floods that left us stranded overnight in Derby. He’d grown, as he has every year since.

In just over a week from now he’ll turn 18. He’ll spend his birthday at his university orientation. But he’s already a man, thoughtful, responsible, intelligent and creative. His loves – manga, anime, mathematics – aren’t mine, but that’s as it should be. We share other things. We talk three times a week, but that will change soon enough, I’m sure. The options for communication – email, Facebook, phone, Skype, Facetime – have grown exponentially. We can be in touch anytime. I can be there for him if he needs me.

He’s the very best part of me. I’m proud of who he’s become, although much of the credit for that goes to his mother. And now he’s about to begin this new life as a college student. He seems to be ready to take it in his stride. Me? I’m full of trepidation, although I’m sure he’ll be fine. I’m as anxious as…a parent. I’m lucky. The bond is still strong between us. But he’ll be making new friends, and have new plans for his year. Already he’s talking about taking classes next summer. Things will be different now. I always knew they would, he’s growing up and growing away into his own life, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

But I’ll always love him and be proud of him.

Thinking About Tattoos

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Back in 1989, when the Re/Search book Modern Primitives appeared, I was living in Seattle and saw the ripples it caused. Within a few very short years people who weren’t ex-cons, ex-service or gang members were wearing barbed wire and Celtic design tattoo bands around biceps and calves, and a healthy smattering of California’s finest tattoo artists had set up shop in the Emerald City.

Nowadays I’m back in England and until last week I worked a few hours a week in a corner shop. Both there and in supermarkets- everywhere, in fact – I’ve been quite amazed at the number of men of all ages with tattoos. There was a customer in his 20s, with a shaved head and menacing manner, with a scorpion on the side of his skull and a teardrop under his eye (and yes, I know what the latter is meant to signify). So many with tattoos on their necks. Women with them inside their forearms, on their backs, feet.

The speculation in the 90s, as the percentage of tattoos among white folk shot up, was that it was a need to belong, to feel part of a tribe. That was 20 years ago and tattoos are now more prevalent than ever, certainly in England. Is that sense of identity so lacking that the need to tattoos has become much greater? Does this explain the fact that so many EDL members seem to be tattooed in pictures (they all also seem to have shaved heads, but that’s another topic), this urge to belong?

Modern Primitives dealt not only with tattoos but also piercings, although (in England, anyway) the fad for them has passed.  That seems strange, given how widespread they became. But why do tattoos remain so vital? I do genuinely want ideas and opinions. If you have a tat, why did you get it? Do you want more? What do you think is the reason so many have/desire them?

Coming Home to Leeds

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Any week now I’ll be living in Leeds again. I’ve been telling myself that for the last several weeks. We’re in that strange legal limbo, the no-man’s land between selling and buying a house and actually signing the contracts then moving in. It’s an odd space, where time seems to expand, making a day feel like a week, a week like a month and – well, you get the picture.

I grew up in Leeds but I haven’t lived there since January 3, 1976. I’ve been back regularly, sometimes for a week or more at a time. But it’s only in recent years that I’ve realised it’s where I need to be, it’s where my heart lies. Most of my books are set there, albeit well in the past. I know it in my bones in a way I’ll never know anywhere else.

My partner’s daughter went to university there and stayed. She’s made a life for herself but she’s stayed close to her mother. Events have aligned in a way that makes this a perfect time to sell, buy and put ourselves in that great Yorkshire city.

It’s a big, daunting adventure, of course. And right now, after hanging around as lawyers do whatever it is they do in these situations, all we want is for it to be over. Most everything’s packed, boxes all over the house.

Soon, though, we’ll be in Leeds. And you know what? It’s going to feel just like coming home.

A New Richard Nottingham Short Story

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I like working with publishers. The knowledge that someone else, someone in the industry, thinks enough of my work to put their reputation on the line and put it out under their imprint is what every writer desires.

 

I’m proud of all the fiction I’ve put out (hey, I’m even proud of some of the non-fiction and all the music journalism). I want my name on it. But some things don’t fit into any publisher’s niche. A few weeks ago I wrote a short story featuring Richard Nottingham, Constable of Leeds. Those of you who know my work will know him.

 

What to do with it? In the past I’ve made stories available for free. This time, with a longer story, I wanted something a little more. So I decided to publish it for Kindle. Via Twitter and Facebook I know several writers who self-publish. Some of them are excellent writers, the equal of anyone traditionally published; others, less so. But with the rise of the ereader it’s become a very successful medium.

 

For me it’s an experiment. The story keeps the name of Richard Nottingham out there. I hope it’ll please those who like the books and that they’ll buy it and enjoy it. I also hope that some people who’ve never read the novels will take a look, think, hey, that’s pretty good, and want to discover more. Finally, it keeps everything simmering until the UK hardback publication of Fair and Tender Ladies at the end of September (January 2014 for the US and ebook). It may pique a little interest and raise the sales. We do what we can.

 

I priced the story as cheaply as Amazon would seem to allow. But it’s a story, 5,000 words, not a novel. It’s something to pass a few idle minutes, not to take over your life.

 

Have I raised your curiosity? I hope so – that’s the aim of this, after all. It’s 77p (or $1.16 – I asked for 99 cents but it seems to have gone out of my control in the US). You’d spend that much of a bar of chocolate. Much more on a coffee or a cup of tea.

 

Oh, and you can buy it here in the UK.

 

Or here in America.

Thank you for your indulgence. I hope you like it if you buy it.

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The Government I Want

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The government I want will desire the best for its citizens – for all of them, not merely a few. It will look first to the welfare of the neediest and most deprived, to create a society that strives for equality, which those that have least given the most.

It will take ownership of the NHS, take responsibility for this most vital of services, not hold it at arm’s length, and keep it close, free from privatisation and profit, in the hands of the government and people, where it should be. It will be properly funded and staffed, a service of pride, not excuses.

The government I want won’t sell off its stock of social housing and then not replace it. Instead it will ensure that every person has a decent place to live, somewhere affordable. They will be a government that creates real jobs, not part-time employment or zero-hour contracts, and put into law that the minimum wage will be a living wage, one on which people can live, more barely exist.

The government I want will be made up of people of integrity, ones with no outside income or interests. Public servants in the truest sense, but also people with experience of the real world. No candidate would be eligible for selection until they’d held a job outside politics for 10 years, to know what existing on a wage packet means. Every expense would have to be justified, and every member of Parliament fully accountable to his or her constituents.

The government I want would tend to those who are disabled. It would ensure their carers were well paid, that they were trained and did a thorough job, that the companies carers worked for were thoroughly vetted.

The government I wanted would not be motivated by the profit to be found in everything, but by the way it could serve the people of the country. Sections of the population would not be demonised for political purpose. Politicians who lie to Parliament, especially to party ends, would be de-selected and dismissed without pensions. If what they did was illegal, they would be prosecuted without fear or favour, to the full extent of the law. Members of Parliament would receive a fair salary and expenses, but no raises beyond those of any other public servants.

The government I want would create fair taxation. No loopholes, no special exemptions, no deals made by HMRC with large corporations. Money earned in Great Britain would be taxed in Great Britain at the amount set in law. No excuses accepted.

The government I want would understand that this country is no longer a global power. Because of that, there’s no need to spend vast amounts on defence or to have a nuclear deterrent when the money involved could be spend for the benefit of people in the country.

The government I want would return public utilities – gas, electric, water, post office  – to public ownership and use the money that would otherwise have gone on profits for investment in infrastructure.

Does this sound socialist? Probably it does. More likely it sounds like the Labour manifesto from 1945. And it’s worth remembering that they won a landslide that year.

Gods of Gold

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Yesterday my agent heard back from the publisher which had been weighing whether to publish my new book. Needless to say, I’d been on tenterhooks (a good Leeds expression, by the way) since it had been sent off.

The result, as those who saw my Facebook and Twitter posts will know, is that Crème de la Crime will publish Gods of Gold in April next year – and four months later in the US, as usual.

So what is Gods of Gold? It’s the first in a new series set in Leeds, this time in the 1890s. The small town on Richard Nottingham’s time has grown and grown, bringing in the suburbs. It’s an industrial place now, full of dark Satanic mills and factories. Street after street is filled with back-to-back housing, the homes of the poor. Most of the buildings are black with soot from all the chimneys.

It’s a place much closer to the Leeds of the present day. Not just in time, but in attitude; it’s very recognisable. The main character is Detective Inspector Tom Harper. He’s 31, from a working-class background. Left school at the age of nine and worked 12 hours a day in a brewery, but was determined to become a policeman. He’s worked his way up from walking a beat in the yards and courts off Briggate – still around 160 years after my earlier Leeds series – to plain clothes.

His partner is Detective Sergeant Billy Reed, a man who spent time in the West Yorkshire Regiment and was in Afghanistan during the Second Afghan War. The nightmares of those times still come to him, leaving him a troubled man who finds it safer not to grow attached to people.

As the book opens, Harper’s wedding to Annabelle Atkinson is just a few weeks away. She’s a new type of women, not so much ahead of her time, but in the vanguard. After growing up very poor in the Bank – the area of Leeds where most of the Irish settled – she became a servant at the Victoria pub in Sheepscar. The landlord, an older widower, fell for her and married her. When he died, she took over the business and made it more successful, then opened two bakeries to cater for the working men at the factories all around. She’s based, in part at least, on stories about a relative of mine who was the landlady at the Victoria (the pub is now gone, turned into an Indian community centre. I did have a drink there once, back in the ‘90s, and it seemed a wonderful place). So a fictionalised version of my own family’s tale is one thread in the tapestry.

The books are more political. The first one unfolds over the backdrop of the 1890 Leeds Gas Strike, one that the workers won (and it’s well worth reading about the strike).

I suppose that this series is part of my continuing love affair with Leeds. The place won’t let me go – possibly just as well as I’ll be moving back there within a month. It’s the start of something new, and it pulls at me just as hard as Richard Nottingham ever has.

The big test, of course, will to be see how all of you like it…