What crime novel would you most like to have written?
THE LAWS OF OUR FATHERS by Scott Turow. One of the few novels about us old hippies that is worth your time.
What fictional character would you most like to have been?
Barbarella.
Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
Zoe Sharp … levels of shit-kicking violence that I cannot emulate and urban street-grot that make me want to live up a mountain in wilderness.
Most satisfying writing moment?
Sitting on a doorstep in Bloomsbury circa 1994 waiting for a 38 bus to Islington, armed only with a pencil and a receipt for a garden hose. A page sprang fully-formed into me head and having nowt else to write on I jotted it down on the back of the receipt. Then I thought ‘what da fukk do I do with this?’ It became the final page of OLD FLAMES and I changed not a word. Arsy and versy might apply, but a good moment all the same.
If you could recommend one Irish crime novel, what would it be?
I’m go to be very old-fashioned and betray all my contemporaries by saying THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GREY by Oscar Wilde. It must be one of the most influential tales ever written and perhaps the most invoked allusion.
What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
Alas I know zilch about modern cinema and go about once a year. I emerge sea-sick from the pace of things, wondering if I have seen The Hobbit Part XIII, Carry On Captain Sparrow or Iron Man on the Planet of the Apes. Can I cop out and say, “Whatever Martin McDonagh decides to film next” … ?
Worst / best thing about being a writer?
The Best Thing has to be just the doing of it, the act of writing. The Worst Thing is definitely dealing with the question I get asked most often … “Why did you never write another novel after BLACK OUT?”
The pitch for your next book is …?
Troy is back … younger, smaller … just as insufferable.
Who are you reading right now?
Volume 4 of Robert Caro’s THE LIVES OF LYNDON JOHNSON: 1960-64. A bit of a cheat as I have not read Vol. 3 and only bits of 1 & 2.
God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
Oh … I’d rather be dead than make that choice. I’d say return me to star dust and zaps of interstellar carbon.
The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
‘Could do better’ … exactly as it said on my school reports 55 years ago. I hate to think the old bastards who pretended to teach me were right. They were a bad-mannered bunch of fascists with no respect for anyone, and violent tendencies that would see them in the lock-up ward of a loony bin these days … but I cannot deny the insight. Fukkem.
John Lawton’s THEN WE TAKE BERLIN is published by Grove Press.
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