“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?”: J. Sydney Jones

Yep, it’s rubber-hose time, folks: a rapid-fire Q&A for those shifty-looking usual suspects ...

What crime novel would you most like to have written?
Can we stretch it to thrillers? HARRY’S GAME, by Gerald Seymour. He can do dialogue and pacing like no other. Or perhaps Le Carré’s A MURDER OF QUALITY. Ditto the dialogue. You can almost taste it.

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
Prince Myshkin. He runs under the radar.

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
Guilty as accused: mysteries and thrillers.

Most satisfying writing moment?
I’ve published a dozen books over the years, but getting my first royalty check for my narrative history, HITLER IN VIENNA, thirty years after publication was definitely a high point. No lie. That book was sold I don’t know how many times from the German original, translated, sold in revised editions (without my blessings) and I never saw a dime. Only financials for years were the photo rights I had to pay for with each new edition. But patience pays out. I now can afford five bottles of plonk.

No. On second thoughts, I believe I will frame the check.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
Worst is promotion - endless, ceaseless (is it even productive?) promotion. The best is that feeling of getting it right, nailing a scene or character with exactly the right words.

The pitch for your next book is …?
Here’s for book four of my Viennese Mysteries series, set around 1900: THE KEEPER OF THE HANDS is a murder mystery that quickly morphs into a thriller of assumed names, false identities, and internecine turf battles between espionage arms of the state, employing the technology and tradecraft of a century ago. It is also a work of social and political commentary in which the demands of state power trump the privacy of its citizens, a scenario that is prescient of our own times.

Who are you reading right now?
Perhaps this is my guilty pleasure: I always have several books going at the same time, fiction and nonfiction. Nabokov’s SPEAK MEMORY, THE AGE OF WONDER by Richard Holmes, and Jonathan Littel’s THE KINDLY ONES.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
Neither. Don’t believe in God.

The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
I’m breaking the rules (so I can’t count, so sue me) and quoting from Kirkus about my last novel, REQUIEM IN VIENNA: “Sophisticated entertainment of a very high caliber.”

J. Sydney Jones’ THE EMPTY MIRROR is published by Minotaur Books.

Putting The Ire Into Ireland

Yesterday the Guardian picked up on a rather fine rant by Julian Gough (right) on the state of Irish letters, in which the Berlin-based scribe put the boot into the current generation of Irish writers for not engaging with modern Ireland. The gist runneth thusly:

“I hardly read Irish writers any more, I’ve been disappointed so often. I mean, what the FECK are writers in their 20s and 30s doing, copying the very great John McGahern, his style, his subject matter, in the 21st century? To revive a useful old Celtic literary-critical expression: I puke my ring. And the older, more sophisticated Irish writers that want to be Nabokov give me the yellow squirts and a scaldy hole …
“The role of the Irish writer is not really to win prizes in Ireland; their role historically has been to get kicked out of the country for telling the truth. And there’s not quite enough of that going on. Just when we need a furious army of novelists, we are getting fairly polite stuff published by Faber & Faber that fits into the grand tradition … At the moment Ireland has one, massively developed, lyrical realism arm which is all biceps, and the other arm, the odd, freaky, tattooed arm, needs to be built up. In a way I’m trying to rally a few young writers around a flag which hasn’t been waved in a while. You can’t save the world with a novel, but it can put a tiny featherweight on the scales.”

  Ach, Julian, get down off the fence and say what you mean, squire.
  For the full and delightfully bilious rant, clickety-click here. For the reaction of various Irish writers, including John Banville and Sebastian Barry, clickety-click here.
  If you want to give Julian an even scaldier hole for overlooking the horde of Irish crime writers currently putting the ire into Ireland, or if you don’t believe that crime fiction is entitled to consider itself part of Irish literature, the comment box is open for business ...

  This week I have been mostly reading: SICILIAN CAROUSEL by Lawrence Durrell; THE TEMPEST by William Shakespeare; and CLOUD ATLAS by David Mitchell.