P&C: First off, why do you write?
"Because I was born to write – almost
literally. My dad was a bookkeeper by profession but all he really wanted to do was write:
letters and columns for newspapers; plays and short stories for the radio. One of my
earliest memories is drifting off to sleep, listening to the clicking of his old Imperial
typewriter.
In my mind there was never any question but that I would
write for a living and it was no accident that I was sent to William Shakespeare’s
school (King Edward VIth in Stratford-on-Avon) even though we lived ten miles from there.
When my academic career began to founder (I was a terrible student), my dad took me out of
school, at the age of 15, and got me my first job on the local paper (the Leamington
Spa Morning News)."
He chose my name, and kept it short, so that it would
fit perfectly as a by-line across the single column of a newspaper.
P&C: After the Leamington Spa
Morning News, where did you go?
"For some twenty-five years I worked for
newspapers, primarily for The Sunday Times of London. I quit in 1985 because,
having frequently visited America as a reporter, I wanted to spend some constant time
there. With my now wife (Sara Walden) I moved to Miami to research a non-fiction account
of the cocaine trade and we lived there enthralled for a little over two years. (The
Cocaine Wars was published by Norton in 1988 and was nominated for the Edgar Allen Poe
award by the MWA. Didn’t win – but what the hell!)
There was some thought that some of our subjects might
not be best pleased with the book, so we then moved to a very small town in northern
Connecticut for six months while the fuss died down. Then we moved to Chevy Chase, MD, and
began researching a second non-fiction book about drug trafficking (Hunting Marco Polo,
published by Little Brown in 1991).
I then decided it was time to return to Europe (Sara was
not in full agreement: she adores the States). We chose France – which cares
more about the quality of life than anywhere I know – and settled on a little hilltop
village in Provence.
To make a living we turned our hands back to journalism,
writing investigative articles for two British magazines (some of which you can read on my
web site, www.graceflint.co.uk). Sara also
wrote the text for a photographic book that truly describes just what is so special about
this place (Provence: The Art of Living, published in the States by Stewart, Tabori
& Chang. If you are into beautiful things, check it out.)
And, in between magazine assignments, I began to ponder
that thing that every journalist believes they have in them: the BIG novel.
Now, I have to say that I had tried once before. A very
long time ago – in the Seventies, I think – I was given an advance by a US
publisher on the basis of a synopsis, and I took myself off to the Spanish island of
Majorca where I sat in the sun for weeks on end staring at a blank piece of paper.
Eventually I accepted that I didn’t have it in me – or at least not then –
and I repaid the advance (by instalments, since I’d already spent it).
But, now, in France, some twenty years later, with a
wealth of real-life characters and episodes filling my memory bank, I felt I did have
something interesting to say. The question was, did I have a voice of my own in which to
say it?
Sometime in 1997 I wrote the opening five paragraphs of Flint
that have survived almost word for word. They are literally true in that every cop and
agent I know on both sides of the Atlantic – and some of our best friends are cops,
honest! – tells me that surveillance gadgets rarely work as they are supposed to, and
even when they do they can be irrelevant.
My favourite and typical true story is of a DEA agent
named Craig Lovato who went undercover in a one-horse town called Douglas, Arizona, to set
up a big-time marijuana dealer named Francisco Cornejos. There was a whole team of back-up
agents supposed to come to the rescue at the appropriate moment but they didn’t, and
this is Craig’s description to me of what happened next:
In this job you don't survive if you
can't read people. When you look into a person's eyes you learn to read their character,
because that's what's going to make a difference between life and death. When you're
undercover, what the bad guy is telling you is totally irrelevant because he's lying. I
mean, you're telling him a total lie and he's telling you a total lie. So you stop
listening to words and you start reading eyes. I knew that Cornejos was a desperado, I
could see it in his eyes.
We're walking towards his car, where his
lieutenant is sitting, and all I can hear is the wind on the telephone lines. I'm waiting
for the pitter-patter of friendly feet. When you're undercover, you always hear your guys
come in. There's this scraping of shoe leather on the pavement and you hear the running
and, `Police officer, don't move! Freeze! Everybody, hands in the air!' A lot of commotion
takes place and you're used to it because you do it all the time.
But I'm not hearing anything except the
wind in the telephone lines and I'm thinking, `Holy shit, something's wrong here.' I don't
know what's wrong, but something's wrong. It's just me and Cornejos and his lieutenant,
and these are real desperadoes.
Craig ended up in a shoot-out with Cornejos and still
has the scars of the bullet wounds to prove it. What intrigues me – and what I sat
down to explore in Flint – was, given the extreme risks, why people volunteer
for undercover work, and especially why women do it.
I mean, if you are a woman and of sound mind, would you
volunteer to wander some God-forsaken heath in the middle of the night as "rape
bait"? Well, some of the women I know have done that – not once but many times
– and sometimes it has gone wrong, and they’ve still volunteered to do it again.
Why?
That’s what I set out to explore in Flint
and by the end of 1998 I had the first 40,000 words or so written and all of those who
read them – all of them women – thought that Grace was becoming a pretty
interesting character. I was persuaded to show the early draft to a fiction agent in
London and he, too, was very encouraging. But he wanted me to finish the book – and
here was the rub: so long as I continued my day job – researching and writing
10,000-word articles for The Sunday Times Magazine that invariably involved a lot
of travel – I was never going to have time to get the book done.
P&C: So, what happened?
If you believe in fate you’ll like this.
In February 1999, some friends from London – Katie
and Bob Gavron – were visiting the house they own near our village and invited us out
for supper. I didn’t want to go out because in February it can get mighty cold even
in Provence, but Sara persuaded me and we met the Gavrons in our local pizza joint. At the
end of the meal they asked if they could borrow some books and we took them back to the
house, and, as an afterthought, I gave Katie the first 40,000 words of Flint to
read.
Bob telephoned the next morning to say they had both
read the draft and it was the best thing they’d read in years and I should definitely
give up my day job and get the damn thing finished – and what could he do to help?
Now, what you need to know about Bob Gavron – Lord
Gavron, as he is now – is that he is a big cheese in the publishing business. For a
long time he was the largest printer of books in the UK and he founded the Folio Society,
so he knows people who matter.
Most important, so far as I’m concerned, he knows
Ed Victor. The day they got back to London, Bob and Katie went to a party – a party
that Ed Victor only decided to attend at the last moment. They told him about Flint,
urged him to get me a deal. And the rest, as they say, is history.
What can I say about Ed Victor, other than he is the
greatest agent in the world? Within a month of that fateful evening, he called to tell me
that Phyllis Grann of Penguin-Putnam had offered half-a-million dollars for Flint,
"and, of course, I’ve turned it down." Believe me, that’s pretty
riveting stuff to hear when, five minutes earlier, I had been pondering how to pay my car
insurance!
He was right, of course, because the eventual deal with
Putnam was even better than that, and it provided the "buzz" that enabled his
wonderful co-agent, Andrew Nurnberg, to sell foreign rights in the Netherlands, Norway,
France, Italy, and Israel – all within a matter of weeks. And, remember, this is for
a first novel that’s not yet half-finished!
For me the highlight came when the UK rights were
auctioned, and Headline Feature won with a bid of around $600,000. I think that’s
probably more than I made in my entire journalistic career.
If I sound immodest about this – and smug and
self-satisfied – I really don’t mean to. I think the moral of the tale is this:
If you think you’ve got a book in you, start writing – and then get Ed Victor to
be your agent!
Oh, and then, one more thing: Hope that he sells it to really
good publishers with really good editors – Neil Nyren at Putnam and Bill
Massey at Headline – because when I then had to finish the book, and live up to the
buzz created by the first 40,000 words, I stumbled over the last few hurdles and I
don’t think I could have got it done without them.
P&C: What made you decide upon a
woman protagonist in the cloak-and-dagger biz?
I wanted to write about worlds I knew something about
– in this case, espionage and money laundering – because it is very hard for a
journalist (at least, this journalist) to give up the habit of striving for truth.
I’ve spent around 40 years looking in my notebook or listening to the tape in order
to know what was said, and the fact that I can now make up the dialogue is license enough.
If I wrote about worlds I know nothing about, I’m sure I would feel adrift.
I chose a female protagonist because women are vastly
more interesting to me than men.
Anyway, Grace is a collage of women I know, who do the
sort of the things that she does. I’m stretching the truth, of course, but she is not
pure invention – and the same applies to most of the other characters. One of the
nicest compliments I have been paid so far came from a neighbour – a self-confessed
former British spook – who when asked by Sara if A.J. Devereaux rang true to him
said, "Oh, yes, I’ve known a few A.J.s in my time."
I called her Flint because I once had a girlfriend
called (Julie) Flint who, although not a cop, spends her life doing incredibly crazy
things. You may have seen her once on TV, on the tarmac of Beirut airport, interviewing
the pilot of a hijacked TWA plane. (He was leaning through the cockpit window, a gun to
his head, at the time.) She got the interview because she was by then the girlfriend of
the head of the Druze militia that was "sympathetic" to the hijackers. The last
I heard of her, she had smuggled herself into Sudan, and evaded government forces, in
order to trek up a mountain and interview the rebels.
P&C: What’s it like to write
non-fiction one day and fiction the next?
In the BEV days (Before Ed Victor) I think I worked all
the hours that God sent – or that’s how it felt. The pattern was, having agreed
an assignment with the magazine’s editor, I’d then hope to spend about a month
doing research (and may those who developed the Internet and the world wide web rest
eternally in Paradise) and setting up interviews. Then I would go to wherever the story
was (usually the States) for two or three weeks, and then give myself about a month to
write the piece. The problem was, my contract called for me to deliver six articles a year
and, as you can see, the numbers didn’t add up. So, I was at my desk at 6AM or even
earlier, and still there late into the night. Sometimes I’d write through the night,
fortified by cheap whisky and coffee. (I know, I know, but just because it doesn’t
work for most people doesn’t mean it doesn’t work.)
In the glow of the AEV (after Ed Vic) days, I live a
more civilised life. I’m still usually at my desk by six or seven AM and I work
through until two PM. That’s when the magnificent BBC Radio Four broadcasts a
news/current affairs program called The World At One which, thanks to Rupert
Murdoch’s Astra satellite, comes in loud and crystal clear in digital sound. So,
while listening to "The World…" I take my lunch and then, depending
on my mood and who’s around, I either play golf (for the sake of the exercise) or
sleep. Then, in the early evening, I write my e-mails and address the chores before
supper. It’s very rare that I now work in the evening unless some "brilliant
thought" strikes. (They very rarely look quite so brilliant in the morning.)
I find myself going through phases. I sometimes cogitate
over a scene or a plot development for days, and write virtually nothing. Sometimes the
words flow so fast I can barely keep up. I have been known to write 5,000 words in a
single day – most notably after my editors told me that I’d lost the plot of Flint.
(Or, as Neil eloquently put it: "Your soufflé has fallen flat.")
AEV I moved my desk down from the top of the house to a
room on the middle floor where I sit in front of my flat screen (I am a gadget freak)
gazing out over what may be the most beautiful valley in the world, watching the wine
grow. The skies tend to look as they have been painted by David Hockney and the light is
simply extraordinary. The contrast between what I see and what I write about is perverse.
We have four cats (three village strays, all of them
grey, and a tabby imported from Miami) and a "puppy" called Sam, who also comes
from our Miami days. Sam (as in Surface to Air Missile because, having very short legs,
she has to launch herself to get attention) is now 14 years old and sleeps a lot, usually
by my desk.
I know full well how very lucky I am.
P&C: What’s next? More Grace,
please.
She most certainly will be back. Before Phyllis Grann
offered a cent for the unfinished Flint, she wanted a cast-iron assurance that I
wasn’t going to kill off Grace. "Never crossed my mind," I said, not
entirely truthfully.
Most of the deals Ed Victor struck are for two Flint
books and the movie deal (with Columbia) also envisages a sequel or sequels. I think I
will want to keep writing about her, because I’m still learning who she is.
She’s only 32 in book one, and 34 at the start of book 2, so she still has a long
career ahead of her. I quite like the idea of her being 50, and still undercover.
P&C: What other books do you read
and what authors are your favorites?
I read everything I can get my hands on and our house is
full of books. Simon, my darling son from my first marriage, came to stay with us for a
while and was charged with building endless book shelves. When he got fed up with it, with
no end in sight, he said, "Why don’t you just throw some of them away?"
– and if I’d had a gun I would have shot him!
All right, I’m joking, but the thing I can least
stand – other than cruelty to children and animals – is people who don’t
respect books. The greatest freedom Ed Victor has given me is the ability to buy any book
I want. I am prepared to believe that the only reason Amazondotcom is now making money
(supposedly) is because of me. [Okay, Maggie, I know this is heresy but we don’t have
an English book store within 200 miles of here. If we lived in New York, of course
we’d never click on Amazon!]
I read more thrillers than anything else, but Sara is a
fan of "new American" fiction so I dip into a lot of that. My hero is Le Carré,
primarily for the quality of the writing and the intricacies of his plots. I admit I am
not so keen on his more recent stuff but Tinker, Tailor… is a masterpiece and
there is a scene (set in Italy) in The Honourable Schoolboy that I would kill to
have written.
Much the same is true of Thomas Harris. He’s got a
scene in Silence…, in Jack Crawford’s house, by the side of Bella’s
bed, that brings a lump to my throat every time I read it. It’s the one that ends: Back
at his chair he cannot remember what he was reading. He feels the books beside him to find
the one that is warm.
And then there is that other scene that has Clarice
forming her last thought and her coda for the day: Over this odd world, this half the
world that’s dark now, I have to hunt a thing that lives on tears.
The sound that you hear is the delicious shiver down my
spine.
I’m also a huge fan of Elmore Leonard, most of all
for his dialogue, and in the negotiations with Columbia I kept in mind a pearl of wisdom
he once dropped: "My book, their movie."
Go to www.pauleddy.com or www.graceflint.com (site now in German) to find out
more about Grace Flint and her creator.
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