Broken Bodies, Influences, Inspirations and More

Sally Emerson

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The hero of my latest novel Broken Bodies (Little, Brown) is a young American historian who bodyguards in his spare time. The heroine is a rival, a more established young British historian involved with a man who deals in stolen art treasures. The novel is in part about their fight to discover, through the diaries of Lord Elgin's wife, the whereabouts of a hugely valuable missing part of the Elgin Marbles (the statues Elgin took from the Parthenon in Athens in the early 1800s). The dealer badly wants it for all the wrong reasons.

I want the readers to be gripped from the beginning, be in a magical and unique world as they read, and be startled and satisfied by the end. I think every writer writes what he or she wishes to read; we all try to produce our own ideal book. For me it is a book which is short and powerful and expands in the mind after its finished. The influences on my work include the writing of Hans Christian Anderson - in particular a powerfully macabre and dramatic collection I have illustrated by Helen Stratton - the work of Borges, especially the stories in Labyrinths, with their sense of mystery, of something terrifying beneath the surface. Muriel Spark is a great writer, and one of my favourite books is her Memento Mori. Raymond Chandler, too, has that sense of wickedness and intense pleasure in words. If you close a book and stop thinking about it, then the writer has failed. I want to read and write books which I'm still thinking about days later, weeks later, ideally even years later. Sometimes it's a rawness which makes a book powerful, and I am often drawn to first novels for that reason - Truman Capote's Other Voices, Other Rooms, Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Maybe they lack the accomplished, sandpapered quality of later works but there's an exuberance, a sense of amazement, and of course all childhood and adolescence is funnelled into the paragraphs. Though of course it's not a first novel, I love the rawness of Graham Greene's The End of the Affair too; it has an anger, and sense of incompleteness.

I have no problem with a certain level of violence. In my novel Separation a child kills the stepmother she hates. In Fire Child the heroine kills the man she hates by making love to him again and again and again. There is violence, and arson. Heat ends with a violent rape and a shooting. When I read a novel I want things to happen - I don't want the story to melt away. After all, these are stories. We don't read newspapers for bland nothings. We want action, energy. But I haven't read Silence of the Lambs. I don't want my mind to be changed by extreme violence and cruelty. As for sexuality, I was always infuriated by books which took you to the brink then drew a polite veil. The great thing about novels is that they allow you into private worlds, and they should do, they help to make individuals feel less alone and to understand themselves better. I want to know how people behave, how these characters behave in bed. I don't want to know who put what where exactly - but I want such scenes to be sexy, and I certainly intend my novels to be sexy.

My next novel deals with politics to some extent, in that the heroine's husband is a politican. I am interested in power, its uses and abuses, but not in the minute details of politics. In Heat there was a political background partly because it was set in Washington DC.

My bodyclock is not well designed for the life of a writer. I should like to wake up briskly, write for three hours like Graham Greene used to do, then play tennis in the afternoon and be out all evening, However, I tend to prowl round in the day and my most creative times are the evening and the night. I find the night magic, always have. There's a banality about the day - all that bright lighting. I can't understand how people can write a word. While I work I play loud music, the type of music depending on the scene I'm writing or the stage the book is at. The right music gives me the rush of adrenaline, or anyway the rush, I used to get when I took the first cigarette of the day. Richard Thompson's music is my favourite creative surge-music at present. It has an erotic energy and danger about it, which is what I hope my novels have at their best.

I find I like writing on a computer less and less, which is exasperation. I don't find that direct relationship between my mind, the pen and the paper that I have when writing long hand. There's a magical quality to each fountain pen I use. At the moment my favourite pen is a gold Cross pen, but it could just as well be a cheap child's Parker with a top from another pen. When I write good scenes with one pen I get suspicious about it - like a dress that always brings the wearer a good time - and won't write with any other for a while, until the spell gets broken. I like different inks too - brown and purple and blue - and the way my writing changes as the scene gets exciting. Whereas on a computer the words all look so formal and polished and identical without the drunken quality of handwriting. It's all part of the alchemy of writing.

The principal appeal of my fiction is I think its tightness, its pleasure in words, and I hope its originality. A review of my new novel in Publishing News called it "mysterious, compelling and strangely erotic - clever mixture of thriller and passionate love story which holds the reader spellbound."

Films do influence me but more in their technique than their subject matter. The fast frames of films are reflected to some extent in my use of short chapters in Broken Bodies. Although writers probably are aware of what is being watched, what is in the air, there is an argument which says that the writer should be beyond that. Some of the best books are written by those who just go ahead and write without worrying about what's going on elsewhere; the Brontes were not exactly au courant with the latest fads of London. My books all come out of a central image that comes to me first. In the case of Broken Bodies it's of the hero and heroine standing in front of the Elgin Marbles. The plot and characters come afterwards. First comes the image, then the mood, then the characters and plot together, as though they are tangled up with each other from the beginning. Very strongly drawn characters can in some novels, though not in mine, almost take the place of plot. Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's is an example; Holly is such a fascinating character you hardly need a coherent plot.

The sea inspires me, but cities do too. Certainly London and Paris. But Washington DC especially interests me, and I wrote Heat based there after I lived there with my family in the early 1990s. The place is a living parable, a mixture of comfortable, suburban living on the outside and an underworld of natural life, vast insects and racoons, and of areas that are a wasteland because of crack. It isn't at all what it seems at first, like a book which at first you think is one thing but it turns out to be something quite different, like Memento Mori or the stories in Labyrinths or some of the Father Brown stories, which have another dimension. Some of the greatest books hanker after some kind of greater, almost religious, understanding, even if in Jane Austen maybe it's the pleasure in human beings, the comedy and warmth of living. Of course many writers write in order to create something lasting in an unstable world, a way of trying to dam up time, your time. And of course they write because they like it, they like the security of entering daily into an imagined world. When a book is finished, it is devastating to lose that world. That's why we start all over again.