Dan Fesperman

Interviewed by Eve Tan Gee

Each year, Britain's Crime Writers Association makes two valuable awards to help new crime writers. The John Creasey Memorial Dagger is given for the best first crime novel published that year, and the Crime Writing Competition for New Writers is for new writers only - those who have not yet had a novel published. These awards are part of the CWA's efforts to welcome talented new writers to the genre and give them an opportunity to meet fellow crime-writers. In choosing a winner for the Creasey, the judges look for originality both of style and of content, and last year each of the three novels short-listed for the award was an admirable example, giving the judges a difficult task in picking an outright winner.

Dan Fesperman's Lie in the Dark is a tense political thriller set in war-torn Sarajevo during the siege. Its central character has the apparently paradoxical role of homicide cop in a city where life is cheaper than a loaf of decent bread and where citizens gamble their lives daily, simply by walking down a street that can turn into sniper alley. Baltimore Sun correspondent Fesperman has a journalist's eye for the telling detail, and builds suspense intelligently. Atmospheric and often moving, Lie in the Dark is a first novel that achieves much and promises more for the future.

CT's Eve Tan Gee talks to the man...

Influences?
As far as influences go, I think readers can probably sort those things out more objectively than I could. Maybe I should just tell you whose writing I've devoured and admired over the years. Graham Greene was an early obsession. I plowed through about twenty of his when I was fresh out of college. All those Penguin spines still make a long orange line on my bookshelf, though it's been years since I've opened one. Then there was Robert Penn Warren - tracked down everything he wrote, poetry and prose, in libraries and used book stores. Got hooked on John Fowles for a few years after reading The Magus. Just wish he'd write another novel. John LeCarre, though not as passionately in recent years. I guess my current rages are Richard Russo, T C Boyle, William Boyd, Ian Rankin, Martin Cruz Smith. So, anyone who'd like to dust for their stylistic fingerprints in my prose is welcome to try.

Can you look back on your early unpublished work with affection?
There's actually very little of it, mostly a couple of short stories and a few outlines, character sketches, scene descriptions, that sort of thing. Some of it's still probably salvageable, but most will probably never see the light of day. My only other attempt at a novel was a few pages of an opening plus about ten pages of plotting and character outlines. That idea still intrigues me, but it's so elaborate and exhaustive that it has always struck me as something I may never actually tackle in earnest. And for years that's generally the way I viewed novels. Writing one was a distant goal, something that seemed almost unapproachable. Then in early 1994 I began Lie in the Dark, and the oddest thing happened. I felt confident from the opening sentence that not only would I finish it, but that I'd also be reasonably satisfied with the result. It's hard to say why. Maybe it's that the setting was so self-contained, like an oversized locked room in one of this old English "cozies." Maybe it's that I finally knew exactly who my characters were, and where I wanted them to go. Or maybe ,after twenty years of writing various forms of prose for newspapers, I was finally comfortable enough to move to the next step. In that case, call me a late bloomer, a severe case of arrested development. But now I feel that certain things have fallen into place for me as a writer, and the idea of doing another one seems quite natural.

The vexed issued of violence?
I'm not big on the gory details, nor do I much appreciate it when a writer stretches out the millisecond of a gunshot into a four-page rhapsody of exploding flesh and spraying veins. When there's violence in a scene, what I look to convey is the speed, the immediacy, the gut level sensations of sight and sound and feel, and also that fast-forward sensibility that results when your adrenaline kicks you into overdrive. Lingering on the damage as it occurs, or on every punch and counterpunch, tends to rob the drama.

And sexuality? Should a contemporary writer opt for frankness or discretion?
Funny you should ask that, given the almost monastic deprivation I imposed on Vlado Petric. Sarajevo was a place of so many different forms of deprivation that it just seemed natural that he should be starving in this department as well. But generally I believe in frankness, although once again too much detail often leaves me cold. I don't think of sex as something where the participants are stopping to take notes, so, as with violence, the more important part seems to be getting the overall feel of the moment correct. The key to writing good sex would seem to me to be the same as the key to having good sex. Do the seduction well and everything that follows will be more passionate, comfortable and genuine.

Apolitical or political?
You've moved into politics the minute you've chosen a subject, a setting and a cast of characters, I suppose. Setting a novel in contemporary Sarajevo, for instance, means you have to explain at least the framework of the whole mess in the Balkans. Do that and you're already taking sides. But as long as you're shading in the greys along with your blacks and whites, you're not going to be straying too far into polemics.

Tell me a little bit about your working methods.
Haphazard, and that's stating it kindly. I have a regular newspaper job and two young children. Subtract the time for those and all that's left is early morning, lunch hour, late at night and the occasional longer stretch on weekends and holidays. When I was living in Berlin it seemed easier, somehow. But lately I've been easing back into something resembling a regular pattern. Then it's the usual matter of writing, editing, re-writing. Then re-writing again. All the way try to stay limber enough to let the characters take me wherever they please.

What do you feel is the principal appeal of the kind of fiction you write?
What I look for in my writing is the same thing I look for as a reader - a book that will take the reader into a world that you otherwise would never be able to visit. That might mean Sarajevo during the siege. It might mean Baltimore in 1861, on the eve of the Civil War. Or it might be simply a world inside somebody's head, or within some profession or lifestyle that most people wouldn't begin to have a clue about. Look at just about any book you've enjoyed and there's probably an element of this.

Teachers, mentors, etc.?
I had a couple of college professors, Jim Shumaker and Claudia Stillman, whose lessons were simple but have stuck with me. Basically, to avoid cliché and to avoid clutter in your syntax. And also, from Shumaker, that the only way you'll ever get anything written is to sit down and do it, day after day after day. Nothing fancy, I guess, but the most important advice usually isn't.

Which comes first? Plot or characters?
I'm not sure you can rank them, except book by book. If you're setting is overpowering, the characters' actions will tend to be dictated by events, whether they're fleshed out and full or not. I think that's what happened in Lie in the Dark. People tended to be pulled along by the undertow of the siege, mentally and physically. So, it was relatively easy plotting for them, without too much danger that one of them would run amok. In another place, with other people more in control of their own destinies, characterization would probably have a lot more to say about where the plot would go.

How would you describe your relationship with your publisher and editor?
Nothing but sweetness and light to report. Juris Jurjevics, my US publisher, had blessedly few requests of me once the editing began, and the suggestions he had were good ones. Fortunately there was very little "body and fender" work, as he described it, to be done.

Do you bear your potential reader in mind?
I do only in the sense that I try to keep things clear, understandable, especially when the material gets complicated. Stylistically, though, I'm writing for my own ear, to bring the prose to the point where its tones and rhythms sound right in my head. If there's still a clank here and a thud there when I'm reading back over the material, then it's time to re-write.

Is reading important these days? Fewer people may be reading, but those who are still at it seem to be reading in more different places than ever. And with all the mumbo-jumbo and incoherent syntax out on the Internet, the strong, clean lines of a novel can look more appealing than ever. I don't ever see reading giving way completely to video. And even with virtual reality become more elaborate, someday it, too, will have dialogue, settings, plotting. So eventually some people might choose to digest War and Peace by spending a few hundred hours in a virtual reality chamber, which will be a sort of reading in itself. But the best and most enduring part of reading as we know it now is that it produces the reality inside your head, with every reader getting his own unique version. And for some people that's always going to be the best possible way to absorb a book. Or maybe that's just wishful thinking by a word lover.

Should a writer be of the world?
Any writer who isn't of the world is going to be pretty limited in his insights and judgments, and in the kinds of characters he can draw. The question is how broad his world is - one slice of east Mississippi or all of the Eastern Hemisphere? Either way you're out in the world, chronicling your part of it.

How do you feel about merchandising of writers? It can be amusing when you see it happen to others - a book promoted heavily on the basis of an author's dashing good looks, for example; I saw that happen this summer with a young Brit's book over here, with the predictable eviscerating results among some critics. Although a number of female book clubs sure seemed more than willing to give his book a try, I noticed. Not having those attributes myself, and not having that sort of publisher, I've been pleased to see the book be the commodity, not me. But I can understand the aspect of wanting to know more about an author, or why else would I have read so many author profiles, or even full-blown biographies. Writers always like to say that their work should speak for itself, and so it should. But that never seems to stop the rest of us from trying to find out what makes our favorite writers tick, or what their literary likes and dislikes are. It's just another way of trying to reach the next level of understanding about a writer's work, I suppose.