Michael Dibdin

Interviewed by Barry Forshaw

He's the favourite crime writer of so many of our contributors, we decided that a chat with the creator of the immortal Aurelio Zen was in order. A new title from Faber, Blood Rain, was the catalyst...

What I remember most about Blood Rain is finishing it in Rome, in a rented apartment, during the coldest winter since 1986 - it even snowed for several days. Heating in the apartment was minimal, so I went around wearing two pairs of socks, all my street clothes, a dressing-gown, an overcoat, a scarf, a woolly hat, and those gloves with the fingertips cut off which street traders use. I was working 12 to 14 hours a day and went slightly mad. My wife joined me a week before I finished and claims that I started haranguing her in Italian, which she doesn't speak. Casting an eye over the stacked dishes in the sink, the overflowing ashtrays and the empty wine bottles, she remarked, "So, is this method writing, or what?" As for the book, it's set in Sicily, and brings Aurelio Zen face to face with the Mafia. It's a project I'd been thinking about for years without quite daring to tackle. It's quite a challenge to deal with the realities of the very complex situation in Sicily in an adequate way, and yet write something which works as a crime novel in its own right. Fortunately, everyone who's read it seems to think that I've succeeded, so maybe method writing is the way to go.

I read voraciously as a teenager, and I think that everyone I read and enjoyed must have influenced me in some way, if only by giving me some sense of what's achievable in fiction. Within the specific limits of the genre, my primary influences were undoubtedly Conan Doyle, Simenon and Chandler, but I was also helped on my way by relatively minor figures such as John Buchan and Erskine Childers - The Riddle of the Sands is still unsurpassed as a broodingly atmospheric thriller. I also much enjoyed the early Len Deightons: The Ipcress File and Funeral in Berlin. It's interesting to note how short all these books were, like Fleming's Bond novels. None of them would stand a chance of getting published in today's steroid-pumped thriller market.

I look back at my own early work with the same mixture of affection and repulsion with which I regard the 20-year-old self who wrote it. It certainly won't be published, but I'll probably keep a copy in case one of my children should be interested in reading it once I'm safely dead. As for my current MO, I wish I had one! Basically I stare at the screen or the page - I work both ways, depending - until total panic sets in, and hope that something happens. I try to get something down, then go back and look at it, at which point I'm usually so revolted that I plunge straight into a massive rewrite out of sheer disgust. And so it goes, by fits and starts of always more or less unsatisfactory activity. The only enjoyable bit is watching minor characters turn into major players, and seeing how the plot could work more efficiently and elegantly with just a few minor changes. Then one day there's a novel there, and I think, "Where did that come from?" And the following year, when I do a promotional tour, I'll be reading from it and think, "You know, this isn't all that bad, but of course that was last year, when I still had talent."

I mentioned Fleming : his erotic sections were considered very strong in their day. But today...as for explicit sex and violence - like day-trips to Venice - are two of the things we can do which were not possible for earlier generations, so there's an understandable tendency to want to take it to the max. Hey, okay, maybe we can't write as good as those old guys, but they couldn't show split-beaver shots or pigs eating someone's face off, so let's go for it. The problem is that these freedoms come with a built-in penalty of diminishing returns. Read the humungous horrors in the latest bestseller! Okay, I've read them. Yes, they're humungous. Now what? Patricia Highsmith could create more genuine tension with a raised eyebrow or an evaded question than most of her successors with a chainsaw-wielding maniac on the rampage. And a day-return from Gatwick isn't necessarily the best way to visit Venice, either.

Am I a political writer? Well, it all depends what you mean by political, as Professor Joad used to say. If you mean party politics, or any kind of identifiable ideology that is implicitly supported by the narrative, then I think the result is as deadly for crime fiction as for any other kind. But if you mean political in the broader sense, meaning the sum of the choices or decisions which create the society in which we live, then I'd say that it was absolutely essential and unavoidable. You can see the distinction very clearly in the work of Chandler and Hammett. Both were left-leaning and disturbed by the corruption and abuses they saw in the society they wrote about, but there is no overt political agenda in their books. They exposed problems; they didn't propose solutions.

Most of my readers seem to love some of my books and loathe others, but the titles concerned are always different. I wouldn't really want to know, anyway. Once you understand your "appeal", or think you do, next thing you'll be deliberately trying to pander to it. A writer's appeal is like a person's charm: the moment it's identified and described, it turns into a stilted mockery of its former self.

Films are a poisoned chalice for writers, particularly for crime writers. It's hard not to want to get your stuff filmed; there's simply too much money and increased sales at stake. But it's a short and slippery slope from that position to starting to write books that are clearly designed specifically to be filmed, and which therefore don't work as books. Because despite their superficial similarities, the two media are actually quite different. The things that books do most effectively - interior monologue or POV , to take one example - are clumsy and lumbering on screen, while a fictional description can never match the unselective density of the simplest cinematic shot. I love movies for their own sake, in their own terms. I don't want them to be books, and I wish fewer people wanted books to be movies, and regarded the text version as a kind of low-tech substitute for the real thing.

There were two teachers I had at school who were very important. One was my French teacher, George Craig, now Reader in French at Sussex University, who passed on a sense of intellectual rigour and also of the wider world outside the little Ulster town where I was growing up. The other was James Simmons, the poet, who taught English at my school, but also jazz, blues, beat poetry, enthusiasm, drunkenness and general anarchy at late night gatherings at his house. Finally, and perhaps most important, was a woman called Eileen Coleman, the mother of my best friend at school, an extraordinary person who had been - among many other things - a lover of Oliver St John Gogarty (the model for Blazes Boylan in Joyce's Ulysses). She had an endless fund of good stories, as well as the ability to smoke an unfiltered Woodbine until it had almost two inches of ash hanging off the end but not dropping until she tapped it. She later drowned in a boating accident off the Donegal coast. I loved her dearly, and dedicated The Dying of the Light to her memory.

Plot...what is plot, if not the series of events put in motion by the things characters do or don't do? And what is character, if not the personality resulting from a series of formative events in the past or present? The two elements seem to me as inextricably connected as melody and harmony in music. When I'm writing, one or the other may temporarily assume more importance for a brief moment, but ultimately they are two sides of the same coin.

Is there a city that gets your creative juices flowing more than any other?

At the risk of making colleagues and rivals envious, I have to say that for the most part I've had a very smooth ride in regard to publishers. Both Faber and Faber in London, and Pantheon Books in New York, have seemed to understand what I have tried to do, and been happy to let me do it without editorial interference. I realise how rare this is, particularly now, and how lucky I have been. There was one minor incident involving an earlier editor in New York who returned one of the Zen books with a long letter saying things like "I feel he should weep at this point" and "There's no one in this chapter who I'm rooting for". I simply held on to the MSS until two weeks after the return date, then sent it in unchanged with a note saying "Thanks for your valuable suggestions - hope you agree this is a big improvement". I never heard another word.

Writing, like reading, is by its nature a solitary activity. This has always made it both suspect and sexy, both of which are good. The problem today is that the writer is both the person who writes and the person who impersonates the writer for the purposes of marketing the book, and the two are not the same. The I giving this interview is not the I who writes my books. There is no duplicity involved here, just an irreducible fact of life. The solitary I writes the books but can't talk or even think about them coherently, while the worldly I can comment on them ad nauseam but couldn't write one to save his life.

To me, the religious experience is, above and beyond anything else, an act of surrender. As such, it is potentially a salutary corrective for writers, who are, after all, playing at being God, and if sufficiently successful may actually come to believe that they are. At the same time, religion - like booze and drugs - offers instant solutions or palliatives for the intractable problems that writing is supposed to address. So, once again, it's a question of balance. And religion is a saleable commodity...like writers. And here, the analogy I'd use here is the rock scene back in the 60s, when none of the record companies had quite figured out what was going on and who these Beatles and Stones and Yardbirds were. It was hit and miss marketing, and so a lot of weird and wonderful stuff got played and recorded and released. Most of it was crap, of course - most of all art at any moment is crap - but there was a spirit of adventure and excitement in the air. You never quite knew what was going to happen next. What depresses me about the crime genre at the moment, like pop music, is not that it's mostly crap, but that it's been published and promoted (and in many cases written) because some suit somewhere thought that he or she could second-guess the market and make X or Y into an instant best-seller on the basis that they have their finger on the public pulse, or that similar stuff had done well in the past. This is not only intellectual, aesthetic and moral suicide, but commercial suicide as well, because publishers don't know what's going to sell. If they did, they wouldn't be publishers, they'd be bond traders.

My next book is an Aurelio Zen and it's set in Iceland. So there!