Fabrice Bourland, author of The Baker Street Phantom.
Interview by Anna Brown for Gallic Books, July 12, 2010.
So enthralled by the Victorian era is the author Fabrice Bourland, that he freely admits he would prefer to have lived during that time. "Life is too fast now, too hurried," he sighs. "I'd love to live at a different pace, with horse and carriages, horse-muck in the streets, no motor cars."
But his vision of late Victorian life is no bustles-and-bonnets tableau. Since adolescence, Bourland has devoured the darker gothic works of Edgar Allan Poe, Bram Stoker, Robert Louis Stevenson and Arthur Conan Doyle.
It was while reading a biography of Conan Doyle that Bourland came across a quirk of London history that became the catalyst for his debut novel The Baker Street Phantom, now translated into English. It provided him with an imaginative literary device that would open the door to a ghoulish cast of his favourite Victorian villains, hunted down by his dapper duo of novice detectives, Andrew Singleton and James Trelawney.
Bourland, 42, hopes to revive a sub-genre of crime fiction in which the detective investigates 'occult' mysteries, citing British fantasy writers from the early twentieth century – Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Machen and William Hope Hodgson – as sources of inspiration.
Early signs are that he is having some success in France at least. His third 'Singleton and Trelawney' novel has just been published there to wide acclaim. Bourland thinks readers are ready for some escapism. "These are tough times for people at the moment. I think some readers want to turn to books where the imagination plays a key role," he tells Gallic Books, in an interview from his office in Paris. But these mysteries are no fairy tales, as Bourland explains...
Q: So how did the first case for your detectives, Singleton and Trelawney, come about?
A: In a biography of Arthur Conan Doyle, I discovered something I thought was incredible. When he created Sherlock Holmes, Conan Doyle also invented the address where he lived. To avoid having trouble with any real householders on Baker Street, he decided to invent a number – 221B Baker Street. At the time, the real Baker Street was much shorter; I think the numbering stopped around 80-something. Conan Doyle died in 1930. Shortly after, the council reconfigured that area. And they re-allocated the Baker Street numbering, which meant that 221 actually now did exist.
As an author, I thought, now there is an excellent idea: an address which was totally imaginary but which, on the death of the writer who invented it, becomes real. Well, I thought something could be done with that.
Then, I became very interested in the other side of Conan Doyle – his fascination with spiritualism. He spent the last 30 years of his life pursuing this.
I found it an intriguing contrast; here was an author who had created Sherlock Holmes, an incredibly cool and rational character, while Conan Doyle himself was passionately consumed by what lies after death.
I asked myself, what would happen if the address Conan Doyle imagined became real? What could occur if the characters that he imagined (and other writers imagined) also became real?
Q: The novel features vivid descriptions of various locations, such as the East End and Highgate Cemetery. How did you set about researching these? Did you visit the sites to conjure up the atmosphere?
A: No! It's all based on documentary research. When I wrote the Phantom, I'd only visited London very briefly, so I knew very little about it. For my third book in the series, I planned to come over to plot out certain landmarks. But I quickly dropped the idea because I found that the London I was writing about had little to do with the modern-day city. I base my ideas almost entirely on documentation. I've stuck up an enormous map of London from the 1920s above my desk; I've bought several old bus and tram maps from the 1920s and 30s; and an old guide to the train network to work out when trains would leave, how long they would take. That's how I feed my imagination.
Each time I want to describe a district, I look at how other writers from the era describe it. For me, what these writers wrote – like Conan Doyle, who described areas like Whitechapel – is almost more real than reality itself.
It was the same for my second book, which has not yet come out in English. My characters go to Paris in the 1930s when there was a strong artistic and literary community, like the surrealists. I thought it would be easier to revisit certain quartiers, since I know Paris perfectly, but again no. Paris has changed so much. In the end I based my descriptions on old photos of districts.
Q: Many of the literary references and characters used in the Phantom come from the late nineteenth century. Do you have a particular passion for that period or rather, for the literature of the period?
A: It's both! I'm most drawn to the period 1850 to around 1930, up until the Second World War. I know that period very well. Already my favourite writers are all from then or before, from Edgar Allan Poe to various French writers like Maurice Leblanc [who invented Arsene Lupin, considered by some to be a French Sherlock Holmes]. I would have liked to live then. I'm an avid reader, so I've read the great writers of that time too: Balzac, George Elliot, etc.
But I have greater affinity with those writers who are sometimes, a bit pejoratively, termed 'popular'. I think they've contributed an enormous amount to our collective imagination through their fictional characters. For instance this morning, I was just finishing Tarzan by Edgar Rice Burroughs. I think it's fantastic that a book like that has cascaded through the years into other books, films, comic strips and into our collective consciousness. That period was extremely rich with these characters: Dracula, Dr Jekyll, Frankenstein. They've all taken up their places in western literature.
Q: And you say you'd like to have lived then...?
A: Why would I? I don't know, but I'd love to live at a different pace, to be in a world without motor cars, with horse and carriages, with horse-muck in the streets. I'd prefer an existence that runs at a different speed from that we run at today. Life is too fast, too hurried.
But I'm well aware that the cities of the nineteenth century weren't ideal either – lots of exploitation, untrammelled capitalism, children forced to work, the poverty. I don't have a rose-tinted view of the period. But I do think there was something in the idea that the force of life was stronger, more important than anything else. There was more hope in what civilisation could be. Perhaps today, it's not exactly that we're disappointed, but our perspectives have changed a bit.
Q: What significance does the Second World War have for you?
A: It was such a massive turning point in humanity's history. It was a total rupture. The Holocaust changed everything. We can't now reflect on humanity without considering the effect of the Holocaust. It's such a horrid part of history, never again can things be as they were. A sort of innocence [of thought] was lost. Given that what I love in literature is a type of childhood-like imagination, I don't think that can be had after the Holocaust happened. It represented such a rupture, that I feel I have to look to the period before to retain that type of imagination.
In the third novel in the series, I've included Nazism, rumbling in the background but that's as close as I would get to writing about the Holocaust. For me, it is too difficult to tackle, at least within the framework of the genre I'm writing.
Q: You say that you'd like to relaunch this 'sub-genre' that combines detective and fantasy fiction. Why do you think it has been overlooked?
A: On television, and in books to some degree, people have seemed to prefer detective stories of a more realistic kind. Works that include some imaginary elements are under-estimated. The same doesn't really apply for writing that is based on pure fantasy. With that, there is a kind of contract with the reader who knows from the outset that what he or she is reading is all imaginary. But when a work appears anchored in reality then veers towards the imaginary, then it becomes more difficult to accept.
And yet, in France, and I think also in England, this is changing slowly. These are tough times for people at the moment, and I think some readers want to turn to books where the imagination plays a key role again. In France, there seem to be quite a few writers who are starting to discuss the imaginary again in terms of it resuming its place in literature...But by escapism into the imaginary, I don't necessarily mean a particularly positive type of escapism; it could be a journey into fear.
Q: The Baker Street Phantom seems to work on several levels because of its characters. Were you intending to create this effect, a kind of meta-literature almost?
A: Yes, I always wanted to create a novel that functioned on different levels. Also, I love novels which refer to other novels or writers within them; for instance, I love the way Conan Doyle in his detective fiction will often refer to other investigations or cases by Sherlock Holmes as if they were published novels, but they weren't even written.
For me, there were always going to be several levels of understanding through the characters. So you have Stanley Cartwright the publisher, Andrew Singleton the novice detective, Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes. With each character I try to mix things up. So I use the false foreword by Cartwright, the footnotes ... who are they written by? The editor? The translator? Cartwright? The author? The reader is thrown off course. Of course they're all written by me, but sometimes as a reader you're not sure!
Q: The effect of this for me as a reader, was that I was always asking myself, 'is that episode real or invented'? Were you purposely placing this doubt in the reader's mind?
A: There are some writers who flag up clearly what is real or not in their books. I'm not one of those. I prefer there to be some doubt in the reader's mind. I do base a lot of the plots on historical elements. What happens next is where the fantasy comes in. I know that some readers have been prompted to find out more about the period, have re-read novels like Dracula or have discovered Conan Doyle. In book fairs, libraries, schools, people tell me that I've given them the urge to read Conan Doyle, or re-read some of the classics. If by leaving the doubt hanging in the air, I've managed to do that, I'd rather have it that way.
Q: How do you set about writing your books? Are you able to do it full-time?
A: No, I work two and a half days a week for a major publisher of practical guides, nothing at all to do with fiction! My work to date in the literary world has been largely on a voluntary or low-paid basis, a labour of love, for associations or small publishing houses. I edited a collection of fantasy novels and a magazine of short stories, but not any longer. I did this on the side, but it was all my weekends and evenings.
Since my books came out, I've had to stop a lot of my voluntary work, as my spare time is now spent writing. I've always written for my own pleasure but only short stories. I was off work on parental leave after my daughter was born and began the book then. Four months later, it was finished and I sent it off to various publishers. In France we don't have literary agents, so you send your manuscript directly to the publisher. And you hope that they'll contact you, but sometimes, most of the time, they don't!
I was lucky. One did. The publishers 10/18 loved my first book so much, they urged me to turn it into a series. It was an incredible surprise, as I'd never even envisaged myself writing a novel, let alone a series. In the space of a few months, I was suddenly doing lots of interviews, and being feted as a debut writer.
My life has changed considerably in the four years since the book came out. I've also now got two children. Working part-time in another field keeps my feet on the ground, stops me losing contact with the outside world, which I think could happen if you wrote novels all day. Also, to be able to support yourself by it, you'd have to churn out quite a high rate of novels. It would change the nature of what I do. I'm able now to write the type of novel I would like to read as a reader, and I think it's important to be able to do that.
The Baker Street Phantom is published by Gallic
