I met Alec Marsh at Liverpool Street as we were both passing through London. I was curious about his lighter take on the spy genre, often a dark form.
Paul Burke: After the Flood, the 4th novel in the Drabble and Harris series, features an historian and a journalist, long term friends, what makes them a good pairing?
Alec Marsh: First and foremost, they are old school friends so they know each other better, almost, than they know themselves. The next thing is that they are very different: Ernest Drabble is a historian, an amateur mountaineer and altogether a bit of an adventurer. He’s also very much being a man of today, meaning that for the 1930s, at least, that tends to give him a rather progressive viewpoint. Harris, meanwhile, is a heavy drinking journalist in the great tradition of Fleet Street’s glory days and very much a figure of his times. He also has a dreadful habit of saying the first thing that comes into his head, which leads to lots of problems, usually very painful. Between them they bump into the world in very different ways.
PB: As you say close friends since childhood but, of course, they have their separate adult lives and in After the Flood Ernest Drabble is on his honeymoon with Charlotte and still they wind up in the thick of a mystery.
AM: Well… yes, since this is the world of Drabble and Harris, and since Harris was Drabble’s Best Man, and since, what’s more, Harris has been to Istanbul before, it felt only natural for him to accompany his old friend and his new wife on this journey… I should say, they aren’t all sharing a room.
PB: No, no funny business there. So After the Flood is set in Istanbul in the run up to World War Two, what an intriguing place and time. What fascinates you about the city and this liminal time. I know you lived there for a while.
AM: I lived in Istanbul for most of 2015, just down the hill from Taksim Square, which was a fantastic experience and a huge education. As the centre of the old Ottoman Empire for 600 years and as the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire before that for more than 1,000 years, Istanbul is a place with serious history and roots, and cultural connections that span time and geographies. After the Flood is set in 1938, at a time when the world at large but also Turkey itself was at something of a crossroads. In Turkey – a country that had been born just 16 years before – its founding president, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, was dying, so who succeeded him and what their policies were in respect of Turkey but also its international position were of profound importance. A pivot back towards Germany (and against Russia, the historic enemy) would have brought Turkey in on the side of the Axis powers in the second world war. Whoever followed Ataturk was going to decide that – so it was a vital time for the country and the world, when you consider Turkey’s geographical location as a gateway to the Middle East.
PB: Clearly you love the place and the time, what turned you on to historical storytelling? I mean, your early writing was ‘literary’ I think.
AM: Perhaps. I certainly wrote a couple of semi-autobiographical first novels, which now, looking back, I’m rather glad never saw the light of day. After several years an old friend of mine basically sat me down and said, ‘Alec, you’re obsessed about the past, all you do is talk about it, you should write about it.’ I told him I’d think about it though not too optimistically. But he also gave me a copy of Shogun, which I loved. And it didn’t take long to click. I also remembered what got me into reading as a boy – Alexander Kent’s 18th century nautical Richard Bolitho series and Forster’s Hornblower. I loved those books and being in that world. So the penny eventually dropped.
PB: So writing about the past, do you think your fiction provides insight and if so how?
AM: I hope so. It’s certainly part of the plan, as well as being – hopefully – thrilling and entertaining reads. I do think historical fiction can bring the past to life in a way that traditional history really struggles to. It also allows you to explore why people behaved in certain ways which today seem repellent but were then normal. In the 1930s, for example, there were 10,000 Brits governing India, a country of 300 million. Getting into their mindset and understanding how and why they were doing what they did is more interesting and telling than simply writing them off as racists or white-supremacists. Most of them, bizarre as it seems to us now, were simply everyday folk like you or me just getting on in their careers. They were people who had taken a job in the Indian civil service or police or army in the same way as a graduate today might work for BAE Systems, Pwc or Google. In many ways what’s more interesting is to see what they did when they were confronted with impossible moral situations they found when they got there, how they coped with it. That tells you more about people then – but also about people now, of course, because humans haven’t changed.
Historical fiction can also open fissures into what we think we know about the past, whether it’s the inevitability of Britain standing as a democratic bastion against Nazi Germany in 1939 – it could have been different – or indeed the future of Turkey as explored in the new book, After the Flood. The cards of our past fell in a certain order but understanding how they almost fell differently is fascinating and highly revealing.
Historical fiction can strip back the hindsight prevalent in the history books, and allow us to ask new questions of our old selves.
PB: So, you’ve also seen the light and joined the crime thriller community. You can really get a sense of what makes people tick in extremis?
AM: The crime thriller community is incredibly friendly and it’s great to be part of it. The support I’ve received from many more established writers has been humbling – with endorsements from Ian Rankin, Alexander McCall Smith, Vaseem Khan, Abir Mukherjee and numerous others.
What most of us are doing is exploring the most extreme or divergent aspects of the human behaviour and what makes people do bad or evil things. And this is what stokes readers’ interest in the same way that it motivates writers because like driving past the scene of an accident, you can’t help but look. There’s a sense of jeopardy that the reader can’t help but share with the characters in the books they’re reading, and that’s strangely invigorating.
PB: And being a journalist by trade that must benefit your fiction in a lot of ways but what do you enjoy about novel writing?
AM: I recently had a conversation with Jane Thynne, whose book Midnight in Vienna is just out now and wonderful, who described writing as ‘your second self’, which somehow encapsulated it for me. I’m probably at my most content when I’m writing. When I’m telling one of my character’s stories and it’s going well, there’s very few things better. You laugh with them, you love with them, you flee… you experience it all with them. Which is why it’s utterly plausible, I think, for the great Hilary Mantel to describe Thomas Cromwell (after three volumes) as she did as an old friend. They’d spent a lot of time together, so I’m pleased they got on.
PB: Can only agree about Jane Thynne’s new book, brilliant writing and like her you don’t just deal in murder, you take us into the secret world of spies. Almost a war behind the war. We get to see Turkey not just for its own history but how it played a big part in world affairs. Istanbul is actually one of the great spy cities, as east meets west.
AM: Absolutely. And I’m sure it still is, because it’s where Europe and the Middle East slam into each other. It’s a melting pot of religions and peoples and money and politics and it has been for more than a thousand years.
PB: I think you enjoy referencing the writers who influenced you. Buchan for instance and Greene, what does Greene mean to you?
AM: There’s no doubt that Drabble lives in the long shadow of Buchan’s Richard Hannay novels. As for Graham Greene – what needs to be said? – he’s basically a god. Whether you think of ‘entertainments’, as he called them – Stamboul Train or Our Man in Havana or The Quiet American or his other work, The End of the Affair… these are incredible, incredible character-driven stories that feel revelatory and remain as compelling now as when he wrote them.
PB: Yes, character is king in any good novel. At the heart of the intrigue in After the Flood is a Nazi-backed bid to uncover a sacred artifact, one that has laid hidden in the remote mountains of Eastern Turkey for more than 10,000 years – Noah’s Ark. Tricky question but tell us a little bit about that, we all love a conspiracy.
AM: To say too much more about it would be to give the game away: suffice it to say, the quest to find Noah’s Ark, believed by many to be located on Mount Ararat in the far east of Turkey, has obsessed certain minds for centuries and remains a live issue. And why not? Imagine finding the ship of Noah, the craft upon which humanity and much of the animal kingdom was saved from the deluge? It would be pretty mind-blowing, to use an expression that neither Drabble nor Harris would ever utter… So it makes for a wonderful backdrop for this stories, and, of course, the Nazis are the icing on the cake!
PB: All four novels reflect big moments in history but they share a sense of fun too. Your novels are lighter and peppered with humour, as is life and you have fun with some of the tropes too, the seductive femme fatale and Harris for instance.
AM: Well, I tend to think that life is funny. And don’t forget that laughter, along with religion and alcohol, has helped mankind manage the human condition for as long as we’ve existed. So to deny your literary world the comedy that comes from absurdity, vanity and real life in general is to deny it something important. The world is a funny place and sometimes it’s so awful only laughter – as Dr Strangelove showed us – will do.
PB: That makes a lot of sense. So what’s next, do you have plans for Drabble and Harris heading into the WWII?
AM: Yes. Book five in the series is coming. It will be set in September 1938 against the backdrop of the Munich Crisis. At the moment the plan is that it begins with Drabble in a dusty archive in Prague, where he makes an astonishing historical discovery…
PB: Munich, that’s something to look forward to. Thanks Alec. Train time I think.
AM: Thanks, Paul.
After the Flood is published by Sharpe Books in ebook and paperback and available now.
After the Flood Alec Marsh – (amazon.co.uk)
