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Well, the one country where I did not expect my publishers to collect me from the airport in a stretch limo came up trumps indeed, with the biggest, bling-blingest limo of all!!! We even made a splash in Romania's largest-circulation newspaper!
PJ and Helen - superstars in Romania!
My wonderful Romanian publishers, Nemira, heard that my Russian publisher had laid on for me, last September, a stretch limousine, and they were determined to outdo the nation whose Communist regime had inflicted over four decades of misery and suffering on their people!
In fact, the car being so long proved really handy -- because the traffic in Bucharest is so bad, and at a standstill half the time, I was able to walk to most places without getting out of the car!!!
PJ about to walk from one end of Romania to another
PJ and his Romanian agent, Simona Kessler, travel in bling style!
My late and very wise father once said to me that he could not decide which would be a better investment: To send me to University or to send me around the world for three years. I think it would be fair to say the only journeys I have ever regretted in life are the ones I did not make when I had the chance.
Woody Allen once famously said, "If I were to live my life over again, I would do everything exactly the same, except I would not have gone to see The Magus". I'm more or less with him on that one, except I actually loved the ending of The Magus. I would replace it with Bugsy Malone, easily the most pointless, boring and irritating film I ever saw. But hey, I'm always game to try new things. One of my favourite quotations is from the late Sir Arnold Bax: "Try anything in life once, except incest and folk dancing."
From all that I had heard about Romania, before I went to visit last week, on a combined research trip for my next Roy Grace novel and a book promotion tour for my publishers there, I was convinced that country was going to rank somewhere between The Magus, Bugsy Malone and Folk Dancing on the PJ scale of "life is too short to..."
I was warned that I would find the streets are filled with wild dogs, and feral homeless children. That the hotels are terrible, their five stars being equivalent to a UK two-star, and that the food is crap. Well, just how wrong these perceptions are. Sure, Romania has many problems, thanks to the heritage from the nightmare 42 years of Communist rule, most of it under the despotic Nicholae Ceausescu and his equally vile wife Elena, both finally and mercifully shot dead following a revolution in 1989. But its people are some of the loveliest I have ever met -- and high on this list I'm including the street people, the orphans, the homeless -- and the living saints who help them.
First to dispel the hotel rumour: We stayed at the Athenee Palace Hilton. I don't know if it is four or five-star, but I can tell you that it has exemplary service and -- like everywhere we went -- very seriously good food. I would rate the service as good, if not even better, than the service we had in Hong Kong recently -- and Hong Kong hotel staff are generally opined to be the sharpest in the world.
Yes, Romanians do eat crap. But it is delicious crap! Because in Romania crap soup is one of their national dishes. We spell it a slightly different way -- carp!
[To be continued...]
Last December 17th, in the UK (and abroad on digital radio) some of you may have heard me on BBC Radio Four, promoting a wonderful new literary magazine, Notes From The Underground, which was launched that day and handed out free, across London by men in bowler hats, looking like pastiches of the famous Magritte painting.
Notes From The Underground is an enterprise started by Tristan Summerscale and Christopher Vernon. Tristan is the son of my English teacher at Charterhouse, David Summerscale, the one person in all my schooldays who gave me the confidence to believe I could be a writer. I owe David ( a brilliant man, who went on to become Headmaster of Westminster School), a debt bigger than I can ever repay, so it was great to have the opportunity to at least give something back, when I was asked if I could support the launch issue of this magazine by contributing a very, very short story!
Part of the ethos of Notes From The Underground is that people should be able to read something stimulating while sitting on the Tube, and the issues of the magazine contain a number of short and very, very short stories. Mine is two sentences long, and is called "Companionship" . You can currently view the video on the Notes From The Underground website's front page. Click the Play button, turn up your sound, you will hear me reading it and see the brilliant animation with it!
If you have Windows Media Player installed, you can also download the short story here - but be warned - it's a big (10mb) file.
There’s a myth that most novelists insist on working alone, slamming their office doors to prevent interruptions, even from loved ones. Don’t always believe it.
Although people can be a serious distraction, the same rarely applies to pets. On a recent visit to Hong Kong, British crime novelist Peter James spoke fondly of his dogs, Phoebe and Oscar.
“Phoebe’s a five-year-old German Shepherd with a gorgeous temperament, unless you’re a rabbit or a burglar. One-year-old Oscar’s an incredibly chilled-out Labrador/Border Collie cross,” Peter said.
As Peter works, Phoebe and Oscar “come and go from my study. They’ll look at me as if to ask: ‘Are you coming out for a walk now?’ If I don’t respond, they’ll turn away, as if to say ‘that’s boring’, and then walk off.”
Peter’s dogs supervised as he completed a 2007 novel, Not Dead Enough. In appreciation, he dedicated the book to them. Again, they’re helping as he nears the finish line on this year’s book, Dead Man’s Footsteps.
Until recently, Peter and his wife Helen shared their home near Brighton, in Sussex, with other dogs too. Sooty, a Tibetan Terrier, and Bertie, an aged Hungarian Puli sheepdog with dreadlocks, both died, as pets eventually do. “Bertie, in particular, was cantankerous, but I loved him,” Peter said.
How much do the dogs contribute to Peter’s work? “One important thing is that they drag me out for exercise,” he said. But they have another positive effect too.
Peter explains: “During my research for Dead Man’s Footsteps, I spent several days in New York with police officers who were among the first people on the scene after the 9-11 terrorist attack. They told me how rescue workers spent weeks on the rubble to pull out remains. They said the workers soon started to experience terrible traumas from what they were seeing. Then people began to bring around ‘feel-good dogs’ so that the rescue workers could stop and stroke the animals for a few minutes. Then they’d feel better and continue working.
“There’s a great therapy with dogs. But to me, Phoebe and Oscar mean even more. They remind me that there’s more to life than just sitting at my desk and smacking out words.”
Peter’s novels appear in 30 languages and reflect his interests in medicine, science and the paranormal. His other titles include: Dead Simple, Looking Good Dead, Prophecy, Alchemist, The Truth, Denial and Faith.
“I like dogs a lot,” Peter said. “But I’m not a cat person. I respect cats, but I’ve never connected with them. If I went out and murdered four people today, I could go home and the dogs would jump up and lick my face. But cats would know what I’d done.
“Dogs can be eager to please, but they’re cunning too. I have a friend whose dog learned to open the fridge, take out yogurt pots, eat the yogurt and then bury the pots so they wouldn’t be discovered.” Some of the criminals in Peter’s novels show less ingenuity.
Animal buddies may influence a novelist’s thoughts and plots. “I’m always fascinated by the question of how dogs perceive humans and the universe,” Peter said. “When I go out the door and leave the dogs at home, where do they think I’m going? They don’t know that I may be going to an interview in Hong Kong. They just see me depart and wonder if I’ll return with a bag of biscuits.”
True, canine assistance isn’t always helpful. “Once in the days of floppy discs, a disc ejected onto the floor, Bertie picked it up and ran off with it,” Peter said. “I found him crunching on it. He destroyed about 5,000 words.”
But ultimately, authors’ pets like Phoebe and Oscar play strong supporting roles to fill the pages on bookstore shelves. Frankly, some stars of the literary world have paws.
Labels: interview
Someone once likened being an author to being a mushroom. That we spend most of our lives in the dark, and occasionally someone opens the door of our shed and shovels shit over us.... Well - a few days ago was different!
On one of the coldest days of the year, a freezing February morning, I rose at 4.30 and made my way to Shoreham Harbour, one of the two commercial sea ports bordering Brighton, to join the crew of the dredger, the Arco Dee, on which a friend, Tim Moore, is the chief engineer, and to spend a day at sea with them.
Action Man getting dirty!
Arco Dee at work
With Captain Ray Marshall and Chief Engineer Tim Moore
- spot the phoney sailor!I'm sure those of you who have read this far are thinking, after a big yawn, how great can a dredger be? Well... I thought that too before my day with the crew, and it was something of a revelation for me. I got out of it the kind of Eureka moment that happens, on rare, precious moments, when I am in the process of starting a new novel. To reveal more would of course be to reveal too much of the story of Dead Tomorrow, the new Roy Grace novel I am now, as of today, 65 pages into and counting, Houston...
I thought that all dredgers did was to dredge mud out of the harbour mouths, to keep the shipping channels deep enough. But I've now learned that is only one role of dredging. Another job, far bigger in terms of commercial enterprise, is excavating sand and pebbles from the seabed for use in the construction industry. Some pebbles go for driveways and garden decorations, but the majority of what is hauled up ends up being used in the aggregates business for such items as concrete, cement, asphalt and tarmac.
Arco Dee with full cargo
Chart of the underwater quarryIt is literally underwater quarrying, on land leased from the UK government, and as strictly marked out as any farmland (see chart above). And there is a real magic about seeing the cargo hold fill with stuff from the ocean floor that has lain for hundreds of thousands, and maybe millions of years. Occasionally they haul up historical artefacts, such as canon balls or bits of Second World War aircraft - and even more occasionally - as I had been hoping, naturally, for my story, a dead body...
Tim Moore, the Chief Engineer told me some years ago of the time a dredger hauled up an unexploded bomb, wedged in its drag-head (see below). As the Bomb Disposal Unit clambered on board, they tried to move it, whereupon it dropped on the deck then bounced into the hold! Tim said that to his astonishment, the first thing the Bomb Disposal guys did was to climb down after it and start hitting it with a hammer. By which point the rest of the ship's crew were busy lowering the lifeboat and writing farewell letters to their loved ones...
The unexploded bombI've a great love of the sea -- and respect for it - and have sailed a lot, but not all my experiences have been trouble free. My most embarrassing moment was when I was eighteen years old and a school Naval Cadet, and head of the Charterhouse School Naval Corps. We had been invited for a day's sailing on a Frigate in Portmouth Harbour, and I was asked if I would like to take the helm as we were approaching the harbour mouth. It was a massive honour and I was nervous as hell. Too nervous. I was suddenly informed, by a voice down the speaker system, that the Admiral Of The Fleet's destroyer was heading into the harbour and I was given the instruction "Starboard Fifteen." I dutifully gave the correct reply, 'Starboard fifteen, SIR" turned the wheel, and then reported, 'Fifteen of the starboard wheel on, SIR!"
Whereupon the ship, instead of turning towards the right, turned towards the left, right into the path of the Admiral's ship. In my excitement at getting my replies correct, I had inadvertently turned the wheel to the left, causing the Admiral's ship to have to alter course. I then had the privilege of speaking to the great man in person, over the radio. Or rather, listening to him... he had a repertoire of swear words that to this day, forty years later, I have not heard equalled.
So of course, it was great to be able to utilize my extensive naval terminology on the dredger. The most important one of all, I learned long ago, is the one for a snack. And it came in handy as the brilliant chef of the Arco Dee, Sam Janes, does a mean line in fruit scones. You have to ask for a tabnab. In the immortal words of landlubber Michael Cain, not a lot of people know that.
