No more Greek tragedy June 16, 2007
Posted by grhomeboy in BooksLife.trackback
Medics in his beloved Greece saved Paul Johnston
Four years ago the crime writer, best known for his successful Quint Dalrymple series set in futuristic Edinburgh, found himself returned to the slush pile by the fickle publishing industry. But that insult paled into insignificance given that he was also fighting for his life, after British doctors failed to diagnose an aggressive tumour beneath his kidney.
A decade later we meet again, in Athens, where Johnston lives for most of the year with his Greek second wife Roula and their 15-month-old daughter Maggie. We drink coffee in a busy square in the shadow of the Acropolis and he tells me what it was like for a crime writer to look death in the face. He says the swift action of Greek doctors, who carried out an eight-hour operation to remove the tumour, saved his life.
In the year following the operation, he lost both publisher and agent when Hodder Headline pulled the plug on his Greek private eye Alex Mavros. He binned the first 20,000 words of an American-set thriller which he hoped would kick-start his career, and wrote The Death List in a month, pumping out 5,000 words a day. He describes it as an “incredible outpouring”.
Johnston’s writing is normally driven by ideas. The Quint series is full of social critique, the teasing out of issues. The Death List came from another place: the guts, the heart. It’s suffused with emotions, principally anger.
“It was very cathartic. If you look at the book in Aristotelian terms, the very heavy load that I’d been carrying, I’d dropped it somewhere.”
“I am a satirical person. One of my very favourite authors is Aristophanes. He has a go at everyone, it’s the machine gun approach to satire, he destroys everyone that’s in range, but it’s so full of life.”
“In many ways, being in a shitty situation is quite good artistically,” Johnston says, wryly. He was writing The Last Red Death, the second Mavros book, when he started to feel unwell, and believes that subconsciously contributed to the book’s success. Deeply political, steeped in the landscape and psyche of Greece, it went on to win the prestigious Sherlock Award for the Best Detective Novel of the Year, and may be his best novel to date.
The conversation ranges from Alexander the Great to Iain M Banks, from Homer to Conan Doyle to Blade Runner. He also plans to do a PhD in Creating Writing at the University of St Andrews.
Johnston is the author of five Quint Dalrymple novels, and three featuring half-Greek, half-Scots private eye Alex Mavros.
The Death List by Paul Johnston is out now, published by Mira, £6.99
Read the rest of Susan Mansfield’s article at > The Scotsman
grhomeboy
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