0
Interview
Neil Stokes - 3 September 2017 2.00 h

Crime between two worlds

- Neil Stokes
How are you find­ing liv­ing in Britain?
For me it is a very pos­i­tive ex­pe­ri­ence be­cause I’m a writer, so I work at home, I live in Ox­ford, which is a very cos­mopoli­tan place where peo­ple from abroad are wel­come. I don’t have any prob­lems in that sense. Now I think is a dif­fi­cult time for peo­ple from abroad that are liv­ing in the UK with Brexit and the po­lit­i­cal sit­u­a­tion. De­spite that, I am used to trav­el­ling from Britain to Barcelona very often, be­cause here I have part of my life, you know, my mother, my brother, my friends... and also my pub­lish­ers.
How long have you been writ­ing crime nov­els?
Well, I pub­lished my first book in 2006, but I could say I’ve been writ­ing all my life, you know, short sto­ries or even other nov­els that I never tried to pub­lish. But with the first crime fic­tion novel that I wrote, my hus­band con­vinced me to take it to an agent, so I tried, and it worked! Since then I’ve been writ­ing nov­els be­cause the first one worked very well, and it was trans­lated into sev­eral lan­guages.
What caused you to choose crime fic­tion?
In fact, when I wrote the first novel I didn’t think that I was writ­ing crime fic­tion, I thought I was writ­ing, you know, a novel with a lot of irony about our so­ci­ety, with a crit­i­cal point of view. But then my pub­lisher de­cided that wasn’t true, that it was crime fic­tion, be­cause it’s true that in the book there are mur­ders, an in­ves­ti­ga­tion and so on. Then I re­alised that crime fic­tion worked very well in order to let me ex­plain the kind of things I wanted to talk about.
Do you think your time in Britain has in­flu­enced your writ­ing in any way?
No, but the thing is that in my last book of short sto­ries there ap­pear Eng­lish char­ac­ters, al­though the plot, the sce­nario, is not in Eng­land, be­cause there ap­pear peo­ple from Barcelona, so I think that is the in­flu­ence of liv­ing there. In the fu­ture, I think I want to write about more British char­ac­ters.
Why is it so pop­u­lar to write crime fic­tion? What do you think peo­ple get out of it?
Well, I think that peo­ple enjoy the enigma and the mys­tery and to find out who done it, but also be­cause crime fic­tion is a genre that al­lows one to write with a very crit­i­cal per­spec­tive about our con­tem­po­rary so­ci­ety, so that one can re­ally por­tray how a so­ci­ety works. I think that’s what peo­ple want to find in a novel; not just the mys­tery, but also the other things that ex­plain the kind of so­ci­ety where we are liv­ing in.
You have now be­come a mem­ber of the Crime Writ­ers As­so­ci­a­tion. Is it pos­si­ble to com­pare that to the com­mu­nity of crime writ­ers here in Cat­alo­nia?
The thing is that the Crime Writ­ers As­so­ci­a­tion has much more money to do things and many more mem­bers; it is a very, very big as­so­ci­a­tion. But it’s true that here writ­ers are also very ac­tive and or­gan­ise a lot of things with few re­sources. In my case, I’m a “rara avis” in the as­so­ci­a­tion be­cause Eng­lish is not my lan­guage, and there are not so many mem­bers in the as­so­ci­a­tion that don’t have Eng­lish as their mother tongue.
Let’s talk about your lat­est book, Matèria grisa. What is the story be­hind it that made you want to write it.
There are eight short sto­ries that are com­pletely in­de­pen­dent, but one of the par­tic­u­lar­i­ties of the book is that all the sto­ries are con­nected through the dif­fer­ent char­ac­ters. It’s not a novel at all, be­cause the sto­ries are com­pletely dif­fer­ent, but every­thing is con­nected, so when the reader reads them, he dis­cov­ers these con­nec­tions that the char­ac­ters are not aware of.
What makes a short story more of chal­lenge than a novel?
Both of them are dif­fi­cult. I don’t think that writ­ing a novel is eas­ier than writ­ing a short story. A short story is re­ally dif­fi­cult to write too be­cause you have to ex­plain a lot of things in only a few pages and you have to de­cide what to keep, what is im­por­tant, what not...I be­lieve that in a novel you have more free­dom to write about more things.
How do you come up with new ideas with­out re­peat­ing any­thing from other writ­ers, for ex­am­ple think­ing of dif­fer­ent ways to com­mit the mur­der?
In the first or the sec­ond novel that I wrote it was easy, you know, be­cause it was the first time and I think I chose poi­son for the first one and in the sec­ond just an im­pact to the head. But it’s true that in the next ones I was going to use the same ideas but I re­alised that I couldn’t re­peat them, so in one of my nov­els I think I de­cided to use a ra­dioac­tive poi­son – be­cause I love poi­son. And on the other hand, every vic­tim re­quires a dif­fer­ent way of being mur­dered be­cause it also de­pends on the per­son­al­ity of the mur­derer or on the cir­cum­stances; it has to make sense.

Going Native

Teresa Solana
Every Monday, English Hour airs the interview series Going Native.
This time Neil talks to the Catalan writer and translator and UK resident, Teresa Solana.
Sign in. Sign in if you are already a verified reader. I want to become verified reader. To leave comments on the website you must be a verified reader.
Note: To leave comments on the website you must be a verified reader and accept the conditions of use.
Neil Stokes
Altres articles de l'autor

Published on

Most Viewed