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- - - - Copyright The Paris Review
- - - - The Man in the Back Row Has a Question: Crime, cont. Boris Akunin, Ann Arensberg, Jane Barnes, David Grand, Chloe Hooper, Jonathan Lethem, Tim Parks, Budd Schulberg, Paul West Winter, 2003 Issue 164 How important is research in the writing of a crime novel? Any harrowing experiences you'd like to share? BORIS AKUNIN: For me it is very important, as most of my novels are historical. 'Ihis is the favorite part of the job: to sit in archives, leaf through yellow brittle newspapers, learn how it really was—in order to be able to later invent and fantasize at ease. Speaking about queer experiences, sure, I had a few. Among them one truly impressive. I have a picaresque novel Jack of Spades about a genius swindler who wipes clean some purses and safes in Moscow in the year 1886. He is a runaway cavalry lieutenant, by the name of Savin. A really ingenious and insolent character who in the end escapes from the police disguised as a German prince saying something vague about maybe becoming a king in one of the newly created Slavic or Latin American states. The story was a complete slapstick, in no way related to history. Well, two years ago I receive this letter from a very old Moscow lady who thanks me warmly for depicting her grandfather in such a kindly and sympathetic manner. Yes, his name was Savin and he had been a dragoon lieutenant. He was married to her mother briefly when exiled to Siberia, then took all her money and eloped never to return, but mother ever after recalled him lovingly. Since I seem to be so well informed about her grandfather's life would I be so kind to write to her what happened to him afterwards? I was intrigued and flattered, as any writer would be, and tried looking for the real Savin's traces in archives. He actually existed and made quite a splash in police department's correspondence. Now I have a Xerox copy of his life story written in his own hand for the prosecutor's office. What made my heart jump when reading this highly amusing document, was the mention of an escapade that took place in the 1880s: the historical Savin, posing as a relative of the French Bourbons, tried to become the czar of Bulgaria. . . That absolutely incredible coincidence made me feel really strange, like I myself was a character in someone's hilarious novel. . . DAVID GRAND: The most harrowing experience I've had recently was writing my last book while caring for my boys during the day; which meant doing my work into the early hours of the morning, and trying to exist on three hours of sleep a night. About a year and a half into this routine, right around the time I finished one of the later drafts, I collapsed inside the Broadway/Lafayette subway station on my way home from my usual night of work, and ended up in St. Vincent's with what the doctors feared was a stroke or a heart attack. While they had me rigged to the EKG machine and had my blood in the lab, I couldn't help but wonder if it was really possible to write oneself to death, and if the title I had chosen for my book, The Disappearing Body, wasn't some sort of unconscious wish fulfillment I should maybe pay a little more attention to. Thankfully, I was only suffering from exhaustion and anxiety and a bad case of vertigo, which landed me in bed for about two weeks and kept the world spinning for about a month. All the stuff of a good old-fashioned nervous breakdown. JONATHAN LETHEM: All my research is bookish, unless it's involuntary. I've by now processed my most distinctive victimizations into one or another scene in my two Brooklyn novels, so I'm no longer free to retail those stories, even if I could remember them honestly anymore—shorn of embellishments. But I did live with a gun-crazy roommate in a gun-crazy house in a gun-crazy neighborhood in Oakland for a brief time. During my short stint there a famous and hideous slaughter took place at a bar around the corner, called The Bos'n's Locker—shooters strolled in and cut loose. The house itself had a seeming magnetism: we awoke one January 1st to find that a bullet, presumably fired into the air somewhere in the surrounding streets during the previous night's celebration, had pierced our front window at an extreme angle, drilling a perfect hole through a box of Kleenex, scarring the coffee table underneath, and bouncing onto the carpet, where we found it. The roommate—I'll call him Ted—was a charismatic Libertarian-hippie type who adored loaded pistols. He also collected first editions—he was from Pittsburgh and loved Michael Chabon's first novel, then brand new, for name-checking his lost city. Ted was and still is the only person I've known beside myself who'd read every single Thomas Berger novel. He also drove a motorcycle and tinkered endlessly with the wiring and heating in the house, which he owned—we often had to heat the place by stove burner. Ted would creep through his house at night with his pistol, yearning to ambush a prowler. In dozens of street incidents through the years I've only faced gunpoint once, but at Ted's place in Oakland I faced it two or three times, standing with my toothbrush foaming in my mouth. TIM PARKS: I'm reluctant to do research. Perhaps that's why I resort to the blunt instrument. If I wrote about quarries once it was because I had translated in the field for years. What interests me is the characters of people I know, not worlds I don't know. What research could be more harrowing and appropriate than marriage and child-rearing? BUDD SCHULBERG: A good crime novel has to be thoroughly researched, unless the author knows his stuff from the inside. In developing Waterfront I spent more than two years first researching and then getting involved in the war in New York Harbor. I was fascinated that waterfront mobsters like "Cockeye" Dunn could commit over thirty murders that everybody down there seemed to know about, while he continued to do business. "Cockeye" finally went to the chair. But his partner and so many others lived on, unscathed. Any single murder pales by comparison with the agonizing millions of murders I was to, in a sense, serve witness to when OSS General Donovan put me in charge of collecting and presenting motion-picture evidence of war crimes against the surviving major Nazi war criminals. We used only captured cinema footage to make our case, titled it The Nazi Plan and ran four hours of it on the opening day at Nuremberg. I had the unforgettable satisfaction of being able to sit near the defendants' box and watch Göring, Streicher, Gauleiter Hans Frank of Poland watching visual proof of their unspeakable crimes. When the lights came on, Hans Frank had passed out cold and even the affable curmudgeon Herman Göring looked shaken. We were dealing not with one but with six million murders—and the only mystery was how human beings could sink to that kind of bestiality. After that experience, murder mysteries read like comedies—which in a sense they are. What is your favorite crime in literature? Your favorite detective? If you could be any criminal in history, who would it be? - - - -
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