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Time, I think, to celebrate the unique talent that is Julian Rathbone. Not
too many crime, mystery or thriller writers, after all, can boast two nominations
for the Booker Prize. None in fact. Throw in the narrative skills that have
grown over the years in both complexity and clarity, great descriptive writing,
and a collection of flesh and blood characters that it is always a pleasure
to encounter. Then take into account a range of political concerns that reveal
his position on the libertarian Left, and a cultural framework that takes him
from Wellington back to Harold Godwin (the last English king) and from Monteverdi
to James Crumley. It is a combination that has resulted in a body of work that
is remarkable in its range and versatility. * * * * * * * (Laughter) ' Britishness' in other contexts I think
you see as one of your major themes. Shovelin has many of your own individual
surface characteristics, and he is a very British character... * * * * *
The last month or so has presented an unusual opportunity to sample the Rathbone
oeuvre. First, now in paperback, is A Very English
Agent, his third historical novel and also a spy story of an
unusual kind. It is the long postponed sequel to Joseph,
his second Booker nominated novel (the first was King
Fisher Lives). In the new book he unleashes the full panoply
of literary tricks first extensively utilised in The
Last English King (to date his most commercially successful
novel), a modern writing style laced with immaculate 19th century history and
usage, literary allusions, intentional anachronisms, characters that embrace
not only his own family history but borrowed from his own and other writers'
novels, thus creating a rollicking story that embraces crucial events at Waterloo,
the Peterloo massacre and the death of Percy Bysshe Shelley.
In
June Allison & Busby published As Bad as it Gets,
the second novel featuring Chris Shovelin, his Bournemouth-based private eye,
their exotic backgrounds (this one modern Kenya, the other fundamentalist USA)
as vivid as ever, and fuelled not only by observations culled from recent family
holidays, but a barely suppressed anger at the anti-humanitarian trends in recent
international politics.
Finally in July, and as if to bring those two strands of the Rathbone career
together, Jim Driver' s Do-Not Press have issued The
Indispensable Julian Rathbone, a collection of short journalism,
poetry, extracts from novels and reminiscence that also includes the first reissue
since its paperback outing back in 1987 of what is perhaps Rathbone' s finest
thriller Lying in State.
A brief summary of the Rathbone life to date might go as follows (a much fuller
account is included in The Indispensable JR
titled My Life as a Writer). He was born in Blackheath, London, in 1935, the
son of an ex-infant teacher (his mother), his father a member of the distinguished
Rathbone family that has given us, amongst many others, the founder of the District
Nursing system, Basil Rathbone the film world' s most notable Sherlock Holmes,
and Eleanor Rathbone, independent MP and influential fighter for womens' rights
during the inter-war years. Graduating from Cambridge in 1958, JR established
himself shortly afterwards as an English teacher in Ankara, Turkey. He returned
to Britain in 1962, becoming first a supply teacher, later in full-time posts
in the new comprehensive schools, and then honing his writing skills under the
key influences of Graham Greene and Eric Ambler, with a series of thrillers
set in Turkey. He became a full-time writer in 1973, eloping to Spain with Alayne
his future wife, after a chance reunion at a school disco - an incident that
Jana Bennett, BBC director of television and then a pupil at the Bognor Regis
school where JR taught, was later to recall at this year' s launch of the BBC's
Big Read campaign. The couple returned to England in late 1974 where, apart
from further stints in both Spain and France, they have since remained. They
have two, now grown-up children, Arthur and Nina.
It was in fact that 1987 paperback of Lying in
State that introduced me to his work. Though following the Rathbone
career, until recently, (now you can try Amazon' s used book section, Alibris.com
or bookfinder.com) has always been subject to the short-lived availability of
many of his novels, I was soon picking up the occasional volume in various bookshops,
particularly those featuring Commissioner Jan Argand, published by Pete Ayrton'
s then recently established Pluto Crime imprint. Starting with The
Euro-Killers this series of three books explored, in thriller
form, many of the political trends apparent in the Europe of the 1970' s. Imagine
my surprise a few years later, climbing into private eye writer Mark Timlin's
luxurious Chevrolet for a memorable trip to Nottingham' s Shots on the Page,
Britain' s first major crime fiction festival, to find that the front seat,
on the ' wrong' side appropriately enough, was occupied by Mr. Rathbone himself!
That year was notable for Sand Blind,
his prescient thriller about the moral duplicity at the heart of Gulf War One.
Later, though from earlier in the Rathbone career, I discovered the splendid
Zdt, sometimes known as Greenfinger
and the excellent A Spy of the Old School,
a book that sits agreeably alongside classic le Carré and John Banville' s
The Untouchable.
Later, as he cast about for an alternative to the diminishing returns of his
more recent politically themed thrillers, such as those featuring his so-called
'eco-cops' , starting with Accidents Will Happen,
he would write Intimacy - ' the
best book there is with that title' - he immodestly (but correctly I think)
claims in The Indispensable JR.
Set in both a superbly rendered modern Spain and in its tortured recent past,
it is informed with an energy and passion that propels you through its 254 pages.
It ought also to serve as a model for those 'literary' writers seeking to write
a literary 'thriller' .
It sold poorly however, and the Rathbone career hit financial bottom. A neglected
contract to write, post-Joseph,
a second historical novel came to the rescue. Troubled
by the Hollywood confection that was Mel Gibson' s Braveheart,
he suggested a novel with Harold Godwin as its off-centre subject, and The
Last English King was born. It became a considerable word of
mouth success. Film rights, a script (still unproduced) and another script,
for Michael Caine, as a Lear-like racing promoter followed. Produced as Shiner
(JR's title), the basic idea unchanged but with Caine as a boxing promoter,
the final script credit went to another writer. Nevertheless, his new success
with The Last English King together
with the film deals have given him some financial security and the confidence
to write a succession of highly acclaimed (and successful) non-crime novels:
Blame Hitler, Trajectories,
and Kings of Albion.
But he continues to retain his allegiance to the thriller, following Accidents
Will Happen with Brandenburg Concerto.
Lately he has created his first private eye, Chris Shovelin, who first appeared
in Homage, a kind of hommage to...well,
I'll let him tell you himself.
The interview was conducted in the Rathbone family home, a cottage situated
a few miles inside the New Forest. JR quickly ushers me from the fresh comfort
of the lounge and dining rooms into the rather more cluttered ground-floor study
that houses a large desk given to him by Johnnie Wolfers, his agent of many
years, a well-used computer, a phone and a fax (he now does his own agenting)
and framed on the wall behind the desk, the letter from Graham Greene complimenting
him on Lying in State. I am surrounded
on all sides by a large number of books, housed in a series of bookcases, only
one of which contains crime novels, the remainder an eclectic collection of
other fiction, history and reference works. It's another hint of the many-sided
character that is Julian Rathbone. I hope this interview does him justice. 
Bob
Cornwell: Your two most recent novels, the crime thriller As
Bad as It Gets and the historical novel A Very
English Agent reflect two clear-cut strands in your career.
Do you think of them, as Graham Greene did, as serious novels on one hand and
'entertainments' on the other?
Julian Rathbone: It' s certainly clear-cut, but
not exactly on those lines. For instance I hope whatever I write is entertaining
and in many ways the thrillers carry serious messages even more overtly than
the books in other genres. In fact I'm increasingly bothered by the whole business
of genres: as its title implies there are thrillerish aspects to A
Very English Agent which become obvious in the passages that
spoof modern thrillers, for example the Captain Quex bit, as he gives Charlie
some Bond-type gadgets, as well as the whole business of him actually being
a spy... but a police spy.
A Very English Agent covers the period
from Waterloo to the death of Wellington in 1852. How did it come together ?
First of all the idea, to have a sequel to Joseph,
came up a very long time ago. Philippa Harrison, who was my editor at Michael
Joseph for Joseph, suggested it.
I didn' t like the idea at the time, because I could see that it was going to
take an enormous amount of research, just as Joseph
itself had done, but I'd thought about that period quite a bit and that led
me into that world and I realised that it had not been covered to any great
extent in many history books.
Is it your intention to inspire further reading? For example I dusted
off my copy of Thompson' s The Making of the English Working Class...
(Laughter) A major source! Yes, my main stimulus, apart from carrying on with
the same character...
...Charlie Boylan in the new novel, it becomes clear, is Joseph Bosham
from the 1979 novel ...
...was that it's a part of history which is simply ignored, in spite of the
success and apparent popularity of Thompson' s book.
The literary techniques you use here, the use of characters from both
your own work and that of others, is used I suspect, rather more freely than
in Joseph...
There's a bit of it in Joseph,
but rather more concealed.
You felt you could do more..?
Yes, having in the meantime done The Last English
King.
You have tended to dismiss your anachronisms as a joke but as you mentioned
earlier, they do have the effect of pointing up references to the present day.
They are both really. I think there was more intellectual justification in my
mind in A Very English Agent in
that I am trying to relate what happened 150 years ago to the way things are
now. We are part of the same continuum. Sometimes one just occurs to me as a
joke, but they do often have that serious purpose.
Elsewhere you have denigrated much historical fiction as presenting
a falsified version of the past.
Denigrate is the wrong word. It' s more a question of pointing it out.
But in effect you are doing the same thing but more obviously.
Yes, well, more self-consciously. We should acknowledge that we experience our
sources through modern sensibilities. All historical novels, consciously or
unconsciously, present a point of view and I think it is better if the writer
knows what he is doing, rather than not.
How is your approach more fruitful?
It' s a more honest approach. If you think of historical fiction in the past,
Walter Scott for instance, they definitely had contemporary relevance - the
Whig view of history for instance. When you get into modern popular historical
fiction on an overt conscious level that disappears - but however unconsciously,
the writer' s ideology or agenda are still there.
But you do have an agenda of your own, don' t you? You are after all
dealing with a period described by Paul Foot in his biography of Shelley, as
'the worst government this country ever had' ...
Oh definitely.
How do you manage to drop into the language and phraseology of the time?
It' s a difficult thing. I think one of the failings of Joseph
was that I did, very self-consciously and deliberately mimic late 18th century
prose. And I think that made it less accessible. And it was a bit of a strain
to do it, for example, knowing when words had first been used. In A
Very English Agent, I think there are sentence structures and
occasional usages that mimic the time and give the right flavour to the narrative.
And that probably varies in the book. There were times when it seemed right
to write in that way and others when it didn' t.
No whisper of a Booker nomination this time.
I' m not in the least criticising or grumbling, but it does rather depend on
the willingness of publishers to put their authors forward for these things.
One thing that did slightly annoy me was that it could have been entered for
a Crime Writers Association award.
What do you think has changed about the Booker?
If I have a slight impression at all it is that the books have got smaller.
One of the things I like about your books is that whether thriller or
historical, they have strong themes, strong characters, there' s a strong sense
of the world, the sweep of history...
That' s very much what I am talking about. There have been exceptions to the
trend. But a prize-winning novel ought to have an important theme.
Let' s turn to your other current novel, As Bad
as it Gets. This time, I think, there is no pretence (pace Homage)
at Hammett or Chandler. Perhaps a touch of le Carré?
You' re saying that because le Carré wrote a novel set in Kenya...
Probably...
No, there is an hommage, but it' s not to le Carré. More to a combination of
Buchan and Ambler. I do have a slight agenda, whatever, in writing the Shovelin
books. I have at least two more in mind, and each will, not too overtly I hope,
pay homage to the thriller writers that I admire.
The name Shovelin, with its allegedly Huguenot origins, does allow you
to make a nice point on UK immigration policy but why else?
I' m not sure I ought to reveal this. A shovel is not a hundred miles away from
a Spade...
In my own mind, his Britishness is definitely there, but just there as a character
point rather than making a point about ' Britishness' . You say he is me, but
he is a strange combination, there is a lot of my father in him.
Has your approach to thriller writing changed over time?
I think so. I think in the past that I thought that I was writing novels that
happened to have crime in them. In the recent thrillers, particularly the Shovelin
ones, I think I have an ideal of what a thriller should be, and I try to match
it.
Your novel has some interesting things to say, the idea of the alternative
airport for example, about how people cope with working in a large organisation,
short of overthrowing the system...
I' ve never been part of a large organisation, but I guess it might
be like that.
It' s a book of powerful scenes but most powerful of all is towards
the end, when Shovelin discovers the underground community of AIDS orphans.
One detail points up Western-Third World interconnectedness, and therefore culpability:
the T-shirt featuring a Nigerian footballer in Arsenal strip. Was that deliberate?
Yes.
And the final ' Why?' when Shovelin offers to inform the authorities
of their plight on his return to the UK. Are you now more cynical about the
power of the word? Yes, I think so. Cynical is not quite the right
word. What I feel is that the West does so little as to be almost useless.
And do books help?
They leave the writer thinking that he is doing something useful .
You mentioned two more Shovelin books. Have you thought about setting?
Where, for instance, have you been on holiday lately?
(Laughter) Cuba! Yes, we had a splendid three weeks in Cuba. But actually the
situation there is now getting so serious that there may be a US-led attempt
at counter-revolution.
A fascinating idea but do you think a Shovelin novel is the right vehicle?
I' m still thinking about it. The other idea, more directly and obviously thrillerish,
might be based in the south-west of Turkey!
I
wonder if I might ask how your two current books, with very different publishers,
are dealt with, marketed even, by them.
At the risk of offending people at both publishers, I have to say I can't detect
any deep difference in their marketing methods. Both seem to rely on word of
mouth rather than spending any huge amounts on publicity (though Time Warner
did push the boat out a bit for Kings of Albion
with posters on the underground). The fundamental differences
are first in distribution: Time Warner has its own sales force who owe their
livelihoods to their ability to get books into bookshops, whereas Allison &
Busby' s distributors are a firm that is selling not just for them but several
other small publishers too. Secondly Time Warner have money to spend on promotions
in chains like Waterstones. The real problem with Allison & Busby is that there
is a real problem in letting my readers know that there is a new Rathbone thriller
out... But then they don't really expect anyone to buy the hardback bar librarians,
and they get the catalogues and the trade papers. It' s good that I don' t rely
on them for a living.
Are they both personally supportive for example?
At Allison & Busby I get on well with David Shelley. Whereas Little, Brown and
Abacus, from the outside one might feel that they ought to be somewhat anonymous,
but that' s far from the truth. It' s partly because when I first went to Little,
Brown, three of the major people there had once been at Michael Joseph years
ago. And I get on with them very well.
How did The Indispensable Julian Rathbone
come about?
It came about a couple of years ago, the last time we were at Deansgate, and
I met Jim Driver there. He had seen a very good review of The
Last English King and we got talking and he came up with the
idea then.
As I understand it the book contains a mix of travel writing, poetry,
reviews, and other journalism. Does this largely come from the early years?
No, they have come in patches, mainly commissioned. Several of the
reviews and articles came from the original Literary Review...
...Auberon Waugh in charge?
Before Auberon Waugh, Ann Smith.
Let' s go back in time and look a little more closely at the Rathbone
family background. In ' The 
Indispensable
JR' for instance, the Rathbones are portrayed as a pretty unblemished
lot. Any rampant capitalists or black sheep of any kind?
They were all rampant capitalists! There were always two lines in the family,ship
owners and so on, and another that were always involved in social issues. There
might have been one or two petty crooks...
You argue very cogently against the genetic origin of the strong creative
strand in the family. But with you it has been writing specifically. Why do
you think that was?
The writing was almost but not exactly an accident. My parents were very literary-minded;
they really valued writers. We were encouraged to read. But I was much more
inclined to writing in my late teens and early twenties.
How much do you owe to your private education?
Bugger all. (Laughter)
No inspirational teachers?
Yes, I had one fairly inspirational teacher, in English. He took a fancy to
me, something that would have got him into all sorts of trouble these days.
But he did take me on three trips, to the theatre and so on, which my parents
couldn't have afforded. That was a big boost. I won prizes for writing.
Your obsession with Wellington was, I think, a youthful one..?
Yes it was. the schoolteacher I was telling you about, got me into it in a sense.
He certainly gave me the popular books about Wellington and the Napoleonic Wars.
What was it about Wellington that appealed to you?
It' s almost too facile, but I think there was an oedipal element, at that particular
time...
Was there any point when you realised you had a facility for writing?
Yes, probably at this particular school...
Under this particular teacher?
Not necessarily, in the whole ethos of the school actually. It was a strange
school, in that it divided very, very sharply between 'arties' and ' hearties'
, and there was a lot of, on the whole, good-natured rivalry between the two
factions and that sort of stimulated my writing, poetry and stories.
You are critical of the current state education system. Do you think
the state system can provide that sort of inspiration?
I think it can do. But I think it happens less regularly now than it used to.
Simply because teachers, in particular arts teachers are far, far more constrained
now. Nevertheless my two children have gone through the state system and, in
many ways are better educated than I was at their age.
Why did you choose to go to Turkey? Was Eric Ambler already an influence?
No, it was just looking down the Times Education Supplement advertisements
for places that were ' abroad.'
And Turkey is where you say you became more politically conscious...
Yes, it was a shock to see such poverty at first hand.
You went 'further left' , you say, after your experience of comprehensive
schooling on your return to the UK in 1962. Why was that?
When I came back, comprehensives had just been formed. I went on supply
in North London so I saw several schools. That was quite exciting. Several of
the schools established themselves quickly and did remarkably well. I actually
got stuck in a rather odd one, only had about 300 pupils and was meant to be
selective. But I quite enjoyed it, actually.
I' ve taken the comment to be a negative one (on comprehensives) but
you' re suggesting a rather more positive view...
Oh yes, it opened my eyes wider than they had ever been opened before, to the
social differences between the privileged and the other pupils. I think above
all the schools were doing something about it, that waste of human potential.
You came back from Turkey in 1962, Diamonds Bid
comes out in 1967. Did you go back to Turkey in the intervening period?
No.
So that immediately striking talent of yours for describing both the
sights and sounds of Turkey, it was all up there?
Yes. The whole experience of those three years was a very powerful one.
But where for instance did, say, the police procedure come from?
I made it all up. (Laughter) No that's not completely true.
I had picked up some very broad outlines.
What was the contemporary crime scene like when you were first writing?
Yes, there was a terrific boom in the mid-60' s, in thrillers rather than detective
stories...
Ambler and Lionel Davidson won CWA Gold Daggers at about that time,
unusual before or since...
And it was the time when John le Carré was coming through. And a lot of far
from minor writers like Gavin Lyall and an interesting writer (under a pseudonym
I think), Adam Diment.
You have said that your motives in writing, at that time, were entirely
monetary...
At that time yes. But at the same time it was clearly something that I was going
to enjoy doing. A nice job, as well as the day job.
Why then an explicitly ' liberal' innocent as a ' hero' , which must
have limited your market to some extent? Did you want to put over a particular
point of view?
No, I wasn' t that conscious of wanting to put over a point of view,
at that time. That grew.
Elsewhere you have cited Lukacs' s The Historical Novel
and the need for a central character ' who has seen the major characters
to some extent from the outside' . In effect that is the position of Nur Aslan
(and later Argand). Was that conscious or stumbled upon?
With Argand that was very consciously done, that there should be a just and
incorruptible police man but a deeply conservative one...Not so much with Nur.
Did you have an audience in mind?
Not particularly. A big one preferably. (Laughter)
How important was the Turkish setting to you?
I felt that this was a selling point. I knew Turkey well, it was accessible
and though not as exotic as Nepal or something, I thought it would be an attractive
background.
Were you thinking of writing a series?
I don' t think I had it that consciously in mind.
How was the editorial process in those days?
There was very little. We had a bit of trouble over explicit sex...
But you' ve always had trouble over explicit sex..!
Hardly any in the last twenty years, I think!
How was that first book received?
It didn' t sell particularly well. But it was quite well reviewed. Particularly
by reviewer and crime writer Francis Iles (author of the classic crime novels
Malice Aforethought, After the Fact. BC)
Was
there more coverage of crime fiction at that time?
Yes I think there was more then. The whole genre was on a roll at the time
My copy of Diamonds Bid comes
from the town library of Ardmore, Oklahoma, population about 20,000 people!
So presumably you were quite widely read right from the word go...
Really? Well I didn' t know I was quite that widely read!
You really hit your stride in the excellent Trip
Trap (1972) with an even stronger and clearer sense of the setting -
Turkey. I wonder, do you feel any tension between pace and good writing? If
so, how do you resolve it?
Largely unconsciously, though I may add or take away when redrafting.
I suppose the trick is to make the landscape, the background whatever actually
play a part in the events, influence the outcome...
Were the Turkish novels ever published in Turkey?
Not then. Oddly enough about two years ago.
Any feedback?
Not yet! (Laughter)
It was after Trip Trap I think,
that you decided to become a full-time writer. Why did you feel the signs were
right?
The main reason was that I felt I could no longer continue teaching English
in English schools. (See the Gradgrind passage in The
Indispensable JR. BC) I would have packed it in even
if the only alternative was emptying dustbins.
Then came a major change in direction: King Fisher
Lives (1976). And straight away pitching for the Booker: why?
Because it was there! I definitely wanted to get away from writing straight
ordinary thrillers. With Bloody Marvellous,
my first book set in Spain, I' d already found it difficult enough to get away
from writing Turkish thrillers. Michael Joseph had said, you don' t write about
Spain, you write about Turkey.
What was the inspiration for the figure of Lewis Fisher?
There were a lot of these sort of people around at that time, mostly Americans,
guru-types. And I had one particular guy in mind; he was giving lectures at
a conference of English teachers at York University...
I assume, rather than Greene and Ambler, that there is a different set
of literary influences in play here: anyone in mind?
Not really. It was also very much the period for campus novels. Malcolm Bradbury,
probably David Lodge by then, which although I don' t think I actually read
any of them, I knew these things were around.
It' s the first novel in which you use a multi-viewpoint narrative.
What adjustments did that require?
I don' t know about adjustments. I found it a very stimulating novel to write.
It was some thing I liked doing, and I' ve done a lot since. I was developing
what I now call, a term I wouldn' t have used at the time, a polyphonic way
of writing: at least two or three narrative strands, probably more, going on
all at once. It' s a bit more than subplots, in that it does involve more than
one narrator. I like the interplay between them, both stylistically, and in
theme and so on.
Your entry in Twentieth Century Crime and Mystery Writers
(1985) talks of the ' sex-ridden' King Fisher
Lives, a description that falls, by current standards at least, rather
wide of the mark...
It' s something that really bugs me. That, and recently a reviewer in the Sunday
Times said that A Very English Agent was
virtually pornographic. Which led me to actually count up the pages that might
qualify... and pushing it, it came to about eight pages out of what, 440 pages?
It' s the way in which the butter scene in Last Tango in
Paris comes to represent the whole film, selling it seriously short.
But apart from sex, football is here revealed as another of your enthusiasms!
How come?
At the time we were living in a basement flat right in the middle of Southampton,
within about a quarter of a mile of Southampton football ground. In my last
year as a schoolteacher I' d been to a couple of matches, mainly to see Arsenal
when they were going for the double. And that' s when I caught the bug. But
I have no expertise in the game.
In 1979 comes The Euro-Killers, the first
of the Jan Argand novels, set in fictional Brabt. Given your highly developed
sense of place, why Brabt?
Partly because I wanted very much to write about a policeman; an honest,
incorruptible but deeply conservative policeman, who is challenged by what he
discovers. So it had to be a policeman - which meant police procedures. So I
invented a country so that I could make up my own procedures! So that was a
very major part of it . Then I became aware that that place was going to be
a very important factor in the book and I wanted a very strong sense of it happening
in a particular place, a particular country. And I wanted it not to be in England.
But I had not actually been in the Low Countries at the time I started writing
it.
You have referred to these novels as more overtly political. Did you
want to pick up on various current European political strands, and drop them
into your fictional landscape?
Yes, I think there was a bit of that in it. Yes, more than a bit. There' s the
odd anecdote too. My agent Johnnie Wolfers spotted that if you turned the map
of Brabt upside down you' d have something extraordinarily like Southampton
Water! I think he' s right, but it was entirely unconsciously done. And my Dutch
publisher, I did go to Holland and met him, after I' d written it, and he was
absolutely convinced that Brabt was Antwerp, and didn' t believe that I' d never
been to Antwerp.
Argand is another of your off centre ' heroes' . Why here?
So that I could play off my political scenarios against a right-minded but fair
man. There is, to use a slightly suspicious phrase, a sort of dialectic there.
Another aspect of the books that I like quite a lot is the relationship with
his mad wife, which is there partly to show those huge areas of the human psyche
are cut off and stifled by the sort of life that he leads.
The Euro-Killers is the first
of your novels to feature, ahead of its time, an ecological theme. Is that an
issue you feel strongly about?
Not particularly strongly... I'm not a single issue person, but as an example
of what capitalism does, and why and how, ecology does the trick graphically.
Readers who see The Euro-Killers solely
as an ecological book are not reading it as I wanted it to be read.
A later novel in the series, Watching the Detectives
(1983) examined, presciently again, the activities
of the new Right. Why do you consider it the best of the Argand novels?
I think the plot works best. It' s got one or two extra flourishes too, the
philosophical lady...
Julia Arendt...Towards the end of the book she comes up with a devastating
analysis of fascism...
That' s one of the bits I am rather pleased with...
The more apocalyptic aspects of her analysis appear, so far, to have
been avoided. Why do you think that is?
I think that is something to do with the irresistible rise of the large corporations
which by and large have exported the inequalities previously a feature of Europe
to the third world.
Let's backtrack a little. In 1979 came Joseph,
your first full-scale historical novel. Again, why the change of genre?
The idea first came to me way back in 1973 when we went off and lived in Salamanca
for a year. I didn' t know very much about that Wellington campaign, I' d forgotten
it, but I realised it was very much the centre of the British campaigns against
Napoleon in the Peninsular War. That interested me. I had this idea of using
the Duke of Wellington as a heroic foil to the central character who is not
a hero at all. Alayne was studying a lot of Spanish literature, particularly
the original picaresque novels. And the idea grew that the period was the end
of the Enlightenment Dream. These things came together.
Do you have any background in history?
I've always been interested, history has always meant a lot to me. I think I
should have read history at university. I've always tried to incorporate history
in the novels I' ve written, for example in a back story that may go back a
long way
Michael Joseph had resisted all of your various changes in direction.
What was their reaction here?
Reasonable enthusiasm. There was never any doubt that they would publish it,
certainly after they had seen the first third or so, and they encouraged me
to go on and finish it. Anthea Joseph herself, the widow of Michael Joseph,was
usually very enthusiastic about anything historical, and although she came from
and had many of the qualities of a fairly upper-class sort of English Tory,
she just valued the history of it, she was encouraging and so on.
The book was also Booker nominated. But I think you have said it didn'
t sell very well. Why do you think that was?
I think there were several reasons. Apart from a fairly large army
of Peninsular War 'nerds' ...
Of which you might be one... (laughter)
It' s a bit of history that people don' t know about, and for most people Wellington
is Waterloo. And partly because I' d written it as a pastiche which was a bit
off-putting. But I think mainly because Michael Joseph just didn' t get out
and push it in the way that they might have done. The hardback did sell out
its print run eventually.
What was the status of the Booker prize at that time?
It meant a lot in purely literary circles, on literature pages, the review pages
and so on, no doubt about that. Every broadsheet and even some Sundays would
run a bit on it. But there wasn' t the big hype or quite the same TV coverage
as now.
You returned to the thriller with A Spy of the
Old School (1982). Your first in a British setting: why had you kept
away?
Partly because I felt, perhaps wrongly, that exotic backgrounds helped sales;
partly because the books were increasingly carrying some sort of message. It
was really a question of seeing the wood for the trees. I felt that I knew England
both too little and too much; that I knew certain areas of it extremely well
obviously, but almost too parochially. For instance I could have written a murder
story set in a comprehensive school, but it wouldn' t have got out of the comprehensive
school. I wanted to take a much broader view.
Even at the time the Cambridge spies had been treated fictionally quite
often. What did you feel you could newly bring?
Well, in the first place the idea came from André Schiffrin (who must rate as
one of the best publishers there has been - in, what, around fifty years). He'
d commissioned the later Argand books, and indeed the first ones, for an American
publisher. And he came up with the idea: write a book about a Blunt character,
but sympathetically and from a first person point of view. And that idea immediately
appealed to me.
How do your ideas about Britishness square with the Cambridge spies?
I' m very sympathetic to them. I think it' s very very easy at the
moment to say how could these people have been fooled by Stalin. It seems to
me that there's a contrast at the moment: people seem able to defend the appeasers
of the same period but attack the spies. From the point of what they knew both
about their own society at first hand against what they knew largely from Russian
propaganda on the other hand, why should they not take the view they did?
Yet you do go to some length to establish, in the case of the Blunt
figure, Sir Richard Austen, what seems to me an entirely credible psychological
trigger in which his subsequent treason becomes all of a piece.
I must read it again. (Laughter)
Let'
s move on to Nasty, Very published in
1984 but it is Maggie' s Britain not Orwell' s. The central character is again
a Bosham, Charlie this time. What lies behind these recurring characters?
In fact there is, I think, right the way through, not all the books but very
nearly, there is always a link, either a character who is a major character
in one book and a minor character in another...
And I' m pretty sure there is a Wellington reference in practically
everything you' ve written...
(Laughter). Partly because I want to signal, if not to a reader, at least to
myself, that they are all part of the same imaginary world. Though imaginary
is not quite the right word: of the same world view if you like. For a short
time I had a sort of grandiose feeling that I was writing a sort of Comédie
Humaine...
The book ends with Charlie as a Conservative MP and the spectre of the
National Front looming. Were you surprised to get a good review in the Daily
Telegraph?
No. In fact the Daily Telegraph and indeed the Sunday Telegraph,
have always been very good to me as far as reviews were concerned. The thing
about Nasty Very, which still
annoys me a bit, is that it was clearly ahead of its time. At the times reviewers
tended to say that this is too bleak, too far-fetched.
Does Blair' s Britain inspire similar feelings of loathing?
Just about. (Laughter)
Another Nasty, Very up your sleeve?
It' s an idea.
Lying in State (1985), in its entirety,
is the centrepiece of The Indispensable JR. Why
did you choose this particular novel?
It was a choice between A Spy of the Old School
and Lying in State. I like very
much the ingenuity of Lying in State.
I like the fact that Graham Greene liked it a lot and wrote to me about it.
I like the central character, Roberto Fairrie, the Argentinian exile.
Apart from his Argentinian background is he, in any way, based on your
friend Johnnie Wolfers?
No, not at all. Fairrie is in fact my paternal grandmother' s maiden name, and
they were a sugar family, connected to Tate & Lyle. That' s where I first came
across this whole idea of this extremely mixed Argentinian society which ranges
from an Italian element, a strong Welsh element and so on. And the fact that
most Argentinian families do keep up their connections with their European roots.
For perhaps the first time, you' ve written a thriller with a truly
international feel. Was that deliberate?
I think that more or less came out of the story. I originally wrote a detailed
synopsis, which was virtually Johnnie' s story without any additions . The main
trigger was the story that John told me, which was true. The other factor that
came in was that we were in Spain or in the south-west of France, close to Spain,
at the time Franco died. We weren' t actually in Spain the day he died but we
were there about two weeks later.
Were you there for the lying in state...
No, that was in the first few days...
...because that is a tremendously atmospheric opening. I would have
thought that any film producer worth his salt would have picked up on that.
Were there any film offers?
There was some momentary interest from BBC Scotland, of all places, which never
came to anything.
It is brilliantly plotted. Is this one that was very carefully mapped
out?
Yes, obviously. Not to give away too much, something that came fairly late,
and possibly after I' d started writing, was the introduction of the Sassen
tapes.
Was this a successful book in terms of sales?
I think it was fairly successful, nothing earth-shattering. But I was back in
paperback by then. Granada' s Grafton imprint did them, and they did me quite
well.
In Zdt (1986), or Greenfinger,
your title of choice, Esther Carter is your first central female character.
That took you a while...
Yes, I don' t know why it took so long, though I did write briefly from a female
point of view in King Fisher Lives.
Esther Carter's point of view is much more prominent in Greenfinger.
How do you approach writing from a female viewpoint?
That there might be a problem for a male writer never occurrred to me. I did
it, and chose the name, taking the cue from Bleak House, where Dickens
has an upbeat, slightly naive, but optimistically inclined narrator in Esther
Summerson (my Esther is née Somers), in contrast to an authorial voice that
is rather 'tired' and cynical.
You' ve also said that this was one of the first books you' d written
that was almost entirely based on research. Did you find this some kind of liberation?
It was in a way. It was really quite amazing. I had a friend who worked at Kew
Gardens and he introduced me to the director of the Herbarium. These two directed
me to other sources, including a botanist who' d worked in the Costa Rican rain
forest. And then I found a sociological study of the indigent poor squatting
outside San José, and things like that. And it all sort of fell into place.
As you know I used to work for one, but what research did you do on
multinational food companies?
I made it all up. (Laughter)
It has a very satisfying ending, something one or two people have remarked
on...
Really? This is what separates the sheep from the goats or something. If you
are a real die-hard Marxist, you don' t like the ending, because it' s a terrorist
conspiracy which is not, according to Marx, the way forward.
It' s one of your few endings like that. Did you do that out of a sense
of outrage that had to be satisfied..
Yes, I think so.
It won the Deutsche Krimi Preis. Was it from this that your German connections
were developed?
Yes. The main German connection is Thomas Worchte. When I first met him I don'
t think Greenfinger had actually
been done in Germany at that time, but he took it up. He liked it very much
and he was on the panel of the Krimi Preis. I had already been published in
Germany, I can' t remember which titles.
In Sand Blind (1993) you tackled the complex
issues at the heart of Gulf War One. An American review remarked on your ' successful'
achievement of an Iraqi viewpoint. How was that achieved?
Partly through reading a couple of books by Iraqi exiles and partly because
I got very fond of the main Iraqi character - and I wanted to understand him.
Do recent events inspire an update?
I' m surprised I' ve not been asked to do that.
Ecological themes are again central to the next thrillers, Accidents
Will Happen (1995) and Brandenburg Concerto
(1998). These were developed with Thomas Wortche and German crime writer Pieke
Biermann. How did that happen?
The three of us came up with the idea of eco-thrillers. We were trying to develop
synopses and so on that would get done by German television as a series. And
nothing came of that, but out of all the talks we had, some of the ideas seemed
worth pursuing.
I like them a lot, but they didn' t do very well. Nor were they published in
Germany at all, which was disappointing. It dawned on me later that foreign
publishers tend not to like books written by a foreigner that are set in their
own country. So I didn' t pursue them. I would have quite liked to have done.
Did your fellow collaborators produce their own eco-thrillers?
Not as far as I' m aware.
But you did borrow a character from Biermann' s Violetta
for Brandenburg Concerto...
Yes, that was between us.
The background, Burg, is again fictional. Why this time?
Partly because the eco-cops themselves had no basis in fact. It also
gets round the procedural problem.
Brandenburg Concerto brings to an end the
political thriller in your output.
Gone to sleep perhaps. It comes back a bit in As
Bad as it Gets, and it' s there to some extent in Homage
as well.
Do you think it is simply uncommercial now to have that sort of platform?
I think literature has become more naturalistic, more parochial and, though
it sounds contradictory, more escapist.
Just before Brandenburg Concerto came the
uncategorisable Intimacy (1995). Where did that
come from?
The very first original spark, this is slightly shameful, came from a Spaniard
I' d met in Gijón at the Semana Negra (the Spanish festival devoted to noir
fiction and film. BC) and a couple of years later he wrote to me and said
he wanted to produce an anthology of short stories, the point of which was that
they should be as noir as possible and as extreme as possible. So I thought
to myself what was the most noir and extreme thing I could think of. And what
I thought of was mother and son incest where the other two brothers find out.
That was the starting point.
But I never wrote that short story, and the anthology came out without it. But
I had that idea in my head and I wanted to make more of it. The Spanish background
came about because we had gone back to live there. And the third element was
Ian Gibson' s expanded biography of Lorca. I knew Gibson quite well. And over
that year that we were living there the whole thing germinated.
It
has the form of a mystery. Did that come naturally out of the material?
No, it' s more a question that I can' t stop writing mysteries. Even when I'
m trying not to!
It' s your most erotic book...
I suppose so. Erotic most often...
It' s also a most beautifully written erotic book, something that is
rarely achieved. Did you have any problems placing the book?
I had no problems with Gollancz at all. The problem that I think I
had was more with my agent at the time. I wrote a detailed synopsis which I
asked her to sell and she more or less said she' d rather not.
It was very well reviewed, But unfortunately Gollancz were going through a bad
patch at the time, and I don' t think they had a lot of money to splash around.
The hardback did tolerably well, and they did a paperback which didn' t do very
much.
And now you are doing your own agenting...
Have been since about 1994, I think.
Does that take up a lot of time?
It obviously does, but the amount of time I spend dealing with publishers is
very little different from that dealing with an agent. The time factor didn'
t really come into it. I' ve got fairly strong views about agents. Nothing against
any particular agent. I think there is a big place for agents amongst the best-sellers,
because they are surrounded by so many complications. There' s a lot to be said
for agents at the start of a career.
Any regrets?
Once or twice I' ve been caught out on a contract where any agent might have
spotted something which I didn' t. One area where I have felt a bit naked, an
area where there is so much hassle and time wasted is with film.
1996, I think, was some kind of low point for you, financially at least.
Yet a year later you are up and running with The Last
English King. Were you at all disillusioned with writing at any point?
Oh no. I don' t think I was disillusioned with writing as such, with publishers
perhaps... I was very short of money. But one of the last things my agent did
was to get me to sign a contract with Little, Brown to do this sequel to Joseph.
The money was wretched and I fear, it was one of those periods when I got bored.
Three years later I was by then fairly well established with Gollancz, and no
longer had an agent. I' d read about and seen the film Braveheart and
it seemed to be clear that Braveheart was not about the Scots versus
the English but about Them versus Us. (Laughter) I went to
Gollancz with that idea and they said: No! Philippa Harrison at Little, Brown
said we want our money back or another book. So I proposed something on Harold
and 1066.
Why Harold?
Well, it was the Braveheart thing in the first place but second, the
research. You have to read say two feet of a bookshelf to do Harold whereas
you'd have to read every book in this room to do most other periods of British
history.
Not an obsession of yours then?
Not at all. But once I' d got into it, and had started doing a bit of reading,
particularly picking up on various ideas such as the destruction of Anglo-Saxon
civilisation as a result of the Norman invasion, the imposition of a very very
small number of thugs on the resident population, and the thinly veiled suggestion
that Edward the Confessor was a homosexual - things like that - I began to get
very interested. And particularly when I'd got the idea of making the narration
central to this trek across Europe...
Was this the first time you used the anachronism idea?
No, there are one or two in Joseph,
not many. It became a bit of a game with Richard Beswick at Little, Brown and
Abacus. It threw up a number of holes in his knowledge of English literature.
He picked up on most of the Shakespeare, and most of the other lot but he didn'
t spot the very first anachronism in the book, which was when the whole idea
suddenly clicked with me, when Quint was in the Forum and says the buildings
and so on are 'monuments of their own magnificence' !
These books have sold considerably better than the crime novels. Does
the audience differ?
I get the impression that the audience for the history novels is fairly personal,
not necessarily the same as the one for more normal history novels. The
Last English King sold almost entirely on word of mouth. There
was very little publicity. You could see pockets where the word got round. For
instance the Waterstone' s in Trafalgar Square sold something like 1500 paperbacks.
And the only reason that I could think of for that kind of sale was word of
mouth in Whitehall. I think they have gained for me a far more personal audience.
What's happened to your script for the film of The
Last English King?
Basically Geoffrey Reeve, who was the producer of The Shooting Party and
The Far Pavilions, was approached at the time that The
Last English King came out, by a large financial company who
had clients who wished to take advantage of the tax breaks (available for
new British films. BC). Large sums of money were available and he optioned
it, and renewed the option several times and then commissioned another script
which eventually became the film Shiner. And I was paid, so that was
all very satisfactory...
Michael Caine was a possibility at one stage...
Yes, as Godwin, Jean Reno too. With Jude Law as Harold. But some backers pulled
out and that all fell through.
But is a film still a possibility?
A possibility, yes.
Finally to Homage (2001), your new series
featuring Chris Shovelin. In this one am I right in thinking that Crumley was
more of an influence than Chandler? 
Well, I think the book goes through stages. It starts with Chandler and moves
on...
Amongst the various twists in the tail of Homage
is the chilling revelation that the Arizona ranch has been thus named in tribute
to ' the American way of life' . What' s your view of America these days?
I' m very frightened of America really.
There are so many really horrifying things about the place. But far deeper than
that, there are statistics that really terrify me, for example that 50% of American
children are clinically insane, a Guardian article I think. The complete
contrast with Canada that Michael Moore shows in Bowling for Columbine,
for example, the way the whole thing is in complete denial of any kind of liberal
or social values...
Past redemption?
I don' t know. Perhaps some kind of economic breakdown, with a way out through
a sort of New Deal perhaps.
So what' s next?
For the moment I am working on the next book featuring Charlie. His full name
is Joseph Charles Edward, so in this book he is Eddie, and he' s been marooned
on the Galapagos Islands where he meets Charles Darwin...
As hinted in the closing lines of A Very English
Agent...
He' s picked up by a whaler. I might have him chasing a big white whale! (Laughter)
Does it have a title?
He' s now gone through Mexico and he' s into the Texian War of Independence
against Mexico, the Alamo and all that. Later he ends up in early San Francisco.
So I' m thinking of calling it: Eddie and the
Girth of a Nation... (Laughter)
So America is still a source of inspiration as well as despair?
Yes. What we were saying earlier about America is very much the theme of this
book.
Finally, if you had it to do all over again, is there anything you would
do differently?
I sometimes, but not often, regret that I did not stick to one format and like
Dick Francis or Ian Rankin for the most part went on writing the same book again
and again... I'll rephrase that... go on flogging the... no, try again... developing
with consummate skill a recurring milieu with a hero who was always the same
guy even if in Francis's case he had different names. It's what the public seems
to want. My other regret is that I rather naively supposed that it was part
of the agents' and publishers' jobs to publicise their authors, get them into
the public eye, on to radio and TV, writing think bits for the papers etc etc.
In short no-one told me to network. Only when I became professionally involved
with cousin Lucy Ramsey (best publicist in the business) did I do any of that
at all, and my goodness even a little of it goes a long way.
It was once an ambition of yours to die on the barricades. Is that still
true?
I' d forgotten about that. Well yes, as well there as anywhere else, so long
as it s quick and when I want it.
Julian Rathbone, thanks very much.
A RATHBONE CHECK-LIST UK Publication Dates (nc: non-crime)
1966:
Diamonds Bid
1968:
Hand Out
1969:
With My Knives I Know I' m Good
1972:
Trip Trap
1975:
Kill Cure,
Bloody
Marvellous
1976:
King Fisher Lives (nc),
Carnival
1978:
A Raving Monarchist,
A Princess,
A Nun(nc)
1979:
The Euro-Killers,
Joseph
(nc)
1980:
A Last Resort
1981:
Base Case
1982:
A Spy of the Old School
1983:
Watching the Detectives
1984:
Wellington' s War (nc, editor),
Nasty,
Very (nc)
1985:
Lying in State
1986:
Zdt (Greenfinger in USA)
1988:
The Crystal Contract
1990:
The Pandora Option
1991:
Dangerous Games (first as screenplay, then as book)
1993:
Sand Blind
1995:
Accidents Will Happen,
Intimacy
(nc)
1997:
The Last English King (nc),
Blame
Hitler (nc)
1998:
Brandenburg Concerto,
Trajectories
(nc)
2000:
Kings of Albion (nc)
2001:
Homage.
2002:
A Very English Agent (nc)
2003:
As Bad as it Gets,
The
Indispensable Julian Rathbone (anthology)
See
Review by Martin Edwards - author of the highly acclaimed Harry Devlin Mysteries
New Books
by Julian Rathbone at Amazon.co.uk 
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