photo: Marion Ettinger

  A curious career move, you might think, from the groves of academia   (albeit with the odd best-seller to one's credit) to the hectic world of   daytime television. But if one thing is clear from the following   interview, it is that Michael Malone sees little distinction in effect   between his mystery and his mainstream novels, and that story-telling   on paper has much in common with story-telling on the silver screen,   small or large.
  It's a refreshing approach in the often self-referential world of crime   fiction, and accounts I think for the unique nature of Malone's fiction.   For Malone brings to his writing a sensibility honed not only by years   engaged in the study and teaching of literature but also by an   upbringing steeped in a tradition of American, often "Southern"   writers, that goes back to Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe and   Mark Twain.
  The significant figure, however, turns out to be Charles Dickens. Interviewed early in his stint as   head writer on the ABC daytime soap One Life to Live, Malone unequivocally stated "If Dickens   were alive, this is what he'd be doing." Recollecting the vast array of wonderfully etched   characters that teem through Dickens's books, not to mention that his fiction was mostly written   and appeared, to be eagerly snapped up by an eager population, in weekly, fortnightly or monthly parts, there is little doubt that Malone is right.
The Dickens influence may however come as no surprise to Malone's mystery readers. For it is to writers such as Wilkie Collins (Dickens's long-time friend and rival), indeed to Dickens himself, perhaps to Dorothy Sayers and, in more modern times Scott Turow, Donna Tartt or, stretching a point, Tom Wolfe, that one turns to find parallels for Malone's multi-faceted plots, remarkable characters and pertinent themes.
To mystery readers those qualities were first in evidence in Uncivil Seasons (DelaCorte, 1983), the novel that Otto Penzler called "one of the few nearly perfect novels in the history of detective fiction." It introduced his fictional community, Hillston, North Carolina (the state where Malone was born), a conurbation in transition from its near-feudal "Southern" history to that of a town beset with many of the ills of the present-day. Most importantly, it also established his curious but complementary detective duo, the wily, witty, wrong-side-of-the-tracks Police Chief Cuddy Mangum along with his romantically inclined, aristocratic police lieutenant Justin B. Savile (the Fifth).
Six years later came the ambitious but no less engaging Times Witness (Little, Brown 1989), returning us to Hillston where an unemployed black man is about to be executed for the murder of a policeman. This complex but witty and humane novel amazingly pulls together an investigation into two separate crimes, one in the past, an exploration of the politics of racial prejudice and a savage indictment of the intrigues of the Hillston élite.
Alternately narrating (Justin in Uncivil Seasons, Cuddy in Times Witness), each lend an unmistakable flavour to their respective books. The pair would be described by Ed McBain (Evan Hunter) as "two of the most memorable police detectives to appear in mystery fiction."
Michael Malone was born in 1942, the eldest of six children. His father was a psychiatrist, his mother a teacher. In 1966 he graduated from the University of North Carolina and later studied for a Ph.D at Harvard. Still later he taught a variety of subjects at colleges that included Yale and the University of Pennsylvania. He is married to Maureen Quilligan, herself a Renaissance scholar and now chair of the English Department at Duke University, North Carolina, a recent appointment that has enabled Malone to return to the state of his birth. They have a daughter.
In 1975 Random House published his first book Painting the Roses Red, to be followed in 1977 by The Delectable Mountains. Over the next five years he published two non-fiction volumes (one, Heroes of Eros, on male cinematic archetypes), along with another novel (Dingley Falls, Harcourt 1980) that attracted praise from author and critic Malcolm Cowley. Shortly afterwards there would be a play (Defender of the Faith) written for the Yale Divinity School.
In the next few years, Malone wrote three more key novels: Uncivil Seasons, the mainstream Handling Sin (Little, Brown 1986) and Times Witness, all optioned for film or television. "Options have supported us over the years, " Malone has said. Not to mention the odd screenplay. Prior to his stint on One Life Malone had written scripts of Handling Sin, a film for Whoopi Goldberg (Washington Slept Here) and another, The Rich Brother, for cable TV.
None however reached the screen. Instead came the highly successful mainstream novel Foolscap (Little, Brown 1991).
Now between novels, he became head writer on One Life to Live (later memorably dubbed One Life to Lose by his wife Maureen as the demands of the job ate into their time as a family). That he was a huge success can be judged by the fact that his work on the series moved it from No.11 in the national ratings to No.4, earning himself an Emmy Award as head writer in the process. Note also the (unofficial) fan website Magnificently Malonian, which charts the heights of his career at One Life, to the depths, six years later, on NBC's Another World where a number of circumstances including "creative differences" with the show's producer brought the Malone TV career to a halt.
But two years later Malone was back on the literary scene, triumphantly, first with First Lady (Sourcebooks, 2001), the third Mangum/ Savile novel, and with a book of short stories Red Clay, Blue Cadillac (Sourcebooks, 2001), featuring his Edgar-winning short story Red Clay. First Lady (published over here by Constable in April 2002) has recently been riding high in the New York Times best-seller list.
This interview was conducted (with much good humour) via emails to the Malone's summer home in Connecticut (whose purchase preceded "the golden chaff of television") and in spite of a demanding schedule of book signings, dinner parties, and the proof reading of his new book, The Last Noel.

but your experiences on your next series, Another World , were less happy. What went wrong?

Publishing has changed radically in the ten years between Foolscap and First Lady. But it's the same old story that I suspect Fitzgerald would have given you if you'd asked him how publishing had changed while he was away in Hollywood. Most of the people I had worked with at places like Little, Brown or Random House were gone: left, fired, retired, died. The new (and often astonishingly young) people who'd replaced them seemed to me far less knowledgable about literature, less interested in and competent at editing, more focused on marketing. There are in fact fewer independent companies than there were a decade ago, and the huge conglomerates into which those companies have been amalgamated are run by management not editors; their CEO's tend to see books as products like television and film (Time Warner owns my old publisher Little, Brown) or even like lipstick or oil; Gulf & Western owns Paramount owns...and so on. More books are published but fewer of them matter.

What do you miss most about the TV life? What are you most glad to walk away from?
I miss the fast pace, the comradeship of collaborative writing, the excitement of "putting on a show." I miss New York City. And not missing the money is an endless spiritual struggle. What I was very glad to walk away from was the compromises imposed by banal and timorous executives and producers, the "focus groups," and the limitations of the genre itself; how can art have form without an ending?

Let's talk a little more about First Lady, your most recent novel- and a mystery. What was the thinking behind its conception? Honestly, I think the real generator was all the letters I'd gotten from readers while I was "away," asking me where was the next Justin-Cuddy novel. Their loyalty led me to the decision to return to Hillston.
When I wrote Uncivil Seasons I had no intention of writing a sequel. Time's Witness came about because I wanted to write a book about racism and the death penalty. I was struggling to find a narrator. The first decision for every novel is: whose story is it? Finding the right voice is vital. (Imagine The Great Gatsby without Nick's voice.) I tried several characters and wasn't happy. Then it struck me that I already knew the right story-teller. It was Cuddy Mangum, ironic, smart, an outsider from the wrong side of the tracks, a highly political man, leftist in his views but also a believer in law and order. Cuddy's Time's Witness was Huck Finn to Justin's Uncivil Seasons, and I thought of them as a duet. But then when [with First Lady] I found myself wanting to write about the romance of celebrity, the saints and stars in our lives, and about modernity; how a small Southern college town could have become a place where a woman's murdered body could lie undetected for months, and then be unidentifiable when found: it felt to me very much the sort of story the lyrical and nostalgic Justin might want to tell.

Why did you return to the mystery form rather than a mainstream novel?
I rather grumpily reject generic distinctions among my novels. In fact I long ago left Knopf because they pressed me not to publish Uncivil Seasons after a "literary" novel Dingley Falls. I was young and indignant at the time, caustically asking if they would shelve The Idiot and The Sound and the Fury in the Literature section, but put Crime and Punishment and Intruder in the Dust in "Mysteries."
But I still say, there are good novels and bad novels, whatever their plots. The presumed separation of the art novel (beautiful sentences, wide margins and nothing much happens) from the story novel (a page turner with a thin surface) has been deeply unfortunate. There's story and there's language in Dickens, there's also a murder mystery in almost every single one of his novels. Indeed I think that readers today turn to the "mystery" because they can find there the kind of story-telling they once found in general fiction. When you write a murder mystery, you enlarge your canvas beyond the relational and domestic, beyond the intimate confines of many modern novels. You bring in police and courts and prisons, juries and judges, different occupations, different classes. You move your story into a public realm where plots have moral and political and social dimensions, where private acts have consequences beyond the personal.

Has your approach to novel writing changed as a result of working in TV?
As my wife Maureen says, "You can't go even to a bad college without learning something." What television drama taught me was how to increase suspense and so create in the reader an urgency to know what happens next; how to drive story from one chapter to the next (the cliff-hanger ending as opposed to the curtain-falling ending). As a result, the plot of First Lady is more propulsive and linear than the plots of Uncivil Seasons and Time's Witness. Having to write in a television studio in the midst of the chaos of production also helped my concentration, though I still prefer to work from nine to five (nine at night till five in the morning) when it's quiet. It amazes me that Trollope scribbled novels while riding atop a mail coach.

Was First Lady a difficult novel to write? Did you feel out of practice?!
Yes, at first it was very hard for me to "go deep" into First Lady, and I started over a number of times. Even put it aside, and began another book before going back to it. I think of the creation of the imaginary world of a novel as a dive deep down into the imagination. Into a lake of fiction so deep that it silences the noise of the so-called "real" world outside. Starting work as sustained as a novel is never easy but this time I was still adjusting to radical changes in my daily life; I'd left behind the familiar noisy bustle of working with hundreds of other people in a television studio in Manhattan and found myself in a much too quiet study in Chelsea, where I knew almost no one. (We were in London for the year; Maureen was running a program at King's College.) I must say that Dickens was a great friend to me in that rather lonely year; not only did I re-read all of his novels, I walked those set in London.

A key theme in First Lady is the changing face of the 'South'. Can you explain to a UK reader the essential differences between the 'South' and the 'North', and between the 'new' South and the old?
Good lord, no! If anyone could have explained those differences satisfactorily, there probably wouldn't have been a Civil War (or as it was called in my childhood, "The War of Northern Aggress-ion.") Since that childhood, the South has changed enormously; when I was growing up, almost all the people in North Carolina were natives of the state. The population of the South is now on the one hand much more heterogeneous (Yankees everywhere, as the locals say), and on the other, much less isolated from the rest of the country. That loss of particularity (everyone in America has the same television-derived accent, information, even materialist desires; every town has the same strip mall, eats the same junk food, gossips about the same celebrity scandals) is lamented by the romantic traditionalist Justin and embraced by the ironically modernist Cuddy. But the South remains different from the North. Do you ever hear an American writer refer to him/herself as a "Northern Writer"? No, but "Southern Writer" is a cultural identity with a long strong heritage. The South is very self-conscious. It defines itself constantly, mythically, historically, and traditionally. Past-haunted and romantic about its virtues and its violence, it creates and sustains itself out of its own fictions. The Old South openly gloried in its indefensible past; the New South is embarrassed by or at least ambivalent about it. The Old South was rural or industrial in a nineteenth-century way; society was almost feudal: aristocrats and workers. The old factories and farms are mostly gone; New South builds a circle of suburbia around a pretense of a city and fills it with the props of the middle class.

I was surprised to find you using the somewhat tarnished conventions of the serial killer novel. Why did you feel you had to tackle this subject?
I wanted to play with this (yes, much used) convention by having the murderer play with it himself. I was also drawn to the story of a terrifying crime wave in a small town in relation to its politics. Cuddy's pride in his police department's reputation is wounded by these crimes; then his job is threatened. He's pushed by the press (and his own ego) into taking public positions he then has to defend.

First Lady is a less overtly political novel than Times Witness. Why?
I'm not sure it's less political. But there are different political arenas under scrutiny: Media manipulation, Celebrity politicians, Image-control, Cover-ups, (the investigation first goes awry because state officials have tampered with evidence to protect the governor), Ambition and power plays. (Will Mayor Yarborough sell out Cuddy in order for a place on the gubernatorial ticket?) And so on.

Have the battles been won?
Oh lord, no. In fact, on our national front, many of the great victories of the last eight years (among them peace and prosperity, civil liberties, separation of church and state, a free press) have been lost, beginning with the usurpation of democracy in the presidential election by a partisan court. The next Hillston book is going to be about a stolen election. It will take place in the past, when Cuddy and Justin first meet, when Cuddy is working for (a then youthful and vibrant) Isaac Rosethorn. It will be about Cuddy's fall from the Eden of his idealism as he watches the powerful Dollard family steal a Senate seat for Kip Dollard, Justin's uncle. (The one with the beautiful voice and nothing to say, in Time's Witness)

Did you have any model in mind for the enchanting Mavis Mahar?
No one in particular. She's more an iconic amalgam of the self-destructive super-star than any individual. A little Janis Joplin, a little Elvis, a little Sinead O'Connor, a little great film stars of the past. But mostly she came to me out of that lake like Aphrodite, fully herself and entirely unclothed. I had originally planned for her to be killed early in the book but I fell so in love with her I couldn't bear to do it.

You're back in the New York Times best-seller list. Did you ever have any doubts?
One always has doubts, one always has to forget them. Considering what a dreadful year it has been for American publishing in general, yes, First Lady did very well. The new publisher worked heroically to bring the books to readers and I was deeply moved to learn that so many old readers were still out there, waiting, and so many new ones joining them.

Let's go back to your early years. What specific factors in your background, do you think, led you to writing?
I'm Southern and Irish. My mother, a teacher for many decades, was a lover of books and of those who wrote them. Once, in first grade, I'd forgotten to have her sign my report card and had done it for her in capital letter block print-MRS. MALONE; and then, forced to admit the forgery, I claimed she'd been unable to sign herself because she was suffering from the "Blue Bonnet plague," as if she'd eaten rancid margarine. My mother marched into the principal to defend me. "He's not a liar; he has a wonderful imagination. He's going to be a writer."
From her I learned a deep sense of the power of the imagination, power so strong it could get you thrown out of places, it could win you love, it could change lives, change whole civilizations. I learned from her that books are history's home and freedom's harbor, and that writers are the keepers of that home and the guardians of that harbor. My mother was also deaf, and always told me, the eldest child, to "be her ears." I think that's why I spend my days listening so hard to voices that aren't there.
Also I had a seventh-grade English teacher, who was quite insane in the wonderful Southern manner. This was in the South in the fifties when we thought marijuana was a Mexican folk dance and we were taught [Nathaniel Hawthorne's] The Scarlet Letter without ever being told what the letter "A" [that adulterer Hester Prynne must wear. BC] in fact stood for. That Miss Taybee floated through our cafeteria reciting Edgar Allan Poe to nobody in particular was no reason to dismiss her. For she was a native of the town and from a good family. The South doesn't mind insanity as long as it's local. Miss Taybee lived for books, for passion, for beautiful stories and for poetry. She would walk up and down the aisles of our classroom, waving her long opalescent scarf and calling on us to go on reciting "the beautiful Annabel Lee in her sepulchre there by the sea, in her tomb by the sounding sea." Then she would suddenly stop, touch a head with a fluttering hand, and whisper eerily, "A ROCK A LEAF, AN TURNED DOOR. I am looking for the next Thomas Wolfe. Is it you?"
I decided I was the one she was looking for. I began by writing a neighbourhood newspaper, then plays for my siblings to put on, then moved to love poems to give to girls, and eventually I found myself writing a novel to avoid working on my dissertation.

Was there ever any doubt in your mind, any tiny rebellions against the idea that you would be a writer?
Yes, I wanted to be a trumpet player. A courtroom lawyer. A stage director. Of course by being a novelist I could live all those lives. Everyone else in my family is a doctor, and I (very briefly) considered that profession.

What was the first book of any kind to make a strong impression on you? And why?
I think probably it was Treasure Island. I can still remember the sensation of opening that extraordinary world and diving into it. The imaginative power of the story and of the language literally set me shivering.

Was there any specific point when you realised you had a real facility for writing?
Neighbours clapping in the backyard at the end of one of my plays. (Of course perhaps it had to do with the fact that it was ending; I recall that one of my plays, The Prince of the Chinese Elephants, had 47 "acts.")

One point about your academic years: I have the impression that you taught writing before you were published. How did you resolve that problem?
Actually no, I didn't teach writing before publishing my first two novels. I taught just about everything else, though, to make a living before, during and after graduate school. I taught "The Classics of World Literature," "The History of the American Cinema," and so on. I didn't start teaching fiction writing until Yale and when I started I wasn't sure it could be taught. Years of work with beginning writers persuaded me that while the gift can't be taught (oddly, while few people think they can sing or dance or draw if they can't, almost everyone thinks they can write), those with the gift can learn to write better.

Let's talk about writing for a while. What drives you, in particular, to write?
Besides the mortgage? The love of the beauty of words and how they fit together. The fascination of meeting characters and finding out what they're going to do. The affection I feel for those characters. The delight I take in the forming of the shape of stories. The pleasure readers give me by their response to the novels, or audiences give me at readings.

Which comes first for you: theme, plot, place, voice or character?
First comes the formal substructure, an architectural blueprint. Take Handling Sin, for example. It began when I said to Maureen I want to write the funniest book possible. She said that book has already been written: it's Don Quixote. All right, I'll write it again, I decided. The picaresque structure of Handling Sin is chapter for chapter from Quixote. Then I thought about the type of quest I wanted: a spiritual journey for a middle-aged son, a life insurance salesman, who has tried to insure himself against all the risks of love and loss in life (an anti-Quixote, with his neighbour Mingo as his Pancho Sanza), whose renegade priest of a father sends him on a wild goose chase that will prove his salvation. Then I inset the journey, literally drawing the map of the trip Raleigh and Mingo would take from North Carolina to New Orleans in the weeks leading up to Good Friday when the father dies, and Easter. Then I inset the seven "sins" and "sacraments" in seven chapters in which Raleigh remembers his childhood and the women who formed his nature. Chapters like "How Raleigh Was Confirmed in His View of the World." Then I started writing. What happened to Raleigh, the wild bizarre adventures he fell into-these are all the gifts of the gods of fiction. I just hang on and try to keep up with the characters. As I think Emerson said, fiction is a kind of ice skating that takes us we know not where. The blueprint of Dingley Falls was a creation structure: the novel takes place in a week and ends with a Sunday sermon; and with a setting: a town (like Middlemarch) bustling about its business, that is threatened by a mysterious secret base in the forest. I began with the map of the town, I drew in the houses and shops and then filled them with people.
Work on each novel begins differently, depending on the original idea. From genre: to write a picaresque novel in tribute to Cervantes, Fielding, and Dickens (Handling Sin). From theme: to address the relation of racism to the death penalty in the South (Time's Witness). And so on.

When you write, say your mystery novels, do you have a different audience in mind to when you are writing your non-mystery novels?
No, I don't distinguish among audiences. My first reader is always Maureen (first and fiercest and best) and I suppose I think of her response first. It is true that there are some of my readers who prefer say books like Foolscap to books like First Lady, or who feel the opposite: "More Cuddy and Justin books please!"

Your favourite writers include Austen, Faulkner and Fitzgerald and, particularly Dickens. In what principal ways do they impact on your fiction (if at all)?
Every book a reader has ever read, like every experience, finds its way into the fiction the writer creates. When those books have a profound impact on the writer (particularly I think the books you read young, as Dickens read Smollett and as I read Dickens), the effect is deep and lasting. It makes its way into the language, the structure, the characters. Miss Havisham, for example, has given birth to countless children- including Ramona Dingley. No American adolescent writer can escape Fitzgerald's romance. No Southerner can escape Faulkner.

Are you a conscious or unconscious writer?
Both, if I know what you mean; though it sounds a bit as if I wrote while asleep or passed out on the floor of a bar. I think all writers are both. Some perhaps more the former (Pope), some the latter (Blake). The form starts out at least to be conscious; the tropes are wrought very consciously. But I work very hard NOT to intrude consciousness on dialogue and story.

As a writer, what role does the internet play in your life?
Most importantly, I use the internet for communication: with friends, professional colleagues, and the publishers. I also use it for research. Say, for example, I need to know what movies were popular in 1963, because I've set a chapter in that time, or how much a Rolls Royce costs, or how you would say something in Algonquin Indian dialect. Before the internet, I would have to go to the local library (where I'd usually get sidetracked reading newspapers and magazines); now I use the Web.

Do you regard its existence as a problem or an opportunity?
I think it a great facilitator. While I resisted the internet for years, I am now a happy convert, convinced that far from killing correspondence, it encourages and sustains epistolary relationships. For example, I am now back in touch with old friends who were for decades too lazy to look for a stamp.

Can we go back a little to your early work? How did Painting the Roses Red (1975) come about?
Painting the Roses Red, set at the University of California at Berkeley in the sixties, was written in graduate school; first, as a love song to Maureen, and second, as a way to avoid working on my dissertation. I had no idea how lucky I was when I sent the manuscript off to Random House and they accepted it.

What lessons did you learn from that first experience as a published writer?
That a writer needs an agent. That a writer needs an editor who doesn't leave the publishing house before the book comes out.

Over the next six years, there were two more novels, a play (with a religious theme) and two non-fiction works, both taking a psycho-analytical approach to their subjects. What ghosts were you exorcising here?
Well, since my father was a psychiatrist, I suppose you could say I was exorcising his. But the two non-fiction books had very specific origins: the one on American film archetypes came out of my PhD dissertation on that subject and evolved after I'd proposed writing a book on Elvis the year after he died. The editor told me nobody would care about Elvis by the following year (!), but that a book about male erotic images in the movies in general would be of interest. The other book (on Jungian personality types), I wrote at the request of the original collaborators, who by then weren't speaking to each other.The play (Defender of the Faith) was written at the request of Yale Divinity School and was originally performed at a symposium on Martyrdom. (The play's about an imagined confrontation in the Tower between the young Elizabeth Tudor and her godfather Thomas Cranmer.)

That play, books like Handling Sin, together with the strong moral basis of your mystery novels, suggest that you might be a religious man...?
Yes, I'm a member of the Episcopal Church (that's Anglican to you.)

Critical success appears to have come early. Taken as a whole do you regard critics as a help or a hindrance?
To me, there was a deep particular and unforgotten delight in those early comments by Malcolm Cowley (who "saved" Faulkner from oblivion) and the Southern Robert Penn Warren (the author of All the King's Men.) Glowing praise from the critics, if well-placed and advertised by the publisher, can make a literary career, no doubt about it. People hesitant to think for themselves (inc-luding prize-givers, other reviewers, bookstore buyers, movie people) are very swayed by printed approval. Of course, like all writers, I'm with Joseph Conrad: "When I ask for criticism, I mean unqualified praise."

Which of your mainstream novels would you particularly recommend to your UK mystery readers?
All that they can get their hands on. Red Clay, Blue Cadillac (the short stories) has mysteries in it, including a Justin-Cuddy novella. Handling Sin or Dingley Falls or Foolscap (half of which takes place in England), or the newest, The Last Noel, a love story that takes place over twelve Christmases in the lives of two people from very different backgrounds.

In 1983 you wrote Uncivil Seasons. Why the switch to mystery?
I love mysteries; I wanted to write one, using a first-person narrator. I've said elsewhere, all stories, like all lives, are mystery stories. Our Mutual Friend is a murder mystery in which a man is accused of murdering himself. Oedipus Rex is a murder mystery in which the detective discovers that he himself is the killer. We listen to stories to meet strangers and learn their plots. We are detectives searching for clues to our connections. What happened before, what happens next? Who did it? How was it done? And of most interest, why was it done? The heart of fiction is always to get at the secrets. Because murder is the highest crime against our shared humanness, it is to murder that the community responds most collectively and dramatically, and therefore to murder that the "mystery" turns. We search, we unleash the law, we expose and expel the violator. What could be better for a storyteller than a world of such secrets, such discoveries, such consequences?

What knowledge of the genre and its conventions did you have?
I had been an avid reader of the classic British (Sayers, Marsh, Christie, Innes, etc.) and American mysteries (Chandler, Hammett, etc.). But I think probably the greatest influence was Faulkner.

The novel refers amongst others to Rex Stout, Christie and Chandler. Are these particular favourites?
Yes, they are.

Anyone you would regard, along with Faulkner, as a key influence on your mystery novels?
I would say I was influenced by a tradition rather than an individual. Or two traditions really: the British line of combining a mystery plot with social satire and comedy of manners, so that you get (in for instance Christie or Sayers) a whole community of characters of all classes and disposition; and the double Southern line of focus on the past both in a lyrical brooding way (Justin) and a social political (often racially focused) way (Cuddy). American detective fiction was fathered in the South by Poe and Twain, and has carried on that strong heritage through Intruder in the Dust and To Kill a Mockingbird to the novels of my contemporaries, like James Lee Burke, whom I read with great pleasure. That there should be such a strong Southern heritage makes sense. To solve murders detectives must unearth all the buried social and familial entanglements that led to the crimes. Here in the South, the roots of our lives are tangled deep in a shared rich and painful past. And, as Sam Spade would say, that's the stuff that dreams are made of.

Anyone else on the current scene, apart from James Lee Burke, that you read with pleasure?
For a while, I almost stopped reading fiction. By happenstance I had judged prizes (the Edgar, the National Book Award, the PEN Hemingway) three years in a row. I had to read hundreds and hundreds of novels at a fast pace, and it became harder and harder to resist the impulse to believe that yes you can judge a book by its cover. I turned to history and biography. I'm back now to fiction, both new and old (I do a lot of re-reading of favourite books.) But I could keep fully occupied reading just North Carolina writers, there are so many of us. Maybe, as little Father Time said in Jude the Obscure before hanging himself and his siblings in the closet, "too menny."

How did you arrive at your two central characters, Justin B. Savile V and Cuddy Mangum? Do they have any basis in fact?
Justin and Cuddy are no more or less factual than any other creation of mine. I mean by that that they no doubt grew out of parts of me and parts of everyone I ever met (in the sense that when asked about the basis of Emma Bovary, Flaubert said, "I am Madame Bovary"). I suspect I split impulses in my own personality between the two: Cuddy's irony and humour and political commitment, Justin's romanticism and traditionalism. Maureen says I dress like Justin and joke like Cuddy. I'd say I think like Cuddy and feel like Justin. (Interestingly, women readers of the trilogy have always been quite vocally passionate about their fondness for Cuddy-one woman wrote me that she'd named her dog Cuddy just so she could say, "Hop up on the bed with me, Cuddy,"-far more so than for the better-looking Justin.) Maureen far prefers Cuddy.

Plotting is key to a successful mystery. What is your normal approach to plotting and did you approach this novel in that regard any differently to your previous books?
I do plot out the crime and the path of the discovery. I do admit that the first time through Uncivil Seasons, I was as wrong as Justin about who the murderer was-though I had a different candidate in mind (Old Briggs, who was outraged by my insinuation, as he made clear to Justin.) First Lady was the most carefully planned in advance of my books, both in the sequence of the turns of the plot and the details of those incidents. This was necessary because of the murderer's own very elaborate and deliberate twisting plots.

The plot of Uncivil Seasons is based around a complex network of inter-relating families, business interests, along with a few skeletons in the cupboard. I envisage a huge Hillston genealogical chart on the wall of your study. Or is it all in your head?
I did draw a map of Hillston when I first started Uncivil Seasons. I wrote out a genealogical chart of the Dollards [the family from which Justin is descended. BC] as I began Time's Witness. Justin has a great many relatives and I recall that I had to search through Uncivil Seasons to recover some of those connections. I re-read both these predecessors prior to starting First Lady.

One of the many joys of the novel is the comic dialogue between Justin and Cuddy (and the verbal jousting between Justin and Briggs Cadmean). Did you have any comic or dramatic models in mind whilst writing?
Thanks for the compliment. If their banter springs from anything other than my own predisposition to humour (almost all my novels are comedies), it is more likely 30s and 40s American movies than the Bard.

You sold the film rights to the book. What happened?
It was fascinating to me that Tony Garnett, the producer who first bought Uncivil Seasons for Warner Brothers, was British. He said he was drawn to it by its understanding of social and economic class difference-something rarely found, he thought, in American novels. [British readers will know Garnett as the producer of Cathy Come Home, Kes and, more recently, Sharman and This Life. BC] A screenplay was written in which Cuddy betrayed Justin in order to become police chief. Nobody (as you may imagine) liked it. Time's Witness was bought by NBC and the fellow who [co]-wrote the screenplay of Breaker Morant [maybe Bruce Beresford, says Malone.BC] did a treatment; I gather it was too complex for the suited powers. Neither film was made, but hope still flickers.

What do you think your endorsement by Evan Hunter (as Ed McBain) did for you?
Most importantly, it paved the way for me to meet Evan (after I wrote to thank him for his review of Uncivil Seasons in the New York Times Book Review), and we have now been friends for decades. In terms of the Cuddy/ Justin books reaching their audience, his praise was I suspect of enormous help.

Your second mystery, Times Witness, is an ambitious book, with many interlocking plot strands. What additional problems did that create for you as a writer, and how did you set about overcoming them?
Yes, Times Witness was a difficult book to write because the canvas was so large, and the plot so inter-laced and threaded through the whole social and political structure not only of the town of Hillston (its police department, courthouses, newspapers, political factions, etc), but the state of North Carolina. There was also the intricacy of the trial, which I took great care to present authentically. The book took years to write.

It is also the most politically overt novel that you have written. Why?
Because the theme of the book is also its plot. And the theme makes exactly that point: that the death penalty is profoundly political.

You don't allow Cuddy to answer the question but are you personally in favour of capital punishment?
No, I am not. I am, and have long been, very passionately-and whenever possible very vocally-opposed to the death penalty. Institutionalizing murder for vengeance brutalizes the state. I think it barbaric.

Are there still executions in the state of North Carolina?
Yes, though there is a growing movement to oppose them that is fervent and vocal. The governor stayed a recent scheduled execution and the hope is to persuade the state legislature to call for a moratorium.

OK. You're back, well and truly with the excellent First Lady. What's next?
A novel called The Last Noel. Here's the publisher's description: The Last Noel is a love story of a long and deepening friendship between two very different people. There is Noni, daughter of a town's leading family, and Kaye, the grandson of her mother's maid, who were both born on Christmas Day of the same year, in a small North Carolina town. Set on 12 different days of Christmas during the tumultuous decades between 1963 and 2002, The Last Noel touches on the great turning points in our shared American lives as those times also profoundly affect Noni and Kaye. In the romantic tradition of Pip and Estella in Great Expectations and Heathcliff and Cathy in Wuthering Heights, Kaye and Noni share a lifelong love that shifts and evolves under the cultural and familial pressures they must face. The spirit of Christmas is at the heart of the book.

Back to the mainstream then...Do you still see the mystery novel as an appropriate form for some of your concerns? Or is it now too compromised by its more commercial (and sensational) manifestations?
Again, I think these distinctions need not necessarily apply. Dennis Lehane's Mystic River is a fantastic novel, call it mainstream or mystery.

You mentioned some ideas for a new Cuddy Mangum and Justin Savile book. Where does that fit into your schedule?
Probably after I finish my next book The Four Corners of the Sky.

Michael Malone, thank you very much.

NB All three of the Mangum/Savile mysteries are available in the UK from Constable/Robinson. The remaining Malone novels, with the exception of Painting the Roses Red, are available in handsome new paperback editions from Sourcebooks, Illinois, U.S.A.


Review of First Lady

The Delectable Mountains
Heroes of Eros
Dingley Falls
Uncivil Seasons
Handling Sin

Time's Witness
Foolscap
First Lady
Red Clay, Blue Cadillac
The Last Noel

Used Books at ABE AuthorTitle KeywordPublisher