Outsider Bob Cornwell talks to Newton Thornburg

There's one thing about Cutter and Bone, Newton Thornburg's 1976 masterpiece, that irritates its author. "People know it mainly through the movie", he says,"there's this great book and they haven't read it - but this mediocre movie and everybody's seen it."

Well, normally I would quibble with that "mediocre" but the remark comes at the end of several telephone conversations with Thornburg, taking place over a few weeks before Christmas. And as I have discovered, his concern is usually a practical one: "There are many more movie fans than book-lovers. Millions see the movie; if 10,000 read your book, you're lucky."

There's no quibbling however with that "great". Cutter and Bone is one of the essential novels of post-Vietnam America, one which is as resonant today as when it was first published. Back in 1976, the New York Times called it "the best novel of its kind for ten years". More relevantly perhaps, in recent times Woody Haut has singled it out for comment (in Neon Noir, 1999) and identifies its significance (though Thornburg himself might dispute its genre) as pointing "to the future of crime fiction." In 1990, it "rocked the world" of George P. Pelecanos, who went on to write an introduction for the book's later reissue.

Then in 2002, well after his previously sporadic UK publishing history, mainly late seventies to mid eighties, came his earlier book To Die in California and it was clear that Cutter and Bone was no out-of-the-blue one-off success, but that a considerable writer had been overlooked. In fact, in the UK only five of his eleven novels have ever appeared. Gratitude then, to Serpent's Tail, who, with the recent reissue of Dreamland, now have three key Thornburg titles in print.

Thornburg may, in fact, have been luckier than he knows. Ivan Passer's 1981 film of the book, retitled Cutter's Way, fell foul of the new management installed at United Artists after the Heaven's Gate fiasco. Only a determined effort by some US film critics gave it any kind of an audience, resulting in a meagre US box office take of less than $1 million in its first year of release. Since then, of course, the film has steadily built a cult reputation, becoming available on video in 1991, and on DVD in 2001. But only in the USA. The film is currently unavailable in either format in the UK, though UK cable channel Film Four gave it some exposure in 2002 as part of a Jeff Bridges season.

The novel on the other hand has been published three times in the UK, first in hardback by Wm. Heinemann in 1977. Then in 1988 it was selected by Maxim Jakubowski for his paperback Blue Murder imprint from Simon & Schuster ("I don't know what it has to do with blue murder" snorts Thornburg when I remind him of this!) . Latterly Serpent's Tail would again reprint it in 2001. And now comes news that Cutter and Bone is also about to be republished in France, this time in Gallimard's prestigious Série Noire imprint.

Nevertheless he is right to be concerned. Life has not been kind in recent years to Newton Thornburg. In 1986 his "lovely long marriage" to Karin, his wife of 33 years, ended when she died, he has lost a beloved son to alcoholism and seven years ago Thornburg suffered a stroke that has left him paralysed down his left side. Living with government help in a retirement home near Seattle, he is wheelchair bound, unable to walk, even the most simple tasks a trial. "Sometimes", he tells me early on, "it takes me a while to get to the phone."

Most of all he is physically unable to write. Somehow he managed to complete Eve's Men (1998), though some of it was written ten years before, and that book remains his last published work. He remains philosophical: "A lot of old guys write one more book", he instances Norman Mailer, "and they shouldn't."

Newton Kendall Thornburg (hold onto that Kendall) was born in Harvey, Illinois, in 1929 and lived most of his early life in Chicago Heights, a suburb south of the major city. He grew up with an older brother and two younger sisters in what he describes as a "fundamentalist Christian home". His father owned and ran "a wholesale company that sold paper, candy, drugs and stuff ", a business in which Thornburg would later work. But before that he went to the Illinois Wesleyan College where, amongst other things, he wrote "a short story, five pages. That won an award and was published in the Methodist magazine, Motive. So I was published at age 18."

Painting, however, was his earliest interest: "When I was young, I was a pretty good realistic painter. I still, probably, could be", he says. So, though neither parent was college-educated, he was sent to the University of Iowa: "sounds like a lot of corn, but it had a pretty good art department", he says.

But his interest in writing continued: "I also wrote a lot of stuff for newspapers in college, sport, little features and so forth. It was something I was good at." He read widely in college, Hemingway and Faulkner spring immediately to mind. "Very fine writers, but I thought, I can do that. Well, I could write but it takes a long time before you stop making mistakes." Later he cites "Sartre and Camus, a whole lot of English writers, Graham Greene for instance." More recently, he particularly likes John le Carré and American Alan Furst.

No pure crime writers come to mind however. "I've never considered myself a pure crime writer," he says. "Cutter and Bone is a straight novel, no matter how you look at it - strong characterisations, simple plot. I don't like novels with private eyes you know, formula ones. I like crime stories, but I like them to be about ordinary people not crime professionals."

Only a slim chance then that he was influenced by Ross Macdonald, to whom Thornburg has been occasionally, if inaccurately, compared. After all, their paths may just have crossed in the late sixties when both were residents in Santa Barbara, California (the setting for Cutter and Bone incidentally) and where Macdonald held writers' workshops in his later years. "No," says Thornburg, "I never ran across him. I didn't know much about him until they started comparing me with him."

After graduating from college, he enrolled in the Iowa Graduate Writers' Workshop but he "got bored with it very soon, and just went home and wrote." By this time he had met Karin Larson, his wife to be. Married at age 23, they then "bummed around" for the next four years, living in Manhattan, in Chicago and in a "ramshackle cabin" on her parents' wooded country place.

During their years in New York, Karin worked as a secretary, while Thornburg held down various part-time jobs, all the while trying to make his way in the art world. He'd taken many of his paintings with him: "I was offered a show on 57th Street," (then as now New York's major art gallery area) he tells me, "but only if I did a lot more of these flowery abstractions that I had a way with. I also had with me a beautiful Deposition of Christ, eight feet by five feet, that I innocently felt would make my career. But nobody had any interest in it. I guess it was too realistic, not puzzling enough. You could tell that a human being had painted it."

Disillusioned with the art world, Thornburg returned to Illinois, with Karin, to the "ramshackle cabin". One of Karin's four brothers had a nearby farm with Angus cattle on it and it was here, working, that Thornburg got his first taste of ranching. "Maybe it chimed with some racial memory of being a herdsman,but there was a feeling about it." Later that "feeling" would find expression in the rural episodes of To Die in California as well as in the heartbreaking Black Angus.

But it would be several years before he was able to repeat the experience. In the meantime he returned to the family firm, where he worked, on and off, for about five years. Ironically it was through his previous feature and sports writing that he landed his first independent job, as a copywriter, a career that would take him and his young family through the next ten years and to places such as Milwaukee, St. Louis, and Santa Barbara. "In advertising there is a lot of job movement", he explains, "agencies lose old clients and gain new ones. And that's just what I did. I lost jobs, I found new ones and I moved on."

But through it all he was still writing, though without published success: "I would write at weekends. Sometimes on evenings, I'd try to get in a little bit", he says,"It was a hectic period in my life. I was learning the craft, just like any other writer I think." I ask him about his ambitions at that stage. "To be a writer, to do that and not go to work", he says without hesitation. "Art is the only way really to express yourself, without commercial or even social considerations."

A key element in most, if not all, of the books is a pretty pessimistic view of modern American life; many of his books feature endings that are both bleak and sometimes without hope. Where did that pessimism come from? "Oh, I don't know, probably genetic, some deep familial bent," he replies. "Then, too, I think my fundamentalist upbringing had a lot to do with it. I believed in all that as I grew up. Then I abandoned it. There really was nothing to fill that void. I'm an atheist and that is certainly a pretty bleak and hopeless outlook."

Elsewhere Thornburg has cited Dostoievsky as the writer who had most impact on him. As we have seen, Camus and Sartre were also an influence. Along with Hemingway, all explore themes of alienation. In this context critic John Williams's view (in Twentieth Century Crime & Mystery Writers (St. James 1992) of Thornburg as the definitive 'outsider' starts to make more sense.

There is also a profound scepticism about politics, particularly as practised in post-Vietnam America. "I was a liberal from college," he points out. "Schools in America are staffed almost 99% by liberals. In fact I had a Communist teacher for some courses." Did his cynicism start young? "I suppose I was pretty cynical early on," he replies, adding "You get more cynical as you grow older, but you're not a firebrand anymore." Any specific events that nurtured that scepticism, the Kennedy assassination for example? "Of course his death moved me very much," he replies, "like most people I know exactly where I was at the time. Mainly it moved me because of his youth, you know. It was just terrible to see him shot like that. But I didn't think he was a great president. He was too young. His tenure was too brief." How, politically, would he describe himself now? "Oh, a conservative", he says, "but I'm reasonable."

Later, I put it to him that it must be upsetting to find that much commentary on Cutter and Bone, film or book, even recent reviews of Dreamland, assumes its author to be a man of the left. "I don't resent it, but I'm a little surprised by it. I mean I have almost no agenda. Most writers don't become writers so that they can plug their ideology"

"But", he agrees, " Cutter and Bone did come out strongly against the Vietnam war. So to that extent I don't mind it being (interpreted as) leftist. I'm against this war too. I generally like Bush for what he has done here socially, but I think the war is a ridiculous mistake."

Thornburg's first published book was Gentleman Born (1967) which he wrote whilst still a copywriter. Thornburg "barely remembers it", though he does remember the title he first gave it: The Baths of Caracalla. And when it came back from Fawcett, the title had been changed to Gentleman Born. "I was as surprised as anybody," he says,"I didn't know what it meant." John Williams's outline in the St. James Crime Writers however (old money Midwestern family, father a suicide, son Brandon Kendall going to the bad, small town corruption) suggests that many of Thornburg's key themes - father/son relationships, corruption, both in monetary terms and of ideals, not to mention a key character who is drifting through life - were there from the start.

I ask him if such themes and characters were consciously chosen. Thornburg at first appears to evade the question. Pressed, he says: "Those themes were things I didn't really think about, just there. I'd get a certain idea for a plot, and then the characters would come, and I'd start writing. I've never outlined anything, no matter what the book. The characters sort of take over and I just follow." As the interview proceeds it becomes clear from such responses that Thornburg is very much an instinctive writer. "I'm not motivated by specific things that I could articulate", he says.

Nevertheless those themes remain throughout the books, instinctively, unconsciously, the texture of the times a necessary component of his story, the whole underlined by what may be his definitive theme, described by John Williams as his "terminal pessimism about the state of America".

He agrees too that it was partly his pessimism that caused him to reject the crime genre, with its detectives and its neat resolutions: "But I'm also a very analytical person," he says,"I'm always wondering when I read a mystery novel written in the first person, why is this detective writing this? It just doesn't seem logical."

Gentleman Born came out in 1967 in the Fawcett Gold Medal series, home to many a "pulp" writer such as Charles Williams, Lionel White, David Goodis and Jim Thompson. Thornburg however was not impressed. Then, as now, paperbacks went largely unreviewed and and it took time for a new name to become established: " I blame my agent at the time for the fact that he didn't shepherd me into hardback. I think he just had a friend at Fawcett. If he had told me to get rid of the sex, that would have helped. But I was naive enough to think that was required for a best-seller."

The next book was Knockover also for Fawcett, a "caper novel" according to Williams. Thornburg agrees: "That's accurate. That was more of a commercial effort. I was hoping for a movie sale, and actually it did sell - for a very minuscule sum. But it allowed me to write To Die in California (1973)."

In that book "hero" David Hook, a cattle farmer from Illinois, buries his son, apparently a suicide, and sets out, unbelieving, to discover how he came to die in far-off California. There are two witnesses to the boy's death: a Mrs Rubin, a key figure in the public relations campaign on behalf of Douglas, a young and charismatic politician running for Congress, and Liz Madera, the beautiful daughter of a rich Californian family. But Hook cannot accept their accounts, and decides to pursue each participant until the cracks begin to show.

Again, many of Thornburg's key themes are here: the family tragedy, father and son relationships, the decaying ideals of the sixties particularly apparent in the scenes where Douglas, the Democratic politician whose career will be ruined if he is exposed by Hook, attempts to win Hook round by demonstrating his own idealistic past. And in Hook's reaction to the one-sided political debate between Douglas and his monosyllabic descendant in the house where the older man grew up, we get a first explicit statement of Thornburg's political scepticism: "...all out of the same garbage bag, labels on empty cans, tactics before policy, frenzy in a void."

Hook is also an outsider, "not one of them", not only in California but in his rural homeland. At his son's funeral, for instance, he is able to appreciate "the simple antique beauty of the scene, its evocation of an America all but dead and buried itself now: these neighbours of his, these countryfolk in their shiny Sunday best, the hard vital weathered men and their drab women and cool longhaired young..."

Hook describes California as "alien, brutal and loveless." So why does Hook have it in for California? "The way a lot of Americans do when you grow up in small towns and the country," he explains,"I wouldn't describe it that way today, not the loveless bit anyway, but it sure is gaudy and ugly. Originally though, Jesus, it must have been the most gorgeous land on earth."

Thornburg looked on the beautifully written To Die in California as "a serious literary effort". How did his approach differ from his previous books? "Well, there was less sex in it," he replies, "I wasn't looking to make some big chunk of money with some lurid story, or a mystery. There's a mystery involved in it, but it's something that could happen to anybody." Again he denies any conscious working of theme: " Basically, I was just interested in the character."

To Thornburg's delight, the book was sold, as a hard cover, to Little, Brown: "I say to myself, a hard cover sale, I really want that. Maybe you're going to be a writer after all." Soon after, this time to his surprise, it also sold, for $100,000, to Hal Wallis, the legendary producer of such films as Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon. The deal at last made possible Thornburg's great ambition: to ranch and bring up his young family in rural surroundings. "I bought a small farm in the Ozarks, where things were cheaper, and moved the family there. I bought a little herd of Black Angus cattle. I had money for change, you know, and we soon spent it."

Ironically at the time, he would have preferred to remain in Santa Barbara. "It's a beautiful town," he says,"but I'd talked about the ranch so much to the kids over the years. The boys felt they had to get out of there. They hated the schools in Santa Barbara, because the Mexican kids were all in gangs, threatening, stealing money...they hated it there. And they really had a good time in the Ozarks. You wouldn't really think so, primitive as everybody was, but they did. The boys lived a 1950's kind of life back there."

Shortly after the family's arrival in Missouri, Thornburg flew back to California to work on the screenplay for Wallis's proposed film. But he found the process frustrating: "Whatever Wallis would say might change the whole script. And you had to do what Hal Wallis said. And I just didn't want that. I wanted my work to be my own. I didn't like screenwriting anyway. It's not like real writing." So why did he start? "They paid me for it. I got a couple of scripts from my agent, saw the format and worked at it." With satisfactory results, in his own eyes: "I thought it was a good script, but who knows?" The movie was never made.

The book however, I suggest, was a major success. Thornburg is quick to correct me: "In comparison with what had gone before, yes. But I have never been a best-seller. The paperback sold about 300,000 copies, but I didn't know about that. I didn't make more money than the advance in other words."

It was on his return to his Ozark paradise, extraordinarily, that he started to write the mordant Cutter and Bone (1976). "It's really weird," agrees Thornburg, "Everything was exciting for me, working outside, rebuilding the barn, dealing with the cattle and the grass. Every day I'd get up early and get to work. Then I'd come in about ten o'clock and write for about three hours. It just seemed to flow. I didn't brood about the book at all.

But once it was done, my wife sure brooded on it. She was not a real editor in the sense that she knew writing that well. But she was great though when it came to characters, any false notes. And she'd always criticise my women. She helped me a lot. She'd go through it, and I'd make the corrections, and she would type it. Then she wanted to see it again!" He laughs at the recollection.

How did he get started on the book? "Similar to the others, the characters," he says. "I had this vague idea, but it certainly wasn't conceived ahead of time. And the ending, I had no idea what that would be." Was the character that led him into the story Cutter - or Bone? "Bone," he says. "I knew they would be friends, but I really didn't have an outline. Once again, I had an idea of the main characters and the situation, and then I wrote until the opening ten or twelve pages were satisfactory. Then I kept writing until I discovered what the story was all about."

George P. Pelecanos has described the book's key theme as "America's festering wound in the wake of Vietnam." What was Thornburg's own experience of war? Did he serve in Korea, for example? No, because the asthma and allergies that have plagued him all his life meant that he was classified 4F, unfit for combat. And his kids were too young for Vietnam. But, as he has pointed out, he was against the war. Not that the book had any revolutionary intent. It was mainly triggered by "reading about all these veterans who were psycho from the war. Then we saw things like My Lai."

True to form, it is the characters that lead you into the book. Twenty-five pages in and the character of Richard Bone, "ex-corporate tiger", dropout and part-time gigolo, one ruined marriage already behind him, is etched on our psyche. So too is Mo, Cutter's drugged and alcoholic wife. Not to mention Alexander Cutter himself, the "wild hawk face glowing with the scar tissue of too many plastic surgeries, the black eyepatch over the missing eye and the perennial apache dancer's costume of tight black pants and black turtleneck sweater with the left sleeve knotted below the elbow, not pinned up and sewed but knotted, an advertisement, spit in your eye."

And our curiosity is already aroused as to the significance of the "squat, large-headed figure" that Bone glimpses apparently stuffing surplus golf clubs into a downtown trash can. The following day, the body of a teenage cheerleader is found in just such a trash can, but characteristically Bone will not take his information to the police. Significantly, neither will Cutter. It is not until Bone, very tentatively (he remains in doubt, his vacillations comprehensively captured, to the very last sentence of the book) identifies J. J. Wolfe, a local business man, as the man he saw, that Cutter takes an interest. For Wolfe represents that corporate culture that destroyed Cutter's body in a brutal war: "it's never their ass they lay on the line, man, never theirs, but ours, mine."

Once again the book sold to the movies, for another $100,000. But the film would not emerge for another five years. Originally intended for Dustin Hoffman as Cutter and John Heard as Bone, the director was to be Robert Mulligan, some time beyond the films for which he is most remembered (To Kill a Mocking Bird, Baby, the Rain Must Fall). It was finally assigned to Czech émigré Ivan Passer, best known for his work as screenwriter and director (Milos Forman's A Blonde In Love, his own Intimate Lighting) in pre-Soviet invasion Prague. By this time Heard had taken the role of Cutter, and Jeff Bridges took on Bone. Later Thornburg would visit the set, meeting the principal actors, including Lisa Eichhorn who did such a fine job as Mo, Cutter's alcoholic wife who later dies (though in the film she has no child, which, in the book gives Cutter an added motive for his actions). Thornburg liked her performance too.

But, as you will have gathered, Thornburg is not a great admirer of the film: "I think less of it than you all do. I think the characterisations are fine, the main characters and so on. But before the end, it just got absurd."

Scriptwriter Jeffrey Fiskin, although an admirer of the book, felt right from the start that Thornburg's shotgun ending was too like that of Easy Rider, twelve years before (!), and reshaped the script so that neither Cutter or Bone makes the fateful journey from Santa Barbara to the Ozark HQ of businessman Wolfe (J.J. Cord in the film). I ask Thornburg why he felt the need for his book to make that trip. "I didn't feel the need," he replies, "I'd driven that route before, going the other way. It's an interesting trek. A lot of things I do without premeditation. Very often a nice turn of phrase will dictate character, and everything else."

One thing is clear from the book: Cutter and Bone must make that journey. Wolfe was born in Missouri, the origins of his wealth are there. And Thornburg's descriptions of the Missouri people make it clear that Thornburg has moved on from the simple clash of values (Midwest vs California) of To Die in California. Here, for instance, he characterises the crowd that gathers at Wolfe's rural festival as "Anglo-Saxon and Celt, not unlike a single extended family - a divided family however. For the sexes were like two races apart, the men lean and sunburnt and improbably pleased with themselves...while their women were somehow like chaperones, old fat and peevish." Meanwhile "herds of hyped up kids stampeded the streets and sidewalks, kids every bit as long-haired and raunchy as their coastal counterparts but somehow wilder by far, perhaps because their natural brutish vigour had not been leached out by dope and money and the soporific rays of the Pacific sun."

As for his ending: "I thought to myself, so many people have been killed over the years by shotguns, for heaven's sake. You can't copyright an ending because there's a shotgun."

"Cutter and Bone", says Thornburg, "pleased me a lot. The paperback, I guess, sold quite a bit. It's been selling over the years you know, reprints. Gave me higher expectations than I had any right to entertain however."

One immediate result was a four book contract with publishers Little, Brown, with Cutter and Bone as part of the package. "I had to tell them what the next ones were going to be, with a short outline, plus a paragraph or two. And that was that. My work was cut out for me for the next six years."

First came Black Angus (1978), his farming novel, written at the close of the five year period the family spent on the farm in Missouri. Earlier in our talks he has admitted that farming, after his initial euphoria "can be unpleasant, (especially) when you don't know what you are doing, as I didn't when I went for my own farm." Whilst he clearly does not regret those years, disaster was soon to strike. "After the third year, somehow Bang's Disease, brucellosis got into the herd," he tells me. "They come out every week and test your herd." As a result animals were slaughtered and their meat sold at knockdown prices. "I'd paid several hundred dollars a head, and I had to sell at about a hundred."

Much of that experience is reflected in Black Angus. "Probably something you'd like a lot," Thornburg had said when we first talked. And, against all odds, I did. Once again beautifully written, Thornburg takes to the wide open spaces like he'd never been away. The book opens, in passages that recall Hemingway, with the eventual subjugation (for blood testing) of a Black Angus bull imported to strengthen the herd owned by rancher Robert Blanchard. Blanchard is facing bankruptcy, the "hairline profit" made by Hook in To Die in California now a business that raises "forty cent beef at a cost of fifty cents."

Blanchard has other problems as well: a wife on the point of desertion, Shea, a sponging friend from Blanchard's previous existence in advertising, and Ronda, a waitress in an Ozark bar, with whom Blanchard conducts a casual affair. Most of all there is Tommy, Blanchard's beloved brother, brain damaged at birth, the clean air and freedom of the ranch offering, at last, some form of fulfilling life. But Shea gets in with one or two of the local no-goods, one of whom, Little, has done time for cattle rustling. So, when the herd is diagnosed as infected by brucellosis, an obvious solution is suggested - to Blanchard's disgust.

This is a moving study of a man for whom all the options are running out. Alongside the "silence and substance... peace and quiet, and the feeling that he was doing man's work, honest labour," he finds that the countryside can be just as conformist, venal and violent as the urban society that he left behind. It is perhaps Thornburg's most pessimistic novel. "Anguish pervades Black Angus", said the review in the New Republic, an opinion that is impossible to contest.

Nevertheless it is a fine book, its central situation convincing and believable, its characters authentic and rounded, its conclusion despairing but true. "Not a setting or a story that would please most people," says Thornburg," it had good reviews, and over the years a few producers have optioned it for the movies, but they haven't come through."

There's a scene early in Black Angus in which Blanchard is reminded, by the hostility in the eyes of his Angus bull, "impassive and implacable," of a racial incident from his previous life as an advertising executive. In the context of the book, it is a surprising reflection, so I ask him about it. "I think it's true," he says. "We had feelings like that, not so intense now, but they were, there on the farm."

Those feelings would soon manifest themselves again, this time in Thornburg's next book Valhalla (1980), another of those ideas briefly outlined to Little, Brown several years before. John Williams (op.cit) describes the book as "an apocalyptic novel of a near future in which America is gripped by race war." It was inspired, Thornburg indicates, by that period (mid sixties to early seventies - surely the most apocalyptic of recent American history) of not only anti-Vietnam protest, but when parts of the black civil rights movement took on a revolutionary edge with the arrival of the Black Panthers. "This was not some lifelong deeply held feeling," he says. "It was basically a thing of the times, you know. The cities were burning, Detroit, Washington, Watts in LA. And the kids were rioting on the campuses too, though that was not racial. That was all going on. Besides, I really don't know what would happen in American cities if we suddenly had a financial collapse, the Japanese demanding payment on all our Treasury bills, and so on."

Thornburg thinks it is his weakest book, feeling that his editor at Little, Brown let him down: "He should have warned me that I was straying away from the four main characters, and getting into a lot of trouble."
In total contrast, Thornburg's next book was the haunting Beautiful Kate (1982), one of Thornburg's best novels, still sadly unpublished over here. "I have been back all of three days now, back in my father's house," writes Greg Kendall, 43, unemployed screenwriter, in the remarkable opening paragraph of the novel. "So where else would I find myself but alone upstairs in the old bedroom sitting at the old desk, Bic in hand, trying to exorcise the same demons that drove me out of here in the first place, at the fearless age of eighteen. Goddamn his ancient ass, but I do find it hard to like the man, even now, when I can barely afford to feed myself, let alone indulge some grizzled animosity of the blood..."

Greg, failing young actress Toni in tow, has returned to his family home to lick his wounds. His old home, once a thriving farm, is now landless, absorbed within a sprawling Chicago slum, in thrall to a local black street gang. Greg fled one summer twenty-five years before, leaving his twin sister Kate (resembling "a young Vivien Leigh" observes Toni when she sees a photo) in a coma after a mysterious car crash in which his older brother Cliff also died. Ultimately Greg, in a series of flashbacks perfectly integrated with (and feeding off) the dynamics of the current household, begins to relive the past, attempting reconciliation with his father and trying to come to terms with the events of that summer, events that included Greg's own incestuous relationship with his sister. The climax (in the past) and its aftermath (in the present) are amongst the most shattering - and moving - in Thornburg's work.

The book was based on another of those little outlines he did for Little, Brown back in 1976. "It wasn't that I had been dreaming of writing about a brother and a sister involved in incest," says Thornburg," I'd always been interested, I mean, not to practice it, I mean in the relationship of brothers to sisters, fathers to daughters. The father/ daughter thing is, to me, quite ill. But the brother/sister thing can, I think, have one or two redeeming qualities."

Should we read anything into the fact that Thornburg uses his own family name, as he did in Gentleman Born, for his central character, I ask "No," he says, "I kinda forgot about that." Does the book's central image, the crumbling Kendall home, (latterly snowbound, and unforgettably, one of its four walls partly destroyed by a falling tree) have any basis in fact? "To a certain degree," Thornburg replies. "My home town, Chicago Heights, was a nice little suburb at one time. Now it's just part of the urban wasteland." The father/son relationship is pretty key here, I point out. "But I had no relationship with my father like this, nothing at all," he protests. "He was quite a boring fellow. Perhaps not the best relationship", he adds, "because of religion, and I was the black sheep."

I congratulate Thornburg on the characterisation of both Toni and particularly Kate, two of the most successful women characters in his books, even in an oeuvre where female characters are unusually fully realised. I wonder how far Karin contributed on this occasion. "Not at all," he replies, "I don't think she liked that book because of the incest." And why, finally, did he make the sister the most active in the relationship, when normally, as he points out in the book, it is the male that is the predator? "Oh, I don't think of her as a predator," he protests, "she is a very troubled girl. I really didn't know how it was going to go when I started. But it turned out all right, I think. It has an elegiac quality."

Beautiful Kate is, I think, a crucial book in the Thornburg canon. Heretofore his novels have suggested that his protagonists are at least partly shaped, sometimes destroyed by outside forces over which they have no control: Hook's son David at the hands of a corrupt political machine, Cutter by his injuries in Vietnam for instance, Bone by the merciless capitalism that once supported him. External forces are however almost entirely absent from Beautiful Kate. Even the threat from the neighbourhood street gang appears more imaginary than real. Instead the forces at work come from within the family. The political has in fact become the personal. Recognising this change, the book's resolution is the most positive in Thornburg's major work. Greg has reached some kind of accommodation with his father, has come to terms with Kate's death, maybe has some kind of future.

It is not surprising however that the book never became a best-seller. "I don't know how well it sold", Thornburg says, "royalty statements being what they are. I could write Harry Potter in Love and publishers would say that I still owe them money."

The book has recently been optioned by Australian Bryan Brown, well-regarded actor in such films as Breaker Morant, F/X and Gorillas in the Mist. But Thornburg sees the book's complex flashback structure as a problem. Perhaps not a multiplex hit, I assure him, but there are commercial directors (Steven Soderbergh, Anthony Minghella, even Australian Peter Weir come to mind) who have skilfully deployed the flashback in the past. But however successful they may be, the result might be a problem for Thornburg. He usually likes movies "that plunge straight ahead." But he's resigned to the fact that "the book is mine, the film will be somebody else's."

Beautiful Kate was to end Thornburg's association with Little, Brown. Not because of the book: "They liked that. I don't think they liked Valhalla very much. I wasn't selling enough, I guess." Did they treat him well, I ask? "My five books there were mainly written all on my own," he replies. "I had a good editor there, I liked him. But I guess my background in advertising is such that I don't really need copy editors that much. I would send in the manuscript and that pretty much would be it. I'd get the galleys not much after that. They were a high class operation though, nothing cheap. Nice little touches, like you'd get a bound copy at Christmas of your most recent book. I mean really beautifully bound."

Dreamland (1983) has some features in common with Beautiful Kate. Crow, like Kendall in the previous book, has returned to his father's house to make some kind of peace. Like Kendall, Crow has a young female in tow, this time Reno, a teenage runaway. But its plot development is altogether more conventional. Crow's estranged father is a retired cop, currently relieving the tedium with the occasional private investigation. And the reconciliation process has hardly got under way when Crow's father is found dead in a crashed car, shortly after delivering the results of a brief investigation, carried out on his behalf by Crow and Reno. Only when two strippers, questioned during the investigation by Crow and Reno, are also found dead, does Crow realise that something more than mere chance is at work - and that he can perhaps make peace with his father in another way.

In Dreamland politics is, however, once again more overt. But it is the politics of the corrupt, violently corrupt at that. Once again Thornburg's anger is evident, this time at "those spasms of senseless violence that the times kept visiting on the random innocent". Crow senses, for instance, a new "potential for violence" that "seemed almost like some universal new source of energy, an electricity one could feel in the air." Nevertheless the ending, continuing the trend that started with Beautiful Kate, is the most positive in all of Thornburg's work to date.

Dreamland was born out of the financial insecurity of the years following the end of his contract with Little, Brown: "Basically I wanted to be sure that I wrote a book that would sell to the movies again," he says. "During the seventies I did earn comfortably, but when you have three kids going to college... And we moved quite a bit. Those were comfortable years and I wanted to recapture them. So I made this more of a thriller than anything else I've written. But even here I never like to have the characters, the male hero especially, do things that the average guy could not do. My heroes don't kill people with a swipe to the neck."

I wonder how he managed his larger cast and complex plot. What happens if something goes wrong, in pacing for instance? "I never rewrite totally. As I go along, I might rewrite a paragraph here and there." I mention Hemingway's dictum about leaving the day's writing at a point where it is easy to pick up the following day, 'like leaving an old car at the top of a hill so that it is easy to restart.' Thornburg agrees. "I write in basically the same way. I don't stop if it's twenty after five or something. I would generally write for about three hours."

Dreamland was to be his last conspicuous success. The book was indeed optioned twice, by independent film companies, but was never made into a film. Nor did the book's sales inspire Arbor House, his new publishers, to a multi-book contract.

Seven years would elapse before the final phase of Thornburg's career. These were difficult years in which he was kept afloat by the occasional reprint or movie deal. In 1986, Thornburg's beloved wife Karin died. "I couldn't get hold of anything," explains Thornburg. He remained celibate for over a year. "Then I decided I couldn't live like that. I went through a good many women here in Seattle. Quite an experience. It wasn't anything like my relationship with my wife. I finally married one of them, but that marriage lasted only three or four years. And I lived with another woman for a year." How did the children react during what was clearly a troubled period? "We were always very close. They are wonderful to me."

There would however be three more books: The Lion at the Door (1990) for Wm. Morrow, then A Man's Game (1996) and Eve's Men (1998), both for Forge. None of them, to date, has been published in the UK. All are set, wholly or partly, in Seattle to which the family moved in 1980. All follow, to a greater or a lesser extent the pattern set by Beautiful Kate. Whilst Thornburg's pessimism remains a given, philosophical notions, overt politics and so on fade into the background, woven more into the fabric of the story whilst the books become more focused on personal or individual action. "That's always been my hallmark, I think," says Thornburg," an average person gets caught up in some sort of crime, and it's how he reacts to it, and deals with it." Yes, but now, I point out, some sort of resolution, however messy, is more common, and the endings become more positive. "That's true," agrees Thornburg. "I've never thought of it much. A Man's Game has a neat little Hollywood ending."

In The Lion at the Door, Tom Kohl reluctantly agrees to help his childhood friend Ken when he is involved in a hit and run accident. Kohl's cover-up activities are observed by "cute sexy" Bobbi, a single mum on the run from Rusty, her loser boyfriend. Then Ken's victim turns out to have connections with local organised crime. And Ken disappears.

Unusually for Thornburg, the novel lacks atmosphere, the mechanics of its plot just a little too contrived, the characters often inert upon the page. "Probably my worst book," says Thornburg. But the book is notable for its portrayal of wily, small-time gangster Tony Jack, anxiously protesting his innocence, house in the suburbs, the neighbours watching closely in case some moral line is crossed, not murder or prostitution but say, disturbing the peace.

Altogether more convincing is A Man's Game. "Didn't cause much fuss," says Thornburg. Nevertheless it is, I think, the best of the later novels. In it paper salesman Jack Baird, his marriage crumbling, has to deal with the threat to his 18 year-old daughter Kathy from Jimbo Slade, a new breed of thug, a suspect rapist, amoral, ruthless and clever. In spite of a restraining order however, Slade continues to track Kathy and Baird resolves to confront the man. But instead Baird finds himself drawn into Slade's world, one of sleazy bars and strip clubs, finally setting in motion a course of action which does not go as planned. When Slade turns up dead, Baird finds himself the chief suspect. His actions as he tries to defeat the charge reveal things about himself that he never knew.

A Man's Game is, for most of its length, much more like the Thornburg of old. Slade is an entirely credible villain, the domestic scenes involving both Kathy and Ellen, Baird's increasingly estranged wife, crackle with electricity, the tension between the crime's investigating officer Leo Lucca, and Lee Jeffers, the more sympathetic policewoman, with whom Baird conducts an affair, has the smack of realism. But I do have a problem with that "neat little Hollywood ending". I put it to him that the Thornburg of say, twenty years ago, might have had Baird, appalled at the revelations of his own weakness, pleading guilty to the crime. "I'm surprised," says Thornburg. "I wanted him to get away with it. The reader does too."

At first sight Eve's Men (1996) has little in common with Thornburg's other novels. The book's key plot strand concerns Brian Poole's campaign of vengeance against a Hollywood studio, about to make a film based on the life of a country star with whom he lived for many years before her death from a drug overdose. Brian is convinced the film will defame him and tries to discourage its makers first by bulldozing the set of the film. Brian's older brother Charley becomes involved when Eve Sherman, Brian's recent girlfriend of three years, phones Charley for help with the bail money required after Brian is jailed.

But as Brian pursues his campaign (taking in not only Illinois but California and Seattle) something entirely more subtle is taking place in the background. The focus gradually moves from the political (Brian's campaign) to the personal - the beautifully portrayed shifting relationship between Charley and Eve. Finally, of course, Eve must choose between the two men.

Elsewhere I have speculated that he wrote Eve's Men as some sort of revenge on the Hollywood that, in his eyes, reduced Cutter and Bone to absurdity. But, unaware of Thornburg's early ambitions as a realist painter, I'd missed the significance of a scene where Brian Poole destroys or defaces a roomful of "assemblages" and "found objects" including a painting by the abstract expressionist Franz Kline - a particular bête noire of Thornburg's, I ask? "Oh no," he says, "Mainly it's my feelings in general against modern art."

Thornburg is fond of the book. Why particularly? I ask. "I don't know," he says,"I suppose I like the parts that were written about ten years ago. I don't know that I like any part of it as well as my better books. I do like Charlie though."

We've reached pretty well the end of the interview proper. Only clarifications, supplementaries in a number of separate calls remain. It's been a curious experience, for both of us I suspect. He knows nothing of me other than what I've told him, he is not able to access the Internet. I know him only through the books, his press cuttings largely confined to the seventies and mainly inaccessible to me. At one point I mention the photographs taken by Karin, craggy good looks, fine head of hair, that adorn his hardcovers. "About all I have left," he jokes, "the hair, I mean."

Neither is he comfortably off, though the reprints and the recent option on Beautiful Kate will help. But every day is a struggle; matter of factly he says of his stroke: "it would have been a good time to die." And what of the writing, I ask. Surely that must be a major absence in his life? "I miss writing," he agrees, "and feeling good about it."

It's a sombre note on which to end, so I ask him what was the best review he ever had. He remembers a few, the Los Angeles Times, Time, Newsweek and Business Week. But (about Cutter and Bone) "especially the one in the New Yorker which said , 'a commanding writer, of unusual power and delicacy.' I can put that on my tombstone," he adds. From five thousand miles across the Atlantic, surely I sense a faint smile of satisfaction?

Publications:                                                              Reviews - Dreamland - Cath Staincliffe     &     Bob Cornwell

       Gentleman Born.1997.
The Knockover. 1968.
To Die in California. 1973.
Cutter and Bone. 1976.
Black Angus. 1978.
     Valhalla. 1980.
Beautiful Kate. 1982.
Dreamland. 1983.
The Lion at the Door. 1990.
A Man's Game. 1996.
Eve's Men. 1998.