All Interviews

Mystery & SuspenseMystery

Kate Atkinson

Kate Atkinson has spent her afternoon stuck in traffic. It's hardly an ideal way to pass a day, but after finally making it to her home in Edinburgh, Scotland, the best-selling author sounds undaunted even effervescent in a telephone interview. The cheerful Scottish lilt in her voice probably doesn't hurt.

Of course, Atkinson has a lot to be happy about. She rocketed to success with her first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, which beat out Salman Rushdie to win the Whitbread Book of the Year in 1995. Critics heaped more accolades on her most recent novel Case Histories, including some unimaginably high praise from Stephen King (more on that later). In her latest book, One Good Turn, we revisit Jackson Brodie, the now retired detective from Case Histories. Brodie finds himself at the Edinburgh Arts Festival just in time to become enmeshed in a growing scandal that includes a frightening road-rage incident and the murder of a has-been comic.

Atkinson manages to keep tabs on a host of engaging characters in addition to Brodie, including depressed mystery writer Martin Canning, police detective Louise Monroe and feisty Gloria Hatter, wife of an unscrupulous homebuilder whose illegal practices are about to catch up with him. It's Gloria a 60-something woman who is arguably the soul of the book with whom Atkinson most identifies.

"Gloria is me," Atkinson says with a laugh. "She's the closest to me of all characters I've ever written. She's very strong and secretive, although she doesn't appear to be secretive. She's powerful yet disenfranchised. She likes rules and likes to obey rules. She wants people to do things properly. She's become fascist in her old age. I really feel myself becoming that way." Gloria, who despises her husband's deplorable business dealings and yearns for a clean break, also happens to live in the same Edinburgh suburb, known as the Grange, where Atkinson lives. "I've never brought a character so close to home," she says.

The characters of One Good Turn, including Brodie, who is drifting through retirement, seem to be struggling to find their way. Atkinson sees this as a reflection of the ups and downs of real life.

"I never see them as miserable, unhappy characters," she says. "They're just complex. Most people have fractured lives and are unhappy. I kind of see them as normal people." Such richly imagined characters set Atkinson's books apart from many mysteries, in which the unsolved case generally takes precedence over character development. Despite the success of Case Histories and the subject matter of One Good Turn, Atkinson actually does not consider herself a crime writer.

"People always want to ask a genre question when I write a book," she said. "It's just the book I'm writing. I was aware when I wrote Case Histories that it would be perceived as crime fiction. But I didn't feel I was writing a crime novel. It was just my novel with crime in it." As it turns out, the genre question is not the only thing readers want to ask Atkinson about when she hits the road to promote a new book. While grateful for the support of her fans, Atkinson still is shocked at the level of familiarity some people assume when she appears at book readings. In fact, the character of Martin Canning reflects Atkinson's fascination with the dilemma of being a well-known author who is actually quite private.

"I was once asked by two women at an event how often I had sex!" she recalls. "People think they're intimate with you from reading your books. I never think of giving myself away like that." What Atkinson does give consistently is clever, intoxicating storytelling that keeps readers guessing until the end. One Good Turn is a fast-paced, intricately woven tale of mistaken identity and bad behavior. Atkinson's new novel is even more intriguing thanks to its colorful backdrop: Edinburgh's annual arts festival, a booming mix of dance, music, theater and opera that takes over the Scottish capital (and in fact was responsible for the traffic jam that tied her up all afternoon). Atkinson brings her hometown's quirky festival to life, offering the perfect setting for murder and mayhem. It is a romp of a read that makes good on the promise of Atkinson's earlier efforts.

Which brings us back to Stephen King. In 2005, the author and Entertainment Weekly columnist named Case Histories his favorite book of the year, calling it the literary equivalent of a triple axel and the best mystery of the decade. In King's opinion, this placed Atkinson head and shoulders above some of his other favorite authors from that year, including heavy hitters J.K. Rowling, Ian McEwan, George Pelecanos and Cormac McCarthy. When this is mentioned, Atkinson laughs uproariously, still sounding more than a bit disbelieving.

When King's column appeared, Atkinson recalled, her publicist "forwarded the quote to me in an e-mail, and wrote 'Holy Cow!' with 100 exclamation points. It's a quote you could not buy. That was just a gift, really. It will now be on every book!" And may there be many more Atkinson books on which to plaster that gift. 

 

Amy Scribner is a writer in Olympia, Washington.

Kate Atkinson has spent her afternoon stuck in traffic. It's hardly an ideal way to pass a day, but after finally making it to her home in Edinburgh, Scotland, the best-selling author sounds undaunted even effervescent in a telephone interview. The cheerful Scottish lilt in…

Memoir

Adam Gopnik

Adam Gopnik arrived in New York City from Montreal in 1980 "with a satchel full of ambitions." First among them was the dream of becoming a songwriter. A close second was the desire to write for The New Yorker. He pursued both while officially being in New York to do graduate work in art history at the Institute of Fine Arts.

The songwriting career, alas, remains an elusive brass ring for Gopnik. But after six years of sitting in a 9-by-11 basement apartment on East 87th Street that he shared with his then-girlfriend-now-wife, Martha, hammering out weekly pieces that he would submit to the Talk of the Town section, Gopnik "finally, finally" broke in at The New Yorker in 1986. He soon became one of the magazine’s pre-eminent essayists.

"For me what makes the essay such a miraculous form," Gopnik says during a call to his family’s newer, larger, non-basement Upper East side apartment, "is that it’s the only form where ideas and emotions walk hand-in-hand. The novel or short story can be a highly intellectual form, but . . . when a work of fiction turns toward argument, we feel it’s a distraction from the drama. Similarly if a straight review takes too sharp a turn into the personal narrative, it feels extraneous. But with the essay, that’s exactly what you’re trying to do – find a subject that simultaneously sets off a chain of thought and sets off an association of feeling. When an essay works successfully, it is because it manages to fire on both sets of neurons at once."

In 1995 Gopnik went with Martha and their son, Luke, to be the magazine’s correspondent in Paris. Upon his return to New York in 2000, he published Paris to the Moon, a series of linked essays interweaving previously published and recently written work, a collection that most definitely hit both sets of neurons and is, quite simply, one of the most insightful and amusing books about France available today. Now, six years later, Gopnik returns with Through the Children’s Gate: A Home in New York, a book quite different in subject and tonal shadings from Paris but which is likely to rival it in readers’ estimations.

"I wanted very much for the book to have a particular kind of arc," Gopnik says. "An arc of excitement at homecoming, then loss, and then recovery." The five years he writes about include the devastating September 11 terrorist attacks and the return of the cancer which would prove fatal to Gopnik’s close friend Kirk Varnedoe, art historian and curator of painting and art at the Museum of Modern Art. "I hope that the me in this book, the narrator, goes from being happy to sad to a little bit wiser," Gopnik says.

Gopnik’s subjects here range from a hilarious remembrance of his former therapist, to observations on the strange effects of feral parakeets in Flatbush and telecom switch hotels in Manhattan on the power grid, to what is almost a hymn for 9/11, to the diminishment of the New York department store, once "the cathedral of material aspiration." But the bulk of the essays are given over to very funny and profoundly moving meditations on family life, and particularly on the lives of his son Luke and daughter Olivia as they grow up in New York over these five years.

"As the book makes plain, I like family life," Gopnik says. " I like living amongst kids and I’ve never found that hubbub an impediment to working." In fact, Gopnik admits to "an excess of nervous energy and unless I’ve got some source of noise that can siphon off that nervous energy so that whatever intellectual energy I have can go to work, I get very restless." So while working on this book, he set up behind a screen outside the door of his daughter Olivia’s bedroom, where he was "sort of the forgotten man in the house, listening to the children chatting in the kitchen nearby."

Gopnik says the biggest surprise in returning to New York was to find "how well-suited to children it is. I think it’s probably always been reasonably well-suited but it seems particularly so now. And I’m aware, as I say in the book, that many people find that appalling because they feel the city has become suburban and no longer has the kind of louche creative energy that it did when we arrived a quarter century ago. There’s some truth in that. Like everything else in life, New York is a series of gains and losses and question marks, not simple exclamation points."

The public and private losses are almost overwhelming during this period in New York. But so are the adaptations to loss. Led by son Luke, for example, the family – including the skeptical author himself – responds to the 9/11 attacks by becoming loyal Yankee fans. And in a brilliant arrangement of essays that pairs a seriocomic piece about the death of Olivia’s fish Bluie ("Death of a Fish") and a marvelous paean to Kirk Varnedoe ("Last of the Metrozoids") Gopnik actually moves both himself and his readers toward wisdom.

"My friend Kirk Varnedoe is in some sense the hero of this book," Gopnik says. "By brutal coincidence he had a recurrence of cancer just before 9/11 and in effect knew he was dying from that Fall on. On the day that 9/11 happened, he said, here is something that we can experience either as an injury or as an imagery. If we experience it as an injury, we will experience it as tragedy and grief. And tragedy and grief are things we can recover from. But if we experience it as an imagery, it will simply run on a recurring loop and never end.

"I am as haunted by what happened as anybody else is, but mortality is the circumstance in which we live, whether it’s the horrible murderous mortality of 9/11 or the comic mortality of poor Bluie or the slow death of a dear friend. In each case we cannot help but mourn, and we cannot help but begin again. If there’s a life lesson in the book – and my children always accuse me of offering far too many life lessons – I hope that’s it."

Alden Mudge fled New York City in 1989 for the left coast, and arrived just in time for the Loma Prieta earthquake.

Adam Gopnik arrived in New York City from Montreal in 1980 "with a satchel full of ambitions." First among them was the dream of becoming a songwriter. A close second was the desire to write for The New Yorker. He pursued both while officially…

FictionHorror

Stephen King

Stephen King has been scaring us silly for 35 years with the simplest premise: What if? For instance, what if dogs could kill (Cujo)? Or clowns (It)? Or telekinetic prom queens (Carrie)? Or a '58 Plymouth Fury (Christine)? Or cell phones (The Cell)?

The "what-if" behind King's haunting, horrific and ultimately transcendent new novel, Lisey's Story, is a decidedly personal one: What if I'd died after being hit by a minivan on that Maine country road in 1999?

King's accident made headlines worldwide and prompted many to wonder: Will he ever write at peak form again, and if so, what might his fertile imagination create out of his own near-death encounter?

Lisey's Story is our answer. At once King's most personal and most playful novel, it examines the quarter-century marriage of best-selling novelist Scott Landon through the eyes of his widow Lisey (pronounced LEE-see), two years after her husband's death. King uses pivotal moments in the marriage—an enchanted snowbound honeymoon, a Mark David Chapman-like assassination attempt at a Nashville library groundbreaking ceremony—as portals into the secret emotional sanctuary, complete with its own language, that the couple built together to keep the encroaching world at bay.

In life, Scott escaped his demons—including a horrific family madness that made his childhood a living hell—by retreating to Boo'ya Moon, a creative haven with its own internal logic. In Boo'ya Moon, all the bools (ritualized treasure hunts taken from King's own childhood) end with candy bars instead of bloodletting, and no bad-gunky (murderous rage) is allowed. After Scott's death, as Lisey sorts through his papers, she becomes the target of rabid academics (dubbed Incunks), and one fanatical fan in particular who will force her to return to Boo'ya Moon one last time for a fight to the finish.

What scares Stephen King? If we can read between the lines of Lisey's Story, it's the devastating effect his own untimely demise might have had on his wife and fellow novelist Tabitha, to whom this book is dedicated.

 

In an interview with BookPage, King cautions that Lisey's Story should not be read as autobiographical—for instance, the Kings have three children, the Landons are childless—but he admits that his own thoughts on mortality permeate the pages.

"Sure, there's no doubt about that. I had the accident, and then as kind of an outfall of the accident, two years later I had pneumonia because the bottom of my right lung was crumpled and nobody realized that. It got infected and that was very serious, that was actually closer [to death] than the accident. So I had some of those mortality issues," he says.

While he recuperated and weaned himself from pain medications, he started thinking about the unsung hero behind the artist.

"Spouses of creative people never get credit, and a lot of time they get the blame," he says. "There's that story about Robert Louis Stevenson's wife urging him to throw the first draft of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde into the fire, which he did, and then he wrote the thing again. What nobody ever suggests is that maybe she was right and that the second go-round was actually better than the first."

That said, King concedes that Tabitha King, who edits his books as he does hers, seems to have reservations about Lisey's Story.

"I don't think she's real crazy about this book, to tell you the truth," he says. "I think that she respects it and everything, but she's real quiet about this book. She says to me sometimes, 'Are you ever going to write about anything besides writers?' I do think sometimes she feels like I've gotten caught in a little bit of a warp there. And she may feel that it's a little close to the bone."

King, like his character Scott, is passionate about what he terms "the pool" from which we all draw the language to articulate our thoughts and feelings.

"It's a real, literal place; it isn't just some kind of an arty-farty, ephemeral deal. It makes a difference in the way we live and you can see it day to day," he says. "Every time a monster like Karl Rove crafts a phrase like 'flip-flop' or 'cut-and-run' and it becomes part of the language, he's going down to the pool and casting his net and saying, Look, this matters. And it does, because that gets amplified in the popular culture and becomes a factor in the way people perceive the political process and the way they vote."

King heaps the most scorn here on academics who dog the heels of famous writers, hoping for a rare scrap on which to build their own reputations. As one who has spent more than half his life as one of the world's most recognizable writers, does he simply ignore the critics, or does he feel underappreciated by the literary community precisely because he's, well, King of the hill?

"Sometimes I feel both ways," he says. "At the end of the year, the [New York] Times Book Review will do a list of the books of the year that mattered, and I always feel on some level that any book that sells X number of copies is de facto excluded because there's a feeling that once you sell a certain number of copies, you can't be good. It's like if too many people are reading you, some kind of mathematical formula comes into play which says ergo, the IQ of your book equals… you must be doing stuff on a James Patterson level. That's a little bit bothersome. But on another level, you just kind of dismiss that and say I'm going to do the best work that I can and try to ignore that and be very grateful that the bills are paid."

King admits part of him didn't want the writing of Lisey's Story to end. "I'm a fool for Lisey; I kind of fell in love with her. I'm working on a book now and I had trouble finding traction on anything after Lisey's Story because there's part of you that says it's going to be a long time, if ever, before I write anything this good again."

Jay MacDonald writes from Austin, Texas.

Stephen King has been scaring us silly for 35 years with the simplest premise: What if? For instance, what if dogs could kill (Cujo)? Or clowns (It)? Or telekinetic prom queens (Carrie)? Or a '58 Plymouth Fury (Christine)? Or cell phones (The Cell)? The "what-if" behind King's haunting, horrific and ultimately transcendent new novel, Lisey's Story, is a decidedly personal one: What if I'd died after being hit by a minivan on that Maine country road in 1999?

Mystery & SuspenseMystery

Elizabeth George

Just weeks away from moving into her new dream home, best-selling mystery writer Elizabeth George is having second thoughts about the weather. Said dream home, you see, is situated on Whidbey Island in the shadow of the rainy Cascade Mountains of Washington State. She and her husband Tom have been overseeing its construction for three years from their Seattle condo and are ready to embrace the bucolic country life. Still, George is worried about the notorious Northwest rain—she’s afraid there may not be enough of it.

"I’m a [stormy] weather girl, I love weather," George admits. "The 34 years I spent in Southern California were really torture for me because I love it when it rains. I always have, ever since I was a child, because when it was rainy out, we were allowed to read and when it was sunny out, my mom always wanted us to go out and play. I’m exactly the opposite of most people; I find extended sunshine very, very depressing. It’s very weird."

Her atmospheric preference certainly helps lend a soaked-to-the-skin authenticity to her 14 best-selling British mysteries that feature noble-born Scotland Yard Inspector Thomas Lynley, his working-class assistant Barbara Havers and his wife, Lady Helen Clyde Lynley, who was shot and killed by a young assailant in last year’s shocker With No One as Witness.

Fans left wondering about Lady Helen’s murderer will be richly rewarded in What Came Before He Shot Her, a prequel of sorts that tracks the events leading up to the crime from the assailant’s point of view.

As the story opens, three siblings—15-year-old Ness Campbell, 11-year-old Joel and seven-year-old Toby—are left to fend for themselves in racially mixed North Kensington when their grandmother dumps them on their decidedly non-parental Aunt Kendra and jets back to Jamaica. When Ness becomes tragically involved with sex and drugs and Toby retreats into an imaginary world of his own, Joel tries desperately to keep his family out of the child welfare system by seeking protection from Blade, a neighborhood drug dealer. Events beyond his control eventually lead him to the Lynley doorstep in Belgravia with a pistol in his hand.

In Joel’s descent, the author explores some heartbreaking truths about disenfranchisement, race, poverty and the plight of children caught in a world they can neither understand nor escape.

"There are so many kids who are basically good people to whom life has dealt a very, very difficult hand of cards that they play as best they can, sometimes with tragic results," she says.

George initially planned to incorporate Joel’s story in With No One as Witness. "My original intention in the previous book was to create something called an hourglass plot, in which two parallel novels run along and then meet in one terrible moment in time, which of course would be Helen Lynley’s death, and then they go on their separate ways again," she explains. "But as I wrote, I began to see that, in order to do the Joel story justice, I was going to end up with a novel that was about 1,500 pages long with a cast of characters like something out of a Russian novel. I thought that what might be more interesting would be to remove the Joel story and then create an entire novel just about this little boy, so that’s what I did."

George is no stranger to working with children, having taught English for 14 years in Southern California. She’s also familiar with the Kensington area of London, where she’s had a flat since 1995. But it took a variety of influences to capture the Anglo-Caribbean patois of the streets.

"I have always watched a great deal of British television, so that was helpful. Also, having read a couple of novels where that was used also helped. The work of Courttia Newland, a young British writer, was extremely helpful to me, because his entire book, The Scholar, is written this way. I was able to examine that and see how he was structuring language," she says.

By now, George is comfortable being known as the most famous British writer who is not British—she was born in Ohio and raised in what is now California’s Silicon Valley. Still, new fans are often shocked to hear her American accent.

"Stylistically, I have always written more like a British or European writer than an American writer," she says. "Setting the books in England gives me much more leeway to do that, I think."

George became an Anglophile at an early age during the British invasion.

"It was right at the time that almost everything associated with pop culture in the United States was British in origin. There was the Beatles and all the groups that followed them, and Mary Quant from London was defining fashion, and motion pictures were introducing us to Michael Caine and Terence Stamp and the Redgraves. My cultural awareness was really informed by things British, so I had a natural interest and inclination toward that part of the world and it just never died."

Although her next novel will return to the Lynley series, George is open to attempting another stand-alone if the opportunity presents itself. "If I did a book similar to this, I would probably choose something tangentially related to another novel, and write that character’s story," she says.

Would this "British" writer ever set a novel in the U.S.?

"I wouldn’t shy away from it if I felt that I had a compelling story to tell in a location that really worked for me," George says. "Location is crucial to my books. I’ve been careful to go to places to make sure that I am going to feel that mystical or visceral connection that allows me to say yes, this is it, this is the place I’m going to write about."

A native of Washington State, Jay MacDonald now makes his home in sunny Austin, Texas.

 

Just weeks away from moving into her new dream home, best-selling mystery writer Elizabeth George is having second thoughts about the weather. Said dream home, you see, is situated on Whidbey Island in the shadow of the rainy Cascade Mountains of Washington State. She…

FictionWomen's Fiction

Nicholas Sparks

Nicholas Sparks has been the undisputed master of the modern-day love story since the 1996 publication of his debut, The Notebook. His 11th novel, Dear John, follows two star-crossed lovers wholesome Savannah Lynn Curtis and soldier John Tyree who face life-altering decisions when love and honor intersect. John and Savannah are biding their time until the end of John’s tour of duty, when he’ll be free to leave the Army so they can truly be together but the events of 9/11 convince John that it’s his duty to re-enlist. When their long separation proves too much for Savannah to bear, John receives a tear-stained letter and eventually returns home to find her married to someone else. Sparks took the time to answer our questions about love and heartbreak from his home in North Carolina, where he lives with his wife, Catherine, and their five children.

Have you ever received a Dear John letter?
 No. But I do know people who have received them. The letters are always heartbreaking.

Several of your previous novels were inspired by your family’s experiences. Was that the case with Dear John? Actually, the novel was inspired by the movie Casablanca. It’s one of my favorite films, and for those who read the novel to its conclusion-it’s easy to see the parallels between the two. Both the film and the novel explore what it means to love another.

September 11 changes your characters’ lives. Where were you on 9/11, and what effect did the events of that day have on you and your family?
 I was at home, glued to the television. I watched the towers fall and felt sick to my stomach. As for the effects, it saddened me; even now, I think the world changed on September 11, and not for the better.

You have a daughter named Savannah, just like the heroine of this book, and you’ve named other characters after your children as well. How do your kids feel about that?
 They don’t care. Not yet, anyway. Maybe one day, they’ll get a kick out of it.

Did you research life in the military before writing this novel? Do you know someone serving overseas?
Yes, though my research was relatively slight. Most of the novel deals with internal conflict, and the novel isn’t meant to be an in-depth look at lives of soldiers overseas. Also, you’ve got to keep in mind that eastern North Carolina has a massive military presence, and a good number of my friends serve in the armed forces. As for family, I had a cousin stationed in Germany (just like John Tyree); he spent a year in Iraq, mostly in Mosul as part of the Strykers.

Your books are all about enduring love. How do you keep romance alive in your relationship?
Both my wife and I work on our relationship. We make time for each other since we both believe that’s one of the best lessons you can teach your children.

What are you working on now?
 I’m working on ideas for the next novel. Hopefully, I’ll have most of the story worked out before I head out on tour.

Nicholas Sparks has been the undisputed master of the modern-day love story since the 1996 publication of his debut, The Notebook. His 11th novel, Dear John, follows two star-crossed lovers wholesome Savannah Lynn Curtis and soldier John Tyree who face life-altering decisions when love…

Children's & YAPicture Book

Sandra Boynton

Sandra Boynton may be the only New York Times best-selling writer with a Grammy nomination and more than 4,000 greeting cards under her belt. Her 2002 combined picture book/audio CD Philadelphia Chickens reached #1 on the bestseller list and featured stars such as Meryl Streep, Laura Linney and Natasha Richardson singing in an “imaginary musical revue.” With One Shoe Blues, Boynton succeeds in a new creative venture: writing, directing and designing a short film. B.B. King and a group of loveable sock puppets star in this book and nearly 5-minute music video about the familiar frustration of misplacing a shoe. In an email Q&A, Boynton answers questions about losing stuff, her dream project and working with B.B. King.

“One Shoe Blues” is your filmmaking debut. Why did you want to try a short film?
I wanted to try film because I was curious to know what it was like. Also the possibility of spectacular failure is much too intriguing to pass up. The most challenging part was during the actual shoot: having to keep in mind and coordinate the technical demands of filming simultaneously with responding to and guiding what the actor is doing. The most fun was working with such an exquisite performer. B.B. King’s sublime musicality, subtle comedic talent and unfailing benevolence are nothing short of extraordinary.

The song “One Shoe Blues” debuted in 2007, on the book and CD Blue Moo: 17 Jukebox Hits from Way Back Never. Of all the songs from that CD, why did you choose to turn “One Shoe Blues” into its own book and movie?
At the original recording session with B.B. for the song of “One Shoe Blues” —in March 2007 at Avatar Studios in New York City—I watched in awe as B.B. King assumed easily and plausibly and with brilliant humor a child’s persona. It’s this skillful and nuanced wry transformation I wanted to capture on film.

Why did you decide to sell your CDs inside of books, instead of directly in music stores?
It’s partly practical: I’m not a singer, so in music stores, I have no slot. The CDs would be lost somewhere in the haze of “Children’s: Various Artists.” But the important reason has to do with the wonderful relationship I have with Workman Publishing. I’ve been with them nearly 30 years—all that time with the same editor, Suzanne Rafer. Suzanne and the ingenious company founder, Peter Workman, support me and guide me in pretty much any quixotic and inexplicable direction I want to go. Also, I like the dimension a book adds to a child’s experience of this music I write. And, too, a book means I get to do more drawings.

When were you first introduced to the music of B.B. King? Did you grow up listening to the blues?
I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know B.B. King’s music. Everything is right in what he does: the unfussy yet complex vocal journey, that impossibly articulate guitar, the yearning, the knowing. I grew up listening to an eclectic mix of the records my parents played—Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, Shirley Bassey, Tommy Dorsey and a whole lot of choral and instrumental classical music—and the music played on the legendary AM radio stations of 1960s Philadelphia (these stations include those from New York City on clear nights.) I somehow assume I first heard B. B. King on Cousin Brucie’s WABC show. Which is why I have Cousin Brucie do a radio intro at the beginning of this short film.

The co-star of One Shoe Blues is the sassy Momsock, a sock puppet. Why did you include sock puppets in your book?
It seemed to me that sock puppets are the clear choice to appear in a video called “One Shoe Blues.”

What was B.B. King’s response when he found out that he’d be working with sock puppets?
I suspect the sock puppets are a significant part of why he said yes. He has a distinctly droll and playful approach to things.

You dedicated One Shoe Blues to “people who lose stuff.” Do you lose a lot of stuff?
Ah. When I wrote the dedication, it did occur to me that it was really a self-dedication. It’s mildly defiant, I guess. My father was a kind and patient man, but I remember his frequent exasperated, “Sandra, I do wish you could keep track of your things.” I couldn’t, and can’t, and neither apparently can B.B King. At the recording session, B.B.’s grandson said, “This song is so him.”

In the “making of” video, we learn that the filming of “One Shoe Blues” was bumped at the last minute from September to July. Did the tight deadline cause the movie to change at all from your original vision?
Although it made for some terrifying preparation, I think if anything the tight schedule enhanced the project, because there’s great energy and focus in that kind of pressured collaborative work. We did have to film some of the sock puppet shots later, and that also turned out to be a good thing, since we were able to better evaluate exactly what was needed to complement B.B’s work and complete the film.

If you could collaborate with any musician or actor, who would it be? Why?
I’ve been so lucky to have worked with so many of my heroes already. I don’t know: Mark Knopfler? The Dixie Chicks? REM? Foo Fighters? Gwen Stefani? Rufus Wainwright? Muse? The Rolling Stones? (There’s nothing like being cheerfully and profoundly unrealistic, I think.)

Describe your current project.
I’m thinking of cleaning my room. Though maybe I’m not quite ready.

RELATED CONTENT:
In her own handwriting, Sandra Boynton answers questions about Hey! Wake Up! (2000).
Video about the making of “One Shoe Blues”:

Sandra Boynton may be the only New York Times best-selling writer with a Grammy nomination and more than 4,000 greeting cards under her belt. Her 2002 combined picture book/audio CD Philadelphia Chickens reached #1 on the bestseller list and featured stars such as Meryl Streep,…

Children's & YA

Shannon Hale

Shannon Hale's 2005 novel Princess Academy was not only a bestseller but an award winner as well, earning a Newbery Honor and a spot on the ALA Notable Children's Book list. That highly prized princess tale, which brought Hale's work to the attention of a wider audience, is just one of the imaginative worlds she has created. Her most recent release, River Secrets, is the third in a line of companion books set in the magical land of Bayern, where characters of supernatural talents discover new strengths and abilities.

"I really do believe everybody has some kind of superpower or some secret talent. People of all ages have many things they're good at. They're a little different from other people," Hale tells BookPage from her home in Salt Lake City. "That comes out when I write these books. These characters find out they have talents that other people don't and discover what it means to them." When she writes, Hale purposefully avoids emphasis on her characters' ages, which may help to explain why River Secrets, and its two companion books, The Goose Girl and Enna Burning, are attracting an audience of all ages. "Half of my readers are adults, usually women, and the other half are preteens and teens, mostly girls."

So who does she target while she's writing? "My audience is always me. In fact, when I wrote The Goose Girl, I had not thought about it as a young adult book. I felt it was something that would have pleased me at a younger age, as well as now. But until I had an agent who said this is YA, I had not considered it that way." Hale gleans feedback about her crossover appeal from her book signings and her popular website (squeetus.com), where she blogs about everything from raising a toddler son to teaching the classics. Teens and older readers alike tell Hale they find life parallels in Razo, Enna and other intriguing characters from the three books in the Bayern series, which don't have to be read in any particular order.

Razo, a minor character in the first two books, stars in his own adventure in River Secrets. He's an unlikely main character for any story and probably would say so himself. Constantly pestered by his older brothers, Razo spends a lot of time alone in the woods, his only talent the firing of a slingshot that often provides squirrel for a family meal. Little does he realize how much his bull's-eye ability will come in handy, and no one is more thunderstruck than Razo himself when he is chosen to join a peacekeeping mission to the hostile enemy land, Tira. Razo becomes a major player in finding the truth in the darkest of shadows of Tira. He finds the first of many scorched, charred bodies and must solve a deadly mystery. In time, Razo discovers he has a knack for being a spy and turns into quite a liaison, befriending the lowest and the highest of rank. People trust him. Some of the young women even flirt with Razo, much to his bewilderment. But in spite of the help of his extraordinarily talented comrades, who have powers to harness wind, rain or fire, this peacekeeping mission is forever being sabotaged. Razo's time in Tira is rapidly running out, and the lives of Bayern's ambassador and his beloved friends are in his self-doubting hands.

As in all of Hale's books, River Secrets hosts a cast of players who accept one another's imperfections but tease each other about their flaws in good-natured fashion. A lesson in acceptance, perhaps? "If I thought I was writing a book to teach somebody something, I'd be completely paralyzed," laughs Hale, who notes that the fantasy genre lets readers find their own themes within each of her stories. "It allows readers to take from the book what they want. They read into the book their own struggles and needs I think that's fantastic."

Will there be a fantasy number four? "Bayern feels like a home to me, and I can't say how many there will be," Hale says. "I'm in love with a lot in Bayern. Razo's sister is next." So Razo's little sister is making noise for her own fantastical tale? That's terrific news for Hale's fans, who should also watch for a graphic novel, Rapunzel's Revenge, which Hale is co-writing with her husband, and an adult novel from this talented author on the rise.

Dee Ann Grand writes from a crowded couch with her two English cocker spaniels, one on either side of her laptop.

Shannon Hale's 2005 novel Princess Academy was not only a bestseller but an award winner as well, earning a Newbery Honor and a spot on the ALA Notable Children's Book list. That highly prized princess tale, which brought Hale's work to the attention of…

Memoir

Ed Viesturs

Be careful what you let your children read. That may be one of the unintended lessons in Ed Viesturs’ thoroughly absorbing memoir about his 17-year campaign to climb the world’s 14 highest mountains, No Shortcuts to the Top.

Growing up outside Chicago in the early 1970s, Viesturs happened to read Maurice Herzog’s story of his 1950 ascent of Annapurna, the first 8,000-meter mountain ever climbed. After that, "I just felt that Illinois was not quite right for me," Viesturs says during a call to Bainbridge Island, Washington, where he lives with his wife, Paula, and their three young children.

In fact, nothing but the Himalaya would ultimately satisfy the questing urge inspired by that and other accounts of adventure Viesturs read as a youth. "For whatever reason, I like things that are difficult," he says, " things that are not only athletically challenging but that also make me really think about what I’m doing and how I’m doing it. Plus it’s just so beautiful up there, and the higher you go, the more spectacular it gets. You realize you are only one of a few people to be in these amazing places."

Viesturs is one of just 12 humans ever to have climbed all the world’s peaks over 8,000 meters high – all of them in the Himalaya – and one of only six people to do so without supplemental oxygen. As a guide, Viesturs also climbed many of these mountains using extra oxygen, which afforded him the stamina to assist client climbers. He has summited Everest six times and, as he vividly describes in the book, was on that mountain in 1996 as logistical organizer, lead climber and on-camera talent for the IMAX movie expedition when disaster struck.

Two of Viesturs’ friends and longtime climbing companions – Rob Hall and Scott Fischer (who was the photographer at Ed and Paula’s wedding) – were among those who died in the fierce storm on the mountain that year, despite the heroic efforts of Viesturs, the IMAX team and others to save them. In No Shortcuts to the Top and in conversation, Viesturs is characteristically modest about his selflessness in giving up scarce resources and even scarcer time to rescue other climbers. "I’ve always felt that if other people need your help, that is the priority," Viesturs says. "If I knew that I got to the summit but another climber didn’t make it because I didn’t stop and help, that would bother me to the end of my days." Viesturs writes movingly about sitting with the frozen bodies of his friends after the storm had passed.

In a conversational tone that is remarkably similar to his relaxed, candid speaking style, Viesturs, with co-author David Roberts, writes about both the physical and financial challenges of being a mountaineer (he was fanatical about training, but in the early years struggled without sponsorship to finance his climbing expeditions while working first as a veterinarian and then – because it offered a more flexible schedule – as a carpenter); about the stress his career put on his family ("Hopefully it comes out that I’m sensitive to other people’s feelings, and Paula’s in particular"); about the details of daily life during a climb (which included long periods of waiting for good conditions, so that Viesturs would "read 20 books on an expedition . . . everything from the latest Tom Clancy to the classics to books by other mountaineers"); and about the personalities of the mountains he has climbed and the companions he has climbed with.

Fittingly, Annapurna was the final and most dangerous mountain Viesturs climbed in his quest. One of the most disciplined and safety-conscious climbers of all time, he had twice turned back from Annapurna’s summit before finally reaching the top on May 12, 2005. "I’ve always felt if I didn’t fail because of my lack of desire or training, I was fine with turning back. It was the mountain that was calling the shots," Viesturs says. "You can’t conquer a mountain. By having the right attitude, by being humble and respectful, I was allowed to go up. And I was allowed to go down. You have to follow your instincts and budget your resources and just keep plowing through it. And you have to remember that getting to the top doesn’t prove anything. It’s getting back that shows you have strength and intelligence. Otherwise it doesn’t mean a thing."

Alden Mudge has trekked to Everest base camp at 18,500 feet.

Be careful what you let your children read. That may be one of the unintended lessons in Ed Viesturs' thoroughly absorbing memoir about his 17-year campaign to climb the world's 14 highest mountains, No Shortcuts to the Top.

Growing up outside…

LifestylesHealth & Fitness

Mireille Guiliano

Big grins will break out on faces across America when readers check out the diet menus devised by Mireille Guiliano for French Women for All Seasons: A Year of Secrets, Recipes and Pleasure, the sequel to her surprise bestseller, French Women Don’t Get Fat.

Chocolate, champagne, cauliflower gratin, duck breasts with honey glaze, pork chops with apples this isn’t crash dieting, but a liberating philosophy that imbues life and eating with joy, satisfaction and sensory sensation. Guiliano has already received thousands of e-mails describing how her approach has created newly minted Francophiles with a fresh way of seeing the world.

"The best compliment is from friends who say the book is like having a conversation with you," Guiliano says with an accent full of the energy and charm that fill her books. "I write like I speak . . . and I speak my mind."   Fans of the first book will recall that Guiliano gorged on pastries and became chubby while in America as an exchange student, and began her quest to lose the weight after a blunt comment from her father ("You look like a sack of potatoes") upon her return home to France.

Enlisting the help of family physician Dr. Miracle, Guiliano reacquainted herself with fresh, homemade food and revisited the tenets her mother and grandmother taught her about tiny indulgences. She eventually returned, svelte and stylish, to the U.S., married an American and landed a job as CEO of Veuve Clicquot, the venerable champagne house established during the French Revolution with Barbe-Nicole Clicquot Ponsardin, an equally impressive female, at the helm. Before Guiliano ever thought of writing a book, however, women often noted that while she traveled the world, entertained constantly and was passionate about food and wine, she didn’t become fat. Not wanting to share her personal history ("I couldn’t say been there done that," she says) she would instead shrug in the French way and say offhandedly that French women don’t get fat.

After her co-workers and friends begged her for more specific advice and began to lose weight with her approach, a Francophile friend finally persuaded Guiliano over lunch in a Paris café to sit down and write about what she had taught them.

French Women for All Seasons presents more easy recipes from family and friends featuring fresh, seasonal ingredients, along with Guiliano’s recommendations for adding gentle exercise and simple, sensual pleasures throughout the day, from dressing and working to relaxing, eating and entertaining (she even shares the secrets of tying scarves à la Francaise).

"The first one is about joie de vivre,"  Guiliano says of her books,  "the second about the art of living." Guiliano’s cheerful confidence and flair have made her popular on the speaking circuit where she presents her ideas to women’s groups and college students, and continues to inspire readers of both sexes and all ages to shed pounds and tons of anxiety. "I’ve learned a lot since the first book came out,"  she says.  "People like being made aware of quality and freshness." Call it natural female suspicion, or looking for evidence of theory in action, but women are now scrutinizing every detail of Guiliano’s life ("Oh, yes, it’s crazy,"  she says) as she moves from continent to continent, from green market to café to charity cocktail function, watching what she buys and eats for proof that her secrets really work.

And it does: The balance of indulgences and compensations can lead to good health, and she often hears comments that "it’s a shame that it had to come from someone outside the culture,"  Guiliano says. Americans apparently needed to hear the message from someone representing a culture known for its rigorous dedication to aesthetics flabby and fat is something the French won’t abide, even in their pigeons. "If I were a sociologist or anthropologist, I could write about it,"  she laughs. But Guiliano somehow manages to turn unrealistic European standards into a gentle, non-recriminatory exercise in living well in her two sensible guides.  "When you desire it, eat a rich crepe take the time to savor it and eat it with pleasure. Eating on autopilot is the biggest no-no,"  Guiliano says.  "Don’t deprive your body, because we all know everything is in the mind."

"And,"  she finishes with characteristic, no-nonsense flair, "it’s just not necessary."  

Deanna Larson writes from Nashville.

 

Big grins will break out on faces across America when readers check out the diet menus devised by Mireille Guiliano for French Women for All Seasons: A Year of Secrets, Recipes and Pleasure, the sequel to her surprise bestseller, French Women Don't Get Fat.

FictionHistorical Fiction

Jody Shields

A World War I-era photograph of Boston socialite artist Anna Coleman provided the spark for Jody Shields’ new novel, The Crimson Portrait. "It was a black-and-white picture of Anna holding a paintbrush to a man’s face," Shields says from her home in the Soho district of New York City. "The caption said she was an artist who painted masks for men with injured faces. I was immediately captivated."

With this real-life character as her starting point, Shields has created a lushly descriptive novel based on little-known events of World War I. Her willingness to gambol in the ambiguous fields between historical fact and imaginative invention also marked Shields’ widely hailed first novel, The Fig Eater, a detective story based on Sigmund Freud’s groundbreaking case study "Dora." And as was true in that first novel, Shields in The Crimson Portrait is after something more than historical and psychological veracity. She is interested in the relationship between the shiny seductive surfaces of the known world and our notions of personal identity, grief and love.

As it turns out, the real Anna Coleman went to France with her husband, a doctor – before the United States entered World War I – as part of the Harvard Medical Corps of volunteers. Also among the corps was a dentist named Anton Kazanjian, who had fled Armenia as a boy, come to the U.S., worked in a mill, and eventually enrolled in Harvard Medical school at the age of 30, the oldest student in the school. In the novel, these two artistic outsiders form an intense bond, and when Kazanjian is transferred to England to work at a hospital devoted to the reconstruction of wounded soldiers’ faces, Anna follows and finds a new calling using her art in service of medical science.

"I hadn’t anticipated that Anna would turn into such a central character," Shields says, sounding genuinely bemused. "And I didn’t imagine that there would be a relationship between her and the dentist. But that’s fate. You just can’t plan everything. But what fun would it be if you could?"

Kazanjian and Coleman end up working at the country estate of Catherine, who in profound mourning over the loss of her young husband in battle has given over their grand house for use as a military hospital devoted to the new science of reconstructive facial surgery. The hospital is run by the tough, philosophical Dr. McCleary, and one of its more appealingly vulnerable inmates is a faceless young soldier named Julian, with whom Catherine eventually falls in love.

Through her dramatization of the bonds and antagonisms that exist among these central characters, Shields is also able to convey an astonishing amount of information about such things as the history of religious controversy surrounding plastic surgery, the mythological gardens of 18th-century English homes, the incredible properties of human skin, the moral and emotional impact of the human face, and, of course, the brutal horrors of war.

"The face is so small," Shields says, almost wistfully, "yet even though you can live without a face, I found an account from the period that said when someone’s face was blown off on the battlefield, he was injected with enough morphine to kill him because while they would try to save men without legs or arms, they just thought a man without a face wouldn’t be able to live as a human.

Shields later adds: "I write about what I find completely fascinating and interesting. It’s a kind of archaeology. I love the tension of research: You can’t plan what you’re going to find. It’s happenstance and luck. And I love spending time in libraries. When I travel I always go to libraries, just to see what they’re like. . . . The challenge is not to burden the book with too much research that doesn’t feel like it fits the story."

In fact, Shields’ deft interweaving of her vast historical research into The Crimson Portrait does not intrude upon her narrative. But it is her enviable descriptive powers that impress throughout. This is perhaps unsurprising, since Shields, who grew up in Nebraska, was a visual artist before becoming a writer; a fashion editor at Vogue before writing All That Glitters, a history of costume jewelry; and design editor at the New York Times magazine before becoming a screenwriter, first, and then a novelist. If not by training, then by instinct, it seems, Shields bedazzles us with the colorful skin of experience, then asks us to consider what lies beneath.

 

A World War I-era photograph of Boston socialite artist Anna Coleman provided the spark for Jody Shields' new novel, The Crimson Portrait. "It was a black-and-white picture of Anna holding a paintbrush to a man's face," Shields says from her home in the Soho…

History

Stanley Weintraub

During war, there are no holidays. But historian Stanley Weintraub knows well that holidays can affect the way war is waged, from the celebrated Christmas Truce of World War I to Hitler’s brutal attack during the final winter of World War II.

In his new book, 11 Days in December: Christmas at the Bulge, 1944, Weintraub shows how Hitler took advantage of the Allies’ Yuletide cheer to launch the 1944 surprise attack that became known as the Battle of the Bulge, one of the bloodiest clashes of the war.

So imminent was an Allied victory in those waning weeks of the European theater that some troops had already taken leave from the front to enjoy the holiday in Paris. Hitler was counting on just such a seasonal lapse as he secretly amassed his remaining ragtag divisions in the Ardennes Forest for one last offensive. The Nazis, short on strategy, were helped by 10 days of driving snow and rain that prompted Gen. George Patton’s famous plea to God, "Sir, whose side are you on?"

The weather cleared as Patton requested, Allied air strikes commenced, and ground troops converged to take Bastogne on Dec. 26, effectively ending Hitler’s conquest. As Weintraub illustrated in his two previous books, General Washington’s Christmas Farewell and Silent Night: The Remarkable Christmas Truce of 1914, Christmas and other religious observances often play pivotal roles in military history.

"The Japanese, for example, planned the Pearl Harbor attack for Sunday. Very often, major offensive surprise attacks occur on a Sunday because it is assumed that, in a largely Christian West, Sunday will be a time when people are less alert and will be doing other things," says Weintraub, the Evan Pugh Professor Emeritus of Arts and Humanities at Penn State.

The Germans were equally aware that, with the war in its 11th hour, Allied troops were less inclined to take risks. " The Germans would broadcast over loudspeakers, ‘How would you like to die for Christmas?’" he says. "They counted on a relaxation at Christmas, and they were quite right." The Allied commanders couldn’t have been more different in style or temperament. British Field Marshal Montgomery, whose troops had suffered most in the early years of the war, was a national hero and cautious to a fault. Omar Bradley, pulled from the Pacific theater, was a fish out of water. George Patton, a born warrior and deeply religious man, saw no contradiction in asking God for good killing weather.

"The real hero was George Patton. He was a fighting general and the troops loved him," says Weintraub. "He was certainly the most aggressive general, but he was off-the-wall; there was no one like him. When he was killed in an automobile crash at the end of the war, I think it might have been the best end for him because he was not a civilian. He was not the kind of person who could sit at a desk." Weintraub leavens his military history with celebrity cameos. Sultry Marlene Dietrich receives frostbite and lice in return for her Christmas goodwill tour to the front, where she exchanged intimate holiday greetings with several officers including Patton. David Niven, then an unknown British intelligence officer, tries to keep Allied codes current to thwart German spies. Even Kurt Vonnegut Jr. is spotted en route to Dresden his experiences there inspired Slaughterhouse-Five.

Weintraub saw two Christmases on the front lines first-hand as a soldier in the 8th Army Division in Korea. "Because the cultures were so different, we could not have a Christmas in which the enemy across the line celebrated, too," he says. The same holds true today in Iraq. Barring a sudden outbreak of hostilities between the United States and Canada, he sees little opportunity for Christmas to play a major role in wars to come.

"I don’t think it could happen today. The idea of a common Western culture in which Christmas is both a secular and a religious holiday shared by the enemy as well just can’t happen anymore."

Jay MacDonald will celebrate the holidays at his new home in Austin, Texas.

During war, there are no holidays. But historian Stanley Weintraub knows well that holidays can affect the way war is waged, from the celebrated Christmas Truce of World War I to Hitler's brutal attack during the final winter of World War II.

…

Fiction

Mitch Albom

Like many legendary sports writers before him, Mitch Albom embodies that plain-spoken but big-hearted guy you want to bear hug, then buy a beer. Not like Albom needs the favor: The sports journalist and radio host wrote Tuesdays with Morrie, a memoir about his relationship with his dying college professor that spent four years on the New York Times bestseller list and became the best-selling memoir of all time an outcome that Albom never anticipated.

"The stories that I write, people seem to be able to grab onto as their own," says Albom, who often encounters people with their own Morrie stories at his signings. "It was my story, but they read it and applied it to their own life. I just wrote it to pay Morrie’s medical bills. It was more of an obligation than anything else. . . . The only way I knew I’d be able to help is if I wrote something."

Albom felt paralyzed when he realized that all people wanted for his follow-up was "Wednesdays with Morrie or Chicken Soup with Morrie. I kept saying I didn’t write the book to become a self-help author, and I didn’t write the book to become a guru, and I’m not gonna turn it into a franchise. That would be wrong, and I don’t think Morrie would be very proud of me." Always imagining he’d create things from scratch like novels, plays or movies, Albom decided that the time was right to tackle fiction. "I figured I needed to live long enough to observe things for real before I could start making them up," he says. But halfway through the process, Albom realized that setting a novel in heaven didn’t make for the easiest debut.

"It doesn’t follow the old ‘write what you know’ axiom, does it?" Albom laughs. That long-awaited work, The Five People You Meet in Heaven, became the most successful American hardback fiction debut ever, according to albom.com, selling more than 8 million copies worldwide. His new novel, For One More Day, is another book with supernatural overtones that hit the top of the bestseller lists within a week of its October publication. It has also sold more than 45,000 copies at Starbucks across the country and once again has hit a universal chord.

"That isn’t something I intend," he says. "I just write stories. I don’t think a whole lot about it. I just write them to move me. I figure if I can’t feel something . . . then nobody else will." The novel begins with washed-up baseball player Chuck Chick Benetto telling his life story to a sports reporter, starting from the moment he decided to kill himself. This attempt—like his former sports career, marriage, fatherhood and role as son—seemed a failure. But instead of a cowardly ending, Chick enters a dreamlike realm where he encounters his late mother and gets to share a final day with her, discovering family secrets, the reason his father abandoned the family, and finally saying all he wished he had said to her when she was alive.

Like many newspapermen-turned-novelists before him, Albom concentrates on character and storytelling and doesn’t torture himself over fancy technique or plots." I guess if you’re writing detective novels it’s all about plot or what will happen next," he says, "but you’re searching for something that gives you a shiver or brings a tear to your eye. You can’t force it." Albom’s favored themes of regret, forgiveness and redemption permeate his modern fables, along with the importance of caring as much about yourself on the way down as you did on the way up, and ring true with audiences young and old. But his book career almost stalled as publisher after publisher turned down the Tuesdays manuscript. One large publishing house even told Albom that he wasn’t capable of writing a memoir, "that I didn’t understand what a memoir was," Albom says."I never forget that nobody wanted that book."

The lessons learned writing for newspapers compact stories with emotional punch might make traditional publishers cringe, but those qualities have made Albom’s titles household names. " It’s hard to write short," Albom says. "People always think, they’re such small books, they can’t be significant. I think it’s a lot harder to write short than write long." Albom has already tackled blockbuster books, made-for-television movies (the Oprah-produced, Emmy award winner Tuesdays with Morrie and the screenplay for The Five People You Meet in Heaven) and plays (the off-Broadway adaptation of Tuesdays with Morrie). He’s even performed with the The Rock Bottom Remainders, a band featuring fellow writers Stephen King, Dave Barry, Scott Turow, Amy Tan and Ridley Pearson. Can Hollywood be far behind?

"I’ve been approached to do a number of sports movies and even came close on a couple," Albom says. No doubt he’ll be patient and wait for the right pitch before knocking it out of the park. "I do know how it looks," Albom says of the sports milieu he’s spent much of his life describing. "And that’s the key for Hollywood movies: how it looks, how it feels and what they say. I do have a lot of that knowledge and it would be silly to throw it away. "

 

Like many legendary sports writers before him, Mitch Albom embodies that plain-spoken but big-hearted guy you want to bear hug, then buy a beer. Not like Albom needs the favor: The sports journalist and radio host wrote Tuesdays with Morrie, a memoir about his…

FictionWorld Fiction

Vikram Chandra

Nine hundred pages? What was Vikram Chandra thinking? Quite a lot it turns out, as readers of Chandra’s exhilaratingly ambitious and entertaining novel, Sacred Games, will soon discover.

Set mostly in contemporary Mumbai (formerly known as Bombay), where Chandra and his wife, novelist Melanie Abrams, spend half the year, Sacred Games is, on the surface, a police procedural novel. In alternating chapters the lives of Sartaj Singh, a Sikh police inspector, and Ganesh Gaitonde, a Hindu crime lord, converge and diverge as a story of international criminal intrigue unfolds. But, as any suspecting reader would surely conclude after hefting its door-stopper bulk, Sacred Games is about much more than its attractively polished surfaces.

"When I started, I thought I was writing a pretty conventional 250-page crime something or other. You know, the type of thing that starts with a dead body on the first page and then at the most 300 pages later ends up with everything figured out and fixed," Chandra says during a call to his home in Berkeley, California. Chandra and Abrams have been teaching in UC Berkeley’s creative writing program since leaving Washington, D.C., about a year ago, which is also roughly the length of time the couple has been married.

Soon after beginning the novel eight years ago, however, Chandra’s research among Indian policemen, crime reporters and even Indian gangsters and mob bosses led him to conclude that what seemed like a local crime "had all these connections to politics and religion and the ongoing struggles between nation-states in the region. I got this sense of this huge web of events, people, organizations and forces at work that were affecting people’s lives and linking them together. Then the structure of the book became more and more clear to me, and it started to grow in size and thematic concerns. At some point I realized, damn, this is going to be big."

Big it is. And rollicking and provocative and frightening and moving . . . and more. Chandra, who says British Victorian novelists are among his favorite writers, displays a Dickensian verve for character and event, with a decidedly Indian twist, of course. The small bribes and favors that come Inspector Singh’s way, for example, induce no cynicism and hold no real corrupting power over the redoubtable policeman and are often the hinges for small, comic turns in the plot. And the murderous Ganesh Gaitonde runs one of the biggest crime cartels in the country and at the same time tries to both produce popular movies and pursue a serious, if deluded, religious quest as a follower of the elusive Swami Shridhar Shukla.

This yoking of seeming opposites within a single person creates an often-unexpected empathy for the novel’s characters that Chandra says is one of his main goals here. "It became very important to me that Ganesh Gaitonde, for instance, be somebody that the reader really engages with, that if you don’t feel, and in some sense participate, in his desire, then the book didn’t work. So when the book was finished, Melanie was the first to read it. After she’d been reading it for a couple of days, she marched out of her study and told me she hated how much I made her like this guy. That was a very happy moment."

Still, Sacred Games seethes with the racial and ethnic conflicts that have repeatedly brought death and destruction in India and throughout the subcontinent over the past half century. "I wanted very much to treat those events," Chandra says, "because . . . things that happened 50 years ago in a sense wrote divisions physically into the geography of the region, but also into people’s bodies and minds. Those events continue to have very clear impacts on our lives today. And I wanted to get at least the feeling of that and not shy away from its ugliness. The propensity for violence that coexists with all those other feelings was something I wanted to deal with."

If the terrifying brutality of the violence in some sections of Sacred Games is not exactly redeemed, it is a least sensibly situated within Chandra’s vivid portrait of the clash and jangle and excitement of modern-day Mumbai – and India, in general – and within the flavorful hybrid of English he uses to tell his tale. Chandra, who reads Hindi and some Punjabi and understands several other regional languages, purposefully spices his tale with linguistic borrowings.

"Bombay is full of immigrants," Chandra explains. "The language that people actually use on the street tends to be sprinkled with all these words from different regions. If I was sitting in a bar in Bombay telling these stories to my friends, I would use an English that has all of these words from other tongues in it. It is so much a part of the texture of life in India now and of Bombay in particular that I just wanted to get that on paper as fluidly as I could."

Not surprisingly, that hybrid language reflects the technological powerhouse that India is becoming. It also reflects an unexpected part of Chandra’s own personality. While studying fiction writing in graduate school in Houston, he earned a living as a computer programmer. He thinks computer programming and fiction writing are not so very different, since both require "constructing a sort of self-contained world in which various components must interact with each other." In conversation Chandra refers to himself as "a computer geek" and admits that his writing studio is filled with gear and gadgets, screens and speakers, whereas Abrams’ studio next door is "a much calmer place."

By Chandra’s account, he and Abrams have an unusually close working relationship, exchanging ideas, working through plot problems, acting as sounding boards for each other. So when, after eight years of writing 400 words a day, six days a week, Chandra completed a considerably longer version of Sacred Games, he and Abrams spent several months together editing down the manuscript. Now, Chandra says, "In my mind, at least, it is as short as it could possibly be."

Alden Mudge is a writer in Oakland.

 

Nine hundred pages? What was Vikram Chandra thinking? Quite a lot it turns out, as readers of Chandra's exhilaratingly ambitious and entertaining novel, Sacred Games, will soon discover.

Set mostly in contemporary Mumbai (formerly known as Bombay), where Chandra and his…

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