'Talking It Over' is the only one of my books people asked me what happened next, ... And they disagreed about what happened when the book concluded. |
As I've explained to my wife many times, you have to kill your wife or mistress to get on the front page of the papers. |
Books say: she did this because. Life says: she did this. Books are where things are explained to you, life where things aren't. |
Braque was like some hilltop castle that Picasso was constantly besieging. He invests it, bombards it, mines it, assaults it - and each time the smoke clears, the castle is as solid as ever. |
But I think you could make it truer by making it up. In a way when people say it could have been non-fiction, that is gratifying because I've convinced them and they can't tell the bits I've made up from the bits I didn't make up. |
George can't believe it but it's true, that's what Doyle said to him, |
He came attached to the case. ... I didn't know much about his biography before I started, and I hadn't read him since I was 20, I suppose. But in the process of research and writing, I found him to be a very admirable and a moral and warmhearted person. |
He left no trace apart from the local papers and Doyle's own account of the case. He really had to be invented from the ground up. |
I briefly considered writing it as a non-fiction book but the fact of the matter is that George left few traces, |
I did read Sherlock Holmes as a boy but I never thought for a moment that I'd ever write about Doyle, |
I don't regard it as a historical novel, I regard it as a novel of now, which just happens to be set when it is set, |
I just read the new novel by Jay McInerney, who is a friend of mine. And I did so with great apprehension, because it takes place around the time of those attacks. But I thought he handled it beautifully, since he comes at it from a bit of a side angle. |
I think he had a quite sort of ambiguous relationship to Holmes. It made him rich, it made him famous, but as often the case with these things, a writer can turn against his or her most successful creation; hence, he killed him off (in 'The Adventure of the Final Problem') and brought him back by popular request. And, of course, people did sort of confuse them and assume if he could invent these complicated mysteries, then he could also solve them. |
I was also interested in the racial side of it. Even today, the Chief of the London Metropolitan Police is trying to make the force more representative of London and there's a lot of resistance from the predominantly white force. |
In soccer, the form of the encoded adjective is well-developed. |