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M: Were you influenced by any of the other great detectives in literature, such as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, or Agatha Christie’s sleuths?
AP: Not Agatha Christie. Dorothy L. Sayers was good. Holmes is iconic in lots of ways, and the stories are better than they are often given credit for, especially in the complex relationship between Holmes and Watson. Watson was a lot sharper than he’s been portrayed in the films; he was not an idiot at all, and more mentally well balanced than Holmes, who was erratic.
M: Tell us a little bit about William Monk, and what he means to you.
AP: I start him off waking up in hospital after an accident, and he knows nothing about himself at all. He sees his face in a mirror and it means nothing to him, and he has to discover who he is by detection. He’s lying there in his hospital bed when a nurse says, “The police want to see you,” and when they come in, it’s obvious Monk is a policeman, and the visitor is his boss who doesn’t like him and is only too ready to catch him in a mistake. When Monk is well enough to leave the hospital, he is assigned a rotten case and has to discover who committed an appalling crime, while at the same time trying to discover who are his own friends and enemies. It’s a hell of a thing to find out the two at once. The more Monk pursues both threads, the more he experiences flashes of memory and feels he’s finding out not only about the case, but about himself. There’s evidence indicating that he’s been at the crime scene before, and yet he can’t remember it.
M: You’ve called Monk a darker character than your other creations.
AP: Yes, he is, because he wasn’t a particularly nice person before his accident. If I had to discover myself through the eyes of others, I wouldn’t like that, would you? You know what you did, but not why. We all have reasonable excuses for our actions that we can live with at the time, but viewed at a distance by someone else it becomes quite difficult. The evidence is there, I did this, but why? Of course, Monk doesn’t go on seeking himself forever, that would become boring; but there is always this awareness that he was not very nice, and he can’t defend himself because he doesn’t know why. He is more acerbic than Thomas Pitt, and not as kind. Monk is clever yet vulnerable, a bit quick to judge. Pitt is not a troubled character. He deals with ethical issues, of course, things we all have to deal with, but he is not as complex as Monk.
M: What are the challenges of writing an amnesiac main character?
AP: It was a lot of fun for seven or eight books, but then it was enough. In Death of a Stranger, Monk really comes to peace with it and moves on, and now there is really only a very casual mention of his amnesia. It’s been quite an interesting challenge, to write about the condition. No one yet has come up to me to say that he or she had amnesia and it was not like that—and one or two have said it did feel that way and was accurate. I don’t really know as much about it, except that it is very unlikely that Monk would actually one day get his memory back. That would be medically inaccurate. So the poor soul must be held in suspense. It gives Monk an extra edge of anxiety and eventually a sense of compassion to be forced to move around in the dark.
M: Will Monk ever find real happiness?
AP: Of course he does marry Hester Latterly eventually, but they don’t have children. Hester needs to stay active, to keep doing what she does, rather than to stay home and look after children. Besides, it would make them too much like the Pitts. They do, however, have a special relationship with a local mudlark. Do you know what a mudlark was? Mudlarks were little boys who lived along the edge of the Thames, hunting for debris that would be valuable.
M: Is that like a tosher, which you write about in A Dangerous Mourning?
AP: Mudlarks are like toshers in that they salvage things that people have lost, but toshers work in the sewers and mudlarks are children. Well, there is a boy, about eleven years old, a little mudlark, a skinny little kid, who helps Monk when he becomes a river policeman. Scuff is his name, and he adopts Monk to look after him. They adopt each other, really. (Hester and Monk don’t formally adopt him—he’s eleven—but he will deign to look after them.) That’s the nearest they come to having a child. Scuff is an independent little soul and he pops up again in The Shifting Tide, which actually has in it the worst nightmare that I could ever possibly imagine.
M: Your worst nightmare? How intriguing. What is it?
AP: Hester gets to run a clinic for street prostitutes, and one woman comes to the clinic with a fever and dies. When Hester is dressing the body she discovers buboes under the dead woman’s arm: the Black Death, bubonic plague. But even more astonishing is the discovery that the woman has been murdered. Imagine that: The whole clinic goes into complete lockdown and they can’t let anyone know why, and those who try to run will have their throats ripped out by patrol dogs. Hester is shut inside a clinic with people who could develop the plague, and one of them is a murderer. There are lots of ways to go, but this must surely be the worst.
M: That’s wonderfully ghastly. How do you come up with your ideas for the crimes and mysteries at the heart of each book?
AP: Mostly I look at events happening today and backdate them. Often i
t’s either a social issue we haven’t yet solved or a moral/emotional issue that is timeless. The new Monk novel I’m working on is based around the question of family loyalties, among other things. For instance, if you discover that someone like your mother or father is charged with a crime you couldn’t possibly excuse, how would you react? I think it’s your natural instinct to say, “Certainly not, I’ll never believe it,” but then how far would you actually go to defend that person you love? It’s a very interesting issue of how you deal with disillusion. Do you blame the person who wasn’t what you expected? Do you blame everyone but yourself? I don’t know that anyone can be sure until he or she is facing it, then and there.
So, as I said, it’s either a social issue that is current or an emotional or moral issue that is eternal, or something very present-day that I backdate. For example, the Patriot Act in America. When the Patriot Act first came out, do you remember stories about people making lists of what others borrowed from the libraries? Imagine that you’d no longer be able to borrow whatever you wanted without people leaping to wild conclusions. If you read Mein Kampf—possibly if you were learning German or were a student of history—people could come to any conclusion. And what about phone tapping—we had that here, too. Doesn’t a citizen have the right to have a private conversation without the wire being tapped? During Victorian times bombings made the police want to have the power to question anyone’s servants privately without anyone knowing, so I connected the present-day concern with privacy to that. Think of the power that would have given servants to misinterpret and blackmail. If a conversation was overheard outside a room and one person’s voice carried and only half the discussion was heard, what sort of a twist could be put on that conversation, innocently, ignorantly, or perhaps maliciously? I think it’s quite a good Victorian parallel to what could be done today. It’s rather fun and very interesting to put the same problem in a different light and maybe see it more clearly.
M: You obviously enjoy writing very much.
AP: Writing is a lot of fun. It is work, yes, but there is nothing wrong with work. I never have writer’s block because I plan with great care. I know what any given scene must show, who’s there, when, and why. Often I write rubbish, but I just go back and rewrite. Sit down and write words—that’s how you get over writer’s block. It will work itself out.
M: How do you compose the anatomy of a crime? I’m wondering about the actual nitty-gritty of fashioning a mystery; do you sketch out the crime, motive, and suspects at the outset, or does the whole thing evolve?
AP: You start with a crime in the middle of your composition because you may enter the story just before or just after the crime. Then you are unraveling what happened to lead up to it but doing so in real time, from the crime forward. The narrative thread goes in both directions: unraveling the past and creating the future. One mark of a mystery writer who’s new at it is having a villain who’s static. A character is going to react to what’s going on, to the investigation, and not wait for you to unravel it. He may commit more crimes or interfere with the investigation. All of the other people are doing something as well, reacting to the situation. And you’ve got to have at least two reasonable suspects—better still, three—and then to narrow down to one. It’s very difficult to mislead the reader without ever lying, but you mustn’t lie.
Carefully, bit by bit, you have more ideas as you go along and you rewrite as many times as necessary. Often I think of great ideas at the end of the book then go back to weave them in from the beginning.
Also, no character is unimportant. No matter how peripheral, everyone should be a real person who came from somewhere before he walked onto your page. Give him a face, a name, interests. Don’t make him cardboard. Even if he’s a postman delivering a letter, give him a blister, a limp, a new shirt—something that makes him real. All people are real.
M: Do you ever see any bits of yourself in your characters, for instance in Hester Latterly’s gumption or William Monk’s inquisitiveness?
AP: There are little bits of me in everybody, even that postman with the blister. If you are not on the page then you’re in the wrong job. Your characters are not a reflection of you but a little of your empathy or emotion should come through them. But I don’t have any self-portraits in my books and I don’t want to write one.
M: What about Hester’s interest in history, the Crimean War, and Florence Nightingale? And Charlotte Pitt’s as well? Surely that bit—this genuine interest in history and a woman’s place in it—must be close to your own heart.
AP: Yes, I hadn’t thought of that. Well, Florence Nightingale’s situation certainly appeals to me, but not her personality. She was pretty awkward, difficult, neurotic, a hypochondriac, but boy did she have guts. Mary Seacole was very good, too, but you don’t hear much about her. There were lots of wonderful women in that century: explorers, collectors of botany and species of birds, teachers, women who went up the Congo in skirts, women who crusaded for social reform in Britain.
M: You have a talent for different dialects, from the accents of the underworld patterers and toshers, to working men and women, to lords and ladies. How did you develop this ear?
AP: I don’t think it’s very good, actually! You have to be very good to get it right. Otherwise, you need just enough to suggest it is different speech, but not too much to confuse what is being said. It’s a judgment call, how much you can put in, what dialect words to use. I actually like using expressions best. Like, “a face like a burst boot.” Can you imagine what that looks like? Pretty grim! Or, “Silly little article, haven’t got the wits you were born with.”
