Bookends Interview

(Taken from the Internet site http://www.bookends.co.uk)

Gerald Seymour is one of the most prolific, enduring and globally successful British writers. Harry's Game, back in 1975, dealt with the thorny issue of a British agent infiltrating the Provisional IRA at a sensitive time. It was a dramatic introduction, pulling on Seymour's insider experience as a hard news reporter for ITN. He adapted that knowledge successfully on all his subsequent novels, and has rarely erred in judgement and fact. His travels in the thriller fiction world have taken in war crimes in Croatia, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the paranoia of the East German secret police, the Stasi, second weapons building in Iraq, and, with his latest book, A Line In The Sand, a mesmerising mix of Iranian zealots after a British undercover agent interspersed with torture from the Pinochet regime. Seymour always manages to have an uncanny finger on the future pulse.
HARRY DOHERTY spoke to him.

Given your subject matter, the recent attacks on Iraq were a timely publicity stunt.
I�m writing about Iran, which is a more more important player in the medium-long term than Iraq. The degrees of possibility for major conflict between Islamic society and western society is much greater via Iran and those that follow Iran�s teachings than the much more temporary situation in Iraq. Temporary is the lifetime of a regime and the lifetime of the Islamic world stretches for centuries and millenniums.

Do you ever think that your work is time sensitive?
I try to be topical. When I had a former life and had a proper job, then my deadlines were measured in hours and what I did would be on the screen within 24 hours, even in the pre-satellite days. The challenge with books if you�re trying to write topical/contemporary thriller fiction is that you�re starting out two years prior to publication and so to keep your eye on a ball that�s that far away is next to impossible. If one is topical at the end of the day, then you have to say that luck shone down. I wrote Line In The Sand 15 months ago. Quite an integral part was the role of somebody who had been involved peripherally in the Chilean coup d�etat of Pinochet and somebody who had been tortured by that regime. When the publishers read the book close to a year ago, they were saying �what�s all this about Chile?�. And the wheels come round. Now, around publication day, we have the Law Lords finally making their decision on extraditing Pinochet. Perhaps I should go for the lottery!

How do you start?
They all start with what is little more than a newspaper photograph or headline, maybe an article and something is squirreled away. This one started with the story of the wife of a captain of an American ship, which fired a missile on an Iranian airbus in 1988. I cut out the relevant page of Time magazine and kept it for a decade, knowing that at some stage it would come up. The intriguing thing was that the Iranians then planted a bomb underneath his wife's car and it exploded as she was driving down a freeway in California. What gripped me about that story was that instead of saying �this is a lady under threat who needs support�, the people she worked with and her neighbours rejected her as a pariah. I thought that was actually much more likely to happen in real life than the supportive community.

That is reflected in the characters in your book. I was surprised that the main character never came out and shouted that he had done what he had done for his country.
But I had him pinched, pushed, prodded. The intelligence services have no great respect for the freelancers and amateurs who work for them. There is a huge amount of entrapment in the intelligence world and whether it be that guy who was the MD of Matrix Churchill who was turned and went back again and again to Iraq before the Gulf War, providing huge intelligence or those poor devils who end up in the ditches of South Armagh with a bin liner over their heads, they�re used. Don�t ever look for respect or support.

But there is also patriotism, such as the character who forsakes a rich bank job for his government security position.
It�s a tough old life. If you want another world, then stick with the lovely late Catherine Cookson. In the intelligence gathering world, it�s a competitive envious self-serving world and casualties are acceptable, and that is not just thriller-speak.

So, name your sources.
I talk to people always off the record and on a non-attributable basis. I�m always pleased when they say �I�m talking to you because you�re not a journalist.� I miss the black gallows-humour of journalism. I miss being in the know. When I meet my old friends, like Michael Nicholson and Martin Bell, I always feel inadequate, but I think they envy me for what I do. When Bell got up in the House of Commons and said that he didn�t think that the bombing of Iraq was a good idea from his POV (point of view, doncha know), I took that as being a significant statement. Most of those who were trumpeting it hadn�t the faintest idea what they were talking about.

Was it a good idea?
I wrote about Iraq just before the Gulf War and I wrote about their weapons of mass destruction, i.e. their nuclear programme. At that time, it was denied and it was only when the war started they came back to it. When Condition Black came out, I recall feeling a sense of evil about that great grinning face of Saddam Hussein. I don�t usually get involved in those type of feelings. If things damage that regime, then I am basically in favour of it. I believe that we have to stand up and have a posture against evil.

Does that make it tough for you being a novelist and outside the grand scheme of things. Do you think you can make an impression?
You have to be very careful. I think I do have an influence, not as immediate and direct as when Channel 4 news is on a soapbox, but I reach a lot of people through paperbacks. I suppose I get them when they are more receptive than when they�re sitting on their bums at the end of the day watching television or snatching through the newspaper on the way to work. I think that because of the area of choice that is involved in buying or borrowing and then reading a book, I think I get through to them. But I�m not trying to say �Hey, I understand that great scheme of things.� I�m saying if you came with me and met the people that I met that these are the sort of emotions, the sort of experiences and the sort of sights that you would be exposed to. You have to entertain and if you fail to entertain then you have no readers. Through entertaining, you can also inform people. It�s very easy and also very wrong not to give a credit to people�s intelligence. The idea that you may jilt people and even upset them and that therefore they won�t like it is a completely fallacious one. If you can walk that fairly narrow tightrope between tragedy and lurid melodrama, and be slightly on the side of tragedy, then I think you have won, and people will bless you and thank you for it.

You wave flags, and the biggest is that English democracy is a central theme. There is a core of Englishness, which can be quite annoying.
I may put the establishment down. I may put the apparatus down, but I am an English writer and I suppose I have to believe in an inherent nobleness of character, which people in many corners of the world would dispute. My heroes, or central characters, are mostly small people, and they�re mostly people who are caught in the vortex. In the real world, the people I think are heroes are people like the man when a ferry turned over who made his body a bridge in the darkness so that other people could get out. Those are the sort of people that I grope towards, people who are compelled to do things out of an inherent sense of decency. The Irish write about the Irish. The Americans write about the Americans. If you�re an English writer, and also if you�re a bit old-fashioned, that�s what I go for. I like the understated aspect of Englishness, which is under threat at the moment. A calmness. Not flamboyant. Quiet people of few words. We�re not overly ambitious. That is an Englishness that I admire. Those are the people I�m trying to write about.

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