Fiction | Brad Spurgeon's Blog

The Political World of Jean-Hugues Oppel: Another In-Depth Interview With a French Crime Writer, this Time Talking at Semana Negra

January 23, 2021
bradspurgeon

Jean-Hugues Oppel

I am absolutely delighted to have found this interview I did with Jean-Hugues Oppel in 1997 at the Semana Negra mystery festival in Gijon, Spain, and to be able to post it on this site in my collection of interviews and articles I did in the 1990s and early 2000s about the French crime novel. This interview is definitely one of the best and widest ranging of them all. I think the environment of the crazy festival helped for it to be so much fun, and so deep. But ultimately, as you will see, it is the depth of Jean-Hugues Oppel’s own knowledge and approach to life and writing that makes the difference here in this interview.

Follow @BradSpurgeon

Another Interview from the past: François Guérif of Rivages and his World of Claude Chabrol and Barry Gifford and James Ellroy!

January 5, 2021
bradspurgeon

Rivages Cover of James Ellroy

PARIS – Rereading this interview that I did 25 years ago with François Guérif, the director of the crime writing collection at the Rivages publishing house in Paris I am actually astounded by all of the interesting aspects to the link between the French publishing world and the American one. François Guérif had already been directing the collection at Rivages for 10 years, and he only left the job in 2017, so this interview is still in its own way relevant. But among the stories that makes this worth reading today are those linked to Guérif’s discovery of James Ellroy, to his hand in helping revive several careers of American writers, like Barry Gifford, and his work with Claude Chabrol, the film director. So as part of my decision to put up on this blog and publish for the first time ever these interviews in their entirety that were done as research for my article on French crime writing in the 1990s, here is my interview with François Guérif, then of Rivages, and certainly one of the most interesting of the Q&As so far!

Follow @BradSpurgeon

Another Story of French Crime Writers: Marc Villard

December 27, 2020
bradspurgeon

Marc Villard

PARIS – I decided to publish another instalment of my occasional pieces from the period in which I wrote all about the writers of the French crime novel. Adding to my interviews with Jean-Bernard Pouy and Maurice Dantec, I have now put up a feature interview article that I did with Marc Villard. Villard has written hundreds upon hundreds of short stories, as well as novels, poems and scenarios. He also had a double career as an art director at Givenchy, and for many years he was the rock critic at Le Monde! Now if that is not enough to draw your attention to looking at my story, “From the Bourse to the Banlieue: Marc Villard, a French Master of the Short Story, and then some,” then perhaps you might like to skip my story about him and click on the links I put in its introduction that will take you directly to his site and the short stories of his that I translated from French to English. That will give you the best idea of some of what he does. So check it out anyway! Today I also suddenly had the idea, by the way, that I might in future do a special page devoted to all of the writings I did about the French crime writing scene, rather than have to have you scrolling through the menu above about “blog stories rather than posts.” The centrepiece, of course, was always my roundup story from “The Armchair Detective,” that I put above under the simple heading, “France and the Crime Novel.” Anyway, check out Villard now!

Fantastic Find of My Never-Before-Published Interview with A.S. Byatt, the Booker Winning Novelist

October 30, 2018
bradspurgeon

A.S. Byatt

I was quite astounded today as I was going through my huge archive of 35 years’ worth of my writing in my computer (my first computer was a 1982 Osborne), and I discovered an interview article I did with the Booker Prize-winning author, A.S. Byatt. Strangely – or not, given the ravages of age – I had completely forgotten that I ever did it. I performed the interview and wrote the article in 1991 and it was immediately rejected by an editor and immediately, for some reason, relegated to my archives as of no interest to anyone. Because it was 1991, the only way it COULD be published at the time was to submit it to print publications, and I probably had gotten tired of all the submissions I had already made for the article that inspired it: my article about the world’s most prolific writers of books in English (which was eventually published as the lead essay on the front page of the Los Angeles Times Book Review. So I “trashed” this Byatt interview, which I also had tied in not only with the theme of prolificacy, but also with the centennial of George Gissing’s novel, New Grub Street. In fact, finding it now, I see it was a lively, fantastic interview with an important British author who is still alive today, at age 82. So no sooner did I discover it today than I decided to add it to my collection on this blog of “Brad’s Rejected Writings.” Check it out, this 1991 interview with A.S. Byatt.

A Bit More Crime Writing… Ancient Interview With Jean-Bernard Pouy

July 16, 2013
bradspurgeon

Jean-Bernard Pouy

PARIS – If I performed an interview in 1996 that I have just re-read and found fabulous and fascinating and super-cool, then I cannot be blamed for being boastful if I say that it is fabulous and fascinating and super-cool. After all, I wrote it in 1996 – which is to say, 17 years ago – and therefore, any such reaction and announcement CANNOT be considered boasting. Before I turn full-circle again on such a pronouncement, I think I just want to say that the interview in question was the one I did with Jean-Bernard Pouy, a French crime writer, as I researched my story for The Armchair Detective on French crime writing.

So as part of my blog articles as opposed to posts section, I have decided that the next installment is the Ancient Interview with Jean-Bernard Pouy, following the Ancient Interview With Maurice G. Dantec. In fact, Pouy is not just a crime writer – today he is still around, at 67 – but he was also a key element of the new wave of French crime writers in the early to mid-1990s as he helped spawn the careers of both Dantec, and another of the major writers, Tonino Benacquista, both of whom were former high school students of Pouy’s in a Paris suburb….

If you want to make any sense of that, read the old ancient interview with Pouy….

Five Dials, a Much Nominated Book and an Optimist – at the Abbey

July 12, 2013
bradspurgeon

PARIS – I had the Abbey Bookshop in mind yesterday when I posted that short story of mine on my new fiction area of my blog. I was readying myself to attend an event at the Abbey for the launch of the latest edition of an online literary magazine called Five Dials, which I have written about in the past, as well as of a book that is published in – at least – English and French and has been nominated for several of the top French literary prizes. But what I least expected to make the whole evening worthwhile for me was the meeting of an optimist.

The Five Dials, to recap on an earlier blog item, is edited by a Canadian named Craig Taylor, who lives in London, and who has done a book about Londoners. Five Dials has been running since 2008, and it is one of the top online only literary reviews. To quote directly from the Five Dials entry in Wikipedia, the review’s “notable contributors include famous authors living and deceased such as Raymond Chandler, Noam Chomsky, Alain De Botton, Zadie Smith, Dave Eggers, Jonathan Safran Foer, Hari Kunzru, J. M. G. Le Clézio and Susan Sontag.” It is published by the respected publisher Hamish Hamilton.

As to the book that was being presented by its author, Eric Reinhardt, it was “The Victoria System,” which the Nouvel Observateur called: “Dark, twisted and devastating. A big novel of amorous adventures in the era of the blackberry. Eric Reinhardt is the new Alexandre Dumas.”

But it was my unexpected meeting with a curious optimist that actually made the evening for me. This was the flower child-looking Marie Deschamps with flowers in her hair whom Brian Spence, the bookshop owner introduced me to. It was not long in our conversation before we realized that we had a point in common. The point was our basic belief in an optimistic approach to life – even when it’s trying to sink you. In fact, Marie told me that she had started a kind of association called “the curious optimists” and they get together once a month in Paris to meet and eat and talk and celebrate about how great life is. She said her Facebook page for the Curious Optimists had just exploded, so much did people want to be optimistic….

Philosopher of Optimism

She also said she was about to leave Paris on a world tour that she will film, trying to meet other optimists and to spread the word. Marie told me her road to this philosophy really came after she did her degrees at Science Po in Paris and the London School of Economics, and she came back to Paris and found a little too much of the opposite of optimism…. I told her that her world tour was a little bit like my world tour and the film I’m working on about it in the world of the open mics and open jams. And, I also told her that she ought to read my interview book called: Colin Wilson: Philosopher of Optimism, as everything she was saying was part of the philosophy of that book.

Could I have asked for a better or more curious or optimistic evening than that at the Abbey Bookshop????

(No.)

Bilipo: The French Crime Writing Library in Paris

July 10, 2013
bradspurgeon

bilipo

Today I have decided to put up on the site another in my ongoing series of “articles as opposed to posts,” this time a story I wrote in the 1990s about the Bibliothèque des Littératures Policères, a unique and extraordinary public library funded by the city of Paris that is dedicated to the crime novel.

A Bit of Crime Writing….

May 19, 2013
bradspurgeon

813

PARIS – Wait, it’s Sunday night and I have not been to an open mic in Paris or elsewhere since the final open mic of the P’tit Bonheur la Chance – mentioned below -? Either that one really took the wind out of me, or something else happened. Up to you to decide. Well, in any case, this blog MUST live on, even if my open mic-ing takes a break. And I realized yesterday – but had not time to attend to it – that there was an area of the blog that had been neglected for some time. I’m talking about the Blog articles as opposed to posts section, where I planned to put a number of my already-published articles, and write some new ones. Last night, I suddenly realized that there was a complete entire aspect of my life and writing that had been neglected on this blog: My crime writing.

At the same time as I was beginning my career as a writer about car racing, Formula One being the main emphasis, I was also establishing a career as a writer about the French crime novel. Because I myself had written several published crime stories and several unpublished, but agented, crime novels, I grew tired of this not-well-paid area of meta-writing that, while it was vastly interesting, was also vastly frustrating. I was a published crime fiction writer, and I had begun to establish myself as crime fiction writing journalist…but who was not considered by the writers themselves as a writer.

The auto racing writing was more attractive in that I could never, ever claim to be a car racer, but I had a subject to write about that involved amazing human endeavor, and therefore, made for interesting material. So it was that I stopped writing about crime fiction. But by the time I stopped, I had amassed a fair sized trove of journalism, especially about the French crime novel.

This story that I am posting today in Blog Articles as Opposed to Posts, was the highest point of the whole period, probably, and covered a massive swathe of French crime writing of final quarter of the 20th Century. Many of the people are still around or still read. The story, one of the best surveys of the French crime novel written in English, appeared in print in The Armchair Detective, in 1997. Check it out.