Awards
Crime Writers' Association Dagger Award : Winner 2006
Crime Writer's Association Steel Dagger Award : Winner 2006
Synopsis
PIED PIPER. SOUL STEALER. SERIAL KILLER.WHO IS MR CLARINET?
It was a job Miami private investigator Max Mingus found hard to refuse: $10 million to locate billionaire’s son Charlie Carver – missing now for over three years. Young Charlie disappeared on the island of Haiti, where over the decades scores of children have vanished. In a country dominated by voodoo, rumours abound of black magic and a mythical figure called ‘Mr Clarinet’, who for years has been tempting children away from their families. But could the truth be even more shocking than the legend? To find out, Max will have to succeed where previous detectives have not only failed – but where some have died. And suddenly, this job isn’t all about finding Charlie or his killers for the money – it’s just about staying alive …
Reviews
Customer Review: 05 June 2007
Reviewer: Nina Valdes
Fast paced, thrilling.....maintained your interest. A well told story that absolutely rings true.
» Submit a reviewInterview
The Interrogation Room Nick Stone tells us about his fantastic debut novel, Mr Clarinet
Firstly, congratulations on winning the CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger – it must have felt good to win ‘Thriller of the Year’ with your debut – particularly against competition like Michael Connelly and Martyn Waites!
Thank you very much.
That was a real honour, and I was truly, duly humbled. I wasn’t expecting to win. At all. I took a look at the shortlist and felt like Frank Bruno up against a bunch of Tysons. They’re all great writers. The Lincoln Lawyer is a wonderful book, and The Mercy Seat (another crime novel named after a Nick Cave song) is an astounding novel.
Anyway, I didn’t bother writing a speech, so I had to wing it and made a total hash of it. Forgot to thank Rob Williams for his sterling copywriting, and Henry Steadman for designing the best jacket this side of Armani. But at least I didn’t start crying and thank my ancestors and dead relatives and Chester Himes and Charles Mingus. They’d have been very pissed off if I’d done that, I’m sure.
While on the subject of violence, do you know my editor Beverley Cousins tried to cut my throat with the trophy? I have photographic evidence of her holding said Dagger (a replica SAS knife) to my throat, teeth bared, evil glint in eye, quite obviously enjoying herself.
How would you describe Mr Clarinet?
Haiti, murder, mayhem, voodoo, redemption, damnation, Miami, Bruce Springsteen, guilt, evil, rum, grown men in nappies, slums, darkness, revenge, chickens, money.
What was the genesis of Max’s character?
His name is a homage to my great childhood pal Max Allen, who got me reading books instead of album credits at the age of 14, and to one of my heroes, Charles Mingus, jazz musician, bandleader, composer, tyrant and an incredibly gifted writer too. Mingus’s The Black Saint and Lady Sinner was the first jazz album I heard. I was hooked from the off.
As for the character himself, well, every main character of every book I started to write and failed to finish from 1990 onwards was called Max Mingus. He’s been many people, none of them me.
Why did you choose Haiti as the main setting for your novel?
I was born here, but my parents shipped me off to Haiti when I was about six months old to live with my grandparents. I went back from time to time through to my early teens, and I always came away with a very positive but highly selective view of the country.
Unfortunately when I went back there between 1996 and 1997, I saw the place I loved turned upside down by a mixture of internecine political chaos (there must have been a dozen changes of government since the fall of the Baby Doc, several of them violent) and exceptionally stupid, insensitive and hugely dishonest foreign meddling. There were something like 20,000 US and UN troops policing the place. The Bangladeshi contingent of UN “peacekeepers” were merrily going around gang raping teenage girls and getting off scot free. The same troops were then sent off to Namibia and did the same thing.
Added to that nothing was really working in the place. You’d never been able to drink the water because it was a beige colour, the country with the most fertile soil in the Caribbean was a dustbowl, all the roads were lunar landscapes, there were frequent powercuts, and – horrifically – some half a million people were living in a slum right next to the capital where the ground is quite literally made of shit – human and animal.
Somehow things were even worse because a few thousand hardcore Haitian criminals – killers, rapists, you name it - were being taken out of US jails and quietly sent back to the island, where there no jails to hold them, no courts to try them, no police of any kind to guard them. So they went free. And then the crime rate rocketed. Starting with child kidnappings – only it was the wealthy who were being targeted, because only they could afford to pay the ransoms.
I think Haiti is a victim of its history. In becoming the first genuinely free black republic, Haiti became a pariah state, regarded with suspicion and fear by Europe and later America, who refused to trade with it and help it grow. America then began directly meddling in its affairs in the early twentieth century, sending Jim Crow-era administrators to run the place, which inevitably gave rise to Papa Doc.
All in all, I thought it was the perfect place to set a crime novel. And I didn’t even talk about voodoo …
The voodoo ceremony which Max witnesses is incredibly powerful and vivid – and Dufour, the witchdoctor he visits, sends shivers down the spine. Have you by any chance had first-hand experience of voodoo?
Plenty. If you go to one expecting something out of Mr Clarinet you’re in for a disappointment. They’re pretty boring in that respect. Lots of slow walking around in circles chanting. Great drumming though. The people sit around the edges of the voodoo temple and beast out these great rhythms on old international food aid oil cans. Sound like twenty Keith Moons in excelsis. Chickens get their throats cut. A lot. People go into trances and start speaking in tongues – but you get that in church too.
My nanny Philomène took me to a few voodoo ceremonies. They tend to take place on Saturday nights. On Sundays the same people go to church. They don’t see a conflict because a lot of the voodoo iconography is directly derived from Catholic iconography. The Virgin Mary, for example, is worshipped as both Jesus’ mother and the voodoo goddess of love, Eruzlie Freda. This came about because, when Haiti was a slave colony, the French tried to forcibly convert the population to Christianity. Quickly realising that subversion was less likely to get them killed than resistance, the Haitians went along to Catholic services but prayed to the icons as if they were voodoo deities. It’s the Haitian way, a Trojan Horse trait. Let the enemy in and then dig away at the ground under his feet and bury him where he falls.
Anyway, seeing Haitians going to church on Sundays, is a wonderful and incredibly moving sight. These very poor people get dressed up to the nines in clothes that must have cost about half a year’s salary and walk miles to the church. They’re incredibly dignified, noble, handsome people, the Haitians. The fact that they’ve been condemned to living a life of such extreme misery makes me exceptionally angry on a daily basis. But I’m not going to rant. For now.
What are the best and worst things about being a writer?
The best thing about being a writer is being able to make a living doing what I’ve always wanted to do.
Prior to writing Mr Clarinet, I spent twelve years working a variety of spiritually debilitating office jobs, where I used to watch the clock from 9.01 AM onwards and dream of the weekend. When the weekends ended at around 4.45 PM on Sunday, I used to pray that I’d morph into a beetle on Monday morning, so I’d have a perfect excuse for not going back to the mental abattoir. In the evenings I’d try to write but couldn’t because I was knackered. I also tried getting up early in the mornings and writing but I couldn’t come up with anything because I’d be thinking about what lay ahead. I had the abattoir blues. That’s just me though. I know plenty of people who combine the two and very successfully.
The worst thing about being a writer is the money. And deadlines like tourniquets. And editors trying to give you tracheotomies.
What other authors or books have influenced you?
That’s the piece of string question. Here’s an inch …
My favourite crime writers include – in no order of preference: James Ellroy, Ed McBain, Jake Arnott, Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy (yes, I know, I know, I know it’s Chandler as imagined by Leibniz, therefore not really crime fiction as such, but I always imagine Lee Child as the rather reluctant existential hero in all three novellas), Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock, A Gun For Sale and The Third Man, Charles Willeford, Tim Willocks’ Green River Rising (the definitive prison novel), Derek Raymond’s peerless Factory novels, Cormac McCarthy’s No Country For Old Men, Suttree and Child of God, George Pelecanos, Richard Price, Chester Himes, Ken Bruen, Jason Starr, Lee Child, Don Winslow, the big daddios of them all, Chandler and Hammett, and their godfathers, Dostoyevsky and Dickens.
I should point out here that Ken Bruen and Jason Starr have joined forces and produced the rather brilliant, very funny and utterly nasty Bust. The two combining forces is akin to getting pummelled by George Foreman and Joe Louis in their prime – inventive brutality - or Hannibal and Genghis Kahn rolling into a town near you, if you prefer the softer option.
I’m currently reading three non-fiction crime books – Chief by Daryl Gates (LAPD Chief up to the 1992 riots) and Turnaround by Bill Bratton (current LAPD Chief, and inventor of the “zero tolerance” policy which dramatically brought down the crime rate in New York) – very different views on policing, both visionary in their own ways – and the superb Black Dahlia Files by Donald H Wolfe. He unmasks the killers at the end and makes a very compelling case for the prosecution. Unfortunately the guilty are now as dead as the Dahlia.
Otherwise I’m very partial to Tom Wolfe, Andrew Holmes, Neil Cross, Alex Garland, Nick Kent (not a writer of fiction, that I know of, but no one writes or has ever written better about music – his Dark Stuff is a masterpiece and contains definitive pieces on The Rolling Stones in their twilight, Brian Wilson in mid-breakdown and a superb piece about Johnny Cash), Don DeLillo, James Webb, Hubert Selby, Paul Auster, Kafka, Gogol, Zola, George Orwell, Graham Greene (again), Marquez and John Berendt.
I also read everything my dad, Norman Stone, writes. I’m a big fan of his, and not just for obvious reasons.
Music is clearly important to your characters – Max loves jazz, Joe loves Springsteen, etc – which forms of media inspire you when you are writing?
I’ve been currently listening to A LOT of vintage disco music because it forms an inaudible soundtrack to King of Swords. Specifically Donna Summer’s back catalogue from 1975-1983, most of which is superb. And I’ve also made myself a CD of popular AOR hits from 1980-81. Some of it’s great, some of it – like Reo Speedwagon – is absolute utter f*cking torture to sit through. But a little suffering’s good for the soul. Builds character. Apparently.
I don’t watch very much television, but I never miss The Shield. Do you know I made Max bald in Mr Clarinet as tribute to Vic Mackey? Can’t have been easy on him, poor guy. Being Kojak in that scorching sun. I forgot to give him suncream. Might have to do that for the US edition.
Otherwise I read a lot, go to the cinema and watch DVDs.
Is it true your next novel will actually be a prequel to Mr Clarinet?
Yes. It’s called King of Swords. It’s set in Scarface-era Miami (1980-81), when the city was a rundown, racially polarised, coke-infested urban warzone. Sort of like the Haiti of Mr Clarinet, but with better teeth, Espanol, plastic surgery, poodles, cocaine and great hair. Very different to what it is today. Now Miami Beach is the American equivalent of a Big Brother audition – but with a great looking and infinitely more interesting cast.
Anyway, King of Swords tells the story of Max Mingus, then a cop, and his partner Joe Liston, tracking his nemesis, Solomon Boukman through the streets of an incredibly volatile city. Solomon runs a voodooesque gang called The Saturday Night Barons Club (or SNBC for short), who, apart from running or having a hand in every major racket in town, also practice ritualistic human sacrifice.
It’s a multi-layered narrative, seen from both Max’s perspective and that of a pimp in Solomon’s gang. And, I think, it’s a few shades darker than Mr Clarinet. I’m having a blast writing it.
Nick Stone on the publishing process through the eyes of the writer.
Parts 1, 2 & 3.
Part one of Nick Stone’s journey to becoming a published author.
Grandpa’s Gun
The plot for my debut novel, Mr Clarinet didn’t come to me all at once. I got it in two instalments. The first came to me in Haiti in December 1995, where I was visiting my family for the holidays. At the time, I hadn’t seen most of them nor set foot in the country for thirteen years.
I remember the moment lightning struck. It was midday – bright and baking. I was pacing around the courtyard with my late grandfather’s Model 10 Smith & Wesson revolver. I was having a nostalgic moment.
We went back, the gun, the courtyard and me. My first memory – age three - is of playing in the courtyard; my second is of the dog that approached me moments later. It was a stray black German Shepherd. It didn’t snarl or growl or even bark. It didn’t run up to me and pounce. It simply strolled into my life and – my third memory - clamped its jaws around my forearm and pulled me off my feet.
What happened next is a blank, although I’ve long since had the empty spaces filled in for me by people who weren’t there. My grandfather was sitting nearby in the shade, watching over me. This was something he liked to do while he still could. He was dying of cancer and knew he didn’t have long to go.
He shot the dog with the pistol he always kept at his side in case of thieves.
Two weeks later he died in his sleep.
My uncle Jean inherited the pistol. He mounted it in a glass case and used to pass it around at dinner parties, whenever the conversation went stale.
I found the gun quite by accident, still sitting in its display case, on top of a cupboard in the house I was staying in.
Jean told me the weapon’s history and then took it out of the case and handed it to me. It had a dull grey finish and a wooden grip which had turned almost black with time. It was heavier and sturdier than it looked.
The day I took the pistol for a walk in the courtyard – all the while mentally recreating the scene where my grandfather had saved my life - I noticed something about it I hadn’t initially seen, something only the intense sunlight revealed. On one side of the grip, close to the end, three thin straight lines, each about a centimetre long, had been crudely scored into the wood.
I guessed what they stood for.
I wondered how my grandfather had felt; being God three times over, for a split second each. I wondered how he’d lived with himself afterwards.
And that was how and when I got the first idea for my novel.
Simple, really: I’d create a character who’d killed three people. I’d give him bad dreams and a mounting sense of remorse. I’d make him sorry.
*
Haiti, in case you don’t know, is a Caribbean island, situated roughly between Cuba and Jamaica. It shares a border with the Dominican Republic. You can’t miss it when you fly over it. It’s the colour of rust on rust. Its neighbours are all lush and green, healthy and abundant. Haiti looks like it doesn’t belong there, like it’s floated in from another, sorrier part of the world, a place where it barely rains and nothing ever grows or lasts.
Haiti is apart, unique and alone, as are its people. They’re also exceptionally funny: two hundred plus years of living with almost constant natural and man-made disasters means there’s gallows humour in the DNA.
I returned to live and work there in September 1996. I’d got a marketing job in a now defunct local bank, based in the capital, Port-Au-Prince. I stayed until December 1997.
The place was a disaster zone. Think of some war/famine/drought ravaged African landscape teeming with extreme poverty and disease and you’ll get a picture of what it was like.
You couldn’t – and still can’t - drink the tap water in Haiti. It’s so filthy you’re urged to keep your mouth shut when you’re having a shower. The electricity supply is temperamental. Power cuts can last for days. Everyone who can afford one has a generator. Everyone else lives by candlelight or in complete darkness. There are precious few streetlights in Haiti. It’s not only the poorest country in the Western hemisphere; it’s also the darkest.
A little publicized consequence of the 1994 US military invasion of Haiti was the repatriation of most Haitian criminals from American prisons – hundreds of murderers, rapists, gang members, and drug dealers were flown back to the island and handed over to the country’s authorities. There was a slight problem with this – actually, make that a rather large problem: at that moment in time, Haiti was quite literally a lawless land. Not only was the country without a police force or army (both having been disbanded by order of the UN), all of its prisons had been emptied of convicts and turned into squats, the judiciary had been suspended and all laws annulled pending the drafting of a new constitution. The Haitian “authorities” who took possession of the homecoming convicts were actually nervous airport security staff. They escorted the criminals off the runway and released them. The criminals found their way to Port-Au-Prince and its neighbouring slum, a vast congealed cesspool and home to half a million people, called Cité Soleil. Within months they were running both.
The crime rate rocketed on the island: murders, home invasions, carjackings, rapes, drug trafficking and, very disturbingly, a whole new dark phenomenon - child kidnapping.
Children had always gone missing in Haiti. Most of them had disappeared for good, never to be seen nor heard from again. There were rumours of adoption rackets, black magic ceremonies, child labour and other things I won’t go into here, but kidnapping was a whole new ball game. And for once it wasn’t the poor who were suffering the worst, but the rich. After all, only they could afford to pay the ransoms.
When I heard about this I got the rest of the idea for my book. I’d send my triple murderer to Haiti to look for a missing child. I’d make him a private detective. He’d be haunted by his past - the life he’d lived, the lives he’d taken and the consequences he’d reaped. His name would be Max Mingus, after an old school friend who’d got me reading Kafka, and one of my heroes, the very great Charles Mingus: jazz bassist extraordinaire, band leader, composer, bully, brawler, genius and author of Under the Underdog – the quintessential jazz autobiography, written as lopsided noir.
Now you know.
*
I wrote the first draft of Mr Clarinet between January 30th 2003 and March 29th 2004.
I wrote every day. Sometimes I wrote a lot, sometimes I wrote three words and a full stop, but I was at my desk every morning for four to six hours.
*
I’d always been advised to get an agent because publishers rarely - if ever - look at unsolicited manuscripts.
I met my agent, Lesley Thorne, at a book launch in May 2002.
I told her briefly about my book. She was very nice. She asked me how much of it I’d written. When I confessed that I hadn’t written a word of it, she looked at me and said:
“Well, I’m not going to write it”.
It’s been that way ever since. I’m very lucky to have her in my corner.
*
Once I’d delivered the final manuscript – which was originally 576 pages long - Lesley, one of life’s natural diplomats, told me the draft needed to be shortened by 20,000 – 30,000 words. That really meant about 100 pages.
We set about editing the book down. When I say “we”, it really was a collaborative process. Lesley was almost as immersed in the book as I was. We talked through potential cuts to the manuscript and changes to the story, and then I went off and made the amendments.
Some of the cuts hurt: I had to lose material I was fond of, chapters I’d spent weeks on, but ultimately it made for a much better book.
The finished manuscript was submitted to publishers in early June 2004.
*
I was in the Old Bailey – working as a legal clerk on a murder trial - when Lesley called to say that Bev Cousins at Penguin had made an offer on my novel. I couldn’t, unfortunately, jump for joy there and then. I was in the foyer, outside the courtrooms where nervous witnesses were waiting to go in and give evidence. Displays of happiness were strictly off-limits.
*
Depending on how you look at it, I’ve either had a very easy time getting published - a mere twenty months from starting my novel to inking the deal – or, if you factor in all the novels I started writing but abandoned, I’ve had to wait twenty years.
I look at it this way: it’s a happier ending than one I’ll ever put in a book.
Part two. Nick gives another fascinating insight on the publishing process - in particular the rather mechanical procedures we drag our poor authors through to get to the final book: editing, copy-editing and proofreading.
More Voodoo
Last summer, after Mr Clarinet was accepted, I got an email from my new editor, Bev Cousins. It was ominously apologetic. While she thought my book was very good in its present form, she felt there was room for improvement. She also added that she hoped I wouldn’t hate her too much for what I was about to receive via courier.
The manuscript arrived the following day. It was, in places, so heavily riddled with editorial glyphs it looked like the score for a particularly wild symphony, something you could easily imagine being played by an orchestra of chainsaws and pneumatic drills.
Also included were Bev’s notes - a seventeen page evisceration of Mr Clarinet.
Initially, I felt somewhat bewildered, like I’d just walked into a new job and been fired as soon as I’d stepped through the door. Rejection slips, by comparison, had been a breeze.
*
It wasn’t supposed to go like this.
Up until then I’d thought the books you read were the same as the manuscripts that were turned in, give or take a few corrected typos.
I was wrong. This is rarely ever the case. All books have to go through an editor for fine tuning before they even get near a printer, let alone a bookshop.
*
Bev and I met up shortly before I started work on editing Mr Clarinet. We went through her notes, which I had, by then, re-read enough times to see that they were really a guide as opposed to an instruction manual: I was free to keep anything she’d suggested I lose, as long as I could justify it with more than a scowl and stamp of the foot.
In the end I agreed with 98% of her changes, not for the sake of an easy life, but because I knew they’d make for a much better book.
*
The changes I made ranged from minor (typos, missed words, contradictions, continuity errors) to major (rewrites of entire sections). One of these was, ironically, the part of the book I’d worked on the longest.
When I was living in Haiti, I’d heard a story about a town one of Pablo Escobar’s close associates had built somewhere deep inland. It had its own airport and housed a vast cocaine refinery which produced most of the coke snorted in North America. No one knew exactly where it was, nor had anyone ever seen it, let alone visited it, but everyone I spoke to was adamant it existed, this cocaine El Dorado.
My character, Max Mingus, finds it. He tails a suspect to a place resembling a miniature Milton Keynes, albeit with a huge narcotics plant slap bang in the middle, a school, a hospital, a town hall and plenty of houses. Appearing right in the middle of Haiti’s squalor and decrepitude it was meant to be as surreal a sight as it sounds –a drug baron’s answer to a Western industrial town.
The chapters were fun to write, but ultimately they didn’t quite work. They had very little to do with the plot, slowed the pace down and – crucially – upset the narrative’s internal balance, the relationship between the main character and his environment. The Haiti I’ve described - all dark, desolate geography, ruined architecture and relentless poverty - is in part a projection of Max’s own internal devastation. He’d be out of sync in Milton Keynes.
I replaced the section with something completely new and far more appropriate, although the drug town does still feature in the narrative – albeit fleetingly.
*
Other changes:
More voodoo,
More characters,
More myths,
More mayhem,
More fear,
Less Bruce Springsteen.
*
Lastly, I added a few more paragraphs about Haiti’s turbulent and very bloody history, from the relatively recent – the 1994 US invasion – to the eighteenth century slave uprisings, and, especially, its most notorious ruler, the satanic Papa Doc. He was a voodoo Howard Shipman, an arthritic Caligula, a Saddam with sick jokes and terrible eyesight. Although he doesn’t feature that much in the book, his cruel and crippling legacy does.
*
Editing Mr Clarinet took the best part of five months.
I finished the new draft in January of this year and sent it to Bev, expecting another autopsy report by way of comment.
Not so.
There were a couple of additional changes to make, but otherwise the book was pronounced as good as done and I could finally type 'The End' and mean it.
The final part of the story
Well, it’s done. Mr Clarinet, my debut novel, will be published January 2006 .
*
Mr Clarinet is now a proper book. It has a cover, designed by the great Henry Steadman.
Henry is responsible for designing covers for books by Bill Bryson, Jonathan Kellerman, Harlan Coben, Dan Brown and many others. His covers vary greatly from author to author, and - of those I’ve read - they tend to capture the essence of the book rather than specifically reflect its plot.
I was very keen for the cover to carry the symbol Max Mingus sees cropping up on walls all over Haiti during his search for the missing Charlie Carver - a Greek Orthodox-style cross with a broken right arm and a split base, like a cloven hoof, meant to be the mark of Mr Clarinet, the child-abducting spirit of Haitian folklore. It made it.
Henry apparently went to great lengths to get into the spirit of the book. For a start, he went out and bought himself a clarinet. I suspect he might even have attended a voodoo ceremony or two. Either way, the cover’s great.
*
The next thing was the author mugshot. My editor had briefed Ian Philpott, the photographer, to shoot something “dark and moody”. I briefed him to do something about my lack of hair. He obliged by omitting my fleeing hairline altogether from most shots. As for the dark and moody part, that wasn’t much of a stretch because I was born with a bad tempered mien, while the lighting was of that shadowy, obscuring sort that highlights certain facial features while blotting out others, especially beloved of vain male authors who’ve already passed the first two signposts to middle age. I now look like someone you wouldn’t want to meet down a dark alley – but one who may or may not have a full head of hair.
*
In between I had one final round of editing to do. Line editing: things that had got past familiar eyes, had been caught by fresh ones and reeled in for fixing. The changes were mostly minor: typos, repetition, continuity errors, and contradictions.
A few weeks later the final manuscript came in. I made one correction and signed off on it.
*
Jason Craig is a man possessed. He is currently overseeing, masterminding and running the sales campaign for Mr Clarinet. He also has a full-time job at Penguin.
In September he took me to visit several key bookshops, to meet some of the booksellers. I was somewhat wary, because we were accompanied by a Penguin sales rep of some infamy - he’d once sold a new book in to booksellers in the nude. No, I’m not making that up. I hoped to God he wasn’t going to sacrifice a chicken right there in the vegetarian books section of Foyles.
Going to the shops was an illuminating experience, as I got to find out a little of what actually happens behind the scenes of a bookshop. The feedback from those who’d read Mr Clarinet was very positive, although none of those readers seemed that keen to go to Haiti.
I got to meet Maxim Jakubowski. Maxim runs Murder One, arguably the best crime bookshop in the Western hemisphere. We go back some way, he and I, directly and indirectly. I once sold him a very rare book (there are only two copies known to be in circulation – neither of which are mine; I had eight of the things, but they got destroyed when my flat flooded during a flash storm) and he once very kindly let me into a sold out, over-subscribed James Ellroy reading for free.
*
I hope you enjoy Mr Clarinet. It’s now yours.
More
Nick Stone on the publishing process through the eyes of the writer.
Parts 1, 2 & 3.
Part one of Nick Stone’s journey to becoming a published author.
Grandpa’s Gun
The plot for my debut novel, Mr Clarinet didn’t come to me all at once. I got it in two instalments. The first came to me in Haiti in December 1995, where I was visiting my family for the holidays. At the time, I hadn’t seen most of them nor set foot in the country for thirteen years.
I remember the moment lightning struck. It was midday – bright and baking. I was pacing around the courtyard with my late grandfather’s Model 10 Smith & Wesson revolver. I was having a nostalgic moment.
We went back, the gun, the courtyard and me. My first memory – age three - is of playing in the courtyard; my second is of the dog that approached me moments later. It was a stray black German Shepherd. It didn’t snarl or growl or even bark. It didn’t run up to me and pounce. It simply strolled into my life and – my third memory - clamped its jaws around my forearm and pulled me off my feet.
What happened next is a blank, although I’ve long since had the empty spaces filled in for me by people who weren’t there. My grandfather was sitting nearby in the shade, watching over me. This was something he liked to do while he still could. He was dying of cancer and knew he didn’t have long to go.
He shot the dog with the pistol he always kept at his side in case of thieves.
Two weeks later he died in his sleep.
My uncle Jean inherited the pistol. He mounted it in a glass case and used to pass it around at dinner parties, whenever the conversation went stale.
I found the gun quite by accident, still sitting in its display case, on top of a cupboard in the house I was staying in.
Jean told me the weapon’s history and then took it out of the case and handed it to me. It had a dull grey finish and a wooden grip which had turned almost black with time. It was heavier and sturdier than it looked.
The day I took the pistol for a walk in the courtyard – all the while mentally recreating the scene where my grandfather had saved my life - I noticed something about it I hadn’t initially seen, something only the intense sunlight revealed. On one side of the grip, close to the end, three thin straight lines, each about a centimetre long, had been crudely scored into the wood.
I guessed what they stood for.
I wondered how my grandfather had felt; being God three times over, for a split second each. I wondered how he’d lived with himself afterwards.
And that was how and when I got the first idea for my novel.
Simple, really: I’d create a character who’d killed three people. I’d give him bad dreams and a mounting sense of remorse. I’d make him sorry.
*
Haiti, in case you don’t know, is a Caribbean island, situated roughly between Cuba and Jamaica. It shares a border with the Dominican Republic. You can’t miss it when you fly over it. It’s the colour of rust on rust. Its neighbours are all lush and green, healthy and abundant. Haiti looks like it doesn’t belong there, like it’s floated in from another, sorrier part of the world, a place where it barely rains and nothing ever grows or lasts.
Haiti is apart, unique and alone, as are its people. They’re also exceptionally funny: two hundred plus years of living with almost constant natural and man-made disasters means there’s gallows humour in the DNA.
I returned to live and work there in September 1996. I’d got a marketing job in a now defunct local bank, based in the capital, Port-Au-Prince. I stayed until December 1997.
The place was a disaster zone. Think of some war/famine/drought ravaged African landscape teeming with extreme poverty and disease and you’ll get a picture of what it was like.
You couldn’t – and still can’t - drink the tap water in Haiti. It’s so filthy you’re urged to keep your mouth shut when you’re having a shower. The electricity supply is temperamental. Power cuts can last for days. Everyone who can afford one has a generator. Everyone else lives by candlelight or in complete darkness. There are precious few streetlights in Haiti. It’s not only the poorest country in the Western hemisphere; it’s also the darkest.
A little publicized consequence of the 1994 US military invasion of Haiti was the repatriation of most Haitian criminals from American prisons – hundreds of murderers, rapists, gang members, and drug dealers were flown back to the island and handed over to the country’s authorities. There was a slight problem with this – actually, make that a rather large problem: at that moment in time, Haiti was quite literally a lawless land. Not only was the country without a police force or army (both having been disbanded by order of the UN), all of its prisons had been emptied of convicts and turned into squats, the judiciary had been suspended and all laws annulled pending the drafting of a new constitution. The Haitian “authorities” who took possession of the homecoming convicts were actually nervous airport security staff. They escorted the criminals off the runway and released them. The criminals found their way to Port-Au-Prince and its neighbouring slum, a vast congealed cesspool and home to half a million people, called Cité Soleil. Within months they were running both.
The crime rate rocketed on the island: murders, home invasions, carjackings, rapes, drug trafficking and, very disturbingly, a whole new dark phenomenon - child kidnapping.
Children had always gone missing in Haiti. Most of them had disappeared for good, never to be seen nor heard from again. There were rumours of adoption rackets, black magic ceremonies, child labour and other things I won’t go into here, but kidnapping was a whole new ball game. And for once it wasn’t the poor who were suffering the worst, but the rich. After all, only they could afford to pay the ransoms.
When I heard about this I got the rest of the idea for my book. I’d send my triple murderer to Haiti to look for a missing child. I’d make him a private detective. He’d be haunted by his past - the life he’d lived, the lives he’d taken and the consequences he’d reaped. His name would be Max Mingus, after an old school friend who’d got me reading Kafka, and one of my heroes, the very great Charles Mingus: jazz bassist extraordinaire, band leader, composer, bully, brawler, genius and author of Under the Underdog – the quintessential jazz autobiography, written as lopsided noir.
Now you know.
*
I wrote the first draft of Mr Clarinet between January 30th 2003 and March 29th 2004.
I wrote every day. Sometimes I wrote a lot, sometimes I wrote three words and a full stop, but I was at my desk every morning for four to six hours.
*
I’d always been advised to get an agent because publishers rarely - if ever - look at unsolicited manuscripts.
I met my agent, Lesley Thorne, at a book launch in May 2002.
I told her briefly about my book. She was very nice. She asked me how much of it I’d written. When I confessed that I hadn’t written a word of it, she looked at me and said:
“Well, I’m not going to write it”.
It’s been that way ever since. I’m very lucky to have her in my corner.
*
Once I’d delivered the final manuscript – which was originally 576 pages long - Lesley, one of life’s natural diplomats, told me the draft needed to be shortened by 20,000 – 30,000 words. That really meant about 100 pages.
We set about editing the book down. When I say “we”, it really was a collaborative process. Lesley was almost as immersed in the book as I was. We talked through potential cuts to the manuscript and changes to the story, and then I went off and made the amendments.
Some of the cuts hurt: I had to lose material I was fond of, chapters I’d spent weeks on, but ultimately it made for a much better book.
The finished manuscript was submitted to publishers in early June 2004.
*
I was in the Old Bailey – working as a legal clerk on a murder trial - when Lesley called to say that Bev Cousins at Penguin had made an offer on my novel. I couldn’t, unfortunately, jump for joy there and then. I was in the foyer, outside the courtrooms where nervous witnesses were waiting to go in and give evidence. Displays of happiness were strictly off-limits.
*
Depending on how you look at it, I’ve either had a very easy time getting published - a mere twenty months from starting my novel to inking the deal – or, if you factor in all the novels I started writing but abandoned, I’ve had to wait twenty years.
I look at it this way: it’s a happier ending than one I’ll ever put in a book.
Part two.
Nick gives another fascinating insight on the publishing process - in particular the rather mechanical procedures we drag our poor authors through to get to the final book: editing, copy-editing and proofreading.
More Voodoo
Last summer, after Mr Clarinet was accepted, I got an email from my new editor, Bev Cousins. It was ominously apologetic. While she thought my book was very good in its present form, she felt there was room for improvement. She also added that she hoped I wouldn’t hate her too much for what I was about to receive via courier.
The manuscript arrived the following day. It was, in places, so heavily riddled with editorial glyphs it looked like the score for a particularly wild symphony, something you could easily imagine being played by an orchestra of chainsaws and pneumatic drills.
Also included were Bev’s notes - a seventeen page evisceration of Mr Clarinet.
Initially, I felt somewhat bewildered, like I’d just walked into a new job and been fired as soon as I’d stepped through the door. Rejection slips, by comparison, had been a breeze.
*
It wasn’t supposed to go like this.
Up until then I’d thought the books you read were the same as the manuscripts that were turned in, give or take a few corrected typos.
I was wrong. This is rarely ever the case. All books have to go through an editor for fine tuning before they even get near a printer, let alone a bookshop.
*
Bev and I met up shortly before I started work on editing Mr Clarinet. We went through her notes, which I had, by then, re-read enough times to see that they were really a guide as opposed to an instruction manual: I was free to keep anything she’d suggested I lose, as long as I could justify it with more than a scowl and stamp of the foot.
In the end I agreed with 98% of her changes, not for the sake of an easy life, but because I knew they’d make for a much better book.
*
The changes I made ranged from minor (typos, missed words, contradictions, continuity errors) to major (rewrites of entire sections). One of these was, ironically, the part of the book I’d worked on the longest.
When I was living in Haiti, I’d heard a story about a town one of Pablo Escobar’s close associates had built somewhere deep inland. It had its own airport and housed a vast cocaine refinery which produced most of the coke snorted in North America. No one knew exactly where it was, nor had anyone ever seen it, let alone visited it, but everyone I spoke to was adamant it existed, this cocaine El Dorado.
My character, Max Mingus, finds it. He tails a suspect to a place resembling a miniature Milton Keynes, albeit with a huge narcotics plant slap bang in the middle, a school, a hospital, a town hall and plenty of houses. Appearing right in the middle of Haiti’s squalor and decrepitude it was meant to be as surreal a sight as it sounds –a drug baron’s answer to a Western industrial town.
The chapters were fun to write, but ultimately they didn’t quite work. They had very little to do with the plot, slowed the pace down and – crucially – upset the narrative’s internal balance, the relationship between the main character and his environment. The Haiti I’ve described - all dark, desolate geography, ruined architecture and relentless poverty - is in part a projection of Max’s own internal devastation. He’d be out of sync in Milton Keynes.
I replaced the section with something completely new and far more appropriate, although the drug town does still feature in the narrative – albeit fleetingly.
*
Other changes:
More voodoo,
More characters,
More myths,
More mayhem,
More fear,
Less Bruce Springsteen.
*
Lastly, I added a few more paragraphs about Haiti’s turbulent and very bloody history, from the relatively recent – the 1994 US invasion – to the eighteenth century slave uprisings, and, especially, its most notorious ruler, the satanic Papa Doc. He was a voodoo Howard Shipman, an arthritic Caligula, a Saddam with sick jokes and terrible eyesight. Although he doesn’t feature that much in the book, his cruel and crippling legacy does.
*
Editing Mr Clarinet took the best part of five months.
I finished the new draft in January of this year and sent it to Bev, expecting another autopsy report by way of comment.
Not so.
There were a couple of additional changes to make, but otherwise the book was pronounced as good as done and I could finally type 'The End' and mean it.
The final part of the story
Well, it’s done. Mr Clarinet, my debut novel, will be published January 2006 .
*
Mr Clarinet is now a proper book. It has a cover, designed by the great Henry Steadman.
Henry is responsible for designing covers for books by Bill Bryson, Jonathan Kellerman, Harlan Coben, Dan Brown and many others. His covers vary greatly from author to author, and - of those I’ve read - they tend to capture the essence of the book rather than specifically reflect its plot.
I was very keen for the cover to carry the symbol Max Mingus sees cropping up on walls all over Haiti during his search for the missing Charlie Carver - a Greek Orthodox-style cross with a broken right arm and a split base, like a cloven hoof, meant to be the mark of Mr Clarinet, the child-abducting spirit of Haitian folklore. It made it.
Henry apparently went to great lengths to get into the spirit of the book. For a start, he went out and bought himself a clarinet. I suspect he might even have attended a voodoo ceremony or two. Either way, the cover’s great.
*
The next thing was the author mugshot. My editor had briefed Ian Philpott, the photographer, to shoot something “dark and moody”. I briefed him to do something about my lack of hair. He obliged by omitting my fleeing hairline altogether from most shots. As for the dark and moody part, that wasn’t much of a stretch because I was born with a bad tempered mien, while the lighting was of that shadowy, obscuring sort that highlights certain facial features while blotting out others, especially beloved of vain male authors who’ve already passed the first two signposts to middle age. I now look like someone you wouldn’t want to meet down a dark alley – but one who may or may not have a full head of hair.
*
In between I had one final round of editing to do. Line editing: things that had got past familiar eyes, had been caught by fresh ones and reeled in for fixing. The changes were mostly minor: typos, repetition, continuity errors, and contradictions.
A few weeks later the final manuscript came in. I made one correction and signed off on it.
*
Jason Craig is a man possessed. He is currently overseeing, masterminding and running the sales campaign for Mr Clarinet. He also has a full-time job at Penguin.
In September he took me to visit several key bookshops, to meet some of the booksellers. I was somewhat wary, because we were accompanied by a Penguin sales rep of some infamy - he’d once sold a new book in to booksellers in the nude. No, I’m not making that up. I hoped to God he wasn’t going to sacrifice a chicken right there in the vegetarian books section of Foyles.
Going to the shops was an illuminating experience, as I got to find out a little of what actually happens behind the scenes of a bookshop. The feedback from those who’d read Mr Clarinet was very positive, although none of those readers seemed that keen to go to Haiti.
I got to meet Maxim Jakubowski. Maxim runs Murder One, arguably the best crime bookshop in the Western hemisphere. We go back some way, he and I, directly and indirectly. I once sold him a very rare book (there are only two copies known to be in circulation – neither of which are mine; I had eight of the things, but they got destroyed when my flat flooded during a flash storm) and he once very kindly let me into a sold out, over-subscribed James Ellroy reading for free.
*
I hope you enjoy Mr Clarinet. It’s now yours.
Product details
Format : Paperback
ISBN: 9780141021089
Size : 111 x 181mm
Pages : 576
Published : 28 Sep 2006
Publisher : Penguin
Mr Clarinet
£6.99
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