The F**k Dialogues

My introduction to Kevin Wignall was brokered by a guest appearance on Sarah Weinman’s blog, Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind. I found him to be erudite and witty, polite but incisive and, dare I say, urbane. An image of him formed in my mind; that of a country gentleman with a vast library and a wine cellar the size of my house.

But that image would be doing him a great disservice.

For the Dogs, Mr. Wignall’s latest book, makes that very clear.

A master of the “compressed” style of writing, as a reader I found not a wasted word. It isn’t uncommon for me to skip a sentence or a paragraph here or there when reading a book. I want to get to the good parts; the action, the meat of the matter.

Mr. Wignall’s books are all meat of the finest cut.

His on-line book, Like Plastic, enthralled me from the first post and I’m actually sad the tale is almost completely told.

When you forget that you’re reading and your mental existence becomes the book or short story you’re reading, you know the writer has succeeded. I can still picture scenes from For the Dogs. This after untold hundreds of books, magazine and graphic novels have passed through my hands and were sifted through my brain.

Although contemporary, Mr. Wignall’s writing displays a clear love of the classics. It isn’t by accident that Stephen Lucas, the lead in For the Dogs, reads the Nibelungenlied as the impressionable Ella Hatto reads Jane Austen’s Persuasion. Their roles are defined and exchanged with a deft hand.

I’ve also come to admire, no – adore, Mr. Wignall’s repeated ability to stand by his principles in the face of oppostion. Re-write kill ‘em with kindness to read wear them down with niceness and you’ll see why I would be loathe to argue with the man.

We owe Mr. Wignall’s writing of thrillers to film and if there is any justice in this world, that is the medium in which his stories will play out.

What is your favorite use of the word fuck?

As in ‘I don’t give a…’ and also when it’s used in tmesis, for example, absofuckinglutely.

Do you recall when you first heard the word fuck?

No.

Do you sit down to write every day?

You’re asking this of the person who took three years to finish his latest book? When I’m actually working on a book I feel wretched if I don’t write every day, but inbetween times, I can go months without writing a thing, not even notes. It all stays in my head until I absolutely have to write it.

A reader of “literary fiction” for most of your life, you write (and write very well) crime fiction. How did this happen?

Well, I would say that I write literary fiction in which some people carry out violent acts and others suffer that violence – it’s only really in the last thirty years that violence and pace automatically sees you labelled as a crime or thriller writer. Whatever measure you use to define “literary” – subject matter, themes, characterization, language – there are plenty of people in the crime field who match and even surpass those published as literary authors. The only shame of it is that a lot of general readers miss out because of the narrow-mindedness of the literary world. For the sake of this interview, I feel I should also add, fuck ‘em!

What do you think establishes voice in a body of written work?

This’ll have a lot of people choking on their chips, but I think you either have it or you don’t. When you’re young, you have to let the other voices die down (the voices of the writers you admire, the voice of what you think a writer should sound like) but the simple fact is, if your own voice doesn’t emerge from this process, it never will. Everything else might be down to technique or experience, but I think voice is the raw talent and it can never be learned. I recently found a scrap of something I wrote when I was around twenty – and for all the things I still had to learn about writing back then, it’s unmistakably my writing, my voice. I think that’s true for everyone.

So, what was it like driving a tank?

How did you find out about that? It was fun, naturally, and remarkably simple. The noise is fabulous and it’s a great feeling seeing almost any terrain in front of you and knowing you can charge straight through it. Imagine all that when you’re seven or eight years old – I can still remember it like it was yesterday.

Where can readers read you next?

Good question. Bit of a romp in the current (March/April) edition of EQMM. A story in “Dublin Noir“, due out in March. As for the new book, hard to say at this point, but unlikely before the summer of 2007.

What are your influences?

I’ve always maintained that you’re influenced by everything you’ve ever read, good or bad. There are certain writers I relate to more than others – Stephen Crane, Graham Greene, Paul Bowles – but is that just subconscious vanity because they use a similarly lean style? It’s also well known that I like Jane Austen, and at some level, I think of all my books as love stories. No, really, I do.

What is the disc in your cd player right now?

At the moment, nothing, because it’s 1am and the stillness is what I like. Earlier, it was The Arctic Monkeys, The Foo Fighters and Nico.

Spellcheck does not like tmesis.

Spellcheck is good for typos, but really, you don’t have to push far to find the limits of its vocabulary. You’ll have to trust me on tmesis.

And I do. Implicitly.

A snippet from Kevin Wignall’s story, The Preacher:

“Are you on drugs? I mean, are you high right now?”

Hector laughed and said, “I’m serious, man. You know it’s like… well, let’s call it the C word, you know, to describe a woman’s er…”

“I know which word you mean.”

“I would hope so,” said Hector with a knowing smile that made Sidney want to slap his face. If the punk hadn’t been driving he’d have done just that. “It’s a bad word, the worst word, but it describes one of the greatest things ever. Haven’t you ever wondered, why that is?”

“No, Hector, I haven’t, just like your parents probably never wondered why you didn’t get into Harvard.”