Review

Contrappasso Magazine
A few words with Clive Sinclair on Death & Texas

MATTHEW ASPREY: Clive, it’s been more than a year since our long interview was published in Contrappasso and the Los Angeles Review of Books. In the interim Contrappasso was thrilled to publish two of the stories now included in Death & Texas. Those two stories alone jumped all over the world—Atlanta, Israel, Germany, the USA. Where else does the new book take us?

CLIVE SINCLAIR: As you say, the stories you published in Contrappasso had itchy feet: one rambles from Atlanta, GA, to Brinkley, AL; while the other starts in London, looks in upon New Mexico, then moves to Jerusalem, Passau, Germany, before finally coming to a halt back in London. Other locations in the book include Texas, as you might expect, New Orleans, Machu Picchu, and Shylock’s Venice. Perhaps I am best characterized as a travel writer too shy to embrace the locals, therefore forced to people the exotic locations with my own inventions. This has been my MO for many years now. So that when I glance at my older stories I am no longer certain what really happened and what I made up. Addressing one of the narrators a character sums it up nicely: “Did we really do all the things you said we did, or was it just wishful thinking?

MA: I was happy to meet Kinky Friedman and Fess Parker in “Death & Texas”.

CS: Not half as happy as me. I first saw Fess Parker on a big screen in a grand old cinema (long since demolished) on Oxford Street, in the heart of London’s West End. In those days there were long queues to see popular movies, which only sharpened the anticipation. Of course movie stars are called stars for a good reason; their images are transported on rays of light, and they live light years away from ordinary mortals. Or at least that was how Fess Parker appeared to me as he defended the Alamo in the guise of Davy Crockett. So imagine my excitement when I discovered that, having quit acting, he ran a winery and a hotel a few hundred miles from my temporary residence in Santa Cruz, CA. How could I not go? And how could I not include the encounter in my story about Davy Crockett? Looking back upon it, the occasion still seems as unlikely as an ancient Greek taking tea with Achilles.
 
I first came across Kinky Friedman much later, by which time my critical facilities were fully developed. So I felt we both inhabited the same planet at least. Moreover, I felt that our world views had similarities; both of us being mordant Jews of the opinion that our Achilles heel does not reside only in the backside of our foot, but in every pore of our bodies. I visited the Kinkstah on his family ranch, near Medina (the one in East Texas, not Saudi Arabia). Needless to say, after the visit I played his songs all the way to San Antonio: “No, they ain’t makin’ Jews like Jesus anymore,/ We don’t turn the other cheek the way they done before.”

MA: How did you connect with the publisher Halban?

CS: Well, the Adam & Eve of my writing career were Clive Allison and Margaret Busby. We had a lot of fun in those early days, especially with Hearts of Gold and Blood Libels. In a way I’m looking to repeat the experience with Martine and Peter Halban, another bookish duo. When I was with a larger outfit there was an expectation that everything—from book design to marketing—was assigned to professionals, who would handle everythingwith the flair of Saville Row’s bespoke tailors. This was not always the case. Now, if the book doesn’t read well or look good I have only myself to blame. I am looking to recapture that sensual experience—that bibliosexual moment—you are never going to get with a kindle.

MA: Still, I’m glad to see the book is available for e-readers. In the last dozen years you’ve published a pair of novellas (Meet the Wife) and a travel narrative in your patented mode of ‘dodgy realism’ (Clive Sinclair’s True Tales of the Wild West). And now you’re back with your fourth book of short fiction. What brings you back to the short story?

CS: I have been thinking more and more that the short story—or the novella, at a stretch—is my natural form. At any rate, it is what I do best. By which I don’t mean better than anyone else—God forbid—but better than my own longer fiction. When I write I try to thread together well-made—even beautiful—sentences. I do this because I remain enamoured of my raw material: viz words. And the way they strike the five senses: the sight, the sound, the smell, the feel and the taste of them. But there is a constant balance to maintain between the felicity of the prose, and the efficiency of the narrative. In the short-story the scales can be more pleasingly biased toward the former. What makes The Great Gatsby so great is that Scott Fitzgerald found a way of so vitalizing his exquisite prose that it actually motored the narrative; each image being not only decorative, but also functional. But The Great Gatsby is a rarity: more often such hyperactive prose in a novel tends to bedazzle the reader, until in breathless admiration or sheer frustration they lose the plot. This is less likely to happen with a short story. The same applies to the intensity of emotion a short story can contain. Put all that in a novel and the poor reader would be in great danger of sensory overload, like Barbarella in the Orgasm Machine. So I write short stories as an act of charity; to save lives and preserve sanity.

MA: You’ve dropped tantalising hints at a detective novel in the works. What else have you been up to and what can we expect in the future?

CS: You know, of course, what happened to the man who knew too much. So I feel a certain responsibility toward both questioner and reader as to what might happen if I were to reveal too much too soon. What I can say is that I have a detective, whose singular vulnerability is his USP (as I learned to say in my Mad Men days). The trouble is that he’s still in want of a client. And he is in want of a client because his creator is short of one master criminal, a Moriarty de nos jours. What I need, in other words, is a suitable crime to solve. So if there are any crooks manqué out there with a seemingly perfect caper ready to green-light please give me a clue. Though I do have a few caveats. A few years ago I taught a course on detective fiction at the University of East Anglia, and took the opportunity to acquaint myself with a few fiends who had achieved both commercial and critical popularity. My response, I confess, was less enthusiastic, prompting me to eschew any thoughts of serial killers, sex maniacs, psychopaths, cannibals, or any other perverted dispatcher of young women, however high their IQ. Such characters invite a form oferotic sentimentality. All of which is not to say that the book will be over-cerebral. The one thing for sure is that blood will flow.

Matthew Asprey
© Contrappasso Magazine 2014