David Malcolm was born in Aberdeen and educated in Aberdeen, Zürich, and London. He's lived and worked in Japan, the USA, and currently calls Sopot, Poland home, where he is professor at the Institute of English and American Studies at the University of Gdańsk. His collection of short fiction, Radio Moscow and Other Stories, was published by Blackwitch Press in 2015 and republished by Artizan in 2016.
His new novel, The German Messenger (Crime Wave Press) is set in late 1916 when Europe is tearing itself apart in the Great War. Harry Draffen, a part Greek and part Scottish British secret agent, becomes part of a daring attempt by British and German spies to stop the gratuitous bloodletting of WWI. Draffen journeys from the slums of East London to an Oxford college, from the trenches on the Western Front to an isolated house on the Scottish coast, and then on to a bloody showdown in the North of England, to chase a phantom and elusive German messenger.
David Malcolm stops by In Reference to Murder today to talk about writing and researching the novel:
Most of the fiction that I write is set in the past. I find the past – places, people, events – much more interesting than the present. The German Messenger is set in late 1916 and early 1917. I’ve also written other crime stories that take place during the Great War or in the early 1950s.
The problem for me is not so much the grand historical events. They can be tricky however. For example, like many even moderately well-read people, I had heard very little of the Salonika campaign in which the British Army was involved, alongside Allied forces, between 1915 and 1918. It was complicated, bloody, not very successful – and largely forgotten. I realized as I was writing The German Messenger that my hero Draffen – because he is part-Greek – has to have been involved somehow in it. I may have to juggle with time-lines in sequels to the Messenger.
However, the grand events are not so much a problem. It’s the smaller details that a writer setting stories in the past also needs to get right. Exactly how short were women’s skirts in 1917? Did British officers wear uniforms to civilian dinner parties in 1916? What did a Habsburg infantry unit look like in 1915? (The answer to that is: in field-grey, very tough, and very scary.) How were train carriages laid out in southern England in the winter of 1916 (with a corridor running the length of the carriage, or with doors opening directly on to the platform)? The problem is not just with the distant past. How much had Hamburg been rebuilt by 1951? What did that part of Warsaw look like in 1953? What was it like to be in that kind of bar in Tokyo in 1984?
But of course there are loads of books and magazines in libraries, and many that you can get to read at home if you haven’t got the British Library twenty minutes down the road. (I am very jealous of those who do.) For example, I have collections of wonderful pictures of the third arrondissement in Paris that give you a sense of the streets there from 1900 through 1940. A book that I looked at by chance in the British Library contains a railway map of the Baltic area in 1908, so I now know how my hero gets from Warsaw to Reval/Tallinn. Books, too, give you ideas for stories. Alex Butterworth’s splendid The World That Never Was tells you more about the anarchists and the policemen of Europe between 1870 and 1914 than you probably ever wanted to know. (In fact, it’s a very depressing book – folly on all sides.) Do you need to write a novel about the Habsburg secret services? Have a look at Albert Pethö’s Agenten für den Doppeladler (Agents for the Double-Eagle). It has the kernels of more plots than you can shake a stick at. Museums, too, can be of assistance, and can inspire. A visit to the marvelous Nissim de Camondo museum in Paris gave me the background to a whole subplot for the next German Messenger novel.
Then there’s the internet. Pictures everywhere. Snippets of stories. Maps. Street plans of Zoppot in 1902. Fashion pictures. Film of Hamburg streets in 1955. It’s almost like being there sometimes. It’s not cheating at all. If only it had all been there twenty years ago.
But sometimes, of course, you just invent. When I wrote a thriller set in Japan in the 1980s, I decided I might as well invent the bar where the hero meets an important female character. I had lived in Tokyo for two years, so I had lots of surrounding details right. But I’d never been to that kind of bar. I couldn’t do the local research, and – to be honest – I didn’t want to. I don’t care for that kind of place, and it’s wise to know your limitations. So I imagined it. European and American readers who’ve looked at the typescript say it’s completely authentic and believable. I haven’t dared show it to any Japanese ones. I did the same in The German Messenger with The Cherry Tree nightclub (do all my stories take place in bars, you ask). I made it up. When I read it again, I think to myself even – how authentic! But I believe the author should do that kind of invention very sparingly. All fictions are precisely that – fictions. But you owe, I believe, a debt to reality, to the past, to the people of the past, and you should do your best to get it right. I try. For readers, too, there has to be a certain density of historical detail to make the story feel real (not too much, not too little). The most accurate is usually the best.
Fortunately, I love libraries. My work has taken me to some of the best in the world. I’m very happy in them, even in indifferent ones. But the streets of London, Paris, Berlin, Boston, and Warsaw give you ideas, give you settings, make you imagine. They’re kinds of libraries too. Dusty second-hand bookstores in provincial cities, too, are still sources of ideas, atmosphere, details.
Then there is serendipity. I was in Łódź (Lodz in German, Russian, and Yiddish) a couple of years ago in a second-hand bookstore (also one of my favorite places, as you can guess). I bought a book about Łódż in the Great War, and the bookseller said to me, “Oh, my grandmother was a girl during the First War.” She remembered one of the first battles of the War that was fought around the city. The local bourgeoisie stood out on the roof of the Grand Hotel on the main street and watched as the Russians and Germans lobbed shells at each other from either side of the city. Who could invent that?
Find out more about David Malcolm and his books via the Crime Wave Press site and Amazon. The German Messenger is now available from all major booksellers.
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