Meeting People
Alex Martin: Crime fiction, decadence, Monty Python, Shakespeare, The Bible and creativity
From researching for Monty Python to writing crime fiction, Alex Martin’s life has been rich with creativity, adventure, and learning. His experiences frame our discussion which includes how to tackle Shakespeare, the importance of beauty and the soul diminishing impact of ugliness.
Creative writing is a dwindling endeavour. The tik-tokification of entertainment has distracted the focus of many would-be readers. In response or in parallel, the publishing industry has become dominated by accountants obsessed over ROI, leading to consolidation and a formula and scale driven mindset to choosing who to promote and who to ignore. We understand the world through stories and fiction is our primary avenue to discovering truth. As per Taleb:
“Fiction is a certain packaging of the truth, or higher truths. Indeed I find that there is more truth in Proust, albeit it is officially fictional, than in the babbling analyses of the New York Times that give us illusions of understanding what is going on. Newspapers have officially the right facts, but their interpretations are imaginary – and their choice of facts are arbitrary. They lie with right facts; a novelist says the truth with wrong facts.”
Publishers no longer help dedicated writers, obscure or otherwise, find their audience. Instead their focus is on celebrity tourists to the craft from whom revenues are more predictable. As such it was comforting to know that there remains a tribe of creatives, dedicated to observing the world and helping us understand it through their efforts. I especially enjoyed Alex talking about his research into the history of bad behaviour via his Decadent series in the 1990s. Indeed the Decadent CookBook that he co-wrote under the pseudonym of Medlar Lucan and Durien Gray includes delights such as Testicles on Toast. A brief correction from the episode – I incorrectly stated that William Buckland, Dean of Westminster ate the heart of Robespierre. It was of course Louis XIV’s heart that he ingested!
I highly recommend reading Code Name Xenophon, by Alex’s pseudonym Leo Kanaris available here and hope you enjoy the episode as much as we did recording it.
From researching for Monty Python to writing crime fiction, Alex Martin’s life has been rich with creativity, adventure, and learning. His experiences frame our discussion which includes how to tackle Shakespeare, the importance of beauty and the soul diminishing impact of ugliness.
Creative writing is a dwindling endeavour. The tik-tokification of entertainment has distracted the focus of many would-be readers. In response or in parallel, the publishing industry has become dominated by accountants obsessed over ROI, leading to consolidation and a formula and scale driven mindset to choosing who to promote and who to ignore. We understand the world through stories and fiction is our primary avenue to discovering truth. As per Taleb:
“Fiction is a certain packaging of the truth, or higher truths. Indeed I find that there is more truth in Proust, albeit it is officially fictional, than in the babbling analyses of the New York Times that give us illusions of understanding what is going on. Newspapers have officially the right facts, but their interpretations are imaginary – and their choice of facts are arbitrary. They lie with right facts; a novelist says the truth with wrong facts.”
Publishers no longer help dedicated writers, obscure or otherwise, find their audience. Instead their focus is on celebrity tourists to the craft from whom revenues are more predictable. As such it was comforting to know that there remains a tribe of creatives, dedicated to observing the world and helping us understand it through their efforts. I especially enjoyed Alex talking about his research into the history of bad behaviour via his Decadent series in the 1990s. Indeed the Decadent CookBook that he co-wrote under the pseudonym of Medlar Lucan and Durien Gray includes delights such as Testicles on Toast. A brief correction from the episode – I incorrectly stated that William Buckland, Dean of Westminster ate the heart of Robespierre. It was of course Louis XIV’s heart that he ingested!
I highly recommend reading Code Name Xenophon, by Alex’s pseudonym Leo Kanaris available here and hope you enjoy the episode as much as we did recording it.
Hello and welcome to Meeting People with me, amal Pandey. Meeting People is a podcast where I have long conversations with adventurous, rebellious and sometimes courteous free spirits. So, alex, thanks for joining us. I'd like to ask you just to kick off with a question about a phrase I've heard you use, called déformation professionnel. What does that phrase mean? What does it mean to you?
Speaker 2:It's a French term, as you can know.
Speaker 1:My wonderful pronunciation.
Speaker 2:It also exists in Italian, déformazione professionnelle, and it just means that there's a when you do a job over several years, it starts to form you, it starts to mould you Physically, physically, mentally. You know, there's a kind of equivalent or related proverb is you know, to the man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. The person who is trained in financial disciplines will always look first at the financial aspect of something you know, even if other aspects should be more important or might be conceived to be more important. And that can be a deformation, a professional deformation of your judgment and indeed, of course, of your physically too. If you sit hunched over a desk all day long, you're indoors all day long, it does deform you physically too, so you become your job physically.
Speaker 2:Yes, yes, so it's affected you a little bit too much. You're not just walking away from it and you're your pure, unadulterated self. What does it mean to me? I've been very aware of it. I'm a great believer in a sort of balanced life, if possible, and not becoming too obsessively honed and concentrated on one particular aspect of life.
Speaker 1:Right, but do you find, as a writer that you're never really switched off and despite trying to live a balanced life, you have this noticing that never turns off, because you're always observing and maybe you're storing something up for later on that that will go into a little notebook. But you used to phrase once you know which really tickled me, which was, you know, flying crockery. You know someone throws something at you out of in an argument and you go oh God, that's, that will go really nicely in a story that I'm working on, the way that the lip of that teacup nearly whacked me in the face.
Speaker 1:Yeah yeah, do you find yourself, as a writer, under deformation professional, despite trying to live a balanced life, because you're never switching off?
Speaker 2:That's a very sharp question indeed. You know, believing that something is bad for you doesn't necessarily mean that you stop indulging in it. You know, I sort of can't help being a writer. Really, I became obsessed with words when I was very young and loved what they can do and what they could do to me. I'm fascinated by their operation on the mind. So I don't really have any choice about doing it. And indeed it does mean that you, if you, if you're in the habit of writing and you know, either professionally or in an amateur way, for instance keeping diaries or just writing poetry and so on you do have this tendency to think oh yes, I can save that up for later. Or gosh, I like that phrase and you note it down. You know, it's kind of thin end of the wedge, check off.
Speaker 2:This is a wonderful scene in the seagull, his play the seagull, where there's a writer who appears on a country estate. This romantic young lady says oh, it must be so beautiful to be a writer. He gets really fed up with this kind of immature adulation and he says look, at some certain point. He says look, I'm going to tell you what it's like being a writer. And he lays out this bitter account of how you can't enjoy anything because you're constantly the go. How could I use that? But it's not. It's not that bad. I mean, that's a very caricature vision of it.
Speaker 1:I guess it's sort of pushing back at this. Yeah, this he check off was probably pushing back at this idyllic representation of a writer which ignores the hard work.
Speaker 2:Exactly.
Speaker 1:The fear of no one liking something. And and is it any good? Yeah, and always in a romantic. You just sit there right all day. Precisely, it's probably hard work and it's intense.
Speaker 2:But I must say I have, you know, I think, on the compensating that is is a wonderful effect of it. I mean, I have kept a diary ever since I was about 12 years old. Not every day. I just write down things that appear to me significant, in passing and in times of trouble, which come to us all. I found it incredibly consoling to do that, because you somehow can step back from the trouble that you're feeling, the pain. You put it into words and you contextualize it.
Speaker 2:You process it you process it, you, you, you sort of plough it into the soil of your being. It's a, it's a, it's a very healing process.
Speaker 1:And when you're writing your diary versus your professional work as a writer, are you trying to make it sound nice? Or are you just unloading words? Are you conscious of the positive turn of phrase that that that's yeah.
Speaker 2:Good question. Yeah, you become instinctively through default Massion. You want to put the right word in the right place, but I don't agonize over it, I don't try to be funny or or really really concise, I just try to write very clearly, to make it, as George Orwell said, like a pane of glass that you just see through it through the writing to the experience, untroubled by any thoughts of that's badly expressed or that's beautifully expressed. So pretty straightforward writing, interesting.
Speaker 1:So I think it's all well. All those said that there were four reasons why people write, and primarily he was talking about nonfiction or prose. But he's, he's, he said of these four reasons A writer will have at least one, will have all four, but in greater or lesser degrees, versus each other and at various points in their lives, and he breaks, he argues. Reason number one is just sheer egoism. So yeah, trying to sound clever, or getting your own back at that school teacher who said you'll never amount to anything, or impressing people is one. It's useless to pretend that that's not a reason.
Speaker 1:Reason number two he gives is that aesthetic love of the sound of words and forming that, what, as we've touched on, you know, having a really good turn of phrase and just feeling really satisfied about it. Number three is this is this sense of needing to chronicle or provide a record for future, for posterity, and then finally, effectively, politics. And he didn't mean that in a I don't think reading the way he wrote it, he didn't mean it in a pejorative sense said we just can't help but write things in a way to influence the world and to push the world or encourage the world into a certain direction. So even if you are saying there is no room for politics and art that is a political form of writing. Would you agree with his breakdown of those four things and would you agree that those four things have been a greater or greater or lesser impact in your career as a writer?
Speaker 2:Yeah, definitely. I mean you know who else for a very sound indeed. There's a, there's. There are more, of course. I mean one is that you see yourself as part of a tradition which you want to belong to. That's, that's a very powerful instinct which I don't think he is included in those.
Speaker 1:So you've got a tribe that you want to be part of.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, you feel that, yeah that's a kind of civilized approach to life. Of course, the more you discover about the way certain writers have lived, the less you want to belong to that tribe.
Speaker 1:Any examples oh?
Speaker 2:lots of them. Yeah, Scott Fitzgerald Hemingway, you know, just goes on and on. So let's just let's just well.
Speaker 1:Byron was, I mean, one of those characters, wasn't he that we will never get again?
Speaker 2:That's right. But in fact, all well himself. Now, you know he was. He was a champion of decency, you know. And now this new book has come out by an offender about all well and his women, you know, saying that actually he was horrible, he was pretty awful to them really, yeah so, but I, you know, his writing is what endures for me.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so let's, let's just go a bit deeper into why you wanted, or you chose, a life of a writer. You've alluded to it already that you know already from an early age you were keeping a diary and you were conscious of words. Was it a love of reading first that creates a love of writing, or did you? What was it that pulled your soul into that area?
Speaker 2:I honestly don't know. I'm not evading the question, I find it. I find it pretty hard to understand now, looking back, given that, you know, when I grew up it was in the 50s and 60s and the world was emerging from the shadow, shadow, darkness of the Second World War.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, my parents had come from quite poor background, educated, but not not with a lot of money and they knew that they were at rock bottom at the end of the war and that you had to make money. You had to better yourself. Yeah, they did it so well as I was growing up. I was, you know, I grew up in a comfortable house with a big garden. There was always food, there was always anything we wanted, things that my parents could never, could never take for granted when they were young. So my ideas about how life could be were totally different from theirs and I remember as I got more and more interested in literature and the artistic life, they became more and more bewildered.
Speaker 1:Right, because they were running up against the wall of necessity in a way that you know, and therefore observing your love of literature seemed like a luxury. That was not something that they could fathom, because yeah, they might.
Speaker 2:My father was an engineer, my mother a doctor. She her father had been a school teacher and schools inspector and writer. He had written lots of short stories as translator as well, but he did that as a sort of sideline from his teaching and his educational work. So she always encouraged the writing and I found at school that you know English and French and the arts were appealed to me much more than scientific studies. So it was a habit formed at school, and particularly the discovery of Shakespeare when I was about 16 just blew me away and I thought I've got to be part of this. I loved theatre as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah yeah, it was a really sort of how much of that was by having good teachers. The teachers were wonderful, yeah, okay. So you got you kind of lucked out a bit, because I'm sure there's many kids around the country and grown ups who just Shakespeare to them is a, is a is. They get kind of nervous twitches and sort of exams and this dull schoolmaster trying to hammer home this language that people kind of don't really understand.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But one of my questions for you, which we can, we can, we can cover it now is what does a curious grown up do about Shakespeare who's not really had an exposure to it beyond getting through it as fast as possible at the age of 15. Is it worth it? Is there a? And how do you approach it? Because an initial it's not like reading Game of Throats, let's say, because it's a different language, almost. So how does one approach what is one of the kind of banks of literature that is so crucial to where we are today?
Speaker 2:Do you want me to answer that? Yeah, I think you've got to see it on stage or on film the stories are very good.
Speaker 1:See it as a play rather than a piece of reading.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean it's like trying to appreciate Beethoven by reading the score. You know, to give a child a score of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, they're not going to like it very much, but when you hear it played then it means something. And play scripts are like a musical score, essentially Right, and I used to teach Shakespeare quite a bit, both at secondary scores and at university level, and I often found that actually getting the students up on their feet and performing seeds would wake them up in the most incredible way.
Speaker 1:They'd suddenly realise how much there is in the first game line by line through Saturn, which has yeah, and yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2:And so when you actually have to stand up and say a few lines from Macbeth or Hamlet, you suddenly realise that there are, the characters are speaking to each other, that there are physical demands being placed on them, they have to do certain things, and it suddenly becomes much more powerful as well You're when you see it on the page. It's just a foreign language. As you said it is, you know it's very old.
Speaker 1:It's unapproachable. Yeah, yeah, and what's your favourite Shakespeare play? Where would you start?
Speaker 2:Where Hamlet yeah?
Speaker 1:Is that Hamlet OK?
Speaker 2:It's, you know, one of the great works, maybe four or five great works of world literature, absolutely miles above most of. And is that because of the story or the characters.
Speaker 1:Just because everything put together Just everything. Yeah, so let's fight. Yeah, I think people listening.
Speaker 2:I mean, everything's not a very good answer. All right, what is it about it?
Speaker 2:The figure of a young man, young prince, who has got everything His world is broken apart when he meets the ghost of his father Saying to him I was murdered, I was the king of Denmark. I was murdered by my brother, who is now the king of Denmark. Now you've got to go and avenge my death and kill that man, your uncle, who's married to your mother now. And Hamlet is a you know, he's studied philosophy, he's a perfect Renaissance prince. He has got no training in this kind of vendetta, blood politics and his life falls apart as he tries to deal with this horrific obligation that's been laid on him by the ghost of his father. I mean it's. It's. It's full of the most wonderful soliloquies as well.
Speaker 2:Freud went to town on it. The scene where he he's in his mother's bedroom with her saying leave this monster that you're married to. And, as Freud pointed out, there's there's a powerful sexual transaction going on in that scene. I mean it's astonishing stuff and it's wonderful to see on stage as well. Really, is I mean you, you, everything, everything else falls away. And the communication with this particular figure, this young man, is is I mean when you get a good Hamlet. It's the one role that all great actors want to play.
Speaker 1:Cricky. Well, I think we all know what's on our to-do list for this summer. The other endowment the English language has, more than English has today, is people argues from the Bible. Have you found that a rich source of material writing ways of demonstrating things? I'm reading a lot of Trollop at the moment. We've talked about it before and it's the. The penguin is very helpful because it provides little notes at the end that you can refer to, and every three pages is either a quote from the Bible or there's a quote from Shakespeare, and Anthony Trollop has managed to. You know, know those two things so well that it's made his stories richer without me realising it If I didn't have penguin telling me that. So have you found the? You know the King James Bible version? Is that as foundational as people say? It is? Oh, yes, yes, completely.
Speaker 2:But I mean you have to remember that that was. It was a, it was really the foundation of our education. I'm you know I'm talking about being educated in England in the 1950s and it had been like that since, since the Bible was translated into English five or six centuries ago. It wasn't just a technical education, it was regarded as the word of God, right. So you know you took it pretty seriously. I mean, even in all the sort of wonderful boisterous rebelliousness of youth, you still would think, well, I should have better take that stuff seriously. And you heard it all day long. You know I went to prayers or church every single day of my schooling. 15 years of church every day hearing the Bible, and then lots of writers who were formed by it. As it happens, the King James Bible was put together by a remarkable team of translators and writers. It's thought Shakespeare might have been involved as well. It certainly makes all subsequent versions sound wooden and dull.
Speaker 1:I've read one or flicked through one or two kind of modern copies where, like Jesus was a dude who kind of you know, and it's sort of a bit cringe. But when you hear that you know the old Psalms being recited on this episode of a wedding or something, there's a reason why I think in a very secular or atheistic world people still crave a Christian wedding.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, because it.
Speaker 1:You're turning up to an occasion which is meant to be cementing something for many decades, so you want something that's been cemented hundreds of years ago to give you that sense of continuity and grounding, even if we don't really none of us really believe in what it's saying necessarily anymore. But when you were at school it was still hammered home as the kind of word of God, and that's why it's not a school lesson. Look at the beauty of the way this is foundational.
Speaker 2:That's right. Yes, and that's right. I think, to just separate out its elegance or its beauty is to do it a violence really. It's been read not just because it's beautiful and not just because people say it's the word of God, but there's a lot of wisdom in it too. I mean it's fantastic to read.
Speaker 2:I've been struck for a long, long time by the first story in the Bible, which is, as Milton put it, of man's first disobedience. You know what is the fundamental fact about human beings If you say to them you can do anything you like, but don't touch that one thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah. People are going to. This plate is very hot. When you get served at a restaurant, the first thing you do is Exactly the forbidden is the most attractive thing and somehow that's hardwired into us.
Speaker 2:It's very difficult and I think it's brilliant that that's there as the foundational story. So I think there's a lot of wisdom in it, there's a lot of understanding that in a sense you could say the whole of life is in the Bible.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and then on it is layered music and literature and architecture that we don't quite see that same richness today based on, you know, trans equality or whatever it might be no, that's right. Or climate change or whatever it is. That's kind of driving religious behavior today.
Speaker 2:I mean, I must say that when I, at the end of my schooling, when I went to university, I became very interested in Hinduism and I'd really lost patience with the Christians at university, I got to know that they're very narrow-minded. They remember somebody comparing other religions to insects that live under stones. When you lift a stone and the insects run away. And I remember you went up to this speaker and said how can you talk about?
Speaker 1:This wasn't a student, because students are kind of. You know, we can all try and say outrageous things. The students are trying to shut up. This was someone who was an informed speaker.
Speaker 2:Yes, he was speaking to the Christian. You know, I went along. I was absolutely appalled by this. It was disgusting and I've always hated racism or anything like that. That just says, you know, like for some arbitrary reason, you're okay on this side of the line and you're not okay the other side of the line. So that has been a big quarrel for me. I still read the Bible, I still count myself a Christian, but not in an exclusive way at all. Yeah, and what?
Speaker 1:do you find the worship, is it made more powerful by the music and the nice buildings? And because I'm trying to, one of the things I'm grappling with at the moment is this low church desire just to strip everything away and it seems quite sort of soulless. Weirdly, but I guess they would argue the opposite. I saw a meme recently which showed a Greek Orthodox church which was magnificent, a Catholic church which was magnificent, and then it was some sort of high street low church with a corrugated roof. And do you find, if you try and strip away the magnificence, it makes it more and more unapproachable. Or is that what you're kind of signing up to? And this is the reason I ask is that I've been?
Speaker 1:There's this term, cultural Christians now, which is something that actual Christians hate. But like culture, christians are those who, like, feel like they're missing something all year round, and so when it comes to Christmas time they'll go to a carol service and they'll love a church wedding. But they want when they do that, they want. You know, I want it into being a nice church or a cathedral and I want lots of nice music and I want a good choir and I want a good organ. And if you're a Calvinist or whatever you know like? No, this is the whole point. This is where you are, the reason we are trying to focus in people's relationship with the divine. Is that something that you've grappled with at all?
Speaker 2:Well, it's very interesting that I have to say that ugliness, I think, is a much greater sin than we allow it. Allow it to be. I think it's a sign of other things. So anything that's ugly I used to just put up with ugly things. There's a certain amount you've got to, and by the you mean intentional or lack of.
Speaker 1:By ugly you mean something of a human creation where they haven't, they've either done it badly or they've chosen to avoid making it nice. Look nice. Yeah, yeah, that's yes.
Speaker 2:I mean, I don't know, there are deliberately ugly things, I know, in certain forms of art and so on. Now I'm talking about just ineligant things, things that have been made with a disregard for the aesthetic aspect, and so anything like that spoils the experience in a way. I mean, that's as simple as that. It's funny we lived in Oxford for many years and our neighbours were both art historians and they had no ugly objects in their house at all. I mean even their toilet rolls. The toilet roll holder was an exquisite piece of oak which had been carved fashion for this fashion.
Speaker 2:It was made by a great craftsman, it wasn't something they'd done themselves. And I always had this feeling of elation and optimism when I walked into their house and every moment I was in their house, and I've noticed this again, particularly with certain gay friends who live this very sort of sparkling, slightly very aesthetic life, and it has exactly the same effect. Everything steps up and you feel more alert, happier, more optimistic, more humorous. So I would say, you know, make the church as beautiful as possible. But of course you get into the danger that is, what is beautiful for you may not be beautiful for me. And certainly you know one could go into many churches where there are in Spain, for instance, there's a famous for it in Mexico as well where you see these really sort of horror story statues of the wounded Christ on the cross with sort of ghastly wounds, very realistic blood flowing out of them, and kitsch, glowing luminous Madonna's in ghastly sort of chocolate box colours and things. And that isn't helpful at all. I'd rather have the plain austerity of a Lutheran church, white walls.
Speaker 1:So let's go back to you. You realise from an early age that you have this enjoyment of writing, putting words to paper, and you have a practical parentage, a parent who may be less supportive. Is that right? Is that the right way to put sympathetic to it?
Speaker 2:No, they were very supportive. They were just a little bit surprised that I would ignore the financialness, financial necessity, and just wandering off into a sort of Bohemian life of art so thoughtlessly.
Speaker 1:So you? And is that what happened when you were after university? How did you? How did that kind of manifest itself?
Speaker 2:Okay. So after university, I mean I got a good degree from a good university and remember my father saying to me right, I think you should do something so that you can earn a decent living. Why don't you do a law conversion? And then you know, he said I said, why would I do that? And he said you'd be a very good barrister. You speak well, think clearly, educated, all the rest of it. And I said no, I don't think I want to do that. I'm going to start a magazine called the Internationalist where we you know working for international cooperation and so on. And he said well, are you sure you can make money at that I said no, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:I'll be fine, and I just dismissed it. And then a few years later I was offered a job in the shipping office by somebody who said you'd be a very good broker and you'd enjoy it, and I said no, no, I'm not interested. Thank you, I didn't even bother to look into it. I do. I went to did a postgraduate diploma in theatre studies in Cardiff and did a lot of acting and lighting and theatre directing, and so I was fascinating. Then I got a job in Fringe Theatre in London, which I absolutely hated.
Speaker 1:Right. Why did you hate it?
Speaker 2:Oh God, the idiocy of it. I just, I mean, it's really, really self-indulgent, stupid people I was working with.
Speaker 1:They were so, but what do you really?
Speaker 2:think, alex, I'm trying to be polite about them. Then I sort of got a job in an old people's home because I couldn't get paid for what I wanted to do.
Speaker 1:And while I was, you hit a bit of financial necessity in terms of.
Speaker 2:I did, you know, and it was very interesting doing that. I mean, that was I took the job because I had to do something and actually it was so interesting dealing with these, you know, first World War veterans and so on, and giving these guys who are half paralysed from a stroke and giving them a bath in the morning. You know, that sort of thing was fascinating and very humbling. But I didn't do that for long. Then I was suddenly met one of the Monty Python's, graham Chapman, who I knew a little and he offered me a job writing with him.
Speaker 2:So I took that up, did that for a couple of years. Didn't like that very much.
Speaker 1:What was he like? Because he was a famous boozer.
Speaker 2:He was a famous boozer.
Speaker 1:Did you have to booze with him? Was that the problem?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, it was very difficult.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:He was an alcoholic poor chap. He was a brilliant man but impossible to work with, so I didn't. I stayed a couple of years with him, but he was very, very hard, was this?
Speaker 1:during his Python days.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Or I guess it must have been because he passed away, didn't he? Yeah, when did he pass away? I can't remember.
Speaker 2:Well, he was a good 20, 25 years ago.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but I remember seeing a documentary of the Holy Grail and they were talking over the clip of him. He was talking to that French knight trying to say like, and the French knight said your mother is a hamster or whatever. And they were saying we had to give him his lines because he was so off his face. He couldn't remember what he had to say, so you could see him in the film going we seek the grail. But he was still phenomenally talented and I still love watching Monty Python sketches of him.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, I mean he and John Cleese used to write together. He was a very complex character. He was very tall, sporty, muscular kind of guy, medical student, qualified as a doctor and gay, and of course being gay was illegal at the time and so on, and he had this extraordinary gift for comedy which was not evident when you met him. He wasn't funny to talk to him, right, he was rather grim to talk to, his shy, and I think he took up drinking when he was first in the footlights and performing brilliant performer, but very nervous and he helped calm the nerves.
Speaker 2:But I mean he couldn't work for more than about an hour a day and they were writing. He and Cleese were writing Life of Brian at the time that I was working with Graham.
Speaker 1:Interesting it was fascinating.
Speaker 2:I used to type out bits of the script.
Speaker 1:Wow, I didn't know that.
Speaker 2:But anyway I gave that up and I just wanted to get away from that whole world of TV and show business and awful hangers on that there are in that. It's a desperate world it really is. You've got to really be desperate yourself to want to stay in it. And I became a schoolteacher and then I taught for years after that and then, gradually, as I was during my teaching time, I started to write my own things and learned to do that.
Speaker 1:Did you write the history of decadence or the history of bad behavior? Is that right? Yeah, I got involved in pretty interesting books I'd love to. I have read your work and we'll come onto the bits that I have read, but can you talk to me about the decadence series?
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah, when was that?
Speaker 1:What's that about?
Speaker 2:Started in the 1990s. Early 1990s. It was a very odd moment. I was a friend who translates novels asked me if I would come to a book launch of a French book. She'd translated and read aloud from her translation at the launch. And I said why don't you do it? And she said I can't read aloud, my voice is too weak and you'd do it much better. So I just did it and this bloke turned up, approached me afterwards and he said I'd like you to write a book for me. And I said what book? And he described the decadent cookbook, a book about cuisine, but based on decadence. He specialised in decadent literature as a publisher. So I said well, what on earth makes you think that I'd be capable of writing a book? And he said well, just the way you read that piece. And I said well, you know what does that mean? It just means I know how to read aloud. And he said no, I could see, by the way you dealt with the language, that you'd know what you're doing. I was completely fooled by this.
Speaker 1:Go on, keep talking.
Speaker 2:I was flattered, you know, and I said, oh yeah, fine, you know, well, I'd love to, but I didn't realise he must have known a bit more about me or something. You wouldn't do that unless you're a complete sort of gambler of the most reckless kind. Anyway, I did write this book with a friend called Jerome Fletcher and we had just great fun looking up the craziest food you can imagine Real recipes from the past, roast peacock served in its feathers, with live birds inside, you know, flew out. So really, really amazing stuff.
Speaker 1:Matt's face there, just a grimace thing. So we did. You know, I'm reading Tom Holland's history, the last days of the Roman Republic and one of the you know this descendants from these civic virtues of the early days of the Republic towards the end, where there was lots of fighting and you had Kato who was the figure of old Rome. The old Republic, who used to, you know, get very angry about things like pleasure gardens and celebrity chefs, was the big ones, the sign that the end of the Roman Republic was nigh. And one of the delicacies was Pig's vulva, which I remember to Tom Holland the way he writes, he said brilliant, it's very casually through, and you know, obviously Pig's vulva was a great delicacy. That was Kato pointed to as a sign of decadence, and fish as well, that was a big thing, sign of a feet Roman decadence. So you were basically scouring the universe of ridiculous recipes from the past.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean they were, and that was great fun because and I would discover that some extreme cooking or extreme anything is a very useful research tool. You can eliminate anything that isn't extreme. So, for instance, when we started, I remember thinking that pasta with with a cream and vodka sauce was decadent. I quickly realized that was absolutely nothing compared with roast dormice or testicles on toast and all that sort of thing. So we had a lot of fun and discovered that there was this vast literature of, of bizarre cookery today or like in modern times.
Speaker 1:No, no, no, this is going back to Roman times, I mean there's a picuous.
Speaker 2:The Roman cookbook has survived and it's fascinating. The medieval ones One of the great decadent cookbooks is Bartolomeo Scappi, who's cooked a couple of Renaissance popes and his stuff is magnificent and it's real. And then we did three more books the decadent cookbook, then the decadent gardener, the decadent traveler and the decadent sportsman, and that tetralogy became a sort of history of bad behavior, really. And I discovered that people who could behave badly, in other words, the very rich, the very powerful, usually do because they feel that they're above the rules.
Speaker 1:It's nothing holding the back on that in terms of the downside.
Speaker 2:I mean. Oddly enough, we invented a couple of characters, Medla Lucan and Durian Gray, who had written these books, and we invented a restaurant that they used to run in Edinburgh called the Decadent. And people started taking this seriously and thinking that Medla and Durian existed. And we were invited in 2004 to go to Vienna and populate a restaurant called the Decadent, which was an art project and real food was served, we had performances and so on. It was a very intoxicating time.
Speaker 1:I've since Did you find yourself kind of getting sucked in mentally a bit or did a bit of de formation or profession?
Speaker 2:A little bit, yes, or you were making your marmalade this morning.
Speaker 1:Oh God, I could really do with a bit of testicle on this.
Speaker 2:I did do a lot of the. I tried a lot of the recipes and it was great fun. What did you try? Oh God, I'm there so many In the names in the books. Chancellor's buttocks, which is a sort of little bottoms made of semolina which wobble. It's very funny. Gypsy's arm is a good one. It looks like a severed arm. It's basically a Swiss roll covered in custard with jam coming out. Lots and lots of such things. Virgin's breast is another good one. There's a lot of sculptural patisserie and so on, based on female anatomy and male anatomy too, but it's easy to find.
Speaker 1:One of my favourite examples of decadent eating has to be. I think it's named William Buckland was one of the deans of Westminster who, during the aftermath of the French Revolution, found out that Robespierre had been executed and wanted to eat his heart, and managed to get hold of it and ate it. It's kind of like a wonderful twist of fate for this man in France, who was more and more violent, ended up having his heart eaten by the dean of Westminster.
Speaker 2:That's extraordinary. No, I'm sorry I missed that, but that would have been very good.
Speaker 1:The things you learn when you're interested in history are quite. You realise history is the phrase Stranger Than Fiction genuinely has meaning. You can't write this stuff because people go this is stupid, but it's generally true. I mean going back to De Formation, a professional one of my favourite phrases about the world of finance because you say it happens to people in finance well as much as writers is the phrase more fiction was written in Excel than in Word, because you can really BS in spreadsheets in a way that you can't BS with the written Word because people find it out.
Speaker 1:But the moment you've got fancy bar charts that have these wonderful projections that base all sorts of idiotic decisions on them, it's fine because it's in a chart and it's on a spreadsheet, so it must be true. It's not worth the paper it's written on. So you did the decadent cookbook and then you end up having a series and say Medley, lucan and Durian Gray are your creations. One is, I guess, a derivative of Lord Lucan or the Roman writer Both. Both and Durian is the fruit, that's right, the smelly fruit mixed with Oscar Wilde's creation.
Speaker 2:Yes, precisely, and Medley is also a fruit which is only eaten rotten Right, it's an apple. It's absolutely delicious. Actually, it's not as smelly as a Durian, it's very very good. So we produced these fruity names that were redolent of decadence and we did all sorts of performances and things like that. It was great fun, but we both rather turned our backs on it. Now it seems like kind of adolescent folly.
Speaker 1:Did you ever come across an Italian cheese called casu mazu? No, you ever had this. So it's a cheese that is a delicacy, where you leave it in a hut over the summer.
Speaker 2:It kind of gets infested with what the little?
Speaker 1:thing?
Speaker 2:maggots.
Speaker 1:And then you kind of, once the maggots have really taken hold, that's when it's ready to eat. And my theory of this, as with blue cheese, you know it's still and I think was the place where blue cheese was first ever sold and then hence it gave the name was some boy who was in charge of the cheese forgot to put it away and then to cover his tracks when he's about to get into a lot of trouble. No, no, no. This is a delicacy. Everyone has moldy cheese in France.
Speaker 1:So we must sell this and, oh yes, delicious, delicious, I guess they're kind of pretending. So you've got a Greek ancestry. You ended up living in Greece for a period, didn't you? And that was the, the genesis of Leo Canaris and. George Zephyrus, which are the series of crime fiction novels which I have read, which I recommend everyone reads, because they're really good fun and they're set in Greece, in during the Euro crisis, which was when you just moved out there. Is that right?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Was that the when did you get the inspiration to start writing those novels, and how influential was Greece in that pretty heated period up to your creativity?
Speaker 2:It was.
Speaker 2:It was crucial. It was really odd. I my mother was Greek, my father was English and I'd lived in England most of my life and I wanted to experience Greece, to get to know more about it and to explore my roots and all that sort of thing. So we moved there in 2009 to Athens, and the it wasn't quite Euro crisis. It was a national debt crisis, that's right, and national statistical crisis because the the government had been. It was connected with the Euro because the government had, or the state had been, hiding its own budgetary irresponsibility, the fact that the nation was in unsustainable debt for many, many years, and the European Union had colluded in this in order to include Greece in the European Union, in the European monetary union, because they wanted Greece, for cultural and political reasons, to be part of it. You know you can't have Europe without Greece for historic reasons, and you know I sympathize with that to a certain extent. But it did mean that the Greeks thought that they were more prosperous than they were.
Speaker 2:And in 2008 or 2009, the Greek Prime Minister, Papandreou, decided to confess, or at least be honest with the public about the state of the of of finances in the country, and there was a horrible economic crisis. As a result of that, People lost their jobs and there was hunger. You know it was. It was really unpleasant. That was just the time we chose to go there, and every conversation I had with someone in the street or in a taxi or in a shop was shadowed with tragedy. And it was very moving indeed and I tried to get to the roots of it.
Speaker 2:What is causing this? And I discovered really it was politics that was at the root of it. It was the state. The state to me, and I think to everybody, really is something like a parent figure. It's there. You take for granted that it is. It wants your good. It's there to help you to develop, to exist, to be healthy as an individual. When you discover that your mother or your father is actually working against you is, you know, in the worst cases, abusing you or as a criminal or something like that, it's profoundly disturbing, unsettling.
Speaker 1:Like I said, simple level, it's almost it's. It's making promises to you that it isn't going to keep. Later on You're going. Well, you know you can go and do that. You can go and spend this, don't worry, because we've got you. And then, three years later you know we said we've got you. Actually you got to pay that back. You could take a salary cut.
Speaker 2:You got to, you know yeah, exactly, there are some harsh surprises like that. But there's also, I think, a very deep sense of betrayal about it, and that's why I use the word tragedy, because it's, it's. It's. It's not just a temporary pain or a temporary setback, or I'm a bit short of money. It's actually that the whole basis of my existence, the whole, the foundation on which I've built my trust, my hopes and everything is rotten. It won't sustain me anymore. I have to find some other thing to belong to, some other thing to have put my hope in. Anyway, that's putting. It's a rather long answer to the the your question. I decide I must write a crime novel because I thought that that was the only way to deal with this, this reality that I'd come across, that there was a gigantic nationwide crime going on against its citizens by the state. Since then I've seen other states do.
Speaker 1:Yes, similar things. It's not Greece particular. No, no, it isn't at all.
Speaker 2:In fact, the Greeks have invented certain things which we're following in Britain quite quite successfully.
Speaker 1:Well, actually, can I ask you, because you mentioned that the European Union wanted Greece in the Montreal Union because of the cachet that Greece brings to it, yeah, now is. Is there a? Does the incredibly deep and powerful Greek heritage bring with it?
Speaker 1:some sense of a. Is it a bit? Is it a bit oppressive in many ways to modern Greeks who are living under this weight of history? I'd give a reason, I ask. I, for example, I'm of Indian origin and you know we were growing up, we were, you know, reminded frequently about the heritage of our civilization and of the, of the religion that that came with it and the contribution that India and Hinduism has done for science and and and and how advanced it was a long time ago compared to this sorry state that, particularly in the in the 90s and 90s, you know we would see in the news and it was almost like this shouldn't be happening to us because we are India.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and it was a weight that that the country has, that a new country like an America or a new state just doesn't have. It doesn't have that baggage of history Making it feel like it should be something more than is. I really sense that with Greece in a sense. You know, it is the foundation stone of our modern world, with philosophy and democracy and all the rest. And I do sense with Greeks that they feel like they have to spend me on their means because they have to keep up this sense of being Greek and being a number one in the world, even though if they didn't have that it'll be. It would be a bit easier for them in many ways.
Speaker 1:Is that. Is there something in that?
Speaker 2:Yes, I mean, this is. It's quite a familiar idea, and a lot of Greeks are aware of that as a weight on their shoulders. I think that there is something else to be said on that, which is that this Deep and brilliant Background civilization Is actually a strength.
Speaker 1:Yeah it has to be yeah it really is.
Speaker 2:I mean, you know, if the existence of Plato and Aristotle, ok, you could say, oh, it's oppressive, you know, because I'm not as good as they were, but come on, you know, they organized thinking in such practical and brilliant ways, not to mention all the pre-socratic philosophers and all the rest. It's a huge wealth. You could say the same about Britain, you know, there's all this sort of weight of history. Yeah, hold us back. In many ways it does.
Speaker 2:But you, I think it's really important to try and see the, see the strength that it gives you, and not worry about, oh gosh, is it making me feel, you know, small, or anything like that? Or as if I'm a failure? Well, you, just, it's really hard. Glass half full, glass half empty. You should see it as a, as a, as a source of immense strength, and I certainly would if I was Indian, I think, and I do as a Greek. I just feel like that. I'm amused when people go around strutting around saying, you know, I'm Greek and my language is fundamental and worst, you know, I just think, well, that person hasn't really benefited from, yeah, from, from their culture.
Speaker 1:And would you say that difficult times breed wonderful things. Because if you look at ancient, the history of ancient Greece, you know you got the Thebans everyone hated and they sided with the Persians. And the Athenians were horrific in their behavior with the Delhi and League. The Spartans were the Spartans at various points. And and then Alexander comes along from North Macedonia, and then you know he's taught by Aristotle but he goes all the way off to off to. You know it makes it to India. But you think, before you know anything about Greek history, you think of these kind of colonnades and golden philosophy classes and, like you know, wine and togas. But actually it's a history of lots of fighting and in fighting and backstabbing, or we better get together because the Persians are coming over the Persians. We've defeated them now. So let's, let's start fighting with each other again. But from that came this inheritance that we're living under today. So actually a bit of difficulty is no bad thing.
Speaker 2:Well look, I don't. I think it's difficulty will always be there. There will always be fighting and stupidity and chaos. That is just the sort of human.
Speaker 2:That's the soil in which everything grows. So I wouldn't, I wouldn't ever say that we need a bit of difficulty now, we need a bit of economic crisis, we need a bit of civil war. You know bollocks? We absolutely do not. You know, what we need is people trying to do fine things and that's it. Forget all, yeah, what might accidentally lead to it, and so you'll always have horror.
Speaker 1:Yeah, life's bad enough as it is.
Speaker 1:One of my favorite stories of Alexander the Great is when he finally makes enough inroads into Persia that the Darius, or Darius and I have decided I better take him seriously now. And he's been defeated. And he makes an offer to Alexander, who's captured Darius's mother and his wife. So I can give my mother and my wife back. And you've made your point, you can have the Eastern sort of the Western part of Persia, just let me keep the Eastern half. And his advisor, parmenion, goes this is a really great offer. You should, you should take this. Alexander goes this this is a great offer and I would take this if I was Parmenion, but I won't take it. And then obviously it goes off. And then it gets all the way to India. But we I don't know where I was going with that, but I just find, I find that this kind of this Greek inheritance that we've got with the Persian inheritance as well, it's just so we don't realize it sitting here in Britain, but it permeates everything and you see it everywhere.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I once had a wonderful. I used to do some broadcasting for BBC World Service, which is a lovely, lovely thing to do, and I remember that one producer that I was working with was Persian in origin. She said, oh, the name Alexander, of course, means a lot in Persia and I thought, oh God, what's coming now? So I said, oh really, what does it mean? And she said, well, he's regarded as a great, great mystic, a great explorer of new realities.
Speaker 1:So I thought, oh, ok, that's a nice free goal, as it were.
Speaker 2:But it's wonderful to hear that, actually, because we, you know, a lot of Greeks are called Alexander, they're named, whether consciously or unconsciously, semi-consciously, after Alexander the Great. Alexander, by the way, means protector of men, which is a nice, a nice thought. It doesn't mean conqueror of men.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, so OK, so sorry. Fast forwarding to away from Alexander's conquest to back to Greece, modern Greece. You've moved out to the country and every conversation you have is being dominated by modern, current reality.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Current affairs has become current conversation in a way that it shouldn't be. It should be boring in left to Westminster hacks or the equivalent, and this informed you to write a novel about crime from a government, and reading the books I definitely got a sense of cronyism which is present in the West, not just in Greece, but this sense of these grifters with beneficial tax arrangements, powerful interest, keeping their interests and doing things to get away with because they can.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And then you've got this character, george Saphiris. Can you tell us about it, george, and how you kind of created him in your mind? What was he based on?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's interesting. I mean George is is a kind of image to me of a decent Greek. I mean there are many, many, not just decent Greeks, but excellent Greeks who are, in spite of living in an environment that seems to encourage corruption and bullying and sort of brutal self-interest, who manage to be extremely loyal friends, very honest in their dealings with people, who have a hotline to compassion and pity and understanding and a kind of decency that the rest of us sometimes need to unlock several doors to get into. The Greeks have been generally very hospitable to refugees of all kinds. Yes, you know, there are many, many plus things in the moment. You go on holiday and you're welcomed by these people, you appreciate it and they struggle.
Speaker 2:So George is the kind of ordinary Greek, decent Greek. His particular background I made it was that he'd worked in a bank for many years. Working in a bank is a sort of ideal for a lot of Greeks because it used to be a very stable, well-paid profession. But he found it dull, he found it one dimensional and he becomes a private investigator. So he's there and he does a lot of kind of unofficial work for the police as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And crime fiction is a great genre that is much bigger than we think it is. We always think it's Sherlock Holmes and plus or minus one or two more. But how does one go about writing crime fiction? Do you start at the end and work backwards, or do you? Is there a method to it that? Or do you find? Do you try and start at the beginning and go down various rabbit holes?
Speaker 2:That's a very interesting question. I think you really need to ask somebody who writes best selling crime fiction, because my books have been. They're fun to read and so on. They're very interesting to write. They haven't sold in vast numbers. You know, whatever I say, take with a huge pinch of salt.
Speaker 2:I don't like overplanning writing. I used to do it. I used to write a very detailed synopsis, knowing exactly what each character would do at each point, and there are people who write like that. I found it doesn't suit me because I simply got bored. I was just going through. When I actually came to write it, I was.
Speaker 2:It was no longer creative. The creative bit was the plotting to start with. So but you know, for me as a reader, I want, I want the words on the page to to create visions in my mind, to be a kind of music, to be Beautiful, a fine experience, and for that the writer has to put a lot of soul and energy into the writing. And I found when I was writing these very tightly plotted stories that I didn't have that energy or the joy in writing. So I like to leave a certain amount open. When I sit down to write, I literally don't know exactly what's going to happen. I know roughly where a scene has got to go, but Ideas will come and I want to be able to use those ideas if they seem right.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So I would With one of the third. Three have been published so far in this Greek crime series. It began when a so it's the second one Blood and Gold began. I was talking to an English doctor who tried to set up in Greece a teaching hospital. He said he knew a lot of retired, recently retired national health consultants who had had to retire at 65. So they still had phenomenal medical knowledge and experience and all the rest. Yeah, these people would work for expenses. Only they would go out to Greece Teach in this teaching hospital. He got money private funds, he said. Every time he tried to find a hospital, or every time he found one, a black Mercedes with tinted windows would turn up and the next day the site was no longer for sale.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:And he said this happened in three or four places in Athens and then other cities around Greece, and then some. When he persisted, two people who were helping him started getting death threats and he just realised well, there's no way I can carry on with this. So he told me that story. Now I didn't check whether that's true. It would be almost impossible to check if it's true. But he was a very eminent cardiologist, this man who wouldn't tell us.
Speaker 1:No, he's not incentivised to make this up. No, no, no.
Speaker 2:So I took that as a starting point and wrote the story.
Speaker 1:And this is what some, the Greek medical establishment not wanting foreign or like or people to challenge the status quo practices or he thought it was the sort of world of private medicine, right and mafia. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Now, mafia isn't a Greek word, it's a Sicilian word, as you know. If you ask people in Greece is there a mafia, they say well, yes, there is, you know, but it's not as well defined as in Italy.
Speaker 1:And just touching on the comment you made about your perceived lack of success with the books, Is that both?
Speaker 2:Well, it's.
Speaker 1:I mean, this isn't idle flattery. I've read all three of them and they're far more readable than very highly sold books. Now, is this a fundamental challenge with the publishing industry? The access to the public is Matt and I were talking about this on the train up. There's just to me the publishing as an industry to see is broken.
Speaker 1:Getting access to the reader. You know there must be some sort of disruption that has to come to this industry because you've got these gatekeepers that are ever more powerful. These publishing houses are consolidating, becoming three or four very powerful players. The agents are. It's as hard to get an agent as it is to get a publisher because they only want to recommend something. If becoming more nepotistic and becoming more who you know, you almost have to sort of be famous separate to writing, to be a published writer. That has a dist. It's just a distribution. What I'm trying to say is that your books may not have sold, not because they're not readable. It's just there's a distribution problem here, not getting to the reader because someone's choosing not to do it, because they've got other priorities that are more relevant to them, because the industry is broken. Is that something you agree?
Speaker 2:with. Well, it's a complex situation. I mean, distribution isn't really the problem. Distribution is just what a sort of mechanical process that's in there between the writing of a book and the reading of a book. But you know I mean. For me, the fundamental problem is that books are no longer the source of entertainment and information they used to be, you know, when Dickens was writing and the great 19th century novelists were writing. There were magazines, novels were serialized in them and then they were published and so on, and there wasn't much else to do on a winter evening than sit and read or play the piano or shout at people.
Speaker 1:The great three things.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's a famous cartoon, an American cartoonist, with someone saying God, I remember before TV was invented we used to just sit in armchairs looking at a blank wall. But you know, along comes radio, television, all the rest of it, and now you know the internet social media. So books are suddenly this tiny one choice among many, and indeed rather an unattractive choice compared with. You know the instant gratification of looking up something funny on the phone and you know TikTok and all the rest of it.
Speaker 2:So you know the fundamental position of books in our culture has been taken away completely. There's just a bit left there and so there's more and more sorry. There is less and less money available for books and if a book is published, people want it to make money. At the same time, accountants became more and more important in publishing firms. The publishing industry started to pride itself even when I started back in the 1980s on. Oh, long gone are the days of the gentlemen publisher where they would have long lunches with authors.
Speaker 2:I used to teach on the publishing course at Oxford Brooks University and I would underline that sentence like that in a book about the publishing industry and say OK, if those long lunches have disappeared, it's your job as the next generation to bring them back again, because they are the building block of publishing. Having a person who knows how to publish something needs to meet people who have stories to tell or who have interesting ideas to promote. If you don't ever meet them, you're never going to get great ideas. And there's the whole filtering process now with agents and you can't get in touch. It's all ghastly. It really is, and I agree totally. It needs disrupting, but as it exists at the moment, it's very unlikely to survive much longer.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, I mean. Your point about the medium competing against more instantly gratifying source of entertainment is a good one, but I sense that people are searching for meaning in long. This is why podcasts are doing so well, because people want long. There's a counter reaction to that tick-tockification of entertainment. Yeah absolutely.
Speaker 2:I mean, reality is complex and it's deep as well. It's complex in many dimensions and the three-minute read or the 30-second tick-tock doesn't begin. It can trigger things, and you're right. I mean books will, they're essential.
Speaker 1:And stories as well. Fiction with stories are how we communicate ideas better than philosophy.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, well, it can be.
Speaker 1:Well, fingers crossed that the industry sorts itself out, because I suspect there's lots of aspiring writers who are not, who have turned away from the idea of it because it's becoming harder and harder to get out there. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:Well, you can. I mean, the other side of it is that it's very much easier to self-publish now than it used to be. Yeah, but it's a bit of a kind of it's a very risky thing to do. I mean, you pay 10,000 quid or whatever. You save it up, you publish your book, you send it out to 12 friends, then you're left with 500 copies sitting in your garage, and that's the danger of it. That's where distribution comes.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and promotion yeah, having someone to promote.
Speaker 2:And the other thing is, if you really wanted to change all this, you would get together with a few friends and say let's start a publishing company. Yeah, you could do it, you really could. I mean, people do and they can be very successful, make a lot of money and be very satisfied with it. It just needs someone with energy and a little bit of organisational ability.
Speaker 1:There is a I forgot the name now, but there is a new publishing company in New York which is designed to give the author the bulk of the proceeds of the piece of writing so that they're more incentivised to effectively choose them as a publisher. But also there are people doing this. I don't know enough about them to kind of see whether they'll be successful or not, but fingers crossed.
Speaker 2:So do you know what I would do? I would incentivise the publicity department.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:I think they're the ones who are really essential. I mean, I know it's a ghastly thing for an author to say an author is extremely poorly paid until they become millionaires. But publicity is the one thing. That's the marketing's hardest bit of it. Nobody really knows how it works.
Speaker 1:With the internet and with micro-targeting and all the things that we know and big data about people. It just surprises me that this isn't a more Decentralised, is not more decentralised and granular? Because for a novel to do well, it only needs to sell. I mean only in inverted commas, but I don't know 100,000 copies, 200,000 copies.
Speaker 2:Less than that actually 10,000 would be enough.
Speaker 1:10,000 to feel like a success. There must be 10,000 people who can read English that would enjoy the novels that you've written, and I do think it's just getting in front of them on their Amazon page or whatever it is next to the buy button is a purely a function of a marketing problem being solved. So yeah, watch this space.
Speaker 2:Maybe I'll have to kind of I'll come and act as a consultant.
Speaker 1:Yeah, please do because I think there's something there.
Speaker 2:But you need enthusiasm, you need an absolute fire burning in you to do it, and then you'll succeed. I mean, all the great publishing companies of Britain in the 20th century were started by single individuals who just you know Andre Deutsch, all those names, you know, they're there. And then they took people to lunch. They took their friends to lunch, they invited them to write books. As simple as that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and then they put in front of people who want to read them.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but you've got to have taste, you've got to have you know, you've got to know what you're doing. A little bit, and a knife what it'll sell.
Speaker 1:Yes, but I think there are your fans out there, good, they just don't know it. They don't know it, yeah, and that's trying to fire, good, yeah. So, as you know, I like to close these podcasts with something I call the long bet, which effectively enables the guests to indulge in some harmless predictions, and I've set a 10-year time frame because I think that's sufficiently far out from the bet to be meaningful, but it's not so far out that it doesn't matter.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And it's something that kind of in year five, when I have you back on the podcast, you know we can see how the bet's coming on. Yeah, and it's not like it's going to be as a bit of fun, but it is meant to be harmless and you know, either something that you think is going to happen in 10 years or would like to happen, and if it's something you'd like to happen, answers such as world peace and people being kind or to be discouraged, it's possible. But yeah, if you've got anything you feel positive or negative over the next 10 years is happening that you see unfolding on your chest, please, please.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's a very kind of, it's an invitation to make a fool of yourself.
Speaker 1:Exactly.
Speaker 2:Yeah, which I shall enjoy.
Speaker 1:It's tax free entertainment for people.
Speaker 2:Now I see sort of I've lived seven, lots of 10 years so far and you start to see patterns when you've seen a number of these decades go past and a decade just goes bloody quickly. Yeah, that's the first thing you notice, because I was trying to think what was 2014 like, and the one date I associate with 2014 is Crimea Russia invading Crimea. Yes, personally, I don't remember it as a particularly sort of important year, but that's the one figure that stands out for me and I don't think we realized what was happening then and in the same way, we don't actually realize what's happening now. But I think that there's a fragmentation going on in the world, largely because we've forgotten the lessons of the 1930s and indeed the 1910s, when there's this sort of movement in the human spirit and human culture which says I don't need the people around me, I'm me and I'm important. And you see it in figures like the German Kaiser before the First World War, adolf Hitler now Vladimir Putin, I would also say, although he's not a criminal in the same way, but there are similar signs in Donald Trump, of a kind of attitude of I'm more important than you and get out of my way because I'm powerful enough to do it.
Speaker 2:The two world wars seemed to teach the world that you can't sustain that. You can have a bit of temporary success, but you're going to end up creating such evil, such a turmoil of poison and violence that it'll kill you in the end too. It might destroy the whole of life. That's what I fear is going to happen. There's more and more of that, and I think we're going to have to learn some very, very hard lessons all over again.
Speaker 2:The counter movement to that is things like the United Nations, the European Union, all created with the best possible intentions to try to rebuild a community. A community is a thing that actually everybody wants. There are people who claim they don't want it, but they do want it really, because we all thrive in a community. So that's what I fear is that in 10 years time there will be more wars, there will be more disintegration, be more hatred and violence around, and I hope that the damage that's being done now will stop. That's all that will. Suddenly will all come to our senses and say you know, it may give me pleasure to you know, to be to despise you and express contempt for you and so on, but actually I think it's better if we respect each other and genuinely respect each other and understand the mutuality of life and the need for community.
Speaker 1:So that's about it really. Yeah, the spirit of collaboration, yeah, it's hugely blessed and things like agreeing to differ.
Speaker 2:You know it's a and even that phrase which is become a formula. But where you say to somebody who's just expressed utterly poisonous opinions, you say, with respect, I don't agree with you. The other thing is to give graded responses to things, not just to say that's a load of crap, I'm not having any of it, you're stupid, you know, you're ignorant, you're wrong. It's just to say, well, okay, I agree with some of that, I disagree with some of it. Finding areas of agreement rather than areas of disagreement to me is fundamental to civilization and to happiness, and let's try and be happy and would you say that we've lost an interest in ideas and have become more well.
Speaker 1:Okay, well, that's. I'm pleased, because my worry is that in modern discourse, we, what we do, is we create an avatar of.
Speaker 1:You know, alex Martin says this thing as opinion about something and someone in a different tribe or different camp will create an avatar of Alex Martin. Well, you would think that because you're a writer and writers think that. Or, like you know. Or well, you would think that because you're a banker and you're just worried about profits. Or you would think that because you, you know, you're a champagne socialist and so we don't talk ideas anymore, we just the tribe is. Now we're more tribal than we've ever been because we prefer to go. Are you in my camp? If you're not, then then I'm going to ignore what you've just said. Put you in that camp that I dislike and then just attack that camp and go, and that that that is a function of, I would say, social media, reducing communication to the to the most tribal, bearish basis level, where it's hacked into our lizard brain which is the worst of humanity and we don't communicate in long letters anymore.
Speaker 1:Well, let me write you a nice long letter telling you why, with lots of respect, why I think you're wrong. It's two minute clips on CNN, or it's the tick tock of so and so, politically destroyed by I'm with you entirely on that.
Speaker 2:I think that's right. I mean the civilized conversation. A good conversation is one where you and I can take something that we disagree about fundamentally and we can put it out there and, without getting angry about it, listen to each other's points of view, find areas where we do agree, find areas where we disagree, not get emotional about those, those things. But that seems to have gone. That takes time, it takes patience, it takes intellectual discipline. Actually, I mean Aristotle say that the sign of an educated man is a woman is that they can hold in their mind views that are totally opposed to their own calmly and consider them calmly. That's what we need to be able to do.
Speaker 1:But does that not require some sort of boundary condition where both parties are signed up to those tenets at least? So if you are a, yeah, of course. Of course it does, if you are the person in charge of Iran or China or Russia. It's very hard to engage in the spirit of collaboration and discourse if the other side is not signed up to that ideal. Yeah, I agree.
Speaker 2:I mean, it's absolutely eternal problem that you often find yourself in conversation with somebody whose aim in the conversation is to win. Correct, yeah, they don't care whether they're right or not, or whether it's founded on evidence, they just want to win. Those people are dangerous.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's the going full circle to all. Well, that sheer egosome is the core driver of why you would get into politics today. The money's poor, it's intrusive to your life, it's stressful, it's long hours. You surely only do it for ego reasons. I can't see why else.
Speaker 2:Let's be honest about ego is an important source of energy in our lives and we should all recognise that we have it, and people who pretend not to have it are often the most poisonous kind of people that exist, because they have this facade of generosity and altruism but actually inside it is an uncontrolled ego. It's just a matter of control and proportion, that's all. Nothing in excess is the ancient Greek formula.
Speaker 1:Yes, and there's a great bit in the Brothers' Carmesov where one of the church elders is giving advice to this aristocratic lady who loves going around doing charitable acts, and he said his name's Elder Zossama and the Elder Zossama tells this lady you know, the problem is that you're doing these things because of what it makes you look like, because you make you feel good. You're not doing it for the thing in and of itself. That really helped her realise that it was just all a. It was all a, it was an act. This altruism and this charity work was an act of ego.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1:Which, as you say, would be dangerous in and of itself.
Speaker 2:Well.
Speaker 1:I let. We could go on forever, and I suspect that we shouldn't, but I highly recommend people look up codename Xenophon, written by a fellow called Leo Canaris, which is your pen name or pseudonym for this. Yeah yeah, medellukin has passed on and long live Leo Canaris, who's the author of these three fantastic books codename Xenophon, blood and Gold, dangerous Days. And there's more to come, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:There's a fourth one to come which. I'm thinking about and will come out before too long.
Speaker 1:Right? Well, we've got catching up to do, folks, so please get started, and I look forward to doing this again in a few years' time, if you've got for it yeah, yeah. Great, thank you.