a correspondence with The Curiously Specific Book Club
"Devotion of Suspect X" by Keigo Higashino
9 September 2022| Issue 32
I'm having an issue whether I’m allowed to believe in serendipity or not. I realise most people have more pressing matters to worry about. It’s having gone on record saying I don’t believe in coincidence or synchronicity, is serendipity palatable?
The fact of finding interesting or valuable things by chance, an aptitude for making desirable discoveries by accident, an unplanned fortunate discovery, the faculty or phenomenon of finding valuable or agreeable things not sought for. 1 2 3 4
We make coincidence by engaging with the world. Synchronicity, well, file under magick and alien anal probes. Chance however, chance is randomness. Randomness is the radioactive decay of atoms. Chance, I can believe in. So let's let serendipity in.
After the sense of place post 5 — location consumption, enjoying books and film in the place of their setting — my friend Adam messaged me.
"Hey Julian. Nice shout out for Epic45", for he is also a fan, "Do you know Tim Wright? He does book walks, I'll see if I can find a link to a website of some kind".
"I don't" I said.
Adam did find a link. Which I clicked. It's true. I didn't know Tim Wright. But sitting next to him in the publicity photo was someone I did recognise. Lloyd Shepherd, author of a series of historical murder mysteries Anne is very keen on. So keen in fact I once took her to the launch of his book number three to meet the author.
I also happen to know Lloyd likes Epic45. This indeed is a desirable discovery by accident.
While you are reading this, I shall be re-enacting scenes from Rupert Thomson's "Barcelona Dreaming", dining on asparagus (the none fucking variety), and Tagliolini with prawns, fried garlic and chilli at Restaurant Agua. Seeking papas bravos at El Tomás de Sarrià, or as they refer to them, the most brave potatoes in Barcelona. Stuffing my face stupid with pastries from Foix de Sarrià.
Which seems serendipitous that Lloyd over the last few weeks, when I explained the align of celestial bodies, answered a few emails about The Curiously Specific Book Club.
Dracula Part 1 from The Curiously Specific Book Club
shows.acast.com/62346150f2091f00138fd904/episodes
Julian: Your mission statement is "We track down the places described and check all times and dates mentioned – ensuring that no great writer ever gets away with simply making things up.”. But it appears to me to be a bit of misdirection, and it’s really a form of “locational consumption” or pilgrimage. But since you boldly made yourself adjudicators, what does happen if you find an author made it up?
Lloyd: So yes, obviously, every book is a pilgrimage, and not just in a physical sense (where is the book based?) but also in a metaphysical sense (what on earth was the author up to when they wrote this?). The biggest thrill in the podcast, for me, is standing in a spot and thinking ’the author stood here’, and the thrill isn’t a fandom thrill, it’s a human connection - this human being who’s created this work of art stood here, where we’re standing now, and had some thoughts about what they were making. It’s like stepping into another mind, and isn’t that what fiction is supposed to be?
But we don’t want to take any of this stuff too seriously. God knows, literature takes itself seriously, and people who like literature doubly so. I’m actually a huge fan of what digital culture has done to literary fandom - the strong visual association between a reader and a book when they share photos of themselves reading. Look at #booktok, it’s absolutely huge, and it’s all about young people sharing, in quite an amusing and arch way, what they’re reading and what it says about them.
So our mission statement is part of that - it sets the framework for how we’re going to go about this. The first thing we do is assume that the book is a contained reality, with dates and locations as part of that. And that’s half the joke. We’re satirising ourselves, because why would anybody *do* that? It’s silly and stupid. The minute you go down that path you establish a freedom to take it to crazy places. Look at what @moongolfer does with phases of the moon and the weather. It’s interesting but it’s also dumb, and it’s a way into the book, into talking about the book, into living an experience within the framework of the book. And the minute you talk about it, as I’m now demonstrating, you sound like a pretentious arse. It’s a shared joke with the listener. ‘What if we were to take this book at face value and assume it is describing a reality?’ It’s actually very postmodern prac crit - it’s no coincidence that @moongolfer and I studied English Lit within a couple of years of each other at a time when the sanctity of the text, as divorced from authorial intention, was all that mattered. And there I go again, taking it too seriously.
As to what happens if the author makes it up - well, that’s why we do our Curiously Specific rating. It’s a stupid gag. It’s reductive. But there’s something serious about it. The thing that matters to us - if anything does - is that the author takes this stuff seriously. If they’re building a world that has locations and dates in it, have they done the work to make it hang together? If they haven’t, we’re going to tick them off and give them a low rating. But the point is we’ve spent 90 minutes or so inside that world, and we’ve used it as a way to learn new things. Even the lowest rated books help us do that. Every book is worthwhile in its own way - well, almost every book. How we rate it is neither here nor there - because we’re making our own thing, having some fun, learning some things, going to some places, and the book is a vehicle for that. What we think about it is neither here nor there in the life of the book itself. We’re here and then we’re gone - the book endures.
Julian: An origin question. You must have done a fair bit of research about ye olde East End for your novels. Did this make you hyper aware of a novel’s accuracy?
Lloyd: I did do a lot of research for the books and I get a lot out of placing things in real places. But this was @moongolfer’s idea - he came up with the idea of bookmapping years and years ago, when he did Kidnapped (in 2009, I find! https://timwright.typepad.com/kidmapper/).
After that, he suggested we take a more detailed approach to another book which is very specific about dates and locations: Erskine Childers's Riddle of the Sands. We did a whole series of podcasts on just that book: they’re here https://curiouslyspecific.com/category/the-riddle-of-the-sands/
We then took that idea and just productionised it for The Curiously Specific Book Club. We wanted to do more books and visit more places, so this seemed the right way to do it.
Julian: I was once on a plane watching Three Kings — which I love — and my neighbouring passenger, who had been up and out of his seat throughout the film leant over during the biro lung scene and explained he was an ex-army surgeon. Head Falklands ex-army surgeon in fact, charity director now etc etc. And that the lung puncture procedure would never work. Thanks, I thought.
Likewise reading Simon Garfield’s "Just My Type”, he complains about watching Titanic and the film being ruined for him because the typeface they used on the menus didn’t exist until 12 years after.
How much do you think an author can make it up before suspension of disbelief goes? What do you consider a deal-breaker?
Lloyd: Well, one person’s deal-breaker is another person’s magic realism. I think every book has an associated book of rules - or at least the good ones do - and the important thing is that the book’s own rules are obeyed, rather than some external set of instructions.
For instance, if you’re writing about wizards and dragons, you’re going to be following a different set of rules to someone writing about spies in London. I’m re-reading Life After Life at the moment for the podcast, and that’s a book that takes an idea - the idea that someone can be reincarnated and reset the world’s clock every time they die - and runs with it to a pretty bleak conclusion; which, in this case, I think even the author is distressed by.
But if you’re writing a naturalistic police procedural, which relies on a naturalistic framework of investigation and discovery for its narrative tension, and then you chuck in a device like phone-tracking software which is available to anyone or (as I saw on a TV show the other day) some nonsense about using a burner SIM to ’bounce’ off another SIM, I’m going to throw the remote at the telly or the book across the room.
But *for the purposes of our podcast* we affect different personalities. We become dull pernickety jobsworths about all sorts of things, because the joke’s on us, not the author. If an author wants to move a town three miles north for the purposes of narrative, then let them do it. We’ll give them a hard time, but we’re only doing it to enjoy ourselves.
Julian: Budget aside, what would be your dream book to re-enact. And why. Obviously. Also, which book would you have to say no to?
Lloyd: My dream book is always The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James, I’m afraid. It’s my favourite book in the world, and it would be great for us - and if the budget was no issue, we could scout locations in New York and Italy as well as hunting down the Touchett estate in England. In fact I’d like to do the Henry James Grand Tour, mapping all his European and American locations and staying in villas with delightful vistas or walking in the Alps. Life goals!
The book I wouldn’t want to do is more difficult. I can’t think of a book we’ve done that I loved any less for having mapped it - The Dark is Rising, which if anything is my second favourite book in the world, came to life even more vividly for me when we mapped it. If you can listen to the episode, you’ll hear me almost breaking into tears when we find the Old Way!
So it would have to be a book that I think would be spoiled by us putting our unserious hands all over it. I’m going to say The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald. It’s such a beautiful thing, almost fragile. I worry that it might come to pieces in our grasp.
Julian: Locational accuracy aside, would you like to recommend a book to Consume & Enjoy. Unlike Desert Island Discs you are forbidden from picking any of your own (which will be featured in another edition).
Lloyd: A book to consume and enjoy - on the recommendation of Dan Rhodes on Twitter, I’ve embarked on something of a Japanese detective fiction. If you’ve never read The Devotion of Suspect X by Keigo Higashino, I commend it to you without hesitation. It’s brilliant.
Lloyd and his detective Charles Horton will return in a future edition.
“The Devotion Of Suspect X” by Keigo Higashino | Buy here
Cover illustration by Fatima Fletcher
The amazing artist Fatima Fletcher has agreed to be the artist in residence. This weeks is a portrait of The Curiously Specific Book Club investigating John Wyndham’s “"The Day of the Triffids”.
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References
Legally I have to tell you I might get five pence or something from Bookshop dot org should you purchase something, but really I just want to stick it to Amazon and keep independent bookshops alive. Yeah, rebel me, bringing the man down from the inside etc etc.
Great interview! Love finding a new podcast.