Today I am very happy to welcome Peter Manus to the blog talking about his novel Fickle – information on the book and a link to my review follow and this was one that I really loved – mainly because it offered something a little different. It has divided opinion it seems, but for me Fickle was a wonderfully twisted and evocative read. So it was fun to find out a little bit more….
So firstly whilst I hate the “where do your ideas come from” question and usually avoid it, in the case of Fickle I have to ask because it is so beautifully compelling. So what inspired you to write the novel as a series of blog posts and the surrounding discussions?
I get why you would ask that with this book — a blogging editorial assistant spins out noiry midnight chapters of her increasingly scary life after she witnesses a train suicide and attracts some lovelorn deviant’s attention, with the story told solely through their blogs — one of those ideas you definitely only want to spin out once as a writer. I got the tone of the book — the concept of a bunch of people sitting in the dark, no connection except the screens in front of them, getting increasingly close and needy and flirty and risky — during a period when I was following a few blogs. People get really frank and prickly and coarse online. Disagreements get raw pretty quickly. I never joined in. I wanted to, just to sample the interaction, but I would have lost the invisible element that I liked a lot, and also the contributors on the blogs I followed all seemed fresh and wry and I didn’t feel like I’d come off that way naturally. I’m sure the experience I’m describing is extremely common, by the way, but that in itself — the notion that there are masses of timid voyeurs hulking over other people’s ranting and sniping and sex talk all night — was kind of eerie. So I started writing about a girl who sees a guy throw himself under a train, and she’s lonely but she writes well, so she turns to the internet for comfort, and she finds what she needs and that’s great, the way people can connect and grow a sense of trust when thery’re nothing but voices, but of course she also attracts some crazies . . . And it seemed right to pitch it as noir because it has that element of stroking the surface of seemingly normal people and finding some really raw, kinky, dangerous instincts, both in ourselves and out there.
You have managed to get a diverse range of characters in here, all compelling, but all obviously seen through the filter of “online” where people can hide their true identities and claim whatever they like. Still, you begin to get a sense of them through their comments and it is very clever – how do you go about plotting and developing those character voices. Especially within a novel as diverse as Fickle.
The bloggie voices — the group of eight or nine groupies of fickel’s blog who blog-chat with her every night — came pretty naturally. I didn’t plot them out beforehand. I have a lot of voices in my head, like I bet a lot of us do, and they asserted themselves right from the start. I’m glad to hear you could sense that they all have fully developed lives that we only get glimpses of in the book, because that’s true. Of course, they’re all pretty frank about expressing themselves — why not, when it’s the blogosphere and you’re using a snarky pseudonym? — so they’re full-fleshed even though they don’t share much about their personal lives and there’s no visual of any of them. The idea was to make the reader feel included, like as a lurker who read along every night but didn’t happen to post. Funny story, though — the first editor who worked with me on FICKLE got to know me as we went along, of course, and near the end he started asking me whether there was some girl’s blog we’d need to ask permission to publish. I finally put it together that his issue was that I come off kind of bland in real life and he found it increasingly tough to buy that all these voices came out of me. Pretty funny — personally, I suspect that most of us polite types are simmering maniacs looking for a vent.
Now our blogger is a Noir fan and the whole thing reads like Noir. I loved the underlying feel to it all. Are you a fan of Noir yourself? I am a bit of a sucker for those old black and white movies and I love a bit of Noir in my reading…
I’m a huge noir fan, so rabid that I’m always surprised when I rediscover that not everyone is, which is usually when I’m nattering on about some old retro pulp and catch the fact that I’m the only breathless one in the conversation. When I was young I used to grab books out of the library, like by Cornell Woolrich or Gil Brewer, stuff you could read quick, and read them while driving. I’m not recommending this or anything, of course, but there was a lot of open highway where I was and it was part of the ritual. I thought Cornell Woolrich wrote beautifully — all about murder and gore but with a lovely light touch — and was offended when I learned that he considered himself a failure. I guess he was going for something other than the simple, dark-yet-lyrical tales he spun out so well. I always thought that these books, plus the B films like Kiss of Death and The Woman in the Window and Deadlier than the Male, were actually meant as black humor. When I figured out that noir is a reflection of post-war moral nihilism and the lost American dream and everything, I remember thinking, yeah, but it’s all a tiny bit tongue-in-cheek, right? I mean, Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley books are plenty dark, but there’s a black comedy element throughout — Tom’s psychotic, sure, but he doesn’t stay all that sullen and has a lot of lighthearted fun between the occasional murders.
Fickle is what I call an interpretive novel – in that you leave a lot of room for the reader to filter it through their own thinking so to speak. Deliberate? What do you hope readers take away from it?
The way I saw it, I was, first and foremost, writing a novel which takes place only in the blogosphere. It wasn’t to be a gimmick and I so had to be true to the big empty cheat that the blogosphere is, ultimately. People lie in FICKLE — scalding, evil whoppers — and I wanted readers to resist their growing realization that there was a manipulator in the mix. People whose voices you love online can disappear, and people can take on fake personae — it’s all there, waiting to snare you and jerk your faith around. There are three intended interpretations readers can take from FICKLE, depending on their own need for logic or level of cynicism, and also depending on how hard they fall for the dominant voices in the book. What should readers do with that puzzle when they finish? One woman who read it told me she went to a diner counter, ordered a soda, and watched it lose its fizz while she revived some of her own imaginative conjurings. That sounded about right to me.
What kind of novels do you yourself love to read? Is there a book you’ve read this year you would like to recommend?
Well, as I said above, I read a lot of noir. I tend to like epistolary novels, for some reason. When I was a kid, I thought that epistolary novels were written for women (like CLARISSA) but then I read THE MOONSTONE and also FANNY HILL and I was hooked. I think it’s because I enjoy the voice most about a book I’m reading, and with epistolary stories all the descriptions are actually expressing the speaker’s unwitting viewpoint, so you get this character who thinks he’s giving a straightforward accounting but is actually revealing all sorts of prejudices and aspirations and ignorance and other stuff. Lately I’ve been motoring through some contrasting noirs, because I was asked to write an article about the role of law in crime fiction so I’ve been collecting prominent cop and lawyer tales in noir. I just finished CLANDESTINE, which is James Ellroy’s first novel. My guess is that most Ellroy fans who love the L.A. Quartet (the basis for the movie L.A. Confidential) already know this, but I did not know that CLANDESTINE is kind of a trial run for the L.A. Quartet themes and characters, with Dudley Smith (a psychotic cop) actually in the book. It was a cool discovery. I also just reread THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE (James M. Cain) — it’s truly bleak — and BUILD MY GALLOWS HIGH (Daniel Mainwaring writing as Geoffrey Homes) and found another really quick read, IF I DIE BEFORE I WAKE (Sherwood King), where the bad guy is a lawyer and there’s a courtroom scene that totally distorts the law, so it was useful for my theme.
Finally are you able to tell us anything about what is next for you in the writing stakes?
My second novel’s called FIVE DEAD GUYS AND A GIRL. It’s Boston-based, like FICKLE. It’s about a serial killer — a strangely impassive, retro style lady with a French accent — and a young go-getter lesbian homicide cop who’s after her, and I did it as the two characters’ journals, which of course presents a huge contrast in the two voices. It gallops along pretty nicely, and my goal is to have the reader be torn about which of the main characters to root for — killer or cop. I named it FIVE DEAD GUYS AND A GIRL, to make it clear that there’s a black comedy element running through it, but there’s a lot of tension and some seriously excellent murders as well. Diversion picked it up, and I’m really grateful about that, and we’re pretty far through the editing process so I’m looking forward to seeing it come out in 2017.
Thanks so much.
Hey, thank you! It’s hugely gratifying for any author to have someone read their work and be curious enough to ask some great questions about it.
About the Book:
One winter night in Boston, a man falls to his death in front of a subway train. The sole witness, a shaken young woman, explains to the police how the man pushed by her as he made his way to the tracks. But when her blog turns up in the dead man’s computer, the cops begin to look for other connections. Was the man a cyber-stalker, charmed to the point of desperation by the irreverent musings of a 20-something blogger? Or are the connections between subway jumper and innocent bystander more complicated?
Read my review of Fickle HERE
Find out more via Diversion Books
To Purchase Fickle clickety click right HERE
Happy Reading!
