A Quiet Flame

"Two great Scottish writers who have left us far too soon are Iain Banks, who I worked with on an adaptation of his short story ‘A Gift From the Culture,’ and Philip Kerr. Kerr created probably one of the most memorably amoral characters in 20th-century crime fiction : the tough-talking, wise-cracking, womanising detective, Bernie Gunther. His Chandler-esque, Marlowian, essentially Berliner detective novels are and extraordinary mix of great storytelling and superb research, creating a totally authentic human character and Berlin cityscape. Part of my book Istria Black takes place in Berlin and most specifically there is a key scene in the Hotel Adlon, that I think pays homage to the spirit of Kerr and Gunther. Posing as an escaping Nazi war-criminal our anti-hero Bernie Gunther arrives in Buenos Aires and, having revealed his real identity to the local chief of police, discovers that his reputation as a detective goes before him. Part of Istria Black takes place in wartime and post-war Buenos Aires and Argentina, so provided me with inspiration, giving a whiff of the times and the customs. Black is set in the Croatian community of NDH fascists who escaped via the Vatican Ratlines to live freely under the protection of Juan and Evita Peron in the aftermath of the Second World War. Bernie finds himself in Argentina, alongside a bunch of unsavoury characters including Adolf Eichmann. My hero Pepi Mihailic along with ex-Partizanka, Faida, set out in search of the Ustasha leader Ante Pavelic in order to eliminate him. Retribution looms in both. I won’t go so far as to misquote Picasso, who may have said that lesser artists borrow; great artists steal – and who might in turn have been rephrasing Stravinsky, whose words could have originated in T.S. Eliot’s dictum – Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal. But, for sure, inspiration from Irving, Conrad, Kerr, Burgess, Harris and Eco is present in my most recent work as a novelist. “What has been, will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.” That’s Ecclesiastes 1:9. But then again, we have the Presocratics – Heraclitus – not stepping in the same river twice. Both the river and the person are in a state of perpetual change; the water in the river constantly flowing and being replaced, and the person stepping into it also changing in the time between the two steps. Inspiration can be a complex series of influences and confluences."