An Interview with James L. Ross
George Ebey, author of The Hated, interviewed James L. Ross
for the January edition of the International Thriller Writers' on-line
publication, The Big Thrill. Here is a slightly shortened version.
George Ebey: What motivated you to set your story
in the Balkans? Does this region hold a specific interest for you?
James L. Ross: My wife had an aunt, a poet named Evelyn Wexler,
who was born in Hungary and was distressed by the treatment
of Jews, although Hungary was among the last to deport
during World War II. I visited Budapest with two other journalists
and had the comical pleasure of being accused on Hungarian TV of
being “from Langley.” It was too absurd, and too much fun,
not to work into a novel at some point. My accuser has a cameo
as Folkestone or something like that. In fact he was a British
newspaperman named Ecclestone. There are other bits of low-level reality
in the book. The basement strip club, Dolce Vita, was much as described.
The paranoia of the country reflects reality as closely as I could
understand it. The nationalism seems pervasive. The economic disorder
that serves as a backdrop to the novel is progressing nicely.
Unlike my hero, I wasn’t shot at, and the only bureaucrats
I met behaved themselves.
GE: The narrator of your story is described as having
a sardonic wit. Can you talk a little about the virtues
and challenges of molding humor into a thriller story?
JLR: That’s a good question. I don’t think there’s much room
in a serious novel for humor, even of the dry or sardonic sort.
If I used it in a serious book, I would assign it to a character
who is trying to evade some sort of reality, the drunken fool
who hopes loud laughter will cover something up.
DEATH IN BUDAPEST is meant as light entertainment. I tried
to anchor it in the real world, but it’s for fun. My first model
was Adam Hall, who wrote the high-speed Quiller novels. I wanted
to see if I could propel a story fast enough that the reader would be
well into a new chapter before understanding what had happened
at the end of the previous one. So there are a lot of very fast cuts.
The other model was a series of romps that Victor Canning wrote.
I’ve forgotten his hero’s name, but he appeared in light thrillers
such as THE MELTING MAN. Dry, bitter humor can work in either of those
type stories. And I also wanted the book to be very cold-blooded.
The downside of that–you didn’t ask but I’ll say it–is that the rewards
for the reader are limited. There’s no warm-fuzzy sense of justice done
or any other value achieved.
Maybe I should back up to the issues of wit or humor. They’re
different things, you know. There’s no humor–at least none
intentional–in DEATH IN BUDAPEST. A couple of my books have
been described as acerbic. That’s probably a good word here.
My novel LONG PIG, from 2011, which managed to avoid being reviewed,
was acerbic in its depictions of movieland and politics, but the spirit was
deliberately mean and nasty. It has one of my favorite character epiphanies,
when the hero concludes that if he can’t help anyone, at least
he can fuck someone up once in a while. In DEATH IN BUDAPEST,
there’s something of that attitude when McCarry decides that
“a needle and soft music” are the usual treatment he can expect
from the intelligence clowns on the scene. He doesn’t get the soft music.
GE: You’ve written numerous stories for Alfred Hitchcock,
Ellery Queen, and others. Did you start off writing stories such
as these before making the leap to full-length novels?
JLR: Well, other writers have leapt. I move at an invalid’s pace.
My first story appeared in Hitchcock’s in 1976. My first novel
was published in 1991. So you see, no natural talent
here just waiting to erupt.
GE: When DEATH IN BUDAPEST hits the shelves, what’s the
best compliment you could hope to receive?
JLR: Kirkus gave it to me in 1994, when they said DEATH IN JERUSALEM
”roars along like a BMW in heat.” The Publishers Weekly review
of BUDAPEST was heartening, and possibly generous.
GE: Publishers Weekly said, “Fans of hard-edged spy novels will hope
that this outing for disgraced Wall Street banker Patrick McCarry
is but the first of many from Ross.” Is this outing the first of many?
JLR: Probably not. I don’t know how other writers can produce
essentially the same story–or at least the same type story–in book
after book. It’s absolutely necessary for branding, I know.
But it would bore me. When I was eighteen, I spent a few months
watching guys do piece work stamping out molds in an iron foundry.
Why do that with a word processor?
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