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Q&A with Lindsey Mellon

2024-02-07 | Q&A

Anyone reading Straw Man will think its author must be a former spy. But I don’t think you are – not that you’d tell me if you had been?

No, because then, sadly, I’d have to shoot you.

 

How did you go about doing your research for the book?

I delved into the explosion of global terrorism in the 1980’s, which conjured up a distant, chilling past. It’s hard to recall the fear that permeated the streets of the capital at the height of the IRA bombing campaigns.
I came across a newspaper cutting about a CIA sting which lured the Soviets into stealing sensitive software, containing flaws, which in due course triggered a monumental explosion in a Siberian pipeline, seen from space and reported by US satellite to be a possible nuclear explosion. I stumbled upon more articles detailing other Western successes ‘helping’ our enemies to obtain forbidden goodies; goodies which didn’t work. And a story started to unfold in my head.

 

What was the original inspiration for the book – was it an opening line? An image? A character?

I started my first draft writing a scene in the Libyan desert, a single man on camelback in an empty panorama of dunes. I love deserts, and it felt good writing it, but… it soon finished in the bin (My editor’s pet line being “The wastepaper basket is your friend”). As a lifelong aficionado of the spy genre – Buchan, Conrad, Greene, le Carré, Robert Harris, Cummings et al, I wanted to write a picaresque novel, where the young hero would do the right thing, just, in the end, with mountains of foolishness and high jinks along the way. But, somehow, the protagonist morphed in the writing and ended up as a disillusioned, cynical, middle-aged spy.

Are you a nine to five as writer, working on your books each day, or does it come in bursts?

I target nine to one, 700 words per day, and usually fail. Sudden creative bursts do occur, when the juices race and the fingers fly. Mainly happens in Spring.

 

The book partly takes place in Libya during the Qaddafi regime. What do you think Libya today will make of your book?

I certainly hope that Dar Fergiani bookshop in Tripoli, bravely remaining open through thick and thin, will stock copies of Straw Man. 13 years after Qaddafi’s death, Libya remains embroiled in a brutal and chaotic civil war. Shortly before his demise, The Christian Science Monitor published an ironic piece entitled “A troubling lesson from Libya: Don’t give up nukes”, which posed the question – Would NATO have bombed him if he hadn’t given up his nuclear programme? Qaddafi ‘s regime went from being, for more than 2 decades, Britain’s implacable enemy, to being our secular ally in the ‘Global war on terror’, famously stamped on our memories by Tony Blair’s photogenic visit to The Leader’s desert tent, wind and robes howling. Then, during the ‘Arab Spring’, things reversed again, and Britain participated in NATO’s bombing campaign which finally did for ‘The Leader’ and his desert tent, after 42 years in power. Last year one of his sons, Saif al-Islam al-Qaddafi, threw his hat in the ring as a candidate for the next Presidential election. Plus ça change?

 

William Faulkner said: “The past isn’t dead, it isn’t even past.” The Irish question feels as much an issue today as it did in the 1980s, and as it did in Gladstone’s time. Were you anxious writing about such hot potato political issues?

Santayana got in ahead of Faulkner. He said: “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Recent wobbles around the Northern Ireland protocol flagged a reminder of how precious is the Good Friday Agreement, how big the prize of peace has been, and how fragile it is. I wove my novel around historical moments, like the Brighton bomb, researching them carefully and seeking to avoid ‘revision’ of history in the telling of my fictional tale.

 

Rome is a feature of the book – but it’s not a picture postcard Rome. Can you talk a bit about writing about place, and how you weave cities into your fiction?

Drawn from a decade of living in Rome, the memories that readily come to mind are of cloudless skies, dining al fresco on the pavements, the smell of mimosa, the chaotic traffic and the honking of horns. Especially the psychedelic blooming of azaleas in the Piazza di Spagna heralding the coming of the brilliant Roman spring. But intense winter downpours and occasional snowstorms – I remember a huge dump unusually one May – hopefully amplify the qualia of my Rome. I like the sense of daubing paint, using place to add to the ‘smell’ and the mood.

 

Thatcher appears here and there. What’s the relationship between real people and fictional people in Straw Man?

Straw Man is a work of fiction. It should be evident what is history, such as the Brighton bomb, and what is novelist’s prerogative, such as an imaginary Italian Minister describing meeting an imaginary Thatcher and reporting, with dialogue, on conversations which certainly never took place.

 

I hear you’re working on a sequel. Anything you can tell us? Will it include Haydon Talbot? Will it include Charlie Lomax?

I’m close to finishing a first draft of a sequel, ‘The Sheikh’, set in Sudan during the sinister infancy of Al-Qaeda, in the early nineties. Haydon Talbot has been banished to this dusty backwater as Station Chief, seemingly his last hurrah before early retirement. He recruits Charlie Lomax to run a small hotel which serves SIS as a ‘listening post’.