1 week Ago By [email protected] (Trish Lee)
Mick Herron and Antoine Laurain at the Oxford Literary Festival 29 March – 6 April By Jon Lewis Spies and Voyeurs The Oxford Literary Festival featured a series of talks on detective fiction programmed by Triona Adams. Oxfordshire-based, but Newcastle-born writer of Slow Horses (now a hit series on Apple TV+), Mick Herron, in a lecture in Harris Manchester College’s chapel called Running Away With the Circus: Rereading John Le Carré The Quest for Karla, explained how Le Carré’s spy thrillers set the standard for all subsequent novels in the genre, including his own. Le Carré introduced concepts like the ‘honey trap’ and described spying as a ‘circus’, both household terms today.
Herron says he created his fictional character Jackson Lamb, played by Gary Oldman (who also acted the role of Le Carré’s spymaster Smiley in the film Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy) subliminally after the rude chauffeur in Smiley’s People. Slough House, the HQ of the slovenly Lamb, is based on the mildewed, run-down flat the family rented above Herron’s father’s optician’s shop in Jesmond Road, Newcastle. Herron said that Le Carré’s spy world was imagined and far removed from the realities of contemporary spying with its reliance on data analysis.
He, and other spy novelists ‘write by the light he cast’. Antoine Laurain, one of France’s most popular novelists, in an interview with Suzi Feay, revealed some of the secrets behind French Windows, his latest novel that’s been translated into English. It’s a novel with Hitchcockian resonances, set in an apartment block in central Paris where the windows face many other apartments that offer glances into people’s lives.
The central character is Dr Faber, a psychologist who, although he’s married, has a susceptibility towards women, especially if the woman is a femme fatale. His new client is one such woman, Nathalie, who has inadvertently photographed a murder from her window. Faber asks her to provide him with stories about other apartments and Faber has to discover the level of truthfulness in Nathalie’s accounts.
Laurain revealed that his novels are usually inspired by an object. With French Windows it’s a passepartout or a set of ancient master keys, and he showed the audience the intricate key that unlocks his mystery. Two great storytellers.
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