David Trevor here. We haven’t sent out a newsletter, or done much of anything, in ages. LB is working on something, or says he is. He won’t say what, but that’s typical. Also says he’s got no time for newsletters or social media or blogging or anything that might take him away from his divinely inspired mission of Being A Writer.

Which is his prerogative, as he’s quick to tell me. But he did make time to answer a handful of questions from one of his translators, which struck me as an odd thing to prioritize, and then he posted the mini-interview on Facebook, where people wore out their fingers pressing the Like button, and posted a lot of comments as well. But somehow the Great Man never did get around to sharing it on Twitter, or anywhere else.

I told him we pay the same monthly fee to Mailchimp whether we send out a newsletter or not, and that when you’re as old as he is you ought to make a point of communicating often enough so that people will know you still have a pulse.  So could I send it out as a  newsletter? He told me to knock myself out, which I’m interpreting as giving me the green light.

So here it is:

My brilliant Italian translator Luigi Garlaschelli, whose most recent work is A Time to Scatter Stones (that’s Aspettando il Buio in Italian) sent me a four-question interview for a page he’s set up, and I thought English-speaking readers might find it of interest:

1) What prompted you to write one more novella about Scudder, where he and Elaine are represented as an elderly couple?

I was thinking about the two of them, as one does, and what their lives would be like, and what sort of episode they might be involved in. And ideas came, and one day I set out to explore one of them. I went away to another city, secluded myself in a house I rented for the occasion, and began writing. It went well for a while, and then it didn’t, and I gave up and turned to something else, a novella about another series character, the hit man Keller. That too went well for a while, and then it didn’t, and I said the hell with it and came home.

But for a writer, Luigi, it can be argued that nothing is wasted. After I’d been home for a few months I looked at what I’d written about Keller and realized that I could make it work, and I put in some more work on it, and published it as Keller’s Fedora. And more time passed, and I looked at what I’d written about Scudder, and rewrote it substantially and saw it through to the end—and that became A Time to Scatter Stones.

2) Why does Scudder age in real time (or almost) whereas other characters (e.g. Bernie) don’t ?

I think it’s a question of realism. The Scudder books and stories are realistic in a way (or to an extent) that the Burglar and Keller stories are not. Most characters in crime fiction—and especially in detective stories—stay essentially the same. They don’t age or change perceptibly. And that’s fine, because in series fiction the reader generally wants the same thing over and over; they enjoyed it once, and want more of it. It’s easier for all concerned if change is kept to a minimum.

But when I wrote about Scudder, I realized fairly early on that what he experienced in one book could not fail to influence him in the future, that he had to age and change in response to the events in his life. I was never specific about his age until I wrote A Long Line of Dead Men, which is more than anything else a novel about aging and mortality and the passage of time. To be other than specific about his age in such a book would be an evasion, so I worked things out and decided that he was more or less the same age as I am. (This made it easy to keep track of his age in subsequent books!)

Allowing him to age has limited the adventures he can have. I myself am 83, and just getting out of bed in the morning is adventure enough for me. So Scudder is well past the age of leaping tall buildings in a single bound. But I’m glad I did it the way I did. If I hadn’t allowed the man to age and change, I suspect I’d have stopped writing about him quite a few years ago.

3) This novella might look both sad (Scudder is now old and tired) and reassuring (he’s old, but he’s always got what it takes). Which point of view did you want to be the main one?

I didn’t really think in those terms. I just tried to get it right.

4) Without spoiling the plot, we can say that there is an unexpected (or unusual) erotic twist. Was there a specific reason for this – for you as the author?

You know, it’s usually profitless to ask me why I made a particular choice in fiction. I’m far more an intuitive than an intellectual writer, and all I do is take the story down the path that feels right to me. When characters come alive for me, I let them do what they seem inclined to do. I won’t babble about the characters taking over, I’m the one who’s in charge here, but I’m happiest when I’m able to keep a very light hand on the reins.

And, all in all, it’s a pretty hot scene, isn’t it?

*  *  *

And that’s that. If he’s actually working on something, and if he finishes it, no question I’ll let you know about it. Meanwhile, I think the least I can do is forge his typographic signature:

Cheers,