Quill and Quire

Peter Robinson

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Man out of time

Crime novelist Peter Robinson and the price of success

When Peter Robinson sits down with me in the corner of a small restaurant in Toronto’s Beaches neighbourhood, the first thing I do is apologize to him for interrupting a work day.

I’m only guessing, but the odds are in my favour. After all, in the past 20-odd years, Robinson has written 19 books, with number 20 due at the end of the year. Sixteen of those 19 books – including his latest novel, Piece of My Heart, published this month by McClelland & Stewart (reviewed on page 41) – make up a massively popular crime-fiction series featuring Inspector Banks, a middle-aged, divorced, music- and whiskey-loving detective living and solving murders in England’s rural county of Yorkshire.

As it turns out, Robinson, who just turned 56, has not yet begun work on a new Banks novel, but is scrambling to finish a short story for an anthology being put together by Otto Penzler, the well-known New York bookseller and editor. It’s a situation Robinson often finds himself in – pressed for time and panicking as a deadline looms. “People say, in September, ‘Would you like to do a short story?’” Robinson explains over red wine and pasta. “‘When’s it due?’ ‘March.’ ‘Oh, no problem.’ Then March comes….”

Still, writing short stories is probably one of Robinson’s more pleasurable distractions. Much less pleasurable is the need to travel to promote the Inspector Banks novels, which have gained a huge international following, are published in nearly 20 different countries, and routinely appear on bestseller lists in the U.S. and across Europe. It’s March when we meet, and Robinson expects to be busy promoting Piece of My Heart until at least June.

And then there are the awards. Robinson will soon be travelling to Denmark to accept that country’s Palle Rosenkrantz Award for the Danish edition of Cold Is the Grave, published in Canada in 2000. Robinson’s 2005 novel, Strange Affair, is nominated for a Los Angeles Times Book Award, though he won’t be able to attend that ceremony, as he will be giving a talk to a group of librarians in Jasper, Alberta, the same evening. “I’ve got a good excuse not to go [to L.A.] and hear them call out someone else’s name,” he deadpans.

As problems go, being in demand is certainly not the worst one a writer could have. But it is still a problem, especially for a writer who puts out a new book nearly every year. Dinah Forbes, Robinson’s editor at M&S, suggests that he has become almost “too successful,” with less and less time to actually write. For years, Robinson was contractually obligated to produce a book a year, a demand made by a U.S. publisher. He has since managed to make his contracts slightly more lenient – he now only needs to turn in a new manuscript every 15 months or so – but as Robinson notes, most of that extra wiggle room just gets eaten up by further travel and promotion. He smiles hungrily at the thought of taking four or five years between books, a luxury routinely offered to writers of literary fiction, though he admits his own frantic schedule is mostly a reality of his chosen genre. “We are trained [as readers] to expect every four years a novel from Ian McEwan or from Jane Urquhart,” he says. “But we’re trained to expect at least one a year from Ian Rankin, Michael Connolly, myself.”

It certainly wasn’t always this way for Robinson. He first came to Canada from Yorkshire in 1974 to study creative writing under Joyce Carol Oates at the University of Windsor. After finishing, he found the situation here more congenial for a student and teacher than back home in a newly Thatcherized England, so he decided to stay. For the last two decades-plus, he and his wife (a Toronto native) have lived in an old house just around the corner from the restaurant in which we’re meeting.

At first, Robinson wasn’t writing crime fiction – he wasn’t even reading it. Mostly he wrote poetry. It wasn’t until he discovered the work of Raymond Chandler and Georges Simenon that he become a fan. And it wasn’t until many years after that that Robinson hit upon the character of Inspector Alan Banks, first introducing him in 1987’s Gallow’s View. That novel was first released by Penguin Canada, which went on to publish the series for 13 years; Robinson describes his early days of working with former Penguin publisher Cynthia Good as an “education” in writing crime fiction. But he moved to M&S in 2001 with the novel Aftermath, and he’s currently enjoying a brand-new arrangement in which input from his U.K. and U.S. editors all comes through Forbes.

Robinson’s Inspector Banks novels, especially the later ones, display an interesting tension between the demands of the genre – each are anchored around a murder to be solved, primarily by Banks – and an interest in Banks’s personal life, and in the lives of the people around him. Though the books certainly have their moments of violence, most of them occur offstage, with outright suspense eschewed for a more patient unfolding of an investigation and a story. “I found as the series developed that what I was really doing was writing books about a man who happens to work as a policeman, and about the things that happen to him as he grows older,” Robinson says.

As with many long-running crime series, the extent to which the protagonist changes and evolves over the years is a key to its connection with readers. Banks even goes through a messy divorce in the 10th book of the series, and certainly he’s been put through the wringer even further lately. In 2003’s The Summer That Never Was, the body of a childhood friend is discovered nearly 30 years after he disappeared as a boy. In the following year’s Playing with Fire, a serial killer and arsonist burns down Banks’s beloved cottage – with Banks inside. And in last year’s Strange Affair, Banks is forced to (unofficially) help solve the murder of his estranged younger brother. On top of all that, his mother may be dying, his father has yet to accept Banks’s choice of career, and his love life is a complicated muddle. “A lot of the e-mails I get from readers,” Robinson admits, “[are] not about the murders or the crimes, they’re about Banks’s life, and when’s he going to get laid, or can he ever be happy.”

For all this, Robinson is definitely not looking to be viewed as something other than a writer of crime-fiction. “When I hear people say ‘literary thriller’ or that something ‘transcends the genre,’ I reach for my gun,” he says, smiling and yet deadly serious. “It’s condescending.”

In Piece of My Heart, there are two brutal murders that need solving, with more unearthed as the story progresses. Robinson splits the narrative into two distinct threads. In the first, which does not contain Banks at all, a young flower-child is found dead at the edge of a huge outdoor rock festival in 1969. In the second thread, which takes place in the present, Banks must solve the brutal murder of a young writer working on a story for Mojo magazine. Both murders turn out to have some connection to the Mad Hatters, a fictional band inspired by Pink Floyd, complete with their own reclusive acid casualty/genius.

Rock and pop music have always played an important role in the Banks novels – several are named after songs – especially music from the 1960s, the music of Banks’s youth (and Robinson’s). Splitting the narrative into parallel threads, with one set in the past, is also a device Robinson has used before. He insists, however, that he has far from run out of ideas for Banks novels, and that writing them remains a joy.

One thing Robinson is sick of, however, is the lack of respect he gets in Canada – a fair complaint, given his international success. Forbes likens Robinson to “the boy next door that people don’t realize has become a superstar,” though she is quick to add that a widespread snobbishness toward genre writing in this country is also to blame. Robinson agrees: “A literary novel, no matter how bad it is, will get a full-page review in The Globe and Mail or somewhere like that; most crime novels are lucky if they get a column-inch.” In one of the only moments when the writer’s gregarious, Yorkshire-accented voice takes on an angry edge, Robinson makes clear his feelings about being a stranger to Canada’s major bestseller listings, despite selling more than enough books for a regular spot: “Most of the time, I think, ‘I made the New York Times bestseller list, I made the Sunday Times bestseller list, I’m a bestseller in Sweden, France, Italy – when it really comes down to it, fuck Canada.” Dominick Abel, Robinson’s New York-based agent, also believes that Robinson’s being taken for granted at home, saying there is “not a huge difference” between Robinson’s sales in Canada and elsewhere.

Whether Piece of My Heart will change this situation or not, Robinson is likely too busy to really care. He has a few countries to visit and who knows how many interviews, readings, and book signings to do over the next couple of months. And then, it’s back to the thing that makes the rest of it worthwhile – writing another book. “That’s the reward,” Robinson says. “I do all the other stuff and then maybe I can get a couple of weeks free to do some writing.”