RJ Ellory wades into dark psychological territory with ‘Everglades’ • FRANCE 24 English

RJ Ellory wades into dark psychological territory with ‘Everglades’ • FRANCE 24 English

[Music] August 1976. The night before the shooting, Garrett Nelson slept like a man awaiting his own execution. Varnished with sweat the damp sheets of turnic around his awkward limbs, he twisted in and out of wakefulness. Jolting upright with a start, he was sure of sounds that then proved to be nothing. Actuality and imagination, each of them reflected in a strange funhouse of mirrors, became seamless. You just heard R.J. Ellery reading from his latest novel, The Bell Tower, which has just been translated into French as Everglades. The award-winning author joins us in the studio to tell us more. Welcome to the show. Thank you very much. You are a very prolific writer, winning prizes in the UK, in France, in the US. In 2010, your book, A Simple Act of Violence, won the UK crime novel of the year. I think in the UK you’d find your books in the crime or thriller section of a bookshop, but here in France you’re not really seen as a genre writer, I don’t think. Why do you think your work resonates uh more broadly in the literary world here? Interesting question. I have a French teacher and she read one of my books and I asked her viewpoint about why perhaps I enjoyed greater success in France than any other country in the world. And she said because there is a psychological aspect a character driven or character motivated aspect to your novels and the French sensibility heirs towards the subject of psychology the subject of human philosophy which have always been of great fascination and interest to me. Um, I think the French as a whole have a very different sensitivity, a very different sensibility towards all forms and all aspects of art. And when it comes to literature, I think there is less of a tendency to try and label or pigeon hole people into specific categories. I think the best description of the the the kind of books that I wrote write came from um a journalist at Venor who said I write slow mo slow slow motion thrillers which is kind of a contradiction in terms but I like it very much. Yeah, but there’s something very cinematic about it as well. And as we heard in that passage that you read, there’s a very dark atmosphere, a very heavy feeling surrounding your protagonist, Garrett Nelson. Throughout the novel, your writing is really evocative when it comes to that place, the humidity of Florida, the Everglades. Most of your books take place in America, I’ve noticed, often the darker recesses of its towns and cities. Tell us about that choice. Um well I think it’s just as important to write about the things in which you’re fascinated as those with which you are familiar. Um growing up um I had a somewhat unusual childhood. Um my father left before I was born. My mother died when I was seven and I went to boarding school and orphanage for many years. But I used to spend two or three weeks a year with my maternal grandmother who was my legal guardian. And she really didn’t know what to do with a 7 8 nyear-old child. So she said you can watch television but you can only watch those things that were produced before the year of your birth 1965. And it was in this way that I discovered the golden age of Hollywood and um the great writers, the great filmmakers, Hitchcock for an example, Sydney Lummet, um Stanley Donan, um the great actors Jimmy Stewart and James Kagny and Humphrey Bogart and Veronica Lake. Those were my aunts and uncles as I grew up and I became fascinated with American culture. And then I remember watching Strangers on a Train um directed by Hitchcock, the screenplay by Raymond Chandler based on a book by Patricia Highmith and I thought who are these writers? And so I started to read classic American noir. Um very much influenced my attitude towards storytelling. Um I think in truth my my writing style and my approach to writing is very much cinematographically influenced more so that than literature. And when I’m writing, I think very much in the kind of visual idea. As far as in the environment is concerned, I always feel it’s important to make the environment as much of a character as the people who inhabit it. Well, Garrett’s career and his life is uh interrupted very suddenly by a physical injury, but there’s also something of the emotional wound to him as well. We learn about his past a bit. I don’t want to reveal too much. That suffering is something he has to endure. But another character tells him that pain reminds you that you’re alive. So should we see pain as a positive thing for him or for all of us even? Well, it’s inevitable. You know, whether it be physical pain or emotional pain, psychological pain, we all experience and endure those things. The thing about human beings is that they survive. You know, throughout the years that I’ve been writing, I’ve been very fortunate to engage with people who are in particularly difficult or particularly stressful lines of work, whether they be police officials, investigators, members of the FBI, such things as this, but also people on the other side of the law. And the thing that’s very real to me is the humanistic aspect of everybody. The fact is that I believe people are fundamentally good. they want to do the right thing. You know, often what they do is not as important as what they do next. So I think, you know, pain of whatever form is an inevitable part of being human. It’s how we deal with it that’s the most important thing. And that’s the thing that fascinates me as a writer. And a major question raised by your book is the idea of the death penalty. So Garrett ends up working on death row at Florida State Penitentiary uh where capital punishment is carried out. Your novel’s set in 1976, but the death penalty still exists in Florida today. How does that look to you as a measure of justice in 2025? Well, I remember uh Peer Point um I guess Britain’s most famous hangman who at the end of his life um regretted his line of work and said, you know, uh the death penalty is nothing more than state sanctioned vengeance. There’s also the very famous maxim um what is it about killing people that proves that killing people is wrong? Um does it reduce crime? No. Um the fundamental difficulty I guess with the entire judicial and penal system is a lack of understanding of what motivates the criminal. If we solved that and if we truly understood what it was that motivated crime, then people could be rehabilitated and there would be no need for extraordinarily long incarcerations and there certainly would be no need for the death penalty. Um it’s always going to be a subject that divides people, you know. Yeah, absolutely. And it’s a social question, like you say, as as well as a judicial one. Absolutely. Um, shortly after you won a big prize in the UK, that uh, crime novel of the year, it was revealed that some of the positive online reviews written for your books were not authentic, that they’ve been written by you, in fact, something you owned up to, apologized for, and it became quite clear that you’re not the only author to have done that. It’s actually very widespread in the publishing world. It does suggest to us that book review websites, discussion boards are perhaps less than trustworthy. How do you think the digital world has influenced what we read, how we choose it, who gets their work in the spotlight? Well, the only real comment I wanted to make about that is the way in which those events were publicized in the newspaper in the newspapers were not an accurate representation of what actually occurred. Unfortunately, once an allegation has been made, certainly now in the digital age, there’s nothing that you can do about it. It exists. um the extent and the the quantity of material online that was um authored by myself was extraordinarily minimal and was not solely authored by myself but was authored by people that I knew in order to avoid embarrassment for them because of their line of work, which I won’t get into. Um, I took full responsibility for it because I was aware of it. I was aware that it was happening and I took full responsibility for it, made the appropriate apologies both personally and professionally. Um, it did influence the way in which people viewed me. It is something that I’ve had to deal with for the last 13 years since since it occurred. But the simple truth of the matter is that it is endemic. It’s pandemic. Whether it be hotels, whether it be restaurants, whether it be films, whether it be literature, right across the digital spectrum, there are people who promote their own work. And historically, if you look back, you’ll find that authors in the 18th, 19th, and early 20th century were doing exactly the same thing. Um, you know, classic instances like Walt Whittmann and people like that writing their own reviews of their own books and publishing them under pseudonyms. Should it happen? No. Is it going to stop? I don’t think so. No. We’re living in an attention economy as it were with everyone jostling for prominence and trying to get their voice heard. And indeed, the freedom to publish and distribute all sorts of books is something that’s been in the headlines recently as librarians in the US have started pulling certain titles from their shelves due to themes of race or sexuality. And some librarians in the UK are now reporting that they’ve been targeted by pressure groups to remove certain books. Do you think Europe could go the same way as the US in terms of what is essentially censorship? Well, I think any censorship is dangerous. Censorship, the beginning of censorship is the beginning of of fascism. Let’s be honest, you know. Um, does the state does the government have the right to dictate what people should and shouldn’t read? I don’t think so. I think if we live in any kind of a libertarian society, we have to take responsibility for the fact that cultures change, viewpoints change, attitudes change, philosophies change. You know, if we remove that kind of material from our reading, then it gives people no opportunity to learn how we have changed, how we have evolved, how things were considered and how things were viewed in the past. And I think people have the right to choose and the freedom to to communicate, to discuss, to debate, to question, to to read what we wish to read is the backbone of any civilized culture. To put limitations on that and certainly for the state to step in and say you can’t, I think is a very very wrong direction to go in. We’ll see how how that pans out. Indeed. Finally, we asked you for a cultural tip, something you’ve enjoyed recently, and you pointed us to the uh dystopias of Black Mirror, the TV uh series. It’s on its seventh season now. What is it that you find so interesting about this show? Well, it comes from a a very very long tradition of these um anthologies of stories that distort reality, that give us a different perspective, give us a different way to view reality, if you wish. I mean, I remember as a child watching Alfred Hitchcock presents and then we had such things as The Twilight Zone, Tales from the Dark Side. We had Rald Dah’s Tales of the Unexpected. And I think Black Mirror continues in that tradition of presenting us with um an hour of of distorted reality. I find them thoroughly entertaining. I find the writing great. Um I’ve loved all of the series. Um and I’ve seen all seven series. Yeah. And let’s hope they’re not too prophetic. Thank you very much for the tip and for joining us today. A reminder that the bell tower is now available in its French translation, Everglades. We’ll leave you with a glimpse of Black Mirror season 7. Do check in with us next time here on Arts 24 for more books, arts, and culture. There’s more news coming up just after this. Ready? Yeah. Three, two, and action. They call it mind expanding. It alters your neuronal structure. The mind is a computer. [Music] I just want something magical, timeless. Come with me. [Music]

Award-winning British writer RJ Ellory tells us about his new novel, “The Bell Tower”, which has been translated as “Everglades” in French, and why he chooses to set many of his storylines in the United States. We also discuss the golden age of cinema, the great “Noir” authors and talk about a philosophical question at the heart of his book, which deals with the use of the death penalty for convicted criminals.
#RJEllory #Everglades #TheBellTower

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