14/11/2013 Meet the Author

Now it is time for this week's Meet The Author. Scot Euro set out to

write the great American novel, but when the rejection slips piled up he

went to Harvard Law School instead and became a lawyer in Chicago. When

he finally published a book, presumed innocent in 1987, it was a

runaway bestseller, and he's followed it with eight more legal

thrillers. The latest is called Identical. It's set in a fictional

midwestern city, and it's about twins, DNA evidence and about the

flaws in America's system of political campaign finance. This is

a book about twins, Paul and Cass. They are Greek Americans. Cass has

done 25 years in prison for murdering his girlfriend. Paul is a

politician and is about to stand for mayor. The model is the myth of

Custer and Pollux. Remind us about that. Castor and Pollux were the

identical twins born of the union... As a result of that, one

was immortal and one was not. This one was is used in disguise. There

was a rather touching outcome to that story. Tiller in the myth, it

would be Castor slain and Pollux asked his father, Zeus, to share his

immortality with his brother. So one spends six months in Hades, there

are all kinds of variations on the ending, but it is always the

division of the immortality that is specifically there. What was the

appeal of this story for you in constructing a thriller? It's the

usual thing, I got what I thought would be a clever idea as a way to

twist the story. In retrospect, I realised this whole issue of twins

has had mythic proportion in my own life. I think that is another reason

I was attracted to it. But I was not conscious of that at all. In your

own life? My sister was a twin. The other baby did not come home, it was

stillborn. A lot of my developmental years I was persuaded in the way

only a three`year`old could be, that perhaps it was my twin. I spent a

lot of time with that fantasy, of being an identical twin, one of whom

is lost. This book is set in a fictional County, in the midwest,

not 1 million miles from Chicago, which is where you live and practice

law. It is told from the point of view of several different

characters, some of whom have appeared in previous books. There's

one character who is new in this book. A character called Tim Brody.

He is 81 and a retired policeman. He's a very engaging fellow. I get

the impression that character rather crept up you. If you are lucky there

is always a character that runs away with the book. Tim Brody is that

character. It made sense, since this 25`year`old crime had to be

reinvestigated, that the person who is doing that, the boss would

necessarily talk to the homicide detective who was in charge. But

once they started chatting, he just became so engaging to me and

different. Different from your typical hard`boiled cop that we are

familiar with in crime fiction. He had to win a place. He says, can I

come along? The crime took place 25 years before. The book is set in

2008, the crime took place in 1982. Why those specific dates? There's a

DNA test that is critical to the plot. It focuses on the issue of

whether you can differentiate between even identical twins with

DNA, which was thought to be impossible until 2008. I wanted the

crime to have taken place before the advent of DNA here in the UK in

1984, DNA testing I'm talking about. But not so late that scientists

could, with confidence, discriminate between identical twins. In 2008 it

had just become recognised that there were actually small variations

in the DNA of identical twins. One of the key aspects of this book,

there's a lot of stuff about campaign finance. Your candidate for

mayor finds his campaign derailed by a right`wing opponent who buys a

whole lot of ads, alleging that the candidate was involved in this

murder. A walk on character with no name stands up at one point and

says, if rich men can buy elections in this way, we are back to the old

days when only rich, white folk... White men with property. This is a

source of continuing controversy in the United States, the involvement

in money. Is that something you ever see changing? It will change for

sure. Eventually people will realise that their democracy has run a mock.

But it changes, it will change when the membership of the Supreme Court

changes. Right now there is a very conservative majority that seems to

believe that spending money on politics as a form of unregulated

free speech. But it is clearly damaging. It is damaging our nation

and democracy. It really is handing control back to the wealthiest

individuals and corporations. The same group, referred to as five

clowns in Identical, thinks that corporations have the right to spend

money on politics. It's very difficult to fathom. You write

entertainments, novels. You are a man of clear social views, you want

to change things. Do you want the books to change things? I'm not

Zola. I believe this, if you want to send a message, use Western Union.

Novels are about ambiguity, conflict and things that can't be shrunk down

to a simple slogan. Obviously you can't write about contemporary

politics without taking note of the mess of private finance. But I want

first and foremost to write a story that is compelling, about characters

that are compelling. There's not a lot of black and white in my

novels. Even the right`wing lunatic who is financing this smear campaign

ends up having much more of a point than it appears at the start.

Coming up... We ask what kinds of medical challenges do