03/03/2016 Meet the Author

Neil Jordan is a storyteller, equally at home on the cinema screen

His thriller, The Dran Detective, has all the ingredients of a movie.

A fast-moving plot, a cast of dark and intriguing characters,

a setting that disturbs you from the very first page.

All of that and a strong whiff of the surreal,

and you realise in this story that you are in the hands

Neal, it's inescapable that you're a writer who straddles two worlds.

When you're writing fiction, putting a story on the page,

do you imagine yourself being behind a camera?

In a strange way, it's a very lonely pursuit,

In a strange way, you can be as alone on a set with 300

To directe a movie correctly or to see it correctly,

you kind of have to place yourself in a very isolated position.

Otherwise, you are influenced by everybody and the media

So, the loneliness of the writer is, in your view, essential, really?

It's also accentuated by the position of the director.

There is nothing as strange as being asked 25 different

You are far better off to keep yourself in an isolated place

and keep your brain clear and to see things as clear as possible.

In a sense, you have that magic eye which is on this unit.

You can move around the room, you see the room, you see

the street, you see the bridge where at one point in the story

a girl is apparently going to jump into the river.

That's where I started making movies in the end because I was writing

I started with a book of stories and over at a novel called The Past,

which was entirely based around a photographer.

I realised everything I was writing was basically to do with visual

Sometimes when people describe novels is very imagistic,

it seems to me to be a slight criticism.

That is the kind of being I am and there is no point in resisting.

We talk about images, but we can also talk about language.

Crispness of the dialogue and the speed of the dialogue

in this book is one of the things that will strike anybody.

Writing novels is about having an ear for speech, in the end.

It's a weird thing, it's kind of a knack.

It's the one thing I most love to you, is to write dialogue,

and I most love to write dialogue that doesn't say

People very rarely say what they think.

Even when I'm going through screenplay, sometimes,

and people say, "Why don't they say, I want to get back to my wife?"

That's the last thing you say in those circumstances.

The fun or the beauty of dialogue is that it is elusive and bleak.

The world in which Jonathan, your hero, the detective,

former special forces man, the world in which she moves

One world fell apart in Eastern Europe in 1989, 19 90.

The world that we see here is one that hasn't yet been

In Europe at the moment, you do feel whatever structures

are holding the societal agreements to gather our collapsing

This is not about Baghdad, Syria, anything like that.

But it is about a place where certainties are collapsing

and ancient legions rise to the surface.

Your central character Jonathan, and absorbing character,

is somebody who can't put it own life together, either.

Didn't you want to give a somebody who had hoped?

It's a portrait of a marriage, as well as everything else,

and a portrait of two people who have been together for 20 years

This mysterious thing has vanished from their lives, which

It's an experience that happens in every person around

It happens in every marriage, every relationship and every human

being wear whatever is that sap of urgency seems to have gone

to somebody else or something like that.

Eventually they leave the environment and they go

back to the certainties of somewhere like Wimbledon.

There is a wonderful undercurrent in here which bus through from time

A psychic character with imaginary people coming to tea.

Do you have the feeling that we've all got that sense of the mysterious

I suppose that's why religions are there.

I've always wanted to construct a mystery that ended up in the zone

of irrationality where the central character, the Demons

the protagonists are looking for beyond the grave in some way.

It's also something to do with desire.

I always feel eroticism and death are sometimes combined.

I do want to get too complicated here.

Essentially what the book is about, anyway.

There's one wonderful character in here, well,

But one particular character, Gertrude, his own incarnation

of Marlene Deitrich with a Pomeranian.

This, clearly, was a somebody you enjoyed creating,

writing about, talking about, and bringing into the room.

There is no basis in fact for this person.

I began to enjoy her and I had this image of her sitting

in her apartment dressed in a yellow morning rope sipping something that

Are you the kind of writer who finds that a character wanders

onto the stage almost unwritten, not fully formed, and you think

Is that what she did? Yes, she came.

That's the beauty of writing a book, as opposed to making a movie.

If you came up with a concept like Gertrude in a film,

or halfway through movie, or even as you're writing it,

the producers or financiers are looking at it and they would

question every aspect of that character.

Whereas when I'm writing a book, I can say, I will see

where she wants to go and what she wants to do.

This strikes me as a story that could work on the screen.

I always love that movie, Don't Look Now.

It ends up in a similar terrain of the rational.

I would like to make a movie of this book and Amazon have a film studio

now and they have bought it and I am talking to them.

I have never made a movie of the book I have written to date,

Neil Jordan, thank you very much indeed.