Q & A With Jason Hewitt author of The Dynamite Room

I was very fortunate to be able to read an advance proof copy of The Dynamite Room, a beautiful and thought-provoking novel set in a Suffolk village during WWII. An 11 year old girl called Lydia is stranded in a large Edwardian house and in the night, sees a soldier enter the house warning of a German invasion. He gives her some rules to live by, but why is he there and is he telling the truth? What follows is a stunning and moving story of two unlikely co-inhabitants who each have their own heart-breaking backgrounds consumed by war. Costa Award-winning author Nathan Filer has described The Dynamite Room as 'Superb. Absorbing, suspenseful and with a beautifully poetic touch' and I couldn't agree more!

Look out for my review being posted tomorrow, but in the meantime, here is a fascinating Q and A with the author Jason Hewitt:

There has been a wide range of WWI and WWII fiction, but The Dynamite Room succeeds in being different. Which literature and real-life events motivated you to write this novel?

I have always had a fascination with alternative histories and novels that start with a ‘what if?’ question. When I first started thinking about The Dynamite Room all I knew was that I wanted to write a WWII novel with a difference, and one where I could pitch two individuals from opposing sides against each other but in an unusual way. Then, in a library, I happened to come across a book called Where the Eagle Landed by Peter Haining. The book looks into the myths surrounding 1940 and whether German troops ever did land on the East coast. In truth this is unlikely but German bodies were certainly washed up on the shore occasionally, usually from shot-down planes or torpedoed boats. The next natural question as a novelist then is: well, what if they weren’t all dead? What if at least one or more of them swam up on to the shore? What then? From that I had the start of my story.
Similarly with the other story lines I tried to unearth elements of the war that I knew very little of. My view was that if they were new and interesting to me, they might be new and interesting to other readers. The sub-plot set in Norway around the battle for Narvik is just one example, and was something I unexpectedly stumbled across when researching another story. World War II-based fiction is such a saturated market that I didn’t just want to add another book to the pile. I wanted to find a story that was different or at least told in a unique way. I’m not sure to what extent I’ve achieved that, but that was the idea.
 In terms of inspiring literature, I had read the likes of Sebastian Faulks, Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient and Ian McEwan’s Atonement in the past, all of which must have subconsciously inspired my story in some way. I read a lot of World War II fiction in the process of writing the novel, too, although I try to steer clear of anything too closely related until I have my own story well and truly fixed.

The novel is written in a beautiful and at times poetic way, with the imagery of flowers, nature and the innocence of Lydia in stark contrast to the brutality of war and Heiden's experiences. How has WWI and WWII poetry inspired you?

I’ve not deliberately taken inspiration from the war poets but Rupert Brookes’ ‘The Soldier’ has a particular resonance with me. It is the only poem I can recite by heart and I once had to perform it as an actor. It gives such hope and sadness in the same breath that if you let each line resonate in you it is almost impossible not to cry. On writing The Dynamite Room, I also read Owen Sheer’s novel, Resistance that has a similar subject matter. Sheers is well known for his poetry. In his novel every sentence is simple but exquisitely crafted. It proved to me that you can have a fast-paced story and yet still deliver it with a poetic touch.

I can see The Dynamite Room working well on stage as the claustrophobia of two unlikely inhabitants becoming dependent on each other in a short space of time. Do you have any plans to adapt it into a play?

I would love to see The Dynamite Room on the stage. I think a film or short TV series might be a better outlet though. The challenge for a theatre production would be how to portray Heiden’s backstory that encompasses a number of European locations and a couple of epic set pieces. There is also the challenge of finding an actress that can play eleven-year old Lydia in what would be quite a gruelling role. It could be done though and maybe one day I’d be up for the challenge (not unless anyone would like to offer!). I’m rather into claustrophobic settings at the moment. My first full-length play will debut at the Edinburgh Fringe this summer hopefully. It’s set in a lift and is called – wait for it – Claustrophobia. It couldn’t be more different to The Dynamite Room but there are certainly common links between the two.

I love the title. How conscious were you of the title having multiple meanings while you were writing the novel and at what stage did you decide on a name for the book?

I’m afraid I have a confession to make. It wasn’t actually my title. Throughout the writing process the working title was something else entirely. My agent didn’t like it – and rightly so in hindsight. He came up with ‘The Dynamite Room’. I wasn’t at all sure at first but now I see how perfect it is, relating not to one but two of the main storylines, and it does the job of grabbing people’s attention. (I still need to buy him a drink for that.)

In your Q & A at the end of the book, you mention that you find yourself acting out the roles of Lydia and Heiden to get into the mindset of their characters. How much do you think that being an actor helps you to bring to life two different, but authentic characters?

I think being a trained actor certainly helps create character. You can’t play a role on stage without hunting through the script for clues. You need to know everything about your character to give an accurate portrayal, and if you can’t find out what you need from the script then you at least need to be able to make intelligent guesses based on what you do know. As a writer then, I know that I need to leave these clues on the page, and that everything that happens or is said or done needs to be driven from the characters’ objectives (or what they want and need).

I find that acting out scenes as the characters makes it easier to spot the little details that my characters might do or how they might behave: when, for example, Lydia might pick at something on the floor and flop back on her bed or how she might sit in a chair. Heiden is the character I relate to most, although it was Lydia that clicked into place first. I’ve obviously never been a girl (no, honestly!) but I have been a child. With her it was more a case of trying to remember what being eleven was like, and out of the two characters she was the most fun to write.

There is a playlist featured at the end of the book, which I thought adds real depth and almost cinematic experience to the story. How did these pieces of music help you in writing The Dynamite Room? Do you always listen to music when writing? What other music do you find inspiring?

I don’t listen to music while I’m writing but I often play music while I’m setting up for the day. It creates the right atmosphere, particularly for a book like The Dynamite Room where music is such an important theme. I would listen to swing and popular radio hits of the time. In fact when I drove around Suffolk one week in the summer doing my research I only played 1940s hits in the car. Mostly, during the writing though, I listened to classical music as that’s what Heiden and Eva would have played and been inspired by themselves. Every major character had a musical theme too, that for me gave a sense of who they are. Sometimes I would play these to help me get in touch with them again. I also tend to have a film soundtrack for each novel I write that I have on continuous repeat and that gets me in the mood. For The Dynamite Room it was James Newton Howard’s soundtrack to the WWII film, Defiance. It’s not a brilliant film but Joshua Bell’s violin in it is haunting. For the novel I’m currently writing it’s the soundtrack to the film, Lore, and also The Dark Knight Rises. Don’t laugh. I know it’s an odd combination but it’s working for me at the moment.

I run a book group and will add The Dynamite Room to our reading list, as I think there is plenty to discuss. Which other books do you find yourself debating and would you recommend for future reads for us?

Adam Thorpe’s The Rules of Perspective has been my latest secret find. The novel is set in a German town now overrun by Americans in April 1945. It has two protagonists whose stories slowly intertwine – Heinrich Hoffer who, together with his colleagues, is huddled in the vaults of the town museum, and Neal Parry, an American GI on patrol in the town. It is one of the most rich and beautifully written novels I’ve read and I don’t think I’ve ever come across characters that have lifted so vividly off the page.

Jim Crace, too, is a writer that constantly intrigues me. His novel, Being Dead, is about a couple that return to a beach where they first made love, only to be murdered. It reads like a thriller and yet is much deeper than that, looking at what makes us love and what makes us human. Its intricate description of what physically happens to the body when we die is absolutely breath-taking.

Finally, I’d recommend Mountains of the Moon by I J Kay. At its very simplest, it is the tragic account of a broken life and yet, despite this, it is funny and fragile and blissfully surreal. The protagonist takes on many characters but eight-year old Lulu is a unique literary triumph.


A huge thank you to Jason for taking the time answer these questions and to Dawn Burnett at Simon and Schuster for sending me a copy of the book and setting up this Q and A.

The Dynamite Room is released at the end of March and you can pre-order a copy on the Waterstones website here

You can find out more at www.jason-hewitt.com, follow Jason on Twitter @jasonhewitt123 and on Facebook.com/TheDynamiteRoom

Q and A with Rachel Hore

After reading The Silent Tide, I was lucky enough to be offered a Q and A with author Rachel Hore. I really enjoyed Rachel's writing style throughout the novel and will be looking forward to reading more of her work. The Silent Tide tells the story of two women working in publishing. Isabel moves to post-war London to make a new life for herself, while the present day story of Emily is linked as she becomes involved in Isabel's past as she starts to discover why Isabel seems to have been erased from history. Both women become involved in relationships with authors which don't turn out quite as they had hoped and I enjoyed the parallels between their lives and relationships.

I was particularly interested in the story of Isabel and Hugh. Isabel was using the post Second World War ideas to her advantage, moving away from home at a young age and finding her own job and home. Hugh seems to admire this in her at first, but when she becomes a mother, he expects her to become the traditional 'stay-at-home' wife figure, which she cannot adjust too. I also wondered why Isabel and Emily both became attracted to the romantic, creative authors who they admire and ultimately become disappointed in as they realise that they are not the men they had hoped them to be. I was really excited to ask Rachel about these two themes in particular...
A quote at the start of the book is taken from Only Halfway to Paradise: Women in Postwar Britain by Elizabeth Wilson – ‘Women were wanting to escape the net just as men were climbing back into it.’ How did you want to explore this in the relationship of Isabel and Hugh? Do you think their relationship was very typical of the era?

Following the Second World War there was a tendency, enacted in government policy and expressed by the popular media, to assume that women would withdraw from paid employment and get back to the kitchen once their menfolk were demobbed and wanting 'their' jobs back. At the same time,  more women were actually becoming better educated and wishing for greater independence.   Whilst it was considered socially and economically acceptable for girls to take on certain kinds of 'female' employment -  teaching, secretarial, nursing - marriage and children were still presented as the ideal, and once married, or certainly after having children, they were definitely expected to retreat to the home.  However, in some more liberal-minded areas of the workplace, publishing being a notable one, educated women were able more strongly to make their mark, and Isabel in The Silent Tide is an example.

I've portrayed Hugh, her husband-to-be, in some respects as forward looking.  He admires Isabel's talents as an editor and intellectually he's very much aware of the dilemmas that young women face.  At the same time, he's a product of his environment, and deeply conservative underneath it all.  Although they love each other deeply, he and Isabel have false expectations of each other in their marriage, and it's these that they need to overcome. Diary evidence suggests that many couples must have had versions of Hugh and Isabel's experience at the time, even if they broadly accepted the social norm. 

Isabel and Emily both work in publishing and both have relationships with authors they are representing. Did you base either of their stories on your own experiences in publishing or did you think about the opposite of what could have happened in your own life?

I met my husband (the writer D.J. Taylor) after I published the paperback of his first novel when I worked at HarperCollins.  As we know, very many people meet their partners in the workplace.  However, I was never his editor in the sense of being involved in the creative process - that was the prerogative of his hardback publisher.  In The Silent Tide I became fascinated by the idea that the professional, the personal and the gender-political could become mixed up to the extent that Isabel, Hugh's editor then wife, unwittingly becomes his muse for a book that's basically about their marriage!  One does hear about writers who fictionalize their own marriages (Hanif Kureschi being one, Philip Roth another), but I assure you that I haven't done such a thing and nor has my husband (yet)!   

Did you decide Isabel’s fate when you first began writing the book, or did it proceed or change as her life went on?

Before starting the novel, I knew that Isabel had been swept away in the great floods of 1953 and it was towards this plot point that my past narrative was working.  The issue of interest for me as a writer, however, was not her demise, but why her story had been suppressed by Hugh's second wife.  Some might see variants of Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca in this, though this wasn't in my mind as I wrote.  

We occasionally get to read parts of Isabel’s memoir in her own words. Why did you decide not to tell her whole story in that way?

Isabel is a girl carried along by the tides of her time.  She's not a person who's naturally very self-aware, nor does she consciously stand with or against the social norm. She's a person of feeling who acts intuitively.  I wanted the past story to be a little more knowing than the way she would have told it herself - hence the third person narrative.

 

If you could write the biography of any author, who would you choose? What questions would you want answered?

Oh dear, everyone's been written about.  I'd be interested to ask Harper Lee why she wrote no more books after To Kill a Mockingbird.  Surely she had some more things to say. 

 

The covers of your books are always so beautiful and intriguing; I am always drawn to them in book shops. How much input do you have in these?

Thank you.  It was the cover of A Place of Secrets that instigated the concept of looking through a gate or doorway to a lovely secret world beyond.  After the novel became a bestseller, my publishers suggested that the backlist should be rejacketed in a similar way and that the design of future books should build on the idea, too, and this seemed sensible. I fully understand that my books have to have the branded look that we're told retailers and many readers need. However, my publisher has always asked my opinion of different versions of covers within the general style, and my response has been largely heeded.

 

What is your usual process for writing a novel? What kind of research do you find most valuable?

 I tend to develop a general feeling for the setting and atmosphere of a novel and develop everything from there.  I read a great many books about all aspects of my subject, and after a while characters and situations start to grow in my mind.  After that I write a two page synopsis, whilst continuing to read and think and work out details in a notebook.  I always know where the book is going to go before I start to write it, but not always how it's going to get there. Sometimes, as with The Silent Tide, the unexpected happens!

Which authors do you enjoy reading? If you could recommend a list of ‘must-read’ books to a book group, what would they be?

I belong to a book club myself and some of our most successful discussions have been around books that have polarized the group.  We Need to Talk about Kevin is the classic example.  Thinking about it, an issue that often crops up is whether or not the group 'likes' the central character or finds them 'sympathetic', and Eve in that novel is exactly the kind of narrator who flies in the face of that requirement. There's something satisfying about concluding that one might not particularly like a book but might still recognize that it's fascinating, gripping and intellectually challenging, and that it has maybe changed the way one looks at the world.  Other recent books that come into this category include The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas, Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn and The Dinner by Herman Koch. My personal perfect list of recent titles? And the Mountains Echoed by Khaled, Hosseini, The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri, The Kill by Richard House, The Summer House by Santa Montefiore, The Great Silence by Juliet Nicolson (non-fiction about the aftermath of WWI), and Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal by Jeanette Winterson (memoir).

A huge thank you to Rachel Hore for taking the time to answer these questions and for Dawn Burnett at Simon & Schuster for arranging this.

You can follow Rachel on Twitter @rachelhore and find out more about her books at www.rachelhore.co.uk

 

 

Robert Ryan

I am so excited to have my very first author interview below. The excellent Dead Man's Land was released last week and I was thrilled when I was offered the chance to ask the author, Robert Ryan, some questions about the novel.

Dead Man's Land sees Dr. John Watson in the limelight, as visits war grounds of WWI to teach about blood tranfusion. Soon, he becomes suspicious of some strange deaths and with memory of his detective work with estranged friend Sherlock Holmes, he begins investigating and finds out that the place with so much death around is the perfect place to commit murder... You can read my review of this book here.

Did you find it a responsibility working with such iconic and much-loved characters as Dr. John Watson and Sherlock Holmes?

To be honest I considered pitching Watson’s War (as I thought of it) several years ago, but I was wary of tackling such a well-established figure. In my novel Early One Morning I dealt with SIS (MI6) in WW2 and with Bugatti. I thought Bugatti owners would love the novel and MI6 hate it. Quite the reverse, I got to know a couple of ex-spies through the process. The Bugatti people were less welcoming. So I knew you could easily upset those who felt ‘ownership’ of a topic or a personality and Holmes obviously has fiercely protective fans. But when I talked with Simon & Schuster I realised it fitted in with exactly what they were looking for and (I think) the first series of Sherlock was being trailed, so I thought: why not give it a go? However, I do believe that, like James Bond or Batman, you can stretch and bend these characters out of shape and they always ping back to the original, allowing other writers to start all over. In Holmes’s case it is, of course, those 56 short stories and four novels that form the ACD canon. But I did pepper the text with references to those stories that I hope the aficionados enjoy.


I enjoyed the fact that Watson was in the forefront and using skills picked up from Holmes. Did you feel that you added any other dimensions to their characters?
Some of the areas I wanted to explore were Watson as an unreliable narrator of the stories who bolstered Holmes’s reputation somewhat, the fact they would both be growing older – the fear of mental capacity diminishing must be even greater for a man like Holmes – and Watson’s way with what Holmes called ‘the fair sex’. Interestingly ACD said that Holmes was simply a calculating machine and that to add anything else was to diminish the character, but I thought the twilight years of such a detective held some interest. There is one thing I would like to add – I didn’t intend for Holmes to be in the novel at all. He just barged in and wouldn’t leave.

What is the process in gaining permission to use the characters from the Conan Doyle Estate and how long did it take?

As my agent explained patiently when I told him the idea, although the Conan Doyle canon is out of copyright, Dr. Watson has been trademarked (the way Disney trademark Mickey Mouse etc.) by the Conan Doyle Estate, along with Holmes, Moriarty and Professor Challenger. Would this really stand up to legal scrutiny? I wasn’t sure. But the whole Holmes copyright issue is murky – not here but in the USA, where the situation is blurred because of various Holmes movies. The legal representatives of the estate of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle insist that as The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes is still in copyright, which means Holmes himself (and Watson) is protected until 2023. The New York Times described the situation as ‘a tangled web’. I had no desire to get caught up in it. So, it seemed worth getting the estate's blessing to proceed and, after a nervy pitch on the phone and a couple of emails outlining plot and characters, permission was granted (after a tense couple of weeks) to say that Dead Man's Land was officially sanctioned worldwide (including the USA) by Andrea Plunket, Administrator of Conan Doyle Copyrights. It might have been unnecessary, legally and strictly speaking, but it made me sleep easier.

Why do you think there has been a resurgence in popularity of the characters over the last few years?
The duo is endlessly malleable but somehow remain above all the re-inventions. Some fans loved Jeremy Brett, before that it was Basil Rathbone, now it’s Benedict Cumberbatch and Robert Downey Jr – you can re-cast Holmes for every generation (much as Bond has been) and keep the essence intact. But also the Watson/Holmes partnership is the blueprint for every detective/sidekick pair you can think of, so even though they are Victorian characters, there is a modernity about their relationship. Plus, ACD’s writing is surprisingly fresh and engaging – again, every generation can re-discover the original source material.

Have you always been a fan of the characters?


Lapsed I would say. The stories and Hound were among the first thing I read (sadly, the second was Mickey Spillane, which might explain a lot). But over the years I have picked up the short stories and enjoyed them. I can’t claim to be one of those obsessive fans – you find me choosing the Holmes canon as a Mastermind subject.

You mention in your notes that found a particular blog (This Intrepid Band http://greatwarnurses.blogspot.com) helpful in your research of WWI. How useful do you find blogs and social media in your research and also in finding out readers responses to your work?

Increasingly so. Compared to the slog of researching something like Early One Morning, which wasn’t pre-internet but was pre-blogging/twitter/facebook, researching WWI was much more straightforward. I have always gone of the basis of ‘first find an expert’ for my research. Tracking down an expert has never been easier. I am not sure about readers’ response through social media. It is two years since my last novel Signal Red and the landscape has changed enormously. Like most authors, I tweet and I blog now, so I await developments with interest.

Do you find it difficult to remain historically accurate?
Not in the big picture, but sometimes precise dates are very inconvenient – like Watson being slightly ahead of the curve in blood transfusion. He is probably six months before his time. But it is a work of fiction, you can’t tie yourself in knots. And as a rule I try and apologise at the end for any liberties taken!

What other research did you do for the novel?

There were three stages. Speak to my nurse/blogger about medical matters. Read the annotated Sherlock Holmes, which dissects the stories in forensic details. Read everything I could on WWI and spend an unhealthy amount of time in the Imperial War Museum. Then just write, trying not to let all that get in the way.

You have set a lot of your work during WWI and WWII, how important do you think it is to keep the memory of these wars alive?
I think there are historians who can do a better job that me (I’m thinking Max Hasting and Anthony Beevor) of dissecting those wars. What I feel is that both conflicts remain amazing backdrops for (often true) stories when everyday men and women did remarkable things in a manner we simply can’t envisage now.

What personal links do you have to these historical events? 


There are no family links left now – but because of the books I have a great friend who was in both SOE and MI6. His history of secret service for this country goes back to the Russo-Finnish war in 1939-40. After he told me his story, I wrote to the Finnish Embassy explaining that he had undertaken secret missions to help the Finns, and the government re-struck the Finnish Winter War medal. So, at the age of ninety plus, he finally got the award two years ago. He is a great source of information and wisdom about men and women in wartime

What further reading would you suggest for those interested in learning more about WWI?
Well, Birdsong did it for me when I first read it and I recently read and enjoyed Andrew Martin’s The Somme Station (which I avoided while I was finishing off DML, because the subject matter was too similar). But of non-fiction I found The Great War and Modern Memory by Paul Fussell useful and insightful and Six Weeks: The Short and Gallant Life of the British Officer in the First World War by John Lewis-Stempel both fascinating and moving.

You can find out more about Robert Ryan at www.robtryan.com or follow him on Twitter @robtryan

Thank you to Jamie Groves at Simon & Schuster UK for arranging this interview.