An interview with John X. Cooper (born
Yianni Xiros) about his new novel Dead Letter – and two excerpts from the
book
The ruins of Rhamnous, the ancient city just north of Athens, where
Akritas is pursued by assassins
Why did you decide to set Dead Letter in contemporary Athens?
I taught English literature at the University of British Columbia for many years and when I retired I thought I’d finally get to read all those books that I had referred to many times in lectures and my academic writing but never actually read from cover to cover. One of those books was the Bible. So, I started with Genesis, Chapter 1 and worked my way through to the final chapter of Revelations. There was an episode in Acts of the Apostles (Chapter 17: 16-34) that really caught my attention.
It was St. Paul’s visit to Athens in 51 AD, when the news of Christianity arrived in Athens. I was amused by the reaction of the pagan philosophers, Epicureans and Stoics, to Paul’s message. They dismissed it as the ramblings of a lunatic. I remember thinking that not much had change in the sceptical attitudes of Athenians in 2000 years.
But later I wondered why Paul had never written one of his famous letters to the Athenians. Why did the Corinthians, Thessalonians, Philippians, and others receive epistles from Paul but not Athens? Then it occurred to me that perhaps he had written such a letter, but it was lost, or better still, it was suppressed. What if someone in contemporary Athens found it in the National Library and then was murdered? It seemed like the beginning of a damn good story.
Raphael’s picture of St. Paul preaching to the Athenians
What is your own connection with Greece?
I was born Yianni Xiros in the Kypseli
neighbourhood of Athens and lived there with my parents for the first few years
of my life. My parents divorced when I was five and my mother left Greece with
me in tow for Bergamo in Italy where her brother was in business. We lived there
for two years until she met Norman Cooper. He was British and his sister was
married to my mother’s brother. They fell in love, married in the UK, and after
a two-year sojourn in his family home in Sussex, we immigrated to Montreal in
Canada. In 2013 when I retired from my academic post I returned to Athens to
reconnect with my roots and now I spend periods of time every year in Canada,
the UK, and Athens.
The old National Library on Panepistimiou Street. The archives of the
Library have now been moved to a new facility in Kallithea.
Who is Panos Akritas?
Panos is a captain in the Hellenic Police
(the Astynomia Elleniki) with its headquarters in the big police building on
Alexandras Avenue across from the Panathinaikos football stadium. Akritas is
the family name of a medieval Greek warrior who is the subject of a well-known
epic poem from the 10th century AD. The poem called Digenis Akritas Basileios tells of the
heroic exploits of this warrior in defending the eastern borders of the
Byzantine Empire against invaders from Central Asia. The folksongs that also tell
of his exploits are called the Akritic ballads and are collected as the Akritika: Odes of the Byzantine
Border-Guards. Akritas seemed like a good name for a modern day policeman,
not defending the borders of an empire of course, but perhaps policing different
kinds of borders. His first name came to me when I was having a coffee at the
Dioscouri café in Plaka that overlooks the east side of the Agora. One of the
streets nearby is called Odos Panos. When I saw the small blue street sign it
was love at first sight.
A medieval depiction of Digenis Akritas in action
Are you a fan of any other crime/detective novels set in Greece?
I’ve read a couple of novels by Petros
Markaris and several by the Anglo-Greek writer Anne Zouroudi. Both are very
good. There are others, but I must confess I’m a big fan of the Italian crime
fiction writers, the Neapolitan Maurizio de Giovanni, for example, or the
Sicilian Andrea Camilleri, the British writer Michael Dibden whose crime novels
are set in various cities in Italy, and the American Donna Leon who has Venice as
background for her Commissario Brunetti novels.
What made you start writing crime fiction?
Some years ago my wife thought I might
like Camilleri’s Montalbano novels. I did, very much and I ended up
binge-reading them. But Dibden was my immediate writerly inspiration. Although
he’s British he manages to convey his Italian stories and characters in a
remarkably vivid way. I also liked his take on Italian society and manners. I
remember thinking I could do the same thing for Athens and although I’ve spent
most of my adult life elsewhere, I was actually born there.
What was the inspiration for your first novel, The Sting of the Wasp?
One of the first things that struck me
when I returned to Greece in 2013 was how the Greek Civil War from 1946-1950
was still present in so many ways, small monuments, history texts, people’s
memories, and political discourse. Although Sting of the Wasp is not mainly
about the civil war it was what got me thinking about the plot that eventually made
up the substance of the novel.
Small monument near the police headquarters on Alexandras Avenue put up
by the Greek anti-Nazi partisans and communists to remember the “December days”
in 1944, which was a prelude to the Civil War that broke out a year later
What do you hope readers will find in your work? What is your favourite
reader comment so far?
I want to write about the real Greece, not
the tourist brochure Greece. The city of Athens is a fascinating and complicated
place and it seems to me that writing about its reality gives both Greeks and
non-Greeks a more vivid picture of what’s it’s like. My favourite reader
comment came from an American who read Sting of the Wasp and wrote to
say that when he finally visited Athens my book had given him a better
appreciation of the place.
Are you writing something new? If so, can you tell us anything about it?
My new Panos Akritas mystery is called Three
Sisters and it involves the murder of a renowned chef who owns a two
Michelin star restaurant in wealthy Kifissia and is found stabbed to death with
one of his own kitchen knives. All the evidence points to his youngest daughter
Zoë. But Captain Akritas has his doubts. I think, more than anything else, it's
a novel about appetite. Enough said.
In Dead Letter, Panos is dreaming of his Greek island holiday. Is
that something you do?
Yes, absolutely. I love the Ionian islands, Cephalonia, Zante,
Corfu and so on. In the Aegean, I tend to stay away from the very touristy
islands. I like Sifnos because of the food and great atmosphere. Folegrandos in
the Cyclades is relaxed and not crowded. I’d love to visit Rhodes in the future
and your island too, Jennifer, Tilos.
Thank you! And now for two excerpts from Dead
Letter:
1: Pursued in the ruins of Rhamnous
After
a few minutes he saw them. Four men in a line with MP7 type submachine guns,
picking their way carefully up the slope. Here they come, he thought. He was on
their left. If he stayed where he was, the point man would pass fifteen metres from his position. Too
close. He needed to move. But where? Staying low, he moved at an angle further
to their left. He kept the buckthorn bushes and stunted trees between him and
his hunters. He found a hollow with some cover.
When the men had passed, he set
off towards what he assumed were Kato Souli and Schinias. “Not sure where the fuck
I’m going,”
he murmured to himself. He was sweating profusely as the sun’s rays came at him
like an attack of razor blades.
When he reached the church, he
rested. It was past noon, so the east side gave some relief from the sun.
Problem was he couldn’t spot his pursuers from there. As time passed, he lost
all sense of their movements. He listened for sounds but the cicadas were
putting up such a racket that he might as well be deaf. Why wouldn’t they
search the vicinity of the church? Of course they would. He realised that they would not
think he was in the church. Killing
him would be too easy there. But would they have to check just to make sure?
They’d
certainly come around to his side eventually. Before that happened, he would
have to move. But where? Straight ahead and slightly to his left there was
thick underbrush, large boulders and small gnarled trees. They wouldn’t give
much cover but it was better than cowering by the church wall awaiting his
executioners. If they were smart they’d come round both ends, hoping to trap
him in the middle. He knew he had to move. Now.
He sprinted straight for the
underbrush and dived in before anyone rounded the corners. He hid himself in
the bushes as well as he
could and watched the church wall where he’d been resting. He didn’t have long
to wait. The four men split up and two suddenly appeared at each end of the
wall,
guns in firing position. They looked around at the surrounding shrubs and
trees. One said something and the four walked carefully to the front of the
church. It looked to Akritas that they entered. This was his moment to escape.
He broke cover and was at least a hundred and fifty metres from the church when the
four men emerged, glanced around, and waited. They hadn’t seen him. Akritas was
hidden among shrubs and rocks. He let out his breath when he saw them confer
and head off in a different direction, guns ready. He rose crouching and began
to creep crab-like away from the church towards the east.
After an hour, he came across what looked
like an ancient marble wall set in the hillside. He looked around. It was
obviously an archaeological
site, although it was clearly not being excavated,
had not been excavated for
several years. “Fucking
Euro crisis,” he said
out loud to a stunted cypress tree nearby. The
heat’s getting to me. I’m talking to the fucking trees. “Rhamnous,” he said under his
breath, the acropolis of Rhamnous.
2: The bonds of friendship
The
next night, Katarina, her sister, Greg and Katia, Valia and Akritas reserved a
big table at Rythmos Stage, a club in Ilioupoli, a south Athens suburb. They heard a Cretan band, Chainides, play the superb and
inspiring music of that ancient island with wonderfully wry political
commentary by the leader, Dimitris Apostolakis, who also did duty on the Cretan
lyre. They played until past two in the morning to a packed house. It was a
foot-stomping good time. It was defiant, funny, sad, and the entire audience
realised somewhere around one o’clock they all shared something in common. Not only a love of their country’s music, or the
joyful fellowship of comrades even if it was only for a few hours, or even
everyone getting tipsy together on the wine, the beer and the Cutty Sark, not
only those things, but something more important. Katarina mentioned it in her
thoughtful way as they drove back to the centre. They were a people and they
all shared a common fate. It was the truth of what it means to be a
nation. The poignancy was not lost on them after six long years of the debt
crisis.
As they drove into
the centre, the six friends were not ready for the evening to end. It was now
about three in the morning. As it was the end of July, the night was warm and
many people were still out talking, drinking and just happily walking about.
Living joyfully was not yet a dead letter among the Greeks even in a dark time.
Akritas suggested the St George terrace in Plateia Karytsi for a nightcap. It
would be quiet there under the walls of the big church. When they arrived, the bar
was closing, but the very small café next door was still open. Akritas and Greg
pulled a couple of tables together so that the friends could all sit as one.
The walls of the church reminded him of St Paul and his crisis of faith. That moment
is one we all must face in our different ways. Even a nation must face doubt when
it loses faith in itself. But perhaps only for a short time.
