The Rupert Event

How many times have I returned from an event with the lingering residue of enjoyment still on my clothes, and yet nothing more than a few fading words in my head and a half-filled page of scribblings in the moleskine as proof of the experience? I'd make a terrible memoirist.

But still I try to do my best.

Friday night was the Rupert Thomson event at McNally Robinson, to promote the release of his latest novel, Death of a Murderer. I'm still finishing The Book of Revelation, but I hope to dive right in to DOAM when I'm done. It was comforting to hear Rupert talk about his work in person, and Maud did an excellent job leading the conversation, eliciting quirky stories and other salient thoughts from the author. And yet, as I say, I was so busy listening that I got little of it down. I pull these impoverished lines from my notebook:

Policeman as prism to the story of Myra Hindley.
First drafts sink down really deep, sinking a lift shaft into yourself and bringing up something you normally don't go into.
Juggler and jigsaw handler.
A room with no windows (vs. A room with a view)

Make of that what you will. The rest is from memory, here-and-there fragments:

He revealed that during the writing of his most recent novel, Myra Hindley came to him in a nightmare, wearing a hood, and he hid under the sheets. In retelling the experience to his friend, actress Samantha Morton, who played Myra Hindley in "Longford," he described how comical it seemed, if only because of the hood. When she told him that Hindley had apparently taken to wearing a hood later in life when her hair began to fall out, the author suddenly had to reconsider his nighttime visitor.

He had tried to incorporate Myra Hindley's name in early drafts, but found that the fact of her name weighed more than the fiction of what he was writing, setting the novel off balance, so he took it out. He loved that Maud used the word "stampeding" to describe the pace of his novels, though he's made recent attempts to slow the reader down. He talked of a potential upcoming memoir, on the avoidance of grief.

Maud wondered if there might be a difference in the way an American audience would read this book from the way it would be received by a British audience who had grown up with the Moors murders as part of their lore. Rupert addressed this with a quote from his American agent who, when he presented his idea of a novel about a guard keeping watch over the body of a deceased serial killer, said: "We have those people here, too." (Referring to serial killers, not - though they may exist too - to the guards of the dead.)

I asked a question about the reception of his book by the victims' families, to which he answered that he wrote to them before the book was published to let them know of his intentions, and they appreciated his sensitivity in the matter.

Two more images I took away: A room painted yellow. Shifting peat.

Bloggers were swinging from the rafters at McNally Robinson (or sitting politely in chairs sipping tea - I'll let you decide which makes the story better). I had the good fortune to meet most of them: the awesome Lauren, who seemed charmed by my jumpsuit, Dana, who no longer blogs, but, like Freaks and Geeks, should be released on DVD, Ed, taller than I imagined, Richard, who has miraculously never had to stand on line at McCarren Park Pool, Jessica, Matthew Cheney, and, of course, Maud, who was more composed than I could ever hope to be in front of a beloved author and a room full of people.

All of these people have found and loved Rupert Thomson's books, and I can't recommend them enough myself. Maud has more on Thomson on her site; I would personally recommend either Divided Kingdom or The Insult as a starting point, though I'm still making my way through the rest.

© Zan McQuade. All rights reserved.