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Matti Rönkä, Chris Morgan Jones, Stephen Kelman |
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| 09/12/2011 |
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“Finland has a very short history. We have always been dominated but we never lost our pride. During WWII we were allied with the Germans, and many Finns who were living in Russia could return to the regions of their ancestors. But when the war was over, a law forced these 60,000 people to return to Russia. Their children could return to Finland only after the fall of the Berlin Wall, but were considered by Finns to be second-class citizens. It is a nation with a short history that needs to build founding myths, and one of these myths is the Karelia.” So Says Matti Rönkä, a writer and journalist born in the Karelia, and author A Man with a Killer’s Face, featuring detective Viktor Karppa, an exile who lives among borders, constantly tangled up with the Leningrad mafia and the Finnish police.
He’s detective with few basic, moral principles: he doesn’t deal drugs, he doesn’t kill. He has a mind of steel and a heart of gold, and makes his sixth appearance in an adventure written by Rönkä, According to the former anchorman and current television head: “I was inspired by Chandler in writing my first book, and began thinking of a very rigorous intrigue, but whose core would be the surrounding elements, those seemingly unnecessary episodes. Big landscapes are created through small things.” A journalist who has never written crime news, in his books Rönkä tackles globalization, welfare and racism. “I don’t write about myself, but through these books I relate my emotions”
Chris Morgan Jones, author of An Agent of Deceit, also writes about his own experiences, many of which are linked to Russia, where his work for a leading investigative agency often led him. Says the sometime-spy: “I really like Le Carrè. He writes about those small details that only those who lived through those experiences can know, details that give a sense of reality. The novel is an instrument for telling things that otherwise you could not say.”
The anti-hero of his book is Konstantin Malin, “a contemporary character, who eloquently depicts the passage from Communism to the market economy. Those who went on to become the great oligarchs earned a lot of money in the last days of the USSR. They bought large pieces of Russia. With Putin the situation changed, he decided to recentralize power. In the first years of his presidency, precisely in order to reinforce his power, he attacked these oligarchs. Malin is part of the Putin-esque organization: a ministry functionary, he’s not a minister, even if he could very well be one. In creating these characters, I thought of my old clients, how they think, how they gesticulate and move their bodies. Both in creating Malin and Ben Webster, who is the book’s positive protagonist, an idealist without ideals, whose next adventure will be set in Iran and the Middle East.”
Stephen Kelman, on the other hand, writes of an entirely different type of delinquency in Pigeon English: juvenile delinquency, by young people living on council estates, told by a young boy, Harry, who has just arrived from Nigeria. This story is also based on true events, and the writer’s own experiences in those barrack-like buildings. It’s a moral novel, in which the boy/protagonist must make a choice that will mark his entire life. “The boy tries to understand,” says Kelman. “He tries to understand how one can be killed, and in fact investigates the death of his friend, whose murder has shattered his moral order, the sense of justice.”
The book was the object of a bidding war between 13 publishers, which, says the author, “gave me strength and encouraged me for the future, to write stories that are directly tied to society. My second book, which is also a story that is important to me, is the story of my friend in Bombay, a highly educated journalist who out of passion breaks absurd world records. It will also be a book about people who come from different environments, meet and become friends. My whole life I’ve always being surrounded by people who had different stories, nationalities and cultural backgrounds. And I am profoundly grateful for this. I think these situations allow you to develop curiosity, respect and knowledge. And it allows us writers to tackle much broader material.”
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