Author2Author: Edwin Thomas & C.C. Humphreys

When St. Martin’s sent me two historical adventure novels, Treason’s River by Edwin Thomas and Jack Absolute by C.C. Humphreys, I thought teaming the two authors up for a chat was a natural. Turns out they were way ahead of me: Thomas and Humphreys have been friendly for years. That set a great tone for their conversation here.

Edwin Thomas: Most historical authors (certainly including me) start with a historical period or person, and then fictionalise it. You’ve gone the opposite way and ‘historicalised’ a fictional character (Jack Absolute was originally a character in Sheridan’s The Rivals). Does that alter the process of writing the books?

C.C. Humphreys: Writing Jack is a bit different, I suppose, than writing my other novels where it all comes purely from my head. I did have something to go on with Jack Absolute, both Sheridan’s play and, especially, my performance in the role twenty years ago. So part of the fun of writing him—and he is huge fun to write!—is taking some of the situations that Sheridan’s Jack, my acting Jack and indeed, Sheridan himself would have encountered and inventing whole new stories around them. To take a couple of examples: the love of theatre and of theatricality; the duelling (Sheridan fought a famous one, I’ve fought dozens). His family: one of my favourite characters, who appears in the second and third novels is Jack’s father, Sir James (the play’s Sir Anthony) Absolute, and my ‘Mad Jamie’ is every bit as bellicose as the play’s Sir… only more so!

So fun, yes, to use some of the play’s ideas as springboards—but they are only that. The joy is to take them to realms as yet uncharted—and then the novel writing process returns to normal: invent something, then the next something, then join them together!

When you first conceived your novels, did you have a character in mind and then seek a period to place him in? Or were you determined to write about the Napoleonic naval era and found a character to fit?

Edwin Thomas: I’d been wanting (and trying) to write about Nelson’s navy for a number of years. In fact, most of my early attempts focussed on a character not a million miles away from Jack Absolute: a doughty, dashing, unstoppable hero who thrived on adventure, Errol Flynn and James Bond and Horatio Hornblower all rolled into one. He was meant to be extreme, to affectionately send up the heroic conventions of the genre, but he only really worked in an extreme (and extremely unrealistic) context. As I decided I wanted to be more historically faithful in the stories I told, I found he didn’t really fit my needs any more. So I jettisoned him, and went to the other extreme of the heroic spectrum: Martin Jerrold.

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26 February 2007 | author2author |

Author2Author: Michael Largo & Lisa Cullen

Michael Largo, the author of Final Exits, an “illustrated encyclopedia of how we die,” was psyched when he found out I wanted to pair him up for an Author2Author with Lisa Cullen to talk about her new book, Remember Me, a “lively tour of the new American way of death.” You see, two decades, when Cullen’s doctor warned him that he’d probably be dead in six months if he kept up his way of life, Cullen responded by pre-ordering his tombstone. When he didn’t die, he recalls, “the monument company threatened to grind my name off and sell it to someone else if I didn’t pick it up. So I persuaded six friends to help me carry this monstrously awkward stone up to my filth floor walk-up apartment on St. Marks Place. This marker in my living room turned out to be the wildest 400 pound granite Post-It note money could buy. In fact, the heavy reality of it got me over the immortality mindset of my twenties and was ultimately a wake-up to modify many a harmful lifestyle.”

Michael Largo: Lifestyle, as I’ve discovered, is the real cause for nearly 50% of all deaths. How do we actually die? That is the question I wanted to know. Of course, the Center for Disease Control (CDC) puts out the top ten causes each year, but that is such a tablet of saccharin in the sea of data, some of which you’ll find in Final Exits. While researching your book, did you find cause of death to be influential in burial choices?

Lisa Cullen: I thought I ought to start by letting you know that Final Exits has been selected for admission to my family’s library of bathroom books. Its quick, funny, bizarre, bite-size reads makes the book perfect for the smallest room of the house. I apologize if you had grander ambitions, but, to my family, this placement is in fact the highest honor… I must however admit I question your moorings. What kind of person knows that more than 500 people died between 1999 and 2003 from economy-class syndrome? Or that halitosis can lead to cancer? Or that “in 1987, Texan Walter Mitchell killed his wife because she was about to say the words ‘New Jersey'”? Your tale about keeping a tombstone in your apartment only deepens my suspicions, friend.

But you pose a serious and interesting question. My first instinct was to answer no, that the cause of death did not seem to reflect upon the mode of burial among the people I profiled in my book who chose unusual and personal send-offs. After some reflection, however, I thought of the mother of three with cancer who chose a “green” burial in a nature preserve in South Carolina. I did not get to interview her before her passing, but it occurs to me that her unimaginable pain must have been eased somewhat by knowing she had chosen to go as one with nature. I think it would for me. And in the case of the Port Authority worker who died on 9/11, his empty casket was held in the mausoleum until his remains could be found.

Do you think the fact that a book like yours can exist means we Americans perceive death differently today? In other words, does our generation see humor in death? And if so, why now? The world just isn’t so funny these days.

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16 October 2006 | author2author |