Jim Nisbet, author of Windward Passage, Lethal Injection, The Damned Don't Die, and the forthcoming Old & Cold, recently sent us this note on what writers have influenced him most:"That's a long list and, one way or another, it would have to include almost everything I've every read.
I've been around a long time, of course. So, for example, I read almost all of Dostoyevsky when I was 22 and maybe 23 years old. I went to my draft physical bearing a copy of The Idiot, and, basically, I never got over Dostoyevsky. Those translations were done by a woman named Constance Garnett. Now, 40 years later, we have in America a completely new and really interesting re-issue of all the novels of Dostoyevsky as translated by the team of Richard Pevear and his wife, Larissa Volokhonsky, and these translations are just terrific. As a result, to date I've reread The Possessed, The Devils, The Gambler, Notes From Underground... And, you know what? Dostoyevsky is still great.
Pevear and Volokhonsky, by the way, have made a big hit here with their translation of War And Peace. I reread that, too, but, you know what? As my friend the late, lamented Robin Cook (aka Derek Raymond; is he translated in Italy?) used to say, "Tolstoy? You can have Tolstoy." Apostasy! Sacrilege! But, well...
Stendhal (much borrowed by Tostoy); I have a collection of English translations of Le Chartreuse de Parme and reread it regularly. (My favorite one remains the first one, done by The Lady Mary Lloyd; my copy was published in 1901.) I hope one day to be able to read it in French. But I also just read La Vie de Henri Brulard. Cesare Pavese I could mention, and Curzio Malaparte -- why not? I'm talking to an Italian! I've even read Ferdinando Camon. Who can forget the entire family fighting over the anchovy hanging by a string over the dinner table? Not so much Moravia... All of Jane Austin. Most of Beckett. Moby-Dick -- what a book! A Story of A Life by Konstantin Paustovsky. All of the literature of single-handed sailing, particularly of course by the circumnavigators, starting with and often coming back to Sailing Alone Around The World by Capt. Joshua Slocum. Books on astrophysics...
But you probably want to know about thrillers. So, Jim Thompson, David Goodis, Dan J. Marlowe... which brings me to...
Chandler, Hammett, H.P. Lovecraft, Ross Macdonald ... and Kerouac. I've read much of what these guys wrote, and avidly, and years ago, and, you know what? Unlike Dostoyevsky, I've not been able to bring myself to repeat the experience. There you have it. But I very much admire The Factory Series, and that before I met its creator, the English writer Robin Cook, whom I came to count as a friend, but of whom, interestingly enough, I never read or heard of until I started going to France. He's still relatively unknown...
When I was nine and ten and eleven years old I read all kinds of Mickey Spillane and various other thrillers, A Coffin for Dimitrios, James Bond, but no more.
Christ, I forgot about Faulkner!... And never mind every book about Antarctic exploration, beginning and ending with The Worst Journey in The World, by Apsley Cherry-Garrard.... Then there's Wilfred Thesiger! And all the Voyageurs tramping North America, looking for plews and the northwest passage. A huge body of literature. Mad dudes like Celine and the Marquis de Sade...
And the poets! One of my back-burner projects is a complete English translation of Les Fleurs de Mal. there're about 115 of them. I've done 35...
I can't list all the authors, let alone all their books. This is a very long discussion... Endless... It's one of the reasons why literature is so great. That, and it's not television... One of the joys of being a writer is that you get to read all the time. That's my approach, anyway... "
Dark Companion will be published in a new trade paperback edition on March 29. Join Jim Nisbet at M is for Mystery in San Mateo, Ca on Wednesday, March 30 for a reading and Q&A.
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