Tangier (50 page)

Q.
You're known as a crime novelist. Do you consider
Tangier
a crime novel?

A.
Not in the sense that it starts with a body on the floor. But the main character is a police detective whose job is to mind the foreign colony. And there are crimes in the book, including a murder, and numerous crimes of betrayal as well. As Hamid interacts with the expats, he arrives at a point of considerable fascination and disgust...which is pretty much where I ended up, and why Paula and I decided to leave. There was another reason too: I began to see that my fictional Tangier was more interesting to me than the actual city.

Q
. How did Moroccans react to your novel?

A.
Very few had an opportunity tp read it because it was immediately banned. Back then the Moroccan government was big on banning books. There was a joke that they banned a book about chess because it contained a chapter on surrounding and capturing the king. One of my characters mentions this.

Q.
Hamid seems a complex character.

A.
He was the first detective character I ever wrote, and writing about him got me interested in writing crime fiction. He's the first of three foreign detective main characters I've worked with. The other two are the Israeli detective David Bar-Lev in
Pattern Crimes
and the Argentine detective, Marta Abecasis in
City Of Knives
. I now refer to these three books as my “foreign detectives series.”

Q.
Any regrets about this book?

A.
Aside from Bowles' objection that I based too many characters on real people, I wish I had made Hamid more sympathetic toward the gay community. Actually he is sympathetic. His brother is gay, and near the end he explains his feelings about all this to Robin (who, of course, is gay) and his deep sympathy comes through. What bothers him throughout is what he thinks of as the plundering of young Moroccan boys by European gays. Still there were times when, rereading the book, I found him a bit harsh.

Q.
Any other regrets?

A.
I think that in the Picnic chapter I over-satirized the old-guard gay community of Tangier. I had a lot of fun writing that chapter, and, indeed, it's made up of bits and pieces I heard and/or observed. But if I were writing that scene today I'd probably cut back on the characters' many cruelties because, nasty as many of those guys were, particularly in the way they spoke of Moroccans, some of them could also be quite kind at times. Looking back, I understand that their brittle meanness can be attributed to their quite legitimate feelings of oppression. I think that's something I could have explored better among the secondary characters, as I did with Robin.

Q.
You mentioned moving to Tangier to work on a novel based on the life of Isabelle Eberhardt. How did that lead to your writing
Tangier
?

A.
While writing the final chapters of
Visions Of Isabelle
, I got the idea for
Tangier
. I remember outlining it on Christmas morning. I'd always admired Lawrence Durrell's
The Alexandria Quartet,
and thought Tangier would make an excellent setting where a set of interesting expatriates could interact. But I knew I needed someone or something to pull these different conflict stories together. That Christmas morning it came to me: a detective assigned to keep his eye on the foreign colony. Once I had that I knew I could write the novel.
The Alexandria Quartet
was definitely a model in terms of the interweaving of politics, sex and expatriate life in an exotic foreign locale.

Q.
Hamid gets personally involved with the Europeans on account of his girlfriend, Kalinka.

A.
Yes, she's the link, a half-Vietnamese half-Russian woman with a mysterious past. The tension between Hamid and Peter Zvegintsov is all on account of Kalinka. Hamid, longing to understand her, uncovers her past, which helps her to understand herself. And she helps him find a new role for himself as well. In a sense you could say that the core story of
Tangier
is their love story.

Q.
I understand that
Tangier
has recently been published in France. What's been the reaction?

A.
The French reviews have been excellent. My hope is that the French edition will find its way back to Morocco where French is still the favored language of Moroccan fiction readers.

Q.
You mentioned that the Peter Barclay character was based on a real person.

A.
Yes, a Brit, now deceased, who was quite absurd and nasty, and who ruled the expatriate social scene. He actually had himself listed as a “Lord” in the Tangier telephone directory though he was not one. That was an amusing aspect of Tangier: people would go there and reinvent themselves, often adding a title in the process. Barbara Hutton (whom I never met, though I used to play tennis with her nurse) famously insisted that people address her as “Princess.” Apparently she'd been married briefly to some sort of Laotian prince. There was also a fellow who received people in his house from a papier-mâché throne, wearing a bejeweled cruficix he claimed to have received from his former lover, the prelate of Hungary. I used him as the model for a minor character, Patrick Wax. But all the principals such as Hamid and Robin were totally fictitious.

Q.
Did you model a character on Paul Bowles?

A.
No. I liked him too much.

Q.
What about the rather mysterious minor character, Martin Townes – what can you tell us about him?

A.
Martin Townes is the voice that occasionally intrudes into the story, referring to the foreign colony as “we” and to Tangier as “our town.” In effect, he's the teller of the tale.

Q.
So are you Martin Townes?”

A.
In fictional guise, yes.

Q.
Aside from disguising the character models, are there any other changes you'd make in the book?

A.
I'm very fond of
Tangier
. It was important in my development as a fiction writer. But if I were to write the
 
novel today, I'd give it a more driving narrative line and thus make it into more of a thriller. There'd be a crime that Hamid would have to solve, the resolution of which would keep the reader involved. The large cast of expatriate characters could then by introduced in connection with his detective work. I also think I'd have fewer instances in which the characters ask themselves questions. Rereading the text I found a great many “whys” posed by characters to themselves. It works for Hamid, who has a questing sort of mind, and it reflects the influence of French existentialism on my writing. That kind of rigorous existential self-questioning now strikes me as a bit overdone. Still, rereading the book I feel very good about it. There've been a number of novels set in Tangier, including one by Paul Bowles. And of course there've been many expatriate novels, probably the most famous of which is Hemingway's
The Sun Also Rises
. I certainly don't put
Tangier
in that category, but I do feel (immodestly, of course) that as an expatriate novel set in the 1970s,
Tangier
stands up very well.

Q.
Have you been back since you pulled up stakes there?

A.
Not since I returned to close on the sale of the house. Paula did go back a few years later, and wrote about that visit in a prize-winning article in
Saveur Magazine
. She found the experience quite disillusioning. The city had grown much larger and had changed in many ways. I have no desire to return, preferring to remember it as it was and as I depicted it in
Tangier
, a white cubistic labyrinth of a city, a marvelous stage set for romantic affairs and mysterious interactions and goings-on.