Interview with James Harland, author of The Month of the Leopard

In August 2001, the Bookworms held a weekend meet in Derbyshire and were privileged to be visited by author James Harland to discuss his new novel, The Month of the Leopard. James’s real name is Matthew Lynn. This is a resumé of the discussion that ensued.

Background

Matthew Lynn started his career in finance and now combines writing novels with financial journalism. His first publications were non-fiction and through that earlier writing he acquired an agent, making it much easier to get a publishing deal for his first two novels. These were published under his own name and are called Insecurity and The Watchmen. Having changed publisher, he now writes under the name of James Harland.

The Month of the Leopard

This novel contains a very hard-hitting prologue which can be found (along with the first 2 chapters) on the writer’s website – www.jamesharland.com We were concerned at what sort of mind would conjure up such grisly methods of torture but were assured that the methods used were not made up. Fortunately the rest of the novel is far less graphic but the prologue is essential for the plot. The novel is a financial thriller set in London, Paris and Estonia and combines mystery and intrigue with a cleverly crafted plot that keeps you guessing right to the end. Tom is a banker, married to Estonian Tatyana, We asked Matthew how he researched his book and he confessed that much of the information was freely available on the web. For example, the cold weather information was mainly gleaned from the US Army Cold Weather Warfare website! He did visit Estonia for further research and his financial background was the source of that aspect of the novel, and indeed his own knowledge was one of the reasons he wrote this book. As he says on his website:

‘The inspiration for The Month of the Leopard came from a variety of different sources. I started taking notice of hedge funds after George Soros forced the pound out of the European exchange rate mechanism in 1992; that seemed to me to be a lot of power to put in the hands of one eccentric individual. I became more interested after an American fund called Long Term Capital Management crashed in 1998 with debts of one trillion dollars: for a few weeks that fund seemed capable of plunging the world into the kind of recession it hasn't seen since the 1930s. I was fascinated by all the money that leaked out of the Soviet Union before that regime collapsed. Two years ago, reports surfaced of Red Army accounts in the Channel Islands: it seemed likely to me that what had been made public was probably just the tip of a very large iceberg.’

Matthew also confessed to having been requested to cut some of the information he had included in the book - for example, there is a scene in which a smoke bomb is assembled. Apparently, there was too much information given and the detail had to be reduced in the interests of public safety! Matthew told us he was intrigued by the way in which people keep secrets from each other - a major theme of the novel.

We were interested in the fact that there were several options for the Epilogue, and why Matthew did in fact choose to include it rather than leaving the reader in the air. He said that he wanted to complete the novel properly and that not to let the reader know the ultimate outcome of the marriage between Tom & Tatyana would be cheating. Which is very nice of him – too many books leave you stranded, and I am never quite sure if it’s a cop-out or the writer really believes we should make up our own minds.

Bookworms also wanted to know if any of the characters were based on real people and Matthew said no, but he did want to make his characters believable – e.g. Tom is known to have attended a gym, making the fitness his character displays later on in the book much more likely. He makes his minor characters more memorable by giving them distinctive characteristics. e.g. Vereden is a very heavy smoker which is emphasised in his scenes.

One of the difficulties in writing a book such as this is knowing how much information to put in and when to do so. Matthew said that you can include quite a few clues in the beginning because the reader will forget many of them but later will start relating subsequent events to the clues given earlier on.

Writing Routines

We asked Matthew about how he goes about his writing and were surprised to find that whilst he is writing one story, he is already plotting the next one. He is currently writing a book called The Bonus, which is about two brothers and sounds intriguing. Again he is using secrets as one of his themes. He writes about 1000 words a day but doesn’t read his work as he goes along, preferring to review it all once finished. He said that his editor cuts about 10% of the writing.

We asked if Matthew seeks the opinion of friends and family when writing. He said that writing is such a personal thing that he doesn’t do that but does test out plotlines on friends to gauge the interest in an idea.

When asked which thriller writers he likes, Matthew said John Buchan, Ian Fleming, Frederic Forsyth & Gerald Seymour. However, when writing a thriller, he prefers to read something completely different, such as Anthony Trollope and you can’t get much more different than that.

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