Meet Lenny Bartulin, crime author

If you’re interested in writing, and you’re here on our blog, you are probably well aware of Faber Academy at Allen & Unwin, which launched in March this year with ‘Writing a Novel’, a six-month course taught by James Bradley (The Resurrectionist, Wrack) and Kathryn Heyman (Captain Starlight’s Apprentice, The Accomplice). Other courses have been directed by or featured lectures from authors such as Vogel Award-winner Hsu-Ming Teo (Love and Vertigo, Behind the Moon), Sophie Cunningham (Geography) and Andy Griffiths (The Day My Bum Went Psycho, The Bad Book).

In other words, Faber Academy is HAPPENING!

A recent addition to the program is the six week course Armed and Dangerous: The craft of crime fiction. Aimed at writers who need help in establishing the early bearings of a story idea, as well as those who have begun a novel but have stalled, this course offers the chance to work with two established Australian crime authors.

Course director and crime author Lenny Bartulin kindly agreed to answer some of our questions about reading and writing crime.

What was the first crime novel or story you can remember reading? How old were you?

It was The Mystery of the Flaming Footprints, from a series called ‘Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators’. Brilliant stuff. I was about 9 years old.

Name a crime book, a crime movie and/or a crime TV series you’d be happy to be stranded with upon a desert island. Why are they worth re-reading and re-watching?

The crime book would probably be To Each His Own by Leonardo Sciascia, a near perfect novel, brimming with eloquence and subtlety and class, all within 150 pages. The crime movie would be Get Carter (based on the equally fantastic novel Jack’s Return Home by Ted Lewis)… This film just gets better each time I watch it. The bleakness of working-class Newcastle, the violence and corruption as black as the coalmine soot that seems to stain even the rain, and all of it is just so poetically folded into a tight and riveting story. And it’s Michael Caine at his absolute best, too. For a crime TV series, I’m going to by-pass The Wire (which is superb) and go for The Professionals. Seriously politically incorrect, with dubious storylines and inconsistent scripts, plus some average acting in the early episodes – but more fun than anything I’ve ever watched on the box. It’s in the Guinness Book of Records for more tyre squeals and car thrashing per episode than any other TV series ever made in the history of modern television. (Or should be, if such a category existed.)

The Professionals go for a round of 'shoot-shoot golf'

When did you realise you wanted to be a writer? Are there any authors in particular who you would cite as inspiration/influence?

About halfway through university I developed a serious allergy to academic essay writing and found that writing fiction was the only antidote to a complete state of manic depression. Early influences were Henry Miller and Samuel Beckett. I also loved the poets Elizabeth Bishop, Dante and Walt Whitman. Nothing really clicked fundamentally, however, until Raymond Chandler blew the doors open on American noir and pulp. More recently, I’d have to add Richard Stark and Elmore Leonard, too.

Tell us when, and where, you do your writing?

The core of my writing day is 4.00 am until about 7.00 am. Then another session from 10.00 am until lunch time. In the past, all done at the kitchen table (still one of my favourite spots) but I’m blessed with an office now (which has a door that my 4 year old has to knock on before bursting in…)

If you could meet any historical or real-life person, who would you choose?

Toss up between Charles Darwin (pre Origins, rather the younger man around the time of Voyage of the Beagle) and Charlie Watts of the Rolling Stones.

To err is human, to arr is pirate

If you could meet any fictional character, who would you choose?

Long John Silver from Treasure Island.

You have just been given the green light to develop a movie based on your book. Who would you cast and/or who would you hire to direct?

To play Jack Susko, I’d love Eric Bana…and to direct, anybody with a minimum budget of ten million dollars…

What are your thoughts on ‘genre’ writing vs. ‘literary’ writing: are they mutually exclusive? If a book is a story about crime, can it also be literature – or does crime writing have to work twice as hard to be considered half as worthy?

The distinction is a modern development…and because of the obsession with categorising books (in part the influence of bookshops and universities) I think ‘literary’ has become a genre itself, and much to its detriment. From my point of view as an author, it’s really just about what is a good story. I’ll read anything to find one: and so should you! Literature really only has one main requirement – that it moves the reader. Great literature does it deeply, and bad literature doesn’t do it at all.

What is one piece of advice you wish you had been given before you wrote your first novel?

Write it again.

And finally, please tell us about your next book and/or what you are working on now?

It’s an historical novel set in Van Diemen’s Land in the early 1800’s. No other information is available at this point due to the Commonwealth Secrets Act.

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Lenny Bartulin is the author of A Deadly Business (published in the US as Death by the Book) and The Black Russian, which was shortlisted for the 2010 Ned Kelly Award for Best Fiction. He has published poetry, short stories and reviews in numerous publications. In 2009, he presented the book review pay-TV show Bookstop on the Ovation Channel. He has taught writing workshops at the NSW Writers’ Centre and presented talks on writing at literary festivals and schools. His latest novel, De Luxe, is the third book in the Jack Susko mystery series.