30723: Hermantin(News)Novelist Nick Stone based his acclaimed Mr. Clarinet in Miami and the subtropics (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: leonie hermantin <lhermantin@hotmail.com>


Novelist Nick Stone based his acclaimed Mr. Clarinet in Miami and the 
subtropics

BY CHAUNCEY MABEBooks EditorJuly 9, 2007
Nick Stone is just your average Scots-Haitian-Jewish-Catholic crime writer who 
lives in London and sets his novels in Miami and the Caribbean."On a day-to-day 
basis I'm comfortable in my skin," says Stone by phone from his home in 
Battersea, south London. "The opposites balance out nicely. I'm more conscious 
of it in Miami. There aren't many Haitians in the U.K."Stone is the author of a 
first novel, Mr. Clarinet, which made quite a splash when it was published in 
Great Britain, where it earned rave reviews from established writers such as 
Tibor Fischer, and won the Ian Fleming Silver Dagger Award for best thriller of 
2006.The book is now published in the United States, likewise to positive early 
notice, where it has been nominated as best first novel by the International 
Thriller Writers, awarded later this month, and for a Macavity Award, which 
will be announced at the Bouchercon in October.And Stone is about to come to 
South Florida with his wife, Hyacinth, for a modest book tour."The Haitians in 
Miami ask where I'm from and when I answer Britain, they say, 'Damn, how'd your 
boat get that lost?'" Stone says. "They have this great humor, which is one of 
the reasons I love Miami so well. That huge Haitian community where I can speak 
Creole, and like me, they're all exiles."Mr. Clarinet is in part a product of 
Stone's love of all things American. Set in Miami and Haiti, it features Max 
Mingus, a former Miami cop and private investigator just out of prison for the 
cold-blooded murder of three child molesters. He takes a near-suicide 
assignment to go to Haiti to retrieve the missing child of a wealthy white 
Haitian family.Stone, 41, says he'd always wanted to write a book starring a 
character named "Max Mingus" — Max for the old friend who turned him on to 
Kafka, and Mingus after his first jazz hero, Charles Mingus."I got the idea for 
this book when I was last in Haiti," Stone says. "I returned to Port-au-Prince 
for a marketing job at a now-defunct local bank. I lasted a little more than a 
year. The place was a disaster zone, lawless, run by criminals repatriated from 
U.S. prisons after 1994."On the day of the phone interview, it was raining 
heavily in Battersea, but for Stone, the downpour had an upside."Where I live 
these crack-dealing kids congregate under my window and in between deals they 
play loops and rap over it while I'm trying to write," he says."There's nothing 
worse than British hip-hop anyway. The rain, at least, clears them off." After 
a pause, Stone bursts into infectious laughter before adding: "My wife won't 
like it if that appears in print. Don't tell people we live in a dodgy area. 
This place is for sale. The neighbors are wonderful, no shootings or stabbings 
ever happen here."More soberly, Stone talks about the way crime in Britain is 
becoming "Americanized," with more guns as hip-hop culture, and its 
glorification of criminality, dominates British youth. Most of the gun crime, 
he adds, is black-on-black.Given the existence of gritty real-life crime in the 
good ol' U.K., why has Stone elected to write American crime fiction? It's a 
question he's often heard."I could either do something really cynical, and 
write a crime novel set in London, which quite a lot of people do," Stone says, 
"or I can go back to the source and relocate it where noir fiction began."Stone 
is the son of a Scottish father and a Haitian mother. His father is the notable 
historian Norman Stone, while his mother is a member of the Aubrey family, one 
of Haiti's oldest, and once one of its most influential. His parents met in a 
library in Vienna, where both had gone to study.The couple divorced after 12 
years, having produced Nick and his brother. "The break-up was just normal 
relationship stuff," Stone says. "It had nothing to do with their origins. My 
dad hasn't got a racist bone in his body."Stone's Jewish lineage comes by way 
of his Scottish grandfather, also named Norman, an RAF ace who died when his 
plane was shot down in WW II.The Catholic part comes from Stone's Haitian 
family. Haitians, he says, are "90 percent Catholic and 100 percent Vodou. "I 
don't practice Vodou, but I do have a Vodou icon, because it looks like my 
wife."Although born and schooled in Britain, Stone spent substantial time as a 
child in Haiti, including the first four years of his life, when his parents 
had no money to support him. He returned again when his parents split. It was 
in Haiti, where his mother's family owned a movie theater, that he first fell 
in love with American depictions of crime."I saw Sam Peckinpah's The Getaway, 
my first exposure to hard-core noir," Stone says. "My dad took me to see 
Superfly six months later."The pulp power of those movies influenced Stone's 
reading, first with Dashiell Hammett's classic The Maltese Falcon. Soon he 
discovered Ed McBain, and by age 10 had read all his books. But it took longer 
to figure out he wanted to write crime fiction, too.While working for a 
publishing company, he discovered James Ellroy's Black Dahlia.Ellroy, whose 
characters share light and dark traits, altered Stone's view of storytelling. 
"My idea had been very Manichean, good guys vs. bad guys," Stone says. "Ellroy 
showed me a way forward. I couldn't write literary fiction anyway."Another 
influence was the Washington, D.C.-based crime novelist George Pelecanos, who, 
he says, showed the neophyte writer how to construct dialogue.Still, while 
Stone wrote off and on, he remained trapped in a series of jobs he hated. He 
had a rough draft of the first third of the book when he met Hyacinth, a 
British citizen of Jamaican descent, and once he got the courage to show it to 
her, she loved it. What's more, she encouraged him to quit his final job, as a 
corporate headhunter, and write full time."She told me I was born to write, and 
she offered to support me," Stone says. "She said if she hadn't read the book, 
she would have told me to get another job."Chauncey Mabe can be reached at 
cmabe@sun-sentinel.com or 954-356-4886.
Copyright © 2007, South Florida Sun-Sentinel














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