30729: Hermantin(News) Former home inspires a gritty debut (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: leonie hermantin <lhermantin@hotmail.com>


Posted on Tue, Jul. 10, 2007
Former home inspires a gritty debut
BY ELLEN KANNER

Nick Stone spent his early childhood in Haiti, his mother's homeland, and his teens in a boxing ring. No surprise, then, that the British author has made his literary debut with Mr. Clarinet (HarperCollins, $24.99), a hard-hitting thriller set in Haiti.

The novel opens in Miami, ''my favorite place on earth,'' says London-based Stone, and it introduces the world to Max Mingus, ex-cop, private investigator, just widowed, just out of jail (manslaughter).

With a dark past behind him and an uncertain future ahead, Max takes a case involving a missing child. ''Ten million dollars if he performed a miracle and brought the boy back alive, five million dollars if he came back with just the body and another five million if he dragged the killers in with it.'' The catch? The search will take him to Cite Soleil, Haiti's most notorious slum, and Max isn't the first detective hired for the job. Things ended badly for the others.
Stone, 41, captures South Florida from Little Havana to South Beach, even a Radisson Hotel on Kendall, but saves his most vivid, feverish writing for Haiti, which even from the air exudes ruin and menace, resembling ''a lobster's pincer with most of the top claw chewed off. . .'' As he goes deeper into the devastated country, Max realizes, ``This may not have a happy ending.''

Released in the UK last year, Mr. Clarinet has received the Crime Writers Association's Steel Dagger Award and nominations for best first novel from the International Thriller Writers Association and Mystery Readers International (''Presentation being done in Alaska and the prize is a wooden cat,'' says a bemused Stone).

Named by UK bookseller Waterstone's as one of the 25 Authors of the Future, Stone has a new book out in England, King of Swords, the prequel to Mr. Clarinet. He wrote the ending ''on the beach in Miami, soused on mojitos.'' He's toying with the idea of relocating to his favorite place on earth. Until then, he'll keep writing about Miami.
''You do crimes in Technocolor,'' says Stone with admiration. ``It's like nowhere else.''

Q: How do you account for your criminal mind?
A: I've always read detective fiction, from the youngest age, too, starting with Dickens. He really understood the criminal mind. Oliver Twist is one of the first things I read. My father [historian Norman Stone] is an academic, and I got pushed in that direction, but a lot of my friends didn't have the opportunities I had. They drifted on the wild side. I encountered that a lot when I was boxing as a teenager. You meet people just about saved from the abyss by boxing. Their insight into life was very different than mine. They rejected education; they looked to get rich quick. I was grateful I never had to go down that path and make those decisions, but as a writer, you've got to project, to put yourself in other people's positions.

Q: Was your father a literary influence?
A: Huge. My dad's read everything -- fiction, French translations, real classic stuff. When I was four, he read me The Count of Monte Cristo as a kind of bedtime story. He had this most amazing broad taste in books. He read a lot of James Bond and this guy called Desmond Bagley, a thriller writer of the '60s and '70s.
I'd sit at his feet in his study when he was working. He'd have a mug of tea on the table, and this fringe which would go up and down and remind me of Jerry Lee Lewis. ''Great Balls of Fire. Wow, my dad is writing.'' He taught me to read and write and gave me my first typewriter when I was five. I always wanted to write, to be like him.

Q: What does he think of your work?
A: He really likes Mr. Clarinet. He did say the first 80 pages were a bit slow-going. I said, ''Dad, you have to understand where the characters are coming from.'' He is proud of it, though.

Q: What do you and Max have in common?
A: I started to write Mr. Clarinet in a time of great uncertainty. I'd left this horrendous job, had next to no money. I was doing part-time jobs and stuff, but I channeled a lot of that fear and angst about the future into Max's experience. He gets out of prison and has nothing to go to. I could understand his desperation, why he takes on this job. His kind of dark aggression comes from me. It comes from boxing. You're sizing people up. Max's whole bewildered feeling when he was in Haiti, that was very much me, too. I tried to mirror his inner devastation with the devastation of this country that was once a proud country and had fallen into ruin and anarchy.

Q: What was it like going back there?
A: When I went in '96, I hadn't been there in 14 years. The country was absolutely horrible, roads like lunar landscapes, and this is 10 years ago. It was heartbreaking, like you have this really dear friend, someone you always looked to, and they've become some broken-down crack-addicted wreck.

Q: How is writing like boxing?
A: They're both things you do on your own. They require self-discipline. You've got to train, to do the roadwork to box. And writing you do on your own, as well. Or maybe there are pathologies there I'm unaware of.

Ellen Kanner is a writer in Miami.


© 2007 Miami Herald Media Company. All Rights Reserved.http://www.miamiherald.com
_________________________________________________________________
Missed the show?  Watch videos of the Live Earth Concert on MSN.
http://liveearth.msn.com