What has been your favourite and least favourite job in the past
My least favourite job was the few years I spent as a partner at a large commercial law firm. I like to be fully involved in everything I do. Having enjoyed many years as an in-house lawyer, engaged in all aspects of the company’s business, to find myself confined to being a legal technician, subject to the whims of clients, was most unsatisfying!
When I left the law and the financial services world, I decided to do something different. So I started a small craft brewery. Over the next eighteen years, the business grew into a sizable operation and, once again, I found myself behind a desk running a company. For the first five years, I was in the brewhouse, brewing the beer, attending to fermentations, filling casks, doing deliveries – I’ve never been happier! Well, until I discovered writing, that is!
Who was your favourite childhood author
I read widely as a child and, once I’d grown out of Enid Blyton and Biggles books, the Swallows and Amazons series by Arthur Ransome stands out in my memory. Written in the 1930s (and read by me in the late 1960s), they were very much books of their time and their attitudes to class, gender and colonial language would sit uncomfortably today. However, the spirit of independence and adventure captured in the series prompted me to take up walking and camping in the Lake District, which I still do to this day. Sadly, I still haven’t taken a small sailboat out on Coniston Water and had a real adventure on Wild Cat Island!
What is the last book you read and really enjoyed
There are so many books to read. Books you should read; books you fancy reading, books that need rereading, books you simply have to read etc, etc, so I confess, I am late to the party in reading William Boyd. His latest, Gabriel’s Moon, is a hilariously mischievous espionage novel set against the backdrop of the Cold War. I am currently reading Any Human Heart, where Boyd charts the course of his main character’s ‘Human Heart’ on its darkly humorous trip through the 20th century.
Like Willian Boyd, I use humour in my own writing to change the pace or lighten the load for the reader. For similar reasons, I also love Abir Mukherjee’s Wyndham and Banerjee series, set in Raj-era India. The racial tensions, the economic exploitation, and the nascent Indian independence movement are all given due prominence and contribute to the fabric of the series, but the humour and plotlines make for excellent, highly readable historical crime novels. I can’t pick just one – read the series!
Describe your working style regarding the craft and the process
With the Inspector George Zammit series, I would describe myself as more of a ‘pantser’ (from the phrase “flying by the seat of your pants”), than a planner, or a plotter.
I usually start with two or three unrelated threads, involving different sets of characters, then develop their storylines in such a way that they all collide towards the end of the book. The storylines (often inspired by some newspaper headline in Malta, or an article about what is happening in the Southern Mediterranean).
The imagining and design of the characters comes fairly easily to me and is the aspect of writing I most enjoy. As many writers say, books often get hijacked by strong characters, and it gets to the point where they seem to dictate events, with the poor writer merely there to record them!
The journey to get all the characters to the point of collision, keeping a steady pace within each thread, is trickier!
With my longer saga (first draft, a meaty 170,000 words, compared to the crime books that are 110,000 words!) that covers the years 1935 to 1950, with many more characters that I work with in the crime series, I did use a planning software package, Plottr. This keeps track of the story and allows me to edit and manipulate timelines. It also allows me to create thumbnails of the characters, with photos, that act as post-it notes, to remind me of who knows who, and who said what, when. I believe a package called Scrivener also has similar functionality.
In terms of the working day, I write in the mornings, usually from 08:30 till 12:30. Life then interferes until about 17:00, when I’ll edit what I wrote in the mornings. When doing major revisions or rewrites, I find this is best done in the mornings, as I get noticeably more lazy in the afternoons!
What is the place that means the most to you
I was born in Liverpool, brought up in Singapore (Dad was a lecturer in marine engineering), and then returned to Sunderland, just in time to face the 11-plus. I went to University in Newcastle, then to Leeds to do my solicitors’ exams. I stayed in West Yorkshire for nearly forty years, until moving to Malta ten years ago. So, it’s a tough question. However, I am well into writing a family saga, set in the North East of England during the period 1935 to 1950. My mind is full of recollections of the North East of England – it’s rivers, coastline and grim industrial heritage. My family was heavily involved in the shipbuilding industry and my secondary school was in the heart of the Durham coalfield. I only lived in Sunderland for ten years or so, but it was a formative time for me. After researching the city and environs on foot and bicycle, and rediscovering the local landscape, I realise it still holds a special place in my affections.
What inspired you to write the Inspector George Zammit series
With all due respect to the fine crime writers out there, I do feel the crime genre is sometimes at risk of becoming a path well-trodden. On moving to Malta, I took inspiration from the local newspaper headlines, which told of a different world from the one I had left in the UK. Every day, there were stories of international oil smuggling, money laundering, political corruption in the highest echelons of government and tales of violent Libyan militia and the gangs at the centre of the migrant crisis.
This rich vein of material inspired me to create the master of survival, the hapless Maltese inspector, George Zammit. George is a reluctant hero who always finds himself tested in situations not of his own making. He is a well-meaning family man whose moral compass can sometimes struggle to find true north. The series is set in the Southern Mediterranean, which allows me to place George in exotic locations, be it the Libyan deserts, the volcanic environs of Mount Etna, magical Istanbul, chaotic ISIS-ridden north-west of Syria, as well as his home, the crowded, historic Island of Malta.
In short, the geopolitics of the southern Mediterranean, the criminality that seems to flow between the cracks of flawed and corrupt governance, and my love of the island of Malta and its people, all acted as my inspiration to write the series.
How do you hope readers will connect with George and other characters in your stories
Inspector George Zammit is an everyman. He is a family man. He has his foibles. He usually has a half-eaten pastizzi in his pocket, in case of emergency hunger pains. He hates paperwork and takes a nap after lunch. He will always choose the path of least resistance. He is kind and scares easily. However, fate often conspires to place George in harm’s way and, somehow, he manages to survive, only to find himself in an even worse situation in the next book in the series. How could you not Identify with George?
In the Inspector George Zammit series, good people do bad things, and vice versa. My favourite characters are those antagonists who are capable of awful deeds, but nevertheless have sufficient redeeming features, or are funny enough, that the reader will find themselves rooting for them, no matter what!
What are you currently working on, what are the challenges you’re facing and how are you solving them
I’m currently on a bit of a break from writing about Detective George Zammit, Malta and the Southern Mediterranean. In a change of genre, I have written a mystery series, set in Ilkley, West Yorkshire, the first volume of which I hope to have published before the end of the year. The second volume is in the final stages of the editorial process. In addition, I have a first draft of the historical family saga set in the North East of England. This is a big book – possibly too big! But the editors have yet to get their hands on it!
I have written the Inspector George Zammit books under the pen-name, AJ Aberford and developed a social media presence using that name. Now I am writing books of a very different kind, the pen-name AJ Aberford doesn’t really work, as readers might be expecting more Maltese detective stories, so I have to find a way of not misleading readers, yet preserving all the work that has gone into building my social media profile! The conclusion is to tweak the AJ Aberford name to something similar, yet different enough to put a reader on notice that they should expect something different. At the moment, that name is Anthony Aberford.