Creating a cop called Costa

Published on August 26, 2007

The novelist is having a hard time believing that he has a sizeable following here.

Manote Tripathi

The Nation

Back in Bangkok for the first time in 28 years, David Hewson can't help but be amazed - not by Bangkok's loss of some of its exoticness as the complimentary bowl of fruit in his Dusit Thani hotel room.

"The taste of the mangosteen in the UK isn't right - it's absolutely nice here," he pronounces.

The same might be said of the flavour of Hewson's crime fiction. His publisher, Macmillan, has advised him that Bangkok is part of the growing Asian market for international crime thrillers.

The novelist is having a hard time believing that he has a sizeable following here, but he's here to promote his latest book, "The Promised Land", along with "The Seventh Sacrament", the fifth in his Romebased Nic Costa series.

"I do a book tour every two or three years," he says. "This time the AsiaPacific tour includes Bangkok, Hong Kong, New Zealand and Australia."

Book tours, he adds, are something "you have to do, really", but, "I don't like the idea of writers being solitary and locked in the closet. I love hanging out with other writers and meeting the public."

Hewson, bespectacled and with somewhat unkempt hair, looks more like a professor than a novelist. In fact he was a journalist, at the Times in London. His books sell so well that Macmillan contracted him for nine instalments of the Nic Costa series. "The Promised Land" is his 12th novel outside the series.

The author, 53, admits to a dysfunctional childhood.

"I grew up in a children's home that was run by my parents in a remote part of Yorkshire - the last place any kid would want to grow up. It's cold and bleak. For half the year the children's home was completely empty, so I spent most of my time in the library, reading old books about Roman and American history.

"From an early age I liked to tell stories," he says, but he left school at age 17 because there was no money for college. He found work as a reporter at a small newspaper.

After eight years he joined the Times, covering the arts as well as general news and business, then helped launch the Independent and later wrote a weekly column for the Sunday Times. A fulltime career in literature finally pulled him off the beat.

A creation born of Hewson's boyhood reading about Rome, Detective Nic Costa has led an ensemble of police officers in the Italian capital since "A Season for the Dead". He is no stereotype.

Costa is a young, fit, idealistic and naive vegetarian who loves Caravaggio as much as justice.

When he wrote the first novel, Hewson says, "most crime series were focused around very predictable male characters - middleaged, fat, melancholy, alcoholic, divorced, having a terrible time, hanging around the bar all the time, got one leg or something like that. I really didn't want to do something like that.

"He's nothing like any reallife policemen, who are deadly boring."

And yet there are cops in Rome he knows who insist he's based the character on a specific officer in the questura - at headquarters. Hewson is adamant that they're wrong - and meanwhile genuinely pleased that many thousands of Italians enjoy his series, because they have a lot of respect for their police.

And Nic Costa is a respectable cop.

Hewson used to live in Rome. He lives in Kent in southern England now, but Rome remains his favourite city, where "stories seep out of the stones". On visits to soak up more inspiration for the series, he loves exploring the churches and the classical buildings like the Pantheon and the Museum of the Souls of Purgatory.

He attends language school and hangs out in a cafe, befriending the locals.

"I don't tell them who I am. Once things become formal, it's a nightmare. I meet people through friends, but my background as a journalist helps a lot."

The sidebar to Hewson's success is that it helps bury the axiom that you have to write about only what you know.

"I can't stand setting my stories in London," he says, pointing out, as well, that Shakespeare utilised dozens of foreign settings.

"If you write only about what you know you tend to be lazy, you tend to see it through the same eyes you've always seen it through. You won't have an awful lot of resonance or dimension."

In the Costa series, of course, he isn't writing blindly.

"For Rome, I have to move there, have to study the language. I have to build Rome in my head first in order to write about it. Because fiction is unreal, imagination has to work so hard at the reality of it, which is more vivid. Fiction is about lying very, very well so that people think it's the truth."

Hewson has no compunction about being "a big liar" because he based his early works ("flashy international thrillers", he calls them) entirely on hard facts, and they flopped.

"Over the years I had to cut myself off from my journalistic roots - the desire to be accurate, to tell the truth. Fiction is fiction, absolute the opposite. So I tried to kill the journalist within me."

This is not to say he distorts established facts. In the Costa series there's no nonsense about actual Roman buildings. "I try to keep the geography absolutely correct."

It's in maintaining a high level of reality that the secret of the modern thriller's success lies, Hewson says. James Bond and Superman just won't do anymore.

"Thrillers are increasingly catching people's imagination because we are living in an increasingly dangerous world. These books are very real, since they deal with the ordinary people, and with situations the readers can empathise with."