Five Minutes With....Douglas Lindsay
Added on 31 December 2008
Q: What’s been the best part of this year?
A: I discovered these really great doughnuts.
Q: Doughnuts?
A: Yeah. I’d like to say that I found them in this quiet little patisserie down a side street in a sleepy quarter of Warsaw, that would be far more romantic. In fact you get them in the Orlen chain of petrol stations in the city. But these are perfect doughnuts. Soft, fresh, delicious, not too sweet, a light dusting of sugar on the top. And a hole in the middle. The perfect doughnut.
Q: I actually meant, what’s been the best part of work this year? I think that’s what the millions of readers who look at your site every day are interested in.
A: Oh. Well, sometimes I eat the doughnuts while I’m working.
Q: OK, so what was the most exciting work thing that you’ve done this year?
A: That would probably be having lunch with Johnny Depp and Robert De Niro to discuss working together on a remake of Pulp Fiction. You know, to try to give it a more contemporary edge.
Q: Holy cow! Is that going to happen?
A: Nah. We all thought it was stupid.
Q: So, can you tell us a bit about what you have planned for next year? I think everyone’s excited about the next Barney Thomson novel.
A: Sure, there’s a lot of media interest in that. I’m already booked into this hectic media tour. Sydney, New York, Tokyo, Moscow, Delhi, it’s going to be pretty exhausting.
Q: But you haven’t finished writing it yet?
A: No, that’s a good point. I need to crack on with it, but in purely writing terms, it’s almost finished. Then I need to get the rest of the novels ready for re-release so that we can relaunch the whole series at the same time as the new novel.
Q: Sounds like a lot of work.
A: It’s going to take a lot of doughnuts.
Q: How about writing the blog? It’s already won four different awards, including the New York Times Best Blog By A Comic Crime Novelist Living In Warsaw And Writing In English, but it must interfere with the work on the novels.
A: I’m afraid so. The blog’s going to be a bit different in the New Year. A little less blogging, a bit more rehashing of old stuff. I need to concentrate on Barney for a while, get him wrapped up. The blog might suffer, but I’ll reprint some old stuff from the early days, which a lot of people might not have seen.
Q: Back from the days when you used to be funny?
A: Exactly.
Q: Cool. Any hints on what’s going to happen to Barney in this latest novel? There are rumours all over the net that he’s going to find romance. Some people are seeing that as a betrayal of everything your books stand for. Black humour, bloody murder, and no kissing...
A: At some stage the character just takes over his own actions. If Barney finds romance it’s because he wants to, not because I want him to.
Q: Uh-oh.