A Short Q&A Interview with Dexter Author and Creator Jeff Lindsay, Beginning His UK Blog Tour!

Photo Copyright © Ed Miller

Please excuse the hyperbole in the title of this post, but as trailed on Friday with a review of Dexter is Delicious, today I've got a rather exciting Existential Ennui exclusive for you: a Q&A interview with author Jeff Lindsay, creator of the hugely successful series of crime novels starring serial killer Dexter Morgan (which, of course, begat the equally hugely successful TV show)! The interview was arranged by Jeff's British publisher, Orion, to mark the UK publication in paperback this week of the aforementioned fifth Dexter novel, Dexter is Delicious, and is the first stop on a short UK blog tour for Mr. Lindsay to promote the book. Jeff will next be popping up on Blogomatic 3000 on Tuesday with a guest post, then Another Cookie Crumbles will have an extract from Dexter is Delicious on Wednesday, and finally on Thursday Shots will be hosting a competition to win lots of splendid Dexter swag. So make sure you swing by those fine blogs later this week!

I mentioned in the previous post that one or two of the questions I sent to Jeff got a bit garbled somewhere along the line, so, contrary sod that I am, I'm reproducing the worst culprit exactly as Jeff received it, as both the question and Jeff's response make for amusing reading. The interview isn't particularly extensive (certainly not as lengthy as my recent interview with spy fiction author Anthony Price) as I was slightly restricted in the number of questions I could throw Jeff's way (which is why some of them are longer than Jeff's answers). But even so, the results are reasonably revealing on a number of issues to do with Dexter is Delicious. So, without further ado, let's get to it!

. . . . .

NICK JONES: Jeff, thank you for taking the time to answer my, as it turns out, somewhat prolix questions. Dexter, it seems to me, fits into a long and dishonourable line of especially villainous antiheroes, often sociopaths or without conscience, and yet still compelling or even sympathetic – the likes of Tom Ripley, Parker from the Richard Stark novels, Hannibal Lecter, even. Are these characters you're familiar with or think could be antecedents of Dexter? And what is it about such characters that readers find appealing? (And when I say "readers", I mostly mean me.)

JEFF LINDSAY: You're right, very prolix. People think I am being cute when I say this, but I don't know any of these characters, except Hannibal Lecter. Saw the movie, and then read the book. Everyone tells me there's a genre, but – I mean, really. Serial killer genre? What's wrong with people? I really don't know why Dexter is appealing – it surprised the hell out of me. 

Dexter is Delicious marks the return of Dexter's brother, Brian, last seen at the end of the first book, Darkly Dreaming Dexter (2004), and it seems as if Brian's sticking around. Why did you decide to bring him back? Or was that always the plan. Or indeed, is there a plan with the novels?

There is no long term plan. There's usually not even a plan for the next chapter. I really admire P. G. Wodehouse, and he used to have incredibly detailed plots, all planned out. And I know other writers who can casually say, "Oh, yeah, eighteen books from now, when they get married . . ." I wish I could do that. But if you saw my office you'd understand. Sometimes I can't even find the desk. At the moment, I think Brian will be around for a while, unless a piano falls on his head. 

Obviously the novels and the TV show are different beasts, but there are parallels between the two, particularly in Dexter is Delicious, where, as in Season Four of the show, Dexter has a new baby, which in turn leads to him to question his impulses, his Dark Passenger. Do you think your novels and the television series still intersect or feed off each other? Do ideas flow back and forth between them?

I am not caught up on the show, so from my end, no. I can't imagine taking ideas from them. I do sometimes notice bits on the screen that are in the books, but maybe it's a coincidence. 

One of the themes of Dexter is Delicious is cannibalism, possibly drawing on the infamous 2003 court case in Germany where the victim volunteered to be eaten. Was that an inspiration, and why did you alight on cannibalism as a plot element?

I remember the case, but it wasn't consciously an inspiration. I don't know what got me thinking about cannibalism; maybe I was just hungry one day and there was nothing in the fridge. . . . Anyway, I got interested, did some research. And I found that a very large percentage of the Cannibal Community – yes, there really is one; worse than serial killer genre, huh? – a surprising number of people really want to be eaten. Desperately. They go to the chat rooms and beg. I was appalled and fascinated at the same time, and I just went with it. 

[Here's where the formatting on my questions started to go slightly awry – this one is the worst of the bunch, so I'm reproducing it exactly as Jeff received it.] There  a scene in the novel where a victim  father offers Deborah [Dexter's cop sister] half a million dollars if she l tip him off to the perpetrator when she catches him, and her fellow officers subsequently reveal they e been offered similar bribes in the past. That was quite a surprising moment for me, chiefly because it felt quite  eal  as if it was something actual cops had told you about. Was it? Do you get assistance from police officers in your research for your books?

Ooh, our grammar is really slipping here – is it happy hour where you are? I'll have a pint of Guinness, please. . . . .

Yeah, a lot of cops have similar stories. My favorite was from an undercover DEA guy I know. This guy is the most rigidly moral man I ever met, and I asked him if he was ever tempted by the huge piles of cash he saw every day. He stared at me really hard, and then he said, "I made up my mind Day One. If I ever find seven million dollars in cash. . . . I call the wife and say, meet me at the airport, we're outta here." He paused a long time and then said, "I found six once, had to think about it. . . ."

The city of Miami is almost a character itself in the Dexter books; I've been there a couple of times and the constant references to the heat and the traffic strike me as both accurate and intrinsic to the novels. What is it about Miami that works for you as a setting for Dexter's adventures? Could he work anywhere else?

Miami is where I grew up, and where I learned to drive. Home town. I don't know, where else would I put it? Pittsburgh? Isle of Wight? Dexter is my Homey, we ain't going nowhere. 

Thanks again for taking the time to respond, Jeff.

Cheers, Mate.

. . . . .

And there you have it. I don't know about you, but I definitely think there's legs in "Dexter Does the Isle of Wight". Don't forget to check in on Blogomatic 3000 tomorrow for Jeff's guest post, Another Cookie Crumbles on Wednesday for that Dexter is Delicious extract, and Shots on Thursday for the competition. (And look out for the next Dexter novel, Double Dexter, in October.) And I'll be back before too long with another Violent World of Parker cross-post (on Joe Gores's Dead Skip) and some more signed editions.

News of An Exclusive Interview with Dexter Creator Jeff Lindsay, and a Review of Dexter is Delicious (Orion, 2010 / 2011)

Well if you read the previous post (on Anthony Price's Tomorrow's Ghost), you might have already guessed the identity of the author I hinted about having an exclusive interview with (following my recent two-part chin-wag with the aforementioned Mr. Price). It is, of course, Jeff Lindsay, creator of the massively successful series of novels starring sardonic serial killer Dexter Morgan – and by extension of the equally massively successful spin-off TV show. The interview took the form of a short Q&A, with my questions kindly ferried to Mr. Lindsay – in the process becoming rather garbled, which makes for amusing reading – by the ever-helpful folk at his British publisher, Orion, and was arranged to mark the publication in paperback next week of his fifth Dexter novel, Dexter is Delicious. Jeff is actually embarking on a British blog tour to promote the book, and, gratifyingly, Existential Ennui will be the first stop on that tour, followed by a guest post from Mr. Lindsay on Blogomatic 3000 on Tuesday, an excerpt from the novel on Another Cookie Crumbles on Wednesday, and a Dexter competition on the Shots blog on Thursday. So make sure to stop by on Monday for an unintentionally nonsensical interview with Jeff Lindsay!

Ahead of that, though, I thought it might be an idea to review the novel itself. I've touched on the Dexter books before, primarily in this post (still the most popular post on Existential Ennui, with well over 2,000 hits to date), in which I compared them to the television series and gently suggested the TV show may well be the superior beast, especially in Michael C. Hall's portrayal of the murderous, conscienceless, yet still strangely empathetic Mr. Morgan. Some of that, I reasoned, was down to the fact that I came to the show before the books, but some of it was also down, I think, to the Dexter novel I'd just read, 2009's Dexter by Design. Because although I enjoyed that novel, at the time I found Hall's version of Dexter more vivid somehow than Lindsay's one. Where the TV Dexter was becoming more rounded – fatherhood and the horrific events at the end of Season Five causing him to question his Dark Passenger – the novel Dexter seemed slightly stuck.

What's striking about Dexter is Delicious – which was originally published back in 2010 – is how, for me, it almost reverses that conclusion. In this outing, Dexter really struggles with his murderous urges, determining to stay on the straight and narrow now that he is – as in the TV show – a father, with a new baby, Lily Anne, to watch over. Consequently there's an added depth to his narration, something that was slightly lacking in Dexter by Design, although the novel is still littered with the expected sarcastic asides and one-liners. There's more meat on the bones of the plot as well, which concerns a cabal of cannibals operating in the Miami area. And there's a delightful additional wrinkle, in the shape of Dexter's brother, Brian.

Now, if you've only been following the television series, you'll be under the impression that Brian – himself a serial killer of some note (except without Dexter's warped "kill only criminals" code) – copped it at the end of Season One. And so he did. But in the books, Brian merely vanished at the end of the first novel, Darkly Dreaming Dexter (2004). It's not spoiling much to reveal that Brian is back in full force in Dexter is Delicious, messing with Dexter's family set-up by befriending Astor and Cody, the children of Dexter's partner, Rita, and encouraging their nascent Dark Passengers. It's an intriguing subplot to go along with the main man-eating action, and is left unresolved at the book's close, boding well for the future.

That central cannibal storyline is certainly more compelling than the commentary on contemporary art (particularly art installations) which characterized Dexter by Design. Bringing to mind the infamous 2003 case of the man who volunteered to be eaten by a German cannibal, Lindsay takes great pleasure in depositing Dexter in some extremely uncomfortable situations, notably in one sequence where Dexter is imprisoned with a willing, er... dinee...? Eatee...? Snackee...? Whatever: a very young lady who wishes to be eaten. The pair are dosed with a potent cocktail of ecstasy and other drugs and wind up, well, becoming rather close, an event – along with its attendant aftermath – that's distinctly squirm-inducing. But there's some solid police procedural and behind-the-scenes cop business as well – largely centring on Dexter's sister, the glamorous but hard-assed Deborah – including one scene involving bribery which to me felt very authentic.

Lindsay's next Dexter novel, Double Dexter, is due in October, and if the author maintains the excellence of Dexter is Delicious, I reckon we're in for another treat. But of course, we don't have to wait until then for more from Mr. Lindsay – oh dear me, no. He'll be along at the start of next week, right here on this very blog. So join me on Monday for a short interview with Jeff Lindsay!

Justified: Elmore Leonard's Raylan Givens Novels and Stories; Pronto, Riding the Rap and Fire in the Hole (Featuring a Signed First Edition)

The relationship between novels and their TV or movie adaptations is a subject I've returned to more than once, notably in this missive on Jeff Lindsay's Dexter books and how they compare to the Dexter television show. I was mostly assessing the relative merits of the novels and the show in that post, but I did briefly touch on the matter of the faithfulness of adaptations, if only by way of illustrating how certain adaptations – the movie of Watchmen, say – can be so slavishly faithful to the surface of a text that they overlook the underlying complexities and even the heart of a work. Truly faithful adaptations – those which effectively translate the feel and even the soul (for want of a better word) of a book as well as its plot and characters – are, I think, few and far between, in large part because distilling a 300-page novel down to a one-and-a-half hour film (or even a 400-page graphic novel down to a three-hour film in the case of Watchmen) is nigh on impossible.

But in the last ten years American television has undergone a renaissance, so much so that it is now possible to do justice to a book over multiple episodes of a show. The Sopranos is endlessly cited as being pioneering in the shift to more complex storytelling on television, but alongside it stand Six Feet Under, Mad Men and particularly The Wire, which really did adopt a novelistic approach, each season acting as one long story. (You could make a case for Babylon 5 and the latter seasons of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine being the 1990s forebears of the extended story-arc approach, but good though those shows were, I think you'd struggle to claim they had the depth of The Wire.) TV has become the natural medium for adventurous producers and writers wishing to properly explore storytelling possibilities – and indeed properly adapt a source text (witness the first season of Dexter, for example). Which brings me, in a rather long-winded way, to Justified.

Justified, if you're not familiar with it, is an FX show about a cowboy hat-wearing Deputy US Marshal named Raylan Givens, who, following a shootout at a swanky Miami hotel pool, is excommunicated back to small-town Kentucky, where he grew up. Created by Graham Yost, it stars Timothy Olyphant as Raylan – a character not a million miles from another lawman Olyphant has played, Sheriff Seth Bullock, as essayed in the brilliant Deadwood. Justified is based on an Elmore Leonard short story called Fire in the Hole... at least, that's what the opening credits would have you believe. In fact the 2010 debut season draws from all of the stories Leonard wrote about Givens, which comprise two novels – Pronto and Riding the Rap – and the aforementioned short. Yost and the rest of the production team's mantra in making the show was, "What would Elmore do?" but in reality I doubt they had to repeat that too much: countless sequences and stretches of dialogue are lifted straight from Leonard's stories; his name runs through Justified as if through a stick of rock. It is, without a doubt, one of the most faithful adaptations – in story, character, and tone – of Leonard's or any other writer's work we've yet seen.

I'll be exploring how and why it's so faithful in a series of posts next week on each book (bet you can't wait after that meandering preamble), ahead of the start of Justified's second season on Wednesday in the States. But for now, let's have a look at the UK first editions:

Left to right we have the UK hardback first editions and first printings of Pronto (1993), Riding the Rap (1995) and When the Women Come Out to Dance (2002), all published by Viking/Penguin; that last one is where Fire in the Hole resides. The cover illustrations on the first two are by Mark Taylor and the photograph on When the Women is by Russell Duncan. Now, if you've been paying attention (a big ask, I know, but anyway), you might recall my having blogged about a first edition of Pronto before, which I bought up in London. The copy you can see here isn't that copy, however. This one has something special about it, something that made it irresistible to me:

It's signed by Elmore Leonard. Of course, signed editions of Leonard's books aren't exactly thin on the ground – there are over fifty signed copies of Pronto on AbeBooks alone. But almost all of those are for sale from US dealers, and almost all of the books are US first editions. There's only one other signed UK first edition I've seen online, and that's going for fifty quid, which is way more than I paid for my copy. So in this instance, I reckon buying a second copy of the same (albeit signed) book was... well... justified.

See you next week.

Doing the Dexter Dance*

Let's talk Dexter.

This is one of those instances where I've ended up reading a book after having seen its film or TV adaptation. Usually I prefer to read the novel first – indeed sometimes I'll make a point of reading a novel before I get to see the adaptation, as with Dennis Lehane's Shutter Island – but that's not always possible, especially if I'm not even aware of a particular author's work at that time (I'm not as widely read as I maybe should be). I can think of a few instances off the top of my head where that's happened: I saw the films of both The Talented Mr. Ripley and Ripley's Game before I ever got near Patricia Highsmith's novels, and Point Blank many years prior to getting hooked on Richard Stark.

What is generally true, though, is that movies or TV shows are rarely better than the novels they're adapted from. They may approach a book in terms of quality, they may even equal it on occasion, but they very rarely better it. What's more common is that a film adaptation will go in a different direction than the source material, and may even end up being something quite extraordinary and transcend its origins, but as a consequence make any meaningful comparison with the original novel redundant. Slavishly faithful movies and TV shows do happen – Watchmen, say, or the aforementioned Shutter Island, both of which only slightly tampered with the originals – but there, often as not, something is lost. With Watchmen it was the intelligence and the formal complexity of the comics; with Shutter Island it was, I think, the book's soul – it wasn't a terribly deep novel, but Teddy's pain came across much more vividly in the novel.

And then there's Dexter, the TV show. Based on Jeff Lindsay's (a.k.a. Jeffry P. Freundlich) series of books about serial killer/blood spatter analyst Dexter Morgan, each season of Dexter is akin to a complete crime thriller. There are individual episode stories, sure, but there's always an overall arc for the series. I'd seen all four seasons of the show (season five starts soon) by the time I got round to reading the first book in the series, Darkly Dreaming Dexter, and I was struck by how similar the novel is to the first season. The plots of both are almost identical, and the characters are instantly recognizable. Thereafter the two diverge, but having recently read the fourth book in the series, 2009's Dexter by Design (I've yet to read numbers two and three), I realised that, for me, the TV show has become the definitive experience.

Now, this could well be because I saw so much of it before I read the books, but I don't think that's the whole reason. As ever with novels versus adaptations, the Dexter I saw in my head when I read Dexter by Design didn't quite match the telly version... but he also didn't quite match up to the screen Dexter, as portrayed by Michael C. Hall. Good though a lot of Dexter's internal monologue is in the book, it wasn't quite as zingy as Hall's voiceovers in the TV show, and sometimes the narration even dragged a bit. More than that, however, the print Dexter lacks some of the extra layers of the TV Dexter.

In the books (at least the two I've read), by the time of Dexter by Design, Dexter himself is essentially unchanged. He's discovered more about his Dark Passenger, sure, but other than that he's pretty much the same emotionless murderer he always was, except perhaps with some small sense of obligation to his adopted – and now in turn also homicidal – children. But on the TV show, the writers – Daniel Cerone, Clyde Phillips and Melissa Rosenberg – and in particular Hall have imbued Dexter with real depth, making him more human and more sympathetic – at least as sympathetic as a serial killer can be, anyway.

I guess fans of the books might complain that the television show dilutes Dexter, but I'd argue it actually enhances him, makes him a more rounded character, as it drills into what makes him tick and how inevitably he can come to question his existence. That's thrown into sharp relief by two similar plot strands in Dexter by Design and the TV show. In both that novel and in the season 4 episode Slack Tide, Dexter makes a mistake and kills an essentially innocent – if disagreeable – person. But whereas in the book this does little more than slightly trouble him, in the show it really has an impact and leads to something of a crisis. The same goes for the plots too. It seems to me that while the Dexter novels are fun, the show has more depth; it's a lot more gripping, with real consequences for Dexter and the other characters.

I picked up a first edition of the recently published fifth novel, Dexter is Delicious, the other week, so I'm intrigued to see how that one stacks up, particularly as it sees the return of an important character who shuffled off this mortal coil in the TV show but is very much alive in the books. But on the evidence thus far, in the case of Dexter books versus Dexter telly, I reckon that, for once, you could make a strong argument for an adaptation turning out to be better than its inspiration.

Er, which I guess is what I've just tried to do.

(* This is the dance that me and Rachel do to the theme tune of Dexter when we watch the show. Yes, we do a Dexter Dance. Demonstrations upon request.)

The Blunderer

Comics may be leaving me cold at the moment, but there's still lots of fun to be had with books! I just won this on eBay:













That's a 1958 first UK paperback edition, purchased for £3.50, including post. Fab. I'm still reading my first UK paperback edition of Strangers on a Train (well, that, and Casino Royale, and Dexter in the Dark), so this'll be the next Highsmith novel I read. I've also seen this for sale online:













Same book, but the first US paperback edition, which carried a different title. I rather like the cover though, and it's dead cheap. Hmm...

First Book of the Year

As in, my first book purchase this year, not the first book I'm reading. (I'm actually reading three books at the moment: Darkly Dreaming Dexter, Strangers on a Train, and Casino Royale.) And it is this:













A first edition, signed copy, bought a couple of hours ago in the British Bookshop up the road... for £7.99. What a bargain. I was leafing through it the other day, and noticed it was a signed copy, but I've been debating whether to actually buy it. I'm glad I finally did though. Should be interesting, not least because I was a regular at the Hacienda from 1989-1992 when I was at college in Manchester. I've already spotted a couple of gigs listed in the book that I was at. Happy days...