Lavie Tidhar is an Israeli author, living in the Southeast. Amongst many other places, his stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Postscripts, SciFiction, Fantasy, Aeon and 13. His novella, An Occupation of Angels, is published by Pendragron Press. As I owed him a chicken, bacon and grilled pepper ciabatta, I thought I would take the opportunity to ask him a few questions on his experiences as a writer.

Neil: I take it from the way you're concentrating on your young adult books at the moment that mainstream publication is the goal?

I would think mainstream publishing is a goal for any fairly ambitious writer! While I have a lot of respect for the small-press, I naturally want to reach as wide an audience as I can – and I also want to be able to make a living out of it at some point down the time-line... I wouldn't say that's why I'm working on the books though – I'm writing them because I think they're worth writing, regardless of where they might end up being published. In a way, writing is the easy bit – the hard part is then going through the process of selling them...

Neil: What importance do you place on professional sales, like ‘‘The Dope Fiend’, in furthering your career? Do you think editors at large publishing houses pay attention to these things; can they use professional sales like these when trying to sway publishing departments into investing in an author?

Well, ‘The Dope Fiend’ had two obvious benefits in terms of my burgeoning career: it got wide exposure, got me my first review in Locus, for instance, and so on – and I got paid a whopping sum of money for it. Most importantly, it got read. When you have something published in a magazine with a circulation of 200-300 people, and then you get something like Sci Fiction... it makes a big difference.

Would it also make a difference in terms of selling a novel? I don't think so – I think you need to find an editor enthusiastic about the particular book first, and that might take a long time – but it certainly doesn't hurt. Editors read Locus, and they spend at least some of their time browsing the Internet...

Neil: What about something like ‘An Occupation of Angels’? How does that tie in with an agenda of looking for mainstream success?

Ha! I don't think I have much of an agenda, but now I kind of wish I did... I wrote ‘An Occupation of Angels’ purely for fun, having never tried something that length before. I didn't know if anyone would buy it, but it was the story I wanted to write at the time, so I did. Novellas are a terrible way to try for mainstream success – no one publishes them! – but that's not to say they're not worth writing. I love reading novellas, and I think that, alongside short story collections the small-press is ideally suited for them, so I was very pleased when Chris Teague at Pendragon accepted it. It's also useful to have a fiction book available, and get reviewed and so on (this one made it into SFX, for example) and while I won't make much money on it now, I might make the money on it in the future, in translation, in reprints and whatnot; as far as mainstream publishing is concerned, however, I don't think it's an issue – if it's not novel-length don't even go there.

Neil: An Occupation of Angels is a master-class in pulp fiction; the pace is break-neck, with the book reading like a cross between Ian Fleming's James Bond and Gregory Widen's The Prophecy. It's maybe like the impression we'd have of Brian Lumley's ‘Necroscope’ if he'd stripped back the characterisation and had stopped writing after the first, superior installment of his series. You've gone to all this trouble to come up with a lovably comforting and hokey espionage fantasy, and then thrown in some wonderful literary experiments. The neat tricks you use, like starting most chapters midway through, then jumping the action back on itself at a suitably dramatic counterpoint, for me only add to the story's suicidal pace, dragging the reader into the thick of things with each new scene. Others have expressed doubts, or been confused by this. Does it irk you when readers shy away from intellectual stimulation? How do you hope people approach your stories?

The main influence on the book was a cold war thriller writer called Adam Hall – the book is dedicated to him and to his main character, Quiller, and the style you mention is a lot in homage to him (with my own weirdness factor thrown in!). Hall isn’t well-known any more, but he was a master at writing thrillers, and this is partly my way of paying respects. I love everything Tim Powers does, and in Declare he wrote a great supernatural thriller that obviously also paid homage to John Le Carre. I think you can take the inspiration from a writer or book you love and still do something new with it, which is what I hope I managed with Angels. Sometimes I wish the cold war never ended! It was such a great time and place for thrillers... probably not so great when you’re actually there though!

Neil: The style and tone of The Dope Fiend is worlds away from An Occupation of Angels, and surely involved a huge amount of research, for setting and historical accuracy. Is this a part of the writing process you enjoy? Sometimes I find the research can get in the way of the actual storytelling.

You know, a couple of reviewers commented on the research, how much of it has gone into the story (for good or bad), and I think it's a bit of a trap – I think there's a verisimilitude of research more than anything else. I mean, it's a fantasy story! It didn't really happen! There's golems and voodoo and chases in the sewers – it's fiction, damn it!

I do love research though, and obviously I tried to make it seem as real as possible, as close to the historical characters and setting as possible. It all came from reading Marek Kohn's wonderful book about the London drug scene in the 1920s, ‘Dope Girls’, and the idea percolated for about a year after that. It's also me trying to make a serious comment about the whole Dope Fiend/Yellow Menace genre from around the same time, so part of the research was picking up a couple of Fu Manchu novels... You might say it's hard work, but I never shirk my duty!

I did go on the DLR around Docklands and Limehouse and so on, but there's nothing you can see now that's from back then – it all got destroyed in the Blitz. So it was back to making things up after that...

If anything, ‘An Occupation of Angels’ required a lot more research, though I didn't know that's what it was at the time. I spent about two months going on the Trans-Siberian line from Moscow to Beijing in a series of trains, and I knew I'd have to use it as a setting at some point. When I did I did check the time tables and so on, but most of my research is really me having been lucky enough to go to interesting places. That, and using Google...

Neil: Both these recent pieces are also somewhat removed from what I'd come to consider typical Lavie Tidhar stories, like the excellent ‘The Gimatria of Pi’ or ‘Alienation and Love in the Hebrew Alphabet’. Have you made a conscious decision to move away from these shorter, sparser, and perhaps more directly intellectual pieces in pursuit of a wider audience? Or is it that in longer works there's more room to maneuver? Do you find it easier now, working in a longer form, to fit everything in: the fun and the serious, the action and the intellect?

Lavie: not at all – I think it depends more on what I manage to sell and what gets published at any given time, more than anything else. In fact, I've been writing some of my best short stories recently: Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling just bought a story from me for a new anthology, ‘Salon Fantastique’, and it's under 3000 words and probably one of the best things I've ever written. It's called My Travels with Al-Qaeda and it's closest to a 'literary' story, and very dark. I've become very interested in combining poetry (my background is in poetry rather than fiction, it's where I started from) within stories, and in the nature of story itself – I'm working on something at the moment that's mostly influenced by Henry James, of all people, but about an Israeli pulp writer!

I also have a Weird Clown Western coming out in Postscripts magazine at the end of the year – that was a fun story! – a ghost story that’s also a Russian travelogue in Fantasy Magazine in the US, and several other things. I love writing short stories, and I don’t expect to stop doing them just because of a novel or three!

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Neil Ayres was born in London but now lives in Surrey. He has had many stories and poems published over the past couple of years, most recently in Aesthetica, Electric Velocipede and Fusing Horizons. His first novel, Nicolo's Gifts, is available from Bluechrome publishing. It is currently being translated into French. In 2005 Neil was project manager for The Book of Voices, a short story anthology aimed at raising awareness of the work of Sierra Leone PEN.

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© 2006 Laura Hird All rights reserved.