Meet the Author: David Hewson

David Hewson's novels have been translated into a wide range of languages, from Italian to Japanese, and his debut work, Semana Santa, set in Holy Week Spain, was filmed with Mira Sorvino. His work has embraced Italy, Spain, Denmark and Amsterdam with the Nic Costa series based in Rome, the Pieter Vos books in Amsterdam, his adaptations of The Killing TV series in Copenhagen and, most recently, the Arnold Clover history mysteries in Venice.

He's adapted Shakespeare for Audible and in 2018 won the Audie for best original work for Romeo and Juliet: A Novel, narrated by Richard Armitage. His latest book is The Borgia Portrait which is the second of his Venetian mysteries featuring retired archivist Arnold Clover. You can find The Borgia Portrait and David's other books on our catalogue.

Who were your literary influences as you were growing up?

I was influenced by lots of people, including the librarians of Bridlington public library where I used to hang out waiting for the bus home from school. They introduced me to the work of Robert Graves and Mary Renault and dreams of the warm, rich world of the Mediterranean which felt a long way from Bridlington. I was hoping to get there one day even then.

As a former journalist with The Times, The Sunday Times and The Independent what were the most memorable stories you covered?

I covered all kinds of stories in my time, business, arts, technology, general news. It was the time of the IRA attacks too so some of the memories, especially those of Northern Ireland where I briefly worked, aren’t too pleasant. The one story that did cause a huge international kerfuffle was the oddest and to do with the Cottingley Fairies, the work of two young girls who produced photographs of ‘real’ fairies that foxed Arthur Conan Doyle among others. I traced one of them when she was a pensioner near Nottingham – it took weeks – and she finally admitted the ‘fairies’ were hand-drawn fakes (which seemed pretty obvious to me but a lot of people fell for it).

Your road to publication was not an easy one. How do you look back on that now you have written and published many books?

I don’t think anyone’s road to publication is easy. Nor should it be. Writing is hard, however many books you’ve written, and publishing a tough old business. I learned early on to listen to those who’d trodden the path before – my first agent was a superb mentor. After that you have to keep listening and if you have a long career expect you will have to reset and relaunch it every ten years or so. Unless you become a giant of the writing world, but there are few of those and it’s best to accept you’re unlikely to be one.

Suffolk library readers will be aware of your three adaptations of The Killing. How did you get the commission and were there any particular challenges you hadn't expected?

I was head hunted. The publisher came to me and said they’d decided I was the right author for the job because I had experience of foreign locations, a record of writing strong women, and Lund was definitely one of those, and the right kind of style. The challenge was to make it an adaptation, not a novelisation, in other words a photocopy of the TV. I asked to be allowed to make changes when I felt they were needed and the TV people agreed. This is why the books’ endings diverge from the TV. I needed narratives that worked in book form where the medium is different.

Your love for Italy and Venice in particular shines through in the descriptions in your writing. When did you first develop your interest?

It was a total accident. I was working as a columnist for the Sunday Times while writing books too. I went to a very boring press conference in Venice, one so tedious I bunked off halfway through and took a vaporetto to the city where I soon got hopelessly lost. Something just clicked there, which led to my first Venice book, Lucifer’s Shadow (aka The Cemetery of Secrets). When I had the final manuscript for that I went to Rome for a week to edit it… and found Rome inspiring the ten books of the Nic Costa series.

Can you tell us a little about The Borgia Portrait?

Books have different levels of stories. For this I wanted the top one to be a hunt, in this case for a mythical erotic portrait of the legendary Lucrezia Borgia. Arnold Clover, my local protagonist, is trying to help a young, impoverished woman from London, Lizzie Hawker, find it in order to stake her claim for an abandoned palace on the Grand Canal. But to do that they have to crack the story beneath the surface, a puzzle left by Lizzie’s vanished mother, a riddle in which the answers lie in Venice itself. So they have to make a journey through some very obscure and rich Venetian history and culture looking for Lucrezia.

I wanted to take readers into a side of the city even those who know it quite well may never have seen. Like its predecessor, The Medici Murders, I see these books as entertainments, not dark, violent thrillers. A free trip to one of the most extraordinary cities there is.

Richard Armitage narrated Romeo and Juliet: A Novel and The Medici Murders. Is he going to return to narrate Arnold's latest adventure?

Yes, I’m lucky in that Richard has narrated a good part of my work, including the previous Venice book, The Garden of Angels. He really is a master of the art… and now an author in his own right too. His audio of The Borgia Portrait goes live on November 2.

Your Baptiste prequel is expected in April 2024 is that a title you can discuss at this stage?

I was approached about this just as I was with The Killing, though Baptiste is a very different project. The idea was to write an original story set in the 1970s with Baptiste as a young, inexperienced officer facing the case which explains his later obsession with missing people. All my own work – nothing from the TV of course. It’s called The Blade Must Fall and sees him in northern France, on the day set for the execution of a young man Baptiste has arrested for the abduction and murder of a nineteen-year-old girl – France still did send men to the guillotine then.

As Baptiste talks to the prisoner, he begins to realise he may have got the wrong man. And so we wind back in time to the case itself. The audiobook is being recorded right now by Baptiste himself, that great actor Tchéky Karyo.

One book, piece of music or work of art that everyone should experience?

I, Claudius and Claudius the God by Robert Graves. Two books that sparked my love of the Mediterranean and Roman history, and are touching tragedies about a decent man who, through power and fate, becomes the very tyrant he hates. The TV is great, the books even greater.

Can you tell us one thing about yourself that your readers may not know?

There’s a lot of history and culture in my work so people often ask… where did you go to university? I didn’t. I left school at seventeen to become a cub reporter on a little, now-vanished local newspaper in Yorkshire. I’m proudly uneducated. Everything I’ve learned and researched over the years has come from the wonderful medium of books.