Deaver reavels more about Dubai's role in 'Carte Blanche'

Much-awaited Carte Blanche is an “indelible impression” of what Dubai is to best-selling and award-winning mystery/crime writer Jeffery Deaver, reports Gulf Today.

Describing it as a “typical Bond book” pregnant with the twists and turns of espionage in the 21st century, the recipient of the 2004 Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Awards by the United Kingdom’s Crime Writers’ Association— for his thriller Garden of Beast about an American assassin sent to Berlin before the Third Reich — on Tuesday evening, said that a thirty-ish “James Bond will be on an assignment. There will be clues and leads taking him to the different locations in Dubai.”

“There is fast pace action. Races on the streets,” he added, resulting in the burst of laughter from his over 100 mostly Caucasian guests who braved the drizzle and traffic snarls to the Dubai Cultural and Scientific Association in Al Mamzar.

“There will be local folks, wonderful food and drinks. Will he be jumping from Burj Khalifa? I do not know,” the sexagenarian-bachelor author of 28 novels, translated into 25 languages, said.

Earlier in the “face-to-face interaction” moderated on by radio and television presentor Shahnaz Pakravan, Deaver said that as a writer, he was able to get inside the “belly of Dubai,” last year from his first participation in the “Emirates Airlines Festival of Literature” (EAFOL), when he toured the city.

Armed with a pen and notebook, he talked with people as well as carefully scribbled his personal anecdotes on its sights and sounds.

“The place is so culturally vibrant, so picturesque,” the journalist-turned lawyer- turned-novelist went on to say.

Adding later on that as some reading materials — he specifically cited the Wikipedia — are a cornucopia of straightforward facts and figures about locales and countries—“emotional resonance” is the blood that stirs life in the kind of writing, he since embraced and concentrated on from age 40, when he already became financially capable and could “quit his legal profession” from Wall Street.

Deaver said he longed to be a writer, anyway.

He was responding to The Gulf Today question during the open forum of the March 8 to 12 EAFOL pre-event, wherein a collage of photoplays of James Bond, featuring in the title role, the actors Sean Connery, Roger Moore, Pierce Brosnan and Daniel Craig as well as movie theme songs “Diamonds Are Forever,” “Goldfinger,” and “Nobody Does It Better,” were interpreted by Filipina singer Celeste.

And apart from his parents who brought up the family in the “relatively conservative” Midwest state of Illinois and encouraged the children to become bookworms, it was the creator of the British Secret Intelligence Service Agent 007, journalist-turned British naval intelligence officer-author Ian Fleming, who moved him into dreaming of becoming a mystery/crime writer someday.

“I have been a fan all my life of Ian Fleming,” said Deaver who volunteered that as a child, he was a “nerd and socially inept.”

Hence, he learnt to binge on Commander Sir James Bond and his exploits with “sick and twisted characters,” that Fleming set from 1946 to the Cold War and thereafter.

Saying that he takes writing as a craft and which he can be doing for “10 hours a day and produce 40 pages,” Deaver claimed it was his idol’s way of writing — making readers “grab the first page to the very end” — that got him into writing, specifically mystery and crime writing.

The author whose first novel, written at age nine, was patterned after 007’s character, and who also wrote poetry in his youth, described Fleming as a “creative influence”.

He said mystery and crime genres let him explore “larger than life”.

“I do not write about children. I do not kill my protagonists. Some of my protagonists are very good,” he said.

“There should be emotional depth. It is very important for readers to have a very emotional connection to my characters. Something that will touch their hearts,” he said.

Asked by an aspiring lady novelist for tips, Deaver who, in an interview with USA Today’s Carol Memmott claimed that the James Bond in Carte Blanche would be “an Afghan War vet” and about the “post 9/11 evil,” said research in any form of writing is very important because nothing is so distressing to a reader when this finds an incorrect detail or information in a supposed to be an entertaining read.

The author shared that he has not been spared of such a mistake and mentioned about an e-mail correspondence he got from one of his fans about one item in one of his books, for which he humbly acknowledged.

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