The Devil's Company

A CONVERSATION BETWEEN

OLEN STEINHAUER AND DAVID LISS

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I first met David Liss in northern Italy at a crime-fiction-and-blues festival. Mr. Liss, hiding behind stylish prescription glasses, comes across as a man lost in his own world … until he begins to speak. From that point on, you find yourself in the company of a man of excellent humor, keen intelligence, and razor wit. This author of six critically acclaimed bestselling novels (and the recipient of an Edgar Award) is probably best known for his character Benjamin Weaver, the early eighteenth-century ex-pugilist and “thief-taker,” whose exploits lay bare the early traumas and extremes of modern capitalism while taking the reader on a thrill ride through the underbelly of London. The Devil’s Company continues his story.

This interview was conducted in our homes in Budapest, Hungary, and San Antonio, Texas, a world away from Benjamin Weaver’s London.

—Olen Steinhauer, New York Times bestselling author of The Tourist

Olen Steinhauer: How did you get started writing fiction?

David Liss: Corny though it might sound, I’ve always wanted to write fiction. I have a very clear memory of writing a short story in the second grade. I believe it involved spaceships. After I graduated from college, I tried writing a novel, but I wasn’t sufficiently prepared for how hard it would be to put a real book together, and I gave up, concluding that my ambitions of being a writer were misguided. However, I never really stopped thinking about it, and several years later, when I was in graduate school, I decided I would try again. This time I was able to apply the analytical and critical thinking skills I’d gained in a punishing doctoral program to figuring out how a novel actually worked and where I’d gone wrong before. Those efforts turned into my first published novel, A Conspiracy of Paper.

OS: In 2008, you were named an Artist for Integrity by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. Can you tell us something about how that came about, and how I can get one?

DL: That was, admittedly, something I never expected. I was invited to participate in a UN anti-corruption convention in Bali along with a series of other artists—a director, an actress, and a couple of musicians. I never really understood why they selected me, but it involved a free trip to Bali, so I wasn’t complaining.

OS: One thing that really impresses in The Devil’s Company is the way you use language to evoke the period without it ever feeling stuffy, static, or imitative. Which is to say, it reads like a historic text imbued with modern pacing. How did you achieve this? Did you read a lot of primary texts from the time, or did you simply let your imagination roam?

DL: Historical fiction is always a tricky balancing act. I want to maintain the illusion of bringing the reader into the past, but at the same time, a contemporary audience wants pacing and language to be absorbing and comfortable. When I was in graduate school studying eighteenth-century British literature, I read countless eighteenth-century documents, and I feel like I got a pretty good sense of the rhythm and feel of the language. When I write a novel set in that period, I try to invoke that rhythm and pepper what is essentially modern prose with eighteenth-century vocabulary, idioms, and, occasionally, syntax. When I first tried doing this, I had no idea if it would work, but now I feel relatively comfortable with the middle ground I’ve staked out.

OS: There’s a school of thought that posits that historical fiction is, in essence, fantasy fiction, because none of us were around to know the visceral reality of those times. Do you hold to this view?

DL: I think this is essentially true. Historical fiction often fulfills the same escapist role as fantasy fiction, though the reader has the advantage of learning actual history along the way. Not that the history of orcs is without interest…. Much of the pleasure of reading—and writing—historical fiction is the re-creation of an alien world. The historical novelist takes many of the details of that world from the actual historical record, but there is always a lot of guesswork, connecting the dots, and speculation involved, even in historical fiction that follows the script of history fairly closely. I try and re-create the past as faithfully and as accurately as I can, but I also know that it is my interpretation with my biases and conceptions.

OS: You’ve recently entered the world of comics, writing for Marvel. Has that had any effect on the way you write novels?

DL: I’m not sure it’s had a direct effect, but the experience has been an incredible challenge for me as a storyteller, and an opportunity to grow. Writing a comic book script is an entirely different way of telling a story than is writing a novel, and I think any time a writer gets to rethink the mechanics of narrative, it’s a good thing. I would never write fiction the way I write comics, but I think my experience in one medium affects and informs the way I approach another. And I also think that the core elements of what makes a story successful—tone, character, narrative energy—are all the same in just about every storytelling medium, be it fiction, comics, television, or film. The difference is how the medium permits the execution of these elements.

OS: The Devil’s Company shines a fascinating light on the relationship between Jews and Christians in early eighteenth-century England. Ellershaw, for example, constantly gives Weaver backhanded compliments that belittle his race. How did London compare to other European capitals in regard to anti-Semitism?

DL: In the early eighteenth century, London was probably the most desirable city in Europe for Jews to live. The novel depicts what to contemporary readers must seem like pure anti-Semitism, and of course it is, but it has to be seen within the context of English culture at the time. The English, in general, disliked Jews, but they also disliked Catholics, the French, Germans, the Dutch, the Italians, and just about everyone else, and they were not shy about saying so. There was very little violent anti-Semitism in eighteenth-century Britain, and Jews were never in any real danger of being expelled or having their property arbitrarily seized, so as distasteful as much of the English attitude seems, it is a far cry from most of Europe at the time, and certainly most of Europe in centuries past.

OS: Benjamin Weaver is a “thief-taker,” essentially a hired gun (or fist), a mercenary. How prevalent was this profession in England at the time, and was there a specific thief-taker you used as a model?

DL: Thief-taking was very real. There was no police force, such as we understand it, in eighteenth-century Europe, and law enforcement was largely a privatized business. Thief-takers received a fairly hefty bounty for bringing in felons who were later convicted, and that was supposed to promote freelance law enforcement. Often it simply promoted schemes by which poor and helpless victims were framed by thief-takers conspiring to find a patsy and share the bounty.

Benjamin Weaver is, in many ways, inspired by Daniel Mendoza, who lived much later in the century. He was a much celebrated Jewish boxer, and later, when he was too old to fight, he earned his living by accepting thief-taking commissions. Like Weaver, he was generally an honorable fellow, but thief-takers of this sort were likely in the minority.

OS: In an interview with January Magazine, you talked about Benjamin Weaver’s love interest, Miriam, who makes only a brief appearance in this book. You said that you’d gotten rid of her because you “felt like the character was done.” What did you mean by that, and does this mean that you can see a point where Weaver himself will be “done”?

DL: I think that when you write about a character over multiple books, you have to be careful not to repeat the same personal narratives over and over again. I don’t believe in resetting the clock.

I felt the character was done because the emotional muck I’d dragged them through must have consequences, and I could not realistically see them as continuing to have feelings for each other after everything that had come before. As for Weaver himself, I don’t need to write a certain number of novels with this character. I’ve gone back to him twice when I’ve had ideas for the character I wanted to work with and stories I wanted to tell. I have no plans to write another Weaver novel at this moment, but I reserve the right to change my mind tomorrow. I do think that at some point I ought to write at least one more to put a kind of period on his narrative.

OS: The namesake of this novel is the East India Company, and its level of brutality and cynicism is often shocking. Yet at the same time, to a jaded reader from the early twenty-first century, it’s never unbelievable. How many of the company’s shenanigans did you take from real life?

DL: I did not set out to write a historical novel in which the East India Company is an allegory for the modern corporation. Rather, in my research, I was astonished to discover just how many modern corporate practices were already in play in the early eighteenth century. The main plot of murder and deception is, of course, fiction, but the business practices I portray are all historically accurate. If anything, corporations were much more brutal in the past than they are now because certain kinds of human life (non-British, the very poor, etc.) were held cheaply, and there was no one to prosecute abuses of what we today would call human rights.

OS: One of the many lively scenes occurs in Mother Clap’s, a boarding-house/club catering to homosexual men. Clearly, such an establishment was illegal in London at the time, yet Weaver and others know of its existence. How common were such places in eighteenth-century England, and how did they exist alongside the law?

DL: There were several such “molly houses” in eighteenth-century England, though Mother Clap’s is certainly the most famous. And yes, they were illegal, as was homosexuality, but there was no clear means of regulating such activity. Prostitution was illegal as well, but prostitutes operated nearly everywhere and in the open, and almost always without fear of the law. Eighteenth-century London was a society caught in the throes of a strengthening, unregulated capitalist system, while older, more ideological systems of regulation (a uniform, monolithic religious structure, the monarchy, the class system) were weakening. At this point, if something was making money, and not interfering with public order (or a more powerful entity’s ability to make money), it was generally left alone. The most seriously and consistently punished crimes in this period were crimes against property.

OS: The London you describe sounds in ways like a libertarian ideal, where the free market is untethered by government regulation—yet no one would call it utopia. In another of your novels, The Whiskey Rebels, wild libertarians in the West try to bring down the federal government’s financial system. In The Ethical Assassin, the title character uses fierce—and very compelling—social critiques to argue for his vegan lifestyle.

All this is just to say that your books are rife with thought-provoking social observations and criticisms. Do you see this as a primary function of the novelist? (I ask this of a United Nations Artist for Integrity, remember.) And how much effect can novelists have in the video-and-Internet age?

DL: I think my primary function as a novelist is to entertain readers. Once we get too self-important and forget that very basic role, we produce far less effective novels. That said, I believe that if I am lucky enough to have readers, I ought to write something worth reading, and to that end, I do often write about issues I think are important. In other words, I see writing about important issues as my secondary function as a novelist.

Can we have much effect? Honestly, I don’t know. It’s the rare novel (I can think of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, but not any others) that radically affects a major cultural movement. On the other hand, it’s better to contribute to an important social conversation than to opt out because you don’t believe you can dominate it.