Interview on the occasion of the publication of THE BRONX BOMBING:

* Mr Gwynne -- Why the pseudonym?

Well, my first novel, back in 1976, FIRMLY BY THE TAIL, dealt with an imaginary central African country, "The People’s Republic of Malaria", which featured a despotic "president for life" called President Savapa. These were both transparently based on the Central African Republic and its infamous President Bokassa, where I, and my family’s mining firm, were deeply involved at the time. I was advised by my dad (and boss) that I should adopt a pseudonym if we wanted to avoid being nationalized and booted out of the country -- and me heaved into the notorious Central African national prison (nicknamed – and I’m not making this up – "The University"… there being no actual university in the country).

So I did as I was told. Then some years later I wrote the second novel, PUSHKIN SHOVE, and since "P.N. Gwynne" had enjoyed some modest success as the author of the first one, I decided to stick with him.

And I must say, I’ve found the pseudonym a useful thing to have, over the years. It helps to keep my life "compartmentalized" -- something I recommend, by the way….

* How did you pick P. N. Gwynne?

Ah – therein lies a tale… (that, I’m afraid betrays my age…)

I don’t know how many people still remember Monty Python and their famous "Dead Parrot" sketch, but even before them there was Peter Sellers and "The Goon Show", a riotous radio comedy Sellers starred in with Spike Milligan for the BBC in the ‘50s. I was a big fan and purely by coincidence, at about the same time that I was searching around for a pseudonym, I happened to be listening to an old comedy record of The Goon Show -- specifically this cut of "The Pet Shop" sketch:

          Customer (Sellers) (entering): "I should like to buy a penguin, please!"

          Pet Shop Owner (Milligan): "A wot -- ?"

          Customer (enunciating carefully): "An penguin."

          Pet Shop Owner: " ‘Ow d’you spell that, then?"

          Customer: "Pee enn gwynne, you fool!"

And the proverbial lightbulb went off above my head and I said to myself – "Bim! There it is!". And P.N. Gwynne became my writing alter-ego.

I should say, as a post scriptum, that I adopted the name without any second thought – but after my first novel came out and had, as I’ve said, some success, my then-publisher began receiving – and passing on to the bemused P.N. Gwynne – a steady trickle of hand-written letters from Wales demanding to know whether P.N. belonged to the Swansea Gwynnes, or the Cardiff Gwynnes or – most alarmingly of all – the Merthyr Tydfil Gwynnes…. and I remember at the time asking my wife Carla, a little anxiously, “What the hell have I wandered into, here?”

* Who are your literary influences?

The most obvious are two of my favorite all-time writers, P.G. Wodehouse and Evelyn Waugh. In fact, in writing FIRMLY BY THE TAIL I went so far as to openly emulate those two, to such a degree that one reviewer,  from the since-defunct Washington D.C. NATIONAL OBSERVER, actually wrote:

“The subject is diamonds, the setting is the preposterous People's Republic of                Malaria, and the hero is Bertie Wooster. That's right, Wodehouse's Bertie                          Wooster, but as he might have been conceived by Evelyn Waugh. The book isn’t going to win the author a whole lot of friends, and it is simply too good to miss.”

(I don’t mind admitting that I was pretty chuffed at those words.)

Another writer I admired and who I consciously aped in my early writing days was J.P. Donleavy, the hilariously caustic author of THE GINGER MAN. Who liked. To write. Like this. (But, some will be happy to hear, over the years I’ve eased out of that phase. To a large. Extent.)

And speaking of borrowing, I always looked to the late Tom Wolfe – whose liberating way with punctuation I enthusiastically adopted. Not to mention his unbridled narrative voice…. (Though the white suits I used to affect as a younger man I adopted quite independently – and before I was even aware --  of Wolfe's own famous practice).

And I can’t mention Tom Wolfe without reflexively acknowledging Hunter S. Thompson, whose dyspeptically defiant take-no-prisoners approach to (non-fiction) writing I always naturally gravitated to.

Other fiction writers whom I’ve greatly admired have been (Sir) Kingsley Amis, William Boyd, Malcolm Bradbury, Anthony Burgess, Mark Helprin, Denis Johnson, David Lodge, Nigel Williams, Walker Percy, the plays of Neil Simon and Michael Frayn, and John Updike.

My favorite "serious", pre-1930s, novelist was undoubtedly Joseph Conrad, the only novelist I was introduced to at school who I took to heart. I’ll even go as far as admitting that sometimes, when utterly isolated for long stretches in the Central African bush, I’d feel something like kinship with the similarly-situated, eponymous "Lord Jim".

And of course I must mention another major influence -- the comic-caper master himself, Donald Westlake, whose lightness of touch seemed to increase in tandem with the gravity of  his characters’ calamities.

All these writers had humorous sides to them, and I like to think some of that was reflected in my first two books, which were primarily "comic adventure" novels. But there’s nothing terribly comic, to put it mildly, about THE BRONX BOMBING, in which I like to think can be found echoes of two of the grittier, more cynical authors I read and enjoyed as a younger man – Robert ("Something Of Value") Ruark and Joseph ("The Choirboys") Wambaugh.

Speaking of serious subjects, the best war novel I ever read (and trust me, I’ve read many), was Jim Webb’s Vietnam masterpiece "Fields of Fire".

And, of course, as an ex-intelligence officer, I devour espionage fiction with what I consider to be particular discrimination. And the two best spy novelists I’ve ever encountered are the American Charles McCarry and the (shamefully under-recognized) Englishman Alan Judd. 

But finally, and before I read any of those guys, there was Hergé (Georges Remi) and his seminal and immortal "The Adventures of Tintin", from the lurid pages of which, as an obstreperous little goggle-eyed schoolboy, I learned more world geography, history, and anthropology than from all the expensive education that I was subsequently exposed to. And in a world of fatuous Marvel Comics super-heroes, I’ve remained stubbornly faithful to that ultimate fictional "force of nature", Captain Haddock….

* How did THE BRONX BOMBING come to you?

Well, I’ve been Yankee fan all my life, since I learned what baseball even was, as a 9-year old kid in ’55. It’s like the Yankees were in my DNA – and all the other teams just existed as opponents for them to beat.

Taken all together -- at first with my younger brother James, and then later with my own kids -- it sometimes seems as if I’ve spent half my life at Yankee Stadium, in its various versions. Over the decades, I got to know the entirety of that self-contained alternate universe, (including every one of its raucous satellite dive-bars on River Avenue), as intimately as the interior of my first car.

A few years ago, after a victory over the Red Sox, I found myself part of a dangerously uncontrolled exiting mob, surging down a packed ramp at the Stadium, and I remember being alarmed at how little it would take to turn that whole semi-hysterical moment into a massively lethal one. And later, recalling the claustrophobic scene, a horrible vision of mortar rounds landing indiscriminately in the crowd added to my disquiet… Plus, the horrendous Islamist attack in the shopping mall in Nairobi, Kenya happened to be going down at about the same time, and, well…. suddenly the whole scheme for THE BRONX BOMBING just mentally fell into place.

And I must confess that as I pondered what I’d conjured up -- Yankee Stadium seemed such an obvious target, and my imagined story-line struck me as so plausible -- that the thing scared me a little. But I soon shook that disobliging thought off --  All the more reason to write it up, I decided.

I suppose I should also interject here that I’ve long been fascinated with mortars, with which I became fairly well acquainted in the army.

Mortars are known as "the poor man’s artillery", and I was always struck by the disproportionate amount of damage that  could so easily – and accurately -- be inflicted upon so wide an area by such a simple, relatively small and portable weapon.

Mind you, the advent of drone warfare has shuffled the whole "indirect fire" deck considerably, but that development has in no way diminished the utility of older weapons like mortars – rather, it’s just expanded the options for terrorists. And the trusty old mortar remains diabolically devious – not being a "line of sight" weapon, it can bring un-announced, silently-delivered devastation from literally anywhere.

(Of course a little instinctive ability with geometry and maybe trigonometry helps with the aiming – but it can’t require all that much, if a math dunce like myself could get the hang of it.)

So, to answer your question: You could say that the plot of THE BRONX BOMBING – including the target of the attack, and the weapon used in it -- was always there, on the sidelines of my mind, just waiting to be called into service by the next terrorist enormity in the news… which was, sadly, never far off….

* How much of you – your experience – is in this thing?

Well, quite a lot, obviously.  (I mean, if you don’t know – and know rather well – what you’re writing about, what the hell are you doing in the first place?)

As regards THE BRONX BOMBING, I can assure you of this:

I know the US military; I know US military bases; I know Jihadists -- hell, I’ve even been to the Syria/Iran-controlled Bekaa Valley, (where I didn’t actually have to travel around in the trunk of a car, but things got pretty damn close to that); I know more about the NYPD than I ever wanted to; and God knows I’m painfully well-acquainted with the limitless and usually-malevolent obtuseness of America’s vast government bureaucracy.

So I’m confident I know what I’m talking about in this novel – and more to the point, I’m confident of the authenticity of the characters in it: How they think, speak and act.

And as for the labyrinthine and ambiguous "legalities" which impact the attempted apprehension of the bad guys in the story -- while I’m pretty sure I know more than most do about the subject, I don’t pretend to know every last damn infinitesimal nuance or interpretation involved. In fact, nobody does – which is one of our biggest problems…..

* Are you afraid your plot might give some bad guys ideas?

Hah! Funny -- well, maybe not funny, but... interesting that you should ask that. In my first book, FIRMLY BY THE TAIL, there’s a scene where the old, incumbent president of my imaginary African country is reviewing an Independence Day parade in which the passing Presidential Guard stops in front of the Presidential Box, turns and fires into it, killing all the spectators therein, including the hapless pres. (And the Minister of Defense, who organized the conspiracy, promptly takes over.)

Well, a few years after my book came out, Egypt’s Anwar Sadat was assassinated in exactly the same fashion.

Now, FBTT was hardly a best-seller, but it wasn’t entirely un-read, either, and believe it or not, shortly after the Sadat assassination, I was actually approached, unofficially, by my old CIA colleagues (specifically by a counterintelligence fellow in the Office of Security) to discuss the possibility that somehow members of the Muslim Brotherhood (who were responsible for the Sadat assassination) might have gotten the idea from my book. In the event, after examining every possible link we could think of, we agreed that this particular suspicion, at least, was, uh, unlikely. (But still… it does make you think….)

As for the plot in THE BRONX BOMBING, I don’t know – and to answer your question, I damn well hope not.  A more likely result, I think, might be – as suggested by an English pal who read the manuscript – that "some warning rockets might usefully go off in the security departments of large stadiums – in America and, indeed, elsewhere". (Though exactly what those poor bastards are supposed to do about random mortar attacks from remote places, is not obvious – not even to me….)

* You don’t pull many punches, in your story – are you worried about  blowback?

No, not really.  I’ve described a very likely scenario, as dispassionately and realistically as I know how. And if anyone’s not happy with that – well, tough.

And anyway, as one of my aforementioned literary mentors, Kingsley Amis, once said, "There’s little point in writing if you can’t annoy somebody." 

* What was the road to publication like?

I first conceived of THE BRONX BOMBING as a screenplay – or rather, from its inception I pictured the thing in my mind as a movie -- and, well,  I’d always wondered what it would be like to write a screenplay: Relatively easy, as it turns out – a lot easier than writing a novel, anyway. But if writing a screenplay is simpler than a novel, bringing it to some sort of practical fruition is even harder – not far from impossible, in fact; (the statistical odds of a screenplay being made into a movie are vanishingly prohibitive – "You could look it up", as Yogi Berra said).

Anyway, I faffed around with my screenplay, sending it all over the place, to laughingly no avail.  Worse, instead of proposing to make it into a movie, all kinds of Tinseltown charlatans insulted my intelligence by offering to give me "notes" if I in turn gave them grotesque amounts of $. In short, Hollywood proved hard to get a look-in….

Then I caught a break: An old pal of mine, the late, legendary CIA Clandestine Service officer Jack "The Other Jack" Platt, read it and passed it on to his sister, the equally legendary Polly Platt, ex-wife of Peter Bogdanovich and noted Hollywood screenwriter/producer in her own right. Well, she "loved" it and vowed to "do something with it", and at that point I reckoned I was "In Like Flynn". But then tragically and suddenly, Ms. Platt became terribly ill and passed away. And that was that, as far as my screenplay was concerned.

So after reverting to my day job for awhile, in time I returned to the old keyboard, rolled up my sleeves and transformed the dormant screenplay into the current novel.

And now, new publisher secured, we’re off to the races, once again. (But Hollywood producers be advised – that screenplay’s ready to roll, like… that {snaps fingers].)

* What’s next?

Well, although another of my aforementioned literary heroes, J.P. Donleavy once told my late brother Alan (who was, for a while, Donleavy’s lawyer… long story… don’t ask….), "If I didn’t need the money, the only thing I would ever write again would be my signature on checks", I myself rather enjoy writing – it’s what comes after the writing, that I’m less crazy about….

Anyway, my next novel will be a reversion to the humor of the first two "comic adventure" books. Called PERSONA NON GRATA, it will tell the story of a hapless young French dilettante who, as an accidental diplomat, gets mixed up in all manner of misunderstandings and skullduggeries in a fictional recently-ex-communist east European country, in the middle of 1990s Balkan Wars. Trust me, it’ll be a good deal funnier than it probably sounds, and also different from any novel you’ve ever read before.

Oh, and I’m also turning my hitherto-unpublished, 86-page Vietnam War novella... (privately-printed, and pictured here – featuring on its cover a photo I myself took on board a USN "brown water navy" PBR boat, which had come to extract us from an ambush position, in the Mekong Delta, Republic of Vietnam – Rach Gia, to be precise – in 1969:)

... into a full-length novel. You’ll like that one too. As they say in Boston, "It’s a pissah!".

* Last question – what’s with that jacket photo?

Ah, yes – that was the inspiration of my daughter Jane (who, in fact, we can also thank for the very existence of this website). When she heard me kicking around the need to come up with a recent photo for the back of the new book’s cover (the front of which, incidentally, and speaking of daughters, was brilliantly designed by my other daughter, Annie), in a flash of great lateral thinking, Jane suggested "Why don’t you try re-creating that picture of you in your car, you know, the one you used for PUSHKIN SHOVE?"

She meant this one, taken in my brother Paul’s driveway in 1984 :

And so, 34  years later, here I am, in my own driveway.

Different car – decades having flowed under the bridge -- but same old (what the Frogues call) ”sale caractère”….