Sunjeev Sahota on Novels as Detective Stories

First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin, First Draft celebrates creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully chosen words to print as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in.

In this episode, Mitzi talks to Sunjeev Sahota about his new novel, The Spoiled Heart.

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From the episode:

Mitzi Rapkin: You said that all novels are kind of detective stories So I’m wondering how you decided the structure to reveal information in The Spoiled Heart. One of the mysteries of this book is that the main character’s son and mother died in a fire and who set the fire is unknown at the novel’s beginning.  By the middle of the book, we learn who set the fire. It is a central question of the book but it’s not as if discovering who set the fire solves everything in the novel.  There’s still a lot to unravel. It’s not working toward a gotcha ending like a cheap movie. So, I’m curious how you decided where to reveal who set the fire in the course of the book, and if that was very conscious, or if it just came out in the writing?

Sunjeev Sahota: I was very conscious that I didn’t want the question mark of who set the fire to be like a watermark running through the entire novel until you get to the end. That’s not the kind of writer I want to be or the kind of books I like reading. It’s more of an okay, once we know, then what?  What are the ramifications of it? How does it actually affect the story? And of course, once we know there’s lots of psychological questions that arise from this knowledge that the reader has at this point.  It’s the drama of psychology, it’s the drama of conversation, it’s the drama of not knowing what people are thinking that I think novels do so well. Just that sense of what’s going on inside your head if you know this piece of information, or if you don’t.  That drama of interiority is what I want to get at so the question of who set the fire I wanted to just kind of set aside with as much reasonable haste as I could and as my publisher would allow.

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Sunjeev Sahota is the author of the novels: China Room, which was longlisted for the Booker Prize and a finalist for the American Library Association’s Carnegie Medal; The Year of the Runaways, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Dylan Thomas Prize and was awarded a European Union Prize for Literature; and Ours are the Streets. In 2013, he was named one of Granta’s twenty Best of Young British Novelists of the decade. He lives in Sheffield, England, with his family.  His new novel is The Spoiled Heart.