Author Michael Collins hails from Limerick but the 'thinking man's JohnGrisham' is more at home with the underbelly of America, writesArminta Wallace
In real life, writers rarely resemble the photographs on their book jackets. Usually they look older. Michael Collins, however, looks much, much younger than the man pictured on the back cover of Lost Souls. Perhaps it's all that running. He has been a runner since his teens. And we're not talking about running for buses here. The man who made it on to the Booker shortlist for The Keepers of Truth has run a marathon across Antarctica and cut quite a dash in the Everest Mile.
On the first afternoon of his two-day interview stint in Dublin last week, he tells me with a casual shrug, he ran from the Shelbourne Hotel to Dalkey. Dalkey? How long did it take? "Forty-eight minutes," comes the prompt reply. "All those cars," he adds, with unfeigned horror. "How would you sit in a car for that length of time?" This, mark you, from somebody who lives in Seattle.
It's interesting that Michael Collins finds Ireland strange, because many people find it strange that an Irish writer has produced a trilogy of literary crime novels set in the American Mid-West. But he's only Irish in that he was born in Limerick.
He is, he says, really a nomad. His family moved, first to Dublin, then, in the late 1970s, to Chicago. Young Michael came back to Ireland to finish secondary school, then went to university in the US on a running scholarship and has been there since. He now teaches writing at Washington State University. But while we're on the subject of his family, is it true that he's related to that Michael Collins? "He was my grandfather's brother," he says. "Growing up in Limerick, it meant that in some sweet shops you'd get an extra sweet, and then in others, well . . ."
Moving to the States at the age of 13 was clearly a formative business for the young Collins. "American sexuality - American everything was really overbearing," he recalls. "There was this thing of phoning your friends and arranging to see them, or have them sleep over at your house. In Glenageary, there was just a green, and you went out and played football."
His father's work with CIE Tours, meanwhile, demanded that the Collins family got out and about in the sort of small towns in the US Mid-West "Rust Belt" which most Irish emigrants never see. "My dad had to mine the Mid-West spouting the benefits of a holiday to Ireland - and it was amazing," he recalls. "There'd be festivals where we'd dress up as Indians, in moccasins and stuff. And my father would give away a free trip to Ireland. It was a really different America to what you see on sitcoms; city-based America. And my whole family was - not disturbed, but we'd kind of look at each other. I mean, some of these towns are more cloistered than towns like Sixmilebridge outside Limerick.
"At that stage you really had the fallout of the death of American industrialism. I was at school in Notre Dame, Indiana, one of the richest Catholic schools. The campus is in a town called South Bend. It has its own security so no one can get in, and usually the students don't want to get out; it's the ideal zoo. I was trying to run 15 miles a day, so I used to just leave the campus sometimes - and a mile outside, you'd be in the midst of devastation. You'd see drug addicts; women with chains of kids; this sort of Jerry Springeresque world."
It was this world, rather than the luxurious ease inside the college gates, which interested Collins - particularly when, having signed up for a creative writing course as a way of acquiring some easy points in his final year, he started to write.
"The teacher, who was Irish-American, said I couldn't do American dialogue," he says. "So I began by writing about Limerick - dark stories about running races in cow-shitty fields." Being well away from where he was writing about, he found, helped.
"It just came to me in images. If I had had a video camera I'd have done three-minute shorts."
He eventually published two volumes of stories, The Meat Eaters and The Feminists Go Swimming. But the technique of recollection in tranquillity, or at least in retrospect, was to become Collins's modus operandi. When he got a job at Microsoft and moved to Seattle, he began to write novels about the Mid-West, producing what eventually became a trilogy: The Resurrectionists, The Keepers of Truth and Lost Souls.
"Lost Souls is, more or less, the life of a guy who's got some credit card debt, who's trying to do different things, who's divorced. I wanted him to be sympathetic, but he did pull a gun on his wife, so there is a vicious streak in him. He's part of the problem - he's not part of the problem."
The problem, as Collins sees it, is the death of social solidarity in a society in which individualism has gone mad. "There's a veneer of easy friendship in America which is disarmingly charming," he says. "But if you just go one level down, it turns into something a lot more sinister. The Mid-West is ultra-conservative, and secret organisations are at the core of it. When the Ku Klux Klan was reborn during the Depression, the biggest order was in Indiana. It's not like the Deep South; they're not lynching blacks. It's more squeezing people out. Don't serve them, don't encourage them, so they'll eventually leave."
The "me" culture, Collins is convinced, began with the decline of manufacturing industry in Mid-West factory towns, when traditional values of "work hard and succeed" were replaced by despairing dreams anchored to nothing in particular. "People have always got a plan - they've always got some dream to buy into. I mean, I know how hard it is to get a six-pack [of stomach muscles]. You'll never get it from running, anyway, and you need to eat zero fat and stuff. But in America they have constant TV ads that claim, 'Two minutes on this machine and you're there'. And if you sit watching that on TV for long enough, well . . ." When the dream dies, nightmare begins. "If you don't make it, you're a loser - and there's always access to a gun for 30 bucks or so."
In The Keepers of Truth, Collins uses the structure of the crime novel - the framework of a murder mystery - to tell his story of the post-industrial Mid-West. Lost Souls, too, opens with the discovery of a child's body amid a pile of fallen leaves, the apparent victim of a hit and run. The Resurrectionists has been hailed as "a thriller with hidden depths", and he has been called "the thinking man's John Grisham". Yet his books are nominated for literary prizes. Is he interested in the place where crime fiction and literary fiction might meet? He shrugs. He isn't, really. "Only one person can win the Booker and even if you do win it, will it make people go into bookshops and pick up your books? When I said I wanted to write something more accessible, people mentioned James Lee Burke to me. I had never heard of him. I moved in the sort of literary circles where the talk is of Colum McCann, Peter Carey, Colm Tóibín. But go into bookshops, and whose books are people picking up? James Lee Burke's."
Film director Anthony Minghella picked up the rights to The Keepers of Truth, however, so Collins is clearly doing something right in the accessibility department. Being around film folk, he says, made him more conscious than ever of the need to write books for short attention spans, so Lost Souls is a book of short chapters and limpid sentences.
Collins, though, is not a man to stay still for long. Having perfected the technique of the literary crime novel in a series of books set in the recent past, he has now made a quantum leap into the future. His next book, Exodus, was inspired by his time at Microsoft. "I was fascinated by the new world order, the way people could make money on paper - it wasn't at all tied to how hard you worked. I was recruited as a programmer, even though I was a creative writer with no qualifications. And the place was full of linguists and psychologists trying to figureout how to beam subliminal messages into cyberspace. They were always on about colours - they were creating the new landscape that people would be looking at. I was there when they came up with the blue which was gonna be the sky. Even the word 'Windows' - it all had to mean something. Which is ironic, considering that - I mean, I've no real axe to grind with Microsoft, but the building we were working in had no windows. We were down in the basement. We were working with Windows and we had the blue sky, but we were isolated from light - the outside world was gone."
Exodus will be set in a near future in which the dotcom elite set out to leave what they see as a corrupted planet. It won't be a fantasy world à la The Lord of the Rings or Star Trek - more a chilling fable on the lines of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. "I don't want to make it too futuristic or totally fantastic, but something that is almost believable. Since the SARS scare, you get people calling up talk radio in the US saying that 500 million is what the population of the world should be. Their theory is that epidemics like SARS and AIDS are experiments which will bring this stabilisation about in a peaceful way by killing off hundreds of thousands of surplus human beings. And these are environmentally conscious people who want to introduce elephants back to Africa. They can go on about this for hours at a time. If you start to listen to that . . ."
Collins shakes his head, picks up his running gear, and he's off.