A quick update to let you know that Book # 5 is now finished and will be published in February of 2014. It is titled 'The Beast in the Red Forest' and follows the disappearance of Inspector Pekkala at the end of Book 4 (The Red Moth). I am now hard at work on Book 6. As I have mentioned before, these days I seem to spending more time with people I have invented than with people who are real, although that is not always a bad thing. The number of foreign translations of the Pekkala series continues to grow. I believe the number is up to 23 now, with more expected very soon. I apologize to my American readers for the fact that The Red Moth did not appear in hard back, although it is readily available through Kindle (or any other e-book form) as well as Amazon.uk. Hard back printing of the series should begin again very soon in the US.
I continue to enjoy the work very much. After the initial strangeness of writing a series, as well as working under a pseudonym, wore off, I find that the effect of working so concentratedly and for such extended periods of time in one head space is of inhabiting two parallel worlds, the world of the fiction and the world in which I actually live. When I am deep down in the mines of a new book, it seems as if every conscious thought is matched by details of the world I am creating on the computer screen. By the way, I use a Getac B300. Somebody asked me about that the other day. Whenever I am sitting quietly, in meetings or on trains or taxi cabs, my mind drifts away into this alternate universe. I am constantly transcribing these details into a small, leather bound notebook made by a company called Arte e Cuoio, which I bought at the airport in Brussels years ago and have managed, through sheer luck, not to lose. Written on the leather inside of the notebook are places I have been with that notebook - everywhere from Honolulu, to Narvik to Tulum to Cardiff station.
After finishing Book 5, I tried to take some time off from writing, but I found it very difficult and quite depressing. For me, not working is much harder than working and I am very glad to be chipping away at the rock face of another book. Without that anchoring to my days, that method of escape, my brain flutters around in my head like a bird trapped in a cage.
As I write this, I am sitting in my study in New Jersey, getting ready to head up to my summer place in northern Maine. I don't know how easy it will be for me to write over the summer. The internet where I live up there is very patchy.
I'm sorry I haven't written more in this blog over the past few months. I have been so busy with finishing one book and beginning another, not to mention teaching my class at the Peddie School, which one of the great pleasures of my life, that I haven't had the inclination to sit down and write.
I am very happy with the way the latest book turned out, and I hope you will be too.

This is from an interview I did recently with a newspaper in Finland -

1.         Inspector Pekkala is quite a fascinating character. Was it easy to create him? What kind of research you did? How many real-life Finns do you know?

Inspector Pekkala is based on two people.

The first is a man named AT Vassileyev, who was the last serving director of the Tsar’s Okhrana prior to the Revolution. He escaped from Russia and made his way to Paris, where he lived in poverty until his death in the mid 1930’s. During this time, he wrote a book about his experiences, which was titled, simply, The Okhrana. The book was translated into English in 1932, I think, and very few copies were printed. I stumbled upon the book in an antique shop in Princeton, New Jersey, which is where I live and work. The book was in very bad condition. The pages were crumbling in my hands as I turned them. but it was as if Vassileyev himself was speaking the words inside my head. I was shocked at how many things he predicted for the future of Russia. Some of them appeared so outrageous that the translator felt obliged to write, in her foreword to the book, that these were obviously the ramblings of an unstable mind. But every one of them had come true by the time I read the book.

The second person is my grandfather, who served as a detective with the London Metropolitan Police (Scotland Yard) from the 1930’s until the late 1950’s. He ran away from his home in Wales at the age of 16 and joined the police in London. One day, when he was chasing down a criminal, the suspect’s dog attacked him. He was taken to the hospital and ended up marrying the nurse who treated him that day. From my father, I heard many stories of my grandfather’s adventures in Scotland Yard. I was always very nervous around my grandfather. He was a tall man – 6’6” – and I do not remember him smiling very much. I still have the truncheon he carried during his early days in the police and also the whistle, with its distinctive sound, carried by all policemen in those days.

I suppose I should include a third person, and that is myself. As a writer, you cannot escape writing about yourself, no matter how many masks you wear. The way Pekkala speaks, the way he acts, the things he thinks about – that is all me – for better or worse.

2.       The biggest question for Finnish readers is: Why does Pekkala stay in Russia?

(There were a lot of Finns in Czar Nicholas’s service, but the majority of them returned to homeland after our declaration of Independence, December 6th 1917. Just the hard-lined Finnish communists / bolseviks stayed – and most of them were excecuted in Stalin´s purges at late Thirties.)

Initially, Pekkala does try to leave Russia. He sends his fiancé to Paris, with a promise to meet her there as soon as he can. Later, as he tries to escape through Finland, he is arrested by Red Militia at the border. From there, he is transported back to Russia and eventually sent to the notorious gulag known as Borodok. There, against all odds, he manages to survive until Stalin himself recalls him to duty. The question which Pekkala (and I as well) must grapple with is – why would he work for a man like Stalin? Why would he serve someone who condemned him to a slow death in the gulag? Equally, one could ask – why would Stalin choose to work with a man who was once the favorite of the Tsar? The answer is that, in spite of their differences, these two men have one thing in common, which is to ensure the survival of their country. The result is an uneasy truce between Stalin and Pekkala. I love writing about this. The complex equation of their loyalty to each other, and to Russia, comes into a different perspective with every book. When I am writing, and trying to understand this character I have created, I ask myself – What does a good man do when his country is governed by a tyrant? Does he simply run away, or does he find some way to continue doing what he believes is right? This is why Pekkala does not leave.

3.       What kind of future will Pekkala have?

I am just finishing up the fifth book in the series, which takes place in the year 1944. I will be handing it to my editor in London and then will immediately begin work on the sixth book. These days, I think, I send more time with Inspector Pekkala than I do with anyone else, living or not. Stalin is constantly losing his temper with Pekkala and threatening him with all kinds of punishments. But he needs Pekkala. No one else can do what he does. In spite of his frustration with the Inspector, Stalin is in awe of Pekkala, just as theTsar once was, and that is one of the main reasons why Pekkala stays alive. For anyone who is interested, details of the books can be found on the website – Inspectorpekkala.com

As for Pekkala’s future, I think he will have a long and colorful career.

4.       What kind of CV do you have? And as a successful writer – how did you end up writing this kind of quality-crime-fiction?

            As some people have discovered by now, my real name is not Sam Eastland. It’s Paul Watkins, and I have been writing under my real name for many years now. I attended the Dragon School and Eton, both in England, and then went to America, to study at Yale University. I live in the United States now, and divide my time between Princeton, which is just outside New York City, and my cabin in the forest of northern Maine. I published my first book when I was 22 and have been writing ever since. For anyone who is interested, there is a website devoted to the books I have written under my own name – paulwatkins.com

I never intended to write under a pseudonym! The way it came about was that I had written a book in which the main character just happened to be a detective – Inspector Pekkala. My British editor convinced me to turn it into a series and, so that it did not disrupt my career as a ‘literary’ author, encouraged me to write the series under a different name. I almost didn’t do it. I didn’t know whether I would enjoy writing about the same characters and the same time in history in multiple books. But I’m very glad I did. I have grown to know the characters so well, the good and the bad, that they seem completely alive to me. It has also been very gratifying to see how well the books have done. The series has been translated into more than 20 languages now, but I was particularly pleased when I learned that the stories would be translated into Finnish! I have traveled quite a bit in Finland, from the southern island of Korpo, north to Rovaniemi and to Lappeenranta in the east. I am a huge fan of your beautiful country, your history and your people.

I try not to think about the last scenes of the book until the time comes to actually write them. The reason for this is that the finale of the story is always slightly different than the one I imagined when I sat down to begin the novel. If I keep too strictly to the plot I laid out in the beginning, the natural flow of the story is hobbled. It's much better to keep things maleable until as late in the game as possible. When the time comes to set those scenes, they all seem to fall into place at the same time, and usually at really inconvenient moments. I have a note book. It is made by an Italian company called 'Arte e Cuoio' and I purchased it at the airport in Brussels after I had written a story for the London Times about traveling through the Ardennes Forest. It has been with me on my travels ever since, and I have written down the places on the inside of the leather cover - Tulum, Fishguard, Krossbu, Drake Bay, Vik, l'Anse aux Meadows. But I can't always carry it, and sometimes, when the ideas come in, my notebook is tucked away some place where I can't get to it. I was once at a funeral when I figured out exactly how a book should end. I wrote the scenes down on the memorial card we had been given at the start of the service. I have scenes written down on Moroccan Dirham notes, scribbled down one night as I sat in the windowsill of my room at the Hotel Smara in Essaouira, having run out of writing paper earlier in the evening. But this most recent episode beats all the others. It happened this past Sunday, when I was out bicycling in the farmland south of the town where I live.  I ride about on a bicycle called a Guv'nor, which is made by the British company Pashley. It only has one speed and I love the simplicity of its design. The crops are being harvested now - soybeans and corn left to harden on the stalk, which is used to feed cattle in the winter. I was cycling behind one truck which was completely filled with dried corn. Thousands of kernels were flying out of the back of the truck, crackling off my helmet and striking my arms like bee stings. In the middle of this, I suddenly realized exactly how the latest book should end. But I had nothing with which to write or anything to write on. The trouble with these sudden influx of ideas is that they completely fill up your mind all at the same time. It feels a little like when your computer is suddenly inundated with pop-up screens. You can't keep them all in perfect focus in your mind and if you are't careful, some of them will disappear if you don't write them down immediately. I managed to find the stub of a pencil on the side of the road, which solved half of the problem. But I still had nothing on which to write. Eventually, I walked out into a recently harvested corn field and picked up a few dried corn husks. And I wrote the scenes down on them . My cycling jersey has three pockets built into the back and this is the first time I have ever used them. As soon as I got home, I transcribed everything onto a nice clean sheet of white paper. but I pinned the corn husk on my wall to remind myself never to leave home without pencil and paper, no matter where I'm going. 

Here's another picture of my grandfather. This photo was taken in the 1930's, when he was a young police officer in the London Metropolitan Police. For the last couple of days, I had been wandering around in a haze of indecision about the last quarter of the book I'm working on now, which is the 5th in the Inspector Pekkala series. The 4th, which is called The Red Moth, is already finished and due out early in 2013. In the 5th book, Stalin gives Major Kirov, Pekkala's assistant, the task of tracking down Pekkala, who has gone missing behind the German lines just after the invasion of Russia in 1941. As with the other books, there always seems to be a moment when I am faced either with a multitude of possibilities about how things could go. The writing grinds to a halt as I try to figure out which path is best. It is very disorienting, and I have learned that the only cure is to get away from my desk for a while. Having built up momentum over months of working on a project, it is actually harder not to write than it is to sit down and write every morning. I look out my window and see people heading off to work. I heard the rumble of cars in the distance as people commute into New York City. This is during the school year. For the rest of the time, I am up in Maine and the most I am likely to hear are chainsaws buzzing somewhere in the forest. And not to be working, when everybody else is working, feels strange and sad. The most logical thing to do when I am stuck is to keep writing and to figure out the problem on the page, but I have learned the hard way that this takes a huge amount of time and energy and is less efficient than doing nothing. How can doing nothing be efficient? It sounds like a Zen koan. But I have learned to trust my head to work things out by itself, if only I can step back far enough from the story to let myself see it from a different angle. The answer always appears. And when it does, it seems so simple that my first reaction is to think - how is it possible that I didn't figure this out right at the beginning? The things which appear simplest in the final product are often the most difficult to create while the process is still ongoing. To work by not working has been one of the most complex challenges I have ever faced as a writer.

Here is a picture of my grandfather, who was a detective sergeant with the London Metropolitan Police (Scotland Yard). The other people in the picture are my grandmother and my father.

I have a cabin up in Maine, which is where I spend my summers and as much of each winter as I can. It's where I get most of my thinking done. The rest of the year, I teach at a private high school down in New Jersey. I only teach one class a term, which gives me plenty of time for writing, but living in the chaos of central New Jersey is not conducive to the kind of thinking that allows me to map out a book. The Pekkala books, perhaps because they are part of the genre of detective thrillers, need to be planned almost completely even before the first word is written. When I first started writing under my real name, Paul Watkins, my approach was just to have a vague idea in my head and then to attack the blank page, hour after hour, and see what came of it. It was a very energetic way of writing. At the beginning of each day, I rarely knew where I was going to end up. I look back fondly on those times, with the same kind of affection as I look back on my first car, which was always falling apart and required an incredible amount of faith and tinkering to stay in motion. But that form of writing, passionate though it may have been, was very wasteful. I threw away almost as much as I wrote. Now I am more surgical in my approach. I remember a scientist explaining to me once that the great Apex Predators of the world - the Great White, the Grizzly, the Orca - expend a minimum of effort catching their prey, but that when they do strike, they do so with such incredible ferocity that the first attack is nearly always fatal. Now I try to write the way a Great White hunts. Which means I spend a lot of time swimming around in my head, making sure I have everything right before my fingers even touch the keyboard. Some of my friends down here in Jersey ask how I can handle the solitude of living up in the mountains of north western Maine. This thing is, it doesn't feel lonely or solitary, even though there are very few people around and the only ones I see regularly aside from my family are the guy at the gas station or the bear hunters who have camps up the road. When I am plotting out a book, I spend so much time with the characters that it actually starts to feel crowded.
I wasn't able to write much on the blog this summer because the place where I live has no regular internet connection. On the one hand, I am glad not to have the distraction. On the other hand, I feel bad about the time gap in this blog. This blogging does not come naturally to me. One of the reasons I started writing was so that I could keep the world at arm's length, as that I could live between the cracks of the world. That freedom to make my own hours and work at my own pace and go where I want when I want is the great wealth of any writer, I believe. Writing under a pseudonym only increases that distance, which i found very disorienting at first but which I have learned to value greatly in the past few years. The Blog connects me to that world in a way not entirely comfortable to me. At least, right now. Maybe I will get used to it. In the meantime, I hope what I am writing is interesting. If you have any questions, you can contact me via the Inspectorpekkala.com website, and I would be happy to answer them on the blog. I receive a lot of messages through the site from all over the world and always reply to them as quickly as I can.
I'll post a picture of the place where I live, and where I do my thinking. In my next post, I will write an update of the latest Pekkala book, which is due out early next year, and also the one I'm just finishing up now. I am pleased to report that the series continues to do well, and has now been translated into more than 20 languages, most recently Soviet Georgian and Macedonian.