Big Derek Lambert, newsman turned novelist, is darkly looking over a dying half of Guinness in the Bailey. Getting tired of resting. Essentially a newsman without a deadline. Talking. Killing time.
But why the hell should you worry about deadlines when your first novel, Angels in the Snow, brought in £10,000 and when that was four books ago and when there’s no tax on writers in Ireland?
And when your publishers in London send out blurbs describing you as one of their best new writers and when you are the only man in Dublin who can claim to be living in a Georgian house with a bow-backed back room (whatever that is)?
Forty years old. Six feet and fourteen stone big and dark like a Connaught cattle dealer with the same canniness in the face. An Irish mother called Riddick before Lambert. Another book, For Infamous Conduct, just finished. Publishers usually want just one book a year from the one ‘name’. Even cheating a little on ten pages a day (a personal deadline?), an old newsman can write a thriller in maybe five weeks. Maybe it’s time to get more names.
‘But still I miss the big story. The fellows I know are in Vietnam or in Nigeria. Though I don’t much fancy it, I get tired resting. I might go to Iceland next.’
Yesterday was Moscow for the Daily Express. Maybe it was India or Africa or the Middle East – on expenses. Yesterday was a time of two-finger pecking at the guts of a battered portable Olivetti, catching planes, meeting deadlines.
Yesterday was the UDI story from Rhodesia. A hot room in the hot city of Salisbury. Ambassador Hotel and the Derek Lambert byline over stories recording a colony slipping out of colonization.
Yesterday was Tel Aviv and sitting at a café table on the Dizengoff, drinking, watching the girls go by in military uniforms. Or it was Suez and battle. Standing beside a General and saying, ‘I can’t see any bloody snipers,’ then ‘Krak!’ – splinters flying and a head wound.
The room in the bleak flats where the Westerners live in Moscow was in Kutuzovsky Prospekt, only a little way from the Kremlin. ‘The room was bugged. You called the unseen bug “Fred” and often had conversations with it late at night. You got used to it after a while. It was stupid for a Westerner to bring one of the Muscovite women to his room with Fred there, and a camera could be operating across the roadway from anywhere.’ The Westerners still try, though. They get into trouble that way.
‘You have the impression that the women in Moscow are drab and unattractive. It’s the clothes. The women in Tel Aviv are beautiful. And Irish girls with their long slithery hair.’
The road back from Moscow ended in Ballycotton, where Moscow-based thriller Angels in the Snow was finished in the flat above Mrs Roberts’ grocery shop in Main Street and the book was dedicated to a lady called Mona in the Holiday Inn, where many good drinks were drunk and good times enjoyed.
For Infamous Conduct, an India-based adventure saga, is confidently expected to follow Angels and such other books as The Kites of War into the bestseller lists. By then Derek Lambert will probably be in either Brazil or Iceland or who knows where? These will be trips away from his flat in Ely Place which is now to become his permanent home. That’s where the battered Olivetti portable is now.
‘I like Ireland. I very much like Dublin. This is a writers’ city really. The trouble is that everybody wants to write a novel about Ireland. I’m a little unusual for a novelist because I don’t think up a plot and then find a location that would suit it. I prefer to visit a country then a plot occurs to me quite naturally. Will I write a book about Ireland? Maybe.’
Now that would be interesting.
This unattributed interview with Derek Lambert was published in 1970 as ‘The Newsman Who Swapped Stories for Novels’ shortly before his two Richard Falkirk books The Chill Factor and The Twisted Wire were published.