Mazzeri
Mazzeri tells the story of a young man, Richard Ross, who travels to the high citadel of Bonifacio in the island of Corsica to uncover his family’s roots. But, armed with only a faded photograph of a Legionnaire standing beneath a stone gateway, he finds the locals curiously unwilling to help. He rents a villa on the coast and meets the singularly beautiful Manou Pietri, who beguiles him with tales of the megalithic isle, its folklore and the Mazzeri – the dream hunters. For a while Ric’s life beneath the Corsican sun is as close to perfect as he could wish, but a chance encounter with a feral boy turns Ric’s life upside down, and he is drawn into a tangled web of lies and deceit. On an island where murder is commonplace and most crimes go unsolved, only the Mazzeri know who will live.
Please tell us about your hobbies of yachting, motor racing and skiing, when did your passion for each of them begin?
As a teenager I raced bangers in the local Destruction Derby at Aldershot and always dreamed of driving the cars I’d watched my heroes drive. When I saw Steve McQueen in the classic motor racing movie Le Mans in 1971, I knew I had to be a part of the scene one day. Also, my father raced stock cars in the early days and Jaguars with Equipe Endeavour in the late fifties. And in 1989 I sponsored my business partner to drive at the Le Mans 24 hour race. He didn’t win, but I got the bug. And yet, I wanted to race older seat-of-the-pants racing cars, not modern slicks and air bags, so historic sports and single seaters were the way to go. As far as sailing goes, I worked on the gin palaces out of Cannes for a season when I was twenty and managed to spend my twenty-first birthday sleeping on a bench in Calvi, northern Corsica. I made some good friends that season and a year later one of them asked me if I would like to join him and the crew he was getting together to sail a fifty foot ketch to the West Indies from Spain. In the event, no one else turned up, so he and I just got on with it. I ended up living in Bequia, the island of clouds, in the Grenadines for a couple of months. The first time I put my feet on snow was a school skiing trip to Lucerne in Switzerland; from then on I was hooked and was fortunate enough to ski every year through my teens. I went to college in south-west Germany and skied weekends with friends in Gstaad. From there I’ve been lucky enough to ski in most of the European countries, including Poland, and Canada and the U.S.A. My eldest daughter is a highly qualified ski instructor who teaches all over the world. In many ways, she lives my dream.
How much research was required for the history of Corsica?
Again, I was lucky enough to spend a month of each summer during my youth in Corsica, so I knew a little about the island. At the end of my last summer there, the local village matriarch gave me a book of Corsu proverbs and aphorisms. I kept it with me until I was mugged when sleeping on the rocks in Cannes that season I worked there. Since then, I have been back to Corsica to finish the spadework for the novel, but much of my time in research for Mazzeri was spent in reading: Dorothy Carrington’s books have been invaluable, so too those of Rolli Lucarotti and Dr Stephen Wilson.
Where did your inspiration for the character of Ric come from?
My inspiration for the character of Ric came as much out of the story itself as from any person I’ve met. I didn’t fit his character in around the premise, but he definitely walked out of the pages towards me as I was writing the story. If I based him on anyone I’ve ever met, I suppose he is most like an American chopper pilot I met in the small coastal town of Villefranche sur Mer near Nice in ‘77. He’d flown in Vietnam and had seen things most eyes wouldn’t want to see. There was a look to him, a kind of world weariness to his face that suggested he wished the world could be some other way than how it was. But, Ric is British of course, or is he?
Who are your favourite reads?
My favourite reads are everything and anything by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest K Gann, The Snows of Kilimanjaro by Hemingway, The Merry Month of May by James Jones, Something of value by Robert Ruark, The Reader by Bernhard Schlink and The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler. But, I like Chimamanda Adichie, Andrea Levy, Carlos Ruiz Zafon, Joseph Conrad, Axel Munthe, Gavin Lyall, Brian Lecomber and Alain Furst, so that’s a pretty broad range.
Please tell us about your background.
My background was very settled. My father, who grew up in New Cross, southeast London, and served in the RAF during the war, was a motor dealer, not sharp like some I’ve met, but very straight and respected by both the trade and the public. My mother, having also lived in London through the war, committed a lot of her time to working with charities that revolved around injured servicemen. I was born in London, grew up in Surrey and went to a public school near Guildford, but I wasn’t a great success at school and always wanted to be out earning money, not sitting in a class room. I was predestined to join the army and spent a couple of months with the Royal Horse Artillery walking the East/West German border, but I was hospitalised with hepatitis for the better part of a year and that put paid to my soldiering. So, I attended the Goethe Institut in Freiburg im Breisgau to learn German and worked as a translator in a textile company in Stuttgart, which was daft when considering the Germans I worked with spoke better English than I did. After that I lived in the office of a shop in Shere, worked on the counter and wrote between serving customers. I coached local children in maths and French in return for a bath and dinner. It was fun, but it didn’t pay well, so I got a job cleaning cars in a garage in Dorking.
What was your process for writing this book?
Initially, I wrote Mazzeri under the title Written in the Sky. It started out as a fairly simple novella about an army officer who, while on leave in southern Corsica, falls for a local woman. Then, through my research I realised I knew more about the island and the Mazzeri than I had at first thought. The more I wrote, the more doors seemed to open and the story of Ric Ross and Manou just charged right out of the narrative.
What is next for you?
At the moment I’m final editing my second novel, Boarding House Reach, which tells the story of five characters who meet in a boarding house over one weekend in a village on the Norfolk coast. The novel tells how the characters come to be in The Reach and how they are interconnected, even though they don’t know it. I have also written some of the sequel to Mazzeri, which is titled Ontreto and set on the island of Lipari in the Sicilian Sea. The Aeolian Islands, like Corsica, are rare jewels of the Mediterranean. I am also working on a book of short stories, which I hope to have completed by early spring.