The critic and author on writing about writers, his 20-year-long fascination with
Berlin, and the political manoeuvres of the Putin era
Chris Power, 46, grew up in Farnborough and lives in
London. After studying English at Swansea, he worked in advertising as a copywriter and creative director. He has judged the Goldsmiths prize and presented Radio 4’s Open Book. His debut story collection, Mothers, was longlisted for the Rathbones Folio prize. A Lonely Man is his first novel; set in Berlin, it turns on an encounter between an expat novelist and a fugitive English ghostwriter whose latest client, a dissident oligarch, has recently been found dead. The writer Catherine Lacey has called the book a “a page-turner with exacting syntax and emotional heft”.
Where did the idea for a thriller about
Russia come from?I’d long been grimly fascinated by Alexander Litvinenko’s killing in 2006 when I read Heidi Blake’s long BuzzFeed investigation, From Russia with Blood, into these 14 deaths on
British soil of
Russian nationals and British lawyers and fixers. It’s definitely on the lurid side – it’s like a James Herbert horror novel – but it’s a brilliant piece of reporting. There was Scot Young, this
Playboy money guy [a property developer], who supposedly jumped from the top floor of his Eaton Square apartment, but his daughters went there the next day and found fingernail marks on the window sill. The verdict of suicide was suspiciously open and shut. Blake’s report is very compelling but nothing’s proven and the layers of intrigue and inconclusiveness in the article got me thinking about an oligarch’s ghostwriter as an innocent in that world – as a bridge into it, I suppose. Robert [the expat novelist] added another layer: the book’s shape came from working out which writer was the main character.