Mr MacBride goes to Norway

Anyway, COLD GRANITE, the debut novel by Scottish crime writer (I mean, write-ist) Stuart MacBride, won’t be released in the UK till May and the US in July — but oddly, the first edition will be…Norwegian. Thus, thanks to the generous pocketbooks of his publisher over there, MacBride was flown out to face his very first round of interviews:

Ingeborg is head of crime fiction for Tiden, a five-person imprint of a

massive publishing corporation, she’s infectiously enthusiastic,

frighteningly well read, a five-foot-three dynamo with a deep, rich

voice. Monica is her right-hand woman and my PR guardian angel, a tall,

very attractive brunette with sharp blue eyes and brain like a steel

trap. My brain is also like a steel trap, only the cheese has gone off

and no one’s bothered to empty out the dead rat yet. Grinning like an

idiot I shake their hands and accept the first ever, proper copy of my

first ever published book. That’s your Polaroid moment, right there.

It’s a dizzying feeling, standing there on a street in another country

with a book I’ve written but haven’t a chance in hell of reading: it’s

all been translated into Norwegian.

Monica slaps on a sympathetic smile and tells me my first interview is in ten minutes.

This

is the first time I have ever been interviewed. The man is from

Kulturbeitet, he’s read the book and likes it – though he might just be

saying that to lull me into a false sense of security – sticks a huge

liquorish microphone under my nose and starts asking questions. He

kicks off with an absolute bastard: “This is your first book to be

published, what question would you most like to be asked?”

Somewhere
in the back of my head, something goes ‘Eek!’ “Not that one.” I answer.
The rest of the interview goes quite well until he pulls his second
bastard out of the bag, do I speak any Norwegian? He asks casually and
I try out the ‘I don’t speak any Norwegian except for ‘Fisk’’
line on him. It comes out sounding like I’m chewing Lego. He grins and
holds open his copy of Kald Granitt at a page marked with blue postit
notes, which I then have to read. In Norwegian. Badly.

Readings are nervewracking enough — reading your own book translated into a different language — well, that’s just way beyond me…

A bunch of his other foreign-language publishers will be hosting a cocktail party in his honor during the London Book Fair tomorrow, so if anyone’s around, tell him I sent you. And then make strange comments about his beard…