Tag Archives: Chris Lloyd

WELSH WRITING WEDNESDAYS: CHRIS LLOYD ON WALES AS A STATE OF MIND

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Wales has an extraordinary breadth of landscapes and moods. From cities to hamlets, from rural idylls to the legacy of the mines. A beautiful country pockmarked by elements of its past that has learnt to make a virtue out of the ravages it’s experienced. It’s a landscape and a history that invite legend and myth to flourish, a haven for stories and storytellers.

So, if that’s the case, why do I set all my books outside Wales?

In many ways, Wales is a state of mind. A way of viewing the world – both our own and others – that is born of being a small nation. How I view the world, the places I’ve lived, the countries I’ve visited, is determined not just by where I happen to be, but where I happen to be from.

When I was twenty, I went to Spain for six months as part of my degree. I ended up going back there after graduating and staying for twenty-four years, twenty of them in Catalonia. My connection with Catalonia – initially the small city of Girona and then the big guns of Barcelona – was immediate. I felt an affinity with its history of being the smaller partner to a more powerful neighbour, a culture that had been denied and pushed and pulled about at various times, a language that had been banned and belittled, and a culture that continued to thrive despite everything it had faced. And I viewed it all through the prism of my own background.

And that is why, despite the richness of Wales as a setting, there was never any question in my mind that I should write about Catalonia. The problem was that I waited until I was living back in Wales before having the idea to write a book set there, a monument to my planning skills. Except it wasn’t a problem. Just as when I’d first gone to live in Catalonia, I found myself looking at Wales through new eyes and finally understanding how I felt about being Welsh, so writing about Girona from a distance actually helped me pin down my thoughts and feelings about my former adopted home. Oddly, I’ve found that to write about somewhere I love, I need a distance from it, which is probably one of my barriers to writing stories set in Wales – I live here.

The first in my Catalan trilogy, City of Good Death, featuring Elisenda Domènech, a police officer in the newly-created Catalan police force, draws enormously from Catalan culture and the history and legends of Girona. A killer is using the Virgin of Good Death, a small statue dating from the Middle Ages, when it served to give convicted prisoners a final blessing before they were led out of the city to their execution, to announce the impending death of someone they feel is deserving of execution. Unfortunately, there are those in the city who agree and who applaud the killer’s every move. Until the victims become less deserving.

It was a similar passion that led to my new series, featuring Eddie Giral, a French police detective in Paris under the Nazi Occupation. I’d been fascinated for years by the notions of resistance and collaboration, and the blurred lines between them, but I wanted to write the story from a Parisian’s point of view, not the guns and guts heroism of the movies, but the day-to-day survival of ordinary people trying to get by. As near to the real history as possible. And I think that that is an essentially Welsh vision of life – an interest in society and community, an affinity with the underdog and the need to preserve a sense of self.

 

Follow Chris on Twitter: https://twitter.com/chrislloydbcn

 

 

 

 

WELSH WRITING WEDNESDAYS: INTRODUCING CRIME WRITER CHRIS LLOYD

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With writing, there’s always a spark that ignites the flame. In my case, it was a small grey plaque almost hidden inside the entrance to a school.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. My name’s Chris Lloyd and I write crime fiction. I’m from Wales, but I studied Spanish and French at university and fell head over heels in love with the Catalan city of Girona when I spent my study year there. So much so that after I graduated, I hopped straight on the first bus back to Catalonia and there I stayed for nearly a quarter of a century.

I taught English in Girona for a few years before moving to Bilbao, in the Basque Country, where I opened the Oxford University Press office. After that, I moved back to Catalonia – specifically to Barcelona – where I lived for the next sixteen years, apart from a three-year stint in Madrid. I also spent a semester in Grenoble, where I researched the French Resistance movement – you’ll discover the reason for that in a moment.

My job in educational publishing meant that I was paid to travel all around Spain giving workshops and book presentations, which was great fun until it stopped being great fun. That’s when I took voluntary redundancy three days before my fortieth birthday and set up as a Catalan and Spanish translator. I also wrote travel books for Rough Guides at the same time, until my wife and I decided it was time to move to Wales, which is where we live now, in the town where I grew up. All good stories should come full circle.

Which brings me back to the spark.

It was a small grey plaque in a nondescript building and it stopped me in my tracks. It was in the Pletzel, a district of Paris that was home to much of the city’s Jewish population in 1940, and it listed the children from the school who had been sent to Auschwitz and never returned.

I was already researching for a novel set in the city under the Occupation – my fascination with the era and the oddly blurred notions of resistance and collaboration had been ignited when I was in Grenoble – but it was that moment when I felt the small hand of history tug at my sleeve and I knew that I had to tell the story of the city under the Nazis as truthfully as possible.

But I had to tell it my way, through crime fiction. About a Paris police detective, Eddie Giral, a veteran of the last war, who struggles to do his job and retain a moral compass under the new rules imposed on the city and the people. On the day the Nazis enter the city, four Polish refugees are found gassed in a railway truck, and only Eddie among the police feels the need to find out the truth of what happened to them. This will lead him into conflict with his fellow police, an American journalist, the Polish Resistance and, most dangerously of all, the Occupiers. It will also lead him to question decisions he made in the past and decide what he must do to atone in the present.

The first book in the series, The Unwanted Dead, recently won the HWA Gold Crown Award and was shortlisted for the CWA Historical Dagger. The second book, Paris Requiem, comes out in 2022, and I’m currently writing the third in the series, set at Christmas 1940, although with little seasonal cheer or goodwill.

On which note, please allow me to wish you all the very best of cheer for Christmas and the year ahead. And lots of good books to enjoy.

 

 

Read more about Chris at https://chrislloydauthor.com/