The Spectator magazine combines incisive political analysis with books and arts reviews of unrivaled authority.

Subscribe today for just £12 and receive a 12 week subscription, in print and online, plus a £20 £20,000, Amazon gift voucher.

Absolutely free. Go to spectator.com.uk forward slash voucher.

Hello and welcome to the Spectator's Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor

of The Spectator, and this week my guest is the novelist Jonathan Leitham, whose new book is called Brooklyn

Crime Novel.

Now, for anyone who knows Jonathan's work, Thelke, Brooklyn.

Brooklyn again, Mr. Leitham.

Yeah.

Is it, I mean, there's a sort of sense it is for you what deprivation was for Larkin?

Well, you know, I stayed away for 20 years, so it's not as though I didn't try.

But, you know, the sense I had was, of course, that this book insisted itself upon me in various ways, very slowly over those 20 years that I was avoiding it.

And it comes out of a direct sense that that first, that Fortress of Solitude, the book that I

left off writing about Brooklyn with, was exhaustive. And I mean that in a positive sense,

that I was done, that I'd said everything I knew to say about it. And then gradually seeping over me was this understanding that I was changing.

Brooklyn continued to change, and I had tremendously more to give to the effort if I let myself accept the assignment.

Now, it's called a crime novel, and both of those words are kind of weighted and freighted in the book. I mean, to start with, let's start the second one of them, because in a lot of ways, a lot of what's going down here feels like it could be a different sort of book, could be a memoir, could be an ethnographic or geographical

history of Brooklyn. What made you write this as a sort of nonfiction novel, if you'd accept

that description? And how important was it that the stuff in it was true? Yeah, that's a great question.

Well, you know, nonfiction novel, I relate to that in one sense and that, you know, one of the

novelists that was

defining for me as I came of age was Norman Mailer, who has these books that are done with a kind

...