Hell, after all, is not others. Hell is ourselves. When we are condemned to live again and again our worst moments looking for solutions and ways to the truth.
Interview with Iuli Tsakalou
“Him and She”, an inspector with a disturbed memory, a Chinese colleague passionate about an extreme sport and a professor of Medieval and Renaissance History are looking for a murderer who composes a peculiar “hell” with his actions. What is your new “journey” intended to highlight?
Bad purpose! This is a story that really plays with the reader’s mind. Nothing is what it seems and every new fact is turned upside down a few pages later. Revenge meets fear, terror meets purification, creation meets destruction, and love meets death. This book is a mirror of the various contrasts, the extremes I might say, that define us as humans, while art itself turns into something dark and painful: a deadly weapon.
Your heroes live adventures that lead to extremes, you test them, raising the tension to the highest. Do mystery, action, twists, or well-developed characters set the stage for success in your story?
For me, the alpha and omega is always diving into the special psyche of the heroes. Setting up a good background and an appropriate atmospheric setting are also integral to a successful plot, especially in a crime novel.
Is it a descent into hell of the mind? In the end, who wins, evil or good? Will the turnaround happen?
It is a descent into the hell of the soul first and then of the mind. The battle between good and evil turns out to be ambiguous and losses are many times more painful than any victory.
What hidden corners do you want the reader to understand so that they can trace the dark sides of the characters?
I think that the goal in a detective novel is probably the opposite. In other words, the reader not being able to completely trace the dark sides of the characters, but to lead him on uncharted paths challenging his mind and at the same time setting “inaccessible” obstacles for him. And by obstacles I do not in any way mean the reversals that arise out of nowhere just for the sake of impressing. Everything else. The reader must theoretically be able to “see” from the very first pages the hidden, behind-the-scenes developments, have all the evidence at his disposal and, despite all this, not succeed in suspecting the final solution to the mystery until only in the last book pages. This is the magic of crime fiction, and the element that, in my opinion, always makes it successful or not.
Do you think that women are more complex, more interesting, that they accumulate more problems? Or are men more reliable for a crime writer?
I think that the individual characteristics of the heroes of a book are not connected to their gender, but to the roles they are called to serve. An author who associates persons and behaviors with gender risks succumbing to stereotypes that for me impoverish the plot and development of each story, as they deprive it of originality and uniqueness.
You made me wonder while reading, can the people who love us and are supposed to protect us harm us?
Everyone can do us harm and harm us, but only someone who is really close to us can hurt us with such a choice. It is friendly fire that kills in all ways, even if not a single drop of blood is spilled.
Can the wounds created through various situations heal and only the scars remain? Should the memory of these remain and not the essence?
They certainly can, but not by themselves. It takes serious, responsible and very painful work with ourselves to close the wounds and leave only the scars as a memory of them. And this can only be achieved with the help of an expert. Psychotherapy is a true blessing when the wounds are such that they continue to bleed no matter how many years pass.
The hell of your heroes, after all, are not others. Hell are they the same?
The hell of us all is ourselves. We shape our course and we even shape our existence. There is no hell worse than the one we condemn ourselves to. When we force him to live his worst moments again and again.
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#Clairis #Theodorou #Everyones #hell