Norman Bogner

An Interview with Norman Bogner

How did you get the idea to write To Die in Provence?

I had been living in Paris and had completed my first novel when my father telephoned me. I was recovering from a month-long battle with pleurisy contracted during a brutal winter. He was coming to Europe to see me and insisted that we meet in Nice. He was a beach lover and believed that all illnesses could be cured by a suntan. I explained that the doctors had advised me not to fly and that I could take the train. A first class ticket on the "Blue Train" arrived several days later. It was the end of May and I had never been to the south of France. I knew that the Riviera was beautiful, elegant and expensive; it was certainly beyond my means and would remain so for many years.

While in my compartment on this fashionable train, I was busily making notes when an attractive, personable young man, somewhere in his late twenties, asked if he might join me and just shoot the breeze. He had overheard me speaking English and he welcomed the sound of the language and a fellow American. He was strikingly dressed in a champagne colored suit, a pale blue shirt, silk tie and the gracious manner that one encounters in well-bred southern gentlemen. He was also remarkable in that he bore a striking resemblance to the actor James Dean, who had died about five years earlier. I soon discovered that my companion was an extraordinary personality, with a wealth of thrilling stories. For these purposes, he'll be called Sloan.

My father had sent me a $100, which was the most kickable cash I'd had since coming to Europe, and I felt almost equal to this gentleman. He suggested that we lunch together, and we did for about three hours. He ordered Krug champagne and I almost fainted when I saw the price. My father's C-note was history.

Sloan told me a good deal about himself and he was a fascinating man: he had been a foundling and adopted at five by a childless millionaire couple in the Carolinas. He was devoted to his parents who were going to meet him and his French fiancee and stay with her and her family at their villa in Cap d'Antibes. The couple were to be married in June at the villa and honeymoon for a month on a yacht Sloan had leased from a Greek tycoon.

I was enthralled by this colorful Gatsby-like patrician who embodied charm, grace and a sense of humor. His tales of cock fights, moonshiners and southern belles were hypnotic. He was also well-read and asked me serious questions about my first novel, which no one had yet seen.

When the moment of dread arrived, I was totally unprepared for his beau geste. He had already paid the lunch check. I hardly knew how to thank him. He would take a nap and we would meet for cocktails at five in his compartment. This time, I insisted, the drinks were on me. I rushed back to my compartment to make notes about this chance meeting with a true southern aristocrat and to change. I owned only one jacket, a thick herring-bone tweed, and hoped that by putting on a fresh shirt and tie my outfit would not seem quite so seedy.

I arrived at Sloan's compartment promptly at the appointed hour and rather than go into the bar, he'd already ordered more champagne -- and caviar to go with it. When we finally arrived in Nice at about eight in the evening, I saw the porter carefully take Sloan's crocodile luggage off the train while I carried a duffel bag.

My father was there and I introduced him to Sloan and suggested that we all have a drink at the station buffet while he waited for his fiancee to arrive. This time, I insisted, it was on me.

In a moment she floated in...Mademoiselle Louise...

She was chic, blond, and dressed in a stunning Chanel miniskirt, the epitome of French style. The abridged dress revealed sun-tanned legs, a lush body which was heightened by the beautiful architectural structure of her face. My heart began to palpitate. What a couple. A marriage of gods.

My father impatiently sat through a quick drink with them and was anxious to leave because he had other things on his mind. I took Louise's card and was asked to join them all at their wedding. Sloan had a new friend. It was fine with her. When we said our good-byes outside, Louise's car was ahead of us. The airport traffic guard was tipping his hat to her as she and Sloan got into the first gull-winged Mercedes I'd ever seen. They drove off into the twilight.

When I suggested to my father that he might have been a bit more gracious to Sloan and his lovely Louise, he lost his temper.

"What's wrong with you, Norman?"

"Nothing. I thought you were rude."

"Look, he's a con man and she's loaded..."

I protested and gave him my standard ugly American speech, capping it off with: "You've always been a cynic and you never give people a chance."

"I've been dealing with the public for twenty years. So nobody can kid a kidder. And, I'm not a cynic, I'm a realist. This guy you're so busy defending is a ladies' man, and I'd hate to see this French girl when he finishes with her. He'll rip her eyes out..."

We never mentioned Sloan or his fiancee again. At St. Tropez, we parted.

My friends in Paris had rented a farmhouse in Provence and I was invited to spend the summer with them, all of us working to pay the bills, finding odd jobs, anything to survive. And so I drifted to Provence and met my group. We were writers, poets, and painters, determined to make our mark and change the world.

Our crowd usually met for a beer or Pastis at Les Deux Garcons in Aix after work. This cafe, one of the oldest and most famous in France, with its outdoor tables, was a gathering place for the town's professors, intellectuals, and visiting beauties from Vassar and Smith whose families sent them to Aix for a summer French course. This was part of a debutante's education in those days.

I arrived early one evening at Deux Garcons and picked up a newspaper that was left on a chair. I don't remember whether it was the local paper or Nice-Matin. It might have been the International Herald-Tribune. I scanned the paper and there on page three was a photograph of Sloan. I immediately thought that this was some social article or an announcement of his marriage to his enchantress Louise.

I was astounded to read that my Mr. Sloan had been arrested in Biarritz which was one of the most celebrated socialite playgrounds in Europe. He had been accused of murdering two women in his hotel. Furthermore, he was wanted for murdering a couple in Paris shortly before he took the Blue Train. No wonder he had an aversion to flying; the police had certainly staked out the airport and warned car rental agencies in Paris. Louise, his fiancee, had been found hacked to pieces in several garbage bins in Nice.

I was on my third drink and in such shock that I found myself reading with my finger pointing at the lines of the article. Sloan had four different passports and a collection of aliases. There was also a jurisdictional conflict: the American authorities suspected him of four murders in Georgia. They intended to extradite him.

When my friends eventually joined me at the table, I sat there in a stupor and couldn't bring myself to explain my condition. I tried to follow up on the article, but there was no Internet or computers in those days. I was working in a bistro kitchen in St-Remy and had to be at work at five AM every morning. Eventually I lost track of Sloan, or whatever his real name was.

I did not, however, forget him and was haunted by the fact that I had spent an entire day captivated by a man who, in today's parlance, would be known as a serial killer.

I was often tempted to tell my father about Sloan, but I knew what his reaction would have been.

I tried to recapture my experience, but was never able to find the right form. I made some futile efforts attempts to write Sloan's story as a screenplay, but it never seemed structurally sound. Finally, I discovered the way to dramatize my experience in a novel.

How did you manage to develop him and the other characters?

It may have been obvious to others, but not to me: I had to find a hero and create someone we could care about. He is a detective, a composite character, based on some real ones I knew in Europe. I wanted to avoid the tedious characterization of this genre and I hope I have succeeded by counterpointing this with two sharply contrasted love stories that are an integral part of the plot. As far as I'm concerned, the challenge in a novel is to create emotional jeopardy which then leads to physical jeopardy. It's who we are, what's gone on in our lives, who do we associate with, which leads to this. I believe that readers want deep, rich character development rather than puppets who respond to an external conflict imposed on them. No one in my novels acts because Washington is going to be blown up in fifteen minutes.

How did you handle the love interest?

The detective meets a remarkable young American woman, an art scholar from California who is in Aix-en-Provence for the summer to do research and to supervise one of her students. Their passionately romantic relationship is set up in vivid opposition to the affair engaged in by the heroine's student: a wealthy, troubled girl whose millionaire parents have spoiled her and are trying to save her from herself. It is already a case of too little too late, for the young woman has fallen in love with my Mr. Sloan, a young man with enormous magnetism, whom she has smuggled into Aix without anyone's knowledge. This liaison explores the darkness and perversity of young people

Do you do much research for your settings and the professions of your characters?

I try to write about what I know and have experienced. I lived in Provence for eight months and have been back many times since to refresh my memory. I have an intimate knowledge of the region and its people. I was also tired of most American settings: malls and McDonalds; Hollywood estates; gangland populated by drug dealers; small-town general stores run by philosophical owners who impart wisdom, New Orleans during the Mardi Gras. As my wife says: been there, done that, got the t-shirt, and so has the reading public.

I was looking for fresh territory and found it. I wanted to transport the reader along with me. The people in my work are shaped by and reflect their environment, and the fabric fits.

You had a number of successful novels, several of them bestsellers. Why this gap between books?

After many years of writing novels, I was seduced by Hollywood. I have many friends in the film business and I was often consulted on scripts. It was a change of pace and paid very well. But after five of my scripts were lost in development hell, I became frustrated and more importantly I missed the process of writing novels.

During this film-writing cycle, I did, however, work on three other novels, but not full time, and they are still in various trimesters.