We know him from such wonderful novels as To the other side of the night and The final escape, but Jan van Mersbergen has more notes to his singing. He recently surprised with The rider, written from the perspective of an old horse, now there is Diary from the river. Not a novel, but his first thriller, published under the pseudonym Frederik Baas. 'I was curious if I could write something like that.'
Puzzle piece
Diary from the river is a thrilling novel. But why do you call it a thriller?
'There is no blood in it and no chases. Still, I think it really did become a thriller, because this book came about very differently from my eight novels. For me, a novel starts with a research question; I want to find out something about a character's emotions and motives.'
'Diary from the river' began with a puzzle. A writer and his publisher and his girlfriend and stepson are staying in a town in the Ardennes, where a missing girl case is going on. To entertain her son, Barbara, the mother, creates a fictional diary written from the girl who has gone missing. They go on a day of sleuthing with the boy and suddenly come across clues she has not plotted. This is exciting. Although the characters are quite fleshed out and the book is also about motherhood, that scavenger hunt was my starting point. I like thrillers with such tension more than the ones full of horror, murder or chases. I was curious to see if I could manage to write something like that myself.'
Boss as brand
And, does it taste like more?
'Yes, I already have a plan lying around for a new thriller. I want to make it a series, under this pseudonym. Then Frederik Baas will become a brand in its own right, so to speak, instead of me being a novelist trying to write a thriller. Novel and thriller are different crafts, I have found, but a novel does write more slowly. A novel takes me two years, a thriller, as it turned out, one year.'
Why a pseudonym when it is already known in advance that you are behind it anyway?
'It gives me more freedom while writing. It is a fairly easy and smoothly written book, with more explicit sentences than I allow in my novels. I wrote it in just a year. For instance, I let the narrator explain exactly the relationship between Barbara, her son and her boyfriend. I am perhaps one of the strictest novelists; anything unnecessary I cut out. The reader has to fill in a lot themselves. A thriller works more along the lines of: sit back and I will tell you the story. As a writer, you take the reader by the hand more.'
Sales figures
Thrillers also sell better than literature.
'There have already been people saying: you must have written a thriller to make money. But unfortunately it is not that easy. A lot of thrillers are published and they really don't all sell that well. Of course: in the top-six there are about twenty or twenty-five thrillers and only five novels, of which only three are really good. Literature demands something else from a reader than leisure literature, and in that sense, this book might offer more room for sales; readers do not have to exert themselves as much when reading this book. But when writing, you cannot take sales figures into account - you never know in advance what it will be.'
And what if the reactions are disappointing?
'If readers now start saying: just stick to what you're doing... that would have an impact, yes. There are now two paths to choose from: I have a plan for a new novel and a plan for a new thriller. So if it turned out that I had made something no one was waiting for, well...'
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