Newspaper Columns and the Epistolary in Detective Grigoris

How to use textual artifacts to embellish literature

The series on the making of my detective novel continues today with a piece that might be useful for other writers, as it discusses methods that are applied often by novelists—that is, the insertion of other forms of writing to complement the greater narrative. In today’s case, these are the newspaper column and letter fragments. Yet how can they benefit a detective novel?

Writers include these and other media artifacts for myriad reasons. For me, it was not only to accentuate the singularities of certain characters, and to ‘speak for them,’ providing alternative dialogue options during the long sections in which they were not part of the ‘action’ of the plot; this narrative method was also used to reinforce the historicity of the setting (1999-2002), a much more paper-bound time than now, one in which people lived in the innocent joy of their carbon-based life-forms, never feeling the worse for the situation.

The physicality of text—the text of the novel—is also reinforced by careful insertions of alien bodies, as it were, interwoven into the main narrative. This tends to function again in a complementary manner to the ‘legitimate’ text of the plain narrative, and with its other external counterpart being the musical allusions—one of which we discussed last time.

Hopefully this discussion will be of use to writers and readers alike. Stick around ‘til the end for another omitted anti-excerpt from the Detective Grigoris novel.

The Function and Historicity of Newspaper Columns for Novel Uses

The novel’s setting in Greece and the neighboring region at the turn of the 21^st century lends itself well to the presence of the newspaper. For those who weren’t there at the time, the Internet was still slow and relatively unpopulated, compared to the US. Print media was still dominant after TV.

As the photo (taken in 2004) shows, newspapers were found at outdoor kiosks (periptera), as well as in shops. Gazing at headlines strung out to bake in the Mediterranean sun somehow did not make the ink drip, though you thought it might. Or perhaps, burst into flame spontaneously. The headlines might cause a similar internal reaction, of course, depending on the audience and medium.

Hung newspapers announce themselves- wordplay on display at a Greek periptero, or kiosk (photo: Christopher Deliso)

Since snacks, drinks, ice cream, cigarettes, bus tickets and so on are also sold at one’s local periptero, these kiosks have long been an institution in Greek urban areas. Thus it was the pandemic, more than the decline of print media, that led to the large-scale closure of many kiosks, as I recall reading in this fall 2023 article. While it would be a great shame to lose these monuments of Greek public life, the sight of steel-enclosed, chained-up kiosks sprayed with graffiti last year made me think of the premise for… you guessed it, a detective story. That one will have to remain until the fourth novel of the Detective Grigoris series, however.

Since in the first novel the characters are rarely reading news stories on computer screens, when not referring to televised headlines, newspaper stories are creatively cited. This I did occasionally and strategically, with some quite nice results. But the part that I really singled out (as it suited one important recurring character) was the eccentric polemical newspaper column, a sort of tradition hardly found only in Greece.

Some Examples: From Flann O’Brien to Modern Greek Newspapers

This concept was suited to the novel’s relevant character, a journalist, because it provided both opportunities for developing character and ideologies, but also for wordplay and making creative explorations of modern Greek and world history.

For the relevant parts of the novel, I did exhaustive research in Greek and international newspaper and magazine reportage of the time cited. Whatever events were discussed (even the creatively repurposed or fictionalized ones) were studied in great detail. In this process, I discovered some curious elements of phrasing, punctuation, and a generally distinct thought-world from that of the Western media.

There was a lot of translation involved of Greek-media texts, just to get a sense of how events that I witnessed and remembered were reported differently—not to mention the many now-forgotten national events.

I modeled the fictional publication mentioned throughout the novel on a 1990s-era Greek newspaper, long out of business, that a Greek friend had recalled. He cited it as particularly prominent for stories involving political scandal, imaginative theorizing of the kind that keep pensioners in the café armed with facts for argumentation. There is no specific newspaper or journalist being mimicked, of course, in Detective Grigoris—just a composite of ideas and invective and applicability to certain historic scenarios, informed by character quirks.

An Irish Column

A further source of newspaper influence of which some will know would be the infernally cryptic and often coded Cruiskeen Lawn columns written by Brian O’Nolan (pen name Flann O’Brien, under another pen name, Myles nagCopaleen) for three decades in the Irish Times. I gave an academic presentation on one of O’Nolan’s 1940’s columns for the International Flann O’Brien Society, back in a 2021 event.

Although I’d read O’Nolan’s work since 1997, the preparation for the event was my first experience with deciphering his newspaper columns. He co-authored them with two other colleagues, sometimes taking a larger or smaller role over the years, and some are much more straightforward than others. O’Nolan’s frequent puns and wordplay in English, Irish and other languages, plus his references to local events and people of his time, have made studying Cruiskeen Lawn one of the more difficult pursuits there can be for the dedicated Flanneur. Over the years, many have lamented that had O’Nolan spent more time on regular writing and less time with cryptic columns, he might have been better off.

I can’t judge, but will just note that Cruiskeen Lawn was very popular. It made its author into a sort of Socrates of Dublin, an opaque moral gadfly who harped on issues ranging from the proper use of Irish to the improper use of atomic bombs—all without preaching or taking up the typical op-ed style of column writing.

So, I thought, if there was a historical precedent for such a real newspaper column as Cruiskeen Lawn at one point time, I certainly could adapt some aspects of it for my own fictional inspiration, though neither the author nor the subject would be the same.

You can read some of the original columns freely on the Irish Times website, including this Best of Cruiskeen Lawn book (2011), whereas the full three decades of columns are in the newspaper’s archive.

And To the Letters: How the Epistolary Format Works in the Novel

Epistolary novels, that is, novels made up largely or entirely of letters between characters, are of long standing. In English, they started in the 17^th century and became popular in the next one with Samuel Richardson’s novels Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1749). Since then, epistolary novels have become very popular and widespread. Alice Walker’s The Color Purple is a modern example of innovative epistolary in novel-writing. Here on Substack, Aisling Maguire of Substack’s What’s the Story? has been writing regular epistolary fiction on her newsletter, too; there she also wrote an insightful article on the genre and on letters in general last November, in an article called ‘The Dying Art of the Letter.’

The Detective Grigoris novel doesn’t feature many epistolary flourishes, just three specific types of letters, two of which are direct-letter communication (though one is more ‘real’ than the other), while the other sort is more mysterious and coded, from the detective, which naturally confounds and entertains him. But both the account of physical damage done to letters in the book, and the historical context I provide for explaining the reason for their encoding, are as far as I know something new and different.

FROM THE CUTTING-ROOM FLOOR: AN ANTI-EXCERPT FROM DETECTIVE GRIGORIS, CHAPTER 8

This anti-excerpt has been snipped from one of the several different epistolary sections, each of which perform specific functions. It is an omitted section to the detective from his friend, who is a Byzantine history professor.

-ANTI-EXCERPTC8-

…As you remember, my boy, the conference that was scheduled for last year had to be postponed. All that work I put in to prepare it, and rushing to finish that thesis as well, for nothing! Anyhow, all is going well here and I have the good fortune of preparing an event which you really must attend, should you have the time, at the Philosophy Faculty in Athens. It will be a special event about various approaches to Byzantine military history and I will say some words about the Anatolian campaign of Nikephoros Phokas against the Arabs, before the expedition to Crete of 963.

And if you can make time to come there, I will introduce you to some other interesting people. I do not expect to travel again abroad this year, as the term is so busy, but perhaps you will? I apologize I did not accept your invitation to visit Mt. Athos, but you know that despite my professorship, I don’t have a very great interest in the church or monastic matters. Yes, my mother would disapprove, but what can we do. I trust you will find another way to make the expedition, even if I can’t go.

Please do give me a phone call if you plan to be free on the 5^th for this event. I can promise it will not boring, even by your standards as a real detective!

We will talk,

-Kyriakos

-END ANTI-EXCERPTC8-