Jacob Ross is a Grenadian novelist, playwright, poet and journalist. He now lives in the UK, where he teaches creative writing.

His books include Pynter Bender (2008), which, in 2009, was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Regional Prize, the Society of Authors Best First Novel, and the Caribbean Review of Books “Book of the Year”; The Bone Readers (2016), the first of his Camaho Quartet series of crime novels, which won the Jhalak Prize for Book of the Year by a Writer of Colour; and Black Rain Falling (2020), the second in his crime series.

Jacob has also written three collections of short stories, Song for Simone and Other Stories (1986), and A Way to Catch the Dust and Other Stories (1999). He published a collection of his short stories entitled Tell No-One About This in 2017.

He is also the editor of Closure: Contemporary Black British Short Stories, published by Peepal Tree Press.

In 2006 Jacob was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and in 2011, he received Grenada’s highest literary award for his contribution to literature.

Talking About Books interviewed Jacob on Pynter Bender and his crime series, and on different ways of seeing the world.

TAB: In Pynter Bender, Pynter is born blind but has his sight restored. However, the initial blindness seems to leave him with a certain mystical quality. What inspired you to write this story?

JR: Blindness was a reality of my early life. When I was a child, I watched my father sink into blindness as a result of an injury he sustained working in the gold mines of Guyana. For some reason, the family decided that I was going to be his eyes. So I learned to present the world to him with language—the visual subtleties of weather, the way light fell on trees and landscape, the little marvels in the world we lived in—that sort of thing. If there is one thing I can point to that shaped me as a writer, it is that experience. Perhaps I became a writer because of it. I don’t know.

Later of course when I began to understand the workings of my society, the inherited atrocities of my history, the social and cultural inertia that it fostered, I began to understand ‘blindness’ in a different way.

TAB: Set on an unnamed island in the Caribbean, Pynter Bender tells of Pynter’s and the islanders’ political awakening. Although the story is not set explicitly in Grenada, was some of it based on the country’s history?

JR: All of it. Where the history and the politics are concerned, there is not much that a Grenadian wouldn’t recognize in the novel. Having said that, there is not much that a Caribbean person familiar with the history of these islands wouldn’t recognize either, since the broad features of British colonization are identical across those islands: the same cruelties and repressions, the same miseducation and a legal system premised on a history of enslavement, the same abandonment by Britain when these islands were deemed no longer useful.  So the ambition of the novel is larger.  I didn’t name the island because that kind of specificity would have got in the way of the thematic thrust of the book. Pynter Bender was an exploration of how post-colonial societies like ours, despite the awful constraints of their colonial legacy, have emerged into the 21^st century. 

TAB: The women in Pynter Bender are central to the book. They are the ones who keep the stories alive. How much of your own childhood is woven into this story?

JR: I was brought up by women; they dominated and controlled every aspect of my life. Dig a little deeper and it becomes very clear that mine is a fundamentally matrilinear society. It is the women who hold the vision. Not the men.

TAB: Could you tell us about the Camaho Quartet? What made you turn to writing crime fiction?

JR: Until I began writing the Camaho series I’d been widely regarded as a ‘literary’ writer. I never thought I’d go down the route of writing crime fiction until I read a worldwide survey of crime novels published in 2015. There wasn’t a single crime novel from the Anglo-Caribbean. That surprised me. Have a quick look around and you’d notice that some of the best literary fiction—from the 1950s onward—has come from the Caribbean. We even have a Nobel Prize winner in VS Naipaul; and in recent times Caribbean writers have been winning top literary prizes internationally. There is a massive gap in Caribbean genre fiction of any kind, though now, I see this gradually changing, in particular with writers like Karen Lord who is doing superlative work in speculative fiction.

I’ve taught Narrative Craft most of my life and know how to strip a novel down to its basic understructure, along with its ‘narrative conventions’—which are largely what differentiate one genre from another. I spent a couple of months doing that, then set about to write The Bone Readers, bringing my own understanding of society and crime.

You can’t just write a Raymond Chandler or Jo Nesbø or Agatha Christie novel with non-white characters. You’re bound to fail.

Crime is tied up with the ‘specificities’: of society, morality, social values, class, ideas of justice, even history, and they are not identical in all societies. So it requires thought and study and an understanding of how one’s society works.

From the moment I began writing the first book, I realized how enormously capable the genre is for holding up society to itself; for examining its secrets, taboos, contradictions and excesses. And in that sense, it is as ‘literary’ as any other form of fiction. It can be meditative or extravagant; gratuitous or forensic in its pursuit of political, social and human ‘truths’.

TAB: In the Camaho Quartet, Michael ‘Digger’ Digson is a forensic scientist who can read dead bodies to understand how they died. Both Pynter and Digger have the ability to see beyond the obvious. What draws you to these characters?

JR: Because there are other ways of seeing and understanding the world than from the monolithic lens of western epistemology, much of it based on Descartes’s recipe for acquiring knowledge. That’s the point I make when contrasting Miss Stanislaus with Digger. More often than not Digger is ‘rational’ and gets results, yes; but look at the kind of intelligence that Miss Stanislaus deploys to get at the truth. She arrives at insights and conclusions before she rationalizes them, much as James Watson did in working out the double helix structure of DNA, or Elias Howe allegedly did with the sewing machine.

Western ideas of knowing often disregard that critical human faculty. I’m simply trying to reinstate it. 

TAB: I have the impression that there are many more Caribbean writers published outside their countries than, say, a decade or two ago. Would that be correct? Do you think the publishing world in the West is opening up to other voices?

JR: There are peaks and troughs. If you look at the Caribbean literature of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, you’d notice how dominant the writing was in Britain.

What we are seeing now is a powerful re-emergence. Let’s hope it stays that way this time.

TAB: What inspired you to start writing? Is it something you have always done?

JR: Yes, I have always written, even before I understood its possibilities.  It’s probably a gift.

TAB: I loved Pynter Bender and look forward to the next books in the Camaho Quartet. Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts with us.

Read my reviews of Pynter Bender and The Bone Readers.