After over 40 years as a successful poet and creative writing lecturer, Tony Curtis released his first novel in 2021. Darkness In The City Of Light, focused on WWII-era serial killer Marcel Petiot, has recently been shortlisted for the Paul Torday Prize for best debut novel from an author over 60. In the run-up to the awards, Hari Berrow speaks to Curtis about his fascinating book.

Darkness In The City Of Light takes you on a whirlwind trip through occupied France, the fallout following the city’s liberation and the pursuit of one of the most vicious serial killers you probably haven’t heard of. A huge chunk of the novel centres on Marcel Petiot, a medical doctor who was thought to have killed up to 140 people during the war. Curtis discovered Petiot’s story nearly 30 years ago, but it took until 2019 for him to find the right medium for his narrative.

“I wrote a script, which was performed in the Sherman Studio Theatre. This is 30 years ago, with slide projections,” Curtis laughs. “It had one performance, it didn’t transfer to the West End, and it went back in the filing cabinet because I was very busy. A couple of years ago, when we decided to move out, I had to get my two filing cabinets down to one and I found this stuff in there. I thought, ‘You know, I really didn’t do that justice…’

“In those 30 years, something called the world wide web had been invented. So rather than just having one solitary book, suddenly a lot of other things opened, including film footage and photographs.”

Though the novel has a linear structure, the form Curtis has adopted plays with place, time, and form. The reader hears the perspective of countless characters throughout the novel, and a blend of poetry and prose is used to create a feeling of rushing through Paris, looking over people’s shoulders as they go.

“For the last 40-odd years I’ve been writing poems in other voices,” he explains. “I’m not the sort of poet that anguishes about his own soul or whatever… although I’ve done that. I was interested in the dramatic monologue. And teaching creative writing at the university, I kept saying to people, ‘Don’t tell me about you, tell me a story’.

“If you get into another voice and lose yourself, then that opens and anchors the possibilities. You can be a Paris hooker, you can be a Gestapo officer, you can be Samuel Beckett, you can be Fred Astaire. Why not? It’s much more fun than being yourself!”

The Paris that Curtis paints is a grimy, unpleasant place, even after the war is over. “It was full of guilt: the French were very, very guilty about what was going on. We would have been the same as we’d been occupied,” Curtis reflects. “If you were a bus driver or a waiter, did you collaborate if you served someone a cup of coffee or kept the Metro going? It’s very easy to make moral judgements when you’re looking back…”

However, rather than giving the obvious portrait of a monster that many would expect of a man like Petiot, Curtis leaves the reader to reflect on the complexities of the character, as well as the Paris that needed a villain that they could look in the eyes. “In 1947, when Petiot’s trial was put on, it was the big show in town. The French needed a distraction, and to draw a line in the sand. Prince Rainier of Monaco went to the Petiot trial, film stars went. It was one of those public occasions where they could say, ‘You know what, we’re washing our dirty linen and then that’s it’. But they weren’t, of course.”

Curtis wanted to reflect the complexities of a postwar society that wanted justice but couldn’t access those who had caused them harm and didn’t know how to move forward. “I think people wanted a scapegoat. You know, young girls had their head shaved and were paraded around in the streets with their illegitimate babies. People can be quite nasty.

“There’s a poem in the book called Taking Line 5, January 1945, where one of the disappeared men comes back. The Germans took a million and a half Frenchmen away – I didn’t know that – and they dribbled back and they were broken. At first, people didn’t want to look at them, they didn’t want to look at their own defeat. And it takes a while for a woman to get up to give him her seat – and then everyone finally acknowledges he’s there.

“I hope people come away,” Curtis says, “thinking – alright, Petiot was a monster, but some of the other characters, could that have happened here if we have been occupied by the Germans? What would we have done? Don’t be so smug, Brits, what if that had happened to us? What if London had been the city of light occupied by darkness? We didn’t go through what they went through.

“While I was writing this, the world started a war up. Nobody survives wars – you’re damaged physically or psychologically or emotionally. Boy, is that true of Ukraine.”

Curtis is the only person over 75 nominated for the Paul Torday Memorial Prize this year, and took great pleasure in telling me that automatically meant he had the best debut novel from an author over that age. As mischievous, witty, and talented as Curtis is, the novel’s reception was a welcome surprise to the well-known poet.

“When [Seren, publisher of Darkness…] took the novel, I was genuinely chuffed and surprised because this was not what I was supposed to be able to do. I could do it – and I was as elated and surprised as anybody else.”

Darkness In The City Of Light is a novel glittering with empathy and originality. The only book from a Welsh publisher nominated for the prize this year, Wales couldn’t have a better representative to demonstrate what our older artists are capable of.

Tony Curtis’ Darkness In The City Of Light is published by Seren. Info: here

The Paul Torday Prize is announced on Thurs 29 June. Info: here

words HARI BERROW