https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B4SSVZVQ/
Jiggery Pokery looks like an exciting story. Can you tell us a little about it?
Jiggery Pokery is the
story of Reverend John Gaule, the priest who famously stood up to the
Witchfinder Matthew Hopkins during the English witch-craze in the 17th
Century. My novel follows John Gaule over the course of three years during
which he gradually falls deeper and deeper into an obsession with Mr. Hopkins. Jiggery
Pokery is populated with a huge cast of characters, all of whom Gaule meets
as he pens anonymous letters to Matthew Hopkins, publishes a book in London, is
attacked by peasants stricken with ergot poisoning in King’s Lynn, and many
other exciting encounters, one of which occurs at the end of his long life.
Based on a true story, Jiggery Pokery is sure to please those with a hankering for historical
romps, replete with jokes and a modicum of horror.
Any plans to turn it into a series?
Seeing as I’ve told the story of
John Gaule, there aren’t any plans to turn Jiggery Pokery into a series.
But in terms of my career, Jiggery Pokery is the first in a series of
novels which deal with the old maxim that great men are not necessarily good
men. I’ve written a novel about a gay Japanese linguistics professor that is
due to come out later this year. I’m really excited about Nakadai
because it touches on the same ground as Jiggery Pokery, but this time
in present times. Another novel of mine which has been accepted is Fibber,
which won’t be out for a while. I’ve found a publisher, but these things take
time—but in the meantime, it’s sufficed to say that Fibber is about
another flawed man: a poet whose punishment is being forced to work as a
bureaucrat in a building that is, in fact, a mass grave…So much to look forward
to!
How long did it take you to write Jiggery Pokery?
I started writing Jiggery
Pokery in 2020. Much of the dialogue was written in verse, and it wasn’t
until I dived into Dostoyevsky that I re-wrote the novel into the version we
have today. It took me two years in total to write book—including re-writes and
thinking holidays, so to speak.
What inspired you when writing Jiggery Pokery?
I’ve always been fascinated in
the (First) English Civil War period because it was almost entirely bad. I
wanted to write a novel that was longer than what I usually wrote, and where
the language was elevated to the same grassland as the characters were. I find
other novels inspiring and fell in love with books like The Idiot and The
Gambler by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Fathers and Sons by Ivan
Turgenev. I wanted my writing to sing like theirs did, and I tried very hard to
pull it off.
Can you tell us a little about John Gaule?
John Gaule is a loner, and is
someone who believes that as long as he fulfills his moral obligations to
himself that everything will be okay. This all changes when he takes on a
project that involves nothing but other people, and requires him to exercise a
level of empathy that he’s never had to exercise before. I think he’s
spiritually squeamish in the sense that he’s happy to read about good deeds in
books, but is rather frightened when it comes to doing good deeds in reality.
Despite the fact that he’s middle-aged, we see Gaule grow up over the course of
the novel, and see how a man who doesn’t believe in miracles, and true
Godliness, finally comes round to the idea. He’s certainly selfish, but it’s
his self-centeredness that gets him involved in the plot to smear Matthew
Hopkins. And by the time we reach the end of the novel Gaule sees that reliance
on self-will isn’t enough.
What motivated you to become a writer?
I’ve always written stories but I
started out, professionally, as a poet. I had some success in that, but there
came a point when the poetry dried up and I returned to writing stories and
novels. At heart, however, I am a filmmaker, and I see myself as a filmmaker
who writes novels. There’s an emphasis on visual aspects that you perhaps
wouldn’t find in most novels. When I don’t write I get sick for some reason,
and so the process starts again: but most of all, I love reading.
How did you come up with the story and ideas in Jiggery Pokery?
I’d never written anything like Jiggery
Pokery before, so I turned to several history books on the subject of
Matthew Hopkins that I had collected over the years. I kept a scrapbook of
sorts, filled with events garnered from the various books, that eventually
became a timeline. I saw things that I could re-create, events that I could
invent entirely, and people who I could probably just ignore. The emphasis was
always on telling the kind of story that would feature in a Victorian novel. In
other words I looked for the melodramatic, and the religious, and worked from
there.
Did anything stick out as particularly challenging when writing Jiggery Pokery?
The whole book was challenging,
but in particular the writing of the first draft. I found the subsequent
drafts, where I expanded the novel greatly, to be rather simple for some
reason. I dictated a great deal of the book using Microsoft Word in order to
give the book an oral quality. And it was this that was, perhaps, most
difficult to edit—because we don’t write how we speak!
What do you like to do when not writing?
My favourite thing to do when not
I’m writing is either reading Doctor Who novelizations that you can get
real cheap online, or watching whatever strange film I’ve come across in my
cinematic travels. I’m not a fan of modern films because they lack a creative
intelligence that the old masters—Kurosawa, German, Tarkovsky, Lumet, Kubrick—seemed
to live by on pain of death. Lynne Ramsay is probably the best living
filmmaker, and I enjoy her films very much. But there’s more to life than
screens, whether big or small, and I enjoy going for long walks with my
partner: we live in Cornwall so there are beautiful places to go in every
direction. I’m very fortunate to live in this part of the world. And I’m even
more fortunate when I get to do some teaching for my university. I think
teaching is the best pleasure in the world. I take it far more seriously than
writing novels, and I love it.
Where can readers find out more about your work?
The easiest way to find out about my work is by Googling my name, or by searching for my author profile on Amazon. All I have to offer is in my novels, so I don’t have a website, but I’m always happy to do readings and answer questions. Come Christmas I will have published three novels, and I’ll be posting the trailer for Nakadai in the coming months on my “Walker Zupp” YouTube page (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrrTCjkH5DziURdWLw3GKWg). Go ahead and subscribe, because that way you’ll see all the trailers for upcoming books I’ve written, as well as any appearances I make at conferences.
I’ve also included the little trailer I did for Jiggery
Pokery: