Richard K. Morgan

Ali Karim interviewed Richard K. Morgan for The Rap Sheet about Morgan's new novel Black Man, coming to U.S. bookstores under the title Thirteen.

Part of their exchange:

Ali Karim: How did your British publishers take to the title to your latest book?

Richard Morgan: Fine, absolutely copacetic. In fact, it was partly my editor’s idea -- or, at least, he encouraged me in the choice, when we were discussing alternatives to my ... rather uninspired working title. He then went away and briefed an absolutely kick-ass cover for the book before I’d written more than the first few chapters. Which put me under a certain amount of unlooked-for performance pressure, actually. [Laughs]

AK: And what about your American publishers?

RM: Um, less fine. ... They were very uneasy about the title from the beginning, and in the end I told them it was fine to change it if it was going to make them that nervous. I really wasn’t that bothered one way or the other; Thirteen is a pretty solid thematic summary of the book in its own way, and Black Man wasn’t in any case the original title I had in mind -- though I do think it’s very powerful in a way that Thirteen maybe isn’t. In more general terms, I think it’s a shame Del Rey have to worry that the title of a novel alone will spark an instant negative response, rather than trust that people will read the book and then judge; but then again, they’re at the sharp end, culturally, and I’m not, so it seems reasonable to be guided by their sense of things. In Europe, the titles of my books are very rarely a direct translation of the original English, and I don’t get upset about that, so it seems a little churlish to start throwing fits about this. The content of Black Man hasn’t changed from one edition to the other, and obviously that’s what counts.

Read the entire interview.

--Marshal Zeringue