INTERVJU / INTERVIEW
TONY PARSONS, WRITER AND JOURNALIST People will always long for stories
his native London. The rest of the world will only be able to read this new story from January, while in Serbia we’ve had the privilege of be- ing the first to discover what hap- pened to our heroes. We start this interview with the writer by ask- ing him why we’ve had to wait so long to catch up with Max, Scout and Stan... “I felt that I had told a lot of Max Wolfe stories after the sixth book in the series. I just wanted to spend time in other worlds, with new characters – I felt that I had taken Max as far as he could go at that stage. And then, as my daugh- ter was getting older, I began to see how Max Wolfe’s world would change just from the simple fact of his daughter getting older. Murder For Busy People comes from two places: the idea of Scout becom- ing a teenager, and also the death of a famous British criminal called Mickey McAvoy. He was involved in a big gold bullion robbery in 1983, but always refused to give up the names of his accomplices in return for cutting his 25-year sentence. I always thought that was impres- sive, keeping silent for so long, and I got to thinking – what if a wom- an criminal did that? So, books are usually built when two or three ide- as come together or collide, and that is what happened with the new Max Wolfe.” Will we have to wait long for the next one? “I would like to return to the world of Max Wolfe, but the next book I am going to write is about my dog, Stan, who died in May of this year. I am going to write the story of our relationship in a book called Man & Dog. So that will be the next one and then back to Max.” As for my encounter with your new book, I must say that it started in tears! Af- ter reading the dedication, I closed the book, fearing that Stan would die on the pages as well... I am very sorry that you lost a fami- ly member...
That craving for stories is embedded deep in our DNA, because we need to make sense of our lives and the universe T ony Parsons has been a beloved Brit in Bel- grade ever since his first book, Man and Boy, appeared in book- al friend of David Bowie and is still a columnist for The Sun. It was ten years ago that he gifted us Detec- tive Max Wolfe, the single father of a girl called Scout and the de- voted owner of a beautiful Cavalier King Charles spaniel called Stan. We “wolfed down” the first six in- stalments, then five years passed... And then Tony Parsons finally shops. A writer whose works every- one gladly reads, he is also a man who loves Serbia and has been vis- iting our country regularly for 50 years. He also has an impressive re- sume as a journalist, who shot to fame by covering the punk move- ment and interviewing legendary bands like the Sex Pistols, the Clash and the Ramones. He was a person- turned up in Belgrade and headed straight to the Book Fair, bringing us a new Max Wolfe book entitled Murder for Busy People, before it had even seen the light of day in
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