Much has been said about the demise of the male novelist, but after reading All Them Dogs, one thing is clear: Djamel White will be stealing readers away as fast as the bullets escape the guns in his novel. Subject to a six-way auction, White’s debut seamlessly transforms from crime fiction to gangland romance to erotic thriller before collapsing into tragedy. It started as a neo-noir in third person, before White found Tony’s voice, written in “a brash, anti-introspective way”, which he felt was missing in Irish fiction.
White grew up and currently lives in the West Dublin suburb of Lucan, where the book is set. He’s quick to point out that he always had “too soft a temperament” ever to be embroiled in anything depicted in his book, but “bore witness to some things”. He considers All Them Dogs different to most contemporary Irish fiction, which is “usually about characters escaping their working-class background via art”.
For his protagonist, there is no escape: Tony Ward returns to Dublin and is paired with Darren “Flute” Walsh, who collects money for his kingpin stepfather. Together, they rough up debtors as Tony attempts to reestablish his reputation in the criminal underworld. He becomes unnerved by the life he’s built and his attraction to it, until he realises it is Flute he is attracted to. High on coke at a party, the two make out. Whatever doubts Tony has, he lets go and they begin a secret, sex-fuelled affair.
Here, Djamel White talks about sex scenes and having a narrator-protagonist who is all about the body, not the mind.
Paul Johnathan: Did you always want to write gangland gay erotica?
Djamel White: No, not at all. Not that I didn’t want to. I didn’t know what I was going to write. I was writing short stories when I was younger. I wrote this as a short story for a dissertation and then I carried it with me into an MFA based on the encouragement of a supervisor. If I hadn’t had that immediate feedback when I sent the first few pages, I don’t know if I would have gone on with it.
PJ: Are there any authors who write about sex that were an influence on your own sex scenes?
DW: No, all the sex came from my own head, unfortunately … I didn’t read a lot of erotica. I wonder how spicy some people find the novel. I think it kind of goes there, but it doesn’t really go there. But maybe it does.
PJ: Some of the sex scenes are hot and heavy, some are more of a suggestion to the reader. Why was it important to you to have the two styles?
DW: I’m always riding the momentum of the scene that I’m writing. If there’s just been this explosion of violence and then we settle into a sex scene, the impulse was to make it more tender than when you’ve got something that stems from a tense scene, where they’re in a room alone together and something is starting to build. There’s gonna have to be a denouement, something to reach.
PJ: Is Tony all about the body?
DW: He is all about the body, yes, he lives in his body. But also, he has this masculine structure that he can’t let break, or he breaks; he will lose himself completely. So you have this interplay of him wanting to give himself up, which is why he’s a bottom; which is why he’s so anxious to be led and taken in, because he doesn’t trust himself. Maybe that’s me opening up a meta text that isn’t actually there. If he backs down, he’s dead. So I can’t get too sensitive or too sensual with it. It has to be rough for him. This is how he would describe it. We can imagine from the outset, if it were a third-person narrator, that the sex might look a lot different. Or maybe Flute would have described it differently. We don’t know.
“All the sex came from my own head ... I didn’t read a lot of erotica. I wonder how spicy some people find the novel” – Djamel White
PJ: There is no connection between the two, but because chronologically they appeared at roughly the same time, there have been a lot of comparisons between All Them Dogs and Heated Rivalry.
DW: I know! I’m glad that comparison’s being made because I’ll ride the coattails of anything that gets me readers, especially when something is as culturally relevant. I have to confess that I haven’t read or seen it, but I think some fans of Heated Rivalry might be disappointed when they pick up All Them Dogs and they’re straight into a gang thriller because that is still a very prominent part of the story.
PJ: How does your family feel about you now being a published author?
DW: They’re more excited than I am! I was the first reader in the house and so, as a kid, I was writing and it was really celebrated. There was always talk of, “One day, Djamel is going to be a published writer.” The knock-on effect is that I wasn’t able to commit myself to anything else. So if this didn’t work out – fuck, it still might not work out – I don’t know what’s gonna happen to me. That’s the biggest privilege in my life that from the get-go, they wanted this for me.
PJ: The book has been optioned and is in early stages of development as a TV show, correct?
DW: Yes, it has a lead writer attached, which feels pretty significant. I got to meet with them and they’re super excited.
PJ: Who would you like to see play Tony and Flute, especially considering the sex scenes?
DW: Well, to be honest, I’d really like unknowns to get a chance to come onto the scene here and maybe have a bigger actor somewhere in the background. But I mean, if I could say anyone …
PJ: Me, right?
DW: Yeah, you. And Jacob Elordi as Flute, just for the height. Would you like that?
All Them Dogs by Djamel White is published by John Murray Press and is out now.
