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Bradford Morrow’s new novel The Forger’s Requiem, publishing January 14, takes readers back to the world of his popular novel The Forgers. In this new novel that will capture readers’ interest from the first page, literary forger Henry Slader, who was left for dead, literally comes back from the grave for revenge. We are thrilled that Bradford made some time to talk to us about the trilogy’s story arc that grew from the novella that he originally imagined into a much broader story.
Ingram Library Services: Can you give us the elevator pitch for The Forger’s Requiem, and for the trilogy as a whole?
Bradford Morrow: The famous Hungarian art forger Elmyr de Hory once said that if one of his fake paintings hangs on a museum wall beside authentic works of art long enough, the forgery eventually becomes authentic itself. The same goes for books and manuscripts.
The Forger’s Requiem is the final volume of my Forgers trilogy. It explores the theme of what’s real—a literary manuscript, an autograph, an alibi—and what masterfully, diabolically, tries to appear real, though it’s anything but. The Forgers and The Forger’s Daughter are about master literary forgers, Will and Slader, locked in a deadly rivalry even as Will makes lethal moves to protect his family. The first novel centers around the dangerous cat-and-mouse game of creating increasingly sophisticated Sherlock Holmes manuscripts, and the second on producing a perfect copy of the rarest book in American literature, Edgar Allan Poe’s Tamerlane.
The Forger’s Requiem picks up where they left off, and moves in fresh directions as it delves more deeply than ever into craft of forgery. Frankenstein author Mary Shelley is at the center of this new novel, with Will’s gifted daughter Nicole creating a series of imaginary letters from Mary to her famous feminist mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, whom she never met. In the first pages of the trilogy, Nicole’s uncle is murdered. Now, she tries to trade these fake Shelley letters to Slader in exchange for photos that will prove her father’s innocence in the murder case.
In The Forger’s Requiem, I was able to fully flesh out the lives of everyone across the series, while more deeply exploring themes of what is real and what isn’t, and whom we can and cannot trust. It’s also a love story. When I wrote the last word—“yes”—I knew that, for all the clever crimes in The Forger’s Requiem, the book also embraces the other side of human experience: of love, harmony, hope.
ILS: This is the final novel in this trilogy. Did you know from the start how you would end the series? Any hope of a return to these characters?
BM: I didn’t know the end when I began. Not consciously anyway. In fact, The Forgers was originally envisioned as a novella for a bibliomystery series. But once I started writing about the world of rare books and manuscripts—I’d been a bookseller since my twenties and knew the terrain intimately—the story took on a life of its own. My characters became so compelling to me that they demanded the scope of a full-fledged novel.
Before The Forgers was even published, my editor and I discussed a continuance or sequel, and when I started writing The Forger’s Daughter, which centered around flawlessly replicating Poe’s first book, I experienced the same passion and momentum I’d felt working on the first novel. Once it was finished, I knew there was more to be explored, so a trilogy began to take shape in my imagination. In retrospect, its conclusion, which revealed itself as I wrote, now seems inevitable. In some ways, given all the shared images, histories, and characters that I have woven into the whole, the Forgers trilogy can be read as one long novel. But I want each book to be a standalone work.
It’s anybody’s guess whether I will return to Will, Nicole, Meghan, Slader, Maisie, and the rest. But they’re all quite real to me, as it were, and very much in my consciousness.
ILS: Readers might think of the real-life story of Lee Israel, the biographer who was arrested for literary forgery and whose life story was turned into a film. What do you think makes literary forgery so compelling to readers?
BM: Forgery—at least at the high-wire, world-class level I’m depicting in these novels—is one of the more elaborate, refined deceits somebody can try to get away with. It combines activities that are at once forbidden, artistic, sophisticated, daring, secretive, dangerous, and even a bit alchemical, given the bravura tactile skills and erudition needed to fabricate literary artifacts that sing with authenticity. Forgers need to fool the seasoned, expert eyes of booksellers, librarians, and collectors who have a vested interest in acquiring genuine material, not fakes. After all, the historical record is at stake, along with, at times, a great deal of money. These days, a multitude of high-tech forensic tools, both digital and chemical, can be used in an investigation of a suspected forgery. An intrepid forger must bear all this in mind.
Most of the famous forgers over the centuries were people who would be very interesting to have dinner with. Many were refined, dazzlingly intelligent, and involved in forging as much for the pleasure of hoodwinking the world as for mere monetary gain. If one of fiction’s functions is to explore the dichotomies of good and evil, truth and lies, and other foundational themes, then forgery—an attempt to undermine truth, skew perception, rewrite history—is a truly interesting, truly uncommon breach of trust to explore.
Readers seem to have a perennial curiosity about characters who think and behave differently from themselves. And those who read The Forger’s Requiem will be, I sense, as compelled by the complex psychology of the forger as by the forgery itself.
ILS: What do you hope readers take away from this story?
BM: One thing I hope they don’t take away is the desire to become a forger! All three books in the Forgers trilogy contain detailed fundamentals about producing vintage inks from scratch, using period papers, aging documents, replicating the telltale calligraphic idiosyncrasies of a number of famous writers—but, of course, they’re not meant to be manuals for aspiring fraudsters. Given the fates of my different forgers, I imagine any temptation to follow their obsessions off the page should be quashed. With the exception of one character in The Forger’s Requiem who avoids personal disaster, witnessing their terrible downfall should be a discouragement from taking up a quill pen and trying to script an undiscovered Shakespeare play (though William Henry Ireland did, back in the 1790s, and duped all the authorities of his day, his scholarly father included).
I hope readers will have, as I did while researching and writing the trilogy, a fresh appreciation—and maybe an empathetic understanding—of how easily one can slip from a virtuous, or at least respectable, life into the morass of deceit. Forgery’s a white-collar crime but one in which more than just money is stolen through deception. Literary history is stolen as well. An audacious, gifted forger can create new interpretations of a work of literature that the original author never intended. Might have even recoiled from. Would certainly disavow if they were around to do so. One repeated line threads throughout the trilogy—“Dying is a dangerous business”—and that’s surely the case with posthumous forgeries.
ILS: What’s the best book you’ve read recently?
BM: Richard Powers’ new novel, Playground, is a brilliant successor to his earlier astonishment, The Overstory. I’m always eager to read each new addition to his work that has evolved into a major contribution to our literature. I also recently read and loved Maya Binyam’s debut novel, Hangman, a book that’s difficult to categorize—dark and comical with a deadpan existential prose tone that reminded me at times of Samuel Beckett’s Molloy, or Thomas Bernhard’s work, but is obviously informed by completely different cultural references. Hangman’s unnamed refugee-narrator leads us on an eccentric quest to find his way back to his homeland, his elusive family, his brother, and, inescapably, himself. Both books are moving, intelligent, and daring in their storytelling styles. One by a master, the other by an original, wildly promising young writer.
ILS: What’s next?
BM: Back in 2011, I wrote a long story, Fall of the Birds, that came out as a Kindle Single. It’s about a widower and his daughter who are mourning the loss of the father’s wife and the daughter’s mother by taking up her obsession with birdwatching—when they notice that no robins have been seen in their upstate New York town. The grieving pair grow closer as they set off on this this avian mystery. My next novel, which I’ve been researching and drafting ever since, will explore the phenomenon of mass birdfalls around the world, particularly in the southwestern United States and down to Mexico, as well as the rise of avian flu (H5N1). It is a nearer, scarier horizon than we might imagine. A longtime birder myself, my research is a joy to pursue, even though its dual themes of climate crisis and diminishing bird populations are profoundly sobering. Set in upstate New York and northern New Mexico, a bit in the near future, the novel’s tentatively titled Birdfall. I hope to have it finished late next year.
ILS: Can you share a favorite memory of the library?
BM: I have so many. I remember the excitement of getting my first library card which, thanks to my packrat mother, is still preserved in a family album. Years later, as an undergrad at the University of Colorado, I worked as a book shelver in Olin Library and recall that having access to the stacks—rows of writers I’d never heard of!—was an education in itself. Since we’re discussing a trilogy, let me share three memorable moments, two at major rare book libraries and the other at a tiny public library in Maine.
The first time I entered the Beinecke Library as a grad student at Yale, I gazed up at the multi-tiered glass tower housing thousands of antiquarian books bound in leather and vellum, and was viscerally moved, nearly fainted (embarrassing but true). The sight of centuries of world culture preserved in books and manuscripts was overwhelming. Decades later, when librarian Carolyn Vega invited me to the Berg Collection at NYPL to examine two of the twelve known copies of Poe’s 1827 Tamerlane, I gingerly paged through the fragile pamphlets knowing it was not impossible the poet himself had once handled them. Another time, while writing my first novel, Come Sunday, on Mount Desert Island, I spent many hours in the little local library where I became friends with the librarian. Sitting in his office one afternoon, I noticed an original leather set of the Oxford English Dictionary on a trolley marked for rebinding. He explained that studier buckram bindings were more practical for reference books. Without thinking, I offered to trade my own new clothbound set, cover shipping costs and any difference in value, and he happily agreed. Mine are still there, and I treasure their old one, which, no doubt, will end up in another library someday.
