Tim and Colin interview Barbara March and Alan Scarfe. Listen on Soundcloud or iTunes.
Replayed on October 25th, 2017.
Married in 1979 Barbara March and Alan Scarfe have had long and distinguished careers on stage and screen, from Stratford to Star Trek. Alan was associate director of the Stratford Festival in Ontario, Canada, and the Everyman Theatre in Liverpool, England. He also performed at Stratford for 8 years. He has played over 100 major roles across Europe, Canada, the UK and the US including King Lear, Othello, and Hamlet. On screen he’s appeared in, to name a few: Due South, Quantum Leap, NYPD Blue, The Outer Limits, Lethal Weapon and Star Trek: The Next Generation and Voyager. Start Trek fans while be more familiar with Barbara, though, as she played the recurring role of the Klingon, Lursa, one of the Duras sisters, from the House of Duras, who appeared in The Next Generation, Deep Space 9 and in the first feature film of the Next Generation franchise, Star Trek: Generations. She’s also a stage actor who’s preformed at the Stratford Festival as well as many in other festivals and in theatres around the world. She’s embodied roles such as Isabella in Measure for Measure, Desdemona in Othello and Titania in Midsummer Nights Dream and played Lady Macbeth several times. Barbara also penned the book The Copper People. Writing is a talent that she also shares with Alan who authored The Revelation of Jack the Ripper and The Vampires of Juarez. All books are published through Smart House Books. The Book Launch for The Vampires of Juarez will be held at the Tarragon Theatre on October 28th, 2015. For more information on the lauch and for other event put on by Smart House Books check out their event page. You are also invited to a Halloween Party thrown in honour of the books release.
The Vampires of Juarez came from a screenplay. Sometime in the 1990s I read Charles Bowden‘s Blood Orchid and became aware of his collaboration with Julian Cardona which had resulted in two very powerful verbal and photographic portraits of Ciudad Juarez. I knew a bit about the rapidly proliferating tragedy of las desaparecidas and also the life of Amado Carrillo Fuentes and put all these things together in a film script called The Loved One and the Tiger.
The impetus to expand the script came ten years later at a lunch meeting with Paolo de Crescenzo, the founder of Gargoyle Books, at the Circolo Canottieri on the banks of the Tiber in Rome. He was in the process of publishing Le Memorie di Jack lo Squartatore, which had been introduced to him by two young fans that Barbara and I met by chance at a Star Trek convention in Bellaria, and asked if I would write him a vampire novel. I was surprised and had no interest whatever in the genre and rather jokingly suggested, “What about vampires and 9/11?” He raised his bushy eyebrows as if I were quite mad and then said, “Why not?”
Barbara and I were living in Italy at the time and working on a translation of a play she had written about the Bronte sisters as well as a film script about the Poles who fought at Monte Cassino called Anders’ Army and as I turned my mind to vampires it became clear to me that I couldn’t deal with the subject properly in a single book but would need to make it a trilogy. So the gist of The Loved One and the Tiger became Book One which leads to 9/11 in Book Two and beyond to the installation of Joseph Ratzinger as Pope Benedict XVI in the spring of 2005 in Book Three.
An eccentric English journalist is in El Paso. One morning at dawn he wades across the Rio Grande while filming a white Siberian tiger that has come to the river to drink. He is kidnapped in Juarez by the tiger’s owner, a drug lord who forces him to impersonate a mysterious go-between in exchange for his life.
“Fast-moving, eloquent, funny and at the same time profoundly violent and distressing . . irony saves it from insupportable sadness and instead creates a fresh and captivating story. Another terrific novel from Alan Scarfe.”
– Susanna Raule, Cut-up
“Scarfe’s vampires are nothing like the classic literary and cinematic archetypes. They are neither romantic nor troubled spirits. They are pitiless, arrogant and vulgar, without immortality and unafraid of the sun.”
– Vito Tripi, Word Shelter