Misha Glenny, the writer of Mcmafia

The writer of Mcmafia on the trials of the investigative journalist and the joys of Gogglebox

INDIVIDUAL INVESTIGATIVE journalists have very different skills. My tools are languages.

Beyond English, I am fluent in four languages: German, Czech, what used to be known as Serbo-croat and, most recently, Portuguese. I’m also competent in French and have residual Latin. With that mix of Germanic, Romance and Slav, I can read any Indo-european language with the help of dictionaries, except Greek, Albanian and Icelandic.

Roughly 51 per cent of the internet is in English, and English-speakers amount to 26 per cent of internet users. But the former percentage is falling, and other Indo-european languages account for almost 30 per cent of online content. I can access stories about South Africa in Afrikaans, about Ecuador in Spanish, about Brazil in Portuguese or about Kazakhstan in Russian.

When writing Mcmafia, I came across the best stories on foreignlanguage websites. I would then dig deeper, talking to the criminals, police and lawyers involved. My languages have taken me to the jungles of Colombia, where I met representatives of the FARC; to the townships of South Africa to talk to drug dealers; and to a mansion in Odessa to talk to the head of a criminal syndicate.

BUT ONE THING is critical: youth. I started learning Portuguese at 55, to research my last book, Nemesis; I assumed it would be a doddle. I did develop a reading fluency quickly; however, the Portuguese spoken by drug traffickers and gangs in the favelas of Rio left me baffled.

But the main problems are agerelated. Firstly, there’s memory: I can tell you who was number one in the British charts in May 1967 but will have no idea if I remembered to lock the back door five minutes ago. The gradual domination of long-term over short-term memory as we age means that I flounder when it comes to vocabulary.

Secondly, like many of us, I listened to a lot of loud music in my teens. The ability to reproduce sounds instinctively starts declining from about the age of 12 and closes down around 25. For me, the process of pronouncing Portuguese was a painfully slow one of hit-and-miss mimicry, but one made much harder by my inability to hear properly.

And thirdly, there’s pillow talk – or lack of. When language students return from their year abroad, you can tell who acquired a paramour. In your teens and 20s, learning a language often involves getting drunk and chatting people up. Unfortunately, by the time I was learning Portuguese, I liked to be tucked up in bed by 9.30pm. Still, I’m a sucker for punishment and in my 60s I’m determined to learn Dutch, Swedish or Italian – I haven’t decided which yet.

OF COURSE, MY CHILDREN have always cringed in restaurants when I address the staff in Portuguese or Czech, but I’m pleased to say on the set of Mcmafia my language skills were appreciated by the director, James Watkins. The show has a multinational cast, and I was able to point out in one of the Prague scenes that a cop was intoning his lines in Czech as if he were declaiming Shakespeare. I discreetly suggested that he adopt a working-class accent.

I WAS THRILLED to find out a couple of days ago that the show’s ratings are looking good. There’s something surreal about knowing there are millions of people around the country watching a show based on my book. My ambition is for Mcmafia to be discussed on Gogglebox. Now that would impress the children. Mcmafia by Misha Glenny is published by Vintage (£8.99)

In your teens and 20s, learning a language often involves getting drunk and chatting people up