Norman Partridge

Tom Piccirilli interviewed Norman Partridge about his latest book, Dark Harvest.

One exchange from their dialogue:

PIC: So much of your fiction deals with western and crime motifs -- desert dusty towns, ex-cons and bad boys drifting into deeper troubles with .45s blazing. How was it switching gears and writing a Middle American cornfield setting full of traditional Halloween elements in Dark Harvest?

PART: Well, I kept the .45s and bad boys, pard. As far as the town goes, I wanted it to reflect my memories of the sixties, what it was like to grow up in a town with a little bit of the varnish rubbed off. Maybe a tougher place, but still a place that had holidays like everywhere else, where once a year you picked out a pumpkin and carved a face on that sucker that'd scare the neighbor's cat. But the setting also came from fiction. If you're a writer who loves this kind of stuff, you've put a lot of Halloween through your creative filter. And, for me, that's a particular reality that works just fine when it comes to getting a story down on the page. I was watching a lot of first and second season Twilight Zone while I wrote Dark Harvest. Many of those episodes are about perfect little towns with a secret. I even managed to give Rod Serling a cameo along the way. That turned out to be one of my favorite scenes in the book.

Read the full interview.

The Page 99 Test: Dark Harvest.

--Marshal Zeringue

Judith Freeman

Allen Barra interviewed Judith Freeman, author of The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved, for AmericanHeritage.com.

The opening exchanges:

Raymond Chandler has been imitated, parodied, and practically plagiarized for so long that his style of detective story has practically become a cliché. Yet somehow the work not only survives but stays fresh. Just about all his books have been in print continuously since they were published. What do you think it is about Chandler that endures?

The short answer is his brilliance, which is a multi-faceted thing. There’s his humor for starters. As Christopher Isherwood observed, There’s fun in Chandler. He’s an immensely amusing writer, and readers connect with that wit. And yet he says some profound things about American society and the corruption in its institutions, how we’re a big, rough, rich, appetent society, and crime is the price we pay for our gluttony. His books contain that quality he most valued in writing, namely vitality, and it is a hard thing to fake if you don’t have it, which is why so many imitators fail. But in the end I think it’s Marlowe that gives the books their real staying power. Philip Marlowe is an enigma. He says so himself at one point. He’s vulnerable, like us, and we feel his sad good-naturedness. He’s an iconic America male, just as Marilyn Monroe was an iconic American female. And this is interesting because Chandler once said that only he and Marilyn Monroe had managed to reach all the brows — high-brow, middle-brow, and low-brow. This is another reason why Chandler endures. He reaches across the intellectual spectrum with stories that still seem fresh in their telling.

When I was at the Los Angeles Times Book Festival two years ago the writer whose name was evoked most often when taking about L.A. was Raymond Chandler. This is odd because Chandler certainly had mixed feelings about Southern California in general and Los Angeles in particular. I think one of his most famous putdowns was that L.A. had “all the personality of a paper cup.” Yet he had many opportunities to move and never did. How would you sum up his strange on-again, off-again affair with the City of Angels?

He had a definite love-hate relationship with L.A. I think he loved it when he first arrived, in 1913, and it must have been a pretty idyllic place then, very different from London, the city where he’d spent much of his childhood. He really took to driving and loved automobiles. But L.A. was a place that got despoiled quite rapidly, and the banality and lack of taste in a population composed increasingly of transplanted Midwesterners — the so called hog-and-hominy crowd — began to disgust him. On the one hand, you had religious nuts of every stripe, and on the other, you had bunko artists bilking the ignorant rubes, as well as gangsters, bad cops, and corrupt politicians. Smog arrived, and stupid fads, and objects with built-in obsolescence. After a while L.A became Paradise Despoiled for him, a grotesque and impossible place to live. California, he said, was the department store state — everything in the catalogue you could get better somewhere else. He lost it as a place to set his fiction, because he had to either love a city or hate it to write about it, or maybe both, he said, “like a woman.” Eventually L.A. bored him. It became “just a tired old whore” to him. Still, he put it on the literary map. His relationship with L.A. was very symbiotic. The city gave him his material, and in return he gave it a lasting identity. No one wrote better about L.A. or captured more of its unique essence.

Read the full interview.

--Marshal Zeringue

Laura Pappano

Laura Pappano, co-author with Eileen McDonagh of Playing With the Boys: Why Separate is Not Equal in Sports, is an award-winning journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe Magazine, Good Housekeeping, and The Washington Post. Pappano and McDonagh’s book is about how women have been unfairly excluded from participating in sports on an equal footing with men. The book calls for sex-sensible policies in sports as a crucial step towards achieving equality for men and women in our society.

From a Q & A at the OUP Blog:

OUPblog: What first inspired you to write this book?

Laura Pappano: Eileen and I first began discussing the connection between the “rules” around how sports are organized and how this related to power structures in politics when we were both visiting scholars at The Murray Center at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. As a kid playing on a boy’s newspaper carrier league baseball team I’d felt firsthand that sense of not being considered equal (even though I played as well as any of my teammates) just because of my gender. I stole a base once and the other team was so upset they wanted me to go back - and then my own teammates (who didn’t like having a girl on “their” team) told me to go back, too. I refused. Every game and practice was an opportunity for me to be reminded by my teammates that I was intruding on their territory. I can’t tell you how many car rides home (one of the boy’s moms was the manager who drove us) I spent staring down at my shorts and sitting in silence as they teased. In good ways (I played field hockey at Yale) and bad I have seen the power of sports to influence who we are and what opportunities and status we have available to us. Sports matter too much to be allowed to stand unchallenged in their role as enforcers of gender inequality.

OUP: What do you see as the biggest challenge facing females in sports?

Pappano: The biggest challenge is that women are often afraid to challenge the status quo for fear of losing what “progress” has been made. The problem is that we have codified a system of organized sports which places male athletes at the center and female athletes at the periphery.

Read the entire Q & A.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mike Carey

Alex Dueben interviewed Mike Carey for the California Literary Review.

The introduction and their first exchange:

Mike Carey’s third novel is out in the U.K., but his first has just been released in hardcover in the U.S. The Devil You Know is the story of Felix Castor, a freelance exorcist who happens to be an atheist in a London where the dead have started to rise.

This may be his first novel, but is far from his first published work. Carey is one of the finest writers in comics in addition to being one of the most prolific. This year alone he’s released Crossing Midnight, God Save the Queen, Re-gifters, Faker, Confessions of a Blabbermouth and Voodoo Child, among others. He’s also developing a joint project for Virgin Entertainment and the Sci-Fi Channel.

Mike Carey’s career in comics has been an odd one. His writing career has rested on two series, Lucifer and Hellblazer, both complex, adult works that straddle multiple genres. We sat down to talk about his novel’s American release.

Where did novel come from?

I honestly don’t know. It comes from a lot of things that are kicking around in your head at any given time. I’d been thinking about this idea of explaining–you know the idea of the grand unified theory, the theory of everything which sort of explains the relationship between all the fundamental physical forces–I was thinking of a grand unified theory of the afterlife, something that would explain ghosts and demons and werewolves and zombies and vampires and so on, by means of a single mechanism. That was definitely one of the triggers.

The other one was just Castor himself. I was thinking about, what if an exorcist was like a private dick, a shamus, rather than a priest. So the idea of a noir-ish, Raymond Chandler-ish Exorcist was the other thing and then putting those two together became the basis for the pitch. It happened over quite an extended period of time and was just floating in the back of my mind.

Read the full interview.

--Marshal Zeringue

Alan Lightman

Alan Lightman is the author of five novels, two collections of essays, and several books on science. His work has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Granta, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and Nature, among many other publications. A theoretical physicist as well as a novelist, he has served on the faculties of Harvard and MIT, and was the first person to receive a dual faculty appointment at MIT in science and in the humanities.

His new novel is Ghost.

From a Q & A at the publisher's website:

Q: The main character in your newest novel Ghost works in a funeral home. David K is a rational man who, as the book opens, cannot deny to himself that one day, at work, he saw something irrational, not of this world — an image, or spirit, something he can not explain as a trick of the eye. What are you hoping to establish by opening the novel this way?

A: I think that the opening of any novel should forcefully draw the reader into the world that the writer has created. Much of the action of Ghost takes place in the interior mental world of the main character, David K, as he agonizes over his unexplainable metaphysical experience. I wanted to throw the reader immediately into that tortured state of mind. The first chapter differs from the rest of the novel in that it is a first person narrative, while the rest of the book is third person. I intended here for the first person voice to be immediate and gripping and disturbing. David's metaphysical experience really launches the action of the book. All the foundations of his life — his understanding of the way the world works and his relationships with people — are thrown into chaos after that defining metaphysical experience. Rather than give a slow lead up to that moment, I decided to begin a few days after it has occurred, describe David's extreme disorientation without describing the apparition itself, and then backtrack in time. In this way, I hoped to create suspense at the very beginning of the book and a strong forward motion.

Read the entire Q & A.

--Marshal Zeringue

Elmore Leonard

Prompted by the publication of Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing, J. Kingston Pierce of The Rap Sheet put some questions to the master, including:

JKP: As one your “rules,” you say writers should avoid giving detailed descriptions of characters and places. But there can be great satisfaction in composing a thoughtful, semi-poetic word picture of a locale or player in fiction. Shouldn’t there be a balance struck between what the reader wants and what the writer needs in order to feel satisfied with the quality of the completed work?

EL: I say in the opening paragraph [of Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing], “If you have a facility for language and imagery and the sound of your voice pleases you ...” go ahead, skip the rules.

JKP: Are you really arguing against the length or concentration of descriptions, rather than their punchiness? If one can describe a character over the course of a book through a series of telling details, is it then wrong to have more fully described that person?

EL: The length, the style, have nothing to do with it. Descriptions by writers trying to write can be tedious. The reader can already have a picture of the character and the writer’s description ruins it.

Read the entire interview.

--Marshal Zeringue

Walter Russell Mead

Walter Russell Mead is the author, most recently, of God and Gold: Britain, America, and the Making of the Modern World.

From a Q & A at the publisher's website:

In God and Gold you say that the conventional view of modern history is all wrong — that it is like a production of Hamlet with no Prince of Denmark. What does this mean?

The conventional wisdom says that the big story in world politics for the last 300 years has been the rise and fall of Europe. I think that’s wrong. The real story of world history has been something else: the birth, development and continuing rise of an international system of finance, politics, power and trade resting first on the power of Britain and now on the power of the United States. Despite America’s troubles under the Bush administration, that global system is more powerful today than ever.

God and Gold says that “the history of the modern world can be summed up in ten letters.” What letters?

This global system, which I call the ‘maritime system’ because it is based on global trade and sea power, was actually invented by the Dutch almost 400 years ago. Think of this system as the software that runs the global economy. The Dutch introduced version 1.0 in about 1600. The British introduced version 2.0 in 1700 and the United States introduced version 3.0 during World War II. Ever since 1600 the country that sets up the operating system has been the world’s most important power, and that is how I get to the ten letters. The official name for the Netherlands is actually the United Provinces of the Netherlands and Britain is formally known as the United Kingdom.

Using these initials gets you a summary of world leadership for 400 years: U.P. to U.K. to U.S.

Read the entire Q & A.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ben Cheever

Ben Cheever's latest book is Strides: Running Through History with an Unlikely Athlete.

Jamie Malanowski interviewed him for Playboy.com.

Their first two exchanges:

You charmingly convey the sense of pride you felt in your development as a runner. At this point in your life, you've run in approximately 50 marathons. You make it seem very easy. Here's your chance to come clean -- can anybody do what you've done?

I've run dozens of marathons, but the race still scares me. That's a long way to go. The wall is not a figment of the imagination. A first marathon -- like that first mile -- can be a life-changing experience. Someday one of these races is going to get me. And I'll be heartbroken until I run the next one. Jim Fixx said that anyone who can walk can run. I'm not certain he's right there, but most of us can run. And most of us don't. Which is fine. Whatever gets you through the night. Without running, though, I don't think I'd make it until morning.

You discuss the findings of some evolutionists who believe we developed as a species because of our aptitude for long distance running. Where do you come out on that?

The chimp doesn't have our arch or Achilles tendon. There's some feeling now that we evolved to be runners shortly after we evolved to stand. Dr. Dennis Bramble of the University of Utah and Dr. Daniel Lieberman of Harvard see distance running as a significant step in the development of man. The piece they ran in Nature Magazine in 2004 got an enormous amount of attention. Mostly from runners. Bramble and Lieberman are both runners.

Read the full interview.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kate Christensen

Maud Newton interviewed Kate Christensen, author, most recently, of The Great Man.

Their opening exchange:

Oscar Feldman, the acclaimed painter, notorious womanizer, and “Great Man” of your latest novel, is a less talented painter than his sister Maxine. As you said a couple months ago, her work is deeper, more resistant to pigeonholing, but his is “flashy and bold” — and male artists are “just taken more seriously, even today.” So it’s Oscar’s life the biographers are stampeding to write, at least until they’re forced in the final pages to confront the truth about Maxine’s talents.

I hate to put you on the spot, but I wonder if the story was at all inspired by the reception accorded your first two novels. Despite the richness of your prose and the originality of your insights — not to mention your sense of humor — too many reviewers treated In the Drink and Jeremy Thrane as disposable fluff, something the Sex and the City crowd might pass the time with while awaiting the next Bridget Jones book. As you said then, “I think I have more in common with Lucky Jim than I do with Bridget, Eve or Jane, but because we’re all standing next to each other and we’re all girls, people think we’re together.” What was that like?

I felt a bit like an underdog/loser with a thwarted ego and an axe to grind in one of my own novels, and in that sense it was ironic, fitting, and really, the best thing that could have happened to me. Sure, it pissed me off at first, because few things are more infuriating than being underestimated, but it also lit a fire under my ass, so to speak, and taught me a few valuable Zennish lessons about writing: Let It Go (you can’t control what people make of your work); Keep Moving Forward Like a Shark (all you can do is write more books); and Ride the Ocean Tides and Stay Your Course (your internal compass, not a glowing or scathing review, is the one authority to be heeded and obeyed). If by some stroke of bizarre and undeserved fortune my first novel had been hailed as genius and won prizes and I’d floated off in a filmy golden bubble of critical blowjobs and huge advances, that would not have been in any way as good for me as a writer as being written off as disposable fluff. Honestly.

That said, and to answer your question more directly, it does seem to me that male writers are taken more seriously just because they’re men, and conversely, female writers have to work much harder to be taken seriously just because we’re women; I don’t have any hard statistics to back this up, but almost every time I open the NYTBR, I become convinced anew. Anyway, it’s a little dispiriting, but there’s nothing I can do about it but keep writing.

Read the entire interview.

--Marshal Zeringue

Richard Lange

Richard Lange is the author of Dead Boys, his debut collection of short stories was published recently by Little, Brown.

T.C. Boyle, George Pelecanos, Alice Sebold, Scott Wolven, Scott Smith, Michael Connelly, Chris Offutt, Anthony Doerr, and Daniel Woodrell number among those with early, enthusiastic endorsements for Dead Boys.

John Kenyon interviewed Lange at Things I’d Rather Be Doing.

One exchange from the Q & A:

You're championed by some heavy hitters in the crime fiction world, though all of these stories were published in pretty traditional short story journals. Is genre a consideration for you? Do you identify with crime writers or mystery writers?

I didn’t think about genre when writing these stories. That the book is considered by some to be a work of crime fiction is fine by me, but I wouldn’t call it that. I do admit, however, to co-opting the language of crime fiction, particularly the hard-boiled stuff, and injecting it into stories that might have been fairly quiet “relationship” pieces without it in order to heighten the tension and describe the violence being done to the characters’ psyches.

I don’t read a ton of crime fiction – a lot of detective books have too many scenes of people talking in offices for my taste, or they’re tough-talking iterations of Chandler or Ross MacDonald. I love Elmore Leonard, though, Charles Willeford, Jim Thompson, and Clockers was great.

Read the full interview.

Writers Read: Richard Lange.

--Marshal Zeringue