Duane Swierczynski

Earlier this year, Kathleen Bolton interviewed Duane Swierczynski, author of The Blonde and other terrific fiction, for Writer Unboxed.

The opening exchanges of the interview:

Q: Tell us about your road to publication

DS: It was the usual road: in dire need of resurfacing, full of confusing signage, and populated by violent highwaymen who’d just as soon carve out your liver as siphon your gasoline.

Okay, maybe it wasn’t quite that bad. But it was a long road. This December will mark 20 years since I started writing fiction for real. I remember the exact date: December 27, 1987. That was the night before my best friend’s birthday. I was 15 years old, and broke, so I wrote him a horror novella as a gift. It had a shock ending, and when he read it, he let out this great yell. That’s when it clicked for me. I knew I wanted to spend the rest of my life trying to do that again, for as many readers as possible.

Hundreds of stories and novel fragments and half-baked ideas later, I wrote The Wheelman as a lark, to see if I could write a stripped-down, fast-moving heist novel. I honestly thought it had no chance of selling – I mostly wrote it to entertain myself. It sold in two weeks. Nobody was more stunned than me.

Q: Did you think that it was never going to happen? How do you keep the drive to write alive, especially after a 20-year wait?

DS: I don’t really think I had a choice. The drive refused to go away, no matter what. The funny thing is, I remember saying to my wife at one point, “Look, I may never get published I may end up with 20 novels in my trunk that my grandkids discover someday, and have a good laugh. But that’s okay.” And a month later, swear to God, The Wheelman sold to St. Martin’s. It’s almost as if I had to admit it out loud: I was in it for the long haul.

Q: Your novels are violent, wacky, and fiendishly plotted. What drew you to writing noir/crime fiction, and why?

DS: As a teenager, I read a lot of horror, and during the late 1980s/ early 1990s some of my favorite writers were writing crime and noir, too. The two novels that really turned me on to crime fiction were Joe Lansdale’s Cold in July, an excellent Gold-Medal style thriller (though I had no idea what Gold Medal was at the time) and Robert Ferrigno’s The Horse Latitudes. That led me to Jim Thompson and James M. Cain and David Goodis … and before I knew it, I was living in Noirville, and loving it.

I think the fascination with horror and crime and noir comes from the same place: I’m fascinated by characters experiencing the worst days of their lives. With crime and noir, however, the characters often bring it on themselves.

Read the entire interview.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jim Shepard

John Kenyon of Things I'd Rather Be Doing interviewed Jim Shepard, author of the recently-released short story collection, Like You’d Understand, Anyway,

One exchange from their Q & A:

Your short stories seem almost like challenges to yourself, with you inhabiting the heads of a staggeringly disparate cast of characters. The acknowledgment pages of your collections, meanwhile, look like the citation section from a thick academic book. Do you do research on topics that interest you and then decide to write stories based on that information, or do you conceive of the story and then do research to help with the writing?

I think they are challenges to myself -- that's a nice way of putting it -- nearly always in terms of stretching the capacities of my empathetic imagination. A story narrated by John Ashcroft began with my fulminating about yet another one of his inconceivably bad decisions as attorney general, for example, and then asking myself, ‘How does he do something like that, and live with himself?’ And then asking myself the question more seriously, and deciding that I would read all about him and try to find out. As for research, I read on subjects that interest me, first. Sometimes that sets off something that begins to feel like a story -- almost always because of some mysterious or elusive emotional resonance that I begin to register (as opposed to because I feel like the elements in front of me would make a good story.) Once I've begun to feel that what I've been reading might generate a story, my reading changes, and I begin to do more focused research.

Read the entire interview.

--Marshal Zeringue

Philomena Keet

Philomena Keet is a British anthropologist whose PhD is on Tokyo Street fashion. Her new book, with photographer Yuri Manabe, is The Tokyo Look Book: Stylish to Spectacular, Goth to Gyaru, Sidewalk to Catwalk.

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

Q: Are there social, economic or cultural factors unique to Tokyo or Japan that have nurtured the fashion scene?

PK: In Japan of course there is no one 'fashion scene' and the social, cultural and economic factors that draw someone to gothic lolita and a conservative look are very different. Much has been written about the importance of the group in Japanese society and embarrassment about standing out, but whilst gyaru groups can be very rigidly defined with 'interviews' to join etc., for other styles like the fashionistas often in FRUiTS, its hard to make out any recognizable 'group' at all.

One of the characteristics of fashion itself is its ambiguous nature in anchoring the individual into some kind of group as well as representing a desire for individuality. Hence, the gothic lolita who looks like she is standing out and rebelling against society is actually dressing in a recognized style with thousands of adherents, but at the same time within any seeming group there are always people striving to stand out, be the most fashionable or extreme.

Economic factors may have contributed to the 'second-hand' clothing boom, which are now sold everywhere from supermarket-like chains to exclusive and vintage boutiques. But on the other hand, people buy Louis Vuitton bags regardless of whether it's a recession or they earn very little.

Culturally, there may be something in the Japanese ability to have fun with clothes and enjoy them for what they are rather than perceiving them as some meaningless frivolity which detracts from the 'inner self'. There is a lot of importance placed on 'surfaces' in Japan: masking one's inner feelings can be positively valued for example.

Read the full Q & A.

Learn more about the book and its creators at The Tokyo Look Book website, blog, and MySpace page.

The Page 99 Test: The Tokyo Look Book.

--Marshal Zeringue

Christopher Goffard

If I had not already read Christopher Goffard's debut novel Snitch Jacket, Sarah Weinman's recent Los Angeles Times review would have nudged me to put it atop my To Read list. "Snitch Jacket is a wonder of sentences that sing," Weinman writes, adding that "the story is artfully told, with shifts between action and first-person narration that are almost seamless." Her bottom line: "we can't help looking forward to what comes next from this talented writer's mind and pen."

Goffard graciously replied to a few questions I put to him (via email) last month:

Zeringue: Publishers Weekly's rave review of Snitch Jacket concluded: "Goffard's prose shimmers with intelligence and humor, and he has a keen ear for telling detail. Fans of such cultish neo-noir scribes such as Charlie Huston and Duane Swierczynski will be richly rewarded." I certainly agree with the first sentence. And while the second sentence is technically accurate -- I'm a big fan of those two writers and I felt richly rewarded by your book -- they aren't the first two authors that came to my mind in that context. Which two writers would you plug into that sentence?

Goffard: It's funny to hear the names of the writers my work is drawing comparisons to, most of whom -- Charlie Huston and Duane Swierczynski, John Ridley and James Crumley -- I'd actually never read, though I'm starting to read and enjoy some of them now. I think if your reading tastes incline to James Ellroy or DBC Pierre's Vernon God Little or the work of Harry Crews, you'll enjoy a book like Snitch Jacket.

Zeringue: Someone tagged Snitch Jacket as "literary noir," which seems accurate enough to me. Of novels of the last few years, the so-called literary novel that I thought of when reading Snitch Jacket was Marisha Pessl's Special Topics in Calamity Physics. (She gets a lot of her pop from active verbs while your adjectives sizzle, and you both have suspiciously unreliable narrators.) As for the noir cousins that came to mind, I give you John Ridley's pulp fiction: like you, he has pathetic losers at the center of the story. Of course, these connections are highly idiosyncratic, and I would be surprised if anyone else thought of your book as Pessl crossed with Ridley. Do you have your own equation -- [literary novel] crossed with [noir novel] -- for Snitch Jacket?

Goffard: I have to admit, the terms "literary noir" or "literary crime novel" embarass me a little bit, because a writer who goes around saying "I've written literature here," as opposed to "I've written a book," is exhibiting some serious hubris and is asking for a beat-down. I think the tags are useful only insofar as they alert readers to what's in store -- that Snitch Jacket's not what a lot of people now consider a crime book, the kind with two-sentence paragraphs and two-page chapters that you read at the beach while you're slathering lotion on your kids and trying to keep them from running into the water. I mean, you'll have to pay a little bit of attention. Because the publishing industry loves pigeonholes and encourages these ersatz distinctions, I think some readers are caught off-balance. Genre folks say, "Gee, this isn't the pace I'm used to," and readers of so-called literary books say, "Gee, what are all these lowlifes doing in a book with pretty sentences?" I'm encouraged by books like George Higgins' The Friends of Eddie Coyle and Gerald Kersh's Night and the City and Chesterton's Father Brown stories, which have crime trappings but transcend them in wild and unexpected ways.

Zeringue: Were you conscious of any connections between your own vocation as a newspaper reporter and that of your protagonist, Benny Bunt, the snitch? That is, you and your fictional creation are both paid to shine light into activities that others would prefer to keep hidden. Of course, that's not to equate your motives or profession with Benny's activities....

Goffard: Well, there's a book by Janet Malcolm called The Journalist and the Murderer which begins: "Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance or loneliness." Now, I think that vastly overstates the case. I think you can do the job ethically and without damaging the subjects whose trust you happen to win. But there's an element of salesmanship in the profession that sometimes borders on the smarmy, on a used-car pitch, and it's uncomfortable to see when it happens. But I came to think of Benny as a broader metaphor for writers in general, that dangerous breed who listen very closely to the people around them, coax out all kinds of heart-meat stuff, and then use the material to hustle out a living.

Read more about Snitch Jacket, and learn about what Goffard was reading in late August 2007.

The Page 99 Test: Snitch Jacket.

--Marshal Zeringue

David Kirby

David Kirby is Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor of English at Florida State University.

His recent books include The House on Boulevard St.: New and Selected Poems (LSU Press) and an essay collection entitled Ultra-Talk: Johnny Cash, The Mafia, Shakespeare, Drum Music, St. Teresa Of Avila, And 17 Other Colossal Topics Of Conversation (University of Georgia Press).

His previous books include the poetry collections The Ha-Ha and The House of Blue Light. His poems have been published in Best American Poetry 2000 and 2001 and in Pushcart Prize XXV. He is a recipient of the Brittingham Prize in Poetry and a Guggenheim fellowship among other honors.

The House on Boulevard St. was a 2007 National Book Award Poetry Finalist. Craig Morgan Teicher interviewed Kirby about the collection and his poetry. Part of their dialogue:

CMT: Let’s talk about the book. You call these poems “memory poems”: they’re conversational, far reaching, witty, referencing all kinds of things, from Dante to whatever happens to be going on at the moment. How did you start writing this kind of poem?

DK: I used to write what I called “2 by 4 look-out-the-window-poems”: you look out the window and see something and give your thoughts on it. That amused me for a while, but I knew I wanted to change. Meanwhile I’d grown up on a farm in south Louisiana, and my mother, who was born in 1902, was an old school farm girl in a rough part of the world. There were actually people on her family farm who had been born into slavery and were emancipated. There were voodoo elements and conjure people in the woods, people who could talk the warts off your hands for a nickel and that kind of thing. My mother was always a great story teller, and she passed on a love of stories to me. In addition to writing these “2 by 4” poems, I liked to tell stories and my wife, the poet Barbara Hamby, said, “you should turn these stories into nonfiction essays.” I kept thinking about that, then one day a light bulb ignited. I said, “ooh, why not combine the two, cut out the middle genre, nonfiction, and make the stories directly into poems.” Then I ran out of stories, and I realized I could either hold up liquor stores and have more stories or do something else. That’s when the poems became more braided, referring to high and pop culture and something I had for lunch.

Read the full interview, and learn more about the book.

--Marshal Zeringue

J.M. Hayes

J.M. "Mike" Hayes is the author of The Grey Pilgrim (2000), Mad Dog & Englishman (2000), Prairie Gothic (2003), Plains Crazy (2004), and Broken Heartland (2007).

Betty Webb recently interviewed Hayes for WebbsBlog. Their opening exchanges:

BETTY: Tell me a little about your new book. I hear it's another “Englishman” mystery.

MIKE HAYES: Sheriff English and his oddball, born-again Cheyenne brother are back for the fourth Mad Dog & Englishman mystery. Think Joel and Ethan Coen working with Garrison Keeler to make The Silence of the Lambs and you'll have the tone of the series. It's set in an imaginary Kansas county where English has been getting re-elected by small margins for years. Sheriff English is also known as Englishman. His half-brother, Harvey Edward Maddox, starred on the local football team where he earned the Mad Dog nickname. Since the glory days of his youth, Mad Dog has evolved into the local oddball — hippie, black power advocate, leader of the grape boycott, and now, a born-again Cheyenne. The boys' mother claimed to be half Cheyenne and half wildcat, though her Indian portion turned out to include Sans Arc, Mexican Cowboy, and Buffalo Soldier portions, as well as Cheyenne. After deciding he was a natural-born shaman, Mad Dog officially changed his name, and stuck the sheriff with his nickname. Once you've got a Mad Dog you've got to have an Englishman.

BETTY: Sounds like fun, and more than a little weird. How’d you come up with the idea for the series?

MIKE: I came up with the idea for Mad Dog & Englishman after the peaceful village where my father was born, Arlington, Kansas, went through the trauma of its first murder. My imaginary Buffalo Springs, Kansas is considerably less idyllic, but I thought it was interesting to consider how a community, in which things like murder never happen, reacts when one does, and how an under-funded and ill-prepared law enforcement agency goes about investigating such a horrific crime. For my own purposes, I thought it would be even more interesting if the sheriff's brother was the most logical suspect, and also happened to be determined to solve the case himself, though using Cheyenne Shamanism instead of police procedures. Then, to keep things moving, I decided to confine the book to one frantic twenty-four hour period. I wasn't expecting to write a sequel, as you'll discover in Prairie Gothic, Plains Crazy, and now Broken Heartland, when you watch me juggle a pair of characters who inconveniently share a name, but I've stuck with the formula in each of those books. Nothing ever happens in Buffalo Springs, but when it does, expect a Murphy's Law squared kind of day. With this addition to the series, that's four days, one each in summer, winter, spring, and fall, when all hell has broken loose in Benteen County, Kansas, and Sheriff English — an honest cop without much help or modern investigative equipment — sets out to find the villain and save the town while his brother, Mad Dog, gets in the way, draws suspicion, and otherwise complicates the sheriff's efforts to bring the guilty to justice.

Read the entire interview.

The Page 69 Test: Broken Heartland.

--Marshal Zeringue

Marcus Sakey

In July 2007 John Kenyon of Things I'd Rather Be Doing interviewed Marcus Sakey, author of The Blade Itself and the forthcoming At the City's Edge.

Here are some of Kenyon's introductory remarks and two of the exchanges from the interview:

The Blade Itself is a taut, edgy thriller that lives up to the considerable hype, and marks Sakey as a new voice to watch in the world of crime fiction. It is the story of Danny, a southside hood who runs with Evan, a gun-happy thug. A botched burglary at a pawn shop sends the two in separate directions: Danny cleans up and goes straight while Evan heads to prison. Of course, nothing good lasts forever, and Danny has a hard time fitting a newly released Evan back into his life.

There is plenty of action here, but Sakey also salts his tale with considerable food for thought, riffing on second chances and the penal system in particular. The author spent 10 years in advertising and marketing before taking the plunge as a novelist, so he had to do significant research to promise verisimilitude in his story. He writes on his web site that he “shadowed homicide detectives, learned to pick a deadbolt in sixty seconds and drank plenty of Jameson.” But this is no term paper; he weaves this newly gleaned information into the story seamlessly.

Sakey's next book is another stand-alone, At the City’s Edge, about “a discharged soldier who returns from Iraq to find a similar war raging in his South Side neighborhood.” Set in Chicago, like The Blade Itself, it is due in 2008.

TIRBD: It seems to be a somewhat risky move to start a career writing stand-alones in the mystery/thriller genre rather than to initiate a series, but you've managed to succeed. Did you give any thought to this when starting out, or was this simply the book you needed to write?

MS: I'll tell you a secret: you give everything thought when you're writing a novel. It takes a year, and it's on your mind the whole time, which means that you have months and months to not only identify all the stupid mistakes you're making, but also to flagellate yourself raw for them.

I worried about a lot of things, including not writing a series. However, at the end of the day, I didn't see a way to be faithful to the characters I had created and the story I was trying to tell, and yet also make it a series. So I took them through the worst experience of their life, punished them for old mistakes, tried to give them a brighter future, and then said goodbye.

The style works well for me, though. After a year of living with a group of characters, I tend to want a little relief, to move into someone new. So for now, I'm planning to continue writing stand-alones.
* * * * * *

You did some significant research for The Blade Itself; did you do similar work to prepare for writing your next book, At the City's Edge, which deals with a soldier returning from Iraq?

Research is one of the most rewarding parts of writing thrillers. You get to experience a life that is a hundred miles from your everyday, from the daily life of most people. I've ridden with the police numerous times. I've toured the morgue and learned how an autopsy was performed. I've taught myself to pick a lock.

For At the City's Edge, I had two main areas of research: the common soldier's experience, and the life and structure of metropolitan street gangs. Both were fascinating. I interviewed soldiers, spoke to cops in Chicago, LA, and New York, read numerous memoirs, kept up with daily blogs, even borrowed a bulletproof vest and spent a couple of days shadowing Gang Intelligence units. I love doing that stuff; my wife, not so much.

Read the full interview.

At the City's Edge is due out in January 2008.

--Marshal Zeringue

Porochista Khakpour

Lance Reynald interviewed Porochista Khakpour, author of Sons and Other Flammable Objects, for Reynald's Rap.

One exchange from the interview:

LR: Your book is infused with a strong sense of New World identity and dichotomy and your characters journey through those things in the aftermath of September 2001. On tour, have you found readers aligned with the experiences of your characters?

PK: The book tour was very confusing. Whereas I imagined a lot of men in their late 30s through 60s as my readers, they mostly ended up to be 20-something girls with artsy glasses and nice tattoos who’d give me these big long hugs after the reading. Lovely, you know? Or, in the case of a few places, homeless-seeming 70+ year-olds – there were a lot of them – but I think they might just go to every reading? Not sure. Once in a while, I’d get some normal bright human who’d thank me profusely for writing this book, because of some personal connection they had whether it was knowing an Iranian-American, being one, being in New York during 9/11, growing up in LA, etc. In one case, an LA editor and blogger called my novel the first great Iranian-American novel, with my being sort of the first of the hyphenates for my people (note to self: The Hyphenates, excellent title for a multi-culti thriller.) I felt very fancy for a day or so.

Read the full interview.

The Page 99 Test: Sons and Other Flammable Objects.

--Marshal Zeringue

George Pelecanos

Rob Lord interviewed George Pelecanos, author of The Night Gardner and other terrific novels, for the Fall 2007 issue of Spinetingler Magazine.

The opening exchanges of the interview:

Rob: As a student at the University of Maryland you took a class covering hard-boiled detective fiction. Can you tell us about your experience in this class and how it set you on the path to write crime fiction?

George: The class, taught by Mr. Charles Mish, had a very simple format: we read paperback novels and discussed them. Mr. Mish was bearish, very smart, and a regular guy. I could relate to someone like that, a combination of the physical and the intellectual, over the standard professorial type. Because of his manner and enthusiasm, I got jacked up on reading for the first time in my life. He considered crime fiction to be as valid a form of literature as any other type of novel, and from what I heard, he was ostracized for this within the English department. I wrote him a letter before he died, telling him about the impending publication of my first novel, thanking him, in effect. This was a case of one teacher changing someone’s life.

Rob: What drew you to the crime genre?

George: The crime novel spoke to my world. By that I mean, it described the lives and struggles of everyday, working class people. It was written for readers, not academics. It was populist literature. And when it was written with ambition and care, it had the possibility of permanence.

Read the entire interview.

--Marshal Zeringue

Donald Westlake

Donald E. Westlake, writing as Richard Stark, has written 23 novels featuring the anti-hero Parker. "The Parker novels suddenly stopped after the sixteenth, in 1974, then resumed, with equal lack of explanation, more than 20 years later," writes Marcel Berlins in his interview with Westlake for the London Times. "The missing years have long puzzled fans."

Westlake explains the gap:

“I didn't know the reason then, but I know now. I didn't want to stop writing about him. I tried the next book three different times, but they all ground down. Now I see what happened. When I first came to New York, no one in my family had ever been involved in any of the arts at all. I didn't know anyone in the publishing world, I hadn't been to any of the right schools. I was a barbarian at the gates. The first Parker novel begins with him walking into New York and creating an identity for himself; saying, goddam it, here I am. That was me. That was 1961. But by 1974 I was successful, making a living, I'd sold movie rights for my books, I had a bit of a reputation, and it was very hard to keep that ‘outsider' muscle.”

Read the full interview.

--Marshal Zeringue