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