David Housewright

David Housewright has won the Edgar Award and is the three-time winner of the Minnesota Book Award for his crime fiction. He is a past president of the Private Eye Writers of America (PWA). He lives in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Housewright's new novel, In A Hard Wind, is his 20th title featuring Twin Cities P.I. Mac McKenzie.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

I like book titles that are provocative. Take a glance at mine – Dracula Wine, From The Grave, First Kill The Lawyers, Unidentified Woman #15, and Dead Boyfriends to list a few – and you’ll see that they were all chosen both to represent the content of the book and make the reader stop and ask “What is this about?” For example, there’s a phrase that people in law enforcement use when referring to suspects that remain at large, especially those that have already been identified – they’re “in the wind.” Nearly half of my novel In A Hard Wind deals with tracking a suspect that’s on the run.

What's in a name?

With the exception of my main protagonist, I rarely name my characters as I’m writing about them. They nearly always have place-holders – Lawyer One, Thug Two, Housewife, Vic – that represent their purpose for being in the book. When I do name them, it’s usually something that makes them easily identifiable by the reader. I hate it when a character walks through the door and you ask “Who is this guy, again?” And for the most part, I try to use “real names.” By that I mean names of people you might actually meet on the street as opposed to simple John Doe names that people rarely have.

Full disclosure, I also collect names; I hoard them and give them to characters when I think it’s appropriate. I met a woman named H.B. She confessed that H.B. stood for “Heavenly-Love Bambi,” the name her flower-children parents gave her way back when. That’s the name I gave to my character’s financial advisor. A waitress who once served me was named Bizzy. You’ll find a character named Bizzy in my next book. I have a reoccurring character who is a close friend of my protagonist McKenzie. I had no idea what her name was until I met an account executive back in my advertising days. Her name was Shelby.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your novel?

My teenage self would be amazed mostly because my teenage self didn’t read crime novels. I was always a writer. In fact, I self-published my first novel when I was ten years old on a hand-cranked printing press that my parents gave me. Only in those days, I was all about F. Scott Fitzgerald. And Gore Vidal. And Kurt Vonnegut. With a sprinkling of E.L. Doctorow. My first novel, Penance, was meant to be about political corruption. Except, as I was plotting it out, it occurred to me that if I threw a few dead bodies on the floor, it would make a great crime novel. That’s because, in those days, I was reading four or five mysteries for every non-mystery and I was very much immersed in the conventions of the crime novel. Penance eventually won the Edgar Award for Best First Mystery from the Mystery Writers of America, so I tell people, I didn’t choose mysteries, mysteries chose me.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

Honestly, it depends on the book. Sometimes it’s the former; sometimes it’s the latter. I will tell you, though; I always, always, always know how the book ends before I begin. I do this for the very practical reason that knowing the ending allows me to funnel the action in a way that gives the book the greatest impact. But I also start with the ending because it tells me – and eventually the reader – what the book is about. And I don’t mean just “whodunit.” The best mysteries are always about more than who killed Mr. Body in the library with a candlestick. In A Hard Wind is about identity; who we are and how we became that person. My previous novel, Something Wicked, is about family legacy. First Kill The Lawyers dealt with the conflict between professional ethics and personal morality. I believe the ending should help express the point your book is trying to make.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

I get this question a lot. My answer is that the good guys who stand up for justice and listen to jazz and watch baseball, yeah, that’s me. The bad guys who commit blackmail, armed robbery and murder, not so much.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

To a writer everything is material. Everything. Every place you visit, person you meet, conversation you have, book or newspaper you read, movie you watch, music you hear – whatever makes you go “Huh.” Anything might inspire a character or a scene or even an entire book. Especially those moments that my pal Libby Fischer Hellmann calls “out-of-whack events.” The trick is to keep open to them. To observe the whole world and not just that tiny part that involves you personally.

Learn more about the book and author at David Housewright's website and Facebook page.

The Page 69 Test: In a Hard Wind.

--Marshal Zeringue