David Peace

David Peace’s books include the "Red Riding Quartet."

From his Q & A at Declan Burke's blog, Crime always Pays:

What crime novel would you most like to have written?

THE GLASS KEY by Dashiell Hammett.

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What fictional character would you most like to have been?

George Smiley.

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Worst / best thing about being a writer?

Every day I thank God I can still write; so nothing bad, everything good....[read on]

See David Peace's Literary Top 10.

Read Ali Karim's interview with David Peace at The Rap Sheet.

--Marshal Zeringue

Gwendolen Gross

Caroline Leavitt put some questions to Gwendolen Gross about her new novel, The Orphan Sister, including:

What is it about sisters that is so compelling?

Sisters! Well, first of all, I have three, one of whom has a different mother and who is 20 years younger than I. She was the first baby for whom I fell, completely; people asked if she was my first (thinking she was my baby), and I said, "No, I have two other sisters!"

Anyone who has sisters knows you share many things: frame of reference, in-jokes, adolescent contempt for parents, deep and sometimes jealous love of those same parents. Sisters give you a model, a mold, for many of life's relationships. Shared experience and competition, both. I think of my sisters daily, but viscerally, rather than intellectually. My son smells like my older sister, Claudia, when he wakes up (a wonderful smell, not morning breath). If I make an absurd nonsequiteur no one gets, I think: Becca would understand, or: I have to tell my friend Cindy (with whom I don't share parents or childhood, but somewhere, historically, we must share genes). Since so much of sisterhood is collective circumstance, adoptive sisters might have their own shared frame--but different matting or something. That could be another book!

What I loved about this novel was how different it seemed from your previous ones (not that I didn't love them, as well.) Did you feel that you were treading new ground and how terrifying was that to contemplate?

First, thank you so very much! As you know, someone who has read your book is someone you have loved, even if only a little, even if you'll never meet (though I've been lucky enough to meet you).

I think writers tend to have both infinite stories and finite truths--the truths emerge in the exploration of character, place, plot. With this book I hoped to...[read on]

Visit Gwendolen Gross's website and The Orphan Sister website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Rebecca Wolff

Rebecca Wolff is an award-winning poet and founding editor of Fence and Fence Books. She received an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and is the author of three books of poems; her work has appeared in The Nation, The Paris Review, and A Public Space.

From a Q & A about her new novel, The Beginners, with Barbara Chai for the Wall Street Journal:

What was the seed for this novel?

The very most original seed was a drive I once took through central Massachusetts, around the Quabbin Reservoir, on my way from Amherst to Boston. Some of my ancestors had moved to that area from Salem (now called Danvers) after their matriarch, Rebecca Nurse, had been hung in the witch trials in 1693. So I was driving around looking for graveyards, and when I found one I would look for headstones with the family name (I found a few). I was also driving through towns, small, isolated towns that to my eyes (those of a New Yorker) appeared inexplicable: Who in the world could be from here, and of what might their lives consist. This was an outsider’s awe of the inside, but eventually these turns of mind reversed and I wondered: Why, or how, on earth could anyone ever choose to move here? And at that point I began devising a story.

Your descriptions of the town of Wick are at once literal and fantastical. Did you borrow details from any of the actual towns involved in the Salem witch trials?

Wick is quite closely based on several small villages, even hamlets, that are nestled along the east side of the Quabbin Reservoir. I amalgamated them into one town, and borrowed the entirely factual story of how next to them there had used to be a very active valley full of towns and villages before they were evacuated, razed, and flooded to create a reservoir that still supplies the water for Boston. So these towns, and the fictional town of Wick, were left behind on high ground, and therefore acquired...[read on]

Visit Rebecca Wolff's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Bill Crider

Bill Crider's latest novel in the Sheriff Dan Rhodes series is The Wild Hog Murders. From his Q & A at Vince Keenan's blog:

Q. What can you tell us about THE WILD HOG MURDERS?

Well, it has wild hogs in it. It's estimated that there are 2.5 million of them on the loose in Texas, and they’ve become a real problem. They’ve even started to invade major suburban areas. Since I’ve included at least a passing reference to them in every book in the Sheriff Rhodes series since that very first one, I thought it was time to give them the center stage.

Q. Have you had any personal run-ins with feral pigs?

It depends on how you define “run-ins.” I own some land in Limestone County, and I’ve seen hogs there, from a distance, but that’s about it. My brother is the overseer of the property, and he’s had plenty of encounters. He’s trapped them and shot them, and he sees them all the time. He’s not fond of them.

Q. Sheriff Dan has been around since 1986. What have been the biggest changes that the character has had to deal with in terms of doing his job?

The sheriff...[read on]

Read the Page 69 Test entries for Crider's A Mammoth Murder, Murder Among the OWLS, Of All Sad Words, Murder in Four Parts, and Murder in the Air, as well as an excellent write-up about Dan Rhodes on the big screen at "My Book, The Movie."

--Marshal Zeringue

Christine Sismondo

Michelle Rafferty of The Oxford Comment met with Christine Sismondo at The Ginger Man in New York City to discuss the latter's new book, America Walks into a Bar: A Spirited History of Taverns and Saloons, Speakeasies and Grog Shops. From the transcript of their conversation:

Christine: American bars are much more interesting for the large part than Canadian bars and they have better selection of drinks because of where I live in Ontario. We are first of all, the equivalent of a control state, like Pennsylvania where it’s very hard to get interesting liquor in.

Michelle: What does that mean, a “control state”?

Christine: In the liquor legislation there are some control states in the United States, which are states where the sale and importing and distribution of alcohol is controlled by the actual state. New York State is not one of them. That’s one of the reasons why New York is relatively cheap, fairly vibrant, has a lot different selection. Pennsylvania on the other hand, it’s a much tighter control over the type of liquor. And Ontario, where I live, is absolutely atrocious, and it’s just starting to get a little bit better. For example, we didn’t have legal cocktails in bars until 1947. And I can remember when I was a kid you could never just walk through a store to buy your liquor or your beer. You had to go up to a counter, just like you were getting a prescription at a drug store, and put in your order, and then somebody would go to the back and get you your little mickey of gin and sell it to you. And you had to have ID, and some places they even had a passport kind of thing so they could look at how much you bought over the year.

Michelle: Really?

Christine: Yeah.

Michelle: So if someone was buying a lot what would happen?

Christine: Well, in Ontario until sometime in the 1980s they had, and this is terrible, what they called the “Indian List.” And the “Indian List” applied...[read on]

The Page 99 Test: America Walks into a Bar.

Writers Read: Christine Sismondo.

--Marshal Zeringue

Craig Johnson

Craig Johnson has received high praise for his Sheriff Walt Longmire novels The Cold Dish, Death Without Company, Kindness Goes Unpunished, Another Man's Moccasins, and The Dark Horse, which received a superfecta of starred reviews from Kirkus, Booklist, Publishers Weekly, and Library Journal, and was named one of Publishers Weekly's best books of the year (2009). Keir Graff, in a Booklist starred review of last year's Junkyard Dogs, called Johnson "a born storyteller if ever there was one."

His latest novel is Hell Is Empty, the seventh Walt Longmire mystery.

From Johnson's Q & A Julia Buckley:

Your new Walt Longmire mystery, HELL IS EMPTY, is a fascinating read, especially, for me, because of all of its literary parallels. Dante’s INFERNO plays an important role in the story. Did you have the idea that you wanted Walt to go, symbolically, through many levels of hell?

It’s a novel that I’ve had in the works for a few years now, and it took that long to get all the pieces into place. I knew when I introduced Virgil White Buffalo in Another Man’s Moccasins that I was committed to the idea of an allegorical tale that would utilize Inferno. I knew that Walt was going to return to the Bighorn mountains, specifically to the area where he ventured in my first novel, The Cold Dish—but I didn’t want the book to simply be another manhunt in the snow (I figure that’s been done to death), so I started thinking about which works of literature explored the things I’d be dealing with in Hell is Empty.

Two things most people aren’t aware of are that there are only one or two sentences describing hell in the Bible--that the majority of the images we have of hell actually come from Dante, and that the further you go down into Dante’s hell, the colder it gets, the epic poem finally ending in a frozen lake with snow and wind. The parallels were there--I just had to find a way to use them so that people who were familiar with Inferno weren’t bored and so that readers who weren’t wouldn’t be intimidated.

Even though you reference Dante continually, the title is taken from a line in Shakespeare’s THE TEMPEST, one of my favorite plays. I see many parallels between your book and that play—specifically the recurring theme of illusion versus reality. On Shakespeare’s magical island, one can rarely tell what is and what is not. Did you try to use that idea in your mystery?

Yes, illusion and reality is...[read on]

Visit Craig Johnson's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Page 69 Test: Kindness Goes Unpunished.

My Book, The Movie: The Cold Dish.

The Page 69 Test: The Dark Horse.

The Page 69 Test: Junkyard Dogs.

The Page 69 Test: Hell Is Empty.

--Marshal Zeringue

Donald Ray Pollock

Donald Ray Pollock's writing has appeared in, or is forthcoming in, the New York Times, Third Coast, The Journal, Sou’wester, Chiron Review, River Styx, Boulevard, Folio, and The Berkeley Fiction Review. His 2008 book is Knockemstiff.

His new novel is The Devil All the Time.

From Pollack's Q & A with Lydia Fitzpatrick and Kate Levin at Fiction Writers Review:

Writers are always reading about worlds and people that are foreign to them, and some of us even try to write about worlds to which we’re not personally connected. How do you balance the “write what you know” adage with what you actually want to write about?

When I was starting out, I tried writing about everything except what I knew. I’d read Andre Dubus and try to write a story about a lapsed Catholic; or John Cheever and try to write about a suburbanite having an affair with another suburbanite. On and on, doctors, nurses, lawyers. Unfortunately, none of that stuff turned out any good. Then I wrote a story called “Bactine” and it was as if someone turned the lights on. I hate to admit it, but I know those kinds of people, the ones in my book, better than anyone else. Now, I don’t prescribe that for anyone. I mean, if that was the case, that everyone just wrote about what they knew, then fiction would be pretty boring. Maybe I just don’t have the ability to make that imaginative leap into another world, at least not yet. I guess I’d rather suggest that you write about what you’re interested in.

In your Acknowledgements [to Knockemstiff], you take care to reiterate that “all of the characters are fictional,” despite the boilerplate language on the copyright page about how all resemblances to “persons, living or dead” are coincidental. You add, “My family and our neighbors were good people who never hesitated to help someone in a time of need.” For whom did you write those lines?

I wrote those lines mainly for my publisher, who seemed a bit more concerned than I did about a mob of locals hanging me from a tree. I knew...[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at Donald Ray Pollock's website and blog.

The Page 69 Test: Knockemstiff.

--Marshal Zeringue

David S. Reynolds

David S. Reynolds, a Distinguished Professor at the CUNY Graduate Center, is the author of Walt Whitman’s America, John Brown, Abolitionist, Beneath the American Renaissance, Faith in Fiction, and Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson. He is the winner of the Bancroft Prize, the Christian Gauss Award, the Ambassador Book Award, and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Prize.

From a Q & A about his new book, Mightier than the Sword: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Battle for America, with Randy Dotinga at the Christian Science Monitor:

Q. What did [Harriet Beecher Stowe] understand the most about slavery?

A: She understood that African Americans are human. That sounds pedestrian, but in that era, African Americans were perceived as subhuman, or different from whites. Her novel is all about how African Americans can be as loyal to their families and devoted to their homes, parents and children, and each other, as white people can. They also have the capacity to be religious, which to Harriet Beecher Stowe was very important. They weren't just beasts that could be whipped, chained, sexually exploited, and sometimes tortured. She made Americans feel the pain and agony that slaves were going through, made them feel the real humanity of black people in a way that nobody had done before.

Q: What else made her book so effective?

A: Before she wrote "Uncle Tom's Cabin," she had written for popular magazines for 15 years, so she had a good sensitivity to what the popular audience wanted. It almost became part of her unconscious mind. When she wrote the novel, she produced these scenes that rang all these popular-culture bells for the audience of that time. The book became an international sensation as well and was translated into 16 languages and sold about 310,000 copies in America and at least 1.5 million abroad.

Q: What did she miss?

A: James Baldwin ...[read on]

The Page 99 Test: Mightier Than the Sword.

Writer's Read: David S. Reynolds.

--Marshal Zeringue

Colm Tóibín

Colm Tóibín's book include The Master, Mothers and Sons, and Brooklyn.

From his Q & A with the Independent:

Choose a favourite author, and say why you admire her/him

I am not sure about favourite - but maybe Hemingway (for his style), Henry James (for his style), George Herbert (for his style), George Eliot (for her wisdom), Jane Austen (for her perfection).

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Which fictional character most resembles you?

Daniel Deronda.

* * *
Who is your hero/heroine from outside literature?

Kathleen Ferrier. I like her singing voice, her immense seriousness, how she used her talent. Maybe I like her in Mahler best, but also Brahms. In another life, I would like to be a contralto.

Read the complete Q & A.

--Marshal Zeringue

Steve Hockensmith

Steve Hockensmith is the author of Dawn of the Dreadfuls, the best-selling prequel to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. He also writes the “Holmes on the Range” mystery series.

From his Q & A at The Zombiephiles about his latest novel, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dreadfully Ever After:

Q. Why a Jane Austen classic? What in particular caused you to imagine zombies in the world of Miss Bennett?

I can’t take credit for that stroke of genius. If I could, I’d be typing my reply on the veranda of my new vacation home in the Bahamas. It was actually Jason Rekulak, associate publisher at Quirk Books, who dreamed up the zombie/Austen connection. He was looking for a way to mix goofy pop culture with a classic novel in the public domain. I’m just thankful he went with Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and not Romeo & Juliet & Giant Transforming Robots or whatever.

Q. What was one of the most surprising things you learned in writing this series?

That I could write a series like this! I’d never tried my hand at romance or horror, so it was a little daunting taking on a project that mixed both. I had plenty of experience with humor, historical fiction and blending genres, though, so in the end it wasn’t that much of a change of pace.

Q. Tell us about the upcoming movie being made from the first book. Are you involved with the production?

This is...[read on]

Visit Steve Hockensmith's website.

My Book, The Movie: Dreadfully Ever After.

--Marshal Zeringue