Dennis Lehane

Dennis Lehane was born and raised in Dorchester, Massachusetts. His novels include A Drink Before the War; Darkness, Take My Hand; Sacred; Gone, Baby, Gone; Prayers for Rain; Mystic River; Shutter Island; The Given Day; and the newly released Moonlight Mile.

Before becoming a full-time writer, Lehane worked as a counselor with mentally handicapped and abused children, waited tables, parked cars, drove limos, worked in bookstores, and loaded tractor-trailers. He lives in the Boston, Massachusetts, area.

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

Q: Who or what has most influenced your writing?

A. Graham Greene and Richard Price were both hugely influential on me. Elmore Leonard's Detroit novels and Parker's Spenser books certainly also had an effect. There are two short story writers — Raymond Carver and Andre Dubus — also set bars I keep trying to reach as well.

Q: Have you worked at jobs other than writing?

A. I've had a million jobs. But from the moment I said I was going to take this seriously, there was no other career track. I was not going to use writing for advertising or journalism. I would tend bar, load trucks, chaffeur — do whatever it took. But from the moment I took my first writing workshop, I was a writer. Whether I got published or not was really irrelevant. Whether I got good was what mattered.

Q: What are your hobbies or favorite pastimes?

A. I'm a pretty boring guy. I love to write, so it rarely seems like work — even when it gets arduous. As for hobbies, I like to play pool and tennis. I sort of play golf because a lot of my friends are into it, but I'm awful — my handicap is about six or seven thousand. I play poker a lot with guys I grew up with, and occasionally go out to catch live music in small clubs. My wife Sheila and I watch a lot of old movies and play with our two English Bulldogs, Marlon and Stella. Outside of a serious addiction to....[read on]

Read about Dennis Lehane's five favorite short story collections and his five most important books.

--Marshal Zeringue

Roberta Gately

From a Q & A with Roberta Gately, author of Lipstick in Afghanistan:

Q. Who is your favorite fictional hero?

A. Atticus Finch from "To Kill A Mockingbird"

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Q. Who is your favorite fictional villain?

A. Rhett Butler - though he's not entirely a villain and maybe that's why he's my favorite

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Q. If you could meet any historical character, who would it be and what would you say to him or her?

A. Anne Boleyn - "What were you thinking?"

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Q. Who are your favorite authors?

A. D.H. Lawrence, Charles Dickens, Jane Austen

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Q. What are your 5 favorite books of all time?

A. "The Secret Garden", "To Kill a Mockingbird", "Gone With The Wind," "Lady Chatterley's Lover," and "The Giving Tree."

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Q. Is there a book you love to reread?

A. "To Kill a Mockingbird"

Read the complete Q & A.

Read an excerpt from Lipstick in Afghanistan, and learn more about the book and author at Roberta Gately's website and blog.

Writers Read: Roberta Gately.

The Page 69 Test: Lipstick in Afghanistan.

--Marshal Zeringue

Russell Hoban

Russell Hoban's books include The Mouse and His Child (1967), Turtle Diary (1975) and Riddley Walker (1980).

From his Q & A with Anna Metcalfe at the Financial Times:

What book changed your life?

A collection of Oscar Wilde’s short stories called A House of Pomegranates, which I read when I was eight or nine years old. The sumptuousness of the language blew me away.

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Which literary character most resembles you?

Huckleberry Finn. He was always true to himself. He knew he was helping a fugitive in Jim the runaway slave, and could burn in hell for it, but he wanted to stick by him. I would stick by Jim.

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What novel would you give a child to introduce them to literature?

Not a novel but a collection of Grimm’s fairy tales. The Goose Girl is one of my favourites.

Read the complete Q & A.

--Marshal Zeringue

Bruce DeSilva

Rogue Island, the new crime novel by former Associated Press writing coach Bruce DeSilva, is getting rave reviews. Publishers Weekly, for example, called it "a masterpiece of irreverence and street savvy," and Booklist declared it "definitely one of the year's best." It has also been praised by 14 A-list crime novelists including Dennis Lehane, Michael Connelly and Harlan Coben. DeSilva just completed the second book in the series, tentatively titled Cliff Walk.

From his Q & A at Sons of Spade:

Q: Can you tell us something about how your debut novel came to be?

It all started back in 1994, when I was working for a Connecticut newspaper. One day, I received a note from a reader praising “a nice little story” I’d written. “It could serve as the outline for a novel,” the note said. “Have you considered this?” I would have tossed the note in the trash except for one thing. It was from Evan Hunter, who wrote literary novels under his own name and the brilliant 87th Precinct police procedurals under the penname Ed McBain. I sealed the note in plastic, taped it to my home computer, and started writing. At the time, I lived 15 minutes from work, so I got up early every morning and wrote for two hours before going in. I was a mere 20,000 words into the novel when my life turned upside down. I took a very demanding new job; my new commute was 90 minute each way; I got divorced and then remarried to a woman with a young child. In this busy new life, I had no time to finish a novel. Years streaked by. Each time I bought a new computer, I taped that note from Hunter to it, hoping I would get back to the book someday. Meanwhile, I was reviewing novels on the side for The Associated Press and The New York Times book review section. That gave me entre to the Manhattan’s literary circle. A couple of years ago, I found myself dining with Otto Penzler, the dean of American’s crime fiction editors, and happened to mention that long-ago note from Hunter.

“Evan Hunter was a good friend of mine,” Penzler said. “In all the years I knew him, he never had a good thing to say about anything anyone else wrote. He REALLY sent you that note?”

“He really did,” I said. “I still have it.”

“Well then you’ve got to finish that novel,” Otto said, “and when you do, you have to let me read it.”

So I ...[read on]

Read an excerpt from Rogue Island, and learn more about the book and author at Bruce DeSilva's website and blog.

The Page 69 Test: Rogue Island.

Read--Coffee with a Canine: Bruce DeSilva and Brady.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jane Leavy

From Randy Dotinga's interview with Jane Leavy about her new book, The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America's Childhood:

Q: What were you hoping to learn about Mickey Mantle?

I set out to answer a question posed by a man named Cromer Smotherman, who was a teammate of [Mantle's] in 1950 in Class C ball. The manager assigned this guy, a first baseman, to be Mantle's minder, to keep an eye on him and help try to regulate his moods because he was so hard on himself when he didn't do as well as he ought to have.

I asked this guy, "If you could speak to Mickey today, what would you ask him, what would you want to know?" The man actually got fairly choked up, and he said, "Mickey, why did you do it? Why did you choose to lead the life that you led? What happened? You were not that kind of person."

Those became my marching orders: to answer that question and to answer a second question: Why does he still have purchase on the American imagination 15 years after his death and decades after he played his last game? I was at a luncheon today and there were people lining up to buy the book who weren't born when he was playing.

Q: What made him unique?

There was a sense of optimism in the profligacy of his talent, the riches of his sheer power and speed. A miner's son in a godforsaken corner of the country that had been and would continue to be devastated by horrible environmental pollution, he seemed to epitomize what was best about us. He seemed to touch a sense of our potential, our resources and our strengths. It was that coast-to-coast smile, a name that had the meter and cadence of poetry.

And he left room for ...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Richard A. Lanham

From a Q & A with Richard A. Lanham, author of The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information:

Question: The information economy is saturated with it: there's something like 80 million websites, 500 TV channels, countless online newspapers constantly updated, a gazillion blogs, podcasts, mp3s, video downloads, etc., etc. And worldwide there are about 1 million new books published each year. Economics is about the allocation of scarce resources. What are the scarce resources in the information economy?

Richard A. Lanham: The scare resource is the human attention needed to make sense of the enormous flow of information, to learn, as it were, how to drink out of the firehose.

Question: So, is the goal in the attention economy is to get eyeballs first, and the money will follow? Is that how to make sense of the enormous flow of free information that is at our fingertips? If so, who can help maximize the number of those eyeballs? Software engineers? Designers? Celebrities? Artists?

Lanham: You are asking three questions at once. First, yes, in an attention economy, you have to get the eyeballs first. But the money, as many found out with internet stocks, does not automatically follow the eyeballs.

Second, how to "make sense of the enormous flow of free information" is another question altogether, at least if I understand you. If you mean, "how do we explain the explosion of free information provided by the internet?," then there are a lot of answers to that, some beyond the traditional purview of economics. People put up information on the web often for the pure pleasure of sharing what they know-the pleasure of teaching. They don't expect money to follow. They are being paid in a different coin, the pleasure of teaching, which includes of course the attention your readers/viewers/students pay to you. One of the great surprises, at least to me, about the internet-based information explosion is the extraordinary human generosity which it has revealed. People want to share their information, their enthusiasms, their way of looking at the world and now they have a new and infinitely more effective way to do it. It may be what they know about Barbie dolls, or about digital cameras, or the specifications of sewer pipe for your house-the range is infinite. It is far more surprising, at least to me, how often people want to give this information away than how they want to be paid for it. So, how to explain the "enormous flow of free information"? Emphatically, not just in the expectation of future profit. Quite the opposite. This generosity of spirit has not been so remarked as it ought to have been.

Third, "who can help maximize the number of those eyeballs?" Ah, well,...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

William Kent Krueger

William Kent Krueger is an award-winning author and crime writer, best known for his Cork O'Connor series of books. His books have won the Anthony, Barry and Dilys Awards.

From his Q & A with Craig Johnson:

Craig Johnson: In the newest edition of your series, you spend a sizable amount of time in Wyoming rather than your own Minnesota. What effect did that have on the process of writing your new book, Heaven's Keep?

William Kent Krueger: None. But the research was a blast. I've spent a good deal of time in Wyoming—the state of my birth, as a matter of fact—and it was fun to look at it from a different perspective, one that required I take particular note of the physical geography. What a beautiful place that state is. And unpopulated. Which is very enticing, especially when you consider that isolating characters in the wild is a great way to create suspense.

You put your protagonist through a great deal of torture through the potential loss of his wife, Jo. Do you enjoy writing characters on their emotional frontiers?

Emotional frontiers? You must have an advanced college degree. Every story, to be compelling, demands tension. And despite the fact that we work in a genre that general gets a lot of mileage out of putting people in jeopardy, I think it's really the emotional dynamics that drive readers' interest. I also think that characters reveal themselves most fully and most compellingly when their nerves are frayed and their deepest fears surface. I love Walt Longmire, for example, not because he cuts a dashing, daring image (unlike his creator), but because I know him and trust him emotionally, and I care about what happens to him and to the people he loves. I hope the same is true for those readers who enjoy Cork O'Connor.

Your usual stomping grounds are among the Ojibwa, comparatively, how was it dealing with the Plains Indian tribes of the Arapaho, Cheyenne and others?

I approached the Arapaho, who...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Anne Rice

Anne Rice is the author of Interview with the Vampire and other books.

From her interview with Anna Metcalfe for the Financial Times:

What books changed your life?

Great Expectations by Dickens and Jane Eyre by Brontë had a profound influence. I’m not sure any book has ever changed my life.

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What is the strangest thing you’ve ever done in the name of research?

Going to the morgue in New Orleans to look at dead bodies, a very illuminating and humbling experience. I saw several bodies and will never forget it. I described it later in one of my novels.

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Where is your favourite place in the world?

The Garden District of New Orleans.

Read the complete Q & A.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jack Todd

Jack Todd's new novel is Come Again No More.

From a Q & A about his novel, Sun Going Down:

Any sweeping novel about the American West is bound to be compared to Lonesome Dove. How do you feel about Sun Going Down being compared to McMurtry's epic novel?

Obviously, I'm gratified and a little embarrassed to find Sun Going Down compared with an American classic such as Lonesome Dove. At the same time, I should point out that they are very different books. Both are sweeping tales set partially or entirely in the Old West but apart from that, I think, the similarities really aren't there. I had read Lonesome Dove when it first came out years ago but didn't remember much about it. I have since re-read it and read Comanche Moon and I might have done some things differently if I had read these books while I was writing Sun Going Down, which was much more influenced by Mark Twain, Cormac McCarthy, and the Nebraska writer Mari Sandoz.

You've managed to tell the story of four generations of one family in under 400 pages, yet the novel doesn't feel rushed or hurried. How did you edit yourself and decide to move on to the next plot or storyline? Given the scope of the novel, did you outline the story prior to writing the book? Did your research or writing process evolve at all while working on Sun Going Down?

The greatest difficulty in writing this book was to get so much story between two covers. The first draft was 900 pages long in manuscript form; it was then cut by a third and then cut to half that length before some 120 pages were restored before the final version. I didn't really do an outline; I was following the story of the family as handed down in diaries and memoirs, so the outline was there from the beginning. In the original plan, however, the Mississippi and Big Sioux sections took up...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Katia Lief

Born in France to American parents, Katia Lief moved to the United States as a baby and was raised in Massachusetts and New York. She teaches fiction writing as a part-time faculty member at the New School in Manhattan and lives in Brooklyn.

From her Q & A with Sandra Parshall:

Did you make a conscious choice to write thrillers rather than traditional mysteries? What does the experience of writing a thriller offer that you might not find in writing a mystery?

I never considered writing a traditional mystery, probably because as a reader I love the visceral sensation of suspense that forces me to keep turning pages. I want to write the kind of books I love to read, which means writing books that get deeply under my skin on an emotional level. As my writing students will tell you, I strongly believe that suspense has to be present in fiction to make it interesting, regardless of whether a book is categorized as literary, suspense, comic, romance, etc. For me, suspense is all about the evocation of emotion, and asking questions that aren't answered until the bitter end.

You wrote in an article once that your career as a novelist has been a struggle. In what way?

It took me twenty years before I started earning a living as a novelist. As a young aspiring writer, I worked the proverbial day job and wrote whenever I could. Later, as a mother, the balance was more complicated. It gets to the point where you have to make very tough choices about how you spend your time, where you put your energy, and as a writer where your focus will be. I stuck with writing novels because I love it and feel driven to keep writing, but I probably explore less than I would have if I were independently wealthy or didn't have children. But that's just the nature of life: you set on a path, you make choices, and you hope for the best. Overall I feel I've been very lucky.

Which writers have influenced you, and how? Do you find that you continue to learn by reading the work of others?

I always learn by reading the work of other writers, regardless of what kind of writing it is. In fact, I think that reading is one of the best ways to learn how to write, because it forces you to analyze what's working, what isn't, and why. I'd say that the suspense novels that have most influenced me (so far) are...[read on]

Lief's latest novels are You Are Next and Next Time You See Me.

Visit Katia Lief's website.

Writers Read: Katia Lief.

The Page 69 Test: Next Time You See Me.

--Marshal Zeringue