A Charleston thriller: The Jon Sealy Interview

By Steve Weddle

I've been a fan of Jon Sealy's since The Whiskey Baron came out a little more than 10 years ago. Of that book, the Richmond Time-Dispatch said: "What you’d get if Cormac McCarthy and William Faulkner co-wrote the HBO series 'Boardwalk Empire' while on an especially inspired, existentially tinged bender."

Since that time, Sealy has published two other novels, as well as So You Want to Be a Novelist, his memoir and manifesto. 

Jon Sealy

I recently read and loved his new novel, The King Street Affair, his southern crime novel that reaches from South Carolina to Estonia, and deals with lawyers, journalists, spies, and more. 

On Tuesday, June 16, I'll join Jon and Kent Wascom at Fountain Bookstore in Richmond for an "Authors in Conversation" event.

I had a chance to ask Jon some questions prior to that.

Steve Weddle: Why Charleston? Could this story have been set anywhere else?

Jon Sealy: The simple answer is that I'm of the school that believes fiction starts with an image, and the instigating image for this novel is the opening pages. I went to a New Year's Eve wedding at the Francis Marion Hotel years ago and then had breakfast at the Swamp Fox restaurant on a cold rainy January day. Staring out at King Street, watching water drip off the palm trees in Marion Square, the scene just sort of vibrated. Charleston has a unique effect, I think. Some of the plot would work elsewhere, in another port city--Wilmington, say--but it would be a different story.

SW:  Bert and Penelope seem so real and well developed as "secondary" characters. Any plans for a spin-off?

JS: Thank you for saying that. Maybe! I actually did write a few chapters of a book featuring Bert, where I had him retired in the Adirondacks and he gets involved with solving a murder, kind of like Le Carre did with George Smiley in his second novel, A Murder of Quality. But I didn't have the energy to keep at it. Maybe it was the setting, or maybe it was trying to write about Bert without Penelope. The King Street Affair is subtitled "A Holy City Novel," so if I do a sequel or spin-off, it also will be set primarily in Charleston and likely would include Penelope, who became one of my favorite characters in the book.

SW: When you started writing this book, did you know that the story was going to move into an espionage thriller with European gangsters?

JS: No, I actually started this as a sprawling multi-generational Cold War novel about Everett Archer, who ended up being a minor figure in the final version. I have all these pages of backstory about him in the fifties, with Naval frogmen and I don't know what else. After a few years I finally decided I needed to tell a simpler, mostly present-time story, starting with a dead body on a beach.

SW: You tell this story with shifting timelines. Was that difficult? What was the process for you?

JS: As I mentioned, I cut a lot of the backstory going back 75 years, so what's left is essentially three chunks: a guy gets picked up for interrogation in part one; then we see what led the agents to him in part two; then we see what he does to try to get out of his jackpot in part three. It was a project to try to make sure the timelines were clear and consistent, but by the end, the process mostly consisted of me foisting the novel on various beta readers and trying to fix spots where they were confused.

SW: This is your fourth novel, which is clearly written with skill and confidence. What have you learned in the last 10 years since your wonderful debut that helped with this particular story?

JS: That's kind of you. I wrote The Whiskey Baron in my early 20s and The King Street Affair in my late 30s, so I have a better sense of myself and the world, but also, I hope, a little less ego about what I'm doing. I started off like I presume a lot of writers start, wanting to write my story my way and to show off with these linguistic flourishes. The King Street Affair is a bit of a transitional book for me, but I'm moving toward writing for someone.

***

CHARLESTON, SC—Wyatt Brewer has a respectable life as a newspaper reporter in the Holy City. One winter morning, he is assigned to cover the death of a mysterious Estonian who washed up on Folly Beach.

When intelligence agents Bert Wilson and Penelope Lowe pick him up for interrogation, Wyatt understands he’s stumbled into an underground world of crime and corruption. The agents give him a choice: Help them bring down a mole in their division or fend for himself against Eastern European gangsters and dirty government officials.

Part southern crime novel, part cat-and-mouse espionage thriller, Jon Sealy’s fourth novel is a meditation on the many ways the human heart can betray us.

Get your copy

Bunny hugs and eBay orders: The Steve Weddle Interview

By Eryk Pruitt

When naming giants in the canon of rural/Southern crime fiction from the 21^st century will inevitably name Daniel Woodrell, Donald Ray Pollock, Bonnie Jo Campbell, and of course Steve Weddle, who, in 2013, published his debut novel-in-stories, Country Hardball. That masterpiece is often named as an influence to the next generation of authors who write rural settings, namely Jedidiah Ayres, SA Cosby, and myself.  

For ten long years, Weddle fans have waited for his follow-up novel. Often we’ve had to make due with a short fiction piece, such as the one published in Playboy in 2015, or by squinting at the Instagram posts he’d teased out while handwriting—handwriting—his next opus. 

 

Ladies and gentlemen, the wait is over. Amazon Reads customers can download THE COUNTY LINE right now and through the month of January. Folks who want the physical book in their hands will have to wait until February 1, but after the long ten years, what’s another four weeks? At any rate, Weddle returns to form with his latest, The County Line, and I’d argue he’s outdone himself. This new one takes us back to the early days of the 20^th century where—

 

You know what: None of y’all are here to listen to me jabber. How about we have the man himself talk about THE COUNTY LINE?

 

ERYK PRUITT:As you know, I am a big COUNTRY HARDBALL fan, so I could hardly wait for THE COUNTY LINE. What were the seeds to this story? 

 

STEVE WEDDLE: COUNTRY HARDBALL was populated with the Tomlins and Rudds and Pribbles of Columbia County, Arkansas. While the stories in that 2013 collection were set in that time, I was curious how those families had gotten there. That book ends with Roy Alison, whose kinfolks are Tomlins, working to find out what had happened to his grandfather, who may have been killed by Franklin Rudd back in the 1950s. I’d thought about having Roy Alison track down Franklin Rudd, who told him about what had happened in the 1950s, but Rudd had to carry the story back to the 1930s for some context. I had this David Mitchell CLOUD ATLAS thing all planned out. Well, when Playboy came calling after COUNTRY HARDBALL published and asked for a short story, I peeled off the 1950s portion of that, which left me walking around in the 1930s, a period that has fascinated me because of outlaw camps and prohibition and the Great Depression and early jazz and so much more.

 

EP: Your sense of place in THE COUNTY LINE is absolutely amazing. You drew us into this world and locked us in. What inspired you to write about that part of the world?

 

SW: I grew up in that region, and it’s pretty tough to get all that dirt out from under your fingernails, if you ever wanted to do so. As I’m sure you know, whether it’s east Texas or North Carolina or my own little corner of Arkansas, once you start digging around in the lives of these characters, pretend people or not, they get their hooks in you. I’ll read family histories and diaries and yearbooks from that time period or read a newspaper article about a pharmacy celebrating five decades and I’ll get to wondering. You let the movie play in your head and just walk around inside of it. 

 

EP:  You had a keen attention to detail in THE COUNTY LINE. There were so many random bits which kept us immersed in the time and culture of Depression-era Arkansas/Louisiana. From famous criminals to blues singers to sports interests and even a Bunny Hug cocktail. I could probably pick your brain for hours about research, so how did you go about researching the culture back then? How did you choose what to keep and what to leave out?

 

SW:  Had I known before I started what it was going to take to pull this off, I’d have bought stock in eBay. I’ve ordered so many out-of-print books and farmers’ magazines and catalogs that I’ve had to clear out a closet upstairs for everything. Leaving any of that out of the story was tough, because I’d read an article about local banker and I’d see so much detail I wanted to use, from his cufflinks to the way he sat in his car. Editing this story down, keeping it as tight as I could, that was tough. There’s just so much great material.

 

EP:  One of my favorite aspects of the book is the rich, tongue-in-cheek dialogue. It was very comparable to what I might read in books by William Gay, Daniel Woodrell, or Chris Offutt. Even the dumbest of characters you write speak in such a way that renders them smarter than the reader. How did you hone your dialogue in such a way? 

 

SW:  If you watch a movie that came out this year, you get a sense of how people talk, but just a sense. Same with movies from the 1930s, I think. Go back to, say, Gold Diggers of 1933. Most of us know the song, “We’re in the Money,” but not the movie. The way people talked on stage then was probably further from the way real people talked than the gulf between movie talk and real talk today. My sense is that today, filmmakers want their movies to sound more realistic, except Wes Anderson, of course. So I couldn’t rely on movies of that time, though that’s the first thing that comes to mind, because we have people from 1933 saying words and we can see and hear them. Ah, the magic of talkies. 

 

So for me, I read through diaries and newspaper articles and out-of-print novels and letters. Reading collections of letters is great because people sound different based on their recipient, so you get a variation of flavor even from the same writer. And I looked online for “slang from 1930s” and so forth, most of which I discounted because it just sounded too phony, though there were a few keepers.

 

Once I had the characters well formed, I got a sense of which of them would be saying which phrases, because not every outlaw sounded like James Cagney. I’d see a phrase or a rhythm of dialogue and know pretty quickly whose mouth that belonged in, you know? 

 

EP: There were ten long years between COUNTRY HARDBALL and THE COUNTY LINE. What was that journey like? Please tell me it won't be ten more years until the next one....

 

SW:  Lord willin’ and the creek don’t rise.

 

EP:  You have teased in casual conversation that you will be revisiting this world in the future, namely with more Cottonmouth Tomlin. The ending (which absolutely stuck the landing BTW) certainly leaves it open for more trips to town. Can you share any information on that?

 

SW: THE COUNTY LINE mentions Cottonmouth’s time running guns and working for Sam “The Banana Man” Zemurray in Honduras. The next book, as it stands, features a friend of Cottonmouth’s from that time coming to Arkansas and following the trail of the Knights of the Golden Circle. In researching Honduras for THE COUNTY LINE, I kept running across stories of mercenary Lee Christmas, and I need to get a version of him into a book soon so I can write off some of these eBay purchases. 

 

EP:  Can you share a little of the process of bringing this book alive? Do you write every day? I saw several Instagram posts back in the day of pages written by hand. How much do you write by hand and how much did it change over the time it took to write it?

 

SW: I’m up pretty much every day around 4 a.m. to write. Some days it’s editing or reading or researching, but the goal is to write. I tend to draft by hand in a hardback notebook. The right-hand side is for the draft, and the left-hand side is for notes. I find that as I’m writing, I’ll think of plot points or character development I want to add in later, so I’ll jot a note to the left. Or I’ll drop in some research notes there on the left. For me, a solid day is filling a page of the 5 x 8.25 notebook, which is usually a couple hundred words or more.

Later, when the pages have been typed in Scrivener, I’ll be able to pop back and forth between scenes and can do a hundred words or a thousand words in a day. I write scenes, not chapters, so it’s usually still a little messy until I get to the point that I’m ready for someone else to read it. 

 

EP: This is your first book with Lake Union publishing. How was the experience working with them? 

 

SW: In addition to being thoughtful and organized, they’ve really helped carve this book into shape. They’re engaged in the book, sure, but they’re so astute in terms of getting the book into the hands of readers.

 

EP:  What are you hoping most that readers will take away from the book?

 

SW: I was listening to an interview David Remnick conducted a few months back with Salman Rushdie, and Rushdie said that the purpose of a novel is to bring joy to the reader.  That seems a very straightforward way of thinking about it. Sure, I want folks to be engaged with the characters, to roll around in the scenery, to be on the edge of their seats for the plot twists. But, you know, I really want the reader to come away from the book having experienced joy in the reading. Life is tough. Enjoy yourself, why don’t you? 

***

The County Line is now available as an Amazon First Reads selection for January and will be published on Feb. 1, 2024.

***

THE COUNTY LINE, in an early, hand-written draft.

***

“At once wry, thrilling, and full of heart, The County Line evokes the Coen brothers at their period best, while staking out a voice and milieu all its own.” —Chris Holm, author of Child Zero 

“A book both wistful for the past but also brutally honest about it. Steve Weddle has crafted a bluegrass hymn with the notes written in blood.” —S.A. Cosby, author of All the Sinners Bleed 

“It’s like Faulkner had a love child with a couple of Elmore Leonard’s 1930s-set novels.” —Nick Kolakowski, author of Boise Longpig Hunting Club

“A slide into the American Abyss from one of our best fiction writers. Steve Weddle’s spectacular novel dramatizes how, in this country, all that glitters is only a gleam away from all that guilt.” — Aaron Gwyn, author of All God’s Children and Wynne’s War

“The County Line is downright biblical. In his latest novel, Steve Weddle follows his truly unforgettable protagonist, Cottonmouth Tomlin, on a lyrical journey through Great-Depression-era Arkansas. As an Arkansawyer who’s often struggled to reconcile my place in this world—this book hit home.” —Eli Cranor, author of Ozark Dogs

“This is the book I have been waiting for and it does not disappoint. Every word in every sentence on every page is jam-packed with pure TNT. Steve Weddle delivers cracking dialogue, tense action, and most of all: heart, to transport us to another time and place that you won’t want to leave. A perfect addition to the canon of Southern literature.” —Eryk Pruitt, author of Something Bad Wrong

“With wit sharp as viper fangs and characters whose pulses vibrate on each page, The County Line is hilarious, tragic, thought-provoking, and relentlessly entertaining. Even the dust rising off dirt roads to drift between cypress limbs is vivid enough to pierce the veil between 1933 and now. This is a storytelling feat.” —Chris Harding Thornton, author of Pickard County Atlas and Little Underworld

“I was lucky enough to get an early look at what is certain to be one of my favorite books of 2024. Cottonmouth Tomlin returns from running guns in Honduras to run the Arkansas outlaw camp left to him by his uncle. The camp is a safe place for criminals to lay low as long as their misdeeds take place over the county line. Cottonmouth has bigger plans, though author Steve Weddle keeps you guessing as to whether he has the brainpower to pull them off. There are echoes of Cormac McCarthy and Elmore Leonard in this drily witty tale, but Weddle’s colorful characters and savory dialogue are all his own. A hugely enjoyable read that builds to a tremendously satisfying conclusion.” —Scott Von Doviak, author of Lowdown Road

Talking Fadeaway Joe with Hugh Lessig

Crooked Lane Books (August 22, 2023)

 

By Steve Weddle

Recently I chatted with Hugh Lessig, whose short fiction has appeared in Thuglit, Shotgun Honey, Crime Factory, as well as that magazine John Hornor Jacobs and I started up, Needle: A Magazine of Noir. 

Hugh's debut, Fadeaway Joe, published August 22, 2023. 

“Man, I can’t tell you the last time I tore through a book like I did with Fadeaway Joe. Paula Jessup is a two-ton firecracker and Joe Pendergast is the match. Echoing the best work of Jim Thompson and Charles Willeford, Lessig filters it all through a voice entirely his own.” —Todd Robinson, author of The Hard Bounce and creator of Thuglit.

Steve Weddle: Library Journal said your debut is carried by "intriguing characters" and Mark Westmoreland said that Joe and Paula "get into your marrow and travel with you." What do you think makes Joe and Paula come alive in your story? 

Hugh Lessig: Joe and Paula engage in an emotional tug of war throughout the story. Paula pushes Joe out of his comfort zone and Joe promptly returns the favor. Yet, both need what the other has.

Joe is an old, white guy who never married or had kids. His experience in dealing with young people comes from working the door at a bar. He grew up in the segregated south. His dad ran a corner grocery store and belonged to the Klan. If a Black person came into the store and touched a piece of produce, they bought it. Now here comes Paula, a 22-year-old biracial, Mohawk-wearing firecracker. She was raised by a grandfather (another old, white guy) who was a bum and small-time hood. She is both scared of Joe and fascinated by him.

Why do they need each other? That becomes farther along in the story, but Paula needs the sort of protection Joe can provide, while Joe needs a planner and a schemer to get back at his boss.

Rob Hart helped edit this book, and I was particularly pleased at his comment that the novel is “just the right amount of gritty before giving way to the depths of human connection.” That’s where I was aiming.

 

SW: Joe Pendergast is struggling with early-onset Alzheimer's in this book, a fight the reader really feels throughout the novel. How important was it to you to really capture this, rather than merely using it as a plot device?

HL: My dad suffered from dementia late in life, and I began reading about it. One thing that fascinated and terrified me was how dementia can sometimes lead to episodes of aggression or rage. My father was not a violent man. He almost never raised his voice. I couldn’t imagine that aspect of the disease affecting him.

Joe Pendergast is naturally violent. He can bring a man to his knees by bending his thumb. He can dislocate the thumb. He can break it. For him, that’s a day at the office. His violence is a tool, and he always controls it. But dementia-induced rage is violence without the guardrails. How would he act? 

There are two instances of uncontrolled anger in the book, one where Joe is exhausted late at night and waves a gun at his neighbor. The second occurs later in the book where he is frustrated at Paula and lashes out with half-fist. The consequences of the violence are minimal – he never fires the gun, and Paula gets a bloody nose – but I found them more chilling than the more controlled acts of violence elsewhere in the story.

The diagnosis of early-stage dementia also lights a fuse inside Joe’s head. He knows his days are numbered, but he doesn’t know how slow or fast the disease will progress. First, it creates a sense of urgency. He’s been abandoned by his boss, he wants revenge and he wants it soon. But when he meets Paula and their relationship progresses, he becomes reflective. He can help Paula navigate a tough crossroad in her life, and he begins to wonder about his legacy (which ain’t much, at this point.) He believes a man will be remembered for the last thing he did.

SW: Joe's story of coming to terms with his lost friendship with Maxie and what to do about it seems as if it could have been its own novel, yet you've woven this in beautifully with Paula's involvement with a trafficking ring. Did you start out with this combination fully formed or did it develop as you went along?

HL: It developed as I went along. This story began as a piece of flash fiction published in Shotgun Honey in 2018. It was a death row scene between an elderly criminal and his much younger partner. It got me thinking about a longer story involving a criminal whose life was winding down and a younger person whose life was at a crossroads. 

In the first draft, “Paula” is a male character. Switching to female increased the tension for Joe, who doesn’t know how to handle a wise-cracking young woman. I knew the story would turn on them having to depend on each other. Joe could provide physical protection, which meant Paula needed to be on the run from something. Hampton Roads has had its share of trafficking -- both labor and sex trafficking – and she stumbles into a situation that she tries to solve. That prompts bad people to chase her. Oddly enough, Joe’s breakup with Maxie was the last part of the story to fall into place. I knew Joe had to be a tough guy, and it seemed like a collector of gambling debts would be a good day job for him.

SW: You were a newspaper reporter for decades. Was that helpful for this story?

HL: Yes, in both specific and general ways. Toward the end of my newspaper career, I covered the military in Hampton Roads and became interested in veteran homelessness. I interviewed a number of homeless people, and that helped develop Paula as a character. She is newly homeless and living out of the back of her car.

For years, I always thought of homeless people as two-dimensional, this shadowy person standing at the end of the exit ramp holding up a sign. My work as a reporter helped me see them as people with work histories, family lives and skills. Many were temporarily homeless or “couch surfing” with friends until they recovered. A few of them, not many, ended up favoring the homeless life. They didn’t want four walls and a roof.

Homelessness did not define them, and it does not define Paula. She simply sees it as another problem to solve.

Working as a reporter generally helps when writing a novel. Andre Dubus said talent is cheap, and what really matters is discipline. A career in news writing will teach discipline. You must press your fingers against the keyboard when you’re tired, stressed, busy, hung over or half sick. I’ve written news stories in hotel lobbies, airport terminals and buses, with all sorts of distractions. I didn’t need my special music for inspiration. I didn’t need to wear my favorite hat. If I had a muse, it would be yelling, ARE YOU DONE YET?

As a reporter, you meet people at various highs and lows. You interview lottery winners and people who lost their jobs in corporate downsizing, parents frantically looking for a lost child and the joy of a homecoming soldier who returned safely. It’s fertile ground for developing characters.

SW: Are there any "minor" characters in this book you'd like to develop a little more into their own story?

HL: Donna P.L. Fallon appears very early in the story as Joe Pendergast’s neighbor, then plays an important role during the climax. She is an amalgam of every kind/nosey/oversharing neighbor I’ve ever had, and her backstory merits a stand-alone treatment.  I’ve got her 1,500-word bio sitting in a file, most of which never made it into the story. 

She’s in her mid-40s, raised by hippies who ditched their van and moved to a trailer park to raise a family. Mom and dad tended to walk around naked (Inside the trailer, not outside.) smoked pot and disdained material wealth. Donna was the most beautiful girl in high school, but she refused to go the cheerleader/homecoming queen route. 

She took up exotic dancing at a “gentleman’s club” after high school and made good money. Her dad would wait in the parking lot to pick her up. She got into real estate a few years later, taking courses and trying to avoid talking about her past. 

Her career path – exotic dancer to realtor – is based on a real woman I once interviewed during my newspaper days. The exotic dancer stuff was off the record, sadly. But I imagine Donna as someone who gets up in your face, smelling of breath mints and perfume, with floppy hats and jangling bracelets. 

She is equal parts curious and kindhearted, and her exotic dancing days have taught her not to take an shit from men. In some ways, she is exactly what Joe needs to get through his various challenges.

SW: What's next for you?

HL: I have three stories due out in various anthologies. The first comes out in September. It’s a collection from Down & Out Books, and all the stories are set during Prohibition. I also have a novella due out from the same publisher, part of a novella series based around a Dallas, Texas chop shop where the main character is a car thief.

I’m working on a second novel about a famous thief in a small Virginia town. She grew up homeless and stole from rich members of the Mallet Society –  a rich men’s club that runs the town. She’s eventually caught, serves five years in prison, and returns to her hometown determined to change her ways. As the story begins, she is blackmailed into burglarizing the home of the richest woman in town, where she finds a secret that would bring down the hated Mallet Society for good. But will the town believe its most famous criminal is now a whistleblower? In a fever of creativity, I have titled it “Mallets.”

Hugh Lessig spent more than 30 years as an award-winning newspaper reporter, covering everything from city council meetings to the earthquake in Haiti. Along the way, he’s met people at the highs and lows of life, interviewed accused murderers and governors, welders and lawyers, and old men who fought our nation’s wars. Born in eastern Pennsylvania, he moved to Hampton Roads, Virginia in 1997. His short stories have appeared in Thuglit, Shotgun Honey, Crime Factory and Needle. In addition, his work is featured in the following anthologies: Mickey Finn 21st Century Noir, Volumes I and II; Groovy Gumshoes: Private Eyes in the Psychedelic Sixties and Guns & Tacos. Fadeaway Joe is his first novel.

***

FADEAWAY JOE: Sixty-four-year-old Joe has known violence his entire life. For forty years, he’s worked as an enforcer for loan shark and close friend Maxie Smith, breaking more than a few bones along the way. When Maxie abruptly fires him, Joe isn’t sure where to lay the blame—on Maxie, the man he once considered his brother, or on the early-onset Alzheimer’s that made Maxie lose faith in him in the first place.

To keep his head above water, he begins to operate a food truck that’s barely getting by. Desperate to regain some purpose in his life, Joe makes a life-altering decision: he’s going to take down Maxie Smith by any means necessary, once and for all. However, his plan of revenge is sidelined when he meets twenty-two-year-old Paula Jessup, a wise-cracking amateur detective with a few scheming cards up her sleeve, who’s on the run from a trafficking ring she’s been investigating. The two form an unlikely bond: Paula needs some protection and Joe needs a purpose.

With the stakes running high and the clock ticking down—will this gamble pay off?

Get your copy of  Fadeaway Joe

The Nick Kolakowski Interview

"This book clicked in perfectly at 35,000 words, which is right in my happy zone of full oxygen saturation. It was the perfect length for a tale of heists, Nazi gold, murderous little people, dead clowns, and New York City at arguably one of its most interesting historical moments."

---

By Steve Weddle

If you've seen the cover of Nick Kolakowski's Payback Is Forever, then you've seen what I thought of it. I dug it.

Classic and fresh.

That's tough to pull off. I know. I've tried.

Nick and I worked together editing the award-losing anthology Lockdown during the first year of the pandemic, and I was privileged to see his skills at work, his eye for detail, for momentum, for all the little parts of a story the reader should never think about, should just enjoy.

Nick brings that same talent to his writing, and we're all the better for being able to watch him work, to read his new book.

Brian Asman said this new is one is like "a demented fun-house mirror version of a Richard Stark novel," which pretty much nails the vibe and the clear influence here.

Nick Kolakowski

I recently sat down with Nick (I assume he was sitting when he answered my emails, but who knows?) to ask him some questions about the book, about music, about movies.

Steve Weddle: Your new book, PAYBACK IS FOREVER, hits the ground running and doesn’t let up. How do you manage to create a character that readers care about as the story is racing down the road? Aren’t you supposed to stop and add in some backstory, have the main character take time to clothe some orphans at the soup kitchen?

Nick Kolakowski: Nah. With Payback Is Forever, I wanted to craft a throwback to the Richard Stark/Donald Westlake novels I devoured as a kid. The main character of Payback Is Forever is very much in the mold of Parker, the master thief who starred in 24 of Stark/Westlake’s books and yet has precious little backstory to explain why he’s an ice-cold badass. I let that homage dominate the character for most of my book’s length, and then I do my best to subvert it in the last few pages, because it’s become a cliché, and it’s a writer’s duty to seek and destroy clichés whenever encountered. Sorry, Donald.

SW: You’ve been writing stories for *checks watch* many years now. How would this novella be different if you’d written it a decade ago?

NK: I would have played the whole thing straight. It would have been a total homage/throwback to those pulp novels of the 1960s without an ounce of irony or invention. But plenty of folks have done just that in the past few decades, and many of them better than I could ever do. So in the last part of the book, I took a chance and tried to implode everything—the all-American myth of the criminal badass, the noir protagonist’s descent into inevitable doom, all that stuff that’s propped up the genre since its inception.

I have no idea if I succeeded, but I think the result is interesting. Hopefully in a good way. I mean, car wrecks are interesting, too, but you don’t want to be anywhere near them.

SW: This novella doesn’t have an ounce of fat on it. Were there subplots you trimmed away or was it always this sleek?

NK: It was always this sleek. I have trouble writing books longer than 40,000 words. Once I get above 50,000 words or so, it’s thin oxygen for me. Plots begin to warp and spin out of control. Characters stand around tapping their toes. But this book clicked in perfectly at 35,000 words, which is right in my happy zone of full oxygen saturation. It was the perfect length for a tale of heists, Nazi gold, murderous little people, dead clowns, and New York City at arguably one of its most interesting historical moments.

SW: Besides this interview, what's the biggest mistake you've made as a writer?

NK: Not starting earlier. I’ve been writing all my life—mostly short stories—but I didn’t put grinding effort into longer fiction until 2017. Some days, I feel like I’m rushing against the clock. I don’t know whose clock, but it’s ticking away, and there’s so much to do.

SW: Bob Dylan's "Stuck Inside of Mobile" and Tom Petty's "American Girl" are a couple songs that have openings that immediately soften my mood and make me optimistic about the next few minutes of my life. Do you have any songs that immediately put you in a good mood?

NK: Anything by Tom Waits or Leonard Cohen. That might seem counterintuitive, but I have such a nostalgic attachment to those two gentlemen that I can’t help but feel perky whenever I hear the first notes of “Downtown Train” or “Everybody Knows.”

SW: What's your least favorite movie?

NK: Who loves Batman & Robin? 

SW: On the off chance that there's someone out there who hasn't read any of your work, would this be a good place to start?

NK: Love & Bullets would be the best place to start, simply because it's a collection of three novellas ('A Brutal Bunch of Heartbroken Saps,' 'Slaughterhouse Blues,' and 'Main Bad Guy') with a whole bunch of added material, and altogether it represents about four years of writing. It's got an epic sprawl, it's funny, and there are some cool kills.

SW: What's the most surprising book you've read in the last year or so?

NK: The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow really blew my mind. It's a nonfiction exploration of "deep time," that period between the emergence of modern human cognition and recorded history. It discusses how people 100,000 years ago might have lived, and how they might have structured their societies, and how it all still impacts us today. Graeber and Wengrow are biased toward this vision of "beautiful anarchy," where everyone sort of operates in harmony without bureaucracy or leaders or laws, and I'm not sure I entirely believe it, but they make some good points. It was mostly surprising for its revelations about how much Native American philosophy and thought might have influenced Enlightenment thinkers and the various Revolutions of the 18th century, actually.

***

Thanks to Nick for the chat. If you're looking for a book to blow your mind, you can snag his new one here.

Processes and a Podcast

by
Scott D. Parker

There must be something in the air this week, because a good number of the writers I follow on Twitter had writing challenges. I did, too, but there is a solution.

On Thursday, Texan Jeff Abbott tweeted this:

“writing early this morning, i had been pondering since last night how to fix a chapter opening, had no good idea, sat down to the chapter, in desperation typed three sentences, character-driven solution presented itself to my weary brain, onward”

Later the same day, Bryon Quertermous had a short thread, the last of which contained this little nugget:

 “Writing can cause so many problems, but almost every time, the solution to a writing problem is to write through it. 5/5”

As for me, I’d been suffering a lazy streak. Part of it certainly had to do with how to craft the beginning of my next chapter. I had struggled to end the previous chapter in a satisfactory way, so I just ended it. The subconscious must’ve festered on my dissatisfaction with that ending because it kept hindering my forward progress.

Until this week. As a writer with a day job, I’m time locked with my writing time. I also hadn’t been doing my exercises as often as I needed to and it’s lack was catching up to me. So I did the most basic thing in the world: Gave myself no excuses. I compelled myself to wake at 5am, get on the rowing machine within five minutes of waking, and after a brisk ten-minute session, sat at my computer and wrote.

Guess what? The words came, fast and furious, until I had to stop and get ready for work. I didn’t mind, really. I had accomplished something. Two things, in fact. I had cleared my mind of the block that hampered my writing as well as the exercise. That was a great day.

No matter the writer, no matter how many stories the writer has completed, there will always be days in which the stuff just doesn’t happen. The brain might be wonky or filled up with life’s clutter. It’s going to happen, so it’s best not to get upset about it.

But there is a way to mitigate the hangups: Rely on the process. Don’t wait for inspiration. For nearly all of us, that means getting in front of our screens and doing the work. When we’re there, inspiration will come. It always does.

My First Podcast Interview

This process of always being available is part of my writing life on which I constantly rely. It’s one of the things Paul Bishop and I discuss in my first-ever podcast interview. It dropped this week and I couldn’t be more thrilled.

Have a listen.

Or use this link to get the episode in your preferred podcast-listening app.

An Interview with S.A. Cosby

 

This week, I convinced acclaimed author of BLACKTOP WASTELAND and the upcoming RAZORBLADE TEARS, S.A. Cosby to chat with me about what he's up to, his thoughts on his recent success, and the challenge of writing cops in crime fiction in the very current (and historical) climate of the American police state.

If you haven't read Shawn's stories (and where the hell have you been if you haven't), I highly recommend you remedy that. Keep your eyes peeled for links to his work and the work of others below.

AC: So, since last we spoke (well, in person during the before times), you went off and released BLACKTOP WASTELAND, which I hear people seemed to like (and is releasing in paperback very soon). I mean, just a handful of award nods, glowing reviews, and a production deal, so no biggie. You're also about to release your second novel, RAZORBLADE TEARS (which I also heard is outstanding).

Guess that's a long way to walk to simply ask: how's it going? Has the success caught up with you yet, or is it all still soaking in?

SA: First it’s good to talk to you again my man. To answer the question, it's all incredibly surreal. Like 5 years ago I was getting yelled at by a customer trying to return a drill from the Pre-Cambrian period at my retail job and now my book is being optioned for a film. I got to chat with Walter Mosley. I was able to get a new car that doesn't come with arcane instructions (once you get to 55 you gotta put your arm out the window to keep it from tipping over).

It's more than I could ever have dreamed and it’s a little terrifying! 

 

AC: And to follow up on that. Is there a sense of wariness as you begin new projects with these successes in the proverbial rear view? Not so much the typical anxiety that comes from writing, but of the expectations that can sometimes (often) get laid on creators of color? Is there even a way to mitigate/deal with that kind of nonsense?

SA: Well, I’m aware that now the playing field is a little different. There are a lot of eyes on me watching how the next project will go. And we both know that WOC don't get as many at bats as other writers, so I feel some pressure and anxiety to maintain a certain level of engagement in regard to my writing, but when I sit down to write I put that out of my mind because ultimately that gets in the way of the story...and the story is the thing 

 

AC: Your next novel, RAZORBLADE TEARS, is set to tackle some very heady social topics. A story of two fathers united in a quest to avenge the deaths of their sons - sons who they were estranged from because of their sexual orientation. What led you to tackle subjects like these? Was there something that made this story compel you to make it come to life?

SA: The quick answer is I had a friend, also African American, close to my age, who came out a few years ago to his family and they were not supportive at all. And that person was devastated, and they told me " You know if I could do hair or lead a choir they wouldn't be so upset " and that statement shook me because in many ways it was true. It made me think about how prevalent homophobia is in our communities of color and how that runs parallel to systemic racism. I felt like I needed to talk about these issues in the only way I know how: through the prism of a crime novel. 

 

AC: You mentioned on Twitter that you're working on a third novel involving a black sheriff and you're editing a cop-themed anthology.

Your rep for being provocative maintains, man.

There's been a kerfuffle lately about writing cops in crime fiction and while I'm no fan of copaganda (and I'm comfortable assuming you aren't either) I do believe there's room for true examination of the broken police state. Is this something weighing on you as you write the next novel and as you prep to read through some of the subs that will come piling in soon?

SA: Yeah, I have no interest in writing about super cops who are perfect paladins riding on white horses. You don't have to be a POC to realize that idea is not only fantastical but also dangerous. But I think it’s important to have conversations about how policing affects our communities and our psyches. The book I'm working on is at its core an examination of what happens when a person of color tries to fix the system from the inside only to find out the foundation is rotten, and the house is on fire. The anthology I’m working on with Rock and a Hard Place Press takes this issue one step further with stories told from the point of view of people who are victims of that broken police industrial complex. In both cases I think writing is one of the best ways to talk about these issues. It's like using a mirror to fight a Gorgon. 

 

AC: Let's lighten the mood.

Who should we be reading that we aren't reading? Which authors out there are knocking your socks off?

SA: Oh man I'll give you four 

Yasmin Angoe, she has a great spy novel coming out later this year called HER NAME IS KNIGHT 

Andy Davidson, a fantastic horror writer (The Boatman’s Daughter) 

Heather Levy, (Walking Through Needles) 

Robert Jones Jr. Author of The Prophets 

 

AC: Last question. A little evergreen to cap things off. Name a song that just must be on the playlist for what you're writing these days.

SC: Haha hmmmm 

Hellhound on my Trail by Robert Johnson 

 

 

 

S. A. Cosby is an Anthony Award-winning writer from southeastern Virginia. He is the bestselling author of Blacktop Wasteland, a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice and Goodreads Choice Awards semifinalist, as well as Brotherhood of the Blade and My Darkest Prayer. When not writing, he is an avid hiker and chess player.