When you're a new writer, interviews are a joy. Oh, you want to ask little old moi where I get my story ideas? *pulls up a chair, ties you in it*
But the more interviews you give and take, the less interesting they become. I try to make interviews interesting for the subject and the audience, as well as my self. I have a boundless curiosity, a rather childlike inquisitive mind, and little capacity for embarrassment, which I use to my advantage. For a year I interviewed crime fiction writers from Patti Abbott to Lawrence Block on my website, in a series called "Belly Up to the Bar." Some questions were repeated, but I tried to get a few out of left field. Some authors have been asked it all, after sixty plus years in the biz, and it's tough to excite them.
I commiserate with Saeed Jones's statement. I would much prefer to meet an author for coffee and record our conversation on my phone and transcribe the juicy bits than come up with interview questions that they must write short essays to respond to. Perhaps Twitter would be a good medium, limiting questions to 280 characters and responses to a couple tweets per? It takes the proper writer, someone fast on their tweet as it were, to keep up. But with the popularity of AMA threads (ask me anything) this may be my new go-to for Twitter-savvy authors.
I recently interviewed Joyce Carol Oates for CrimeReads—it's not published yet, so don't bother looking—and the questions were lost in email hell for a month or so. She was kind to take the time to respond to my rather detailed interrogations, but was despondent at the idea of having to write responses again, and I do not blame her. Even someone as prolific as Oates—seriously, she had two more books published since I pitched the interview, and an anthology she edited is about to be published as well—answering these questions has become a burden, as you can tell from the short responses the more seasoned authors give. Read Lawrence Block's "Belly Up to the Bar" interview for a couple of quick witty rejoinders that parry my attempts at getting him to write an essay for free!
He was gracious, and so was JCO. Many writers have asked for a moratorium on the most repeated questions, that have become a running joke for decades: "where do you get your ideas?" Because for a writer, we can't imagine not getting ideas. It's what we do, we observe the hot mess that is humanity and get inspired to write a story. The best interviews I've read of late have been lightly edited chats; here's a good one with Stephanie McCarter and Jia Tolentino on sexual brutality in Ovid's Metamorphoses, for example. Another excellent one by Matt Zoller Seitz with Sady Doyle on her book Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers that does a deep dive into Frankenstein, is a great read.
You can't do this easily via email; there needs to be back-and-forth, quick thinking, not an author sitting at their chair with all the time in the world to craft the perfect answer. But there are time constraints, especially when it's an author promoting a new book. Meeting somewhere? In a digital world, without teleporters? Madness. Even an hour of FaceTime becomes difficult to schedule. You can get away with not wearing pants, but you need a shirt and to get your hair did. Maybe a text chat in Google Hangouts or similar, Twitter DMs, is a good place to start? I'll attempt that for my next interview, and we'll see how it goes.
In my previous post a couple weeks ago, I referenced the fact that I know how to pick locks. Several of you were curious about how I came about this skill. So today I decided to share that little story.
Just as a caveat, this is a post about my experience with locksport, which Wikipedia defines as the sport or recreation of defeating locking systems. It should in no way be an encouragement to anyone to attempt defeating locks for the purposes of trespass, theft, or any other unlawful activity.
My initial interest in lock picking began when, as a teenager, I started reading Lawrence Block's Bernie Rhodenbarr cozy series about a cat burglar who occasionally stumbles upon dead bodies. If you haven't read any of this series, I highly recommend them.
I was instantly fascinated with how dear Bernie could take a few pieces of spring steel and tickle the tumblers into giving up their secrets.
I so wanted to be able to do this. Not to steal from anyone, but for the sheer challenge of defeating a lock and exploring places where I'm not supposed to be. Bad Dharma! I know.
A few years later my curiosity in locksport rose again. I don't remember why. Maybe I started reading some more in the Bernie Rhodenbarr series.
It was the early 1990s, and I had no way to buy an actual lock pick set. But I did have other tools. A library card. A letter opener. Aluminum cans. You'd be surprised how simple everyday items can be used to defeat locks.
I confess I did use my limited skills to access some places I shouldn't. My mother's car. My manager's office at the radio station where I worked. A neighbor's apartment. I didn't steal anything. It was all about the thrill.
Let me reiterate this point. Don't break into other people's private spaces without their permission. It's illegal.
Also, alarm and surveillance systems have become much more sophisticated. The thrill isn't worth spending a few years in a medium security prison. Trust me.
For reasons I'd rather not get into here (read: serious consequences), I put my love of locksport on hold for a long while.
And then about five years ago, I was working out of Gangplank, a collaborative workspace in Avondale, Arizona. The building had been a bank originally, then Avondale City Hall, then the West Valley Arts Council, before becoming Gangplank, whose motto is "Be Dangerous."
Because of its various incarnations over the years, the building had a few interior doors with keyed locks for which we did not have keys. This became a problem one morning when a member's kid locked one of the meeting rooms, leaving us with no way to open it.
Fortunately one of our other members' wives had a lock pick set. But she didn't have time to pick the lock. So while we waited for her to show up with her bits of spring steel, I went on YouTube to brush up on my lock picking skills.
The pick set arrived. I set to work, and five minutes later, I had tickled the tumblers, turned the cylinder, and opened the door.
Hurrah for Dharma, that hero and rapscallion!
Some months later my skills were called upon again to access the broom closet which some doofus had accidentally locked.
I still love practicing on defeating locks. But I no longer try to access places I have no legal right to be in. Locksport isn't about breaking and entering. It's about problem-solving and creative thinking. And it's just a whole lotta fun.
If you're interested in learning more about locksport, you can visit Locksport International or search for videos on the subject on Youtube. Be aware that possession of lock picking tools is illegal in some places. Familiarize yourself with the laws where you live.
As one of the only transgender authors in crime fiction, Dharma Kelleher brings a unique voice to the genre, specializing in gritty crime fiction with a feminist kick. She rides a motorcycle, picks locks, and has a dark past she’d rather forget. She is the author of the Jinx Ballou bounty hunter series and the Shea Stevens outlaw biker series. You can learn more about Dharma and her work at https://dharmakelleher.com.
I’ve been actively pursuing a career in writing for more than a decade and have read countless books on writing. I’ve read Stephen King’s On Writing, Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules, and was a devotee of Lawrence Block’s column on fiction writing in Writer’s Digest.
In all that time, I’ve boiled down what I’ve learned into three general principles. The overarching idea is to keep the reader reading.
The reader wants to be entertained. If your story does that (and your reader is hoping it does), then you will reap the rewards.
But all too often, a writer will violate one of these three principles, and the reader gets pulled out of the story. They stop reading.
When that happens, they don’t leave glowing reviews. They don’t recommend it to their friends. And they don’t buy your next book.
So before you submit your book to your publisher, or hit publish on KDP, take time to ask whether your story passes muster on these three points.
Principle #1: Don’t bore the reader.
Life is short. There are too many great books out there for your reader to waste time on a boring story. So you better make damn sure your story isn’t boring.
Elmore Leonard said he left out the parts that readers skipped over. He didn’t want to bore his readers. Which is why he would sometimes sum up bits of dialogue with a line of narration. Because maybe we already know what the characters would say.
If Raylan Givens tells a cop who just showed up on the scene what just happened, we don’t necessarily need to hear three pages of Raylan recounting what we already witnessed as readers.
So Elmore Leonard might instead just say, Raylan told Officer Jones what just happened, leaving out all the boring parts.
Info dumps also tend to be boring, especially in the middle of a scene. It’s like racing down the street and suddenly killing the engine for no reason. The action abruptly stops. The thrill is gone, baby. The reader tosses the book aside. Next!
Without giving the readers a full accounting of our character’s histories at the beginning of the book, we’re afraid we will pull the readers out of the story. But doing so can put readers in a coma.
The best way to fix this is by identifying the absolutely critical elements in the info dump, intersperse those bits into action and/or dialogue, then toss the rest. Because readers are smarter than you think. They are used to figuring things out from context. And what they don’t figure out right away can introduce a sense of intrigue that will keep them reading.
Also, look at how you describe characters. Does the reader need to know that the receptionist in the office has blond hair? Or is it more revealing that his clothes are rumpled? See what I just did there? You were assuming the receptionist was a woman, huh?
Describe characters in ways that reveal who they are, not just what they look like. Jim Butcher is especially good at this. He can tell you three things about a character, and you know as much about their personality or history as what they look like.
Okay, enough on this principle. You get the point. I don’t want to bore you.
Principle #2: Don’t insult the reader or their intelligence.
That whole thing about writing what you know? It's bull hockey! Well, to an extent.
It's okay to write about things you don't have personal experience with, provided you do the proper research. This applies to writing about space exploration, police procedures, and locations you've never visited.
One of my pet peeves are scenes where someone’s house has been broken into and the cop says, “The lock doesn’t appear to be picked. There are no scratches on the lock.”
Granted most people aren’t as familiar with lockpicking as I am (long story for another time). Thing is, unless a burglar is a complete klutz, they won't be scratching up the outside of the lock. The picks go INSIDE the cylinder.
If you don't want to look like a fool, do your research and have an expert in the field beta-read your story to check for glaring errors. Because readers will tell you when you screw up and ding you in reviews. Better to learn about it before it goes out to the world.
The same goes for writing about marginalized communities of which you are not a member. As an outsider to that community, you are missing a lot of context—lingo, cultural references, and social taboos, just as an example.
So if you are writing about a transgender woman, do your freakin’ research on what it’s like to be transgender in this day and age. There are lots of YouTube channels from trans people who share what they face on a day-to-day basis.
I can’t count the number of poor representations of trans characters I’ve read or seen on the screen. Trans women stumbling around in heels or the trans hooker trope, that kind of crap. It just turns me off.
Once you’ve done your research and have written as authentic a character as you can, have a sensitivity reader take a look at it. Not only will they help you avoid alienating readers, but they will help you create a more nuanced, authentic character.
Principle #3: Don’t confuse your readers (at least not for too long)
It took me three or four episodes before I had any clue what was going on in the Netflix series Stranger Things. A lot of people quit watching after one episode because it was too confusing. Eventually, I caught on and fell madly in love with the show.
I also struggled quite a bit reading the first book in Jim Butcher’s Cinderspire series because the world was so different than what I could relate to. And I’m a big fan of his Dresden Files novels.
If you throw so much at your readers at once that they get completely confused, they will stop reading.
A little confusion is okay and can generate intriguing questions in the reader’s mind, propelling them through the story. But if you push it too far, they will toss the book aside. Readers don’t mind figuring things out from context, but don't make them do advanced calculus along the way.
I struggled with this a little bit with my outlaw biker series. There is a lot of lingo that is foreign and confusing to non-bikers. What’s a bitch seat? What does it mean to ride sweep? What’s a cut? What are twisties? What does it mean to scrape the pegs? I knew what they were because I'm a biker. But most of my readers are not.
So much of this is a balancing act. You don’t want to bore the readers or insult their intelligence by overexplaining things. At the same time, you don’t want them so confused that they throw your book at the wall in frustration. So how do you know where the happy medium is?
Get feedback from critique partners or beta-readers, especially people who may not be as versed as you are on the topic.
Final Thoughts and Parting Shots
Your book is a partnership between you, as the author, and the reader. Your goal is not only to tell a story, but to tell it in a way that keeps the reader reading. Because if they stop reading, they probably won't leave a review. They won't recommend it to their friends. And they won't buy or read your next book. So keep the readers reading. Follow these three principles.
As one of the few transgender authors in crime fiction, Dharma Kelleher writes gritty stories for misfits, oddballs, and eccentrics. She is the author of the Jinx Ballou bounty hunter series and the Shea Stevens outlaw biker series. You can learn more about Dharma and her work at https://dharmakelleher.com.
I stole that from Laird Barron, the horror writer whose new crime novel Blood Standard is a blast. It started with a tweet (rather like the upcoming world war) where he said it amused him that readers assumed that his protagonists would survive, when he writes about them in the first person.
You might assume this as well. I wrote a story in high school set during the Civil War, possibly inspired by "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," where a deserter tells us his story as he dies, impaled on a cavalry saber. It wasn't very good, I'll admit, but the only feedback I received from my English teacher was "you can't kill this character and write in the first person." Her reasoning was that he was telling the story, so he had to have survived to tell it, write it down, pass it on.
But the character isn't telling the story. The writer is.
Now that I think on it, I had recently read Grendel by John Gardner, which flips Beowulf and tells the story from the monster's point of view, and he of course dies at the end. The Viking hero tears his arm off and he bleeds to death, staggering across the countryside:
They watch on, evil, incredibly stupid, enjoying my destruction. "Poor Grendel's had an accident," I whisper. "So may you all."
Now, I am not defending my story, which was crap, but the use of the First Person Posthumous. We've seen it in film plenty of times. Sunset Blvd., Double Indemnity, D.O.A., Carlito's Way off the top of my head. I remember a wonderful Lawrence Block story (I remember many of them, that fellow has a knack) titled "Miles to Go Before I Sleep" about a man who cannot rest in death until he solves his own murder. It's in his collection Enough Rope, which you should read anyway. It's a doorstop of a collection, full of delights. A few of Mr Barron's stories that are in first person are "More Dark," the finale in his excellent story collection The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All, and the title novella in the collection The Imago Sequence, about art that is too terrible to contemplate. I'll leave it to you to figure out if the protagonists live happily ever after.
What are your thoughts on this? In another tweet, editor Jim Thomsen said that he finds it hard to feel concern for series protagonists when he knows there are 23 more novels after the one he's reading, or if he's convinced that the author won't kill off the series character this early on. Who has done a two book "series"? You'd have to be a well known author to trick readers who expect a trilogy and kill off the guy in book two. I can't imagine a publisher going for it. Perhaps Tana French could get away with it, since her Dublin Murder Squad series jumps protagonists? I haven't read them all, so I don't know if she's done it yet.
David Morrell argued in The Successful Novelist that first person is not as easy as it looks, and you should have good reason when using it. Others like Lawrence Block almost write novels in it exclusively. Almost all I've read by Octavia Butler is in first person, and she creates such empathy for the character with it that I recommend her as a lesson for any who prefer that point of view.
Do you have strong feelings about this? Let's hear it.
I still can’t say when it will be published (for a number of
reasons) but the other day I put to bed the latest draft of the fourth McNee
novel. If you don’t know the books, McNee is a private investigator from
Dundee, Scotland. When I started writing the books, I remember the author
Steven Torres asking if there were any other Scottish PIs. At the time I couldn’t
think of any. Today, I still can’t. I sometimes wonder if that’s because the UK
is so in thrall to the police procedural (and especially Scotland, where the
admittedly excellent Laidlaw series kickstarted the modern movement so hard, we
find it hard to escape the Inspector’s long shadow). But when people ask me why
I chose to write about a PI, I have to point them towards my influences. So
here are the five most influential (to me) PI novels that I have read:
1) WHEN THE SACRED GINMILL CLOSES by Lawrence Block
– It was my dad who introduced me to crime writers, and one of the biggies at
the time was Lawrence Block. As Dad said, Block wasn’t just writing about
colving crimes, he was writing both about New York and about alcoholism. This
particular book changes everything for Matt Scudder. His alcoholism is final properly
acknowledged, and the closing of the novel is a stunner. The mystery and crime
elements are very well handled, but really this book shows how the PI novel is
about so much more than just solving a crime and how the detective can be
affected much more deeply than a cop, who is assigned a case rather than
actively choosing to pursue it. Block and Scudder were my introduction to PI
fiction (as an adult) and I haven’t looked back.
2) THE GOODBYE LOOK by Ross MacDonald – You could
probably blame Ross MacDonald for the family theme that runs through the McNee
novels. MacDonald’s Lew Archer novels were obsessed with family secrets, which
is perhaps no surprise given his focus on psychological motivations; who else
can affect you more deeply than family? The Goodbye Look was the first
MacDonald I read (and it was far from the last), and it blew me away. This one
finds Archer employed to discover why a son would be involved in a burglary
perpetrated against his own parents. But Archer soon uncovers decades worth of
secrets and lies linked to an old kidnapping. MacDonald really added a
psychological depth to the pulp template, and deserves to be mentioned in the
same breath as Hammett and Chandler, which is why it was a terrible shame he was
so hard to find in the UK for a long time (although Penguin Classics have now
re-released the books).
3)
THE BIG SLEEP by Raymond Chandler – Anyone who
says they don’t like or appreciate Chandler is lying or trying to hard to find
a reason to disparage him. Yes, Chandler’s plots are often a little unclear (he
tended to move from set piece to set piece, each scene more important than its
place in the whole) but by God, its all about the writing. And no one has
bettered Chandler. He is the reason for all the wisecracking heroes, all the
glib humour in crime fiction. And with The Big Sleep he instantly creates a
hero who would become something of an archetype. Encoded in every PI (and many
cops) following Chandler is the DNA of Philip Marlowe.
It
was about eleven o'clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining
and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my
powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black
brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them. I was neat, clean,
shaved, and sober, and I didn't care who knew it. I was everything the
well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million
dollars…
4) The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett – Hammett’s
own experiences as private eye served to inform his fiction, and with the
Maltese Falcon his hard edged experiences clearly inform the character of Sam
Spade. It’s a tough novel on many levels, and its interesting on re-read to see
how Hammett doesn’t really let us too deep inside the character’s heads,
preferring instead to let their actions do the talking. He’s a tougher read
than Chandler in some ways (he’s a lot less warm) but he’s every bit as
rewarding. As with Marlowe, Spade would go on to influence generations of PI
characters.
5)
Hammett by Joe Gores – this 1975 novel took the
tricksy task of blending real life and fiction by making Hammett the central
investigator. It’s a brilliant novel from Gores (who would later write the
official prequel to the Maltese Falcon, authorised by the Hammett Estate, and
one of the few novels of its nature that really invoked the atmosphere of the
works on which it was based) and his fictional recreation of a real life figure
feels absolutely real. Its become a kind of forgotten gem, and I’m not sure if
its still in print, but if you can get a hold of it, you really should: it’s a great
novel about crime and crime fiction and works both as a thriller and as a kind
of meta-commentary on the history of the genre.
Are there modern writers you should be reading, I hear you
ask? Oh, yes, there have been some great eye novels past the 90s, but the books
mentioned are the ones that really influenced me before I was published. So if
you’re looking for more modern eyes, check out Sean Chercover’s Ray Dudgeon
books, Reed Farrell Coleman’s Moe Prager novels, Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Milhone novels
and Laura Lippman’s Tess Monaghan series. And while I bemoan the lack of Scots
eyes, check out an Irish eye in Jen Bruen’s Jack Taylor novels, an ex-con who
thinks he’s an eye in Ray Banks’s Cal Innes series and our own Jay Stringer’s
brilliant Eoin Miller books.
Scudder was so drunk. he thought that 'tache was cool
Are some characters wedded to their surroundings?
I watched the 1986 screen adaptation of Lawrence Block’s superb Matt Scudder novel 8 Million Ways to Die the other week. I knew from people who had seen it that there would be problems, but the idea of adaptations intrigues me and I love to see the way film-makers approach novels, often finding that those who have a strong vision produce the most interesting works that don’t always have to be note-perfect adaptations.
However, it always intrigues me when they move characters out of their natural surroundings.
And that’s exactly what they did here with Scudder.
The plot of the film is fairly inconsequential in many ways. It marries together a few different elements from the Scudder books and very quickly sets up his alcoholism after softening (just a touch) the mistake that got Matt fired from the police. Now, what the film has in its favour is Jeff Bridges. Even now he’d be my first choice for Scudder (although the recent announcement that Liam Neeson is to take on the role is not one that I’m opposed to), and here he does a fine job of playing the asshole with the unshakeable sense of responsibility. He’s great struggling with the bottle and acting against his better instincts. But something feels off.
And I realised that its nothing to do with Bridges or the character of Scudder.
It’s the fact they moved him to LA.
LA, the town that has so many personalities it never feels entirely cohesive. LA, where the sun shines and the city sprawls.
Matt Scudder does not belong there. Even the way the script portrays, you know that he is New York man, that he belongs in the crowded, occasionally dirty, always edgy city that is New York. Matt Scudder does not belong near the beach or the houses of the Hollywood stars. He is dirty, grungy, hard-bitten. He is New York. And New York is not LA.
And that’s where everything falls apart. Matt is so out of place in this new location that everything else begins to feel wrong. No matter how good Bridges’ performance is, it never feels right. And let’s not even talk about some of the odd narrative jumps or the strange, hallucinogenic way he gets involved in his “case”. It often feels like we’re missing half the narrative that was meant to explain some of the characters’ motivations here.
Oh, and Andy Garcia’s little pony tail is hilarious. As is his weird accent “Hello, Mr Scooder,” he drawls, pretending to be all Latin American and sleazy.
Following this, I watched SLAYGROUND, an adaptation of the Richard Stark novel of the same name. His character, Parker, is something of a drifter. He does where there’s a job. He’s not wedded to one place, but he is wedded to a country. Which is why it strikes me as odd that they took a book whose sole purpose is to trap Parker in one location (an abandoned fairground) and then move him all the way across America before – for no good reason – suddenly sending him to England where he gets to team up with Mel Smith in a finale that seems almost an afterthought to that great title.
It was bad enough watching this poorly made, poorly conceived adaptation while Parker… sorry, Stone… blundered across America displaying none of the professionalism that we had come to expect from the character in the novels. But when they moved him to the UK, suddenly everything felt deeply, sickly, wrong. The entire mis-en-scene was screwed. The character and his story did not belong there. And there was no strong reason to move either there, other than the script seemed to say it happened.
Location can make a massive difference to character. But not always. Take the adaptation of Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, which does not suffer in the slightest from moving to the states after the novel was set in the UK. Why? Because Hornby did not wed his characters to place. He did not create them to be English so much as he created them to be geeks.
Its just something that struck me, especially with these two movies, that some characters are integral and part of the place they come from. They become unstuck when moved, somehow lesser. And the more I think about it, the more we do associate certain characters, especially in crime fiction, with place. Marlowe with LA, Hammet with SF, Rebus with Edinburgh (and look what happened when he moved to London – it really didn’t work), Holmes with London… I guess what I’m saying is, a movie needs a strong reason to move narrative location and has to work twice as hard to make us believe in the change, especially when its characters are not part of that location but come and are a product of somewhere else entirely.
I remember my dad giving me a book. This was when I was first getting into crime fiction. The book he handed to me was called 8 MILLION WAYS TO DIE. "You'll love it," he said. "Its part of a whole series about a detective in New York." I was, admittedly, a little skeptical, already beginning to realise how certain crime novels could start to blend into each other. Then he said: "But while the crime's intriguing, really the whole series is about New York itself. And alcoholism." I was intrigued enough to look. And I was glad I did, because the Matthew Scudder books have been a huge influence on my own work and I remain, to this day, a fervent fan of the works of one Mr Lawrence Block.
Which brings me to today's guest post. I'm in Harrogate just now, living it up with the UK crime brigade, and so I thought I'd try and arrange a guest post. I didn't in a million years reckon that I'd be able to bag one of my favourite eye-writers to do it. But somehow, ladies and gentlemen, we have managed to procure for you a true legend of the crime writing world to do some damage this Friday. Of course, the man himself has admitted this post is not without its flaws, but I guess you're just going to have to read on to see what he means. So, ladies and gentlemen, without any further pre-amble (as I write this I'm late for my lift to Harrogate), I give you, Mr Lawrence Block:
PRETTY BOY FLAWED
By Lawrence Block
Critics and reviewers like to point out that the characters I write about have flaws. It’s not hard to see what they’re getting at. Matthew Scudder, the narrator and protagonist of seventeen novels to date, begins as a good two-fisted drinker, and by the fifth book he’s in the grip of full-blown alcoholism.
He sobers up, and not a moment too soon, but not getting plastered doesn’t make him a plaster saint. He’s had a few girlfriends over the years, though I have to say I was bemused when one reviewer spoke disparagingly of Scudder’s womanizing. Now that’s a hard enough word to use in any circumstances without sounding like a perfect twit, but I was appalled to hear it applied to Scudder. If I had to guess, I’d say that the lad who wrote those lines hasn’t been getting much.
Still, it’s true that the man cheated on his call girl girlfriend, Elaine, with his winsome widowed client, Lisa. Then he married the one and went on seeing the other. That’s a pretty serious flaw. And it seems to me there was something else, but what was it?
Oh, right. His best friend is a career criminal. And sometimes, when the law doesn’t appear to work as he thinks it should, he’s not above taking it into his own hands. A couple of times he’s killed people, and it hasn’t always been in self-defense, or in the heat of battle.
Or consider Bernie Rhodenbarr. He’s a nice enough fellow, literate and personable. Old ladies and dogs take to him, and he runs a secondhand bookstore, for heaven’s sake, and he’s even got a stubtailed cat named Raffles. You’d be glad to have him over for dinner, but afterward you’d count your spoons.
Because, see, the habit he can’t seem to break is one of letting himself into other people’s houses and stealing their things. He knows a lot about art and collectibles, and part of his knowledge includes where to sell it without having to furnish proof of ownership. He’s a burglar, for God’s sake, and he’s been one for ten books already, and if that’s not a flaw, what is?
Well, how about killing strangers for a living? That’s what Keller does. He’s been in four books so far, and the body count is really getting up there. Aside from that, he’s a pretty decent fellow, a sort of Urban Lonely Guy of assassins.
He winds up being a guilty pleasure for a lot of readers, who like him more than they think they should. Women in particular are crazy about Keller, and are ready to take him by the arm and pick out drapes, and names for their kids. Some of them try telling themselves that he only kills people who deserve it, but that’s not true at all. Hey, he’d kill you if somebody paid him to. (Well, not you, but that other lady over there. He’d never kill you.)
So it’s not as though I’m arguing that my protagonists are perfect beings, that they’ve built up enough good karma in countless reincarnations to be subsumed into the next world and absorbed into the infinite goodness of the universe. I don’t rule it out, but it strikes me as unlikely.
But does that make them flawed?
I’ll tell you, I don’t much care for that word. It suggests that they’d be much better off without these flaws, and we’d be better off ourselves for knowing them. Why, if only they managed to overcome these flaws, then they’d be perfect. And wouldn’t that be wonderful?
Matt’s already come a long ways, now that he’s given up the drink and made an honest woman of Elaine. And he hasn’t been catting around on her lately, or if he has he’s kept it to himself, so at least we don’t have to know about it. Now if only he could stop hanging out with that reprobate Mick Ballou. . .
And Keller. Why, all he has to do is fine another way to make a living. He’s a stamp collector, so why doesn’t he give up homicide for hire and set up shop as a dealer in rare stamps? It may seem like a tame life in comparison to his old profession, but there ought to be enough drama and excitement in the life of a professional philatelist to keep readers turning those pages.
And Bernie. He keeps telling us he knows stealing stuff is reprehensible and he yearns to give it up. Well, duh, what are you waiting for, Bern? Give it up! Run the bookstore. Go straight home after work instead of boozing it up at the Bum Rap with your pal Carolyn. And who knows, if you can set a good example by giving up burglary, maybe she’ll see the error of her ways and give up being a lesbian. I mean, the two of you could get married, you could have kids, you could move to Armonk and run the book business over the Internet. You’ll love it in the suburbs. All that fresh air, all those healthy people—you know what? It wouldn’t surprise me if Raffles the cat grows his tail back. Who’s to say it couldn’t happen?
Oh, I exaggerate, do I? After the publication of Bernie’s fourth adventure, The Burglar Who Studied Spinoza, I got a copy in the mail from a disgruntled reader. “This is my last Burglar book,” the accompanying note advised me. “I find it unacceptable that, after four books, a presumably intelligent hero would not have grown enough to renounce his criminal ways and reform.”
Now I’m not generally quick to take umbrage, but there was an abundance of umbrage there for the taking, and I helped myself to a double armful of the stuff. “You mucking foron,” I wrote, approximately. “Either way it’s your last Burglar book, because if Bernie reforms the series is done.”
And who on earth wants to read about a perfect person? I haven’t come across too many in real life, but they turn up all too often in fiction, always doing the right thing, always taking the right path, always putting the needs of others ahead of their own. Empty suits is what they are, empty suits of armor. And untarnished in the bargain.
I don’t want to read about them. And I certainly don’t want to write about them, and couldn’t if I did. Because I wouldn’t know how.
But I still don’t like that word.
Flawed.
It makes my peeps sound defective. Like they’re somehow less than. Like there’s something wrong with them. Like they need fixing.
The hell with that.
Fortunately, there’s a better word. I had to get away from readers and writers to find it. So I went up to West Forty-seventh Street and walked amongst jewelers, and there I learned what the call the wee imperfection within a gemstone.
They call it an inclusion.
An inclusion! Isn’t that better? Isn’t it, like, tons better? Damn right it is. My characters don’t have flaws or blemishes or defects. They have inclusions.
They’re not missing anything. No, they’ve got something extra, something that puts them a step ahead of those flawless perfect nobody-home cardboard heroes.
They’ve got inclusions They’ve got what the other guys have, and more. Something additional. Something included.
Makes me proud of them, looking at ’em that way. Makes me want to sit down right now and start writing something about one of them. I’m not sure which one I’ll pick, and I might strike out in a new direction and embark on an adventure with a brand-new character. But if I do, I know one thing about him from the jump.
He’ll be a man with inclusions.
_
Lawrence Block’s most recent book is A DROP OF THE HARD STUFF, a novel about Matthew Scudder, Man of Inclusions. In September Hard Case Crime will bring out as its first-ever hardcover original GETTING OFF, a novel of sex and violence, by Lawrence Block writing as Jill Emerson. Its heroine is an endearing young woman whose mission in life is to pick up men, go home with them, enjoy great and fulfilling sex with them…and then kill them. Some might say she has issues. LB says she’s got inclusions, and he loves her just the way she is.
This week, I'm running late again, with deadlines, so I thought why should I do all the yakking? I figured, why not let you see some of the great stuff I've been finding on the web of late. But let's pretend to have a theme by linking only to interviews.
I also thought you might enjoy some video interviews, too. Such as an hour long session with the legend that is Lawrence Block conducted by Charles Ardai. I was at this Bouchercon and missed the intervew because I had been taken by a bearded bad influence to get beer and chicken wings somewhere else the city.
Or this with the incomprarable Laura Lippman, whose WHAT THE DEAD KNOW still haunts me.
But then I figured, "oh, you want more bang for your buck, right?" and remembered a little project I was thinking about lately. When Crime Scene Scotland folded into irregular blog-only fomat, a wealth of content dissapeared from the web. But I still had many of the original files. Such as one of my favourite interviews with the best writer you should be reading, Mr Ray Banks (whose latest US release, NO MORE HEROES, has just hit US stores in harback, you lucky, lucky people). So, in honour of Ray's release, and to save me typing original content (I really should be concentrating on the next novel), allow me to take back to 2006 and the halycon days of Banks first releasing his brilliant second novel, SATURDAY'S CHILD upon the world:
Ray Banks is one of the best writers to emerge in recent years. Kicking Brit Crime hard in the crotch, he's one of the new breed of noir writers who are taking the British crime novel back down into the gutters where it belongs. His characters can hardly be described as likeable and yet they are compelling in their own ways... fascinating studies of some of the worst aspects of our nature. His grimy take on modern Britain reflects the true nature of the darker facets of our modern urban existence. And more than that, he writes like the Devil himself.
We were honoured to be able to catch some time with Banks before his appearance at Waterstones in Edinburgh alongside Al "Sunshine" Guthrie and Alan "Sparky" Bissett, although we perhaps should apologise for ensuring that he was late for his own event.
RAY BANKS: Before we start, should I hold my book up?
RUSSEL McLEAN: Okay, hold it up.
RB: Yeah, right in front of the microphone.
RM: Well you’re away to do a panel so you should really hold it up, then.
RB: Sure, I’ll put it on the table. I’m sure it won’t make me look like a prize ponce.
RM: Right, well I think we’ll dive right in. We’ll start with Saturday’s Child: fantastic book as we’ve already said here on the site. Actually we’ll be changing the review once this is finished.
RB: Finally admitting it’s a pile of shite.
RM: Yeah, that’s it. What struck me was that you’re dealing with the PI mythos in a very British environment which is a very tough thing to do. I seem to remember someone (I’m fairly certain it was Stuart MacBride) [Although it should be noted that MacBride can't remember this, and it may have been my mind playing tricks on me]saying that PI novels are the toughest thing to do in a British setting.
RB: I suppose that’s true because the PI’s a very American archetype. And a lot of the British PI novels that I read,.. they all seemed to be a bit, for want of a better word, lame. In that the PIs were very much the kind of Marlowe stereotype: they all had drinking problems, mostly divorced, mostly this and mostly that. There were just little things that would throw me out like… a certain PI, I won’t mention who wrote him, got hold of a gun very very quickly. I said, okaaaay, and that would be the end of that book for me… well you know how I feel about guns anyway [Making reference to his Not The White City panel at Bouchercon 2005 which became very heated on the subject of gun control in the UK]
RM: I was sorry I missed that panel
RB: Yeah, it got a little out of control, a little heated. But it always seemed to me that these characters were always playing PIs rather than actually being PIs. We do have private investigators in this country but its corporate crime, pretty dull stuff, and you don’t have that kind of Lone Wolf PI tradition… and this basically originated from the short stories… Cal Innes is a very, very different character in the books than he is in the short stories. I was originally gonna tie them in with the book but it was impossible because an almost entirely different person.
RM: So the same name but a different kind of feel?
RB: It’s the same name… kind of a shared history but the temperaments might be different. When he was in the short stories he was basically a PI who had a bit of trouble in his past and… there wasn’t a great deal about his home life… and there was a little bit about Donna in one of the short stories and Paulo and the lad’s club and so on but there wasn’t a great deal of back story. He was basically just a tool to tell the story which a PI often is… like a commentator on what’s happening rather than an active participant… that’s what he was in the short stories.
RM: Like a camera?
RB: Yeah, so you’re seeing everything that’s going on through this one guy who’s supposed to be some kind of moral yardstick. But when it comes to translating that to a novel he would have been very dull to read about. So in order to address that… and what I prefer to read anyway is characters who are a little bit screwed up, who don’t necessarily have all their functions and aren’t necessarily thinking straight… I mean they’re trying to do the right thing, but it always turns back on them. But he’s not really a PI.
RM: No. He acts like one and he obviously thinks he’s one… I mean he makes up his business cards at the machine in the service station. One of the things that quite struck me was the parallel in one sense with the early Matt Scudder stories. When he was doing favours for friends before he got his license.
RB: You mean when Scudder was good? Before he quit drinking? But the main PI that I was always thinking of was Jack Taylor [Ken Bruen’s Galway based PI: an alcoholic and generally rather screwed up hero] because the beautiful thing about Ken’s books is that you’re reading them… and you’re not necessarily reading them for the plot.. you’re reading because he’s an alcoholic, essentially… which is why I like the early Scudder books… you’re reading about this alcoholic who tithes…
RM: The character is important rather than the plot?
RB: Yeah, and these books are alcoholism dealt with properly rather than “uh, yeah, I like a bit of a drink and then I have a blackout and then, ooo, something else bad’s happened to me” I’d actually prefer to read and write about someone who actually had issues to deal with on an almost minute to minute basis… With Cal it wasn’t necessarily the drink but the ex prisoner thing and his ties to Uncle Morris [a criminal boss in Saturday’s Child]
RM: I feel when I’m reading it he’s trying to constantly turn that part of his life around but he never quite seems to manage it. And that’s something with both Saturday’s Child and The Big Blind… they both seem to be about these kind of choices…
RB: God, you’re good, man: that’s exactly what it was all about. It was all about choices. The Big Blind was, I think, a bit more obviously about one moral choice that Alan has to make about whether Stevie lives or dies and he has to face the consequences of that… but he takes the easy way out… the good and right thing to do is never really the easy thing. With Cal, these choices are more on a kind of ongoing basis. As much as he’s trying to turn his life around he’s kind of stopped by himself. Especially in the later books. Especially in the book I’m writing just now. Suffice to say that car accident, when he gets knocked over… that has major repercussions in the rest of the book and the rest of the series.
It is a finite series. Because if I didn’t make it a finite series he would end up like so many PIs being cranked out again and again and again and eroding what made the earlier books so much fun... and I don’t want to be one of those writers, all fat and comfortable and lazy. With Cal, considering his circumstances, he’s not that kind of PI. He doesn’t even really have an office. He doesn’t have a background in law or anything like that. He has no skills, he’s just making it up as he goes along. Like me.
RM: He can’t keep meeting clients in pub toilets and getting beaten up?
RB: Yeah, that’s it exactly.
RM: That was what I was planning to mention, your thoughts on the nature of series characters and whether Cal was a finite character.
RB: It’s only five books. I might do some odds and sods with Cal, but not another full-length book...
RM: Do you think there’s ever a point with any character where you could keep them going more or less indefinitely? Do you think anyone’s managed it convincingly yet?
RB: Not off the top of my head. I mean, Ken Bruen’s going strong with Jack Taylor. At the end of The Dramatist I thought, right, that’s it, he can’t possibly… I mean there’s gotta be a limit to the amount of punishment he can take before, you know, he collapses into a coma. And he has some horrible things happen to him in The Dramatist. There’s that kick-arse ending.
RM: Ahhh, you see, I’ve still not read that one. I’ve read Priest, though.
RB : So you know what happens at the end of The Dramatist, then?
RM: Yeah.
RB: You’ve just spoiled it for yourself! ‘Cause when that comes, oh, you just don’t expect it! A real kick in the heart. And I think Ken’s doing a wonderful thing whereby it’s kind of like a cycle… a pattern that he [Jack Taylor] goes through, like the kind of choral way he writes... There’s repetition and reinforcement like a great song. A real murder ballad. It’s the same thing with the books of Jim Sallis… He wrote what is very much a finite set of books and yet it’s totally infinite too… and I’m hoping to get that kind of feeling. Because when you get to the end of the Lew Griffin books [Sallis’s series] you start reading them again because they are kind of like a cycle whereby patterns repeat themselves and he puts on different masks all the way through it…
RM: But you get a feeling of finality at the end?
RB: Yes. The ending of the books as I’m planning at the moment is going to be pretty finite.
RM: But Cal and Donna aren’t going to spoil the romantic tension like Maddy and Dave of moonlighting?
RB: It’s funny, did you read that on the Blog [Ray blogs on a semi-frequent basis at his website: http://www.thesaturdayboy.com - although it has undergone so many revamps since this interview that the post in question is long gone]? Kerri was asking when Donna and Cal were getting together. They are in the third book together. She does come down to Manchester.[Did this actually happen? UK readers will already know, but US readers will have to buy the new hardcover edition of the spanky NO MORE HEROES to see if Ray got this bit in the book] As to whether they consummate that relationship is another story entirely because of certain things that I probably shouldn’t go into.
RM: You put in all the romantic tension to widen your audience base, didn’t you?
RB: Actually, yeah! Well, there’s gotta be some respite from the doom and gloom and all that, and it can’t just all be cracking gags. There’s gotta be some kind of hope of redemption. And that’s a beautiful thing that Jason Starr does… and Al [Guthrie] as well. You give the character that glimmer of hope and then you go, no, you’re not having that! That will make you keep reading. So, yeah, Donna and Cal are gonna be that kind of glimmer… but they’re both really, really damaged, Funnily enough. I don’t think there’s anybody who’s not damaged in these books, to be honest.
RM: So we’ll never see a Ray Banks chicklit, then?
RB: Well after the response to the Cozy [Ray wrote a cozy paragraph for reading at a panel at Left Coast Crime 2006] you never know… I might write a cat mystery! With that cosy paragraph I was really just taking the piss… but… people seemed to enjoy it! So you never know… Francesca Muldoon might be written under a pseudonym...
RM: Next thing you know you’ll be writing in the style of Rendell…
RB: REEENDEEELL! Ah, I think I’d better move on before the red mist falls.
RM: I find the violence in the books very well done… kind of a nice change… its very street level and there on the page in front of the reader compared to some serial killer books where violence is often grotesque but often offstage and not so affecting.
RB: The thing is with serial killer books… its like John Rickards has said that certain writers feel they have to up the ante every time… so you’ve got people’s eyelids being cut off and all that… and I read these things and I think, “yeah, it sounds like it hurts,” but I can’t really relate to it, it’s out of my sphere of knowledge so it’s just ick for ick’s sake. I’m more likely to relate to somebody getting their nose broken. You know what that’s gonna feel like… we’ve all smashed our heads or whatever, got into those two-punch fights… and you get the tears in the eyes, you can’t focus, the blood and everything… But… and I was talking about this the other day… I don’t think that the eyelid stuff’s necessarily violent. It’s just gore.
I think there are some violent parts to the book. There’s the bit in the toilets at the beginning… it’s violent, but not a lot of violence takes place…
RM: It’s more a scuffle.
RB: Yeah, its more like, when I was in the toilet earlier some guy went into the cubicle and it sounded like he was wrestling with it… that clatter, clatter, bang, crash… So there’s that, there’s the bit where Cal gets beaten up… the cricket bat scene which keeps coming back to haunt me. I mean, its kind of sadistic, but I hope you understand why he’s doing that.
RM: It’s where Cal’s at his lowest ebb, I suppose… it’s where he makes the choice to go in a certain direction.
RB: For the most part of the book he’s trying to control that base anger, And at this point it just spills out: he’s had too much to drink and he’s really upset, hopefully understandably so. And the most horrific bit of violence comes right at the end [edited here for spoilers to the plot]: that was the only bit that maybe I thought I’d gone a bit too far but then I said, “nah.”
RM: But it’s in the nature of [this character]. You can’t forgive him but you do expect it from him.
RB: It’s almost casual… and that’s what’s disturbing. And it’s uncomfortable because there’s this tenderness after the fact, which is really what I thought was going too far. Its not posed punches or anything like that. In real life people are scuffling and they can’t throw punches and they’re kicking each other in the shoulders, punching each other’s ears and that… that’s what you see. Round where we live on the weekends when the pubs kick out you can see these drunk people hugging each other, almost or they’re just rolling around… It’s the kind of violence I like to see in books because violence is supposed to hurt and it’s supposed to be awkward.
RM: If Cal ever makes it to the movies, we’ll never see him in bullet time, then?
RB: Maybe if he’s really drugged up or something…
The kind of violence that stays with me in movies is like the pavement thing in American History X, or the pistol-whipping in Goodfellas... you know the bit where Ray Liotta just stalks over to the guy next door and wails on him with his .38. And the effects of violence... like the aftermath of the kicking Jeff Bridges gets in Thunderbolt and Lightfoot... saw that when I was kid, scarred me for life.
I can’t emotionally engage with violence that’s atrocity after atrocity after atrocity. When it becomes almost… well, comic…
RM: Like an over the top gory horror movie? Where you end up laughing instead of being scared?
RB: You reach a sort of Troma level of things like heads exploding… I’m not keen on that and I like to see characters who’ve been hit suffer and carry those scars with them. Like I was saying about the series character, there’s only so much they can suffer before it’s too much. The one I’m writing at the moment he’s carrying two books worth of beatings with him. That horrific beating he gets in the first one, he carries that with him… you know, with the codeine he gets prescribed by Dr Dick and then he gets part of his ear shot off in Donkey Punch.
You know, I wanted to get him shot. But I couldn’t set it in Britain and have him shot [Donkey Punch, Ray's second novel - also known as Sucker Punch - takes place in the US]
RM: I think you can get away with it in some settings and not others.
RB: There’s a certain market and a certain type of book that you can expect it in. Like Simon Kernick’s books. You can believe it in them because, well, they’re thrillers and these guys are all packing guns and that’s fine and Kernick does that really well. But what annoys me is very much a middle-class thing where they’re like, “Oh, I’ll just go to a rough pub and secure myself a weapon” and you think, no, what are you, high? Or just lazy writing... With the gun culture in this country it’s just not that easy to buy a gun. There aren’t people just walking around with guns.
RM: Well, maybe in parts of London.
RB: Yeah, and I hear Birmingham’s got a bad gun reputation. One of my favourite moments was in the film Bullet Boy, where the cops burst into a flat because there’s a hand gun on the premises... that’s the kind of reaction the police have to weapons... it’s like there’s a bomb in the place... But where I grew up a weapon was batteries in a sock or a pool cue or a six inch nail in Mars Bar. Its what they used to use in football grounds. One of the hooligan tricks was they’d put this nail inside a Mars Bar so they could get it through into the stands and then, wham! And then there’s knives, and Stanley knives which I’ve never liked the look of… car aerials, which can be particularly nasty… cricket bats…
RM: What’s frightening about these kind of weapons is that they’re so easily obtainable. Like glassing, I suppose.
RB: Y’know, I haven’t done a glassing scene yet. I will do one at some point. I mean… you can just grind it and… well you can see the damage it does to people’s faces. You only need to look at the late Oliver Reed because he was glassed at one point and he had scars all over his face. It’s a horrible way of disfiguring someone for life.
But I’m not keen on guns. There’s a gun in Donkey Punch but it’s set in America so I can kind of get away with it... and even then I was reticent about having one... maybe even more so because it was set in America, because I didn’t want to be one of those writers who’re like, “Oh it’s America, everyone’s packing heat because they’re all crazy and violent”... that kind of patronising rubbish... But the kind of gangsters in Saturday’s Child… well, there’s Rossie who carries a butterfly knife. There was this kid at school had a butterfly knife. He used to flick it about like that [demonstrates] and he cut his hand to ribbons because he couldn’t do it.
You know, I’m not interested in the big gun-toting gangsters. I’m interested in the low level ones. The Scally gangster. The ones who’ll rip off a car and then not know what to do with it. Well, Mo Tiernan [From Saturday’s Child] is a small time pill pusher. He’s not even graduated to Heroin. So he pushes pills because it’s something he can do and it makes him feel like Tony Montana.
RM: Which again is about this street level mentality that I think has been missing from mainstream Brit crime for a long time. Of course there are a few writers trying to bring that back. There’s you and Al Guthrie for sure, and for our purposes here I’m going to use Ken Bruen…
RB: …the London novels, yeah…
RM: …As an example even though he’s Irish. I mean, I’m not saying this is a massive movement but it’s gaining in popularity at least on an underground level.
RB: We’re kind of undermining the entire crime genre in this country, yes, with our dirty little books... how dare we? And Ken’s a wonderful example because… well, there’s The Hackman Blues and Rilke on Black…
RM: Of course, The Hackman Blues, which, sure enough, a certain someone tried to ban… and then ended up on the cover of one of Ken’s books…
RB: Yeah, Taming The Alien.
RM: I’m sure they said it was disguised but I knew who it was straight off.
RB: It’s pretty obvious who it is if you have a good look, you can’t miss those rows of Critter teeth… But The Hackman Blues is one of my favourite Bruen books… it was my favourite for a long time until I read American Skin. The book’s getting this kind of reputation that,.. well in a way it’ll be strange if it ever gets published because the hype has kind of outgrown it… But it is absolutely… it’s on a par with The Hackman Blues.
RM: I met Ken briefly at Bouchercon… cool guy… and I said to him how much I enjoyed The Hackman Blues… and he turns round and says, “Oh, it’s a horrible little book!”
RB: Well it is a horrible book! It’s completely non-redemptive in every sense… I mean, you shouldn’t have to redeem any one, any of your characters...
RM: A story has to be honest to its core…
RB: Yes, these people should not and do not go walking off into the sunset. Its sort of an old school noir paperback mentality… like the fantastic last chapter of The Getaway [Jim Thompson] where it’s almost existential… its just that good. It shouldn’t have worked, maybe, but it did. Or at the end of Savage Night which is grotesque and… there shouldn’t be any kind of false redemption, I don’t think. I don’t think there’s any real redemption at the end of Saturday’s Child.
RM: That’s true… why would these characters need redemption forced on them? Unless its an attempt to make them sympathetic… to force that on them… one of the notes I have here about your characters is that they’re always interesting and engaging and wonderfully layered but they’re not necessarily sympathetic…
RB: That’s right, me and Al [Guthrie] for sure, we definitely don’t go for sympathy! Why should we? We’re not collecting for charity... Empathy’s the only thing you need. Although I’m twisted in my belief about my characters and I would say if there’s anyone… its Mo that’s probably the most sympathetic to me. Cal can be a real nasty piece of work… I suppose like Slater in The Big Blind. I don’t know that I like him…
RM: But the thing is, in The Big Blind especially, you’re on Slater’s side at first and then… Well, I don’t think with Cal he’s as bad as Slater was…
RB: No, that was pretty awful. But then in my mind there was a direct correlation between Alan Slater and… well one of the Thompson ones, A Hell of a Woman or A Swell Looking Babe where there’s this emptiness to the character and even he eventually notices it but he does nothing about it... he can’t because the scales drop from his eyes too late. It’s kind of his fate to be empty. Whereas with a character like Beale [From The Big Blind; Slater’s mate and a general arsehole] he’s this idiot, but you kind of feel sorry for him. Because he doesn’t know what he’s doing.
RM: In the book you start out hating Beale and liking Alan and then somewhere they kind of cross over…
RB: Yeah, suddenly you’re feeling sorry for him, I hope, despite the fact that he’s a violent drunk and a bigot… but with Mo he’s just so damaged… people like Mo… people who’ve read the book actually like Mo because, well, he’s a bit funnier than Cal and, well, he’s a bit more alive than Cal… Cal kind of sleepwalks through parts of it…
RM: But that’s part of his wanting to be the hero character, I’d imagine. And we all know that heroes have to be dull…
RB: That’s absolutely true! I hope Cal’s not dull, though... There’s this wonderful Tom Waits quote, “a hero ain’t nothing but a sandwich” which is just great and bang on the money. And that’s the way it should be. I don’t believe in… there’s this whole big thing in Donkey Punch about heroes with this American guy he comes into contact with who’s going, “there aren’t any heroes. They took all our heroes away… the good guys used to wear white hats and the bad guys wore black hats and now… Now everybody’s grey and talking like they’re Jesus.”
I don’t know that there’s any room now, especially in this day and age for good guys and bad guys. Maybe in the thriller genre because they might think they need that black and white… but certainly not in the crime genre.
RM: Especially in, how is it Polygon describe it in the Press Release, “Literary Noir”…
RB: Ahhh, you see I’m not so sure Saturday’s Child is noir. I’m not sure it’s literary, either, but what do I know?
RM: I suppose Saturday’s Child isn’t noir because Cal’s coming back… its something you and I have argued about before...
RB: True, you can’t do series noir. Unless it’s an overall arc. Which is what Ken’s done beautifully with the Taylor books. With Cal, taking each book individually, I don’t think it’s noir, but the series might end up that way, if you get me… at the moment, it’s more hardboiled… in fact is it hardboiled? I really don’t know what I’m doing!
RM: Telling a good story, which is what’s important in the end.
RB: Hopefully… You should have seen the book before Mo got his narrative. I mean I’m hearing now that people can’t imagine it without him. When I was originally shopping it around it was just Cal. Mo was in it. But he didn’t have a voice. And my wife – Ana – she originally said to me, “Go on, give Mo a voice!” And I’m going, “Ahhh, shaddap, you don’t know, you don’t understand me: I’m an artist!” and then my agent turns round and says, “Why don’t you give Mo a voice?” and I go, “that’s a wonderful idea!” so I give Mo a voice and make a point of listening to Ana’s advice instead of my laziness, because that advice always makes the book better... But it fucked me in the States though, because a lot of people were coming back and saying its very difficult to read… it wasn’t anything about Mo being a nasty character but just the way it was written… first person local dialect, which I can understand. In order for a book to sell to the widest possible audience, there’s a feeling it has to be as easy to read as possible. So I suppose I am being literary in that respect! I’m glad to hear that Harcourt think it’ll sell in the US, though... we’ll see. Hope I don’t let ‘em down.
RM: I suppose I was worried with my own short stories when they were published in the states about whether they would get the accents… but they seemed to pick it up…
RB: Yes, but I think there this rhythm there where its almost perfect English but… and you get this in Rankin… where even though it’s a Scottish accent there’s no, well, “Hoots mon” for want of a better phrase…
RM: There’s reinforcing stereotypes! How long have you been away from Scotland now?
RB: Really, isn’t everyone going around shouting, “See you Jimmy!” and all that? Or sitting around on buckets with their tackety boots and black dungarees oan? But really, I think there’s room for it. It’s all about voice.
RM: Look at Charlie Williams and the Mangel books…
RB: The voice is fantastic in the Mangel trilogy. That’s what I read for. I read for voice. Charlie Williams is fantastic… I can’t hype him enough, And he’s not a crime writer necessarily. He’s simply, well, a fucking good writer! He’s got this whole bizarre, satire thing on the state of Britain which is just bang on every single time… and that would still be good, but it’s the voice that makes it great. All my favourite books are all down to voice. Fight Club. One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest would not be the same if has been narrated by McMurphy instead of The Chief… A Clockwork Orange… the prime example of voice and the prime example of an unreliable narrator. Which hopefully, in both my books we have. I mean, Mo’s completely delusional…. And Cal’s deluding himself about being a PI… and Alan Slater, he’s beyond belief… he thinks everything’s fine!
RM: So with these characters and their delusions, how well do you know them before you start writing? I mean do you spend time getting to know them, thinking about who they are, or do they just kind of surprise you as you’re writing about them.
RB: Mo is based on a few people I know and, you’ll like this, he’s partly based on Tyres from Spaced… that whole rave culture thing and the whole, “I just wish I could control these fuckin’ mood swings!” I’ve known pillheads before and it’s that whole psychosis… Cal… I’ve written about him for such a long time… the first one was 2002, maybe… Hand Held crime were the first people to pay me and edit me… but its no longer on the net and he wasn’t a PI in that, he was just a bloke helping somebody else out which he’s kind of come back to again. Saturday’s Child was gonna kind of be a prequel to the short stories because he’s just out of prison in Saturday’s Child and he’s just coming off probation in Donkey Punch… So it was gonna be a prequel but the shorts got thrown out and all I really had was a backstory… I didn’t realise he was as clichéd as he really was; the ex-con PI.
RM: Although when you’re dealing with the PI mythos you can’t avoid certain clichés.
RB: No, you can’t. I mean if he’s gonna be a PI he’s gonna drink and more than likely to excess.
RM: At least Cal doesn’t have a drawer full of bourbon.
RB: No, well he doesn’t have much of an office! Well in the shorts… Look, those are completely alternate universe. They share some characters… Paulo’s in it.
But the characters… “Donkey” Donkin’s a bit like Beale… but he’s a bit one note although he comes into it more… although there’s the odd thing like listening to Dido which is a direct rip off of Colm Meaney’s character in Intermission with his Clannad obsession…
RM: So what you’re saying is everything you do is ripped off something else?
RB: Yeah…No, wait, I’m paying homage…
RM: So you’re Quentin Tarantino, then?
RB: Yes, but better… Yeah, “better than Tarantino”, that’d be right... but, Cal… Cal is… I share some characteristics with him… you kind of have to if you’re gonna write a series character… there’s gonna be bits of you in there. And I did the same with Alan Slater, but he was more me when I was working in Manchester which was, not a very nice person, to be honest so that was kinda getting that out.
RM: But without all the mess with the dead body, I hope.
RB: No, I didn’t dump any bodies and I didn’t kill any dogs. Despite what you might have heard. I haven’t killed any dogs. Oh God, I am getting such a reputation... No cats, no animals AT ALL in fact were hurt in Saturday’s Child and no animals will be hurt, I think, in the other books… I’ve done dogs and I’ve done cats… what else can you do, gerbils? Nobody cares enough about gerbils. Children?
There is a certain kind of character that I like to do and that you can do in novel length. It’s weird because when I did Barry De Silva, he was like the anti-Innes and now Innes is turning into that… turning into Barry. My wife hates the Barry stories. She thinks he’s absolutely horrific. I mean in Dirty Barry when he’s having a bit of a five knuckle shuffle… But he’s a rip off, Barry’s a rip off of Loren Visser in Blood Simple. I’m ripping folks off left, right and centre here… But the Coens rip everyone else off... That’s what culture’s all about, it adapts the old into the new... that’s my excuse anyway... I’m a serial homager...
RM: Ray, I think we’re gonna have to stop because, shit, you’re meant to be on that panel now!
RB: Oh, shit! I just noticed that!
RM: But thankyou for your time… it’s been fun…
RB: And thank you for touching me all the way through the interview... very relaxing.
