Richard Godwin's Blog, page 7

Quick Fire At The Slaughterhouse: Interview With John Lescroart

John Lescroart is a New York Time bestselling author known for his series of legal and crime thriller novels featuring the character Dismas Hardy. His novels have sold more than ten million copies, have been translated into twenty-two languages in more than seventy-five countries, and fifteen of his books have been on the New York Times bestseller list. He has a new novel out, The Keeper. John met me at The Slaughterhouse where we talked about his new release and how publishing has changed.

Tell us about The Keeper.

The Keeper got its earliest life because I had just read the novel “Gone Girl,” and decided that this whole missing person idea was powerful as can be, and that there were probably a million different ways to do it. At the same, I was looking for a new way to involve my character Abe Glitsky in a story that would do justice to him. And it turned out, I think, that I was right. From the minute that Katie Chase disappears — and it pretty much happens on page one, the story just flies along. And ironically enough, it’s nothing like “Gone Girl.” It turned out to be as fun and as different as I had hoped, and the early critics seem to agree.

During your career as a writer how would you say publishing has changed?

The entire landscape has changed in a very fundamental way. The biggest sign of this change is the self-publishing establishment. When I began trying to publish, in my twenties, it was virtually universally accepted that there was a certain objective quality standard that accompanied the publication of a book. There were a host of what I’d collectively call gatekeepers — agents, editors, publishers, even critics — whose main function was to identify writers who had achieved that standard and who were rewarded (even if not financially) by actual publication by (usually) a major publishing house, generally located in Manhattan. There was a concept called the “mid-list” where novelists would be shepherded through a first or a second or even fifth or sixth book because the writers were “good,” although they hadn’t yet been discovered, hadn’t written the “break-out” book. Many authors never did get that breakout moment, but the concept was pretty much universally accepted. People who “self-published” with “vanity houses” were not considered actually “published” writers. Nowadays, this distinction has almost entirely disappeared. There is no objective standard to define a book worthy of publication, and so we see 60,000 novels “published” in a year, with each one as worthy as the next. This, to me, is the biggest change in the industry, from which so many of the other changes flow.

As an author how have your views of justice changed over the years?

Having now written something like twenty books in the general vein of “legal thriller,” you might think that my view of justice would have significantly evolved. In fact, though, the reality is quite the opposite. In my very first “legal” book, Hard Evidence, I came across the adage that “Justice delayed is justice denied” and this simple truism is still one of the hallmarks of the true meaning of justice, and/or the quality thereof.

What else is on the cards for you this year?

I’ve got an amazing year ahead of me. First, on May 6 my latest Dismas Hardy/Abe Glitsky novel, THE KEEPER, is published and I will be spending much of that month on a book tour — always a great time. (See my website, www.johnlescroart.com, for details.) In the middle of that tour, in mid-May, my son Jack graduates from Georgetown Law School. In July I’ll be attending the International Thriller Writers big bash in NY, the Thrilllerfest, where I’ll be part of the Craftfest. I’m also featured as one of the 23 authors in the FACE OFF collection of short stories, where I teamed up with T. Jefferson Parker and we turned out a collaborative story featuring Joe Trona (from Jeff’s Edgar Award winning best novel, Silent Joe) and my own Wyatt Hunt. The story is called, appropriately enough, Silent Hunt. Next up is another milestone moment when my daughter Justine gets married to Josh Kastan in August. I suppose that somewhere during this time, I’ll also have finished the currently untitled book that I’m working on now. I’ve also signed up with Taxi.com, and I’m going to be devoting some time and effort in getting my songs places with artists and in movies and television. Who knows? Stranger things have happened. In all, it looks to be a full and exciting year.

Thank you John for an informative and perceptive interview.

Links:

Pre-order THE KEEPER:

Amazon US and UK – Hardcover, Paperback, Kindle

Barnes & Noble – Paperback, NOOK

Books-A-Million – Paperback, eBook

Simon & Schuster – Paperback, eBook

iBooks (Apple)

Read more about THE KEEPER here.

Find John at his website, on Facebook, and on Twitter

Quick Fire At The Slaughterhouse: Interview With T. Jefferson Parker

T. Jefferson Parker is the critically acclaimed author of numerous crime novels, among them Laguna Heat. The paperback made The New York Times Bestseller list in 1986. He has a new novel out, Full Measure. Jeff met me at The Slaughterhouse where we talked about the novel and his forthcoming works.

Tell us about Full Measure.

“Full Measure” is the story of two brothers — Patrick, a combat grunt returning from Afghanistan, and Ted, a hard-luck dreamer who idolizes his younger “war hero” brother. Like most brothers they love and frustrate each other, and are viewed very differently by their father. When their family’s third generation avocado farm, nestled in the rich foothills of San Diego County, is threatened by drought, debt and wildfire, the brothers resolve to help their parents avoid bankruptcy and hang on to the land. Trouble ensues. There are shades of Jacob and Esau in “Full Measure.” And influences as varied as Steinbeck and Scorsese.

To what extent does territoriality play a part in your crime fictions and your latest novel?

That idea of turf runs through a lot of my books. So far as “Full Measure” goes, there’s the family land — eighty acres of Haas avocados that have been in the family for three generations. Part of the drama of that story is will the young brothers be able to make it last four generations, or will they lose the thing? In my thrillers I’ve written a lot about Mexican drug cartels, which are all about territoriality. They call it the “plaza,” meaning, loosely, the place where business is done. Because drug manufacturing and transport requires physical space, the “plaza” becomes very important. Thousands of Mexicans have died fighting over the various “plazas” in the last seven years.

As a writer how do you view justice?

It looks different to me as a writer than it does as, say, a reader of newspapers. All we humans can do is make laws and apply them fairly as is humanly possible. Does this always result in justice? When you’re making fiction the definition of justice suddenly goes from the insitutional to the intuitive. When I come to the end of a novel I think: what does this character deserve? People in life don’t always get what they deserve, so therein comes the writer’s duty to somehow administer poetic justice, or clearly confess that in the case of this story justice will not be done. Readers don’t always like that confession but I think a character in a novel who gets away with murder has plenty of precedents in the real life that I see around me.

What else is on the cards for you this year?

I wrote a short story called “Side Effects” for the recently published MWA collection, Ice Cold. The volume is a collection of stories, all dealing with the Cold War, so there’s funny prescience about the topic, given Russia in Ukraine. There are some good writers in the book – Jeffrey Deaver, Laura Lippman, Sara Paretsky and John Lescroart to name just a few.

And speaking of Lescroart, he and I teamed up to write a short story for the soon-to-be published Face Off, which is a volume of stories co-authored by thriller writers, and featuring their franchise characters. So, John and I wrote “Silent Hunt,” which stars my hero Joe Trona from Silent Joe, and John’s Wyatt Hunt. They meet on a Baja fly fishing trip, not unlike the one that John and I took a few years ago. It’s a wonderful story – fishing, Mexican baseball, found treasure, a dangerous cartel soldier and a rather likeable poor family living in the village of Aqua Amarga. We traded off writing sections, never knowing which way the other guy was going to take the tale, so it zigs and zags rather pleasantly.

Besides all that I’ve started another novel, which is a high-velocity drama set in the world of competetive skiing, where athletes risk life and limb to go inhumanly fast and maybe someday make the Olympic team. That story will keep me busy for a year. I hope to write some more short stories, too. I’m really getting to enjoy that form.

Thank you Jeff for an incisive and succinct interview.

Links:

‘Full Measure’ can be pre-ordered at the following online stores:

Amazon.com (hardcover and audio CD)

Amazon.co.uk (hardcover, paperback, and audio CD)

Barnes &Noble (hardcover and Nook eBook)

Book Depository (hardcover)

Books-A-Million (hardcover and audio CD)

Click here for a complete list of all T. Jefferson Parker books.

Find T. Jefferson Parker at his website and on Facebook.

Chin Wag At The Slaughterhouse: Interview With Denise Baer

Denise Baer has her first novel out in Net Switch. It is a psychological suspense narrative that explores mental illness. Told in journal form, the novel is about an online relationship that becomes predatory. Denise met me at The Slaughterhouse where we talked about rehabilitation and surveillance.

Tell us about Net Switch.

‘Net Switch’ by Denise Baer – see below for buy links

Net Switch is a dark, psychological novel that touches on themes of loneliness and mental illness. Set in Chicago and Seattle, Net Switch is true to the suspense genre in keeping readers on the edge of their seat with twists and turns.

A woman, Sydney Hayes, is trying to get out of a mental institution. For her to accomplish this she must hand over her prize possession—her journal. There is only one man with the means to save her, so she entrusts him with her personal thoughts and emotions.

Told in journal form, readers watch an insecure woman crumble before their eyes through first person narrative. At the beginning, Sydney finds herself in an internet chat room in hopes of expelling her loneliness. Enchanted by a stranger, she soon finds herself caught up in an affair that swiftly spills over into her real life, and before she knows it, he’s in control. After chiseling away at her independence, he takes her against her will and begins playing with her, situations becoming more sinister than the last one.

Trapped from fear, Sydney seeks solace halfway across the country, in Seattle, obtaining a new identity. She begins to rebuild her confidence, reclaims her life, and befriends a neighbor. Time and exposed secrets bring them close, but the man she is running from begins to show signs that he is near. Sydney must decide how to turn from hunted to hunter, and her journal holds the key to the switch.

Do you think the rehabilitation of mentally ill people may ultimately make them subservient to those same social or familial forces that made them ill?

I believe the human brain is complex. Fortunately, I’ve never had to witness a loved one struggle with mental illness. I think of the brain much like a map of global highways and roads. These roads carry information and messages for emotions, intelligence, personality, etc., and sometimes roads of information are or become damaged. In some cases, beyond repair.

It’s difficult to say whether the mentally ill can be rehabilitated to become submissive toward social or familial forces that made them ill. There are degrees and reasons that affect one’s psyche, and one reason is if mental illness has made an imprint in the gene. In those cases, I don’t think modern medical technologies can repair such an intricate organ, that’s assuming medication isn’t considered rehabilitation. We can mask the problems, and put them on a hiatus using medications, but to rehabilitate them would be a feat that I don’t think modern medicine can achieve.

In some cases, if the personality and individual are open to and can withstand rehabilitation methods, then yes, they can ultimately learn to overcome the reasons that made them ill. Again, this also includes medications to balance the illness with whatever caused it.

Who are your literary influences?

My very first literary influences were William S. Gray and Zerna Sharp. They taught me to read with their Dick and Jane books, so they deserve some credit. I would then have to say William Shakespeare for his timeless stories and wit. “I would challenge you to a battle of wits, but I see you are unarmed!”

Then I have to add William Faulkner. His novel, As I Lay Dying, captured my attention out of many authors of his time. Fifteen different characters tell the story, each chapter the POV of a character. Another literary influence is John Irving for his wild imagination and odd characters. One of my favorite books is A Prayer for Owen Meany. It follows themes of religion, faith, war and friendship. The way he wrote Owen Meany was brilliant in my opinion, and it did not make sense until the end. Now I will end my influences with the one who made me want to become a writer. After reading, The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon, I realized I wanted to move people with words the way he did. “Her voice was pure crystal … so fragile I feared that her words would break if I interrupted them.”

What do you make of the E Book revolution?

It is more like eBook Ebomination. No, I’m kidding. Being a self-published author, I am grateful to have a publishing outlet. Established writers have an audience, a following, so standing out in a crowd is not an issue. EBooks help Indie and self-published authors get their works in as many hands as possible and as quickly as possible.

Like everything else, there are positives and negatives to this revolution. The eBook rave gives Indie and self-published authors the opportunity to publish at low cost. We can price our eBooks low or free. For me, I do not sell my eBook for pennies, or give it away, and I still offer paperback to those who want to hold the pages in their hands.

Unfortunately, publishing in eBook form with the many other unknown authors does not give me very good odds to acquire a following. There is an ongoing debate as to whether or not giving an eBook free will help build an audience. My belief is anyone can download a free eBook, but there is no guarantee it will even be read. At least if someone buys it, they are more likely to read it. Then again, you have the debate regarding how many people will buy an eBook from an unknown author.

The eBook revolution created two types of writers. There are those who read, learn and improve their writing, and take writing seriously. Then there are those who came up with a novel idea, wrote it, and published without a care for creating the best possible novel they could produce. The latter has harmed Indie and self-published authors. On the other hand, I see the same issue with some traditionally published books. Of course, every book has its flaws—I have never read a flawless book.

How do you explore the theme of identity in your writing?

The identity theme is often found in books. Much of my writing deals with the identity of a character through loneliness, the diminishment of hope, or the lack of truly knowing oneself. To avoid giving too much away, Net Switch explores the theme of identity by showing the readers the main character’s loneliness and low self-esteem. She isn’t sure of herself, and therefore, latches on to someone who makes her feel important. It also, as the title hints, switches the character’s identity from lonely to fear, and then fear to survival mode.

In my current novel, Fogged Up Fairy Tale, the main character struggles with identity because she has amnesia. Through discussions with her husband and friends, she learns about who she was and uses her second chance to change.

Graham Greene wrote, ‘There is a splinter of ice in the heart of a writer.’ What do you make of his observation?

I think Graham Greene was a wise man, but a bit harsh when it comes to writers. Graham Greene zeroed in on writers, assuming they are the only ones with “a splinter of ice in the heart.” We all observe other people’s pain whether consciously or subconsciously. Built within us is a need to watch tragedies play out. It’s human nature. Every day of our lives, we examine scenes of struggle and deprivation, anguish and loss. We participate in these scenes by collecting information regarding setting, people’s reactions to situations and our own reactions.

Life is the ultimate gift, and writers use that gift by showing the world just how cynical, horrific, and compassionate humans are by combining life events and imagination. These moments are treasures in a writer’s life. It’s as if we put our pain and others in a vault, and when the writing opportunity comes along, we dig into our vaults. Writers must live to be able to write.

Do you think we live in an age of surveillance?

Definitely. Computers. Phones. Technology is a welcoming present and future, and a kiss good-bye to privacy. There are endless reasons why the NSA, Stasi, hackers, etc. need to tap into our private lives: terrorism, child pornography, and national security. Unfortunately, we give away enough about our lives that everyone watches us.

The generations who grew up with technology, grew up with the idea to get noticed, and in some ways, this has caught on with older generations. It doesn’t matter if you are noticed in a positive or negative way, as long as you get your 15 minutes of fame. I believe our conduct on the internet and phones has raised the stakes in surveillance. There is bullying, people videotaping their suicides, Facebook warning statuses, and everyday threats.

We no longer live in a private society where family secrets remain at home and not discussed. Now everything is discussed. Everywhere. If you don’t like what your sister said to you, you let her know—on Facebook—where everyone else can see it. Why? In my opinion, it makes people visible. We make it easy for governments to investigate whom we talk to, our friends and family, where we work, and how much we make. As long as technology is around and continues to grow, either government or society will always scrutinize us.

Do you think this is an extension of the longer history of voyeurism?

It’s a good question, Richard, and an interesting connection. I admit I hadn’t thought about voyeurism and surveillance. Then again, all of your questions have made me think, so thank you for that. Without looking too deep into the matter, I’d have to say it is not an extension. Voyeurism mainly has to do with sex, and the voyeur doesn’t necessarily relate to the person they’re watching.

Surveillance has to do more with safety, or wanting to be seen. From what I know about voyeurism, it isn’t about safety, and it mostly involves not being seen.

What else is on the cards for you this year?

Aside from writing, I finished building my author website, and my press site, Baer Books Press. I created my own imprint with the hopes of publishing other authors and I’m offering creative services. There are plenty of imprints, small press, publishing companies out there, but I figure I can’t succeed or crash and burn without trying.

As for writing, I’m revising my women’s fiction / chick lit novel, Fogged Up Fairy Tale, scheduled for publication in Summer 2014. I’m also working on a book of short stories created from photographs, Snapshot Stories, scheduled for publication later this year.

What advice would you give to your younger self who just started writing?

Many new authors become tangled up with the writing rules, and spend a lot of time reading How To books. I happened to have done the same when I first started, minus the How To books.

I would tell my younger self that there’s nothing wrong with learning the rules, or dabbling in books that tell you how to write, but there comes a time to let go. You must stop obsessing over rules and editing, and just write. Read and Write. Those two things will take you far. Every writer is different, they have their own voice and style, but you must read and write to find out your own voice and style. Reading is the best teacher, and writing, the best way to find your weaknesses and strengths. Writing is a constant work in progress. Lastly, I’d tell my young self to write from the heart. Readers can always detect when a writer’s heart isn’t into it.

Denise thank you for a perceptive and informative interview.

Links:

‘Net Switch’ at Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk

‘Sipping a Mix of Verse’ at Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk

Denise Baer’s Amazon Page

Author website

Baer Books Press

Skipping Stone Memories (personal blog)

Quick Fire At The Slaughterhouse: Interview With Keith Nixon

Keith Nixon’s debut novel, The Fix, dealt with the events surrounding investment banker Josh Dedman who is fired when millions go missing from the bank. He has a new novella out, Dream Land. It’s the first of a series. Keith met me at The Slaughterhouse where we talked about his new release and the themes it shares with The Fix.

[image error] Tell us about Dream Land.

Dream Land is the first in series of novellas that will be published by Caffeine Nights every 6-8 weeks. They follow one of the characters from my debut novel, The Fix – Konstantin and act as some back story.

In Dream Land we meet Konstantin as he steps out of a car, fresh out of the Lubyanka. He’s been thrown out of his country and his employer, the KGB and arrived in Margate of all places. Dream Land covers his first 48 hours of freedom, how anD why he becomes a tramp. Trouble follows Konstantin, whether he likes it or not.

Does it have any other themes in common with The Fix?

Yes, it’s punchy and gritty in style for one, answers a few questions about Konstantin but equally raises more. Otherwise it’s a bit of a departure from The Fix, there’s less of the black humour and very little swearing.

Tell us about the forthcoming novellas.

There are a further five novellas, they follow on from Dream Land in chronological order (but can be read as stand alones). They introduce a couple of new characters and show Konstantin’s developing life in Margate – this is all preparation for a future (already written) novel.

In the second novella, Plastic Fantastic, Fidelity Brown, a dominatrix, arrives on the scene. She has a problem with a local loan shark and believes Konstantin can help her. Even though he’s reluctant, he can’t help but get involved. Fidelity is then tied into events in the next two novellas. In number 5 she gets a story to herself and the final episode is Christmas themed.

What else is on the cards for you this year?

In terms of publication, besides the novellas I will have a historical fiction novel out by May. It’s the first in a series about a largely forgotten man – Caradoc, Britains first great General and Boudica’s inspiration. He fought tooth and nail against the Roams when they invaded Britain in AD43.

I’m writing another novel, a police procedural this time.

Keith thank you for an informative and tight interview.

Links:

“Dream Land” at Amazon US and UK

“The Fix” at Amazon US and UK

Find Keith Nixon at his blog, Amazon author page, Twitter @knntom, and Facebook

Chin Wag At The Slaughterhouse: Bill “AJ” Hayes Remembered

I was honoured to know Bill, and spend a week with him in the late summer of 2012 in the UK. Bill wrote the most economical stories, full of wry humour, and passion, full of poetry and lacking any spare meat. He was an immense supporter of writers, an unerringly generous man. This was balanced by his modesty about his own writing. Bill was arguably the best read man I ever met. He wrote beautiful and honed verse. He also told me once he wanted to be known as writer’s writer, and I think he achieved that aim. In 2010 Bill met me at The Slaughterhouse, where we talked about his experience riding AMA class C and Southern literature.

You’ve ridden AMA class C. Do you find any correlation between speed and writing?

I think not so much speed as the plain fact that you’re doing something that can get you killed. On one mile dirt tracks for example you have to have to hit as least 140 miles an hour on the straightway to be competitive. There’s no room for mistakes at that speed. I’ve had close friends who made the smallest error in judgment and died. I was lucky. I got off with my knees intact and only six or so broken bones and innumerable concussions. What that pressure breeds in the competitors — the only way to handle it really — is laughter. I have yet to meet a successful racer who didn’t have a graveyard sense of humor. When I broke my right heel three times at three different races in a row my nickname became Thunder Hoof. It’s that same sort of doomsday laughter that I try to carry into my writing.

In ‘Hamlet’ the hero is haunted by his father’s ghost and embarks on a course of revenge for his death. Do you think when a father dies he ceases to exist?

Since I have had four major influences in my life, none of whom were my parents, I couldn’t answer to whether or not fathers live on after death. I do know that my grandfather, who raised me the first seven years of my life, does. I hope I’ll live in the memories of my daughter and granddaughter. One thing that hampers my opinion on that question is the hole I have in my memory from age eight to age twelve or thirteen. No memory of that time at all. Except for my dog, Chief and my cousin Lynne. As far as I know I was on my own raising myself during that period. I guess it was bad times but I’ve never asked anyone what went on back then because a long time ago I decided that I didn’t want to know. It’s not that big a deal. I don’t miss the information. I lived a life full of a lot of bad things and good things and I’m pretty happy I turned out the way I did.

If the question was is my dad is in heaven or not, I’d counter with Isn’t that where all war heroes go?

Aldous Huxley named his book ‘The Doors Of Perception’ after a line from William Blake’s poem ‘The Marriage Of Heaven and Hell’, where he writes ‘If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite’. To what extent have altered states of reality influenced you and changed your life?

Blake’s poem sought God in extraordinary visions of ordinary things. Huxley’s book sought God in mescaline and the shadow and substance of the root systems of a plant. Both authors generated Hunter S. Thompson’s, Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas, which did not seek God at all but revealed the true engine behind both of the other books: We’re all gonna die!

That particular thunderbolt hits us all pretty early on and comes right out of the blue. Bwanggggg! (Louis CK’s monologue about telling his five-year-old that the sun is someday going to go nova is a great example of that revelation.) It wasn’t any different for me. I forget just when and where it happened that I realized that everybody and everything I knew, myself included, was going to, well, Fucking Die! That piece of news hit me pretty hard. Especially the Me Too part. That launched me into my own recapitulation of the immortal journeys of Blake, Huxley and Hunter Thompson.

Blake entered my life in the form of the Foursquare Gospel Church Of The Lord God Triumphant in El Cajon California. It helped that both my parents discovered religion at the same time I was desperately seeking protection from the Reaper. When they took me to church and I saw all those people praising Jesus, rolling on the floor, talking in tongues and yelling about Life Everlasting, I knew I’d found the answer. For a whole two years of perfect attendance medals I held that opinion. Then my Sunday school teacher got killed on a church mission to Africa and all the pastor could say was it was God’s will that his favorites join him sooner than most of the rest of us. What that translates to in kid speak is, “God likes death.” Because of my perfect attendance record, I was obviously one of his favorites so I was outta there.

Huxley’s vision came in the form of a buddy carrying a copy of “Doors” and a pillbox full of synthetic cactus buds (and later most every other kind of inner, outer, upper, downer, spinner, crosstop or blue heaven available). I got my lenses polished peering minutely at the same vegetative universes as the Great Man had. Wasn’t enough though. Lurking at the bottom of every grassy civilization I stared at was the dirt from which it sprang and the decay to which it would return — in other words, The Man With The Scythe still ruled. Let me tell ya, I was one morose teenager.

Hunter S. Thompson came kicking his way into my existence and philosophy with a bottle of Wild Turkey in one hand and a fistfull of methamphetamine sulphate in the other. And that drunken, loaded, projectile vomiting, wreckage of a man showed me the way, the light and the means to finally lay the skull faced piece of shit chasing me to a full and total rest. I just stayed loaded. The booze put the threat at bay and the speed gave me a fairly optimistic outlook no matter what the situation. Blackouts covered the rest. It worked great for twenty-five years. Then I quit.

Don’t ask me why I quit. I just did. No great revelations. No sky-parting visions. No worries about dying alone. Nothing. Just a Doctor I liked telling me. “AJ, you gotta quit.” And me saying, “Okay, Doc.” And doing it. It’s been twenty years now and I think the Reaper’s lost some ground on me. At least he’s running a little slower and I just might have gained a step or two on him. Makes things a bit quieter in my head. I got no moral for you here. No great answers to eternal questions. Nothing you can take to your spiritual bank. I guess it happens that way, sometimes. At least that’s the way it happened for me.

So, concluding the longest answer to a yes or no question ever written, I’ll say altered states have affected or changed my life very little but have changed the different aspects of that same life a whole lot. I got lucky with the people who love me and whom I love. For the most part they’re — for some reason I cannot fathom –still here and still love me. As far as all the chemically enlightened verities I discovered? The beat, beat, beat of whiskey powered philosophy? Sidetracks man, just sidetracks. I guess I echo the sentiments of that other great philosopher, Fox Mulder, who said, The Truth Is Out There . . . it’s just not There.

I’ll keep looking.

William Faulkner said that the South had the best writers because it lost the Civil War. Do you think this is true and to what extent does the polarisation between South and North still affect cultural perceptions in the US?

First off, as much as I admire William Faulkner — and that is a whole lot — the pure fact of the matter is the Confederacy did not lose The War Of Northern Aggression. We’uns just got too broke to pursue the course of victory to its fullest extent. The North prosecuted the Great Disagreement in the same way it would later combat the former Soviet Union — Them Damn Rooskies, as we who speak the true mother tongue call that particular foe — it relieved them ole comm’nest boys of their wallets. No glorious bugles a’blowin victory there either. It’uz just another Yankee slickity trick.

The difference between South and North might be expressed best in two lines of John Greenleaf Whittier’s poem, Barbara Frietchie. The poem concerns General Thomas Jonathan (Stonewall) Jackson’s passage through the conquered Union town of Frederik, Maryland and his conduct concerning an old woman who is waving the flag of the United States — that had just been blasted off it’s pole by the gunfire of a passing rank of Confederate troops — from her upstairs window. Jackson arrives as his troops prepare to fire again. This time to blast the old woman and her flag to smithereens. She leans out her window and says:

“Shoot, if you must, this old gray head,

But spare your country’s flag,” she said.”

Jackson considers her words and addresses his troops:

“Who touches a hair of yon gray head

Dies like a dog! March on!” he said.”

Whittier, an abolitionist New England poet, thought he was writing a tribute to the courage of the old woman and her love of country in the face of an enemy and indeed she was. But, the truer statement here, as written in the second couplet, is a larger testament to the courage, conscience and gallantry of Stonewall Jackson.

Grant or Sherman would have fired immediately.

The first colonies in the New World were established in the southern portion of this country because the weather there was more favourable to the agrarian society the founders had envisioned. Roanoke, Jamestown and other fledgling colonies pre-dated the northern settlements by twenty years and were firmly in action by the time the second Plymouth Colony was established in 1620 in the North (the earlier Plymouth settlement had been abandoned after only a year for various reasons.) Time of settlement though is not that important in the differences between the North and South; nor were the highly different climates. The difference was stamped on North and South from the jump by the makeup of their populations.

The Northern colonies were comprised of English religious zealots and some English Army soldiers, a few English aristocrats and of course a lot of “indentured servants” (oh so different from slaves down south, now weren’t they?). As far as the Puritans were concerned the New Land was to be an earthly paradise for the followers of their severe faith. Mostly this lead to branding, imprisonment in stocks and making unsuppressed feminists wear a large scarlet letter A affixed to their clothing, indicating to others of the town that they should: Beware! Here is a woman who thinks for herself. Run away, run away! That particular punishment was a lot better than the other option: Burning them as witches. Other members of the Northern communities, in order to escape the rather Gothic governmental approach to anything resembling, well, fun, became sea captains and set out on long, long ocean voyages to hunt whales and practice the real money maker of occupations: running slaves down to the south.

The ice and snow of the northern winters did not lend themselves to a storytelling or myth making culture either. Unless your cup of tea consisted of biblical tales (highly edited by the Puritans to not include anything close to resembling sex or saloons or dysfunctional families of gods drinking themselves silly on top of a high mountain). It was just the nature of those northern bluenoses to pitch (as my granma used to say) a hissy fit and jump in the middle of it at the slightest hint that folks somewhere might be even thinking about enjoying themselves. Lately, this trend seems to have re-surfaced.

Down South, population demographics were an uncontrolled riot. I think the expression we use today is a Hot Mess. English aristocrats, English commoners, Irish, Scotch-Irish, the ubiquitous indentured servants, some Hispanics off Galleons floating around the Caribbean, a few Voyageurs from out west floating around in their canoes, Creole Pirates and slowly growing under it all, the jet black gumbo of slavery was bringing the lore and myth of Africa (and the Caribbean) to the place. All of these groups had stories and they were not afraid to tell them loudly and openly (Maybe not so loudly for the slaves right then, but they were whispered in the holds of the Blackbird ships and around the fires of the quarters and the plantations and would soon be known to every white baby who had a black mammy telling him or her bedtime tales . . . so much so, that the people of the southern states today would swear that the stories have always been there.) And that, best beloved, was how the tradition of storytelling came to the New World — the Southern part that is. (All of this is deliberately ignoring the other obvious contributor to the southern writing tradition — the music that arrived with the settlers. That’s a whole ‘nother story.)

If you are trying to find a definition of just what Southern Writing is by researching it, you’re going to come up with a lot of tired ass descriptions of Form. “Strong sense of place. Odd or unusual characters. Poverty and pride. An underlying sense of guilt about the defining fatal flaw, slavery.” All of which, of course, are critical to the lexicon but do not capture the heart of the literature. Most all attempts to categorize the form crash on the reefs of “I might not be able to define it, but I know it when I see it.” I think there is another engine driving the art: wisdom.

One of my favorite writers, Robert Anson Heinlein, defined wisdom this way: Primary man sees the world and rages against it. Secondary man sees the world, sees the way it works and rages against it. Tertiary man sees the world, sees the way it works, understands why it works that way and does something about it. (I’m quoting from memory here and that is not the exact wording but I think I captured the gist of it.) Southern writers are of the tertiary persuasion,. Northerners are not. In an admittedly flawed attempt to explain what comprises Southern writers, and by default, the South in general I will cite an example from the Civil Rights movement of the early Sixties.

One day in Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus because — as northern writers would have you believe — she had had a long day and was too tired to give up her seat. If you are a Northern Writer you bought that reason completely and immediately started to raise money for Freedom Riders and busses and all the other accoutrements of A Noble Cause. Southern Writers knew better. They knew Rosa Parks was not physically exhausted. We knew another kind of tired was involved. A few years later Rosa Parks said: “People always say that I didn’t give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn’t true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.”

That’s a stiff-necked rebel soul talking. A rebel who knows who they are and where they’re from and how they got there. A rebel soul who, with their feet firmly stuck in the red clay of their native land and with a thousand voices from their treasured past filling their ears, says: That’s enough. Look deep into the heart of the next novel you read and if you find a Hero Journey — what Campbell called the Wonderful Song Of The Soul’s High Adventure — you’ve just read a Southern Writer.

So, darlings — as Jimmy Callaway says — thereby hangs the reason why Southern writers seem for the most part to be better at it than Northern writers. We were brought up with stories talking in our ears from birth. The poor Northern boys are forced to learn it from school or reading other writers works. I mean it’s hard to do, but it’s not impossible, to learn the art of storytelling without my Grampa sitting on the hearth of the stone fireplace teaching you to read, at age four, from comic books. You probably don’t need my Uncle Bird Duck scaring the pants of you telling you tales of the fearsome critters and goblins and wood sprites who live in the woods you’re walking through. Or Tillie Butts, your mammy, softly sending you to sleep on the wings of stories about villages and heroes and firelight holding back the dark jungle and hearing creation stories from people whose ancestors were there when it all began. Yeah, I appreciate how hard it is to get your art started without all that in your head. But keep trying. Some of you are getting . . . pretty darn okay.

*In fact Roy Blount Jr. has started a little fund to which all us Southeren Boys are going to contribute and send North. You know, a little sumptin’ to keep yaw’ll encouraged. Maybe buy yourselves an RC Cola and a Moon Pie, you know?

Do you think Oedipus was wise to crack the Sphinx’s riddle?

Was it wise? All wisdom is hindsight. When you’re in the middle of a jackpot you can’t take the long view. It’s only later that the carrion crows get to hootnanney about the “wisdom” of what you did. Probably the ultimate version of that question, at least in our iteration of civilization, would be: Was it wise for Jehovah to create Eve? The answer to that question is the same. It depends on your point of view. Let’s hear from the cast.

The Girls.

The Sphinx: Damn right it was a bad decision. It made me commit suicide.

Jocasta: Bet your ass it was stupid. Made me hang myself.

Antigone: You kiddin’ me? I got to spend the rest of my life taking care of a blind old man. In a fucking cave yet!

The Boys.

Laius: Beats me, but then, I’m dead.

Oedipus: Oh the tragedy, the tragedy. At least I atoned for my sins. I decided that suffering was superior to suicide and went for that tired old eye gouging trick. Even if none of it was my fault, I think the punishment fit my slight lapse in judgement. Learn from this O My Children.

Final Word.

Antigone: Fuck you, you asshole! If you’d of asked me if suicide was more appropriate, I’d of handed you the rope and tied the knot myself.

(Little did Antigone know that Sophocles had even worse plans for her. Buried alive in a stone coffin was the first. She slipped that business by employing the tried and true solution to which all the Oedipal ladies eventually resort — yep, she strung herself up. Can I have a rim shot please.)

If you look at the progression of the Oedipus saga the theme is not particularly concerned with wisdom. The story is a compilation of cause and result cautionary tales. If this hadn’t happened then that would not have occurred. It’s one of the myths that seem to me to be more of a fable. Of course elements of true myth appear in the tale, like the Green Man aspect of Laius. The King was corrupt so the land was dying. The Sphinx was there to keep the curse going until the King was slain. I suspect the way back original story was concerned with Laius and didn’t really care whether he was killed or killed himself. The land must be healed with the blood of the king. In the end, that demand was pretty well satisfied.

Joseph Campbell had another, kinder view. In Hero With A Thousand Faces he says: “The latest incarnation of Oedipus, the continued romance of Beauty and the Beast, stand this afternoon on the corner of 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue, waiting for the traffic light to change.”

Personally, Joe, I’m not buying the whole romance angle. Especially in light of the faithful, loving wives who bit the dust during the course of the story. All because of the hot temper of a spoiled rich kid.

I’d better stop now. I think Antigone has gone to get her shotgun.

Robert Penn Warren is a Southern author who won the Pulitzer Prize for both poetry and fiction with his novel ‘All The King’s Men’, whose central character Willie Stark is based on the radical populist governor of Louisiana, Huey Long. Why do you think Robert Penn Warren is not more widely read these days and who for you are the leading Southern authors?

Probably the reason that RPN is not widely read today is that Huey Long was a charismatic, flamboyant, contradictory character who captured the popular imagination. The rest of RPN’s works, mostly scholarly volumes on race and bigotry which (although they feature such other charismatic men as Malcolm X) are not written in the unbridled style of All The Kings Men. The novel was made into an Academy Award movie and gained an even larger readership because of that. Warren’s later work, however, did not excite the imagination of the reading public further — perhaps because most of them were volumes of poetry and as any poet knows, the audience for poetry is composed of the poet, his mother and a few foolish people such as myself who actually think poetry doesn’t suck. (Well, okay. Maybe a few more than that, but still not enough to raise a nationwide groundswell of attention.)

Another possible factor was the movie, A Lion Is In The Streets, which was in competition with the cinematic version of All The King’s Men. Between the two pictures they pretty well mined out the Lovable Southern Scoundrel In Office as a theme and audiences, both readers and cinematic took out after other tropes, such as the career launch of another fledgling politician (and union leader), Ronald Regan, when he made the deathless epic, Bedtime For Bonzo, in which the flamboyant scoundrel was a monkey. Some say the central characters in the other two movies were also monkeys — but that’s another answer. I have my hopes that someday Bill Clinton will get the LSSIO treatment, but that probably won’t happen until we get our national sense of humour back– sometime about the year 2055. (Yes, that is when the Mayan calendar predicts it)

To introduce my list, I’m grabbing a page from a very good southern writer, Tom Wolfe, who said a while back that the only meaningful US fiction being written today is genre fiction. Which pissed off The New Yorker, Harvard Review, Atlantic Magazine, The New York Times and every other Academic publication on the face of the planet . . . mainly because Tom was right on the money. I’m not good at the pick ‘em game since I admire all good writers in whatever form they practice their art. But I have a few faves listed. There’s lots more. I mean like LOTS! more.

Tom Wolfe (gotta keep my Virginia homies tight close).

Tom Franklin ( if he had never ever written anything but Poachers he’d still be at the top of the list)

Cormac McCarthy (love to hate him)

Roy Blount Jr. (funniest man alive)

Ace Atkins(dark south)

Daniel Woodrell (pitch black south)

James Lee Burke (Love him hate him, ain’t NObody more Southern)

Horton Foote (Tender Mercies, ’nuff said)

Harper Lee ( Yes, MOCKINGBIRD. And you don’t like it, well just f . . . never mind)

Jimmy Callaway (Yes, I know he ain’t Southern. But I put him on all my lists anyhow)

Richard Dansky (Horror south – Firefly Rain)

Ian Ayris(south London)

Molly Ivers (late great Texas funny lady)

Carolyn Haines (Sarah Booth Delany, Daddy’s Girl Detective)

Charles Washington Carr (best storyteller who ever lived and my grandfather)

About four hundred more names need to be added, but I’ll stop there. The list is long. Life is short. Read fast.

What makes you angry?

A short list of things I do not allow myself to become angry about. There are more but who cares what I’m not angry about?

The economy

People saving “The Ecology” (to which ecological system are you referring?)

Banks and bankers.

Big business

Small business

Lawyers

Democrats

Republicans

Tea Party-ites

China

India

Shri-Lanka

And, for all I know,

Space Nazis on the Moon

These are just a few of the fleas that have been biting the national dog for a long time and will be shaken off naturally when they become too pesky. I’m pretty cool with all the stupid stuff you can’t control. Anger usually just riles you up for days while the other person goes on their happy way undisturbed. Blow ‘em a kiss and drive ‘em crazy, you know.

However.

Hate is an interesting thing. Though it usually inflicts more damage on the hater than the object of the hate and I don’t recommend it to anyone — there are some things out there that deserve that much attention.

Like:

When I see a five-year-old girl with JUICY across the butt of her sweats, I should be required to punch her mother in the face.

When I see four-year-olds in six-inch spike heels and full makeup, false eyelashes included, doing the “sexy dance” routine across a stage I ought to be ordered to horsewhip the crowd; mommies, daddies, grammas, grampas and pedaphiles included. (Yes I do include Howl Ginsberg in that whipping. More on pedaphiles coming up)

The Fuck It, It’s Worth The Price section:

Pedaphiles, child raping priests, pimps who trade in kiddy porn and short eye sex, media whores who tell teenagers “size zero is the new six” and damn them to the madness of anorexia and bulimia, parents who deliberately fuck their kids up in the head because they know that all children are better than we are ( thanks for the quote Louis CK) you cowards who turn little kids into bombs to further your fucked up manias — in fact, all of you genetic defects who harm kids, be warned. You are enemies of the human race because you are messing with it’s children — who are the only hope we have of survival. And we’re coming for you with death (and more than a little bit of torture) in our eyes. Soon.

That’s some of the things on “me little list.” There’s more. Be careful.

You’ve written a lot of poetry. What qualities do you admire in a poet?

Clarity is important. The continental divide in poetry between Classical and Modern occurred about 1944. The period from after the divide to today also marked the rapid rise of college classes mainly concerned with “What the hell is this poem about?” as subject matter. Sometimes the subject matter was simply “What the hell?” It was the first time in history that a poem’s meaning had moved beyond the understanding of the “common man” and had to be taught by full-time instructors with college degrees. The era also spawned one of the most puzzling college degrees of all time, Master Of Fine Arts. Again, “What The hell?”

Purpose ranks high also. If a poem is stuffed clear full of dazzling images, torrential rapids of metaphor, complex contrapuntal rhythms and whole buckets full of clever wordplay but goes nowhere and illuminates nothing of value then it crashes and burns with no effect. The tree fell but nobody was home in the forest.

Transportation of the mind counts. Take me a place I’ve never been even if the poem is concerned with mundane matters. Lift me up through your words. However, please don’t tell you about “your day.” Unless your day was fraught with cosmic insight and infinite purpose it was boring. Though, if you’re Kim Addinesio, then just glugging wine, washing the dishes and cussing about your day would do it for me too.

Brevity is good. Today the short stuff is king. Write short and you will get to be poet laureate of the US. Billy Collins found that out early and cashed in. Poet Laureates make twenty five grand per speaking engagement. Their book sales gross maybe six or eight thousand.

Have a Beginning, a middle and an end. Please. They don’t have to be in that order but they should be in the poem.

Mostly I admire poets who take me deep into their dream, who make me come out of their work not knowing whether I’ve been under the spell of their words for seconds, minutes or hours. I like poets who can put a word or a phrase or a line or a stanza in my head forever. It’s simple really. I want to be fucking AMAZED!

You’re up.

Many authors in the US have questioned American identity. What to you constitutes being an American?

I’m the worst guy in the world to define what an American is. All I have to go by is me. I am a citizen of the United States Of America. Born here. So by, classical and legal definition, I’m one. The trouble starts when I try to define me. And I have to do the defining because I’ve tried all my life to not allow anyone but myself to make that definition. Yeah, I’m political. But I change those politics every fifteen minutes depending on what “those sonsabitches” are saying right now. Yeah, I was a soldier and like all soldiers understand what the fourth verse of the Star Spangled banner is talking about when it says “ thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand between their loved home and the war’s desolation!” But I also know how wrong military action can get. Yeah, I believe that rule of law in open court is the strongest quality of this nation. And you bet your boots I want to string up immediately those who would cause deadly harm to innocents with or without benefit of a judge and jury. I quit seeing color of your skin as a definition of you a long time ago because it’s a waste of time. I want the Bracero program back in California so decent people who want to work their way into US citizenship can do so. I understand why those sea containers full of dead Asian women and men and children they find on the San Francisco docks far too frequently exist and the frozen bodies up in the mountains to the east of San Diego just Norte of the border in the California snow. They exist because folks out in the world believe in something that a lot of us no longer believe in: The Promise of the American Dream. They believe it enough to risk everything for it. I believe some of us have forgotten what it means to be American — and the some of us I mean might surprise you. Guess I’d have to simply say Americans are generally confused and sometimes fucked up and some times really fucked up and sometimes fucked up beyond all recognition, but we’re workin’ on it. We’re tryin’. That’s the only definition that’s ever really worked for me: We’re tryin’ — hard.

If you were to write a Southern novel, what would you write it about?

A friend gave me a book by Pete Hamill called Forever. It’s about an Irishman who is given a boon/curse. The boon is he gets to live forever. The curse is the stipulation that if he leaves the island of Manhattan he’ll die. The story begins following the protagonist in pre-revolutionary New York and finishes in the present day. In between lies one of the most compelling first person histories of a place ever told. (It also has one of the most shitty, deadline-coming-down-let’s-get-this-damn-thing-finished ending ever. Read it anyhow.) It’s an immense work adorned with intricate detail and absolute historical accuracy.

That ain’t what I’d write.

There’s a movie called Sin Nombre that tells the story of three people — a boy, a girl and a bad guy — as they ride the tops of boxcars along with a hundred or so others trying to make it to the States from San Salvador. Romeo and Juliet stuff right down to a similar ending, except one of them makes it to the golden land of a Stateside Wal-Mart parking lot just outside of El Paso, Texas.

More like it.

The territorial capitol of Arizona back in the days following the Civil War was in Prescott, a tiny town buried in the mountains in the central part of the state. The territorial government selected this hard to get to site because they didn’t want anything to do with the larger cities of Phoenix or Tucson to the south. The reason they avoided the southern part of the territory was that it was practically overrun by a couple of Confederate armies who had no intention of being reconstructed along with the rest of the South. Indeed, the generals of these armies had a plan to re-launch the Civil War and attack from the west. A plan that might have worked. For various reasons that rebel plan never came to fruition and the armies dispersed. Most of the soldiers and their officers returned to their homes in the South and were lost to history. A few went south to Mexico and over the years, blended in with the native population of that nation. To this day you’ll find Mexicanos with red hair or blonde hair and family names like O’Reilly or Carr in certain parts of the country.

Perfect.

If I had the time to research the Confederate escape to Mexico and how they all turned out after they got there, I might have the start of the Southern Novel I’d think about writing. Maybe follow a descendant of one of the families on a journey from deep in Mexico on a mission to enter the US illegally seeking his perception of the American Dream. You could take him through Mexico over the border into Arizona and a new kind of slavery. Hm, maybe the kid could have his great granddaddy’s sabre. Maybe through family legends he would have a vague idea of his family’s history. Maybe he could trace the story of Grandpa’s sword. Maybe he could rise to political prominence. Maybe he could be the first Hispanic president. That would make a great story. Maybe in his journey you could find a new way to view the South and its history. Maybe. Maybe. Maybe . . .

Damn it, Richard. You got me thinking. You’re pretty good at that.

Thank you AJ for a revealing and sincere interview.

[image error] A few of Bill “AJ” Hayes’ best:

http://a-twist-of-noir.blogspot.co.uk/2010/12/twist-of-noir-645-aj-hayes.html

http://a-twist-of-noir.blogspot.co.uk/2010/03/twist-of-noir-391-aj-hayes.html

https://tknc.wordpress.com/tag/aj-hayes/

http://www.close2thebone.co.uk/wp/?p=753

http://a-twist-of-noir.blogspot.co.uk/2010/10/twist-of-noir-599-aj-hayes.html

http://a-twist-of-noir.blogspot.co.uk/2010/08/twist-of-noir-553-aj-hayes.html

http://a-twist-of-noir.blogspot.co.uk/2010/08/twist-of-noir-543-aj-hayes.html

http://muckandmuse.wordpress.com/2011/04/01/lost-light-by-aj-hayes/

Quick Fire At The Slaughterhouse: Interview With Chris Allinotte

Chris Allinotte lives and works in Winnipeg. Many of his stories explore themes of isolation and fear of the unknown. He also hosts the yearly Days of Madness at his site The Leaky Pencil, and he has Ten Days of Madness up This Year. Chris met me at The Slaughterhouse, where we talked about the pharmaceutical approach to madness and his plans for the event’s future.

How did the idea for Days of Madness originate and how have you seen the publication evolve?

Originally, back in the winter of 2011, I had seen and participated in a few online story festivals, most recently at this point, Erin Cole’s 13 days of Halloween; and I loved the format. It was a great way to be exposed to new writers, and the comments sections came alive with positive, friendly conversation.

So, I decided to “me too” the idea and, in a joking sort of way, decided that I would do “Madness in March” as a counterpoint to the “March Madness” basketball tournament. In this respect, the word “madness” came before the concept. As I explored and planned the event, though, I realized that some of the most terrifying, stick-with-the-reader stories I’ve read, are those that have stayed within the realms of the possible. As much as I love, and will always love, “monster stories” – it’s never failed to chill me when you look at history and discover the absolute depths of depravity that humans can get up to.

From there, I put out the call, and got eight stories that were right for the theme, and I launched it. To my great delight, the response was everything I hoped for. When it was all over, I decided to collect all the stories into a proper ebook that I would provide to the authors, as I couldn’t pay them, but figured everyone should receive at least a little something for their efforts.

The following year was much the same as the first, but I knew a little more from having been through it once, and was better able to shape my call for submissions to make sure I got the kind of stories I was looking for.

Last year, I started to have fun with the concept and decided to see what would happen if I just asked for a bunch of much shorter stories on the theme – and that produced some fun results.

This year, we’re back to longer stories, though, which is where I think this concept is best served. Again, I’m surprised by the different takes that everyone has produced on the theme – and that is really the fun for me – setting out the box of LEGO, and seeing what everyone builds.

Every year, I try to grow the event a little more, and make it a little better, and this time around, I was very fortunate to have illustrator Niall Parkinson approach me as a potential participant. Niall agreed to create a new drawing for each and every story in the event – adding another layer of depth to the presentation.

Most of the authors are folks I’ve read a lot of, and really liked – so getting them all together in one place is a real coup. It’s going to be a good year.

What do you make of Nietzsche’s observation that ‘man is the unnatural animal?’

While I first must admit to not being well read on Nietzsche, he may have been on to something.

Humans are the only species that seems to suffer with psychological problems. In a way, it’s as if our deeper intellect merely presents more places for our wandering thoughts to go astray. What’s more, in some of these shadowy crevasses of imagination, humans have found the most horrific uses for the creative impulses. To quote George Carlin, “A rat will do a lot of gross things; but it will not fuck a dead rat. It wouldn’t even occur to it.”

What do you make of the pharmaceutical approach to madness in the modern age?

Well, getting back to your question about the logic behind rehabilitating people back into the society that caused their challenges in the first place – I think we have to deal with the civilization we’ve got, rather than the one we’d like. If I’ve learned anything in almost forty years, it’s that the world doesn’t care about “should be”.

But there’s more to it than that. As I understand (and I certainly could be better educated about this), many times the core problem behind “madness” is chemical imbalance. So, you fight chemical with chemical. If it helps a person get out of bed, and participate in the world, without being dragged down into the depths of their own internal dialogue, then I am totally supportive of it.

Does everyone with an issue require meds? No.

Do some people feel the need to medicate when analysis and self discovery may prove a better, longer solution? Probably.

Am I the one to decide where that line is? No goddamned way.

What future madness do you have planned?

Future madness? Well, based on how the event goes this year, I’d love to be doing a fifth edition next year. Already I’ve got ideas to go even further with the concept.

Also – I’d like to finish writing something really in depth – where I can really get into the characters and have the room to get subtle here and there. I refuse to say (rhymes with “hovel”) because every time I’ve said that in the past it’s thrown up a giant brick wall in my way. Might not be that crazy all things considered, but given that I’ve yet to do it – it’s a mental reach for sure.

Chris thank you for a perceptive and informative interview.

Links:

Days of Madness: http://chrisallinotte.blogspot.com

Past Days of Madness editions: https://www.smashwords.com/books/byseries/12447

My other books: http://www.amazon.com/Chris-Allinotte/e/B004MF3ZM4/ref=ntt_athr_dp_pel_1

Chin Wag At The Slaughterhouse: Interview With Castle Freeman, Jr.

Castle Freeman is the award-winning author of six novels. Go With Me is based on one of the King Arthur Tales of Thomas Malory. All That I Have is about the middle-aged Sherriff of a rural Vermont town. Freeman’s novels are set in Vermont and typically focus on local lives. Most of Freeman’s writing is about life in rural New England. Castle met me at The Slaughterhouse where we talked about gun laws and the relevance of mythology.

How did Thomas Malory inspire your great novel Go With Me?

I have always loved Malory’s King Arthur tales, and in particular the Tale of Sir Gareth, because it seems to me to have a humor, an irony, that the other tales lack. The similar tales of Lancelot, Gawain, Galahad, etc., etc., are mainly straightforward accounts of heroic chivalry. The knight vanquishes the bad guys and delivers the damsel from her distress: curtain falls. In Sir Gareth, the heroic knight is subject not only to the threats of the various adversaries he must overcome, but also to the scorn and abuse of the very lady he is trying to serve, who has zero gratitude for his help, zero admiration for his feats of arms on her behalf, and zero respect for what she takes to be his low birth. My project was initially to cast that witty situation into an engaging, artful story set in the present in rural New England.

Having done that, however, I found the finished product somehow thin or incomplete—hence the invention of the circle of men sitting around the sawmill, drinking beer, reminiscing, and commenting on the simultaneously developing Maloryesque adventure, and on much else. They gave me a whole new dimension of my story to elaborate and exploit; indeed, the chair factory scenes wound up being closer to the feeling I wanted the whole book to have than did the original inspiration from Malory. In my experience, stories often end up being about something other than what you originally intended for them—a freedom and unpredictability that is a source of surprise and delight for me.

Vermont has the loosest gun laws in the US, yet is a state with low crime levels, it is also an agricultural state in which hunting is popular. What are your views on US gun laws as they apply to Vermont?

The bitterly vexed question of gun ownership and gun crime in the US today does not invite originality and is, in any case, far above the pay grade of a journeyman fiction writer. Nevertheless, a couple of things should be kept in mind.

Vermont is a low-crime state because it is a low-people state. (For UK comparison, our state’s total population is similar to that of Bristol.)

Vermont has loose gun laws (in fact, it has essentially none) because it is a thinly settled, rural state. The divide in the US over whether and on what terms people should own guns is a divide along an urban-rural line, rather than a divide according to section, income, education, occupation, religion, national origin, race, political culture, etc.

Partly the tradition of gun ownership, here and elsewhere, is related to hunting, which obviously implies use of and familiarity with guns. Hunting is not as prevalent in Vermont as it was a generation ago, but it is still well and widely established here; hence, so is gun ownership.

That so many law-abiding US citizens own guns is not merely a perverse American anachronism: it’s a custom that is rooted deep in US history and culture, for better and for worse, and that is (evidently) sanctioned by the US Constitution. The dilemma for thoughtful Americans is that, notwithstanding the right to bear arms, there are a hell of a lot more arms borne here than there should be for the sake of everyone’s safety. Whether that dilemma can be resolved by law or public policy is the question. Perhaps it can’t be. The guns are here, and they aren’t going to go away.

Who are your literary influences?

I am a paleo-modernist. Therefore, my hero is James Joyce. In the USA, Wm. Faulkner and his great progenitor, Mark Twain. Also the whole spectrum of the classic English poets, right from Anon. to and through Auden, Thomas, Frost—and never forgetting the King James Bible. I could go on and on. And on. It seems to me that reading and really attending to and being moved by any literary effort is, whatever else it may be, an experience, on a par with other crucial experiences in the realms of love, growth, learning, loss, struggle, etc. We are touched, and we are changed, often (mostly) in unaccountable, imperceptible ways. The ambition to serve other readers as we have been served by these authors is not the least of the reasons why we do the work in the first place, is it? (In addition to the big money, of course.)*

* Joke

Tell us about your novel All That I Have.

ATIH is the story of a stressful passage in the life of Lucian Wing, the middle-aged sheriff of a rural Vermont town. Wing is successful in his work because, rather than devote his energy to enforcing and imposing the strict letter of the law, he takes a softer path, using his intimate, lifelong knowledge of the people he serves to help troubles work themselves out. This approach does well enough with the locals, but as the story begins, a group of mysterious criminal Russian emigres has moved into a remote property in the sheriff’s jurisdiction and is raising hell. Sheriff Wing’s zen-like police work will hardly succeed with this crowd. How does he proceed, and what happens?

That’s the story, but more important than the story is the character of Sheriff Wing, the portrait of his community; and certain problems he has in his personal life, including a wandering wife, a self-destructive young protege, an overzealous subordinate, an obstreperous father-in-law, and a sense that the times are passing him by.

I had originally intended in this novel to explore the idea of the witless thief who steals something whose importance, and whose threat to himself, he does not understand. That story, which is still in the book, was to have been the main narrative. The sheriff was a minor character. But then I began to think of telling the story from the sheriff’s point of view, and as a first-person narrative. Right away he kind of began speaking to me, and he and his voice soon took over the book.

Once again, as in GO WITH ME, the story, given time, knows what it needs to do and where it needs to go, almost without the help of the author.

How has Vermont influenced your fiction?

Hmmm. I don’t know if it’s a matter of influence or something bigger, vaguer, and more pervasive. Does the water influence the fish? Vermont, as a setting, a landscape, a community, a place with a particular history and culture (including a particular kind of humor), is the subject of most of what I have written, fiction and nonfiction, over more than forty years. It was to try and convey the feeling of living here, and to do so without too much recourse to straight physical description, that I originally began to write short stories and sketches. That’s my ambition today, as well, or a large part of it.

Maybe I ought to add that I am not a Vermonter. I came here in my twenties. So I have an outsider’s view, and an outsider’s affection.

What do you make of the E Book revolution?

I don’t know: is it a revolution, really? You’re still reading, aren’t you, still taking in the written content in essentially the same way? It’s a revolution, all right, if you’re a traditional book publisher, but for readers, I’m not so sure. That said, I have never read an E book and, so habituated am I to conventional books, I doubt I will ever change. I doubt I will ever have to. Books are going to be around for some time to come, I expect. They aren’t going anywhere. Kind of like guns that way, right? (See above)

Graham Greene famously wrote, ‘There is a splinter of ice in the heart of a writer.’ What do you make of his observation?

It’s a clever line, but I don’t believe it. Where is the splinter of ice in the heart of Shakespeare? (I’m willing to believe there was a splinter of ice in the heart of Graham Greene.)

What advice would you give to yourself as a younger man?

It’s a bit quaint, perhaps, but there is a saying of the Stoic philosopher and Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius that has always meant a lot to me. He said, “Love the art, poor as it may be, which thou hast learned, and be content with it; and pass through the rest of life like one who has intrusted to the gods with his whole soul all that he has, making thyself neither the tyrant nor the slave of any man.”

To this I would add, concerning that poor art: have fun with it.

What are you working on at the moment?

I’m finishing a new novel, hope to be done by spring. I’m also working on stories and essays, including a short biographical essay about the 19th century American historian Francis Parkman.

How relevant do you think mythology is today both to everyday life and literature?

I think mythology is relevant to everyday life and to literature in that it is implicated in both, and in somewhat the same ways. Myth is a way humans have used to understand and be reconciled to their experience. Myth commonly achieves this in very broad and conventionalized terms. Literature (by no means confined to fiction) does the same but on the smaller, less stylized, and more documentary scale of portraying lives lived in real time. Literature is micromyth.

I find I am beginning to sound like a Big Thinker, so I will close with gratitude for my very enjoyable visit to the Slaughterhouse.

Thank you Castle for giving an eloquent and insightful interview.

Links:

‘Go With Me’ at Amazon US and UK

‘All That I Have’ at Amazon US and UK

Read about other Castle Freeman books at his website here.

Review of ‘Go With Me’ in Monocle.com‘s Culture Briefing
Find other reviews at Mostly Fiction and on Castle Freeman Jr’s Books page

 

Chin Wag At The Slaughterhouse: Interview With Luke Rhinehart

Luke Rhinehart is the bestselling author of eight novels. He is most famous for The Dice Man, in which a therapist decides to live his life at the throw of the dice. It is at once a biting satire and a challenge to the concept of order. The narrative itself switches between third and first person perspectives and inhabits the sense of the irrational that is at the core of the story. Rhinehart’s career has eschewed the predictable and bravely tackled the wider body of literature beyond the formulaic. A single book by the author contains multiple genres. While the author’s career is far more expansive than the reading of a single book by him will allow, I highly recommend The Dice Man, since it occupies a unique place in fiction. Luke met me at The Slaughterhouse where we talked about the irrational and the Great American Dream.

Publishing today seems dominated by genre, while your fictions have acted as a seminal counterpoint to that tendency. To what extent do you think shifting genres, and by implication paradigms, is necessary for a novelist?

Of course, getting away from patterns is usually a good thing, so shifting genres, like shifting roles one plays, is often rewarding. However, from the point of view of commercial success as a writer, finding a genre one is successful in and sticking with it, is the way to go. Just as all societies reward people more if they play one consistent role, so too does publishing reward the writer who sticks to one genre. If I had found it natural and enjoyable to continue writing sci-fi adventure stories like LONG VOYAGE BACK, I might have a bit more money in the bank than I do after writing in so many different styles and genres. Or if I had followed up THE DICE MAN with another comic novel about Luke or about dicing, I would have been much more “successful.”

Instead I followed up my long dark comic-philosophical novel THE DICE MAN with a short dramatic historical novel, MATARI. The second book got only praise in reviews but did not sell to the fans of THE DICE MAN. Twenty years later I wrote SEARCH FOR THE DICE MAN, a lighter comic novel about Luke’s son Larry and his dicing, and it has done quite well, although I think it nowheres near as good a novel as MATARI (republished seven years ago as WHITE WIND, BLACK RIDER).

So I don’t think shifting genres is necessary for a novelist, and may even be damaging. Most writers find a style and subject matter and genre that they’re good at and they stick with it. I admire their luck. My own personal preference among my styles is the comic-philosophical fun of THE DICE MAN and WHIM, and the lighter satirical comey of NAKED BEFORE THE WORLD and JESUS INVADES GEORGE. But I’ve happily written five other books that don’t fit into this comic genre.

Looking back on it now, after such a phenomenal success, what do you see as the reasons you took such a divergent path as a novelist?

I don’t have the faintest idea why I do things or have done things. I don’t think humans can ever really find a causal chain to explain human behavior. In THE DICE MAN I don’t have a single sentence about Luke’s father or mother, whether he has siblings, where he went to school–not a thing about his past. And I realize I did this because I don’t think any causal connections I might try to make would have any validity. I majored in, and did graduate work in psychology and it led me to conclude that almost all psychological analysis is illusion. I admire Freud for showing us that unconscious motivations are always at work, but disagree with his theories about how we can discover these unconscious motivations. My “divergent” path as a novelist is the result of . . . . . . . beats me.

Your novel The Book Of Est is a fictional account of Est training and includes mention of Carlos Castaneda’s works. How do you view the training and to what extent do you think it and Castaneda’s work represent attempts to decondition pre-existing social programming?

Well, we’re getting into the heart of things. I like to think that everything I write is an attempt to “decondition pre-existing social programming.” Although I was concerned with the commercial goals of the est program, I nevertheless felt strongly that it was a powerful deconditioning and therefore liberating program. Carlos Castanedas work, at least his two books “A Separate Reality” and “Journal to Ixtlan,” seem to me equally powerful in getting people to question some of their basic attitudes and actions.

I think we can divide books into two classes: the literature of liberation and the literature of litany. The great mass of best sellers have incorporated into them the main values of the society; they work with many people because readers feel comfortable with the assumptions of the author, which are, in fact, the assumptions of the reader and his society. When they finish such a book they feel comfortable.

Other books force readers to question their lives and the values of the main society in which they live. Such books may force readers to question their attitudes towards gays or women or America’s “greatness”, or may question more basic structures like the nature of “selfs”, how we make decisions, or the seriousness of life. Readers who read works of liberation are left uneasy or questioning or excited: other possibilities of living have been opened to them.

There can be great novels in the literature of litany and lousy novels among the literature of liberation, but the two genres should be seen as serving very different purposes.

What are you working on right now?

As I’ve moved from my seventies into my eighties my creative energy has diminished as much as my physical energy. So after three years of doing very little new original work, I am a bit surprised to find that two months ago I began writing a new novel. Ironically, it is based on a character about whom I used to make up stories to my three boys more than fifty years ago.

In style and tone the novel is closest to my novel WHIM. The leading character is a visitor from another universe, who is originally encountered by a wise old geezer rather like Grain-of-Sand in WHIM. FF (the name the geezer’s children give to the beach-ball shaped fish that their dad brings home one day) is all muscle and all brain. FF and two dozen other FFs have arrived on earth not to conquer it, but just to hang out and see what the place is like. NSA becomes suspicious when several of these strange creatures turn up and seem to have miraculous powers of movement and brains and who resist being captured and interrogated. Obviously they are up to no good and may be robots devised by the Chinese or other baddies.

This format of having someone look at our society from outside the world of that society permits me to comment on American civilization in ways I couldn’t do without such an alien being. Whim and Jesus (in my novel JESUS INVADES GEORGE) served a similar function in their stories.

I doubt that I can now write a novel anywhere near as good as WHIM, but I’m enjoying trying. Having low standards is a good way to get writing done; having high standards leads to writing blocks.

How do you view the Great American Dream?

The American dream has evolved over the last three decades into an American nightmare. Success and getting ahead have always been an important part of the American dream but today success and getting ahead are almost exclusively measured in terms of money. Our culture, media and government have all become dominated by powerful corporations and the aims and values of these corporations. By law, corporations are required to put profits for their shareholders over all other considerations, considerations like the welfare of their employees, the effects on the environment of the corporation’s activities, the effects on society in general of their activities. Success is defined exclusively by monetary considerations. And it is these values that the corporate media spreads into our TV sets, computers, schools and households.

Most of the current sicknesses of our society–healthcare, the breakdown of the family, the gross inequalities of wealth and opportunity, the obscene waste, inefficiency, and immorality of our “defense” and spying apparatus–can be attributed directly to this perversion of the American dream to focus exclusively on monetary success. Our health-care system, the most wasteful, corrupt, and inefficient in history, is the most blatant example of a system that in our country, unlike most all other developed nations, is run by businesses for profit and, as a result, is a catastrophic failure. Since the Obamacare continues the reliance on the profit motive in much of its structure it will continue the catastrophe. Think what a different healthcare system might develop if all hospitals were non-profit, with limits on executive compensation, limits on specialists reimbursement, limits on how much a drug might be marked up from its cost. But any limitation on compensation for anyone at anytime goes against the “American dream” of letting everyone get as rich as he or she can.

The American dream used to include concerns for community, the environment, the family, the nation in general. No more. Now it is all about money. And the whole world is suffering as a result.

The Dice Man is your most famous novel. How do you view its success today and to what extent do you think we are governed by the irrational?

The success today of THE DICE MAN is really rather remarkable. It is very rare for a novel to become much more successful 30 years after its initial publication and then hold onto this resurrected success for more than a decade. The book was published in only seven or eight languages back in the early seventies and soon went out of print in all those nations except the UK, Denmark, and Sweden, where it has remained in print now for 43 years. Then, beginning in the early twenty-first century the novel began to be republished by these initial countries and be published for the first time in dozens of other countries . Today the book has been translated into 25 languages and remains in print most everywhere. Late in the first decade of this century the book was selling more copies around the world than at any time ever.

THE DICE MAN has never been a bestseller. It is a cult book, attracting a few very enthusiastic readers, but never appealing to a mass audience. I like it that way.

And as an interesting sidenote, two others of my books which were each published more than 30 years ago have also found an audience as great as upon initial publichation. Three years ago I and two friends republished THE BOOK OF EST as an eBook and paperback. Initially published in 1976 and long out of print, the book has been a very profitable seller now for almost three years. And two years ago Permuted Press republished LONG VOYAGE BACK (first published in1983) as an eBook. For almost six months it was their single most successful eBook. I have no explanation for these late successes of these three of my books.

My guess is that we are pretty much governed totally by the irrational. The human being is so complex, has so many independent variables acting on him or her at any moment, that “reason” will always remain a very minor player in the big league of human behavior. Assuming there is such a thing as reason I feel that even when I behave “rationally,” with purpose and intelligence, I am still governed by the irrational. Sometimes (rather rarely in my case) the multiple irrational forces move me to act in a way that others label rational, and at others in a way that others label foolish or irrational. Although I believe we can never have any certainty about why we do things, I certainly have never found any evidence that human beings are governed by the rational. We may do many clever or reasonable things, but if we think it’s because we are “rational” I think we are sadly mistaken.

Tell us about White Wind, Black Rider.

WHITE WIND, BLACK RIDER was the first novel I published after THE DICE MAN. I wrote it under the influence of Kurosawa’s magnificent film THE SEVEN SAMURAI, Joseph Conrad’s way of telling stories, and the tragedies of Shakespeare. I was consciously writing a tragedy: a story of a good man, Lord Arishi, brought to a tragic end despite his good qualities and the noble qualities of his wife Matari, who has fled his confining court, and the noble qualities of Oboko and Izzi, the two samurai who rescue her in a blizzard and then try to save her from the vengeance of Lord Arishi. Four good people, all acting for good and noble purposes, nevertheless reach a tragic end.

The book was published in the UK in 1975 as MATARI. All of the reviews it received were rave reviews, but the book sold few copies. Although Pocket Book paid me a modest advance to publish a paperback of the book in the U.S., their enthusiasm evaporated and they never published the book. In 1977 Andrew LLoyd Webber’s people approached me about turning it into an opera, but nothing came of it.

I talked earlier about genre and the commercial desirability of sticking with one genre and writing in one of the major genres. WHITE WIND, BLACK RIDER is a tragedy, and although there are sword fights and chases, the book is driven by the relations between the characters, the story of four good people caught in tragic conflict. There is no genre of “tragedies.”

I have published the book myself both as a paperback and an eBook and hope I can draw readers to read it since it is the sort of book that if you read the first 30 pages you’re hooked. Tough, though, to get people to read the first 30 pages.

What do you make of The E Book revolution?

I think the eBook revolution is a great gift to writers. An author can now get his book out into the world for a huge audience for a few hundred dollars. He may not make a lot of money from eBook sales, but his royalty percentage is five to ten times more than what he gets from traditional publishers.

For readers too the eBook is a gift. One can now read and own bestsellers for much less than in print form and buy fine books by lesser-known authors that previously might not even be available–and for half perhaps of a paperback price.

The eBook and print-on-demand publishing make it possible for an author to become his own publisher. He can thus receive royalties of fifty percent or more rather than the ten percent or so from traditional publishers. I recently turned down a publisher’s offer to publish my novels SEARCH FOR THE DICE MAN and WHIM for the first time here in the U.S. I concluded that I wanted to publish the books myself as print-on-demand and eBooks and enjoy the control and high royalty structure that such self-publication permits.

What advice would you give to yourself as a young man?

None. I would give myself no advice to the person I was then. As a young man I was stupid, arrogant, uninformed, unread, immature, egotistical without any justification, and generally a person I blush at when I remember him. Still, I give him no advice. He was what he was and I am what I am. We are both fools, and I see no justification in letting the fool I am today make judgments on the fool I was back then. Much more importantly, I am satisfied with my life and thus would not want the person I was as a young man to be any different than he was since a different him then would mean a different me now.

No regrets. If one embraces the present as I do, one can’t lament anything that happened in the past. One can know one was stupid or cruel or selfish, but wishing one could change things is a waste of effort. It was Nietzsche who in his idea of the eternal recurrence suggested that the healthy man would be happy if he lived the same life over and over through all eternity. I personally might prefer a “spring break” now and then, but his idea is that if we embrace now then we embrace everything that has ever happened. Yes.

Do you think that the self exists?

The ‘self’ is a construct that is more dangerous than useful. I often have a feeling of my ‘self’, and it is pleasant enough. However, always such a feeling separates me from other human beings and from the rest of the universe. I think most human beings’ happiest and most creative moments occur when their feeling of self disappears. Any athlete or writer competing at full throttle loses all sense of self. When he starts imagining his gold trophy or his royalties, he ceases to write.

I have concluded that a human being cannot be separated from the reality that is all around him and in him and is him. There is the cliche question: am I playing with the dog or is the dog playing with me? I think this question could be applied to everything that happens: is the individual ‘doing’ things to the world or is the world doing things to him? One of the most comforting phrases I know comes from a South American shaman: “N’gyam.” It means “nobody home.” There is no central self, there is no soul, there is no “me”. Nobody home. If the Buddha taught anything, he taught work until the self, mara, disappears. He sometimes seems to say that when the little self is gone then the Self arises, but what he means is that when the little self is gone, then all that is left is the All: Buddha’s Self includes the entire universe.

So let’s throw out the concept of self and try to live with a sense not of self, but of flow, emptiness, the interaction of all with all. It’s a nice way to be.

Luke thank you for a great and informative interview.

Links:

The Dice Man

Amazon.com

Amazon.co.uk

Lukerhinehart.com

White Wind, Black Rider

Amazon.com, kindle

Amazon.co.uk, kindle

Lukerhinehart.com, paperback

See the Shop at lukerhinehart.com for all Luke’s books

Chin Wag At The Slaugherhouse: Interview With David Mark

David Mark worked as a journalist before becoming a novelist. He spent many years as crime reporter with The Yorkshire Post. His writing is influenced by the court cases he covered. Dark Winter was his first novel. And he has a new one out, Original Skin, published by Quercus. In it, Detective Sergeant Aector McAvoy makes his second appearance. David met me at The Slaughterhouse where we talked about his new release and the importance of Hull in his fictions.

Tell us about Original Skin.

In essence, it’s a police procedural and a serial killer story but I hope there’s more to it than that. It’s the second outing for Detective Sergeant Aector McAvoy; the shy colossus of Dark Winter. He’s a member of Humberside Police’s Serious and Organised unit, though his part in the downfall of a corrupt but popular officer means that he very much a marked man. In Original Skin, McAvoy comes into possession of an old mobile phone that contains the phone number of a young man who killed himself months before. As he delves deeper into the life of the dead man, McAvoy finds connections between the suicide victim and key decision-makers on the Police Authority and city council. Was it suicide? And is there a link to the sudden escalation in violent crime linked to the drugs trade within the Hull city boundary? McAvoy and the unit’s boss, Trish Pharaoh, are unsure. McAvoy also begins to see a common thread in several seemingly unconnected crimes – all of which seem to point to one dangerous and deadly foe. Somebody is targetting pleasure-seekers. They are searching out the ‘swingers’ willing to leave their doors unlatched and themselves exposed and who are blind to the risks as they seek to satisfy their own needs and the pleasures of strangers. McAvoy must risk his career to save the lives of hedonists whose lifestyle he cannot understand, in a case that could shatter the tranquil life he has built at home.

Do you think that the best detectives have strong criminal shadows?

I think it would be naive to suggest that good detectives need to have criminal impulses. I would hate to imagine that all quality murder detectives were secretly high functioning sociopaths who are secretly battling inner demons. Crime fiction is littered with these types of caricatures, and I love reading about them, but what i try and create in the McAvoy books is a feeling of authenticity. The crimes may be remarkable but I like to imagine that it wouldn’t seem incomprehensible to read about them in the newspapers in the real world. To that end, I try and make McAvoy a believable human being. He’s imbued with the characteristics I admire and which I would hope to find in a real life murder detective. He’s committed, dogged, tenacious and, because he’s like the rest of us, absolutely riddled with self-doubt. He loves his family, doesn’t know if he’s actually any good at what he does, gets himself intro trouble by accident, but tries to ensure that anybody who suffers, gets some measure of justice. He’s basically a good egg who gets dragged into worlds and situations he doesn’t understand. But by the same token, he does, like we all do, understand the compulsion to kill. He just hasn’t given in to it and believes that those who do have somehow let the species down a little. It would be lovely to kill the people who wrong us. But the planet would be empty in a week.

How important is Hull as a location for your fiction?

It’s crucial. It’s really the central character. I admire the novelists who can create a Jack Reacher or a Dirk Pitt or even a Hercule Poirot character who can have tremendous adventures regardless of location but those aren’t the books I feel I could write, which is probably why I’m quite a few quid behind their creators! I have to understand a place before I’m qualified to

turn it into fiction. Hull is the place where I was a journalist for what felt like a very long time, and I understand how the people interact and talk to each other and how certain people on certain streets feel an instant distrust for people on other streets because of some trawling dispute going back 60 years or because they support Kingston Rovers instead of Hull FC. I

could probably acquaint myself with that kind of knowledge about other cities but it just wouldn’t feel comfortable for me. I like the idea of the old Westerns where you have a sheriff keeping a small town safe from trouble. That’s how I see Rebus and Grace, Alan Banks, Frank Elder and Benedict Devlin. Their role is to keep their part of the world safe. For McAvoy, it’s Hull. My only fear is running out of geographically or architecturally interesting settings by later in the series. I guess it’s just a city that speaks to my imagination. Every scene or scenario I can come up with, I can picture happening somewhere in the city. Every new character I create, I put through the filter of whether or not I can picture them having a drink in one of the pubs in the Old Town, and if I can, then that makes them believable and worth writing about. I did read somewhere that the photographer Ansell Adams only knew how to find equivalent scenes for the images in his mind when he was in the landscapes of his youth. When he tried to photograph abroad he felt his images were insipid and contrived. That’s how I feel when I write about somewhere that isn’t Hull. I know this city. I know how it feels. I know it well enough to pick handfuls of it up and throw it at a page and see what sticks. I don’t feel that way about anywhere else.

Are there any particular authors you admire and if so why?

I admire anybody who can call themselves an author in the traditional sense, in that they are given a sum of money by a publisher in order to see their name on a book in a bookshop or library. That is no small achievement! The amount of obstacles one must overcome and the sheer serendipity required to make it happen, sometimes makes it feel nothing short of a miracle to walk into WH Smith’s and see a book you have written staring back at you. People tempted to self-publish on Amazon should only do so after they have utterly exhausted every avenue of living their dream the old-fashioned way – there really is no sensation quite like it. But of those who do make it to the party, there are some whose skills and insights and sheer brilliant leave me both inspired and depressed – and full of self-loathing at not being as good as they are! in the literary world, people like Sebastian Faulks, Pat Barker and Hilary Mantel and Margaret Atwood leave me thoroughly green with envy at their mastery of language and depiction of the human condition. When it comes to tales of swashbuckling chivalry I am a Bernard Cornwell devotee. For satire and fantasy, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman are the first names I search for. But when it comes to crime, the list is endless. Ian Rankin, for the consistent quality and reliability of the work. Reginald Hill and Colin Dexter, for their ability to use language beautifully while telling a damn good yarn. I like the plot structures of Mark Billingham, Mari Hannah and Val McDermid and the atmosphere created by Stav Sherez, Peter May and Steve Mosby. I admire the imagination and scope of Lauren Beukes. Neil Cross is damnably good at everything! Looking at that lot, it’s amazing I dare call myself a writer, really. I’m humbled just to have the same job title as these people.

Graham Greene wrote, ‘There is a splinter of ice on the heart of a writer.’ What do you make of his observation?

It’s a very poetic way of saying that writers (and most artistic types) can be proper grumpy and cynical bastards, but because we have a way with words, we dress it up a little. He’s right though. You have to have something to say before you write a book and that does tend to come from some dissatisfaction with the world or one’s place in it. I think of the place where my creativity comes from as being a tar pit or an inkwell – all full of bile and rage and awareness of how horrible the world can be. But I only tend to channel that when I’m writing or thinking about writing. You can’t live your life that way. My kids don’t want to go on long journeys where I spend the whole time discussing man’s inhumanity or despairing over my inability to solve life’s riddles. They’d rather I made them laugh and then stopped for doughnuts. I think that without the support of my family the inkwell would be my guiding force and I’d treat myself very badly and write the gloomiest and most brutal books imaginable, but i have people who shoot some spears of light through the cloud and somehow i find a way to live in a state of relative balance, though they will probably laugh at me and disagree heartily upon reading that.

What do you make of the E Book revolution?

Evolution is a human compulsion. Everything moves forward. It’s the same with stories. They’ve moved from the campfire to the cave wall, then to to papyrus and parchment. I don’t know anybody who still reads on scrolls but I’m sure when the first book came out people were moaning that scrolls were always good enough for them. I have no problem with people finding new ways to ingest stories. What I do take issue with is the fact that some of the charm seems to be leaving the book world. In the same way that nobody can say in good conscience that they get the same thrill downloading an mp3 from iTunes as they do browsing the vinyl in a record shop, I do hate the idea of people not going into bookshops any more. Nobody can argue with the fact that ebooks are helping more people to think of reading as a major part of their life. I love my Kindle. I love being able to hear about a book one minute and be reading it the next. My gripe is with the lack of quality control in eboks. I’m a great believe that every book on Amazon should have either a ‘sp’ or ‘pp’ sticker beside it. self-published or properly published. I say that because it took me bloody years to get properly published and I had to work and work and work to get here and now people can say they are a top ten bestseller because they’ve stuck out some thriller at 20p and a load of people have snapped it up. Does it mean it’s any good? Has anybody got past the second page? I just get narked at authors being devalued and casual readers being encouraged to buy something because it’s cheap, rather than a properly put together and competently edited professional work.

How have you found Quercus as a publisher?

When Dark Winter was up for grabs I found myself in the surreal and wonderful position of having to choose between several competing publishers who all seemed very keen on making the McAvoy series a big success. Quercus wasn’t the biggest name but they did offer something that nobody else did, and that was editor Jon Riley. Jon seemed to understand instinctively what I

was trying to achieve and has become a true friend and significant person in my life. For that reason alone I’m delighted to have chosen Quercus. Of course there are times when I’m petulant and precious and kicking up a fuss at home because they haven’t spent a million pound advertising the latest McAvoy book on billboards in Leicester Square but that’s just because I’m a novelist and we can all be a bit of a twat sometimes. But, yeah, Quercus and me seem to work pretty well together. The sales team are really enthusiastic and I love all of the artwork that the art department has put together. Visually, the hardbacks are superb and the look of the paperback for Dark Winter was instrumental in its success. Quercus, I’m really rather fond of you. Not so much the accounts department, but me and numbers people don’t get on ….

What are you working on at the moment?

I sometimes feel like I have insufficient arms for all the things I have on the go at once. If I was Dr Octopus I’d be able to type all the different things I have in my head. As it is, I have to go for discipline instead. I’ve just put the finishing touches to a historical novel set in hull during the cholera epidemic that killed thousands of people in 1849. It introduces a new character by the name of Meshach Stone; a fallen hero and lone survivor of the massacre on the road from Kabul. he is now serving as bodyguard and guide to a young Canadian Archaeologist on a quest to discover religious relics. That search leads them to a country house in Yorkshire, where the brutal murder of a young girl leads the drunken, laudanum-addled Meshach into an investigation which threatens his sanity, his life and his soul. It could be the best thing I’ve ever written or it could be a pile of tosh. I’ll let you know when my editor has seen it. Aside from that I’ve got the edits to do on the fourth McAvoy book, Taking Pity, and a compendium of children’s stories for ‘children who are happy to be bonkers’. I’m not sure if anything will ever come of that but my nine-year-old daughter insists I do it, and she’s the boss. Then there’s a full-length children’s novel which has been in my head for years and features a family battling evil creatures underground in Andalucia. It’s a good job I’m a full-time writer these days. Work really used to get in the way!

What else is on the cards for you this year?

It’s always difficult to predict the future but a lot of things are in the “could happen and could be amazing” bracket. A major TV company has bought Dark Winter so with luck that will take off, and on the book front it’ non-stop. The third McAvoy book is out in the Spring and I’m hopeful that the historical novel isn’t left languishing for too long as I’d like to see it out sooner rather than later. I’ve sold books into several different territories so they all come out at different stages. In a couple of months I’m in Amsterdam chatting to Dutch journalists about the first McAvoy book but by the end of the year we’ll be talking up the fourth one in the UK. Throw in Germany, Spain, Italy, Russia and Turkey and it’s hard to keep your brain in the right book. The Americans are keeping pace with the British releases and I hope my publishers there maintain their faith in the series. I’m also on the organising committee for the Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival at Harrogate, which means I spend a lot of time with my heroes, which is surreal and wonderful. Really, my year is just writing and talking about it, and being a dad the rest of the time.

Give us a snapshot of the life of a writer. What are you doing right now?

I’m in my office, which is currently littered with wrestling figures because my daughter has been in and sitting in front of the electric fire, which I insist on having in my room because the big old parsonage where we live is bloody freezing and I’m the only one here during the day. My son is downstairs practising a Ray Charles song for a gig tonight at our local. I think my partner is doing something complex with a chicken. In a minute I will retreat to my battered armchair and read through some editorial questions on Taking Pity, then I will have a small rant about pedantic bastards before realising they are right, and addressing their questions. The evening will involve whisky and I will probably begin watching an uplifting documentary on Sky Arts, then get bored and switch over to an old episode of QI. My life is so frightfully middle class these days I feel an urge to go out and smash a bus shelter just to re-connect with my roots.

Thank you David for an eloquent and observant interview.

Links:

You can get a copy of ‘Original Skin’ from these sources:

     Quercus, the publisher

     Amazon UK in Kindle, Paperback, Hardcover, and Audiobook formats

     Amazon US in Kindle, Paperback, Hardcover, and Audiobook formats

     Barnes & Noble in Nook/ePub and Hardcover formats

Other books by David Mark published by Quercus

Find David Mark on his website and Twitter @davidmarkwriter

Quick Fire At The Slaughterhouse: Interview With Lisa Morton

Lisa Morton is an acclaimed horror writer whose story ‘Tested’ won the Bram Stoker Award for Best Short Fiction, and whose first novella ‘The Lucid Dreaming’ went on to win the Bram Stoker Award for Best Long Fiction. Morton has also had an extensive career in the film industry, in 1979 she worked as a modelmaker on Star Trek: The Motion Picture. She has a new novel out, Netherworld. Lisa met me at The Slaughterhouse, where we talked about fantasy and the multiverse.

Tell us about Netherworld.

NETHERWORLD is a dark historical fantasy about a British noblewoman, Lady Diana Furnaval, who travels the world in the late nineteenth century fighting evil, both human and supernatural. Along the way she searches for traces of her missing husband, William, who may have been taken to a nightmarish realm called the Netherworld.

To what extent does the idea of a parallel universe play a part in the novel?

The Netherworld is not exactly a parallel universe – the geographic locations don’t match, and time runs differently there – but it is a dimension that sits alongside our own and can be accessed via mysterious gateways scattered around the globe. The Netherworld is a

nightmarish realm where all of our supernatural entities reside, so the areas around the gateways are commonly believed to be haunted in our world.

How Manichean is the universe you have created and what do you think its appeal lies in?

It’s probably not truly Manichean, because I think I show just as much human darkness in our world as supernatural in the Netherworld. One of the things the book is about is how corrupt British imperialism was in the nineteenth century; throughout the course of the tale, my protagonist – a British noblewoman – is awakened to how her country has aggressively traded opium to the Chinese for tea. The horrors of the Netherworld are almost playful by comparison.

What else is on the cards for you this year?

In June, I’ll have ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE: WASHINGTON DECEASED out from

Constable & Robinson. It’s a tie-in to the ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE anthologies edited by Stephen Jones, and it charts the fall of the U.S. capitol during a zombie war. I’m currently working on a non-fiction book about the history of ghosts – this one’s for Reaktion

Books, who published my book TRICK OR TREAT: A HISTORY OF HALLOWEEN.

And of course there’ll be the usual short stories popping up in various books and magazines.

Thank you Lisa for an articulate and succinct interview.

Links:

Get a copy of ‘Netherworld’ at Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in hardcover, paperback, and Kindle formats

All Lisa’s works, to include her novel ‘The Castle of Los Angeles’, a 2010 Bram Stoker winner, can be found on her website and are listed on Wikipedia.

Follow Lisa on Twitter and Facebook