Richard Godwin's Blog, page 8

Chin Wag At The Slaughterhouse: Interview With Alan Brenham

Alan Brenham is a crime novelist and attorney. He worked as a Special Deputy US Marshall and a police detective in Temple, Texas. His first novel was Price Of Justice, a dual narrative reality-based thriller. Alan met me at The Slaughterhouse where we talked about policing and guns.

Tell us about Price of Justice.



Price of Justice was my first novel. Written in a combination of 3rd person and 1st person POV, it tells two stories, one of a grieving detective, written in 3rd person, trying to raise a young daughter while working within the framework of the law to stop pedophiles, and the other of a mother, narrating her own story, seeking vengeance against the same pedophiles while fighting to maintain her own moral integrity. The book deals with their struggles, their mutual attraction and how each changes the other. Kirkus Reviews called Price of Justice “A gripping, fast-moving and emotionally charged drama centered on well-drawn characters with genuine motives.”

How has your work as a Treasury agent and overseas had an impact on how you see crime as a novelist?

Being an agent had no impact on how I view crime as a novelist.

Travel, surveillance and writing reports were the predominant tasks I performed.

I left the job to become a street cop so I could have all the interaction with criminals I wanted.

The impact jobs were the police positions and the attorney career.

How did being a street cop inform your understanding of crime?

As a street cop as a first-responder, I got an up-close look at crime in all its forms, ranging from emotional-based offenses such as family disturbances to a bloody massacre at a low-class bar, then to deliberate crimes such as sexual assault and murder. At first, I felt a sense of shock at these scenes – a kind of naiveté that morphed over time into “us against them” cynicism.

The cynicism developed from learning that I couldn’t predict what anyone was going to do or say at any given time, making me stay vigilant whenever I dealt with people in any capacity – victim, witness, or offender. You just didn’t know who was lying. Some victims turned out to be offenders and vice versa. Witnesses “forgot” facts due to fear or just plain “I don’t want to get involved” attitudes.

It came down to a need/belief that whatever they said or did had to be verified. Their word alone carried no absolute value. And, of course, I had to keep my guard up since I didn’t know what might be going through a person’s head. Intoxication, rage, depression, woman scorned, and some mental conditions made for some dangerously-charged moments. What I learned from 14 years was that people are capable of inflicting any degree of harm, justifying lies/actions in any form that their mind tells them is okay at that time.

What are your views on gun culture in the USA?

A plain reading of the 2d Amendment to the US Constitution ties the right to carry to having a “well-regulated militia”. When Congress and the States passed and ratified that Amendment, it’s my view that they expected people to be armed in the event of a need to fight an invading army.

Of course, in that time (circa 1791), men used rifles and pistols for hunting and protection from external sources although I doubt that in 1791 they were experiencing the level and sophistication of violent criminal activity happening today. In this day and time, criminal offenders will always find a way to obtain weapons.

But, on the flip side, a potential crime may be prevented if an offender wonders if his prey may very well shoot back. From my experience as a police officer, I know of one instance where a pharmacy owner stopped an armed robbery of his business by having a gun available. He used it to shoot and kill the robber. That offender had a track record for shooting his victims. In yet another instance, from a court case I prosecuted, a college student was kidnapped off the streets of Austin, driven to another county and assassinated at a roadside park for his car. One has to wonder if he had been armed or in the very least, if the offenders (two of them in this case) thought their victim might be armed, perhaps the young man’s death may not have happened. Therefore, I believe qualified citizens must be allowed to possess and carry firearms.

By qualified, I’m referring to those who not only qualify at a range but satisfy certain background checks. The allowable firearms should be restricted to semi-automatic weapons. I can conceive of no circumstance where a citizen needs an automatic weapon for self-protection, sport, or hunting. Others may disagree but those are my views.

While many crimes are economically motivated or opportunistic there are extreme criminal acts that stem from pathology. What are your views on pathological crime and its detection?

Certainly, pathological crime is harder to detect, but it’s not impossible. Much in the landscape of criminal investigation has changed since people like Ted Bundy, the I5 Killer, Son of Sam and others inhabited the Earth. Long gone are the days when investigators had to rely solely on eyewitness statements, fingerprints, and confessions. The major impediments to solution of a pathology-based crime are public perception (no thanks to TV shows like CSI) that police can solve it and make the arrest in an hour; and, the difficulty of finding the person of interest once an ID has been made by methods such as DNA, or other computer-supported means.

Once police arrest a person of interest, a cat-and-mouse game ensues. Most pathological offenders are very intelligent and deny any involvement with a “prove-it” mentality. Their ego convinces them they are actually intellectually superior to investigators, attorneys and the like, and, honestly, some of them are. Lying is a means to an end for many of them. Even when faced with overwhelming evidence, They’ll persist in denials. A jury trial is the end result. For most pathological offenders, their crimes are so heinous, no plea deals are even considered by prosecutors.

What are your views on the efficacy of the court system?

First, I want to say that my response is limited to Texas criminal courts.

Courts are bureaucracies. Each court has a judge, a court coordinator, two assigned prosecutors, bailiffs, one or two probation officers, a deputy county or district clerk depending on the court’s subject-matter jurisdiction (misdemeanor or felony). Each has a role in the court’s operation and as such, each has an impact on that court’s efficiency – some, of course, having a greater impact than others. Bureaucracies plod along.

Texas courts operate on a docket system. Cases get placed on a docket. Each court employs a court coordinator whose job it is to schedule cases on a given docket: appearance docket; arraignment docket, pre-trial docket, plea docket, trial docket, and/or jury trial docket. Courts are expected to move dockets. When they don’t, the system bogs down. More cases are filed, making the dockets grow. Cases fall through the cracks. People languish in jail.

Typically a court will hold a docket call for a particular docket, for example, arraignment docket on Monday, and plea docket may be heard on a Friday. In between, will be hearings on attorney motions, bench trials, and special pleas. There’s only so much time in a day. Judges’ brains, like anyone else, can only absorb as much as their butt allows. Attorneys, especially defense, file motions, some of which are subtly designed to impede the court’s moving of cases to disposition. The more time that passes without a case going to trial, the more likelihood witnesses and victims move out of the court’s jurisdiction or die or forget or evidence gets lost or disappears.

But the fault for being an impediment doesn’t always lie at the feet of defense attorneys. Prosecutors share blame too as do government agencies who file certain types of cases.

In one instance, I represented, by appointment, a middle-aged man in jail for aggravated sexual assault of a child. The indictment charged him with sodomy of his grandson. Sounds horrible but when I sought copies of the agency’s file, they refused to turn it over to me, releasing it instead to the DA. After a careful read of that file, the DA dismissed the case. The government agency had sat on evidence that the boy had recanted his story when meeting with an agency-retained counselor. So, here was a case clogging the docket that should have never been indicted.

After a trial is finished, the defendant, assuming he lost, files an appeal which allows the case to languish for a few more years. Occasionally, especially now with the advent of the Innocence Project and DNA testing, convictions are reversed and sent back for a new trial. The system then begins anew for that case. Recently, in a county north of Austin, an overzealous prosecutor hid mitigating evidence and lied to the court about its existence, resulting in an innocent man having to spend 25 years in prison for a murder he never committed. Thanks to the Innocence Project and DNA testing, he was absolved of the conviction and released with apologies all around. The actual offender was caught. That prosecutor had been elected as a state judge. He resigned and lost his law license as a direct result of his false assurances to the court and the defense.

I’m not sure how the court system can make itself more efficient. It has to follow laws and procedures set down by higher entities. The Texas Supreme Court and the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals set procedures for civil and criminal cases. The Legislature passes penal statutes. Politicians (including prosecutors) rant about being tougher on crime so they can feed out of the public trough. Prisons fill to the max allowed by federally mandated rules. It’s like a pendulum that swings back and forth. A few years ago, during the “let’s get tough on crime and build lots of prisons” cry by politicians, I saw a newspaper cartoon featuring an elderly couple standing outside a small home, looking at a prison and saying: “Myrtle, I think we’re the last two Texans who aren’t in prison.”

Tomorrow, faced with the rising cost of building more prisons and hiring/training more guards, case dispositions may flow faster with both defense and prosecution making use of community-based correctional options as an alternative to prison, reducing backlogs and improving court efficiency.

Hollywood’s depiction of cops, like many things in the film industry, is arguably distorted and glamourised. Would you say that the reality of police work is meticulous information gathering and that many criminals avoid imprisonment while victims remain unrewarded by the kind of justice seen in films?

Real-life police work is nothing like what is depicted on TV and in films. It consists of detailed information collection, most of which lacks any semblance to the glamor portrayed on TV and in the movies. Not every lead generated or called in by a citizen results in solution of the offense and apprehension of the offender(s).

Unless the offender is arrested at the scene or a short distance away, a bona fide offense is rarely ever solved in an hour as shown on cop shows.

When an offense is reported to police, a uniformed officer (s) respond to the scene. Depending on the type of offense, the initial investigation can consist of a preliminary interview (A lengthy question and answer type) of the victim(s), identification of any witnesses and the taking of their statements, to a full-blown crime scene search for evidence, detailed photographs of the scene, of the victim’s injuries (or of the body). The officer’s interview is recorded in a report which takes a day or two to be assigned to a detective. The subsequent investigation may last anywhere from a day to becoming a cold case, that is, one that’s never solved.

Often, a victim of a property crime, like burglary, may never recover their missing property or it may be found in pieces, damaged and unusable. Crimes against persons, such as assaults, have to live with the trauma, unlike the “happy-ever-after” endings seen on TV.

Tell us about Cornered.

Set in a small city in central Texas, Cornered is a dark crime thriller about a police detective haunted by the memory of a cold case kidnapping/murder gone bad. Detective Matt Brady struggles to solve the disappearances of seven young professional women but quickly finds himself pitted against a criminal organization that knows as much about police techniques as he does—an organization that will do whatever it takes to stay one step ahead. His troubles mount when he steps into the cross-hairs of a professional cop killer. The story features not only the protagonist detective but a strong female character, Dr. Tracy Rogers, as well. Using dual protagonists seems to be a trademark for me. I used it in Price of Justice and am using it (with a twist) in my current project, Rampage.

This novel took me about a year to finish from when I typed the first word until I signed a publishing contract for it. The story is set in Temple, Texas, where I had worked as police officer and detective for over 8 years, The Temple police chief and a detective served as technical consultants for the modern operational procedures for the department. My wife and I made several trips to the city to select and photograph suitable locations for scenes appearing in the book. Overall, writing the book was a lot of fun: it brought back memories of places I used to frequent, places I had lived, and sites where some of my more infamously memorable police events occurred, ranging from the location where I made my first arrest of a drunk pedestrian to a shooting call where I ended up facing the business end of a double-barrel shotgun. For Cornered, I even made use of a murder case I worked there which, unfortunately, remains unsolved to this day. I tried to make the story and the characters interesting and memorable and must have been successful since Kirkus Reviews called Cornered “a rock-solid thriller”.

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

I have three main crime fiction authors I openly admire: Michael Connelly, John Sandford, and Michael McGarrity.

Connelly and his Harry Bosch novels – Connelly uses his LA Times crime beat writer past to great effect in characterizing Harry Bosch. He fashioned Bosch as an old-fashioned pavement-pounding, door-knocking LA detective, neither computer-literate or technically adept with modern devices such as cell phones. Riddled with flaws and personal problems, Bosch is the archetypical detective who gets it done in spite of LAPD bureaucracy, his distrust of the FBI, and his failed romantic interests. Connelly deserved all the awards he received for his Bosch novels.

John Sandford, on the other hand, created Lucas Davenport, a rich police detective who neither cares what anyone thinks nor which rules he breaks to get the job done. Unlike Bosch, he has a number of girlfriends before marrying a very likeable female surgeon. Sandford made Davenport a rough, salty investigator who not only talks the talk, but walks the walk. A reader can’t help but root for Davenport and for his wife, Weather Karkinnen as they live and work in the twin cities of Minneapolis-St. Paul.

Michael McGarrity created the Kevin Kearney series. Kearney is a New Mexico lawman married to an Army officer wife. Kearney has to deal with his wife’s Army posts being far from home. With a past which included fathering an out-of-wedlock Indian son he never knew he had until well after the son got his own family, Kearney continues to plug away at cases that take him all over landmark places in New Mexico which McGarrity describes to great effect in his novels. He gives the reader the sense that he (the reader) is right there in rural New Mexico, probably in a little more descriptive detail than either Connelly or Sandford do for the big cities.

There have been many novels and films in recent years depicting the perceived threat in the US from Mexican crime drifting across the border, particularly at places like El Paso owing to its proximity to Ciudad Juarez, and exemplified in the relentless lawless force that is Anton Chigurh in Cormac McCarthy’s seminal classic No Country For Old Men, in which Temple Texas is mentioned in the famous coin toss scene. What are your views on the reality of the threat posed by Mexican cartels to the American economy and safety?

The threat is very real. The Mexican cartels have spread like a cancer across the Texas-Mexico border, north into Dallas, Houston and beyond. Much of the American public’s perception of the cartels is that they are involved in drugs. But, like the Mafia, their fingers have gone into many enterprises, such as trafficking/prostitution, vehicle theft, murder, and weapons acquisition. With theft, the retailers raise prices to cover their losses, making goods and services cost more, and thereby impacting our economy. Insurance companies have to cover vehicle thefts for cars, vans and trucks hijacked to Mexico.

But the border area is the war zone. The Cartels are murdering anyone and everyone opposing them without regard to nationality. Americans have been killed deliberately and as collateral damage (caught in the cross-fire) in a few of the Mexican border towns like Matamoros – across from Brownsville, in Nuevo Laredo, and, of course, Juarez. News media articles mention occasional mini-firefights between US officers and persons on the other side of the River. Reports have surfaced about the Cartels assisting terrorists to move across the border. Yesterday, news media reported on the theft radioactive materials from the US. The materials were located inside Mexico.

The border is now staffed with National Guardsmen, Texas Rangers, and state troopers as well as Customs and Border Protection agents. Nightly helicopter patrols of the kind seen in Iraq and other combat areas are routine. Taxpayers are footing the bill for these deployments. A finite amount of tax money is in local and state government coffers. The shifting of tax moneys to finance these deployments and the supplies to sustain them mean some other services are faced with a reduction in funding and have to bite the bullet.

Corruption is worsening on our side of the border. I’ve read of multiple arrests by FBI and convictions of border area judges, law enforcement officers, and federal agents for assisting in drug and human smuggling, and bribery. Trials of those officials arrested cost money as does the housing and care of them when they are incarcerated. And , of course, there is the border wall/fence along the US-Mexico border, erected with tax money and having repairs made to holes in it and paid by more tax dollars. The bottom line is that the Cartels have grown into multifaceted criminal enterprises that have snaked their way into American society and impacted our economy.

Thank you Alan for a perceptive and informative interview.

Links:

Get ‘Price of Justice’ for your Kindle at Amazon US or UK, or in paperback format, Amazon US and UK

‘Price of Justice’ is also available at the publisher Black Opal Books, Barnes & Noble and Kobo.

See also Alan’s website for other buy links.

Chin Wag At The Slaugherhouse: Interview With Patrick Freivald

Patrick Freivald is a horror writer. Twice Shy is his debut novel. Dealing with the teenage experience of high school, its central character is a zombie who has to take Ritalin-like injections to stop her from eating her friends. Patrick met me at The Slaughterhouse where we talked about horror and surveillance.

Do you think the appeal of zombies lies in the sense of dystopia they convey?

Perhaps. I think zombies mean a different things to different people. Romero considered them an allegory for capitalism, and a lot of people go in that direction. I like them for the oxymoronic sense of simultaneous claustrophobia and agoraphobia they force on characters–there aren’t many people left on the whole planet, but dammit, you’re stuck in a mall with nine people just as annoying as you are!

Thinking of the Romero concept, do you think capitalism has created a dystopia which is masking its own entropic nature through propaganda that fiction is able to confront?

I really don’t. I think that, as imperfect as it is, no economic system has even come close to creating the general, wide-spread wealth that capitalism has. I do think there’s a perceived entropic plunge into dystopia in a lot of peoples’ minds, but as far as I can tell, that’s because they don’t really have perspective on how harsh life was even a hundred years ago for the vast majority of people.

Anyone able to complain about how hard their life is on the internet is so vastly richer than the norm in history that I can’t help but laugh at the irony, while worrying about the sentiment.

As a teacher of physics and robotics as well as a novelist, you must be used to switching paradigms. How do you view the role of religion in the historical improvements brought about by capitalism?

I’m not sure that I’m able to differentiate between religion specifically and culture in general. What parts of Western culture are because of Christianity, and what parts of Christianity are that way because of Western culture? (Ditto any other culture/religious pairing.)

I think that the Western economic engine of the past few hundred years could have come about independent of Christianity, and I think that arguments can be made for and against religion in general and Christianity in particular’s compatibility with capitalism. But to be honest, I’m talking out my rear-end a bit on this one. I’m confident that a younger me would give you a surer answer, but I’m too old to know everything anymore.

Tell us about Twice Shy.

My work as a teacher inspired Twice Shy. The theme that dominated my brain throughout the writing process is that teenagers are funny, sometimes on purpose. They tend to trivialize the important, and obsess over the trivial. I’ve always had a soft spot for slavering monsters, so instead of making my protagonist’s dark secret something real–like she’s a kleptomaniac lesbian with AIDS–I made her a closeted zombie who has to take Ritalin-like injections to keep from eating her friends; a ludicrous premise for a ludicrous time in our lives.

I never intended it to be YA. It never occurred to me that anyone would read it as straight fiction instead of satire, but that’s how most people read it, and it’s been a load of fun watching it evolve into something I never meant it to be. It’s nice to have teen readers tell me how much they just love Ani, and I kept that in mind when I expanded the story with Special Dead.

On the zombie side of things, I tried to be true to the tropes of the genre and upend them at the same time. I’ll leave it to the reader to determine how well I pulled that off.

Do you think satire has unintentionally become a form of realism and if so why?

I think to some extent satire has always been a form of realism, though intentionality may vary. Mankind drowns in irony on a daily basis, and sometimes our ability to poke fun at things is overshadowed by how ludicrous they really are. Look at the satire sites today–The Onion, Private Eye, NewsBiscuit, The Daily Currant–and how often their articles are swallowed as real on Facebook and Twitter. Good satire skirts the real, and all too often the line between them knots up and snaps.

Special Dead deals with a post-apocalyptic situation that explores a totalitarian education system. What are the issues you dramatise in the novel?

While Twice Shy is satire of high school life, Special Dead is satire of the institution of education (and special education in particular), where I take the general dysfunctions of a school and ramp them to a Spinal Tappian eleven.

I took a “kitchen sink” approach. The students are chained to their desks, threatened with fiery death from the flamethrower-toting guards in the back of the room if they misbehave. Parents and community members protest the programs they despise, corporations interfere with the educational process, underqualified teachers use high-performing students as teaching proxies, qualified teachers are treated poorly and prevented from doing their job as well as they want to, students celebrate mediocrity and are socially promoted.

Mixed into that is a zombies-as-civil-rights court case, where higher and higher courts consider the radical position that the zombies who can for the most part control themselves through medication are in fact sick people and thus entitled to constitutional protections, and not creatures to be exterminated on sight. The idea grew in my mind from an entertaining aside to a comment on the dehumanization of “the enemy”, and it led me to fold some medical ethics and religious bigotry into the narrative as well.

And I think I did it all without shoving it in your face. If you just want a good story without worrying about the social commentary, you’ll find it.

What are your views on the uses of authority and social engineering in education?

Education is social engineering–at the very least, the act of educating the masses is an attempt to engineer a better-educated society. Beyond that, political and social indoctrination have always been a part of the experience, and I’m not sure that they’re avoidable. Even if all you want to do is promote an open mind and teach kids to think for themselves, that in and of itself is a type of political indoctrination; you’ve made the implicit assumption that open minds and independent thinking are good things, and to hell with whoever disagrees with that.

I believe that open minds and independent thinking are good things, but I also accept that these are societal judgments that are not universal–so when we’re educating kids that come from families or societies that do not value or support these things, to that extent we’re indoctrinating those kids. The question comes down to what, not if, social engineering and indoctrination happens. Disagreements thereof can get pretty sticky and heated, fast, by and large because people who agree with a particular vein of social engineering don’t see it as such; it’s not even that they think their indoctrination is right and the “other side” has it wrong, it’s that they don’t see that they’re guilty of the same thing as the “other side”.

I try to keep that in mind when I’m teaching young-Earth creationists about cosmology and the Big Bang. Just because I’m right doesn’t mean it isn’t indoctrination and social engineering.

My thoughts on authority in education are this: we want to teach kids to think for themselves, but not when we’re telling them what to do and expecting them to do it.

How does your view of the world as a physicist influence your writing?

I write fiction, so I’m not that concerned about the technology in my novels being accurate per se (the zombie virus, for example), but I try very hard to make it believable given the general suspension of disbelief needed to read about monsters and so forth in the first place. It irks me in movies and in books when I see/read something where the author just threw together sciency-sounding words, and the “Gamma Neutrino Atomizer” or somesuch makes an appearance.

In Blood List, Phil and I took care to make all of the technology believable, and indeed, in the time between when we wrote it and publication, several of the amazing-but-believable devices we’d invented had become reality. The medical aspect of the novel proved to be a challenge, because neither of us have a background in medicine or even biology, so we consulted experts in medicine and virology and depended upon their insight to make the fanciful aspects at least plausible.

Other than that, I don’t feel too constrained by physics. Demons and devils and ghosts and psychics and dimensional gates are all fair game, as are all-to-human monsters who follow all of the laws of the universe as we understand them. But come to think of it, physics might be why I’ve never felt all that inclined to write science fiction.

Do you think that horror is most effective when it draws on the unconscious?

What constitutes horror–indeed, what’s even scary–is subjective. I don’t even blink an eye at the Saw movies (or The Hills Have Eyes, Wrong Turn, and the like). Jason and Freddy amused me more than anything else. But these same movies will scare some people out of their wits. The same is true with books–I thought Carrie better than Cujo, the Books of Blood better than anything by Dean Koontz.

Horror is a personal emotion, and for me it’s tied to some degree with hopelessness. The more tangible a horror is, the less likely I am to find it scary. Unless it’s spiders. Spiders freak me out.

Do you think we live in an age of surveillance?

Very much so. Just this morning I posted an article on Facebook about the FBI hijacking the webcams on laptops without turning on the indicator light that tells the user it’s on. From loyalty cards at grocery stores to credit cards to e-mail intercepts to traffic cameras, to keystroke loggers and data loggers and web history loggers, to drones and satellites and cell phone GPS data, I don’t know that there’s much of anything that isn’t under surveillance anymore.

There used to be a pragmatic control on surveillance, and that was that you had to choose your targets. The resources didn’t exist to spy on everyone all the time. But both RAM and storage memory have become so cheap, and the devices used for spying so ubiquitous (I mean, I’m typing on one and have another in my pocket at this very moment, and I live in the middle of freaking nowhere and don’t even have my wallet on me), that we can not only collect unbelievable amounts of data, we also have the capability to mine it.

Give people the ability to acquire power, and they’ll do it. Not everyone, but enough of them. We now have the ability to spy on just about everyone just about all the time, so it’s a no-brainer that it’s happening. Anyone paying any sort of attention didn’t need Edward Snowden to break that news.

Thank you Patrick for a perceptive and informative interview.

Links:

‘Twice Shy’ at Amazon US and UK

‘Special Dead’ at Amazon US and UK

‘Blood List’ at Amazon US and UK

Patrick Freivald’s website

Chin Wag At The Slaughterhouse: Interview With Alafair Burke

Alafair Burke is the author of numerous novels that have earned her a reputation for creating strong, believable, and eminently likeable female characters. She is also the daughter of the great crime novelist James Lee Burke. She has a new novel out, If You Were Here. Alafair met me at The Slaughterhouse where we talked about identity and law.

Tell us about If You Were Here.

The book jacket version: journalist McKenna Jordan is chasing down the latest local media phenom – an unidentified woman who rescues a teenage boy after he falls on the subway tracks. When she manages to find a grainy video of the incident, she’s shocked to see that the mysterious woman looks exactly like her friend, Susan Hauptmann, who disappeared without a trace a decade earlier.

The search for a long lost friend is a familiar plotline in crime fiction, but what made this story special for me is the intermingling of the past with the present. Susan was McKenna’s friend, but she was also a former West Point classmate of McKenna’s husband, Patrick. Digging into the reasons Susan may have disappeared forces McKenna to take an honest look at where she was in her own life ten years ago, where she stood with Patrick, and how well she really knows her own husband. At an even larger level, I think the book is about the way[s our smallest choices have the power to determine not only the paths of our lives, but the lives of others.

As a former Deputy District Attorney in Portland, Oregon, and Professor of Law at Hofstra Law School, how has your knowledge of law helped inform your fictions?

I know the flow of a criminal investigation and prosecution at a fairly organic level, and that flow tends to shape the arc of my novels. It helps that I can depict procedures in a believable way without having to do research, of course. But most important, I learned a lot about the culture of law enforcement when I was still in practice. There’s a language and a vibe to a precinct, and when it’s not depicted with authenticity, readers know it.

Revenge is a popular theme in much crime fiction. To what extent do you think revenge is lawless justice and does its appeal lie in the feeling that the law fails many victims of crime?

I’m not a huge fan of raw revenge stories. Maybe I’m old fashioned and still believe that our imperfect justice system is the best system out there. For me, revenge stories only work if the audience truly believes there’s a reason for the hero to work outside of the system. Then you can let those stories rip.

Do you think the best detectives have strong criminal shadows?

I think the best detectives have empathy. Perhaps in some instances, that empathy comes from understanding one’s own dark side, but I don’t believe that’s necessarily the case.

How much do identity and the manipulation of identity play a part in your novels?

I’ve had a few books where identity plays a central role in the plot. Dead Connection, for example, is about a serial killer who uses an internet dating service to locate his victims. Having met my own husband on the Web, I was fascinated by the potential to create fictitious identities and the idea of people falling in love with a wholly fabricated profile. In both NEVER TELL and IF YOU WERE HERE, there are characters who create new identities in a attempt to start over again, raising the question of whether it’s really possible to part from one’s past.

What do you make of the E Book revolution?

Whatever gets people reading is a good thing, as far as I’m concerned. Other people will have to figure out how to make pricing fair, how to have gatekeepers to quality, and the usual concerns. I try to keep my head down and write the books.

Your father, the great crime novelist James Lee Burke, has included you in his novels. How does it feel reading about yourself in his fictions and how has being his daughter influenced you as a writer?

There’s no doubt that having a writer for a father and a librarian for a mother shaped my passions for reading and writing. Our house was filled with books, and every member of our family is a storyteller.

As for Alafair Robicheaux, Alafair is a family name that she and I share, but she’s a separate (and fictional) character.

What are you working on at the moment?

I just finished a new Ellie Hatcher novel, ALL DAY AND A NIGHT.

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

Drink more water, and don’t wait until you’re thirty years old to get a passport.

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

To describe the ice as only a sliver might actually be too generous. Most of the writers I know have the ability to study other people as if they have entire trays of ice in their veins. But it’s not just detachment that serves a writer well in writing about the human condition. It’s a unique combination of empathy and detachment that really does the trick. One moment, you’re sitting like a stranger on a cloud, looking down at one of the many pawns buzzing around his planet. The next, you’re living inside him, shedding tears. How crazy is that?

Thank you Alafair for an informative and perceptive interview.

Links:

Get a copy of If You Were Here at Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk

See also the US Harper Collins If You Were Here page for a comprehensive list of buy links to include Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, and IndieBound, and browse inside the book here.

Find Alafair at her website, on Twitter and Facebook.

Quick Fire At The Slaughterhouse: Interview With J. H. Bográn

J.H. Bográn is a thriller writer who was born and raised in Honduras. He is in a new anthology, Hard Targets. It is a collection of hard action thriller stories.

José met me at The Slaughterhouse where we talked about confessions and the contemporary Zeitgeist.

Tell us about Hard Targets.

Death Toll 2: Hard Targets is a collection of thriller short stories. Plenty of action for everybody. The roster includes some of today’s best selling authors around the globe. Here’s the list of the stories and its authors:

The Able Man – An exclusive tale of a Ranger’s ruthless revenge – MATT HILTON
Kill Zone – A classic Spider Shepherd SAS short story – STEPHEN LEATHER
Kyiv Rules – Crime, corruption & the Ukrainian Intelligence Service – ALEX SHAW
Absolution Withheld – A thief’s strange encounter at confession – JH BOGRÁN
The Perfect Tonic – A murderous tale of the unexpected – STEPHEN EDGER
The Commuter – A writer & a serial killer meet -LIAM SAVILLE
Bangkok Shuffle – A Bangkok PI on the case of two scams – HARLAN WOLFF
The Four Shades of Black – A special police unit investigates a special crime -MILTON GRAY
Widows Dance – A Ukrainian militia officer unearths a shocking secret – SCOTT H LEWIS

So you see, nine stories, nine thrills.

How would you elevator pitch your story to a man who hates confessions?

Here’s how I tell people about this short story:

A thief enters a church to do a job, but ends up confessing his darkest sins; definitely it is more than he had bargained for.

How versatile do you think the thriller is as a genre?

Very versatile, the many sub genres should attest to that. We can go from techno thrillers like Tom Clancy and Clive Cussler to historical thrillers like Ken Follett, or why not, legal thrillers like John Grisham.

With any luck you can also run into a romance before you know it. The early works of David Baldacci had heavy elements of a love story, The Winner and Saving Faith to name a couple.

The fact remains that what thrills a reader can be something very personal, or a world-scaled event threatening life as we know it. There are as many thrills as authors out there because we each add our unique layer of trouble to the plot.

And that is the reason why I stick with the genre.

Which contemporary thriller do you think defines the Zeitgeist?

For me, there are two thrillers that define our times:

One is The Godfather, I know it dates back to the 60′s, but its effects ripple back all the way to this date. The book deserves way more credit than it has as I believe it was shadowed by the movies.

The other one is The Silence of the Lambs. It created the epitome of a realistic, yet creepy, hard-not-to-root-for antagonist. Hannibal Lecter is as much alive now as he was at the time of the novel’s release.

The way I see the thrillers of our times, is that they must be dark, gritty, and as far away as possible from clichés. Take a look at the current TV shows line-up like Dexter, CSI, Hannibal, Grey’s Anatomy. They must be as realistic as possible, blurring the line of fiction. The same goes for movies where the campy old Batman and Superman have morphed into The Dark Knight and Man of Steel.

Thank you José for an informative and versatile interview.

Links:

Get a copy of ‘Death Toll 2: Hard Targets’ at Amazon US and UK

Find J. H. Bográn at his website, Goodreads, his Amazon author page, and on Facebook profile and author pages, and Twitter

Bio:

J. H. Bográn, born and raised in Honduras, is the son of a journalist. He ironically prefers to write fiction rather than fact. José’s genre of choice is thrillers, but he likes to throw in a twist of romance into the mix. His works include novels and short stories in both English and Spanish. He’s a member of the Short Fiction Writers Guild and the International Thriller Writers where he also serves as the Thriller Roundtable Coordinator and contributor editor their official e-zine The Big Thrill.

Chin Wag At The Slaughterhouse: Interview With Renato Bratkovič

Renato Bratkovič is an accomplished crime writer and a Slovenian publisher. He owns Artizan, a company publishing some of the hottest new titles in crime fiction. He blogs at Rakialnews. Renato met me at The Slaughterhouse where we talked about the former Jugoslavia and just how Partisan publishing is.

Would you say that Slovenia has recently undergone something of a political revolution?

A year ago my people were joined in the flood of protests, starting in Maribor, my hometown (against the corruption of the mayor and his team), which immediately exploded into the whole-Slovenian movement against the so-called political and economic elite – “elite” being a completely inappropriate name for all the scum, who have been running (ruining) my country for more than 20 years.

The ex-Slovenian prime minister, who maneuvered his way up and formed the government hadn’t even been elected in the first place, he built his power on dividing us to lefties and righties, us and them, and had the balls to call the protest movement “the rise of the zombies”, but guess what: he had to go and we, the zombies, are still here!

And the new government is bending under the pressure from Bruxelles and tries to force unpopular austerity measures, where the honest and poor pay the price for those who have actually caused the crisis … So, after a year this autumn is again going to be hot, at least that’s what they say.

What do you think the historical importance of Marshal Tito was in the unification of the former Jugoslavia?

Well, I guess he was very important … I mean, first thing he did was kick the Germans’ asses during the WW2. No, seriously, I was eight when he died. Everyone believed the world was going to end. Almost every world leader came to pay respects at his funeral. Even when he died, he was able to unite what seemed non unitable.

There are people who adore him and there are the ones who hate him, noone is neutral. He was obviously at the right place at the right time, he was smart, he had a vision and charisma, and was able to inspire people to follow. The whole situation in Yugoslavia was very complex. The problem with the WW2 was, that that there were more than just two sides – it wasn’t only the aggressor and the defender, there was the aggressor, defenders and collaborators with the aggressor. And within the defenders, there were also those who wanted freedom and new world order (Communism) and those who just wanted freedom and peace. And within the collaborators there were people who were for Germans and those who were just against communism. There were (and still are) also questions of nationality, religious views etc …

So from that point of view, he can be credited as the winner of freedom and peace, otherwise I would speak and write German or would perhaps “leave the stage” through the chimney. What people cannot forgive him is the fact that to maintain the new world order – we established socialism as a step toward communism – you had to remove those against it. So people who openly disagreed were sent to Goli otok (a Croatian Archipelago) or killed. And that would, of course, describe him as a dictator.

Well, ten years after his death the world didn’t end, but Yugoslavia did, with Slovenia and Croatia leaving first and the wars breaking out. In Slovenia it lasted only 10 days, while other ex-Yugoslav countries were not as lucky.

But many people today still see him as a hero and a guy, under whose leadership life was much better than today, when instead of communism we found ourselves in the middle of capitalism, or as I call it, cannibalism.

How important do you think the exclusion of Stalin was in the former Jugoslavia in terms of its identity and form of Communism?

I guess it caused a lot of people lose focus – one day Stalin was a god, the next day you were not supposed to mention him, or you could book a vacation on Goli otok. And Tito, well, he wanted to show he didn’t like being pushed around, and developed a softer, “less totalitarian” form of communism. Non-Aligned Movement, as a form of resistance to eastern and western bloc division, would later probably not come into existence either.

How politically motivated are you as a writer?

I haven’t done real political writing yet – I have a story (The Contract) about the guy, who can’t get his dick up so he makes a deal with the devil. His life changes drastically up to the point that he becomes a Slovenian prime minister. At the end the guy has to pay, of course … In this story – it is actually a political satire – I reflected on the events that occurred on the political playground at the time.

But I think I should put more politics into my writing and I am playing with the idea of writing a non-fiction column on my blog (Radikalnews), a series of provocative pieces, where I’ll start with a flash fiction story, a metaphorical take on some current events or people involved, and then describe how I feel or think about them.

Tell us about Artizan.

Artizan is your advertising agency and a publishing house that I run with my partner, comrade Jurij. We established Artizan in 2012 to offer our creative services to our clients together – strategic storytelling, graphic design, book publishing … The name and the logo, of course, play with the word Partisan.

Our portraits on our website (http://www.artizan.si/) are actually our faces placed put over the picture of Tito and Koča Popović (Yugoslav philosopher, writer and national hero).

As the prime minister and the government were right-winged, it felt natural for me to make a statement and express my own political views and values with my company – so my work actually is politically motivated after all!

And I honestly believe in comradeship with our clients.

Who are your literary influences?

I think Hubert Selby is one of the greatest writers, ever. His writing is more than writing – it’s a recording of life. Irvine Welsh is another writer I just can’t get enough of – his spoken scottish accent is really inspiring. I tend to use a Maribor dialect, when I write a dialog and I wrote one of my stories entirely using it.

When I sent it to a couple of Slovenian writers, two of them were totally pissed off, as they thought I was illiterate. When I thanked them for their feedback in my email and explained why I had written in my dialect, they could see, that I actually had a clue, how to spell, where to put a comma, etc …

I also like Chuck Palahniuk, Will Self, Norman Mailer, I literally grew up with stories by Charles Bukowski, I dig Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs, and Slovenian writers, of course.

In January 2012 I “discovered” Paul D. Brazill, who inspired me greatly, as well. Reading his stories made me aware, that my writing was a bit noir too. Then I e-met you and a wonderful bunch of other American and British authors I can communicate via Facebook and Twitter, and who all provide both a reading pleasure and an inspiration for my own writing.

I do, however, write from my life, the world and people around me, things that happen to me …

How has Slovenia affected your writing?

Slovenia has become a sovereign state when I was nineteen or twenty – I’ve written my first stories as a kid, when it was still a part of Yugoslavia. We had been taught about the WW2 heroes, about the Partisan kids who risked their lives to carry around messages of great importance, about brotherhood and unity, about belonging to the collective, about things that were more important than we were, etc … In the beginning of the nineties everything fell apart.

I mean, we wanted to have our own country, to be masters of our own fate, to have a final say on everything – Slovenia was being compared to Switzerland, everything seemed possible, a small country, big opportunities, if only …

I began writing seriously in August 2011, and some serious shit was beginning to happen. I am a sensitive person, I am pissed when I see the arrogant politicians and managers trying to make a fool out of me, and I feel pain seeing kids who have nothing to eat, while the greedy sons of bitches with no integrity easily get away with stealing great sums of money and transferring it to some financial oasis, while we are paying for this. I never imagined “the next Switzerland” like this.

In that respect my writing is greatly affected by Slovenia – I write about people losing their jobs, about alienated couples, about hopeless future … But as I still see a glass half full I try to add a bit of humor every now and then too.

And, as you know – Laibach, Slavoj Žižek and Boris Pahor come from Slovenia …

Do you think publishing is in trouble?

Publishing in Slovenia is in GREAT trouble. The biggest publishing company over here, Mladinska knjiga is currently for sale – it’s owner is the catholic church, which had insatiable economic appetite and is now sinking in debt. They owned a bank, a vine cellar, a thermal destination, and what have you, and they produced one of the biggest holes in Slovenian economy …

But this is probably not the biggest problem. The problem is, that two million people live in Slovenia, perhaps half of them is reading, and only thousand people are actually buying books – an average circulation of books here is 500-700 pieces.

As I see it – and here I risk being called paranoid – it is all a master plan of so-called political “elite” who influences the school system, where nothing is being done to promote reading, as it is a route toward thinking, which the “elite” does not want us to do.

Luckily, there are some smaller publishers here who do care about the language, reading culture, literary quality …

What are you working on at the moment?

I am fighting on (too) many fronts at the moment – I still have to make money as an advertising creative, although I’d like to focus entirely on books, no matter what the situation in publishing. I’m working on several great books that will get published with Artizan in the near future. As I am doing it myself (my comrade Jurij is responsible for graphic design and printing projects), the progress is a bit too slow, but I’m doing what I can.

But to be more precise: there’s your Apostle Rising in Slovene on the way, couple of novellas and short story collections by Paul D. Brazill, both in English and Slovene, a wonderful collection of 49 stories by Joseph Grant (also in English and Slovene), and a new novel by Slovenian author Janja Rakuš in English.

I am also working on translation/rewriting of my Don’t Try This At Home stories in English (one of the stories, High Midnight, has just appeared recently in Noir Nation 3) and writing a rats novel …

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

I’d kick my ass and say: “Hey, you, stop wasting your time – go out and create something!” I’ve raised time wasting into an art form!

In my twenties and thirties I just kept doing wrong things, making wrong decisions … I’ve had my mid-life identity crisis when I was 32! It seems that only when I turned 40 (with my short story collection coming out a week before), that I finally found myself, my purpose, I found out what I wanted to do with the rest of my life – which is, of course, better than never at all. Kind of like DBC Pierre, right?

So, I keep telling that to myself now … and to my boy and girl, as well.

Thank you Renato for an insightful and versatile interview.

Links:

Find Renato Bratkovič at Artizan and on Facebook and Twitter

For the Slovenian audience, Renato’s ‘Ne poskušajte tega doma’ can be found here

And if you’ve not yet got a copy of ‘Noir Nation: International Crime Fiction No. 3,’ go to Amazon US or UK

Quick Fire At The Slaughterhouse: Interview With Rocky Wood

Rocky Wood is the author of numerous books on Stephen King, on whom he is a leading expert. His publications include ‘The Complete Guide To The Works Of Stephen King’, and he has been involved in research for King’s latest novel, Doctor Sleep. He is also the President of the Horror Writers Association. Rocky met me at The Slaughterhouse, where we talked about King’s fiction and what it was like working with him.

Stephen King’s latest novel, Doctor Sleep, is a sequel to the classic The Shining, that King himself described as a ‘crossroads novel.’ Tell us about your involvement in it and what it is like working with the foremost horror novelist of the past decades.

Back in 2011 Steve kindly invited me to do the continuity between ‘The Shining’ and ‘Doctor Sleep’, as well as some other things, including two sets of recreational vehicles, in different timelines. The RVs are used to help the villains of the piece travel incognito. I guarantee you won’t look at retired people travelling the country in mobile homes the same way ever again!

Working with Steve was a breeze. Of course, he’s a total professional and I enjoyed the interaction about obscure parts of the Torrance family history, the Overlook and so on. I got the chapters as they were written. Even though I had to come to expect fine, clear writing from Steve it was amazing to see how good it is even in first draft. As you know, he doesn’t plot, so the story was the same sort of experience readers will get – a roller coaster road of emotions. In fact, this is also one of King’s most personal novels, dealing as it does with alcoholism, AA and his eternal themes of hope and redemption. It was very interesting to see how he dialled up the story, and the emotion in the second and final draft. A great craftsman at work.

What do you think differentiates King’s work from other horror writers’?

King is much more of a mainstream writer than most horror writers. Yes, he writes horror, but he also dabbles in other genres and very often writes largely mainstream short stories and novels. There really is an effortless suspension of disbelief with King. His characters are ‘real’ in that we instantly recognise them. Even minor characters appear completely rounded. Of course, his tales are compelling and he creates very real settings. He doesn’t plot, he reports the reaction between characters and events, so even he is often surprised by the turn of events. He is a true craftsman, working hard every day (yes, every day) on improving his writing. In simple terms King is another Twain or Dickens, a once in a half century talent.

Tell us about your involvement as president of the Horror Writers’ Association.

The main role of the HWA’s President is to lead. Sounds simple, huh? But the point should be obvious – if you set the tone, and are willing to work hard yourself, lots of people will be motivated to follow. In the three years I’ve been President our volunteer team working on HWA’s functions has expanded from 40 to over 160. That has allowed to implement a raft of new programs – including Young Adult, Poetry and Librarian sections. These new programs and a reinvigorated membership is part of a positive feedback loop. As these programs grow and succeed we get more members – up from 240 in 2009 to over 1100 today. I have also made a major part of my role documenting and codifying our procedures so we don’t have to reinvent the wheel when a new person takes over a position. And in the end, HWA serves the genre, so we work every year on enhancing our iconic Bram Stoker Awards.

What are you working on at the moment?

Because Motor Neurone Disease is now affecting my hands, I can no longer touch type and control of the mouse is becoming more difficult. As a result I won’t take on any more book length projects. I am updating my ‘Stephen King: Uncollected, Unpublished’ with new and exciting material. Look for the update early in 2014!

Thank you Rocky for an informative and perceptive interview.

Links:

Get a copy of Stephen King’s Doctor Sleep at Amazon US and UK.

While you’re waiting for the Stephen King: Uncollected, Unpublished updated edition, check out these guides by Rocky Wood: Stephen King: A Literary Companion (Amazon US and UK) and Stephen King: The Non-Fiction (Amazon US and UK)

Read more about Rocky and all his works at his website here.

Chin Wag At The Slaughterhouse: Interview With Peter Leonard

Peter Leonard is the author of five fast paced novels. His thrillers have earned him wide critical acclaim for their tight plotting and story lines that add velocity like well-oiled chicanes. His latest novel is Back From The Dead. It is packed with the author’s trademark twists and turns. Peter is also the son of Elmore Leonard, one of the greatest crime novelists of all time. Peter met me at The Slaughterhouse where we talked about his latest release and what Elmore Leonard thought of James Lee Burke.

Tell us about your latest novel Back From The Dead.

It’s the sequel to Voices of the Dead. Set in 1971, Back from the Dead is a continuation of the confrontation between Harry Levin, a Holocaust survivor and scrap metal dealer from Detroit, and Ernst Hess, a former SS officer and still a dedicated Nazi twenty-six years after the war. At the end of Voices Harry shoots Hess, drops him in the ocean and lets the current take him out to sea.

But in the opening scene of Back from the Dead: Hess opened his eyes looking up at the white blades of a fan slowly rotating above him. He was in a hospital ward, an infirmary, the last bed in a big white room filled with beds, Hess on his back, a lot of activity to his left, Negro nurses moving about, checking on Negro patients. Everyone he could see had black skin. For an Aryan who believed in racial purity this was hell, God playing a cruel joke on him. Hess picks up where he left off in Voices of the Dead.

How much do identity and the manipulation of identity play a part in your fictions?

Manipulation of identity is a critical plot element in my next novel called Eyes Closed Tight, a psychological thriller, which is based in part on hanging out with Detroit Police Homicide for several weeks. I can’t explain any more or I’ll give the story away.  Incidentally, Elmore spent time with DPH Squad 7 back in the late seventies, and wrote a piece for the Detroit Free Press called Impressions of Murder.

Your father, the great Elmore Leonard, acknowledged the influence of George V. Higgins’s seminal novel The Friends of Eddie Coyle on his fictions. Higgins characteristically uses a dialogue rich prose with an economic use of description to advance the story, how much of an influence would you say the novel is on your own writing?

I remember my father phoning me after reading The Friends of Eddie Coyle, saying, you have to read this book. Higgins has set me free. I reread Eddie Coyle a couple years ago, and I think it also set me free. Reading Higgins was like eavesdropping on a conversation among crooks. The novel is a crime masterpiece, one of, if not the best crime novel ever written.

You have mentioned Cormac McCarthy as an influence. His style is unique, thick with imagery and in many ways lyrical. Thematically the idea of the frontier and its attendant brutality recurs in it. How do you feel the sense of the frontier in the American psyche translates from traditional Westerns to crime fiction?

No Country For Old Men is the perfect example. I read this novel four times, studying Cormac McCarthy’s style, his sound. The characters in Cormac’s spare prose are rendered with authentic western grit. The dialogue is so simple and perfect, it’s beautiful. I think of No Country as a modern western and an example of, as author Stav Sherez said, “the versatility of crime fiction.” Curiously, when the Coen Brothers won their Oscar for the film, having used most of Cormac McCarthy’s dialogue, they never gave him credit. I discussed this with my father and he said it was a mortal sin.

Would you say your career in advertising has enriched your understanding of what it takes to write good fiction?

Writing ads didn’t help me in writing fiction. Although I did enjoy creating campaigns for Volkswagen, most of the products and services I promoted, I didn’t really care about. Writing fiction, I think, is the opposite experience. I love my characters. In my mind they become real and tell the story in shifting points of view. I can’t think of a more enjoyable way to spend time. It’s immensely satisfying.

Do you think excessive plotting can kill a story?

I suppose, but I think, unlike my father, plot is important to the reader’s enjoyment of a novel. My view is: keep the reader off balance, keep the reader guessing. I love it when I hear: “I thought I knew what was going to happen, and I was completely surprised.” Elmore’s point of view was: I don’t give a shit about plot. I’m going to tell my story and the characters better be able to talk. I said, well what if they can’t? He said, I’ll have them killed.

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

I don’t want to disagree with the great Graham Greene, but to me his observation is a bit dramatic. I think writing is fun and if it isn’t you’re doing something wrong.

Do you think the best detectives have strong criminal shadows?

Good detectives, I believe, have to get in the head of the perpetrator whose crime they’re trying to solve. They have to think like criminals.

What are you working on at the moment in your own canon and can you tell us something about your father’s last unfinished novel?

My latest is called Eyes Closed Tight. It’s about a retired Detroit homicide investigator named O’Clair, who has purchased a small seaside motel in Pompano Beach, Florida. When the book opens, O’Clair discovers the body of a young woman on one of his motel lounge chairs on the beach in front of his property. He sees that she has been murdered in a very particular way that reminds him of a homicide he had solved years earlier. O’Clair ends up helping a young, inexperienced Pompano Beach investigator named Holland, try to solve the crime.

I can’t talk about my father’s unfinished novel. I may finish it, and therefore I want to keep it shrouded in mystery. Suffice it to say, what I’ve read of Blue Dreams is quintessential Elmore.

Elmore Leonard and James Lee Burke are in my opinion the two greatest crime novelists of the last decades, they also have quite different styles. What do you make of the differences between them as authors, and did your father ever express a view of James Lee Burke’s novels?

Elmore admired James Lee, liked his protagonist, Dave Robicheaux, and Robicheaux’s sidekick, Clete Purcell. Elmore liked James Lee Burke’s dialogue, authentic to Elmore’s New Orleans-born ear. I think the biggest difference between them is that Elmore didn’t see the need to describe character and setting, while James Lee Burke, in Elmore’s opinion, used a lot of words describing nature, weather and wildlife, but Elmore also admitted James Lee was good at it. My father also told me he couldn’t imagine writing a series of novels with a recurring main character. Elmore thought it would be difficult to hold his interest.

Thank you Peter for an insightful and great interview.

Photo credit: David Trott

 

Links:

Back from the Dead can be had at Amazon US and UK and Barnes & Noble

See also the prequel, Voices of the Dead, at Amazon US and UK and Barnes & Noble

Read more about Peter Leonard’s books at his website.

Chin Wag At The Slaughterhouse: Interview With José Bográn

J.H. Bográn is a thriller writer who was born and raised in Honduras. He has a new novel out, Firefall. It is about a firefighter whose life falls apart and who takes a job investigating insurance fraud.

José met me at The Slaughterhouse where we talked about his new release and Honduras.

Tell us about Firefall.

New York City firefighter, Sebastian Martin, seeks sanctuary in spiraling alcoholic oblivion following the loss of his wife and child in an air crash. Consumed by rage and resentment, directed against his brother and uncle, he takes a last-ditch job in Dallas, Texas, investigating insurance fraud.

But more than a thriller tale, Firefall is the first novel where I use locations found in my own country, Honduras. Previous works had my characters running around New York, Frankfort, and London among others. However, here we find not only Sebastian’s new partner based in Honduras, but half into the book, he actually travels down there too.

You probably noticed that Sebastian’s new job is investigating insurance fraud. I have a couple of friends who are insurance adjusters. Oh the horror tales they’ve shared with me! Some of those cases were truly stranger than fiction. The idea of a globe-trotting investigator is what led me to select that profession for my recently widowed main character.

Do you draw on the pre-colonial psyche of Honduras and how does the world vision of it differ from that of a guilt ridden colonialist West?

In short, no.

However, there is another post-colonial influence in Honduras from where I did draw.

First of all, unlike the United States, Honduras was conquered and exploited for three centuries by Spain. The country confirmed its independence in a joint declaration with the other four countries of Central America on September 15, 1821. (Now ask me why the release of Firefall was on Sept/15/2013).

Honduras is an oddity.

During the first half of the 20th century, two American companies invested heavily in Honduras and made it their headquarters for the pineapple and banana production in the area. The influence of the companies were such that many areas where they had plantations or offices to this day still carry names in English. The original working title of the novel was Highland Creek, which is a location near the town of Tela where the climax of the novel takes place. Yes, that’s an English name for a location in a Spanish-speaking country. Of course, we had to rename the novel because there were comments of Highland Creek sounding Irish.

Here are other examples of influence: Even when we are subscribed to the Metric System, the 99% of the fuel pumps in the country dispatch gasoline in gallons, but we measure distances in Kilometers. We give our height in meters, but our weight in pounds. We buy fabric by the yard and eggs by the dozen, but measure constructing sites in square meters, and so forth. And I won’t even go into the role Honduras played during the 80’s in America’s war against the red threat.

Still, I looked at many of those little bits and wove some of them into the story.

Do you think that crime fiction sanitizes crime?

Yes, to a certain point I think it does.

Our society has a knack for idolizing bad guys like Robin Hood, Billy The Kid, or even John Dillinger. We rooted for Danny Ocean to steal the money from the casino in Las Vegas and get away with it. We wanted small time crook Porter, played by Mel Gibson, to get his payback in the eponymous film.

However, no amount of sanitized crime can save us from a crueler reality. We were thrilled reading Tom Clancy’s Debt of Honor when a jet crashed and burned into the Capitol building and promoted Jack Ryan to the presidency of the U.S.A. Then again, we were terrified when in real life two jets crashed and burned into the World Trade Center in New York.

What do you make of the E Book revolution?

I’m all for it. Let me dust off that old major in Business I got from college and dazzle you with some cold hard numbers.

My average was a meager 12 – 15 books per year.

Reading books for me used to mean always having a novel next to my bed and reading a few pages every night, and twice on Sunday. I would have a second book, generally a non-fiction, poetry or short story collection in the car’s glove compartment. I would take the second book for lines in banks, doctors, whatever.

Ebooks give you a freedom to read anything, anywhere and anytime. And the beauty of the app is that whatever page I stop reading on my phone will be the same page I’d be taken to by the auto synch when I switch on any other reading device registered to my account.

With the advent of e-book devices, and most importantly, reading apps for smart phones, computers and tablets, I’ve been able to read more. As of September, I have finished 23 books this year alone. Only four of them were printed.

By now you know I’m all for trivia, right? Last year I bought a nice hard cover anniversary edition of Gone With the Wind. I figured that after 40 years of loving the movie I was way overdue on reading the source material. A third into the book my wrists started to complain about the hefty 950+ page mammoth. I said fiddle-dee-dee! and went on line to buy the ebook version. Problem solved. Yes, the hard cover still looks wonderful in my bookcase.

Do you think the publishing industry is in trouble?

I think the publishing industry is no more in danger than the arms manufacturing industry.

It’s a simple offer and demand issue. There will always be people wanting to read, ergo, there will be something to read.

You don’t believe me? How many times have you found yourself reading the back of cereal boxes because you were eating breakfast alone and yearned for some reading while the newspaper lay beyond your reach?

We live in exciting times when the publishing industry is going through changes that are shaking their centuries-old foundations. Some of the key elements in the industry as we know it now will change, I’m sure, but it will morph into something that will serve its new purposes.

An oversimplification of the fact is that books are the delivery device for knowledge or entertainment. Students will ensure the survival of non-fiction books in whatever form they evolve into. We, as fiction writers, are entertainers, and we will find ways to deliver our tales—our products—to people, even if we have to go back on the roads like the troubadours of old. Although, I my age, I’d hate to learn to play the mandolin.

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

Well no, I think the warmth of our heart would melt any ice there. More than a sliver of ice, I’d qualify the sentiment as extreme empathy.

It is not that we detach from the circumstances and try to spin every little thing from our life into a novel. On the contrary, we draw from those feelings and pour them into our writing. Think of “Method Acting” were the actors go to extreme lengths to characterize a role—they say Robert De Niro used underwear typical of the time period when he played Al Capone in The Untouchables—in the same manner, we channel previous feelings through the tips of our fingers and bleed them into the pages.

A couple of years ago my kids were watching one of those dumb shows about accidents caught on video. I remember a clip about a young man who was dared by his drunk friends into spitting fire. He swung the bottle of alcohol and spit the clear liquid into an open flame, with such bad luck—or lack of a forceful spitting—that he was engulfed in flames burning all the way to the insides of his mouth and lungs. The images of the man on fire made a lasting impression on me. Then, a few months later I penned this flash fiction bit titled Experts Make It Look Easy:

Tired of cleaning windshields with a rag, Peter imitated another beggar’s daring act; practiced a full day but couldn’t spare the fuel to rehearse the grand finale. When he returned to his street he twirled the fired-up baton, tossed it up in the air, and then caught it in mid fall. Many heads turned as Peter took a mouthful of inflammable liquid. Kids gaped, faces glued to car windows like stuffed Garfield dolls. Peter spat fluid into the flame but the hot luminous ball reached him. Now Peter begs while a rag scarcely covers his burnt face.

Now I’m wondering if in doing so, we become “method writers.”

How important is location to you in your writing?

In some of my stories the location is inconsequential because they are events that could take place anywhere in the world. In those cases, the absence of location is intentional. In others, the place where the events happen reaches such high importance that they almost become an extra character.

One of my favorite parts when working on new project is the research. Once I determine the location, I try to learn as much as I can of the place. Visit if I can, study maps if I must. I interview not only locals, but people who got there later in life as to get their perception too.

For example, in Firefall, the main character is a New Yorker who has to begin a new life in Dallas. The cowboy-themed culture, the accent in there speech, even the music they play on the radio, they all add up to create a shock to the newcomer. And of course, the novel is not a “stranger comes to town” one, but those bit increase the depth and realism to the character.

And that’s just the big picture. Then there are the micro-locations such as bars, houses, offices, hospital rooms, bed rooms, et al.

When I determine the exact location of where a scene takes place, I have to know the dimensions of the rooms, where the furniture is located, sometimes even the colors of the paint on the wall. Thus, I draw a little layout with all the details so they are clear in my mind, even if I don’t include all of them into the story.

For determining which details to incorporate I use the maxim that less is more, and only mention the ones that are relevant to the character or they help setup the mood. For example, if the character is sad, I mention the tittle of that song playing on the bar’s jukebox that makes him want slit his wrists.

What are you working on now?

I’m working on a novel about a serial killer prowling New Orleans. Here’s a brief description:

In A Killer in a Blind Spot, a retired P.I. joins a journalist to hunt down a serial killer who uses poisonous animals as murder weapons.

Alan Knox hates New Orleans, that’s where his football career ended. Yet, he returns after a call from his son. When the N.O.P.D rules three dead women as accidents—one of them his son’s fiancée, Alan teams up with former star journalist Scott Trent to expose a serial killer whose weapon choices include deadly scorpions, snakes, and box jellyfish. The feature article generates plenty of attention, perhaps too much attention. Trent’s wife becomes the next victim while he lands at the top of the suspect’s list. In the meantime, Alan follows the breadcrumbs all the way to the city’s highest circles of power, where he uncovers a plot to assassinate the first female mayor of New Orleans.

I was blessed with the opportunity to visit The Big Easy twice. I stood on the exact spots where my killer drops the victim’s bodies, interviewed people from the police department, the city morgue and locals in general.

With the editing of Firefall, plus other two movie script projects that came my way, it wasn’t until earlier this year when I completed the first draft. I’m working on the second draft now, and expect to have it ready to send out by end of the year.

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

Oh, you so did hit a nerve with this question because many times I have thought about going back in time.

I actually have two versions of this ambition of sorts: The first version is similar to your question; it involves meeting the younger version of me to give him the poor bastard some pointers.

The other one is regressing in time, and I am in my own younger self, say back in 1985, but with the knowledge of the future in my mind. I picture myself writing a bunch of letters and sealed envelopes marked “do not open until…” giving me the tips and reminders to avoid the wrong choices and keeping the right ones. You see, I fear losing the good stuff like my wife and kids.

Ahem, sorry. I think I digressed a bit. Back to your original question, I’d give my younger self two tips:

1. Work on developing organization skills so it doesn’t take me over 2 years to finish a novel!

2. Never lose the faith, keep working even in the dark times.

How much sexual pathology do you think there is in murder?

I came across this interesting bit. It looks like sexual pathology and its relation to murder has occupied the mind of doctors for a good time now.

To me, it all comes down to the specific circumstances of the murder. For example: picture an average man, he walks into his house and discovers a rapist having his way with the man’s daughter or wife. The man goes to the closet, gets the shotgun, and aims to the head before squeezing the trigger. Boom. Bits of skull, hair, and gray matter scatter over the opposite wall. Then it’s up to his lawyer to get the man acquitted with a diagnosis of Temporary Insanity.

In this case, the murderer suffered from no pathology at all. . . or maybe he did, but it’s not relevant to this case.

A few years ago I wrote a story about a guy who falls in love with a woman suffering from Multiple Personality Disorder, I titled it—what else?—“Love Me Two Times.” While doing the research for that novella I read a couple of books on basic phycology. The knowledge has come in handy when developing many of my recent bad guys.

When applied to murders it usually encompasses the deviant behaviors that can also be found in other crimes, for example the rapist from the first paragraph.

It would be too much of a hyperbole to claim all murders are motivated in some degree by the sexual pathology of the murderer, however, it doesn’t take a long stretch of mind to believe it. It certainly feels possible, and perception, as they say in politics, is the key.

Thank you José for a perceptive and informative interview.

José H. Bográn, born and raised in Honduras, is the son of a journalist. He ironically prefers to write fiction rather than fact. José’s genre of choice is thrillers, but he likes to throw in a twist of romance into the mix. His works include novels and short stories in both English and Spanish. He’s a member of the Short Fiction Writers Guild and the International Thriller Writers where he also serves as the Thriller Roundtable Coordinator and contributor editor their official e-zine The Big Thrill.

Website at: www.jhbogran.com

Facebook: www.facebook.com/jhbogran

Twitter: @JHBogran

Goodreads: http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4307673.J_H_Bogran

Amazon author page: https://www.amazon.com/author/jhbogran

Firefall buy links:

Rebel E Publishers: http://rebelepublishers.com/about/our-books/firefall/

Amazon US and Amazon UK

Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/355941

Quick Fire At The Slaughterhouse: Interview With Paul D Brazill

Paul Brazill has two new books out, Gumshoe and Snapshots. If you want a dose of hard core Noir delivered with the characteristic cultural referencing Brazill does so well snatch them up. And there’s more to come from Brazill with Italian publisher Atlantis. Paul met me at The Slaughterhouse where we talked about his new releases and Noir.

Tell us about Gumshoe and Snapshots.

Gumshoe is the blackly comic story of Peter Ord, a divorced teacher who decides to become a private detective in a fading town in the north-east of England. Farce and tragi-comedy ensue.

Snapshots is a short collection of flash fiction dating from 2008 up to today.

How Noir would you say they are?

Well, if noir is about losers, as Otto Penzler said, then Gumshoe is as noir as it gets since the protagonist Peter Ord shuffles through life tripping himself up wherever he goes. A lot of the stories in Snapshots could be considered noir although there is humour in a few of them. But then there’s humour in noir, isn’t there? Chaplin said that “Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot.”



What is it that causes these characters to lose?

Self-sabotage. Self-destructive impulses. The inability to resist the urge to board a runaway train.

What else is on the cards for you this year?

I’ve a few irons in the fire. I have a couple of stories coming up in some hot anthologies.

There’s a flash story called The Skull Ring in the hot new EC Comics inspired print magazine Nightmare Illustrated, which should be out in the next month or so.

The last two chapters of the international noir novella that I’ve written for the Italian publishers Atlantis/ Lite Editions will be published soon-ish. The first three parts took place in Warsaw, Madrid and Granada. The last two are set in Toulouse and Cambridge. The first story- Red Esperanto – has been accepted for inclusion in The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime 11, by the way.

And there are a couple of secret projects that I hope will come to fruition in the New Year.

Thanks for the interview Richard.

Thank you Paul for a tight and insightful interview.

Links:

Gumshoe will be available on Amazon platforms soon.

Snapshots can be had at Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com

Paul D. Brazill is the author of Gumshoe, Guns Of Brixton and Roman Dalton – Werewolf PI. He was born in England and lives in Poland. He is an International Thriller Writers Inc member whose writing has been translated into Italian, Polish and Slovene. He has had writing published in various magazines and anthologies, including The Mammoth Books of Best British Crime 8,10 and 11, alongside the likes of Ian Rankin, Neil Gaiman and Lee Child. He has edited a few anthologies, including the best-selling True Brit Grit – with Luca Veste. He blogs here.

Chin Wag At The Slaughterhouse: Interview With Lawrence Block

Lawrence Block is the author of countless mystery and suspense novels. He has written award-winning fiction for half a century, including A Drop Of The Hard Stuff. He has a new novel out, Hit Me, about a hired killer. Lawrence met me at The Slaughterhouse where we talked about his latest release and the publishing industry.

Tell us about Hit Me.

Hit Me is the fifth book about Keller, a hired killer. I wrote a short story about him in 1989 and, well, one thing led to another. He’s a wistful, introspective fellow, a passionate stamp collector, and the Urban Lonely Guy of assassins, and I seem to find him sufficiently compelling to go on writing about him over the years. The fourth book, Hit and Run, ended with him married and a partner in a construction business in post-Katrina New Orleans. I figured he was retired. I seem to have been misinformed.

Do you think killers are collectors and what stops collectors stepping over that line?

No, I think Keller’s an anomaly.

Do you think the best detectives have strong criminal shadows?

In life or in fiction? A cop has to be able to think like a crook. Beyond that, one is what one is.

Do you think too much crime fiction sanitises crime?

I don’t think fiction has any effect on much of anything, so whether it paints a realistic picture of crime—or anything else—seems beside the point. That’s not necessarily its goal. All that matters is whether a given book works for a given reader.

How has your experience writing erotica helped your career?

For awhile it made my description of sexual episodes far more circumspect; I was reacting to what I’d written earlier. And I went through a long stretch where I wanted to disassociate myself from that early work. I found it comforting that they hadn’t been printed on acid-free paper.

But, you know, the hell with that. I’ve brought much of my erotic work back into print—or the electronic equivalent thereof—and people are reading the books, and enjoying them, and who am I to judge?

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

It probably tells us more about Graham Greene than about writers—or ice or splinters, come to think of it.

Is the publishing industry in trouble with the rise of Amazon and the E Book?

The industry is changing at a whirlwind pace, and anyone who purports to tell you what it’ll be like in five years—or five months, or five minutes—is guessing. I think it’s a fine time to be a writer, and a fine time to be a reader—but I’m not sure it’s such a good time to be a publisher. The big houses are becoming irrelevant, and I don’t see this turning around. But, like everybody else, I’m just guessing.

I sold my first story in 1957, so I’ve been doing this for a while. Everything I wrote under my own name, and most of what I published under pseudonyms, is presently eVailable. I’ve done much of the ePublishing myself, and I’m neither tech-savvy nor a marketing genius. Anybody can do it, and most people can do it more effectively.

Books and readers can find one another as never before. So how necessary are traditional publishers? My favorite argument of theirs is that they’re the gatekeepers, maintaining the standards of the literary landscape, keeping us from being swamped with crap. It’s a nice story, and then you look at their lists, and their argument goes, um, down the drain.

Would you say you are more Noir than thriller writer?

I think judgments and assessments of that nature are for other people to make. I just write books, and I don’t know that they run greatly to type. Some are light, some are dark, some are suspenseful, some are not.

What are you working on at the moment?

Nothing, as I’ve just finished a new book. About which, alas, I cannot tell you a thing at present.

I thought I might have retired. A few years ago I had the feeling that I was done writing novels. I’ve certainly written enough of them. But there were a couple of books after that. And then I once again felt as though I was probably finished.

Still, I had the urge to write another book. And I went on a five-week cruise, from which I’ve just now returned, with the intention of either getting a book written or knowing for certain that I was done. Well, I came home with a book, and the half dozen people who’ve read it say it’s one of my best.

Which is not to say that there’ll be more. But there’s no gainsaying the fact that I’ve made an absolute dog’s breakfast of retirement. Eventually, though, I hope to get the hang of it…

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

Same advice I give everyone: Write to please yourself.

Thank you Lawrence for a perceptive and informative interview.

Links:

Hit Me can be had just about anywhere – here are a few locations: Amazon US, Amazon UK, Book Depository, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, iBookstore, Sony

For more of Lawrence Block’s books, see his Amazon US and UK author pages and find some real gems at his bookstore, “LB’s Bookstore on eBay”

Find Lawrence Block at his blog and website , on his Facebook Fan Page and Twitter – @LawrenceBlock