Dave Zeltserman's Blog, page 54

Where my ideas come from: Dying Memories

After seeing how difficult it had been to sell The Caretaker of Lorne Field and A Killer's Essence, books that I thought should've been easy sales to the Big 6 publishers but kept getting blocked because they were deemed too different, I decided to write a more conventional thriller, but one with enough of a noirish edge so I'd be happy with it. So now I needed both an idea and a plot, and after some brainstorming hit upon a very cool idea. I needed to do some research on nanotechnology to better understand and formulate this idea, and while I don't want to ruin the story by giving this away now, the idea I came up with is something I'm convinced that will be developed in the future. Maybe not today, or next year, but give it 10 years or so. And it will be a scarier world when that happens.



So now that I had myidea, I needed to work that into a plot, and I did so by steeping it deeply with paranoia, and Dying Memories was born. I wrote it to follow the standard thriller conventions: shorter chapters than I usually write with a kind of cliffhanger at the end of each of these, and like my other books, lots of twists and ever escalating danger. But I also gave it enough of a noirish edge so it would stand out as a book that my current readers would also be happy with. My friend, Vincent Zandri, was having a lot of success with the ebooks that StoneGate Ink were publishing, so I decided with Dying Memories to play more in the ebook world and have StoneGate publish this one also.

Where my ideas come from: Killer

When Serpent's Tail told me they wanted to publish Pariah, I threw out the idea of a book based loosely on Boston hitman, John Martorano, as a third book to make Small Crimes, Pariah, and now what would be Killer, a 'man out of prison' noir trilogy. Martorano had killed 20 people and then was able to serve out only 12 years in prison when he cut a deal to give evidence against Whitey Bulger. I had no idea what this third book would really be about, but I wanted to have a 2-book deal with Serpent's Tail so I'd get to write a book for once without having to hustle afterwards to sell it.



I never had any intention of writing a 'man out of prison' noir trilogy in the first place. I started Pariah with Kyle Nevin leaving prison because I thought it would be an interesting contrast to what I did in Small Crimes since Nevin is almost the opposite of Joe Denton. While Denton is deep in denial as to how much damage he's caused and what he really is, Nevin is just a force of nature--someone who remorselessly leaves death and destruction wherever he goes.



So now that I had this third book that I needed to write, the trilogy took shape as everything just kind of coalesced. It just ended up fitting so well as you had each protagonist going down their own paths--for Joe Denton it was a search for redemption, for Kyle Nevin it was money, revenge and to reestablish himself as a man to be feared, and for Leonard March, my ex-hitman protagonist of Killer, it was a search for self identity.



So while I had no clue what Killer was really going to be about (other than this very vague notion that it would be loosely about someone like Martorano) when I threw out the idea to Serpent's Tail, I ended up both creating and finishing off my noir trilogy with what many (myself included) feel is the best book of the three.

Where my ideas come from: A Killer's Essence

The ninth book I wrote, A Killer's Essence, will be published this September and will be my 10th book published (with Blood Crimes and Julius Katz and Archie self-published as ebooks). The original title I had for this was Essence, and my publisher and I went through a long list of titles before settling on "A Killer's Essence". While very different than my "man out of prison" noir books, this and my still unpublished, Murder Club, are easily my two best crime novels, and I'm in the process of wrapping up a film deal for this one which I should be able to talk about more in a few weeks.



So the idea for A Killer's Essence came from a very cool idea that hit me. With the book coming out very soon, I don't want to ruin it by talking about what this idea was, but when you read the book you'll see.



So now that I had this idea, I had to work it into a story. I started this in November of 2007. The Red Sox had just won their second World Series in three year. 2004 was a cathartic moment for millions of Red Sox fans, and making it even more so was the way they came back from the dead against the Yankees in the ALCS. Whether this was a conceit on my part or not, I wanted to center this book during the 2004 ALCS, and a good part of the book takes place then with the Sox-Yankees series being more than just a backdrop but in a way integrated into the story. The book didn't seem to fit the Boston area, so I placed in the New York (Brooklyn and Manhattan respectively), and with it set there, I got to have some fun and show the ALCS (and the Yankees massive chokejob) from the point of view of a diehard Yankees fan.



So far I really haven't talked much about what A Killer's Essence is about. Let's just say this is my most character driven novel, and in a way it's about two very damaged people, Stan Green, a decent man and a good cop whose personal life is spinning out of control, and Zachary Lynch, a recluse who is barely able to fit in this world, and how they ultimately end up helping each other.



When I finished A Killer's Essence, I was sure I had a book that the Big 6 publishers would want to buy, and I showed it to an agent who used to be an editor for Gold Medal. She told me if she was still at Gold Medal she'd buy it in a heartbeat, but that the book was too gritty and different for publishers today. I ended up finding an agent, Matt Bialer at Sanford J. Greenburger, who fell in love with this book and ended up selling it and The Caretaker of Lorne Field to Overlook Press. Maybe it is too gritty for the Big 6, but I'll be finding out in the next few weeks whether it's too gritty for today's crime readers.



One last note, Matt, who lives in Brooklyn, was convinced when he read the book that I must've lived there at one time also because of how authentic it felt. Nope. If I ever lived there it was in a previous life, and if that was the case, I hope I wasn't a Yankees fan then!

Julius and Archie could use a little help...

Julius Katz and Archie are currently engaged in the case of the missing tags, and they could use your help... 15 seconds should do...



I read recently how Amazon has these hidden groups that are directly related to tagging, such as mystery series, and that these can have a major impact on book sales. So if you want to give Julius and Archie a little bit of help, please click on the tags already in place for these two books (about halfway down the Amazon book page), and if you can click the Like button at the top even better! Thanks! I know Julius and the little guy will appreciate your help.



Julius Katz Mysteries

Julius Katz And Archie



My series of posts of where my book ideas came from will continue tomorrow with my ninth book.

Where my ideas come from: Blood Crimes

Back in 1997 I was still trying to work with the agent who had given me the Silence of the Lambs ripoff plot that I transformed into Bad Thoughts, and now he gave me this really cheesy vampire biker script that he wrote that he wanted me to novelize. There was no way I could've written a decent book off the script he gave me, but it got me thinking about putting vampires in a noir world--although not supernatural vampires, but more along the lines of the ones from I am Legend where a virus creates vampire-like changes in a person. The more I thought about this, the more excited I got by it, and I worked out an extremely harboiled/noir script based on this idea. When I showed this new script to my agent, he was not happy and that ended up being the final split between us.



Fast forward to 2006. I'd just finished Pariah, and my Blood Crimes script (then titled Vampire Scripts) had been on my mind for the last 9 years where I'd been wanting to turn it into a series of novels, and so I wrote my 8th book. Unfortunately, my agent at the time had her hands full trying to sell Pariah and Caretaker, so she didn't want to take this on. When I later switched agents, he fell in love with it, as did a lot of younger editors we sent it to, but the problem was the vampire genre had been hijacked into teen/women romance genre with the success of Twilight and True Blood, so it became impossible to sell a hardcore crime/horror vampire novel. The book also generated a lot of excitement with the film people I showed it to, but we ran into that same problem where until the Twilight and True Blood dominance wears off, there's no way of doing anything with it in Hollywood.



Anyway, I decided to put this out myself as an ebook, and reader reaction has been great. I know the book is going to upset any Twilight fans who stumble on it, but I'm getting emails from readers who tell me they hate vampire books but love this book. I'm also seeing readers really digging seeing vampires taken back to real horror, and written in a tough-minded violent adult style. Blood Crimes is the first of what I'm hoping to be a 5-book series.

Where my ideas come from: Pariah

I wrote Pariah in the early Spring of 2006. For years I'd been fascinated by the stories I'd been hearing and reading about Whitey Bulger and had been wanting to write a crime novel based on him, although I hadn't figured out what angle to use. At this point I had finally sold Small Crimes to Serpent's Tail after having the book rejected by every NY publisher, and was still struggling to find a home for Outsourced.



What finally pushed me into writing Pariah were two things: (1) seeing all these South Boston mobster tell-all books come out in early 2006 (2) the Kayva Viswanathan plagiarism scandal with Little Brown. Both of these sent me into a rage-filled writing frenzy, and I ended up writing Pariah as a mix of crime and what I politely like to say is a satire on the publishing industry, although it's really a fuck you to New York publishing. I ended up writing Pariah in 6 weeks, which is the quickest I've written a book, and while this will probably surprise anyone who has read Pariah since it's such a fast read, this is not a thin book--it weighs in at 95,000 words.



For those who've read Pariah, you probably think I also used the OJ Simpson "If I Did It" story. Nope. I had Pariah written well before that story came out. I just didn't think it would be possible for a NY publisher to behave as outrageously as I had my fictional publisher, but once again NY proved me wrong.



While Pariah made a number of end of the year best lists, including The Washington Post's best books of 2009, I'll always be grateful to Serpent's Tail for publishing this, because there's not a single New York publisher who would've ever had the balls to publish this.

Where my ideas come from: The Caretaker of Lorne Field

My wife and I bought a house where we had what I think was a black locust with a root system that ran all over our front yard and the side of our house. Every day, 100s of weeds would pop up from this root system, and they'd grow fast, maybe growing as much as a foot after 4-5 days, and then they'd develop thorns. IF left unattended I'd have a forest of these black locusts, so every day I'd pull out 100s of them. After a few years of doing this I told my wife I was going to write a book about these weeds. Maybe I was joking, maybe I was serious, I can't say for sure now, but when she told me I was nuts, I had no choice, I had to write the book then!



I'd like to thank Paul Tremblay and John Langon For their write up yesterday on The Caretaker of Lorne Field.

Where my ideas come from: Bad Karma

Bad Karma was the 5th book I wrote, and was the 4th one of mine published.



I wrote this back in 2005, and at the time Fast Lane had been published here and in Italy, but Bad Thoughts, Small Crimes and Outsourced were still all unsold, and I decided to write a sequel to Bad Thoughts to help generate more interest in that book. At the end of Bad Thoughts, I had Shannon and Susan in Boulder, Colorado, and decided to keep them there. After the hell I put them through in Bad Thoughts, I also wanted them to be back together and happy, and I wanted Bill well along the way of healing himself psychically from all the damage that had been done to him. My goal from the beginning was to write this as a more conventional hardboiled PI novel so it would be an easier sell.



So now that I had my goals, I had to come up with an idea for a plot. At the time a couple of people I knew had gotten messed up by this cult that operates what looks like these seemingly harmless yoga studios, so I wanted to use that, especially with the cults that were in operation in Boulder when I was there from '78 - '82. I had also written a PI story that I was never quite happy with and never sent out, but I liked its plot, so I decided to salvage that from the story and use it for Bad Karma. Finally, I go back to Boulder occasionally, and I wanted to write this as almost an homage to the Boulder I used to know as opposed to what Boulder has become.



Bad Karma is my only somewhat conventional hardboiled PI novel (I say somewhat because there's a lot of new age stuff in it, including a fair amount dreamwork, lucid dreaming, etc.). I never really pushed Bad Karma because the lousy timing of it coming out weeks before Pariah, but it's been really interesting the way readers have responded to it. Fans of Fast Lane and Small Crimes seemed almost betrayed and angry by this book, while readers unfamiliar with me tended to like this book quite a bit, at least from the emails I received and the reviews the book garnered. Well, it's been brought back as an e-book, and I hope people give this one a chance, accept that not everything I write is going to be some pitch-black noirish journey (although at it's core, Bad Karma still has a very dark plot), and if you do read this, let me know what you think.

Where my ideas come from: Outsourced

I'm writing these blog posts in the order in which I wrote my books, so while Outsourced was my 8th book to be published, it was the 3rd book I wrote.



The idea for Outsourced came from several places. I need to put this in some context. I wrote Outsourced in 2004, and at that time I was very disappointed that Small Crimes was having no luck finding a publisher. Second, I'd been a software engineer for about 20 years and the industry's push to outsourcing was something that I was keenly aware of and interested in. Third my short Nigerian email scam story, More Than a Scam, was really my first success in the great reader response it was getting and making honorable mention in Otto Penzler's Best American Mystery Stories anthology, and so I thought I hit on the secret to writing something that will grab people's attention and sell more easily--be the first out there with a very topical theme. So I decided for my 4th book to write a bank heist novel with my bank robbers being software engineers who'd been made obsolete (and desperate) due to their industry's push to outsource their jobs.



The results of my using outsourcing as an underlying theme for the book ended up being mixed. On the plus side, it immediately attracted the attention of Hollywood, and eventually led to a film deal, and it's now looking very likely this will be going into production soon, but editors at different publishing houses who tried to acquire the book were being shot down by their editorial boards because of the fear that outsourcing wouldn't be an issue by the time the book would be published in 2006. It wasn't until I stripped out most of the outsourcing theme and made the book more of a pure bank heist novel that I was able to sell it to Serpent's Tail. This also turned out to be my most widely translated book, with it currently having been translated to German, Dutch and Lithuanian, with French and Thai coming.

Where my ideas come from: Small Crimes

Small Crimes came about from two newspaper articles I read. One was about a Sheriff's office in Denver in the 60s where they were robbing businesses blind, including an incident of stealing a safe they couldn't break open, loading it onto a pickup truck, and not securing it well enough so that it fell off into the middle of the street. The other was about a cop who committed a crime very similar to the one that my fictional Joe Denton did, and then somehow this cop not only serving out an extremely light sentence in County Jail, but then getting his pension once he was released. With that first newspaper story, Sheriff Dan Pleasant and his boys were born, as well as the extreme corruption within my fictional Bradley, Vermont. Joe Denton and his situation came out of my merging the second newspaper story onto this corrupt environment and playing a lot of what-if games to try to figure out how a bent cop committing such a heinous act could be treated so lightly.



Once I had this idea for Small Crimes (and the title came to me early on and just felt very right), I set about to write a more modern noir novel than Fast Lane which would be thematically centered around the idea of redemption and whether you reach a point where it's no longer obtainable. Fast Lane drew a fair amount of comparisons to Jim Thompson, and while I love Thompson's psycho noir novels (and could probably hold an honorary degree in them with all the times I've read and studied them), I set about to write Small Crimes to be very different than a Thompson novel. It kind of surprised me later when some readers and reviewers still compared Small Crimes to Jim Thompson. When I reread Small Crimes I couldn't find a single vestige of Thompson anywhere in it, and Joe Denton is really the antithesis of Thompson psycho noir antihero. What also surprised me was the heavy Dan Marlowe influence that had worked its way into the book. I hadn't realized this while writing it, but I guess it made sense since The Name of the Game is Death is probably my favorite noir novel.