Complete turnaround

I can’t fool myself.  Like any writer, I’d like to think at least a few people are reading what I write.

But as a novelist I struggle with a huge disadvantage, one that few writers overcome.  I can’t write the same book over and over.  I can’t even work in the same genre.  

Someone who can write the same book over and over is someone who gets read.  Someone who writes in at least the same genre over and over gets read.

But someone who writes what I think is mainstream fiction one day (CHINA BLUES & CHASING WOMEN) , then historical fiction the next (that was one long day: it took seven years to research and compose THE SECRET MAGDALENE and three years to create FLOW DOWN LIKE SILVER, HYPATIA OF ALEXANDRIA) can’t build a readership.  

So then what do I do?  Instead of building on the interest of a major publisher when Random House bought my Magdalene and encouraged my Hypatia, I have to go off and write HOUDINI HEART.  I didn’t know it was horror as it appeared on my screen each day, fully formed in the mind of its nameless lead character.  But apparently it is.  The Horror Writers of America certainly saw it that way else why ask me to submit it for a Bram Stoker Award for the Best Horror Novel of 2011?  It didn’t win but it came horrifyingly close.

And now what do I do?  I’ve been taken over by a would-be noir private detective.  He calls himself Sam Russo, he was dragged up in a Home for Kids Nobody Wants, he lives in Stapleton, a town nobody knows, on Staten Island, a place nobody takes seriously.  I was born on Staten Island.  I haven’t seen it since.  But Sam has.  

For Sam, it’s the late 1940s, he’s survived the Second World War fighting on the Pacific Front in the last cavalry unit of the US military.  Sam loves horses and horse-racing.  He likes reading dime crime paperbacks in his one room four story walk-up.  He’s crazy for the movies.  Jimmy Cagney.  Edward G. Robinson.  Bogart!  He wants to be Bogie.  He wants to solve crimes.  He wants to be hard-boiled.  He wants to swap wisecracks with great lookin’ dames.  He doesn’t want a dog.

I’ve written three Sam Russo cases, soon to be published in all the latest formats books get out there these days.  SHADOW ROLL is set at the Saratoga racetrack in Saratoga Springs, New York.  Three young jockeys are dead.  The town would like ‘em to stay that way and get on with their lucrative racing season.  Sam wants to solve all three cases like Bogie would.  GOOD DOG, BAD DOG takes him and his new-found friend, the one he’s brought back from Saratoga, up and down Broadway (“The Great White Way”). They’re in and out of one hit show after another looking for a giant killer.  THE GIRL IN THE NEXT ROOM is all about his neighbor Holly.  She has the single room next to his.  Holly is a girl.  Or maybe he isn’t.  Whatever Holly is, Sam and his new friend like her.  They like her a lot.  So when she disappears off her street corner, they take it seriously, very seriously.

Now I’m writing DEAD ON THE ROCKS.  Sam is on a huge first class yacht headed for Florida.  And so is his friend.  Sam hates water.

You see?  As a writer, I’m all over the place.  What next?  A surreal musical film called THE LAST SHOWBOAT?  

I’d ask for professional help, but I love writing. Apparently, I’ll write pretty much anything. Well, maybe not a western. But then, but then… there’s all those pretty horses.