Q&A with Tyler Dilts
If you’re the sort who picks through the Kindle bestseller lists for something new to read, you couldn’t have missed Tyler Dilts and his new novel, A Cold and Broken Hallelujah, in August.
A selection for the prestigious Kindle First program, where books get a digital rollout a month before their official release, the book went directly to No. 1 in the entire store and stayed there awhile. Now just days into its official release, it continues to burn brightly on the bestseller lists and has racked up impressive reviews.
Tyler, a buddy since we met at an Amazon party in New York a few years back, was kind enough to entertain some questions about the new book and the literary sensibility he brings to the police-procedural genre. Read the Q&A, then read the book. You’ll be glad you did.
You’ve created a very human character in Det. Danny Beckett. In A King of Infinite Space , he’s doing his job while dealing with the loss of his wife and family, and in The Pain Scale , it’s the chronic pain after a yearlong medical leave. In what condition do we find Danny at the beginning of A Cold and Broken Hallelujah?
At the opening of the new novel, Danny’s come to terms with much of what was haunting him in the first two books, but a murder he investigates—a homeless man who is burned to death by a group of teenagers—tests his resolve, especially in mourning his late wife, who also died by burning. Danny’s the kind of detective who carries the weight of the past with him. It’s a quality that is certainly not healthy for him, but it keeps him connected to the victims of the crimes he investigates and allows him to maintain a sense of empathy. He knows that it is his greatest strength as a detective, so he can’t bring himself to let go, even though he’d be healthier and happier if he did.
Your Amazon profile notes that you once dreamed of following your father’s path and becoming a police officer. What did he do, and when did you realize that your aspirations lay elsewhere?
My father was Sheriff’s Deputy for Los Angeles County. He worked in quite a few different capacities—in the county jails, on patrol, as a trainer at the academy, and as a detective. I think I realized that I wouldn’t follow in his footsteps sometime in high school. But I didn’t know what path I would take until I got to college and discovered theatre. I got my BA in Acting and Directing and spent several years working in theatre in LA. I’m a big guy and found myself getting typecast, so a good friend, after hearing me complaining about the fourth time I played Lennie in Of Mice and Men, suggested that I start writing my own plays. That led me back to grad school, this time in English Lit and Creative Writing. In a way, writing about Danny Beckett feels like coming full circle and returning to that desire to follow in my father’s footsteps.
What’s the role of Long Beach in your writing? You don’t pull any punches in your depiction of it, but it’s also clear there’s a lot of love there.
Tyler Dilts
I’ve always loved crime fiction. When I was working on my MA in English Lit, I always tried to keep that interest quiet. There was a lot of genre-disparaging going on around me, and I hoped to avoid getting pegged as a lightweight by my grad school peers. Around that time, though, I discovered James Lee Burke and realized that crime fiction could be every bit as “literary” as the stuff I was studying in my classes. It seems absurd to me now that I ever thought any differently, but I did. Burke was the first author who really showed me that it was possible to combine the literary quality and the genre elements that captivated me in the same work. He showed me it wasn’t an either/or proposition (dozens of other authors would show me the same thing when I read them—but Burke showed me first). One of my favorite elements of his work is the way he captures the settings his characters inhabit. The setting in any Burke novel is an intrinsic part of the narrative and characterization. Place is every bit as important and vital as any other element of the story. That was something that I really connected to as a reader, and I remember thinking very clearly and specifically when I started writing about Danny Beckett that I wanted to do the same thing for Long Beach that James Lee Burke did for New Iberia, Louisiana. Fortunately, I was naive enough at the time not to realize the challenge I was setting for myself. I don’t know if I’ll ever come close to reaching that ideal, but I am happy to report that three books into the Long Beach Homicide series, I finally managed one paragraph that I feel lives up to the challenge I set for myself. Maybe I can manage two paragraphs in the next book.
What are the challenges of developing a character over a series of books?
It actually feels like a great luxury to be able to develop a number of characters over a series of books. It’s very enjoyable to be able to explore so much more of a character’s life and backstory than would be possible in a single book. One of the long-term goals of the series is to actually make several supporting characters protagonists in future novels. The next in the series, for example, will feature Danny’s partner, Jennifer Tanaka, as the lead. That’s something Ed McBain did very well with his 87th Precinct novels. That said, there are challenges as well. The biggest for me is keeping everyone’s backstory straight. I remember the big events, of course, but I can’t seem to write a chapter that doesn’t force me to dig into one of the previous books to find out what color someone’s eyes were or what kind of car someone drove or some other small detail. I’ve started keeping notebooks to record details like these. I wish I had started that at the beginning of the first book.
What drew you to the police procedural as an artistic vehicle? How daunting is it to get the particular details of police work right?
I didn’t realize this until long after I’d started writing A King of Infinite Space, but I think a significant aspect of my interest in police procedurals comes from my father. He died when I was only five. My life-long interest in cop stories comes from trying to understand what my dad did and through understanding that, to understand something more about who he was. I discovered Joseph Wambaugh as a teenager, and, much later, heard Michael Connelly quote him: “What’s interesting is not how cops work on cases, but how cases work on cops.” That’s what fascinated me about cop stories. It wasn’t so much the mysteries of the crimes themselves, but rather how those mysteries affected the investigators that fascinated me. And I knew when I started thinking about writing my first novel, it would be a cop story. I didn’t understand much of this at that point, though. My thinking was simply that my dad had been a cop, I know a lot of cops, I read a lot of stuff about cops, I should write about cops. It was only over the years of working on the series that I really came to understand how deeply personal my connection to these novels and their subject matter was.
As for the technical aspect of writing procedurals, it can be very daunting to get the details right. I had an advantage knowing cops when I was young, so I was able to do a pretty good job with what I call “cop culture” from the outset. The personalities, the language, things like that. The investigative details were another matter. I educated myself as much as I could with criminal justice and investigative procedure textbooks, and I rely on on a few people with real world experience to get the details right. And that’s something that I take very seriously—I go for authenticity and believability in all the investigative procedure. I’m very picky and I know nothing spoils a police story for me more quickly than an unrealistic detail. I sweat the small stuff. I actually had quite a bit of anxiety while we were editing A Cold and Broken Hallelujah because some of the things the detectives do in the story were rendered unconstitutional by a recent Supreme Court decision. I seriously considered re-writing a few hundred pages, but then I discovered that I could make myself feel better by referring to the book as a “historical novel.”
You teach writing at the college level. In what ways does that help inform or shape your own work?
I’m really very fortunate to have the day job that I do because I genuinely enjoy it. But also because it makes me a better writer. I get to teach a lot of fiction writing classes, and because our primary work is analyzing the students’ work, I wrestle every day with the same questions of craft that they do. I get to see what works and what doesn’t. And in discussing these issues, I usually feel like I gain as much as they do. This is a real benefit, and very much the same one I received while working on my MFA. Seeing problems and talking through them and figuring out how to fix them really helps me keep my own craft in tune.
The only real downside is that it’s a time-consuming job that you can’t help but bring home with you. It’s not the kind of thing you can leave behind when you clock out. I understand the benefits of that kind of occupation, but for me, the ability to spend most of my time talking and thinking about stories is very helpful when I sit down to write.
What are you working on now?
The next novel is a stand-alone thriller titled No Straight Thing. The title comes from a quote from Kant: “Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.” It’s about kidnapping, snipers, drones, drug cartels, and fracking. It’s something different for me and that seemed really exciting when I was planning it, but now that I’m actually working on it, it is pretty much just scaring the crap out of me.
