Thomas Pluck writes unflinching fiction with heart. His stories have appeared in Shotgun Honey, Beat to a Pulp, Crimespree Magazine, Plots with Guns, and The Utne Reader. He is co-editor of Lost Children: A Charity Anthology to benefit PROTECT and Children 1st, which collects 30 hard-hitting tales to protect children at risk. He met me at The Slaughterhouse where we talked about Noir and psychopaths.

Do you think Noir without women is a castrated bull?

Men fear weakness, and strong women make weak men feel weaker, because their sexual power can overrule the advantage of physical strength men have over them. Odd choice, mentioning castration. Perhaps a hysterectomy instead? I think you can write a noir story without women, but please don’t ask me to define noir. I like the genre just as much as any other powerful fiction. But I think it’s the kind of thing you know when you see, and means different things to different people. I’ve read some, the classics, Goodis, Cain. Noir can be about reaching too far, beyond our station, and we class the opposite sex in
the same way. “Unattainable,” “too good for him or her,” so sexual tension is natural for a noir story. My favorite noir stories have women in them, not always as fatales or instigators, but as protagonists. It is still a man’s world, so women have higher to reach, and greater stakes.

But to answer the question directly… no.

If you met a psychopath how would you know he was one?

Psychopaths remain an intriguing fictional character type. We cheer them on, the Tom Ripleys. They are fascinating, playing on our fears. There’s actually a test for them. Long ago I read the seminal work by Robert D. Hare entitled Without Conscience. It has slowly become accepted, as people realize that psychopaths are not charming and hungry Hannibal Lecters, but well-camouflaged human predators among us. If they were all killers, we’d identify them rather quickly. There are only so many drainage ditches and crawlspaces for all the bodies. The lack of empathy is the most outstanding characteristic. I’m not sure if I’m a good spotter, it’s something you learn from contact with them. If it was easy, people wouldn’t become victims. There is genuine charm that comes from human empathy, which gives back, and there is the vampiric type that leeches. The giving only goes in one direction. As greed becomes seen as a virtue, they will become harder and harder to spot.

How would you like to be remembered?

If you want to be remembered, don’t underestimate the ability of one man and a gun to change history. I’m going a more difficult route. I want to be remembered fondly, so I’m writing about what angers me. That can usually be boiled down to the abuse of power. It’s
everywhere, and in many ways it has become accepted. Well, not by me.

Where do you see the abuse of power at its worst and what do you attribute it to?

That’s an easy one, that of parent over the child. I’m not a psychologist. I don’t know why people do what they do. I think bullying is epidemic in western society, and not just schoolyard stereotypes. We believe that might makes right. There was a time when we believed reason, intelligence and humanity were superior to strength, but now the ends justify the means, and a Calvinist view of success is in place; whatever one did to achieve success is acceptable, and any criticism is punishment of that success.

The weak are belittled by the powerful. Power is a drug, and throwing your weight around is quite thrilling. When you’re beaten down, the easiest relief is to find someone weaker to beat down yourself. We call it the pecking order, but that comes from chickens. If we can’t rise above a critter than can live for weeks with its head cut off, we’re in trouble.

Tell us about your novel.

Louisiana boy Jay Corso maxed out of Rahway prison 25 years after taking the fall for the murder of the school bully in a quiet New Jersey suburb. The town’s hero cop said his parents would rot in jail if he didn’t, and now Jay wants answers. When he shakes things up with his misfit friends and their families, his two fists unravel a twisted tale of small town secrets and good old Jersey corruption. Jay wants payback, and it’s time to bury the hatchet!

It’s about a group of children who were bullied and took matters into their own hands. One of them paid for it, and the story begins the day he is released from prison, looking for revenge and answers. It’s a bad-ass out of prison story at heart, dealing with New Jersey’s unique flavor of corruption, organized crime, and the lasting effects of bullying and emotional abuse.

Jay Corso is a Cajun boy whose family moved to New Jersey for reasons he’s never known. He’s slow to anger but explodes when provoked, beyond all reason. You’ll get a taste of him in the next issue of Needle, in a story called “Gumbo Weather.”

You are paid a sum of money to carry out a hit. How would you do it to avoid
detection?

A gentleman never asks, and a lady never tells!

If I was to hit a complete stranger I would find an old knife or tool that couldn’t be traced to me and wipe it down, run it through the dishwasher to get any stray pubes off it, and wrap it in plastic bags and tape it up. A hammer would do. I am a big man with a beard. I
stand out. I buy a clipboard and some yellow triplicate at the office supply store, and wear work boots and a drab uniform. I am a delivery man.

If you are not paranoid like me, you have awful situational awareness. I buy a pay as you go cell phone with cash. I follow you to work. In the parking lot, as you are getting out of your car, I call your number. I leave the phone in my pocket. I hold the hammer under my
clipboard. I ask you where the delivery entrance is. You are distracted. The hammer comes down. My work uniform and gloves go into a donation bin.

Even better, I read a great blog post by a female crime writer whose rear wheel well was smoking. A man tried to get her to pull off to a secluded street to assist. She didn’t get out of her car, luckily. A mechanic later told her the car was fine, and the man had probably
sprayed her brake disc with WD-40 to create the smoke. That would work quite well in the right area. You don’t want your victim pulling into a gas station. If they don’t have a garage, spray the tires before they leave home, then follow them. Start honking. Offer a fire extinguisher. Then bash their head in with it.

If you have time, eat an everything bagel over their corpse. The CSI guys will spend hours cataloging that shit.

Do you think revenge is lawless justice?

Justice is not an objective term. The man I strangle for killing my kin, has kin of his own. Who call me the murderer. Revenge is a dish best served in fiction.

I love revenge stories, I must say. In civilized society they exist as wish fulfillment, because we trade our ability to exact personal revenge to live under the protective umbrella of the rule of law. Look at famous blood feuds, fought for centuries, where the original crime is long forgotten.

When I am wronged, I want revenge. It is a self-destructive impulse. I’ve learned over the years to control my temper, but my characters have not. Jay has a hard time learning the consequences of revenge, even after serving 25 years in prison for it. Denny, from “Junkyard Dog” at Plots With Guns, and other stories in Crimespree and Pulp Modern, is less realistic. He’s kind of my urban myth character, a hulking beast with a good heart who metes out his own justice.

I can’t say whether my hands would go unbloodied if someone killed or hurt someone I love. Whether justice was served to the state’s satisfaction or not.

How do you see the concept represented in Art?

When I visited the Louvre, I only had half an hour. I saw the Mona Lisa, the Winged Victory of Samothrace, and Hammurabi’s Code. The lex talionis, law of the fang. The Idol of Vengeance. An eye for an eye. A tooth for a tooth.

It is either human nature, or so deeply ingrained in my own that I think it so. I have forgiven those who have wronged me. I’m not a monster. With me, revenge is born of fear. Fear that harm would come to my wife, my family, and I could not protect them. That fear inspires rage. My temples are on fire just thinking of it, now. And that rage is what makes me write.

Graham Greene said writers have a piece of ice in their hearts. What do you
make of his observation?

It wouldn’t be very interesting reading stories written by someone who didn’t. A writer is a jealous and vengeful God who sows pestilence on Creation. A story is struggle of some sort, whether it’s two starvelings wrestling to thrust an icicle in the other’s eye or an invalid pondering the decisions she’s made in life. It doesn’t have to be a cold story in itself, but that struggle comes from somewhere. You imagine a character, and watch them grow in your mind, and then you break their heart because it tells a good story. That’s pretty cold stuff.

William Burroughs used addiction in his fictions as an analogy of the power
mechanisms at work in US and Western society. How do you view his
interpretation?

It’s a very apt metaphor. An addictive drug is the perfect product. It has no intrinsic value, it is consumed immediately and the consumer wants more and more. Like Pepsi or the eponymous Coke. As everything becomes more disposable, it nears the status of a drug.
With the abolition of slavery and indentured servitude, they have to keep us working somehow. Imagine if people could live off the land, it wouldn’t be very productive. Why would we sell you our labor, the best years of our lives, if we could eke by and live a life of leisure.

Americans can’t imagine a life without work. It’s our one true religion.

Thank you Thomas for a perceptive and memorable interview.

Thomas Pluck links
Website
Twitter @tommysalami
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I reviewed JD Mader’s Joe Cafe here not so long ago. It really is a brilliant Noir read. The novel centres on the kidnapping of lap dancer Sara by psychotic killer Chet Mooney and is compellingly told from the opening line until the finish. JD Mader has a band called The Flying Black Hats. His next novel The Biker is due out shortly. He met me at The Slaughterhouse where we talked about addiction and the economy.

How does your music relate to your writing?

When I was young, I wrote stories. It wasn’t something I took all that seriously. I started writing professionally when I was fourteen, covering sports for the local paper. I also wrote feature articles and eventually convinced them to give me a weekly column. I’m still surprised this happened. About this same time, I started playing punk rock. I was in a band with my best friends and we were not very good musicians. I did, it turned out, have a talent for writing lyrics. I was a bit of an angsty teenager, and I wrote lyrics constantly, purging my anger and frustration onto the page. My best friend, Pat, usually wrote the music, I wrote the words and played guitar. That was our arrangement then…it is still the basic arrangement now at age 33, although I write some music now, too. Our musical tastes have changed a bit, and we live in different cities, so the amount of music we write has diminished. I digress (god, how I hate that phrase).

I did not like school. I enjoyed reading and writing. I made good grades in English class. I made life difficult for my teachers. Most of the time, I sat in the back of the classroom and wrote lyrics. I would write up to five “songs” a day and then give the wrinkled notebook pages and scraps of paper to Pat. Many of them disappeared. Some made it into actual songs. We played local clubs and recorded. We never made much money. We had a lot of fun. In the years since, Pat and I have written songs for pleasure and to share with friends. We are both pretty introverted people, so playing live was always an issue (generally with a solution that involved whiskey or malt liquor). At any rate, music (and the writing of music) is very important to me, but it is something I do mainly for myself. And for Pat. And I write silly songs for my daughter. We have put up a lot of songs on Bandcamp and Last.fm (for free, of course) and have developed a kind of bizarre following of people we do not know from around the globe. We go by the name ‘The Flying Black Hats’. Ah, the wonders of the internet.

Now, to answer your question. I consider fiction to be my ‘writing’ writing, and I didn’t really start to take it seriously until my early twenties. I write non-fiction sometimes. I write music. But I don’t take any of it as seriously as I take fiction writing. You would think that there would be some connection to writing music and writing fiction, but they come from very different places for me. I spend a lot of time on my fiction. When I write lyrics, I write them quickly…stream of consciousness style, generally…and I can’t think of an instance when I have ever ‘edited’ a song. I probably have, but it is not the norm. I either get an idea for a song and write it down, decide I want to write a song and puke out some lyrics, or sit down with Pat and he tells me what he wants me to write about and I do it…it usually takes about five minutes. It is a fast and relatively thoughtless process…quite different than my fiction, which I edit and sculpt until I think it is as close to perfect as I can make it. About the only connection I can think of is that I do pay a lot of mind to the rhythm and flow (poeticism, I guess one could say presumptuously) of my fiction.

I think that writing music is a release for me. Writing fiction is too, but it is a different kind of release. The only apt analogy I can think of is the difference between making a grilled cheese sandwich and making Thanksgiving dinner I like them both quite a bit, but making a grilled cheese is quick and easy. If it is a little over or under cooked, well, so be it. But if I am going to make a meal, then I want it to be perfect. I want the flavors to dance on the tongue. I want the meat cooked perfectly. I want the people eating it to savor every mouthful and I want it to stick with them. I want it to be the best representation of what I am capable of producing. I want exactly the right amount of spices. I want them to eat until they are about to burst.
last.fm/music/The+Flying+Black+Hats
http://theflyingblackhats.bandcamp.com/
from the old punk rock days:
http://www.last.fm/music/The+Patsies

Tell us about Joe Cafe.

I am, primarily, a writer of short stories. ‘Joe Café’ is the second of three novels that I have written. It has been described in many ways. Crime Noir seems to be the general assessment. The first novel I wrote, ‘The Clear’, was kind of a learning process. With ‘Joe Café’ I wanted to try an experiment. I have long believed that my characters do most of the writing, i.e., if they are good, true, fully developed characters, they begin to act the way they should, and that moves the plot. So, I decided to give myself a starting point. A situation. A happening. There is a robbery and brutal murder in a small town diner. That was it. I needed a cop and I needed a bad guy, and they showed up. I needed subplots and secondary characters and a backstory and they presented themselves.

It is impossible to give free reign to your imagination (at least it is for me). As much as I wanted to not think past the next word, I did. The interesting thing was that I saw it unfolding in kind of a boring cliched way, and it annoyed me. The protagonist, Michael,
started to get on my nerves. The antagonist, Chet, starting seeming like a much more interesting, empathetic character than I had given him credit for. And the victim (one of them…the one who lived), Sarah, started becoming much more important.

I wrote ‘Joe Café’ at an interesting point in my life. I’m not sure I could write the same book today. I quickly became interested in the idea of good and evil and the way fate plays a hand in which one you turn out to be…or where you fall on the spectrum since there are no absolutes. I have worked as a teacher for many years, and most of those years I worked with kids from the slums of San Francisco. I was always fascinated at the way these kids were influenced by their surroundings and their home lives. Most of the kids I worked with were great people. They worked hard and struggled to escape the hand they were dealt. One of the smartest kids I ever worked with – a truly brilliant young man and a fabulous writer – went to jail for possession of crack. Last I heard, he was unemployed with kids and living with his mother. It would not surprise me at all if he is back in jail. He was too smart to buy into a system that seemed set up to defeat him. He was his own worst enemy.

I have always found it ironic that Americans are so depressingly naive about the social politics and harsh realities many of our neighbors face. I was raised in a lower middle class family. When I was young, I had a bad attitude and some bad habits. I had some run-ins with the police. I had some close calls. And there is no doubt that I got out of a lot of jams because I was a white kid who lived in a stable family. It is not fair. I talked to my students about it many times. There is not a doubt in my mind that I would have served jail time if I had been black or latino, or if I hadn’t had a family that supported me and exposed me to literature and art and beauty – whether I wanted it or not.

So, these ideas were bouncing around in my head. And I started to think about Chet. He’s a killer. He is a psychopath…but is it his fault? Michael…he is everybody’s “good guy”…but was it earned or handed to him. If you take a kid and put him in the ghetto with two drug addicted parents who don’t give a shit about him. If no one makes him go to school, or he goes to school but the teachers don’t care. If he has no positive role models. If the people he looks up to are hustlers and gang-bangers, then should we really be surprised when he breaks the law…when he has no regard for ‘the system’ that has utterly failed him?

And my bad guy, Chet. If Chet is abused and beaten and shoved around by the world. If he is given a gun and told to kill people for his country. If he does it and copes by hiding behind drugs and alcohol, should we really be surprised that he doesn’t come back home and become a preacher? The converse is true for Michael. It is easy to be the ‘good guy’ when you have never been tested. But what if you suddenly have to deal with the fact that four people were brutally murdered in your town and you don’t have the skills or emotional depth to deal with it?

I have learned the hard way that you cannot force your characters to do things that are out of character. So, the characters in ‘Joe Café’ took over. And it was fun, and interesting, and a little frightening. I wrote things that I was afraid to even think about in real life. But, like Michael, I have been afforded the luxury to live my life away from the brutality that really does happen. People are murdered. People are raped. There are people who kill for fun, or money, or because they truly just don’t care. It is not a comforting thought, but who said reality is supposed to be comforting?

‘Joe Café’ is about a murder in a small town. It is about a man who kills some people, steals some money, and kidnaps a stripper. It is about human frailty and also about incredible strength and the possibility of redemption. People ask me what the book is about, and I have a really hard time answering the question. It is not your typical crime story. It is about people. It is about how people react to life, the good and the bad. Sometimes, the very bad. It is also about beauty. It is raw and ugly, but it is also beautiful. It is very much like real life.

I was (and am) pretty happy with the way it turned out. Mainly, because it turned out to be a completely different novel than the back of my mind had planned.

Do you think addiction is socially engineered or hardwired into character and how does it relate to violence?

This is a very complex question. It also needs to be addressed on several levels. But first, a bit of back story. I have a very addictive personality. I sometimes eat the same thing for lunch for months at a time. I am addicted to reading and writing. I have also been addicted to alcohol and other substances. I have thought a lot about addiction and it is a recurring theme in my work. There are very few people I know who are not addicts. One of my oldest friends is on methadone and still shooting heroin. But there are subtler examples. I know people who are addicted to TV. To food. To exercise. To shopping. I think society is unfair in the way we view what an addiction is. An addiction is something you feel compelled to to so that you will feel good…or ‘not bad’. I have trouble placing harsher judgement on someone who is addicted to cocaine vs. someone who drinks six cups of coffee a day. The results may be different. But the mechanism is the same.

So, to answer the first part of the question. Yes, I think addiction is hardwired. I think it is hardwired into character (whether these characters are flesh and blood or exist on a page is of little concern to me). It is the way animals (and especially humans) operate. We work on reward systems. Whether your reward is a pint of ice cream every night or half a fifth of whiskey is kind of irrelevant. Let me be clear here. I am not saying the results are the same. I would prefer to be around people who binge on ice cream rather than drunks. Drunks do weird shit. The outcome may be different, but again, the way it works is the same. We are appeasing brains that are often to smart for their own good.

My Dad is a good example of the distinction I am trying to make. He doesn’t drink or do drugs. He doesn’t watch TV. He eats well. But there is not a doubt in my mind that he is addicted to exercise. He does more exercise in a day than I do in a month. He ran marathons. He puts hundred of miles on his bike every week. He does Yoga several times a day. What could be the harm in being addicted to something that is “good for you”? Well, the harm is that the results may be good, but the mechanism of addiction is the same. When my dad is injured and can’t exercise, he experiences something very close to withdrawal. He is anxious, irritable, unhappy. I worry about how this will play out as he ages and his body loses its ability to keep up. Point being, addiction is addiction. Some of us just happen to be addicted to more harmful things than others.

Now, for the second part of the question. I believe that violence (whether learned or ingrained) has little to do with addiction. Violent people are violent. I have never been a violent person. I used to drink a fifth of bourbon a night. It didn’t make me violent. I have spent days curled in the fetal position, sweating, wishing I could just die…I didn’t want to hurt anyone except possibly myself. The exception here is that sometimes we do things under the influence of addiction that we wouldn’t normally do. But I don’t believe it is as extreme as many people believe. I may have gotten into a few altercations when I was drunk that I wouldn’t have sober, but they were minor scuffles. I never slit anyone’s throat or tried to run them over with my car. I did more LSD when I was in college than I can even contemplate now. I thought, saw, and heard some weird shit, but I never wanted to fly off a roof or pull out my teeth with pliers or anything that Nancy Reagan promised I would do. I never stole to support my habits.

If you are inclined to be violent, addiction (especially drugs and alcohol) can make you violent, but the violence was already there. The addictive mechanism might give it a chance to present itself, but I don’t think it is fair to say that addictions/drugs will make you act out of character…they may make you act more in character, but that is a ‘chicken and the egg’ argument. If you never allow yourself to lose control, you might be able to suppress your natural tendencies better…be they violence, sadness, anger…but the tendencies are still there.

I have been sober for quite some time now. As I said, addiction is a recurring theme in what I write. In my novel, Joe Café, we meet Chet, a drunken, formerly drug-addicted psychopathic killer. But drugs and alcohol are not the impetus for his violence. They merely coexist. And I believe it is like that for most people, real or fictional. Addiction is part of the human condition. It is one of the less appealing aspects of being human. But it is merely there. It may amplify violence, but it doesn’t create it.

When you consider the addiction to sex, do you think it is bound up in a socially engineered narcissism that keeps various industries afloat, and is addiction beneficial to the economy?

Let’s start with the end. Is addiction beneficial to the economy? Most certainly. Addiction is the human condition and we drive the machine. There are so many levels to this. Obviously, there are things we pay for that are addictive: alcohol, cigarettes, junk food, etc. There are stories we pay for. Some people honestly care what Kim Kardashian is up to. I honestly don’t care enough to see if I spelled her last name correctly. But gossip is one of the most vicious and most easily ignored addictions. There are entire magazines and TV stations devoted to following people who are ‘famous’. And, in just my lifetime, the parameters of fame have changed so much. You don’t have to have talent to be famous anymore. Maybe you never did. But fame is attainable to more people now, and it drives the addiction. And gossip on the local level works the same way. We crave drama.

But we are talking about sex. My initial reaction was to think I am not qualified to answer this question. My sex drive is not particularly menacing. I’ve always been happy about that. I know that I won’t ever cheat on my wife. I don’t want to. And I am too lazy to. I have had a string of monogamous relationships since I was 16. Most lasted longer than they should. I was never one of those guys whose life was ruled by sex. I pity people like that. It must be a bitch of an addiction to deal with. As I’ve said, I have been addicted to many things, but they were often things that did not directly involve someone else. Sex addiction usually does. I say usually because I know that ‘sex addiction’ is an umbrella term that is forced to cover everyone from the man who pays hookers to beat him up and piss on him, to the woman who can’t stop sleeping with men because it makes her feel more powerful, to the kid who can’t turn off the internet porn and have a real conversation. It goes absurdly deep. And there are many double standards at play. As a society, we tend to think sex addicts are male. But there are women who crave sex beyond all else, women who use sex, women who let sex use them…it is unfair that we automatically assume sex addicts are men. But it is the way things are.

I feel sorry for anyone addicted to sex, but especially anyone addicted (compelled toward) ‘inappropriate sex’. I have OCD and I know what it is like to have compulsions that are hard to ignore. Thankfully, I am compelled to wash my hands too often and write too much. I can’t imagine what it would be like to be compelled to rape, take advantage of, or harm another human being sexually. What a tragic hand to be dealt.

Narcissism. Sex and narcissism are irrevocably linked, but I don’t think addiction and narcissism are. When you pass the normal sexual drive and enter the realm of narcissism…true narcissism, I think you leave addiction by the wayside. I have met very few proud addicts. Very few addicts that are not self-loathing on some level whether they are addicted to sex, heroin, or reality TV. Narcissus was not addicted to his own reflection, he was under it’s spell. There is a subtle but very important difference there. I will spare you an essay…this is a difficult one to pin down. Does sex support certain industries or Industry in general? Certainly. Is it ‘socially engineered narcissism’? No. I don’t think so. Narcissism is generally tame (vanity) or it takes us into the realm of the truly insane (serial killers are often narcissistic). Addiction is a craving. And addicts are craven. Forgive the wordplay, but I think it is true. Addictions rule you, you do not rule them. Is addiction beneficial to the economy? I think you could say the world economy depends upon it on just about every level.

William Burroughs used addiction in his fictions as an analogy of the power mechanisms at work in US and Western society. How do you view his interpretation?

Dang. Another good question. First of all, I need to break down my philosophy regarding power (not that it is particularly unique). When I was working with inner city kids, this is something we discussed a lot. Reason being, we have (as a society) odd ideas about what power is and how it works. In America, money is power. That is certain (and not just America, but I am American, so it’s handy). But power is an insidious thing. We tend to simplify it, I think, i.e, ‘power is strength’. Well, strength in what sense? Bill Gates is pretty damn powerful, but I bet I could kick his ass one-handed. And physical strength is meaningless in a society where guns exist. Part of the reason many people are infatuated with guns (Burroughs was one of them) is that they are the most compacted concrete example of power. A gun is a manifestation of power form-fitted to your hand. But then, we can also get more abstract.

Words are power. Trotsky proved this. Even more concretely than the kind of words you and I traffic in. But propaganda aside, words – ideas – stories are very powerful, albeit abstract and open to interpretation. We have been telling stories for thousands of years. Millions have died and continue to die because of stories. And stories also have the ability to transport us…something the scientific community hasn’t gotten quite right yet.
But, what I often discussed with my students – and what I believe – is that power is everything. Every human interaction is affected by power dynamics. The example I always used with my students was this. I was their teacher. That gave me a certain amount of power. But that power needed to be handled carefully. I am not a power-tripper. If I had been…and if I had been too heavy handed with my power, then I would have ended up losing power in the long run. By allowing my students to be empowered, I also garnered more power for myself. Teaching is actually a really good example. We have all had teachers who got off on their power. And what happened? You lost respect for them and they lost power. They skewed the balance and we, as humans, are naturally averse to that.

Western culture, and particularly America, suffers greatly because we have decided that capitalism is god, that money is power. There are different constructs that would be far less damaging. For instance. If money is power and the minority have most of the money, then the majority feels disempowered. But for $50, I could go right now and buy a handgun out of the back of a truck. Instant power. Then I can use that to try and right the scales. It is an ugly cycle. It is why our prisons are bulging. It is why murder rates and crime statistics continue to shock. Money is power. You either have it, work for it, or take it. And there are a lot of people who grow up in circumstances where there is one very obvious solution.

I was riding my Motorcycle a while back and a guy threw a beer bottle at me. The police got involved. I was shaken up. One of the cops, with his hand on his gun, asked me why I seemed so nervous. I said, “because you have a fucking gun, and I don’t.” That wasn’t the real reason, or maybe it was. But it was an interesting moment of mutual epiphany. But, back to point. Power dominates all relationships and interactions. I have a three year old daughter. Power is very important to children because they don’t have a lot of it. And it makes for some interesting interactions. I try to give my daughter as much power as I can without letting her live off cookies or endanger her life. Overusing your power is a bad call. Underutilizing your power is equally dangerous. The non-assertive are punished in western society. Humility is lauded as a virtue, but if you look at popular culture as a barometer, the idea is ridiculous. There are TV shows about the rich and famous. There are no TV shows about the poor and destitute. Except COPS and the like, and we know where the power lies there.

Now, to address the question. The way I interpret this is that we are addicted to power. And it is an insidious addiction because power means different things to different people. Money doesn’t motivate me as much as it does some, but I would be lying to say I do not recognize it’s power. Some people find power in what kind of car they drive…how scared their wife is of them…how revered they are in the community. As I said, I find a lot of my personal power in words and ideas. In knowledge. I am a fairly intelligent person. I am well read. I write well. This makes me feel powerful. It is pure egotism. I am a pretty good fisherman, too. That makes me feel powerful. As does my motorcycle. And yes, I am addicted. We all are.

If it weren’t for the addiction to power, western culture would grind to a halt. We do not value (many of us) the idea of the solitary philosopher sitting under a tree. We are not ascetics. We are consumers. We buy things we don’t need. We pride ourselves on our talents and judge the shortcomings of others. We strive for power and that fuels the machine. If we, collectively, decided that power (concrete, not abstract) was overrated…where would that leave us? Why would we go to work? Why would we shop online for things we have forgotten about by the time the mail brings them? Why would we be intimidated by the political systems…intimidated to the point of complacency?

Burroughs was a smart fellow, and maybe I have him all wrong, but it seems to me that he accepts that power controls everything and attempts to subvert it where he thinks appropriate. Which is what we all do.

Are you working on another novel?

This is an easy one. Right now, I’m revisiting a novel I wrote last year. ‘The Biker’. It is pretty much complete. I just need to edit it a few more times and then it will be out there. It is the first of a series. I wrote it as a challenge to myself, and it turned out better than I thought it would. So, I am rereading and tweaking and editing right now. I’m also working on a collaboration with three other writers I know. It is a lot of fun. It’s kind of an outlet for all of us. It will either be fairly successful or a complete disaster. I don’t really foresee any middle ground.

You write about the kidnapping of a lap dancer in Joe Cafe. Do you think sex workers have already been kidnapped and if so what do those forces that hold them prisoner tell us about the society we inhabit?

Good question. First, let me say that I did a lot of research (something I never do for characters), so I could learn about what it is like to be a stripper. Reason being…my imagination is pretty good, but there is no way you can understand what a stripper endures unless you have been one or have talked to many. There is a strip club in San Francisco (not a particularly sleazy one), where there is no cover charge before seven. So, I went and sat with my notebook. At first, I wrote down observations. Pretty soon, I was interviewing almost every dancer in the place. I owe them a lot. They knew they weren’t going to get money from me, but they gave me their time. Some just really wanted to tell their stories. Others appreciated that I was there to learn – that someone actually cared about the truly fascinating social dynamics they are surrounded by. I knew that there was a LOT to learn. And there is/was. So, point being, I know a lot about stripping.

There are a lot of hard ways to make money. Dancing naked for money has got to be one of the hardest. If you want to make a lot of money and are good at compartmentalizing, then it is a good gig. If you are one of the 3% who actually, legitimately enjoy the dancing and interactions with customers, great. But most strippers are not having fun when they are at work. Yet, the amount of money they make depends directly on portraying how much ‘fun’ they are having. Imagine a shitty day at work. And now imagine that to make rent you have to go grind your semi-naked body on a stranger. This stranger could be a gentleman. Many of the women I spoke to had great stories about kind, lonely men. The stranger might also be drunk and belligerent. It doesn’t matter. As long as he doesn’t cross ‘the line’ (and it’s a blurry goddamn line), then you do what you need to do to make money without it seeming like the money is the important part. I should write a whole book about stripping. It is a fascinating subject that most of us know nothing about.

To answer your question; I don’t think that there is a definitive answer. There are many stereotypes about strippers. They are all addicted to coke. They are all ‘working their way through school’. All they care about is money. Like most stereotypes, a lot of strippers fit them. Stripping is hard work and any energy boost (brain numbing qualities bonus), helps. A lot of strippers do drugs. And a lot don’t. Some strippers are working their way through school. A lot of them aren’t. And they all care about money, but some of them are genuinely nice and generous people, too. I interviewed/chatted with women for hours who knew they were losing money. I always told them to go make money any time they wanted and I would understand. Some of them stood up instantly and left. A lot didn’t. Sara is one of the more complex characters in the novel…more so than she seems at first glance, because that is how most of the strippers I met and talked to were…they were one thing on the surface, but there were layers upon layers beneath.

Do I think sex workers have been kidnapped? Some. Some kidnapped themselves. Expensive habits. Debts that needed paying…and once you are in the game and making money, it is hard to stop. Sometimes strippers make $150 a night. Sometimes they make $1,000. I am going to assume we are not talking about sex workers who are actually physically kidnapped because that is a whole different ball game. One I know very little about. And one that is incredibly sad.

So, yes, I do believe some have been kidnapped. By addiction. By greed. By the idea that the most valuable asset they have is their body. But there are also many women who strip because they can handle the negative aspects and want to capitalize on the weird fact that some men will spend $500 to talk to a scantily clad woman for a night. They are the minority, but they exist. I also believe that the hardcore, drug-addicted, heartless strippers are the minority. Most of the women I met started stripping because they were young, it seemed like an easy way to make money, and by the time they had gotten over the initial shock, inertia and money kept them going. There is a burnout point. Some people reach it faster than others.

As far as what all this says about society. The first thing I learned was that we are incredibly hypocritical and judgmental. I met some really nice women at strip clubs. And, sometimes during a conversation, I would realize that we had somehow slipped into some kind of therapy session (with them as the therapist) that they were gaining nothing from. Sometimes we just had a good chat. A lot of them were really grateful that I was writing a novel and that I wanted to portray ‘the strippers’ accurately and fairly. If you ask most people how they categorize strippers, the definition is pretty close to prostitution. I disagree. Sure, it can be that way. It depends on the woman and it depends on the club. Some dancers have very firm boundaries in place and take the job for what it is. A very hard way to potentially make a lot of money.

I also met some nice guys at clubs. That’s a big misconception, I think…that all patrons of strip clubs are lecherous perverts. Not the case. A strip club is a place designed to make a man feel special. I met rich guys who just wanted a place to have a beer and talk. I met shy guys who probably never talked to women outside a club…where the woman would make the first, second, and third move. There were jerks, too. But it wasn’t all old men in trench coats. So, our hypocrisy was my big revelation. And believe me, I am not trying to paint too rosy a picture. Weird, bad shit happens at strip clubs, too. But not as often as you would think.

As I alluded to earlier, the saddest thing for me when I was doing research…and the most appropriate answer to your question, is that I really understand (now) the damage we do by focusing on physical attractiveness. A lot of strippers are not supermodels, by the way. But that is beside the point. The way a lot of women get ‘kidnapped’ (and not just into stripping) is that they are born beautiful, and the fact that they are born beautiful has a strange fallout effect. We assume that pretty people have it easy. Some of the women I talked to wanted to talk to me because they were really well read, into music, and pretty intellectual. I could talk to them on that level. And I got the distinct impression that they did not get to talk about classic literature or musical theory very often. We pigeonhole people. And a tall, busty blonde does not get taken as seriously (in an intellectual capacity) as someone who is less physically attractive. That is the worst ‘kidnapping’ that I encountered…women who had accepted that they would not be ‘heard’ so they might as well make money being seen. And that paradigm exists outside the club as well. We are taught by society to worship the beautiful, but not for their minds.

Do you think tomorrow ever comes?

Does tomorrow ever come? In a literal sense, of course, no. Tomorrow is always ‘a day away’. I can’t believe I just quoted ‘Annie’. At any rate. That’s a boring answer. I can do better. Tomorrow is a concept that goes beyond its literal definition. Let’s run with that. OK, so tomorrow is hope. Tomorrow is the opportunity for a better today. Tomorrow is faith. And it is blind faith. And I find blind faith repugnant. Tomorrow might come, but it might not, too. And it is irrelevant since all we can possibly know is today. This moment. If we can even know that. I find the whole thing highly questionable. I have done enough mind altering substances to realize that there are things we do not understand. Not to sound like a hippy, but you go far enough down the rabbit hole and you learn some things. Some of them are bad. Some are good. Some make you realize you don’t really know anything.

We depend on tomorrow. It is an addiction in and of itself. And it hurts us. It is a cop out. I would live my life much more fully if I lived every day under the assumption that there would be no tomorrow. Literal or metaphysical. Except when I am fishing or riding my motorcycle or playing with my daughter, there are very few times that I actually live ‘in the moment’. And I blame the bastard we call tomorrow. It allows me to obsess about all the things I plan to do. It affords me the opportunity to procrastinate. Tomorrow is a bitch.

People often ask how writing benefits you; how does it hurt you?

Writing is one of the greatest things in my life. I am glad that I am able to do it. It is cheap therapy. I would be lying if I didn’t acknowledge the negatives as well, though. Writers are generally solitary folk. That is the stereotype, but it often holds true. It certainly does in my case. I am married, and I have a daughter. I have friends. I am seldom “alone”, but I feel alone much of the time. I am often inside my head, riffing on ideas, thinking about whatever I am working on. Social gatherings are difficult for me. Part of the reason is that my natural inclination is to sit back and observe…after half a lifetime of writing, that has become my default mode. I like to sit in a dark corner and watch people. I like to study their mannerisms and movements…the way they relate to each other. Not only does this make me feel uncomfortable at times, it is also not conducive to being a good party guest.

I think a lot of writers can relate to this. And, I shouldn’t just say writers. Being drawn to some kind of creative outlet to the point that is dominates your life is wonderful, but it is also a huge sacrifice and can be very draining. There are times that I want to chuck it all and give up writing. I never could. But the feeling surfaces sometimes and it is never because I have writer’s block or I am frustrated with slow sales – it is because my life would be a lot simpler if I wasn’t a writer. Or at least I like to think it would be.

I played in bands and that is a much different animal. There is fellowship and camaraderie there. Writers work alone. Except for the occasional compliment, they appreciate their work alone. Most people are not good readers or do not read. The fact that I know that my writing is far better now than it was 5 years ago is something I can be proud of. No one else cares. That is part of the writer’s pact. You give your soul to your writing, and it will never be appreciated as much as it should be.

This is also part of it’s allure. My relationship to writing is one of the most intimate I have. I wouldn’t trade it for anything. And I am by no means trying to complain. Just explain. That is why writers gravitate towards each other. Richard, when I read Apostle Rising, I had the reaction many people do – what a damn fine novel. But I also know how much time and sweat and frustration and exhilaration went into it because I have walked that road.

No one truly appreciates the talents of others unless they possess the same talent. My brother in law is an excellent mechanic and fabricator. I respect and appreciate what he does, but I cannot truly appreciate it because I don’t know what all is involved. So, this is not a writer’s dilemma so much as a human dilemma, I suppose…or a creative dilemma. When you find your passion – if you find your passion – you make a deal. And, of course, the house always wins.

Do you believe in parallel universes?

I guess it depends on what you mean by parallel universe. Parallel implies that it runs along the exact same course as this one. I don’t know if I believe that. But I don’t disbelieve it. I feel very much the same way about it as I do about religion…and pretty much everything else. Agnostic. I don’t know. Nothing would surprise me. As I mentioned earlier, I have had some experiences that make me question my natural cynicism. Granted, I was under the influence of some pretty powerful chemicals for some of these experiences, but that doesn’t make me doubt them necessarily. And then there are other little things. I don’t believe in ghosts. I don’t disbelieve in them either. I do believe I’ve seen one. I do believe a lot of ghost sightings are crap. I have rambled so much in this interview that I think I already mentioned this, but it was when I was a young boy. We lived in an old house in England. I got up one night and a lovely woman in old fashioned clothes led me back to bed. She was young and pretty, and I was not scared for a second. This could easily be written off as a dream, but I really don’t think it was. On the other hand, when I was a reporter in San Diego, I spent the night in the world famous ‘haunted room’ at the Hotel Del California. People travel from everywhere just to see it. I got to sleep in it. Totally peaceful night’s sleep in a nice bed. So, I’m by no means a promoter of ghosts. I just happen to have seen one.

I don’t doubt for a second that there is life somewhere else in the galaxy. I hope there isn’t a parallel universe because that would mean there are craven, selfish bullies screwing up another planet somewhere. Agnosticism is a handy cop out. But it is what it is. I don’t know what to believe. I don’t really believe in God, but if he showed up, I’d be cool with it. I believe the human brain is capable of far more than we give it credit for. I do not profess to understand the universe and the way it works. I don’t even understand the way email works. I do know that people have a tendency to buy into their beliefs too much and to push them on other people. I have a lot of faults, but I am glad that is not one of them. I am trying to figure things out as I go. I would never try to convince anyone that my personal beliefs are better than theirs. I am ignorant of many things, but I recognize this ignorance. I find some solace in that. And I like to keep my options open. Just in case there is another me somewhere typing on their laptop right now. Speaking of, I better nip this answer in the bud and take the trash out before his wife gets mad at him.

Thank you Dan for a brilliant and honest interview which I hope will draw new readers to your work.

JD Mader links:

Author website
Joe Café on Amazon US or UK
Music – have a listen here or here
Twitter
Facebook

Roger Ellory shot to fame when his novel A Quiet Belief In Angels won the Richard and Judy Book Club. The book has since been translated into twenty-five languages. His latest novel Bad Signs is out now. His work defies categorisation. Roger also plays with the band The Whiskey Poets. He met me at The Slaughterhouse where we talked about psychotic killers and Conan Doyle.

What do you think of Richard and Judy and the rise of the E Book?

R&J was a phenomenon. I said, long before I was ever chosen for the program, that R&J and JK Rowling were pretty much exclusively responsible for getting the country reading again. I was in wholehearted support of R&J because they forced people to read outside their comfort zones. I don’t know the exact numbers, but apparently the quantity of reading groups expanded over 30 times in the UK as a result of R&J. I did over 100 library and bookclub events during the eighteen months after my book was selected, and the vast majority of those reading groups based their year’s reading around the two R&J lists. That’s not all they read, but they read those as a foundation. R&J will never be reapeated, the same way that Harry Potter, Twilight, Stieg Larsson etc. will never be repeated. They are phenomena. They cannot be controlled or predicted. They cannot be knowingly and calculatingly started or continued. They just are, and if publishers knew how to predict what would be the ‘the next big thing’, then the game would be over for everyone else. I know Amanda Ross well (MD of Cactus, the R&J production company), and she is a powerhouse, a real dynamo, a great lady, and – first and foremost – a big, big reader. She has done, and continues to do a huge amount for books in the UK, and I will wholeheartedly support anyone or anything that promotes reading.

Now e-books. Well, what can I say? E-books will never take the place of hardcopy books, just as photography never took the place of painting, and recorded music never took the place of live performances. They run alongside one another, they complement one another. There are certain downsides to e-books. You have to switch them off half an hour before the plane lands. You can’t just give them to people the way you give someone a book you’ve read. The batteries go flat when you’re in the middle of reading something. They can’t be left on the sun lounger while you take a dip in your holiday hotel pool. But they are here, and they are here to stay. I have absolutely no problem with them, and I will – more than likely – end up getting one. Again, I will support anything that enables people to read, or enables them to read more.

Do you think psychotic killers are motivated by impulses that inhabit areas that may be described as religious?

Depends on your concept of the word, ‘religious’. ‘Religion’, strictly speaking means, ‘a set of ideas or beliefs’, nothing more. ‘Religion’ does not mean ‘church’ or ‘faith’ or anything else. It is just a set of ideas or beliefs, so yes, in that sense, anyone’s motivations or impulses are, potentially speaking, a religious matter, because those motivations and impulses can be precipitated by something in which they believe. The belief can be rational, irrational, sane, insane, psychotic, neurotic, psychopathic, sociopathic, whatever you like, but it is still a belief. Psychotic killers, it seems, are solving a problem that exists solely within the parameters of their own reality, and that’s a reality they don’t share with anyone else. They believe that they are threatened by a particular type of person, that they will not survive until a particular type of person is removed from the environment, they believe that they have a ‘duty’ or ‘God-given right’ to terminate the lives of certain people, they believe that they are empowered by some higher force to ‘show others that the have wronged, and they need to be punished’. The list is endless, and unique in each case. I would say, in my experience, that these impulses and motivations are very much a matter of belief, and therefore yes, they could be considered ‘religious’ in nature, if we are applying the strict definition of the term.

What do you make of Carlos Castaneda’s idea of alternate realities and how does this relate to your career as a writer and musician?

I believe there is a great deal of crossover and common territory between writing and music, just as there is a great deal of crossover and common territory between religion and philosophy. I have always been fascinated with the nature of Man and life. Even as a child, looking at this from a more personal perspective, I was never asking myself ‘What am I going to do?’, I was always asking myself ‘Who am I going to be?’ I remember confronting that question at the age of eight and nine, you know? Who shall I be? What identity shall I assume today? What kind of personality shall I assume now? Odd questions to be asking yourself, but that’s where I was at. But then, having said that, I had an odd childhood. My father left before I was born, and I still don’t know who he is. My paternal grandparents, therefore, were never known to me either. My mother died when I was seven, my maternal grandfather had drowned in the 50s, long before I was born, and I was raised by my maternal grandmother. I went off to boarding school when I was seven and stayed there until I was sixteen. The holidays from school were spent back in my home city at my grandmother’s house. I didn’t know anyone in the area, and I was a sort of quiet, intense kid, very much tied up in my own thoughts and ideas. I read a lot, watched a lot of films, specifically films from the Golden Age of Hollywood (Cary Grant, James Stewart, Bogart, Bacall, Edward G. Robinson, James Cagney etc.), and I think I just started looking at the mechanics of life from a very early age. I would say that I am a spiritualist, philosophically and religiously speaking.

I think the idea that our ‘intelligence’ and ‘personality’ has something to do with our brain is utter, utter nonsense. I don’t think Man is an animal. I think Man is a spiritual entity, a ‘soul’ if you like, and that the ‘soul’ is the person, the character, the intelligence, the personality, and the soul is simply using the body as a vehicle with which to communicate with the physical world. I believe implicitly and with great personal certainty in reincarnation. I believe in past lives and future lives. I believe we have been around for a long, long, long time, and we have even more future ahead of us. I think if you view life and Man from a spiritually-orientated perspective, then there’s a great deal that makes sense that hasn’t made sense before. I think there are many more usable and practical answers about Man to be found in religion and philosophy than there are to be found in scrutinising and measuring brain chemicals. However, no-one possesses a monopoly on the truth, and I am open to all ideas from all walks of life. I believe that I have sort of fashioned my own personal philosophy of life from the things I have read, the things I have seen and experienced, as we all do I suppose, and I have answers that I feel work, and answers that do not, and I throw away the unworkable answers and keep the ones that seem to contribute to quality of life for me and the people I care about, and that’s all there is to it.

I read Castaneda as a teenager, and though there are a great many things I agree with, there are also some basics that I do not. I think Castaneda’s interpretation of the spirituality of Man is over-complicated. I do not believe that there is anything other than Mind, Body, Spirit, and I know that Castaneda was taught that there was both tonal and nagual, but I don’t agree. Anyway, best thing to do is read the books and make up your own mind!

As far as writing and music are concerned, I have a deep and abiding love for them both. I have commented on a number of occasions that one of them is my religion and the other is my philosophy, but I don’t know which is which! That’s just a humorous aside anyway, and isn’t meant to explain a great deal. I have always had a passion for music. Music has always played a great part in my life. I have – for a long time – been desirous of creating something musically, but for many years felt so frustrated at the lack of time I had to work at this, that I created nothing. I played guitar for a couple of years in my teens, and then I set it aside and didn’t pick it up for twenty-five years. A couple of years ago my son expressed an interest in learning the guitar, and I said I would show him a few chords. His interest lasted about three weeks, but I was bitten by the bug again and started working at it. I have now been practising as regularly as I can for the past two years, and recently I got a three-piece band together (which may soon become a four-piece as I am not the greatest singer in the world!), and we recorded a CD (just four tracks, so an EP rather than an album), and this was merely to get some of our ideas down in a more permanent state and create some opportunities for gigs and suchlike. Where it will go, and what will happen with it I do not know. All I know is that – foolish or not – I have this urge and desire to continually be creating something, and music has always been an area where I have wanted to create. My first love is blues, but I have a very wide and eclectic taste in music, and if you randomly picked ten tracks off my iPod, you would find The Gun Club, Melody Gardot, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Led Zeppelin, Doug Sahm, Shostakovich, Sinatra, Chet Atkins and Johnny Burnette. Rockabilly, jazz, country, crooners, they are all there. I tend to write most every day, then around two or three o’clock I will practice guitar and write songs, and then in the early evening I will cook for my family and friends, and there is always music playing in the house. It sounds like an ideal life, but it has been a long time coming, and continuing to create, continuing to work, travelling extensively, always being ahead of schedule, dealing with the press and radio interviews, the blog entries, facebook, twitter, the website, the flood of e-mails I receive that never stop, you have to be very organised and you have to compartment your schedule each day to stay on top of it all.

Anyway, I digress, as I always do. I think reality is reality, and we each – to a degree – have our own perception of reality, what we consider reality is, and what we would hope it to be. I think – as human beings – we have a great deal in common. I think we all have basic goals that are the same. I think the destructive elements in any society are in the vast minority, and the vast majority of people are good, decent, hardworking, kind, compassionate, philanthropic individuals who just need to be granted a greater freedom to pursue their own goals and purposes. I think the lies in society – that money is everything, that ‘celebrity’ is important, that people can’t be trusted, that there are dangerous individuals everywhere, that we are bound on some predetermined and unchangeable track towards the end of our life and then that’s it, it’s all over – have been sown by a few individuals with vested interest and ulterior motives, and we have fallen for those lies. It takes a little bit of courage to be a non-conformist, and I am in complete agreement with Emerson on that point! I also agree with Krishnamurti, that a life of comparison is a life of misery. I agree with a lot of great philosophers and thinkers about a great many things, and I believe that you just have to read as widely as you can, talk to people, listen to people, look with your own eyes, keep your own counsel, be brave enough to stand up for what you want and what you believe in, never be afraid to get it wrong, never be worried about making mistakes, always remain humble and willing to learn from anyone, and stop concerning yourself with what others think of you. What you think of yourself is so much more important, and yet worrying about what other people think of you has become the most pointless and popular pastime of the entirety of Western ‘civilisation’.

So, in conclusion, I am a thinker, a reader, an observer, a participant, and I interfere where I am neither needed nor wanted, and I am always asking questions and requiring answers that make sense and can be used I life to make things better. I believe that there is time to cram as many things into life as you can mentally and physically cope with, and you should always be trying to stretch yourself so you can take on more, get involved in more, learn more and accomplish more. I think there is a direct correlation between your own happiness and how much happiness you try to create for others. I was listening to Julie Walters yesterday evening on some TV program, and she quoted Wilde when he said, ‘Ordinary riches can be stolen, real riches cannot. In your soul are infinitely precious things that cannot be taken from you.’ I would agree with that, and I think if people stopped for a moment, looked at themselves, their own lives, their own likes and dislikes, and really asked themselves how they could make more people happy, and what they could do that would bring happiness to themselves, then they would stop worrying about what others thought, and start living a more fulfilling and interesting existence. As my cousin said to me the other day, ‘It takes courage to follow your dreams’. It does, and it should, and here endeth the lesson!

You are well known for your novel A Quiet Belief in Angels. Are there other works of yours you would prefer to be known for?

I have an affection for each novel I have published, but each for different reasons. Asking me which is my favourite novel is like asking a father with nine kids which one he loves the most. There is no favourite. There can’t be. I am very pleased with the success of ‘A Quiet Belief in Angels’, of course, but if it was another book that had been promoted through the Richard & Judy Book Club, then I would have no problem with that at all. I like the prose in ‘Angels’, I like the pace, but – as with all the books that you write – you can always look back and think how you would have done something differently. That’s the thing about working hard and writing continually. There is always room for improvement, and if you look back at something that you previously wrote and cannot see how you could have done it better, then you are not improving. We seem to consider that artistic creative ability is something one is born with, something one is inherently gifted with, but I don’t believe that. Picasso, interviewed in his eighties, was asked why he still spent so much time in his studio, and he made some comment to the effect that ‘When inspiration finds me, and she finds me rarely, I wish her to find me hard at work’. Hemingway said something like, ‘Never let them know that you have to work at this craft; let them think you were born this way.’ I think there is such a thing as natural talent, of course, but I think even those with natural talent have to work and work and work to hone and perfect it. True professionals in any field are generally those who have devoted years and decades to what they do. Your own ability as a writer, a musician, a photographer, a choreographer is ever-changing, ever evolving, and it changes and evolves as you work. Every book I write, I am writing it to be the best book I have ever written. That’s the way I view it. Whether it becomes the best book I have written is beside the point, but that is the attitude with which I approach it. That is what I want it to be. So no, there is no other work I would prefer to be known for. I was pleased with ‘Angels’ as a book, and I am still pleased with it. I will keep on trying to write the perfect book, but I know I never will, and I kind of don’t want to write the ‘perfect book’ as I would then have accomplished my goal as a writer, and I would have to go and get a proper job!

Carlos Santana believes music can alter your molecular structure. What do you make of his observation?

I THINK HE SMOKE TOO MUCH WEED!
I don’t think music can change your molecular structure at all, unless you fire sufficiently strong a soundwave at someone, and that could blow them to pieces. No, molecules don’t change. I think what he means to say is that the wavelength of aesthetics is very close to that of spiritual energy, and thus – sometimes – music can reverberate along a wavelength that is similar enough to the wavelength of an individual’s spiritual aura, and thus the aura could move and and shift in intensity proportionately. That would produce a physiological reaction, an agitation of the nervous system, an increase or decrease in glandular secretions etc., and I think it would feel like a molecular shift, but it wouldn’t be a change in your molecular structure, no. Additionally, music can evoke emotional responses by triggering past memories, and this would be a psychological reaction that could produce a physiological reaction, e.g. laughter, tears, a change in emotional state. But here we are talking mental, emotion and spiritual responses to aesthetic wavelengths, not physical responses. I think that Carlos needs to get a bit more spiritual, and a little less biological!

You cite Arthur Conan Doyle as an influence. How do you see his legacy?

So, to Conan Doyle. You know, there has been a longstanding contention regarding which novel could be considered to be the first ‘thriller’. Is it ‘The Riddle of the Sands’ by Erskine Childers (1903) or ‘The Thirty Nine Steps’ by John Buchan (first serialised in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1915). Childers has been cited as an influence for Fleming, Le Carre and others. Buchan described his own novel as a ‘shocker’, and then went on to say that a ‘shocker’ was an adventure where the events in the story are unlikely and the reader is only just able to believe that they really happened. Does this definition not desribe the vast majority of crime fiction?

My question is this? Is Conan Doyle not the forerunner of both of these styles of writing?

‘A Study in Scarlet’ arrived in 1887. It gave us a detective – quirky, idiosyncratic, brilliant, forensically-minded, astute and perceptive beyond any previous parameter. It gave us the detective-sidekick relationship, the challenging plot, the stunning denouement, the application of logic to illogical problems. Was Holmes not an inspiration for Christie, Marsh. Allingham, Chesterton, Sayers and then all the way through to Chandler, Hammett, Macdonald, Thomas Harris, Patricia Cornwell and Michael Connelly? Each of them have created an iconic, quirky, identifiable lead detective character, a series character, and they all owe a huge debt to Holmes.

Detective fiction novels in general, whether they be crime thrillers or police procedurals, also owe a huge amount to Conan Doyle. Doyle’s work is superb. I read the complete works of Conan Doyle as a teenager, and have read them again since, and I never cease to be blindsided by Conan Doyle. And Holmes, as a character, is a very dark creation. HIs obsessions, his misogynistic attitude, his drug dependency, his moods, his aggression, his disappearance into some inner world that no-one can fathom or perceive. And Watson was not some bumbling half-wit, as protrayed in the Basil Rathbone adaptations (which, despite all, I loved as a child, and still love), but Watson was a doctor, a trusted confidante and companion, and we cannot forget that Watson was the voice of Holmes, considering that the short stories and novels were ‘Watson’s memoirs’.

So I see his legacy, even now, as valid today as it has ever been. Holmes is a brilliant creation. Conan Doyle’s plotting and ‘reveal’ is second-to-none. These stories have recently been adapted and ‘updated’ once again for British television, and the public love them as much as they ever did. Even Hollywood has thrown itself into the mix with the recent Downey/Law partnership, and I believe there is a sequel on the way.

I am a dedicated and committed fan of both Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes, and I think we will forever be referencing Holmes as one of the most important, significant and utterly fascinating detective characters to ever have been created.

Do you think creativity is connected to childhood experiences and that narrating is an effort by the adult mind to impose order on them?

In a word, no. I don’t honestly believe that childhood experiences have as much of an effect on the person as we are told. If you consider that a human being is not a body, but a spiritual entity, then the vast majority of what is going on with that person is already there at birth. Birth is just a genetic process, as is death, and the personality and character of an individual is there before the birth of the current body, and is still there after the death of that body. Your parents are your genetic originators, and are responsible for the well-being and care of your body in infancy. And, of course, there are truly dreadful childhood experiences that can very significantly influence a person, or at least focus an individual’s attention and energies in a particular direction, but most people do not have to endure truly dreadful childhoods! Nevertheless, even in the case of those who are raised in a violent, abusive, dangerous environment as a child, they are still – at least to some degree – predisposed to responding to that environment in a particular fashion, and themselves becoming violent, abusive and dangerous. How do we know this? Simply because there are many, many more people who also endure horrendous treatment in childhood, and they do not becomes psychopaths, sociopaths or sex-killers. I know this goes against the grain for a lot of people, this idea that we – ourselves – are very much responsible for the condition we are in, but I have a mind to be contentious and nonconformist much of the time. That is my nature, and you neither have to agree or disagree with me, but simply accept that I have an opinion. The spirit is the personality, the character, the identity, and the motivations, purposes, interests and intentions of that person are innate to that person, not his or her body. The body is merely the vehicle that we employ to communicate with the physical world around us for a few decades. Then we move on, obtain another body, and begin a new cycle. We have been around for a long, long, long time, and will be around for a long time into the future.

It walks us right into the ‘nature versus nurture ‘ debate, and though this is relevant, it is very short-sighted. In essence, it comes down to semantics. What is ‘nature’? It is used to mean the genetic and cellular predisposition of the individual, but Man is not a genetic or cellular entity. His or her body is genetic and cellular, but the individual themselves is a spirit. This is where Western religions have gone wrong. You are told you ‘have a soul’. No, you don’t. You are one! So when we look at the ‘nature’ of a person, we have to look at ‘spiritual nature’, not physical nature. The state and condition of the spirit – which is the person themselves, the personality, the character, the identity – is reflected in what the person does, how they behave, who they actually are. When the body dies, so does the brain. The spirit does not die. The spirit goes on, as does the mind. The brain is no more responsible for your thinking, feeling, remembering, deciding and rationalising, than the heart – as a physical muscle – is responsible for who you love! The brain is a car battery. It generates electrical impulses which pass through the nervous system, and enable the body to move. It governs hormonal and glandular secretions, so – on a purely physiological level – we are readied for ‘fight or flight’. But the brain does our thinking? The brain ‘feels’? No, absolutely not. Utterly, utterly ludicrous.

The ‘brain theorists’ will talk about adrenalin and serotonin and neurons and synapses, and how you can alter a person’s personality with drugs and whatnot, but when a person is given psycho-active drugs all that is happening is that the brain – nothing more than a relay switchboard between the mind and the body – is being disabled or inhibited in some fashion. Therefore, you can actually limit the ability of the individual to carry out a predetermined intent to harm or destroy, but all you have done is put chemical handcuffs on the person, you have not actually addressed the origin of why he or she wanted to harm or destroy.

The idea that the brain has anything to do with thought is a very new idea, perhaps a couple of hundred years old, if that. The idea that Man is a spirit is in the tradition of ten thousand years of philosophy and religion.

If ‘nature and nurture’ were the answer, as we understand them now, why are two identical twins entirely different in personality? How can two people – genetically identical, right down to the colour of their hair, their height, even the weight of their internal organs, both raised in exactly the same way, the same emotional, physical, educational, familial and social environments, then be two completely different personalities? One works for ‘Doctors without Borders’, and one is a drug addict. One is a judge, one is a sex offender. How does that work?

If Man is a body, then what is the explanation for déjà vu, ESP, past-life memory, child prodigy phenomena, ghosts, instant dislikes of people you meet, love at first sight, criminal impulses, natural gifts and abilities etc.?

To say that Man’s intelligence, wit, humour, skills, humanity, compassion, talent, memory, ability to reason, creativity and all else that he is, comes down to about six or eight pounds of hamburger inside his skull, is just insulting and ludicrous!

I know that the ‘Man from mud’ theorists and psychiatrists would have us believe this, for then we can be drugged, shocked, ‘counselled’ and ‘analysed’, and we pay up at a rate of £150.00 an hour to feel worse than we did before, in the main, but there is no contemporary, known workable science of the mind. Man does not understand Man. Never has. Of course, there are truths. Man has figured out some things, but there is no monopoly on the truth. Truth is everywhere you look, and it is more a matter of looking, reading, asking questions until you receive answers that make sense and help to clarify things for you personally, and then you can build your own personal philosophy about life, a philosophy that explains things for you in such a way as to improve and maintain your quality of life. The answers are there in the Bible, in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, in the works of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Guatama Siddartha and Guatama Sakyamuni, Krishnamurti, in the Qur’an, the Bhagavadgītā. The truth is no more in the ‘Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders’, than it is in ‘Mein Kampf’. Austro-Germanic psychiatric principles gave us IG Farben and the holocaust. It gave us ethnic cleansing and ‘genetically impure’ races. It gave us electro-convulsive techniques, devised by an Italian psychiatrist who observed the way in which pigs were being stunned by electric shock before they were slaughtered and believed that this might be a very profitable way to ‘treat’ human beings. It has proved very profitable, but it has never made anyone feel better. As Hemingway said, having been given over twenty administrations of ECT which destroyed his will to live and contributed to his suicide, ‘Brilliant cure, but we lost the patient…’.

So no, very simply, Man is not a brain. He is not a body. He is a spiritual entity. He has been around for a long time, and will be around for a long, long time to come. The vast, vast, vast majority of his personality and character arrives with him in birth. Your current birth is just one of many, many births that you have undergone. And the few years that you have spent being influenced by this lifetime’s childhood, in all honesty is not very significant at all in influencing your personality. Your personality was already there, and was formed over many, many experiences through countless numbers of lifetimes.

How significant do you think exile is in a writer’s life?

I have a very good friend by the name of David Peace. He said he could never have written the Red Riding books had he stayed in the north of England, and only when he moved to Japan with his wife did he have enough distance to be able to look back and recreate the world of his childhood and teenage years. I remember readng a quote once, I believe from a Russian author, and it went along the lines of ‘Visit a city for a day, you’ll write a novel, stay a month, you’ll write a chapter, stay a year, you’ll write a page.’ You get the idea. Exile, as a write, can meany so many things. For me, I write in silence and solitude. It’s the only way I can work. That is exile, at least to some small degree. And I visit the US now quite frequently, but I am still exiled from the location of my books. It is a question I am always asked at library events and festivals, and now – in light of this question – it seems an appropriate place to take it up. Why America? Why does someone, born and raised in the Midlands, choose to write books set in the US?

I don’t think there’s any one single, simple answer (is there ever, for anything?), but to give you some kind of an idea of how this all came about, I sort of have to go the long way about explaining it. I may repeat myself a couple of times as I answer this, so please forgive me, but here we are walking into an area of not only why America, but why do I write at all. Paul Auster said something very interesting one time. He said that said that becoming a writer was not a ‘career decision’ like becoming a doctor or a policeman. You don’t choose it so much as get chosen, and once you accepted the fact that you were not fit for anything else, you had to be prepared to walk a long, hard road for the rest of your days. I also believe that you don’t so much choose your genre or subject mater, it kind of chooses you. I think the very worst kind of book you could write is the book that you think others will enjoy. I think the best kind of book to write is the one you believe you yourself would enjoy reading. I think the genre you write in has to relate to your own interests and passions. Writing a book can take a while, and if you’re not interested in what you’re writing about, then that’s going to make the job so much harder, perhaps even impossible.

I think I was weaned out of infancy on American culture. I grew up watching Starsky and Hutch, Hawaii Five-O, Kojak, all those kinds of things. I loved the atmosphere, the diversity of culture. The politics fascinated me. America is a new country compared to England, and it just seems to me that there was so much colour and life inherent in its society. I have visited a good number of times now, and I honestly feel like I’m going home in a strange kind of way, a bit like ‘deja vu’, if you know what I mean. And I believe that as a non-American there are many things about American culture that I can look at as a spectator. The difficulty with writing about an area that you are very familiar with is that you tend to stop noticing things. You take things for granted. The odd or interesting things about the people and the area cease to be odd and interesting. As an outsider you never lose that viewpoint of seeing things for the first time, and for me that is very important. Also many writers are told to write about the things with which they are familiar. I don’t think this is wrong, but I think it is very limiting. I believe you should also write about the things that fascinate you. I think in that way you have a chance to let your passion and enthusiasm for the subject come through in your prose. I also believe that you should challenge yourself with each new book. Take on different and varied subjects. Do not allow yourself to fall into the trap of writing things to a formula. Someone once said to me that there were two types of novels. There were those that you read simply because some mystery was created and you had to find out what happened. The second kind of novel was one where you read the book simply for the language itself, the way the author used words, the atmosphere and description. The truly great books are the ones that accomplish both. I think any author wants to write great novels. I don’t think anyone – in their heart of hearts – writes because it’s a sensible choice of profession, or for financial gain. I just love to write, and though the subject matter that I want to write about takes me to the States, it is nevertheless more important to me to write something that can move someone emotionally, perhaps change a view about life, and at the same time to try and write it as beautifully as I can. I also want to write about subjects – whether they be political conspiracies, serial killings, race relations, political assassinations or FBI and CIA investigations – that could only work in the USA. The kind of novels I want to write just wouldn’t work in small, green, leafy villages where you find Hobbits!

With me, the most important thing about any novel is the emotion it evokes. The reason for writing about the subjects I do is simply that such subjects give me the greatest opportunity to write about real people and how they deal with real situations. There is nothing in life more interesting than people, and one of the most interesting aspects of people is their ability to overcome difficulty and survive. I think I write ‘human dramas’, and in those dramas I feel I have sufficient canvas to paint the whole spectrum of human emotions, and this is what captures my attention. I believe that non-fiction possesses, as its primary purpose, the conveying of information, whereas fiction possesses the primary purpose of evoking an emotion in the reader. I love writers that make me feel something – an emotion, whatever it might be – but I want to feel something as I read the book. There are millions of great books out there, all of them written very well, but they are mechanical in their plotting and style. Three weeks after reading them you might not recall anything about them. That is not meant as a criticism, because that degree of clever plotting takes a great intellect, and is probably something I just could not do well. However, the books that really get me are the ones I remember months later. I might not recall the names of the characters or the intricacies of the plot, but I remember how it made me feel. For me, that’s all important. The emotional connection. So back to the setting and literary style. ‘A Quiet Belief In Angels’, for example, has been described as ‘Steinbeck-esque’. The setting and the literary style were certainly not meant to be evocative of Steinbeck. I have to be completely honest and tell you that prior to writing ‘A Quiet Belief In Angels’ I had read only ‘Cannery Row’. I have cited Steinbeck as an inspiration, also Hemingway, Carson McCullers, Harper Lee, Willa Cather, but it is only now that I am beginning to read more of their work. As with all my novels the style in which I write is based on the subject matter. Other novels – ‘A Quiet Vendetta’, ‘City of Lies’, ‘The Anniversary Man’ – are actually written in a far more economical and punchy style. The style came with the setting, the style came with the voice, and there was never any intention to write like another author.

I have done, and still do, a tremendous amount of research. It was always very, very important to me to ensure that everything mentioned in the book was genuine and correct as far as the time and place were concerned. It can be quite a task. There is an old adage as far as writing is concerned – ‘Wear your learning lightly’ – meaning that you cannot bury your fictional work beneath a ton of facts. I had to be careful of that too; to make sure that the history and the cultural aspects necessary to give a sincere reflection of the time and place weren’t so overwhelming that the story beneath was lost. Some facts were hard to find, others somewhat easier, but still the responsibility lies with the author to make his or her work as sincere and genuine as possible. You can read about places – about cities and towns and areas. You can study guide books, maps, photos on the internet, but any description of a place is the author’s ‘take’ on that place. Readers are not necessarily looking for anything that will agree with their perspective on a location; they are looking for something that evokes an atmosphere. The first sentence of ‘A Quiet Vendetta’ is eighty-seven words long and has no full stop at the end. It’s about New Orleans. People from New Orleans write to me. They don’t say ‘Hey, you aren’t from New Orleans…you can’t write this!’ They say, ‘That’s what New Orleans feels like to me as well!’ It’s about evoking an atmosphere, not agreeing with everyone else’s viewpoint of a place. Does that make sense?

Anyway, more than anything else is people. Readers will forgive you anything if you engage them, and the way to engage readers is with your characters.

The thing that fascinates me is people. Doesn’t matter who they are or what they do, the important thing is people. The thing that never ceases to amaze me is the indomitability of the human spirit, the things that people are capable of overcoming, and the fact that they can then survive beyond that. For me, writing ‘crime thrillers’ or ‘mysteries’ is not so much about the crime itself, even the investigation, but the way in which such events can be used to highlight and illuminate the way that people deal with things that are not usual. If there is one common thread throughout my books, though they are all very different stories, it is that we are always dealing with an ordinary person thrown into an extraordinary situation. That’s the common theme. That’s the thing that fascinates me. I suppose I am a romantic at heart, and I try very hard to be in touch with the emotional nature of people and things, and what I am always striving to do is have a reader feel what the characters are feeling, to get an idea that they have spent some time with real people, and to bring about the sense that they were aware of what was going on with that character on many levels. That, for me, seems key to making a book memorable. And, in conclusion, although now I have digressed enormously, I beleiev that there is a sense of exile in the way I work, albeit very mild compared to being exiled from your own country or placed under house arrest as some authors have been (wasn’t it Nabokov who said that the best way to get a book written was to be under house arrest?), but I do operate in a very indiviudual and insular way, and I like to work that way.

Do you think isolation kills?

No doubt about it, and in both a physical and spiritual context. Isolate a man or woman from human contact, and you have – essentially – removed the very reason for being alive. There are those that need to be incarcerated, not only to prevent them from harming others, but also – to a degree – to prevent them from harming themselves, but such persons are in the significant minority. When we look at criminals, we find that only a very tiny percentage are truly dangerous. But imprisonment, as has been proven by recidivism statistics, does not work as a remedy for antisocial conduct, and neither does the death penalty. As has been said, what makes killing people prove that killing people is wrong?

From a creative standpoint, isolation is immensely destructive over any extended period of time. Perhaps for a short while, a writer or painter working in a studio, intense, industrious, yes, but over any significant period, no. How often have I been asked, ‘Where do you get your ideas from?’ The answer is always the same. From life, and that’s it. The newspaper article, the conversation over dinner, the eavesdropped dialogue on a train or bus, the recommended book that you never otherwise would have read. That’s life. Life is people. Life is just people, and little else. The collisions of humanity, the interactions, the confusions, the disorder, the anecdotes, the heartbreaks, the losses, the successes, the observations, the mistakes, the moments of awkwardness and embarrassment that happen all the time just as a result of being alive. That’s where inspiration comes from.

I remember reading an interview with a musician I admire enormously, Kelly Joe Phelps. He was on tour with another musician. The second musician was approaching the stage, turned to Kelly Joe Phelps, and said, ‘We’ll do ‘Wanda and Duane’, a song that was part of the set. Kelly Joe heard ‘wandering away’, and there was the title and inspiration for a wonderful song he subsequently wrote.

Some years ago, perched at the end of the kitchen table, asking my son to turn the television down so I could work, I would hear snippets of dialogue from the TV and get thoughts for dialogue in my book.

So no, isolation is not a good operating state for anyone. Seems to me that the degree to which people are actually alive is proportional to the degree that they are in communication with life, and life is people, it is the business of living, and it is my raison d’etre. To be isolated from life would be – for me – an emotional, mental and spiritual death sentence.

What are you working on at the moment?

Well, just in the past couple of weeks I have completed the copy-edit of the book for 2012, entitled’ A Dark and Broken Heart’. Again, a contemporary New York setting, and the blurb is as follows:

It should have been so easy for Vincent Madigan. Take four hundred thousand dollars away from some thieves, and who could they go to for help? No-one at all. For Madigan is charming, effective, and knows how to look after himself. The only problem is that he’s up to his neck in debts to Sandia – the drug kingpin of Harlem, known as the ‘Watermelon Man’ on account of the terrible act of vengeance he inflicted against someone who betrayed him. This one heist will free Madigan from Sandia’s control, and will finally give him the chance he needs to get his life back on track. But when Madigan is forced to kill his co-conspirators, he finds that not only is the stolen money marked, but an innocent child has been wounded in the crossfire. Now both Sandia and the collected might of the NYPD are looking for him. And beyond even this, the one person assigned to identify and hunt down Madigan is the very last person in the world he could have expected. Employing every deception and ruse he can think of, Madigan is engaged in a battle of wits that will test him to the very limit of his ability. Can he evade justice for what he has done, or will his own conscience become the very thing that unravels every one of his meticulous plans? Will this final lie be his salvation, or his undoing?

And I have also been working on the book for 2013, entitled ‘The Devil and The River’, set in Mississippi in 1974, about a returning Vietnam veteran who takes the job of Sheriff in Whytesburg, and has to investigate a very strange murder that had remained unknown and undiscovered for two decades.

I have two other projects on the go, one purely literary that will be announced soon, and a second that’s related to a potential television drama, but as yet is unconfirmed.
Lastly, I formed a band, and we recorded a few tracks on a CD which people have started buying through the website (www.whiskeypoets.com), and we hope to be in rehearsals soon for some live gigging.

That’s it really, aside from the routine and mundane aspects of day-to-day life such as Christmas shopping! Things are busy, and I know I have a good deal of touring next year so I am trying to get ahead of myself as far as possible.

Thank you Roger for a great and perceptive interview.

R.J. Ellory links:
Author website
R.J. Ellory Books page with UK buy links
RJ Ellory TV
Facebook fan page
Twitter
R.J. Ellory novels on Amazon US:
Bad Signs (2011)
Saints of New York (2010)
The Anniversary Man (2009)
A Simple Act of Violence (2008)
A Quiet Belief in Angels (2007)
City of Lies (2006)
A Quiet Vendetta (2005)
Ghostheart (2004)
Candlemoth (2003)

Darren Sant is one of the new voices on the crime fiction scene. He writes gritty hard boiled Noir and reviews books at his blog Daz’s Short Book Reviews. His collections of stories Tales From The Longcroft Estate is available as an E Book and drawing some great reviews. He met me at The Slaughterhouse where we talked about E Books and publishing.

What do you think truly terrifies people?

Fear. One of my favourite films is the Shawshank Redemption. This film is of course based upon the novella Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption. The film has the tag line Fear can hold you prisoner, hope can set you free. I truly believe that. There is a band from Manchester, England called James and one of their lyrics goes It’s the fear of failure that’s a real disgrace. That also resonates as a deep truth to me. Fear itself is the enemy that electrifies us into inactivity. If we can conquer that nothing will halt our actions.

Do you think the politicians in this country know what they’re doing?

A difficult question for me to answer without just putting a string of swear words. Firstly, I’d say that I take a somewhat simplistic view of politics. I am interested in politics very broadly and not the people who create policy. I know my own views and what I believe is right. I think politicians know what they are doing so long as it suits them. I will never believe that my best interests will be best served by a bunch of privately educated millionaires sat around a table trying to decide how best to rip off the taxpayer.

They know what they are doing with regard to their own narrow self-interest. Broadly though they don’t care enough to look at the bigger picture.

Why do you think people are drawn to reading about darkness?

It takes us away from the mundane perhaps. People are curious too about what lies at the other side of every day living. I know when I see some horrible deed has been committed on the news I always wonder at the motive. I’ve studied psychology, sociology, counselling and did two years on the Samaritans lines, I am extremely interested in all facets of human nature. I think most other people are too. I believe we all read not just for entertainment but to look for answers to those questions that aren’t quite on the tip of our tongue or that we dare not ask aloud.

Do you think E Books are changing the face of publishing and if so how?

I believe e-books are changing the face of publishing. They allow people to self-publish what they like quickly and easily. There are obviously positive and negative aspect to this. On the plus side it allows shorts story writers like me to get their work into the market place via e-publishers like Trestle Press one story at a time. This is not a new idea they were doing serialisations in Dickens day. As an avid reader I love the fact that new styles of fiction and speculative fiction can get so easily into the market place.

Traditional publishers have too long controlled the market place with their $$$$ at all cost mentality. They would argue that the quality of this new fiction is poorly edited and badly written. However, that is a sweeping statement which is untrue for a lot of the work out there.

I also believe these interesting times will become better regulated and the politicians will work out ways to make it harder for the little guy whilst getting more revenue out of us. UK buyers are already charged VAT on their purchases when that does not apply to paper books.

Who are your literary influences?

My main influences are storytellers and humorists. Terry Pratchett, Douglas Adams, Robert Heinlein, Stephen King, Philip Jose Farmer.

My reading has been very varied over the years. I just love a good story. However, I’d have to say that my recent fiction has been inspired by more recent reads and authors including: Nigel Bird, Nick Boldock, Chris Rhatigan, Iain Rowan, Paul D. Brazill, Julie Morrigan and many very talented others.

Do you think killing and fucking are related?

Perhaps in the minds of some people. Both are things done with both motive and passion.

Do you think publishers have adapted to the way the E Book has changed the face of publishing?

I don’t think they have or can that easily. A lumbering dinosaur does not become a lean mean killing machine overnight. I think they will adapt and hopefully the market will be a better place for it. It will benefit writers and readers.

Is there a particular event that has changed your life and influenced your writing?

The biggest event that has influenced my writing was my moving to Hull in 2001. In Hull I met my good friend Nick Boldock who encouraged me to join his writing group which was called the Renegade Writers. Without giving you too much bone achingly dull detail they got me writing again. I also have to credit Byker Books. When Nick was published in the first of their Radgepacket series I bought the book. These stories spoke to me. They were a new kind of urban story that I felt I could relate to and even write.

Tell us about your novel.

My ongoing series of stories with Trestle Press are called Tales From The Longcroft Estate. I’ve not really had any ideas that I feel could be of novel length. However, the concept for the Longcroft stories has been rattling around my head for some time. I grew up between two large housing estates and the Longcroft is a bastardisation of these.

What I want to achieve with this series of stories is a range of tales that will entertain people but that they can also in some small way relate to. I like to think that my strengths are in humour and in a certain tight writing style that allows me to include quite a lot of story into relatively few words.

Another thing that always seems to include itself in my stories is a moralistic twist. I don’t want to preach to anyone so this moralistic outlook just seems to include itself. I write with only an outline of a story and I like to see what flows and then edit it into something that makes sense. Somehow within this process I come out with a story I am pleased with.

What I want to give the reader with the Longcroft stories as they progress is a sense of familiarity. I want them to look forward to the next tale and to enjoy exploring the setting as it grows. I don’t have any great master plan (yet) each new tale is bringing as many surprises to me as it is to the reader.

What are the Longcroft Tales about? Well they are urban tales some are darker than others. My aim is to give the reader a glance into a darker grittier world from the comfort of their armchair. A series of little glimpses into a world that will contain humour, heart, soul, sadness, shady characters and dark deeds. The Longcroft stories are not about the black and white but about the shades of grey in between them.

I am over halfway through the third story and the first two are available on Amazon UK (also US) for download at only 86p.

A Good Day (Tales From The Longcroft Estate)

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Good-Tales-Longcroft-Estate-ebook/dp/B005G96GEY/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1318698299&sr=8-1

Community Spirit (Tales From The Longcroft Estate)

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Community-Spirit-Longcroft-Estate-ebook/dp/B005LW1ZO2/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1318698345&sr=1-1

I also have a collection of six flash fiction tales around the theme of revenge:
Flashes of Revenge

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Flashes-of-Revenge-ebook/dp/B005ME3CBI/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1318698437&sr=1-1

Released just this the first part in a zombie series which is a collaboration between Sam Lang and myself:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Beginning-Severed-One-ebook/dp/B005UO6SIY/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1318698528&sr=1-1

Graham Greene said writers have a piece of ice in their hearts. What do you make of his observation?

Perhaps he was referring to the way writers seem to analyse life. Yes, maybe he has a point, it takes a cold fish to look at all of human nature and put it down on paper like it didn’t matter to the observer. That is one argument of course. Another might be that it takes a compassionate person who is only trying to understand the human condition through exploring it. Wiser men than me will be debating that point long after I am worm fodder. I wish them luck! In closing I simply refer you to Douglas Adam’s final thought on life, the universe and everything and respond simply with 42.

Thank you Darren for an insightful and entertaining interview.

Sant links:
Writing as “Old Seth” on “Close To The Bone”
Daz’s Short Book Reviews
Twitter

Amazon.com links to the books mentioned above:
Tales from the Longcroft Estate – Volume One – A Good Day
Tales from the Longcroft Estate – Community Spirit
Flashes of Revenge
Severed – Vol. I – In The Beginning

C. E. Lawrence writes gritty dark thrillers. Her novel Silent Kills sees NYPD profiler Lee Campbell try to unpick the mind of a deranged killer. Her novel Silent Slaughter is soon to follow. She met me at The Slaughterhouse where we talked about vampirism and the body without organs.

In your new novel Silent Kills you deal with vampirism. What do you think of so called real vampires and why is the myth so enduring?

Interesting you say so-called vampires, because I think there are some cultures in which the presence of vampires is very real. It’s so interesting to me how cultural attitudes vary. In my writing class last night, a woman submitted a story about a reincarnated talking baby. Most of us took the story as being magic realism, and found it very amusing, but one of the students was raised in India, and said it was common in India to hear stories just like it, where very young children spoke of their past lives. So he saw the story completely differently from the rest of us! He took it quite seriously, and couldn’t see what we all found so funny. It was a real lesson in cultural relativism.

As far as vampires go, I think they are such a potent metaphor, sexually and psychologically. On a psychological level, we’ve all experienced “emotional vampires,” people who suck us dry of life and energy through their insatiable need for love and attention. People who take emotionally (or physically) without giving back are another variation – and the sociopath is the most virulent of all. Like the charismatic vampires in books and films, they often cast a kind of spell on their unsuspecting victims – lulled by their charm, the victim is captivated and sometime literally in their power, emotionally, physically or both. They don’t see the fangs until it’s too late, and the damage has been done. Sociopaths can’t turn an ordinary person into a creature like themselves, fortunately – but neither can they become like the rest of us. They really are creatures of the night, forever damned to roam in search of new victims; it’s the only way they can relate to other people.

As for the sexual aspect of vampires, I’ve always thought they were a lot like the incubus and succubus of the Middle Ages – those grotesque creatures that come to you at night and take advantage of you sexually. Talk about an outlet for repressed desire! There are some famous paintings of these creatures; here are a couple of links.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Incubus.jpg
http://www.lizaphoenix.com/encyclopedia/incubus.shtml

In both pictures, notice the woman’s pose of complete surrender, and how similar it is to shots in so many films of victims under a vampire’s spell. I think it’s a literary way of undercutting sexual repression and taboo. After all, it’s not your fault if someone has sex with you when you’re asleep, is it? You don’t have to be an English major or a criminal profiler to see that the puncturing of the neck by fangs is a pretty obvious substitute for a penis. And then there’s the exchange of bodily fluids . . . well, you get the picture.

When Bram Stoker wrote Dracula in 1897, he was culling together myths and legends that had existed in Eastern Europe and other places for centuries. I think it’s no coincidence his book resonated with the sex-obsessed Victorians, bringing the vampire legends fully into the light, as it were. (Stoker was a good friend of Conan Doyle’s, by the way, and Graham Moore plays with that idea in his novel “The Sherlockian.”)

Even when sexual desire and talk about sex became more socially acceptable, there was still something thrilling in this notion of surrender – of being “taken” by a handsome stranger in a long flowing cape who enters your bedroom by flying in through the open window. I mean, it’s the height of Gothic romanticism, isn’t it? And I find it interesting that the great German film Nosferatu features a truly frightening creature in the form of the great actor Max Schreck (“Schreck” being the German word for fear) – whereas so many later versions played up the attractiveness of the Count.

Today’s vampires on television and in films for young people don’t interest me all that much. They aren’t very sexy; they’re too buff and square-jawed for my taste. Maybe I would feel differently if I were fourteen years old, but even then I liked my heroes to be darker and quirkier. I liked Interview with a Vampire – the book, I mean. I thought Anne Rice was really onto something there.

As for my “vampire,” well, he’s a disturbed young man whose psychosexual disorder compels him to drain the blood of young women. In part it’s sexual, and in part it’s a kind of phobia about death – which is based on several real life cases. To find out why he has the compulsion, you’ll have to read the book!

What do you make of Deleuze and Guattari’s observation in Anti-Oedipus that ‘It is not the neurotic stretched out on the couch who speaks to us of love, of its force and its despair, but the mute stroll of the schizo. Lenz’s outing in the mountains and under the stars, the immobile voyage in intensities on the body without organs’?

Well, first I had to look it up – thank god for the internet. Secondly, these guys are WAY smarter than I am. There’s a reason I majored in English instead of philosophy. But I’ll do my best.

Perusing excerpts of the book, it reminds me a little bit of lectures I’ve attended by the great Lacanian theorist, Alain Didier-Weill – the use of graphs and charts to portray the spirituality of the inner life. I’m sorry to say I know not very much about Theodore Reich’s work, and I had to look up Lenz as well. The title “Anti-Oedipus” is intriguing, since it seems to repudiate Freud’s most famous example of psycho-sexual forces at work.

From what I can glean it refers to the idea that sexuality transcends bodily organs and their functionality and inhabits a higher plane that is perhaps closer to the spirituality of Nature. I’m not sure what schizo means in this context, but as a bit of a nature freak myself, I can state without hesitation that there is something essential and transcendent about being in the presence of Nature, whether in the form of a thunder shower or a woodland landscape, that seems the true and proper expression of the life-force, or libido, as Freud called it.

What do you make of Walpurgisnacht and to what extent is it an illumination of the things that preoccupy the waking mind today?

Aw, heck, again I had to run to my Google toolbar to do some research. Even though I double majored in German, I had only the vaguest notion of what Walpurgisnacht really is.

And what an interesting thing it is! Here’s what Wikipedia has to say: “Walpurgis Night (Walpurgisnacht) is a traditional spring festival on 30 April or 1 May in large parts of Central and Northern Europe. It is often celebrated with dancing and with bonfires. It is exactly six months from All Hallows’ Eve.

They had some cool photos of the bonfires in Heidelberg and other places. From what I gather, it’s kind of a Bacchanalian celebration of life, in the same way Halloween is a celebration of death. And as Halloween takes place when it’s really clear the sun is going away, Walpurgisnacht takes place when it’s evident the sun is returning – in the middle of spring, in other words.

In Helsinki they have huge, all night long picnics – how fun is that? In Germany, that’s the night where witches are reputed to meet on the Brocken mountain and revel with their gods. Well, that’s Germany for you. There are references in Goethe’s Faust, The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, Dracula’s Guest by Bram Stoker, as well as Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee.

So I guess my answer would be is that it seems to be a natural, universal reaction to the seasons of Nature – oh, look, the sun really is returning, so let’s party on, dudes! And bonfires seem to be a symbol in a lot of cultures of cleansing, moving on, a spiritual reawakening.

What are you working on now?

I just finished my fourth Lee Campbell thriller, Silent Slaughter. My killer in this one is a Professor Moriarty type – a brilliant, ruthless mathematician, a complete psychopath, the nastiest killer I’ve created yet. He’s a Type Four on the scale of offenders developed by Richard Walters and Robert Keppel – as bad as it gets, an “anger-excitation” killer, someone who gets off on the suffering of others. So I hope the book gives the readers some chills and hopefully thrills.

And I’m in the middle of a ghost story called The Vly, which is about a mysterious area in the Hudson Valley, in the foothills of the Catskills. “Vly” is an old Dutch word for “valley,” and I’ve recently become fascinated by the history of of the Dutch presence in the Catskills. Though the Dutch influence is almost completely vanished, they were the first European settlers in that area. Rip Van Winkle is an early 19th stereotype of a Dutchman – lazy, good-natured, feckless. Amusing in light of how we view the Dutch today!

And Irving’s storyline was based in part on local folklore, as well as stories from the Orkney Islands, where his father was born. Rip follows a quaintly dressed Dutchman into the hills, where he encounters oddly dressed people playing ninepins. When he drinks their liquor, he falls into the deep sleep that lasts for 50 years. When Irving wrote Rip Van Winkle, there were already American folk tales of Henry Hudson and his men playing nine pins with gnomes “a group of pygmies with long, bushy beards and eyes like pigs.” According to this tale, the spirits of Hudson and his men return to the mountains every twenty years to play nine pins with the gnomes. These are the men Rip meets in the mountains.

In my story a young boy of Dutch ancestry experiences a frightening supernatural phenomenon in the Vly in which he encounters otherworldly beings – perhaps his long-dead countrymen, perhaps goblins or ogres. In fact, your last question has given me an idea – I might just set the whole story on April 30th, and turn it into a Walpurgisnacht tale! Spooooky!

Thank you Carole for an insightful and great interview.

C.E. Lawrence links:

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