Joely Black is an astute highly talented author who has created a complex world in her Amnar series of novels. She holds a Phd that covers 19^th century history and a lot of geography. Her concerns as a writer involve the way ordinary people get caught up in huge political shifts. She uses Amnar to explore consciousness, the power of religion, political end economic systems and hierarchies. The themes of dictatorship and ideology pervade the books. I highly recommend reading one of her novels. Start with ‘The Inheritor’ then read ‘The Execution’.

She met me at The Slaughterhouse where we talked about authoritarianism and pathology.

Do you think it is possible to delineate an antithesis between matriarchal and patriarchal hierarchies and what does the difference say about power as it relates to gender?

It would appear from studies of matriarchal societies that still exist that the difference is not simply one of which gender rules and which way equality is imbalanced between them. A matriarchal society isn’t simply an antithesis of a patriarchal one, and in fact it seems they’re difficult to define, as it requires more than simply identifying the gender of “rulers” or perceived “leaders”. It would be inaccurate to say that the UK during the Thatcher years was a matriarchal society, just because the Prime Minister and monarch were both female.

I’m not an expert on matriarchal societies themselves, but I am aware that they are generally thought of as organising along kinship lines, tend to be agricultural in their economic basis, have different concepts of holiness and what is deemed to be sacred, as well as seeing marriage and family in much wider terms. As far as this relates to power and gender, I have always felt that while there are of course differences between genders at a fundamental level, everybody operates on a spectrum and that some women are just as capable of tyranny as are men.

I have to say here, one of the difficulties of researching and understanding these societies is that it’s easy to approach with an agenda to demonstrate men as evil and women as good, and their societies as correspondingly corrupt or pure. Neither society is going to be perfect; a matrilineal one that emphasises clan and community over individual is necessarily going to sacrifice the rights of the one to appease the many, whereas a patriarchal one with a strong ideology of domination, control and power is always going to create inequality.

What we do know about matriarchal societies suggest that when women have control (i.e. over goods and the supply of food and provisions in society) they operate very differently to patriarchal ones, with power spread horizontally between representatives of clans and families, all of whom have a say in decision-making. It would be hard to acquire a large amount of obvious political power in such a situation, but doesn’t necessarily mean that individuals could not exert a more subtle influence or sway over others.

Hannah Arendt said in ‘The Origins Of Totalitarianism’ that  bureaucracy and racism were the main traits of colonialist imperialism, itself characterised by unlimited expansion. How does the world you have created in your Amnar fictions illustrate the nature of despotism and in what ways do you see Hannah Arendt’s observation as relevant to the social models you are dramatising?

Within the world of Amnar, we have one city state – Amin Duum – that has, in the transition to democracy, voted in a despot. In coming to power, the leader Tiom had to make absolute enemies out of the traditional Amnari civilisation through the use of violent purges, but also built up an ideology for his own people of eventual expansion, planning to conquer and “save” the Amnari people outside the state from the apparent tyranny of their own society. Whereas regimes like Hitler’s focused on the inherent superiority of one set of people, Tiom can’t really escape the fact that once upon a time, his people were Amnari too, so he uses the idea of rescue and protection as a justification for expansion. The “Tiomke” of Duum have been raised above their peers by the discovery of his personal ideology and the dream of a “better world”, and their attitude toward Amnari is one of both hatred and pity.

By the time the book opens, we see that Amin Duum is now a world dominated by a combination of fear and overwhelming bureaucracy – it’s more visible in Commander Vasha’s life, as he spends much of his time followed around by a ledger-wielding assistant who manages his time and takes messages. Every office Vasha enters, even that of Tiom, is full of clerks filling in forms of one kind or another. Getting from one place to another is almost impossible without filling in endless paperwork, something that’s even slower in the Amnari world because of the lack of technology like typewriters to make the process quicker.

The power of racism to create a united people is a powerful one in despotic regimes, and it can be broken down in many different ways. Aside from the presence of a small, “inferior” race called the Taija, who are constantly victimised by Tiom’s guards, everybody in Duum is aware of where they sit in a complex social hierarchy, with hatreds aimed at various different groups that prevent them from united against the oppressive regime. Therefore, inhabitants of the three cities hate each other, especially residents of the larger, poorer South City, which is regarded as a waste pit for the dregs of humanity.

I found Hannah Arendt’s work incredibly useful for creating and building the state of Duum under Tiom. Her observations on the Eichmann trial were particularly useful for me, because they helped me understand how bureaucracy can be used to dampen down the human emotional response to horrific events. I did not – and could not – reproduce the industrialised killing of the Nazi regime, but many of its features as expressed by Arendt’s study appear in Duum. It was also useful to look at the psychologically destructive techniques employed during Mao’s Cultural Revolution, and the approach of the Khmer Rouge who used the idea of people becoming infected with an illness to explain those who refused to join their own campaigns. It was really important for me to understand and then explain how people could go from a relatively good, socially wealthy situation to one of poverty and suffering and yet still support the leader who created it. Although none of the regimes mentioned did quite the same thing, they did help me understand how it’s possible for leaders to inspire people to live in desperation and fear but for the majority not to challenge it.

In ‘Obedience To Authority’ Stanley Milgram showed clearly that when confronted with a figure of authority people will engage in acts of cruelty towards strangers, deferring their moral responsibility to those seen as in control. Thinking of the Nazi regime and that of Amnar do you agree with the philosopher Edmund Burke’s comment that ‘The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing’  and to what extent do you think Milgram was right?

I think this is where writing Amnar became really interesting. I’ve actually seen live taping of people repeating the Milgram experiments, which adds a new layer to our understanding of what was going on. Participants often repeatedly question what they’re doing, but around a third to a half will go on to give fatal electric shocks during the tests. It’s possible to see that they don’t just willingly give shocks to people but protest frequently. In one case that I saw, an individual stated that he conveyed responsibility to the white coated researcher, but he still carried on.

To a great extent I do agree with Burke. The Nazi regime in particular has been the source of a lot of fascinating material on how “good” people can come to commit acts of evil, fictionalised accounts like “Good”, demonstrating how a liberal man could end up a member of the SS because he made a series of very small decisions, none of which were, by themselves, responsible for his transition into somebody who could commit or condone acts of pure evil. This is what makes the regime so fascinating to study and on which to base tyrannical regimes.

You start to understand that people rationalise what’s going on around them all the time, possibly because they’re looking out for themselves and it’s easier to do nothing than to stand up and fight. It’s easier to shrug at a book burning, for example, than to lose your job, career and home. These choices, which make the political and moral stand so difficult to take, are what gradually change people. Of course, you have examples like Adolf Eichmann (to return to Hannah Arendt), as well. He claimed that he believed he was doing good precisely because he was doing what he was told. The influence of authority is often so subtle that you don’t know until you’re right in front of the worst possible evil, that you’ve been led there by a small series of choices that seemed trivial at the time.

He was also at a remove from the cruelty for which he was responsible. Going back to the second question of bureaucracy in totalitarianism, this is what makes it so pernicious. Every individual is such a small cog in a big system that it’s often impossible to see how your own acts could possibly be wrong. You can rationalise yourself out of making your own life painful by saying that what you’re doing isn’t the actual act of killing. Understanding all of this, I had to really think about how to work with a character like Vasha, who is not necessarily a bad man, being shunted into a position where he is exposed to the violence inherent in the regime, and to develop Io’s character as she quietly and persistently challenges authority by being the “Queen of the Awkward Question”, as she terms it.

It’s important to remember that not everybody will persistently follow authority. Part of looking at the Milgram experiments was understanding how people coped if they disagreed with a regime, what sort of people did, and how they squared it with their own ethical values. The Nazi regime was one that went out of its way to transfer moral consciousness from the killers, to prevent the breakdowns that took place amongst killing squads early on in the conflict. People have to do a good deal of mental work, but it’s perfectly possible to perform a mental switch so that the moral act becomes the act of murder. When the victim is face to face, that appears to be harder (judging by the experience of the squads). One of the things I’ve wanted to show in the Amnar series is that not everybody is swayed by authority, but that it is also incredibly hard to resist the pull of the majority.

Milgram’s work has actually made me wonder about myself, and whether I would be capable of withstanding that kind of pressure from authority. We are so socially conditioned to agree with authority, and with the majority that I would probably query anybody who felt certain that they’d be the one to stand up for good in a despotic regime. It is much, much harder than it looks.

In ‘The Authoritarian Personality’ Theodor Adorno tried to postulate a set of criteria by which to define personality traits and their intensity in a person on what he called the Fascist scale. Adorno came up with nine traits that were believed to cluster together as a result of childhood conditioning. They include conventionalism, authoritarian submission, authoritarian aggression, anti-intraception, superstition and stereotypy, power and toughness, destructiveness and cynicism, projectivity and exaggerated concerns over sex. To what extent do you think these are relevant to the personality of a despot and how do they relate to the despotic characters in Amnar?

One of the biggest difficulties doing extensive studies on the personalities of dictators is that they aren’t all that common, so you can’t do large-scale work, which makes it hard to identify personality traits that might “diagnose a despot”, if you like, in the same way that you can diagnose egomania or schizoid personality types.

However, when you look across the various most famous figures who stand out in history for their tyranny, even just those of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, you see common threads, and even though Adorno refers to the scale as “Fascist” it could apply equally to extreme left-wing dictatorships as well, although the qualities shift and often take different forms. The essential question is “How did this person become who he is? Why does he believe what he believes?” and I think Adorno’s work goes some way toward offering a framework on which to build an understanding of how an imaginary dictator emerges from the crowd and goes on to control it.

When I started working closely on Tiom himself, and the people who surround him, it was vital to know how they maintained their authority and how their personalities worked. I understood from histories of both Hitler’s and Stalin’s governments, that they both kept a constant fear and distrust amongst their ministers and officials as a means of ensuring people couldn’t possibly gang up and overthrow them. All of these personality traits appear somewhere in the Tiomke leadership, although the interesting part of it has been how differently they are expressed.

So far, I haven’t explored Tiom’s background and childhood in the books themselves, but I did have to answer questions about where his views on the world came from. As a writer, when you’re not just commenting on research but producing fiction, there’s a point where you have to start looking at how they interact as people with other people, and that was the hardest part. In Traudl Jung’s diaries, for example, Hitler appears as charming and often kind and erudite, which is a far cry from the monster people want to imagine. It became a matter of looking at how these traits are expressed in language, behaviour, and dialogue.

One of the features not mentioned is charisma, and I found that to be the key that makes so many people fall for despots. Curiously, though, it was also an opportunity to demonstrate that it’s a wily trait, expressed in one of the “good guys” just as much Tiom himself.

Gunter Grass revealed in ‘Peeling The Onion’ that the way Fascist control worked was through the carefully engineered dissemination of information at various hierarchical levels. How does this relate to the world of Amnar and do you believe that Chomsky’s notion of Manufacturing Consent is relevant?

The use of information and indoctrination is absolutely crucial to Amnar, and it was a core feature that I knew I had to have in creating the regime in Amin Duum. The two are very different but related concepts in understanding totalitarian systems. Obviously, in the former case we have the strict control of information, that access to information for some groups is not just better than others, but that there is a degree of privilege that comes with knowing you have insight into secret plans and details, while others do not.

In the case we have the concept of manufacturing consent, whereby people are indoctrinated into an ideology that will of course lead to them supporting actions taken by the leadership without question, because they believe they are right and proper. Tiom created, very much like Hitler, an historical discourse that was published as a book, which gave everybody a standard, accepted history of the city. Dissent from this text was completely banned and books that disagreed with this history were burned.

Teaching children everything they would learn from this book created early indoctrination, and a devotion to Tiom as a saviour figure. Like many dictatorships on the left and right, control not just of what people can do but their time is important. The creation of youth groups, where the young spend most of their time away from their families in situations where they are constantly fed certain types of information and are taught that questioning this is a sign of weakness or ill-health or poverty of mind, is another vital feature of these systems, which explains the appearance of the Junior Youth Movement and the Youth Movement in Amin Duum, both acting to control what children and young adults learn, but also making them tools of dissemination of a particular ideology.

There is actually very little mass media in Amnar, which makes the control of media bodies as explored by Chomsky slightly less relevant than it would be in a modern society. Newspapers are a relatively new development and appeared in other states before Amin Duum. Tiom takes advantage of the lack of media to spread a message solely through the use of the Youth Movement, making constant “proclamations” not unlike the slogans and announcements that appeared in Maoist China. There are also no big corporations in Amnar; in this sense the Tiomke regime is much more like communist dictatorships than Nazi Germany in that it did away with the idea of elitism creating massive inequality.

On a personal level, for characters, it was important to show that questioning what’s going on is very difficult given the level of indoctrination involved. After travelling in China for a while I was amazed by the extent to which people are capable there of not seeing things they are not supposed to see (rather reminiscent of China Mieville’s The City and The City). Studies of the psychology of belief show that people filter reality according to what they already believe, so of course to be raised in an environment where you’re constantly exposed to certain propaganda will make it harder to make that leap into outright dissent. I raised this with Io, this is what makes her so uncertain at first. Something tells her what she sees around her is wrong, but because of the way she’s been raised, it is very hard for her to make the jump to say with authority that “this is wrong.” It would mean challenging everything she’s been raised to believe about the world.

You cite Dostoyevsky as an influence. In ‘Crime and Punishment’ Raskolnikov attempts to place himself above the law through his interpretation of the Nietzschean position of the Ubermensch and he fails. Why do you think he lacked the ability to turn himself into a psychopath and do you think he was ultimately seeking the reassurance of guilt?

I think this relates back to your question regarding the psychological makeup of dictators, but not just that. One of the arguments that I’ve faced as an atheist is one that suggests that without a supreme being dictating order to humans, we have no sense of right and wrong. When I think of Raskolnikov’s attempt to commit murder, his failure to detach himself from what he had done and to truly see himself as above the law (rather than just attempt to convince himself of the idea), I’m reminded of that argument.

This goes back to everything we’ve discussed here from question two onwards, whether you consider the Milgram experiments or Theodor Adorno’s Fascist scale. How do we understand what is good and what is bad? How do we develop a sense of right and wrong? And why is it that some people will do outrageously awful things to other people or participate at a bureaucratic level in industrialised killing, but others will face death because they refuse?

I’m not sure if this is the answer you’re looking for, but it seems appropriate to consider Raskolnikov’s actions in light of all of this, and consider the nature of whether or not people are born good or bad, in some way made good or bad, and whether it’s possible to jump that barrier, either way. Raskolnikov might be rather like the members of SS squads who could not cope with the mass murder they were forced to carry out at superior’s orders, in the sense that it goes against something fundamental in us as a species. His crime was intimate, and as I said earlier, it is hard and emotionally damaging for people to cause that kind of harm to other human beings, if they have to look that person in the face as they’re doing it. There are people, though, who are perfectly capable of that kind of killing, the people we think of in society as psychopaths.

At the other end of the spectrum, we have the Adolf Eichmann situation, of being a cog in the machine who never really sees the slaughter directly and can more easily rationalise it. That said, we haven’t touched on Zimbardo’s controversial Stanford prison experiment, which shows that people can commit horrific crimes against each other if placed in the right environment. I’m not sure if we could consider Eichmann a psychopath since he was removed from the actual act of killing in a way that made rationalisation of his actions easier. Based on what I’ve learned, it seems harder to do this if the human effect of the crime is more immediate.

At this point, I’m tempted to suggest that Raskolnikov failed because without the right mental setup there from the start, and that regardless of motivation, there are certain things that we as humans struggle to be capable of doing without suffering some form of psychological trauma. We’ve discussed here what compels people to commit or to persuade others to commit horrific acts against others, but the consequences are equally fascinating. Much of this rather relates to later books in the Amnar series, although I will hint at a breakdown in one of the characters facing the reality of the regime after a lifetime of devoted support. Privately, I wonder if guilt is one of those mechanisms we have for defining what is right from what is wrong, and that rather than seeking reassurance from guilt, perhaps Raskolnikov is demonstrating that he has one of those mechanisms and that it overpowers his philosophical reasoning for committing the crime in the first place.

Do you think killing and fucking are related?

Definitely. Perhaps not so much the bureaucratic killing where all the emotion is stripped from the act, but there is a passion in both acts, as we use a powerful physical force on another human being. Killing is just as intimate an act, even if the emotion behind it is completely opposite to the one we experience when we fuck. Whenever I write either, I’m aware of the visceral sense of both – as though we drop that higher-brain connection just for a moment and function from the lizard brain. All that sweat and movement and force and energy are propelled into an act intended to physically impress onto another person exactly how you feel, one way or the other.

Franz Kafka in his story ‘In The Penal Settlement’ shows the absolute control over the human body by a dictatorship. He describes the use of a torture and execution device that carves the sentence of the condemned prisoner on his skin in a script before letting him die. Deleuze and Guatarri in ‘Anti-Oedipus’ developed their theory of the body without organs and postulated that the schizophrenic is reacting against the pathologies of capitalism, while RD Laing theorised that mental illness is sometimes a symptom of pathology elsewhere and that the patient is actually being coerced by mainstream psychiatry to cooperate with something that is diseased.

How does the concept of the social control over the body within a therapeutic or punishment structure relate to the fictional world of Amnar and what are your views on these positions?

It isn’t overtly stated until later in the book, but there are several uses of the body, and what is written on the body, as a means of social control or delineation of status. Although public execution and more private torture are used in the Tiomke regime, there are those left alive, scarred by burning, who are kept alive as symbols of what happens to people who have fallen victim to the “sickness” of supporting the Amnari. Nenja in particular is left with burns over her face, and the use of the face as a location for physically visible symbols of punishment is common in Tiomke Duum.

On the other side, the use of tattooing in Amnari culture on graduation or the achievement of a position, especially amongst the Servants, symbolises that these go deeper than simply being titles or jobs in the conventional sense. I was interested in the way that a Servant (one of ten senior warriors and watchers, very highly respected) takes on a role for life, under an indenture which is carved as a tattoo into the flesh. One character, Cosai, while being tortured by the Tiomke, uses the fact that she has this tattoo as something to cling on to; although to us that loss of freedom might seem awful, to her it becomes the thing that keeps her fighting, because she realises that whatever the Tiomke do, she has something that gives her value that they cannot touch.

I’ve been fascinated with Laing’s work, despite the fact that he is largely regarded as an outsider and most psychotherapists would probably look askance at his work. I have experience with mental illness, and the way that it causes you to step outside the conventions of society. My interest arose because it can feel as though you’re being asked to join in a kind of collective madness, that in order to function as a human being you have to spend a lot of your time in denial about the fact that very little in our lives makes much sense. I have my doubts that schizophrenia is a reaction to capitalism, but certainly extreme forms of depression and anxiety could be seen as a sudden realisation that much of what we do in life is madness. When I say that, I’m thinking specifically of the way we as a society cycle between boom and bust, buying into ideas about house ownership and capital that only lead to bust when the markets collapse.

To relate it specifically to Amnar, one of the means used of separating the faithful Tiomke from those who question the regime is the idea of mental sickness. It was used by the Khmer Rouge as a way of explaining people who said that life before their reign was better. A “memory sickness” was used; similar uses appear in China as well. In the same way, I made use of Kafka’s creative legal nightmare from The Trial, that at any moment people could be accused of a crime but cannot know what that crime is. Tyrannical control seeks to undermine the individual’s faith in their own sense of what is real, and this struck me as crucial to creating a realistic sense of torture and suffering in the Tiomke regime. It isn’t so much pure physical pain that breaks people, but the endless assault on their sense of who they are as people.

Robert A Heinlein in ‘Stranger In A Strange Land’ tells the story of Valentine Michael Smith, a human raised by Martians who returns to Earth and starts a religion. It inspired Charles Manson. Science Fiction authors often create a complex mythology to illustrate aspects of the human condition. To what extent do you think religion is a power structure that is different from those discussed and how easy do you think it is to start a cult?

Heinlein isn’t the only author who’s inspired people to start cults, although I won’t go about naming names as that tends to lead to people like me getting sued. There seems to be something about a really well-built fantasy world that inspires a sort of devotion, probably because there is something about taking a story right outside the boundaries of our normal lives and into an entirely imaginary one that allows the reader to make connections about their own lives. It also gives a sense of meaning and certainty in an otherwise uncertain and frightening real world.

I’ve never gone about starting a cult, so I’m not sure how easy it is, but I do see a great many connections between the power structures and methods of control used in religions and those used in either cults or totalitarian regimes. After all, the latter are given the name “totalitarian” because they require a level of fealty and devotion that other political systems don’t.

It’s common amongst the more staunch atheist thinkers, such as Christopher Hitchens, for example, to describe religions as a dictatorship, with the dictator in the sky, rather than in a government office. I can see clear parallels in the call upon believers to have faith, no matter how strange or unpleasant the demands of the invisible dictator. I suspect, although I’m not sure that there are many studies on the subject, that the psychology behind it is very similar. We are wired to believe what we’re told, rather than to question – especially authority figures – and the same underlying principles swing into operation whether you’re talking about a religion or a dictator.

As we’ve seen in the last ten years or so, religion is also a tool used in regimes in order to inspire a greater level of devotion and adherence to whatever law they have instituted. The idea that a god is behind it, enforcing it, and that the punishment for transgression is eternal, puts extra force for many people living in dictatorial regimes. Others, such as Communist ones, react the opposite way. In both fascist and communist regimes leaders have felt that religion is a distraction and that people cannot be devoted to both leader and church.

Not all religions are the same, however. It is entirely possible to move in and out of some safely, to question without putting your own life at risk. Much of that depends where you live, the specific denomination you belong to, and the people around you. Religions also profess to have something that political systems simply can’t, and that is the offer of eternal life, a solution to the fear of death. There was something of a death cult within the Nazi regime, that there was a nobility in dying for the sake of their beliefs and the country, but as a rule unless the system is specifically religious, they don’t offer any consistent message of redemption or of a specific sense of what happens after death.

There is a strong tradition in literature to take political messages and commentary out of the present time and place them in fantastical contexts. From George Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984 to Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, authors choose not to place their stories within the specific world on which they are commenting. What made you choose to create a fantastic world rather than, say, set a story within Maoist China or Nazi Germany?

I had a few reasons for doing it. The first was that the fantasy world came first. When I was young and still learning, I wrote to have fun and the world was where I went to play. As the world grew and I grew up, I felt very strongly that if I was going to create a world that involved a despotic regime that it should be done right, and avoid clichés of traditional fantasy villains. Dictatorships operate in certain ways and because I was writing something deep and very involved, I wanted to make sure it felt very real.

The second major reason was that I think there is a power in taking things out of original context because it gives them more impact. I think stories about China, Russia or Nazi Germany have to be very specific to their time, and you need to be very involved in that world, but you’re also constrained by the rules that operate in that world. It’s difficult to step back if you write about Nazi Germany and say that this is not unlike the way dictatorships at the opposite end of the spectrum work. Placing something in a purely fantastical context often gives a story more punch. I’m inclined to say that unless the story is original and brilliant to the standard of, say, Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief, that we’re better off with the real human stories that survive about those times.

I also wanted people to be able to have fun with it. I know that some people reading this interview might feel a bit overwhelmed, but Amnar is intended to be an enjoyable ride, even if it is a very dark one at times. I didn’t want it to feel as though the message was everything, and that people couldn’t sit back and read Amnar without any knowledge of the deeper work that went into it. One of the things I love as an author is the way people interact with characters, telling me they hate so-and-so or love so-and-so. That kind of personal connection is a very powerful thing, and I didn’t want the background to be so overpowering that any sense that the people were real and their experiences genuine was lost.

I have to admit to being nervous about the idea of somebody of my generation being able to effectively reproduce the experience of living through those times. I have mined the archive for real stories of experiences in order to make the world as accurate as possible, without having to worry about pettier details that don’t matter but can destroy a story set in historical context. A few years ago I toured China and was lucky enough to encounter one guide who went shockingly off-message when she described growing up during the Cultural Revolution. Her mother, a party worker, had been denounced and imprisoned. As a very young girl, our guide had gone to visit her mother and found her in the compound, beating her fists on the floor in the snow. She committed suicide three days later. As an adult, she still felt a great deal of pain about the way people behaved during those times. These are the kinds of stories that bring all the research to life, and I don’t want to ignore them at all, but write in a way that allows me to bring them out rather than absolute historical accuracy.

Thank you Joely for giving a brilliant and unforgettable interview.

Black links:

Joely’s website is here.

Her Amnar series e-books are available online at Amazon.uk.com and Smashwords.

Download ‘Amnar: The Inheritor’ kindle edition.

View samples and download kindle and other versions of ‘Amnar: The Inheritor’ and ‘Amnar: The Execution‘.

Joely’s take on this interview featured at Zen In Heels.

Chad Rohrbacher writes tight hard crime fiction that smacks you in the jaw.

He writes easily within the genre you know him for.

He also writes about alienation.

He writes poetry and is accomplished within the genre.

He met me at The Slaughterhouse where we talked about alienation and politics.

And he slam dunked.

Who are you main literary influences?

Most recently I would have to say Murakami is the biggest influence on my writing. I just can’t get enough. The biggest problem is it takes years for his books to get translated, which is a major pain in the ass. I read all of these reviews and fan sites that tell me how great his latest piece is and we here in America are two books behind.

Another guy I’ll wait in line for is William Gibson. I’m completely hooked.

Of course Stephen King is right up there. Any prolific writer who can draw tight characters and engaging plots like he does I have always been attracted to.

George Orwell, Kurt Vonnegut, Asimov, Joseph Heller, Raymond Chandler, Raymond Carver, Vollman, and poets like Carolyn Forche and Larry Levis, are all amazing.

I’ve recently (last year) been reading more folks like Ray Banks, Hillary Davidson, Victor Gischler, lee child, Lehane, oh, and Max Brooks ’cause I love me some zombies.

Murakami is known for his portraits of alienation and loneliness.
Do you think alienation is a key issue to authors and do you think we alienate ourselves?

That’s an interesting question. My initial response is “of course” to both parts, but it’s not that simple.

I know some writers who can start a story, write 3 lines at breakfast, get a paragraph written between phone calls at work, write another paragraph at their kid’s ballet recital, do some more at home with the TV on in the background, and they never miss a beat. Those jerks amaze me. It’s not fair they can do that and do that well.

I read a quote by Lawrence Kasdan when I first started wiring and it still seems true for me as a writer. He said being a writer is like having homework every night for the rest of your life. For me to do this work I have to physically remove myself. I have to go someplace where I will be uninterrupted. I sign out of gmail, twitters, facebook, and put my phone somewhere where I won’t see it. Sometimes my hiatus from my electronic life is an extended period of time and my friends start emailing me — “hey where you been?” That’s not so bad; it’s when the wife and kids start saying it too that I know I need to come back to “real life”.

Is writing alienating? Yes. Sometimes it does cut me off from family and friends. Sometimes I do stay in instead of going to that bar after work. Sometimes I do find myself overwhelmed with writing new projects, revising others, while sending out completed ones and I wish was a “normal” person with a “normal” life and hobbies that didn’t put me in front of the computer staring at a blank screen seeing made up people come to life in front of me.

Then again, writing is one of the most community driven professions out there. We read each other’s work and talk about authors and help each other improve our crafts and discuss ideas and explore philosophy and argue. And there is a real connection with people in ways that other professions just don’t experience. And luckily it’s not just in the profession, but in the family as well. My wife shares my reading interests so we can discuss and explore and argue about books too.

I do want to mention one thing that draws me to Murakami. I love his sparse, descriptive, surreal moments that his characters experience. For example, in THE WIND UP BIRD CHRONICLES one of the main characters meets a girl and gets a job counting bald guys for a company that makes wigs. Or he finds a well and goes down into it and he thinks of many things. He remembers a story of this Mongol soldier who skins a Japanese soldier alive. He thinks about this zoo where an order was given to kill the animals because the army couldn’t feed them. These images stuck with the character. They stuck with me. It’s like a dream that you just can’t shake. I think about what was meant by this image, that one, etc. He touches on a truth(s) for me (not sure what yet), and I felt / feel less alienated because of it.

Yukio Mishima, whose avant-garde work displayed a blending of modern and traditional aesthetics that broke cultural boundaries, with a focus on sexuality, death, and political change,  became disillusioned with modern Japan. Historically Japan is a military hierarchical system. Japanese society was shocked by his well planned suicide. Do you think alienation may be a product of an individual conflict with cultural conditioning?

To be honest, as far as Japanese culture is concerned, I’d have to do some reading and thinking; however, as far as our culture I’d have to say yes.

When I was in college I was reading a lot of surrealist poets, especially the French surrealists. Rimbaud and the DRUNKEN BOAT, Mallarme, Breton, and at that time I thought the guys were just dandy. That didn’t last long; there was this side alley that grabbed my attention that I think may get at the heart of your question.

We see simple “rebellion” in everyday life where alienation is clearly portrayed. Teenagers sitting in their rooms smoking pot thinking no one understands, kids shifting foot to foot at a middle school dance while watching others have fun, or even an individual questioning his/her life and wondering if they are raising his/her kids “right”. We have these images produced by the culture running through our heads and when we don’t see those images in our own lives, perhaps it does lead to a feeling of alienation.

Artists, I think, are a unique case to this idea. There are at least two ideas being acted out here. First, I think society likes the idea of the crazy artist. Oftentimes we look at artists as hurt, crazy, drug addicted, mentally unstable caricatures who are on society’s periphery, looking in from the hard edges that gives them the ability to “see” truths that others might not be able to grasp. While this may be true for some (it’s not hard to name many from every artistic field — Jim Morrison to Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath to Edvard Munch, that guy from the grunge band from Seattle that I highly dislike to Michael Foster Wallace) — it’s not true for most.

The other ide is that there are a lot of artists who are, in fact, touched by the mentally unstable stick. This was the side alley I mentioned earlier. I was amazed at how many artists were, or were thought to be, depressed or bipolar. Now we understand that there may be chemical/hormonal imbalances that affect these disorders, but I wonder how much was just that the artist has always been looked at as different precisely because she has been on the periphery.

The cynical part of me thinks there are some people who grow up with this romantic notion of the tortured or crazy artist and they purposefully develop that persona to further their careers. Perhaps they are great actors and their careers will take off. Or perhaps they really are screwy. Perhaps I have no idea what I’m talking about, which is most likely.

Ultimately, I suppose, if we dug into anyone’s life we would see signs of “craziness” and we could attribute it to their feelings of alienation.

Do you think that peak moments of inspiration for artists may be brain chemistry that when it reaches a certain peak crosses the line to diagnosable mental disorders?

I’m not sure if inspiration is brain chemistry or emotional intensity or spiritual awakening (though the last sounds the coolest).

I absolutely think there is the “zone” we get in. Is it diagnosable? I wish, because then they might make a med for it and I could get in the zone every time I write.

When I playing basketball I had one particular game that I could nothing wrong. I was hitting everything, handling the ball well, everything. If I could’ve played like that all the time, I would been in the NBA. It was like I was watching from the outside.

The Greeks had their Muses and maybe they had it right. All I know is once I’m in that writing space and I get hit with the zone, I  go with it until I pass out.

Do you think it is possible to write a great story with a political agenda?

The short answer: Absolutely.

I would argue all writing is inherently political. In this I completely agree with George Orwell. He basically said that all writing goes in a particular direction and that direction, whether explicitly “political” or not makes a political argument. Personally, I believe that writing is an extension of what shaped the writer’s experience and values. These values, beliefs, etc. can not be dissected from the author and the author’s writing. It would make the writing  the  completely devoid of any kind of heart.

I understand some say “I’m just telling a story” or “I’m not being political” and they truly might believe what they are saying, but if they create characters and put those characters in certain situations they are saying something politically. Raymond Chandler examines class quite a bit in his novels. Most of our popular books and films are great political stories. Some like BLINDNESS are allegorical while others like 1984 are more explicit.

Jack London, Joseph Conrad, Margaret Atwood,James Baldwin,  Flannery O’Connor, Alexie Sherman (one of the wittiest writers I’ve ever read), all say something about society and thus say something politically. And they are accompanied by every other writer out there.

Now the qualifier “great” is the issue. Many, especially many beginning writers, start off with their message. I’m going to write a story about how awful war is or I’m going to write about women’s rights, and generally I have found those stories usually fall flat. The writer forgets the first rule, the character. Without the character there is no reason for dramatic situation. Without the dramatic situation there is no conflict. Without conflict, there is no story.

Rather the great stories that advance a “political agenda” are those that just let us experience life through their character.

Like many, I have been watching the protests in the Middle East and I have been excited about what I see. Closer to home I have been following the fight for worker’s rights in WI and other states. My own family background is rooted in the blue collar traditions in Ohio. My great grandfather was a carpenter and the other worked on the railroad. My grandfather worked on the docks while the other was a truck driver. My father is a painter by trade. So when I write, there are working class themes that come out. I don’t sit down and say I will write about those themes, but I’m proud of what these men in my family, and so many other people have done and continue to do, that I find these characters popping up all over the place in my writing (poetry, fiction, and even my non-fiction). Is it a political agenda? I don’t think so, but I could see how one might say it is.

At one point in the novel I just completed, KARMA BACKLASH, a middle-aged gangster considers the changing world around him. He recognizes the city growing old, he sees more people wearing “suits” instead of what he thinks as really “working’ for a living, he sees power being abused. While this is not the crux of the novel, it does add depth to him as a character and it does, I suppose, bear some political ideology/agenda.

I guess since I believe all stories are political, the tougher question is what makes them great.

What do you make of WB Yeats’s observation in his poem ‘The Second Coming’ that
‘The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity?’

I think this is a good example of a “political” poem. I think he is basically saying that the “best” people are not interested or not fully engaged in politics (politics meaning any ideology that one might subscribe), while the “worst” are zealots for their issue(s).

I suppose it depends on you’re values and beliefs to define who you would consider as “best” or “worst”.

What do you think the greatest crime films are?

There may be some spoilers here –

Double Indemnity is at the top of the list. It’s a classic for a reason.

Momento, Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs, Man Bites Dog, and Natural Born Killers all do something with story structure really works without being gimmicky. Also I think each added something new to the crime genre.

I think Momento with its layers of mystery explored through the main character’s psychological issues was strong in its own right. It kept the audience engaged and hoping that he would figure out the who killed his wife. The twist at the end was even more significant.

Tarantino’s use of breaking the movie up like chapters in a novel is now his signature. Pulp Fiction and Res. Dogs both do it very well. Each chapter following a character(s) in their experience and each illuminating the story to a tightly knit climax is fantastic.

China Town is a classic. Nicholson does a wonderful job as Gittes. This working class detective stumbles into a broader crime and there once again, there is no happy ending. At the very beginning when Gittes shares pictures of some guy’s wife having an affair, the guy says he is going to kill her. Gittes responds, and I’m paraphrasing here, you’re not rich enough to get away with murder. To me that one line sets up the entire plot. The cutting of the nose scene is also pretty gruesome. You don’t need a lot of gore to make the audience share the pain.

For my money, the Cohen brothers are contemporary masters of the genre. Raising Arizona was one of the first movies I saw that not only made me laugh, but also made me want to watch every movie they ever made/would make. Millers Crossing, No Country for Old Men Fargo… to a single one they have unique characters, great dialogue and complex plots that are engaging.

Blue Velvet. That movie speaks for itself. From the ear that starts the film to the tormented Loren, it’s a disturbing crime film from top to bottom.

I also enjoyed the Boondock Saints quite a bit. The original, not that awful part 2. The larger than life father (similar to Raising Arizona) that the boys must face is one that worked here. Plus a good vigilante story is hard to come by.

History of Violence, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, and Suicide Kings are all films that I found extremely well written and very entertaining.

The Usual Suspects is probably my all-time favorite crime film. The unravelling story from Verbal Kint’s point of view was absolutely astounding. The attention to detail and complexity that was interwoven throughout the film was one of the best I have ever seen. It made the movie one of the few that I have watched numerous times and have seen more every time I watch it.

Do you think we are motivated by the fear of death?

I don’t know. Perhaps on some subconscious level, but I’m not sure very many people think about it all that much. It seems most of us live in ambition and focus on a very small circle of people in our lives so much so that death doesn’t enter our consciousness unless we are forced to recognize it. When my grandfather was sick and needed extensive assistance, it was the first time I thought about death in any serious way. This was in 1991 I believe and I was just entering college. Perhaps I am odd in this way, I don’t know, but after I made peace with him dying, I never considered it again. Luckily I have not had to either.

My grandmother, 82 years old, has started talking about her death. She is very open about the funeral, her will, which great-grand daughter should get what. It’s very odd, but at the same time comforting. Even though I don’t even want to imagine her not in our lives, through her discussion of end of life, I believe we as a family are more aware and better able to take advantage of whatever time we have with her. Camus wrote about this idea quite a bit, recognizing the mortality to take advantage of the life, but it never held any “reality’ for me until recently. She’s an amazing woman who has taught me so much without even realizing it.

Carlos Castaneda quotes the Yaqui Indian Don Juan as saying ‘In a world where death is the hunter my friend there is no time for regrets or doubts’. Do you believe that crime fiction is motivated by a desire to control death?

That’s an interesting question. I think it’s much baser than the desire to control death, much more primal. I think we have a fascination with death, of violence, of what people can do to one another, of how people can be complete brutes or intellectual thugs. We want to know how simple people can sometimes be drawn into situations and do the unimaginable. It’s like when we slow down to see an accident, especially if there are emergency vehicles there. We aren’t trying to control death in those seconds we crane our necks, we are trying to catch a glimpse of the macabre. And if it is gruesome, what is the first thing we do? We tell our co-workers “Oh, you should have seen this accident; it was awful.”

A few months ago they found a body dumped in some high weeds in our neighborhood. The body lay there a long time before it was discovered. Now we live in a typical suburb with families and a walking trail and a nice park. It was, as you can imagine, on the lips of everyone here. Who was that guy? Was he a part of the neighborhood? What happened? Come to find out it was a drug deal gone bad and someone killed him someplace else and just dumped him in our neighborhood. We wanted answers. Did we want answers because we were worried about safety? I don’t think so because I saw the same amount of people walking the trails, the same number of kids at the park. It was a sad story, but it ultimately just became another anecdote people told.

Crime fiction seems to be similar. By vicariously living through crime fiction characters — these vigilantes and mobsters, these private eyes and victims turned predators — we can do all the things we ever dreamed and find satisfaction when the bad, or in some cases, the “badder” (think DEXTER or Gischler’s GUN MONKEYS or Bank’s SATURDAY’S CHILD) guy gets his/her due. When we read crime fiction, I feel like we’re in on it, that we have information that no one else has, and then afterward we can say, “Have you heard? Did you see? Wasn’t it gruesome? I can’t believe.”

So many authors like Nancy Bartholomew, Chuck Palahnuik, Raymond Chandler, Scott McFetridge have a wonderful dry wit and dark humor, it is hard not to be drawn into their stories. So, perhaps the bottom line is we like the twists and turns and surprises of the stories. We like to be entertained.

I understand you have written in other genres and writing forms, how has your experience in other areas helped you in writing crime fiction?

I started off studying and writing poetry, and then moved to screenplays because of my love for film. I think both share some specific techniques, but also taught me different skills that I have been able to apply to my crime fiction.

Both forms do share a love for concise language and using striking images. Anyone can write a long piece, using extemporaneous verbiage to take up space – what school-aged child didn’t “fluff up” an essay just to reach the word count? But in poetry, like a screenplay, an author must search for the exact right word or phrase, they must write to get the most punch in the least space. Indeed, screenplays you generally can not go over 120 pages or risk never being read by an agent, producer, or contest judge. So the challenge in both forms becomes getting readers in quick, developing ideas fast, and making the reader not want to stop reading.

After my brief surrealist stint, I moved to narrative poetry. Poets like Larry Levis, James Wright, Dave Smith, Yusef Komunyakaa, Carolyn Forche, Norman Dubie, David Bottoms, Scott Cairns, Edward Hirsch, and so many others, taught me a lot about how to create a character, establish voice, follow images and story to “say something” about the world in a (hopefully) meaningful way.

Richard Hugo has always spoken to me as well. His focus on place also creating meaning had a huge impact on my writing. Because of him I started seeing places as characters, not just backdrops that people wade through. Toledo, Ohio, where I grew up is a significant character in my novel because we see it as a dying city, one that has struggled for years to remain significant in the face of suburban sprawl and loss of key industries. Just like my main character, Derby Ballard, is a middle-aged gangster trying to remain relevant in the changing world and his crime family.

Place also plays a significant role in many of my poems.  “Over A Bowl Of Potato And Corn Soup, Mr. Marvin Tells Me How He Castrated Baby Goats” depicts the farm in Louisiana where I worked to pay for grad school. The place is as harsh as the act of the narrator castrating goats. The place becomes a living thing that has a personality and acts on its own accord.

I have 5 screenplays under my belt, 3 straight crime / noir pieces and 2 science fiction in the vein of Blade Runner (so crime is central to the script). While I’ve had some success with my screenwriting, a couple of awards, placed in some contests, worked with Mike Farrell for awhile, I just couldn’t quite make it over that hump. Even so, I learned a great deal, especially concerning dialogue and plotting. Mike in particular taught me a lot and I owe him a ton of gratitude.

Eszterhas and Tarantino are two of the greats in both areas of dialogue and plotting. For both the dialogue is real, it flows, it’s tight, it drives the plot while developing character; in short, it does everything good dialogue should do.

Plotting the screenplay was also a good lesson. Having an idea of what the end was going to look like was really important. At first I thought the process should be “organic”, just let things go where they may and that’s one reason no one will ever see that first script. Now I look at it like driving across country: you don’t just get in the car and go. The highways, side streets, rural roads, and detours will derail you so bad that you’ll never get somewhere no matter how fun it was. However, if you have a destination in mind, but find a neat little town off your route, then continue on and find a park you want to stay at, and that affects your final destination some, usually it’s not so significant as to completely ruin the entire trip – you were still able to get where you needed to be.

The plot points in a script applied well when I was writing my novel. The way I could look at each chapter, examine the main plot, the subplots, and how the characters grew as the story went on was integral in finishing it.

As far as writing in different genres, I’ve come to the conclusion that Steven King had it right: tell a good story. When I first started writing, I wanted to write “literature’ with a capital “L”. I mistakenly assumed pulp could not do what literature did, even though that’s what I enjoyed reading, and even if written well. I was miserable. When I started writing crime fiction and noir, I fell in love with writing all over again. To me, that’s what it’s all about – loving what you do, hoping readers get something out of it, and entertaining people along the way.

Thank you Chad for giving a great and unforgettable interview.

Chad Rohrbacher has published in places like Needle Magazine, Crime Factory, Powder Burn Flash, Twist of Noir, and others. Currently he is shopping his crime novel KARMA BACKLASH. He lives in Greensboro, NC, with his wife, 3 kids, dog, and crazy kitten. You can find his work at http://rohrbacher.wordpress.com/.

You want real? I’ll give you real. Come here. He’s here. Aaron Philip Clarke has written a brilliant crime novel with ‘The Science of Paul’. It is not about forensic detail it’s about the psychology of crime. While it is stylistically rooted in the Chandler and Hammett classics Paul is as Aaron says an ex-con with a conscience and the author delves into the moral complexity of what we like to dismiss too easily. He mentions Dostoyevsky’s ‘Crime And Punishment’ as an influence and that is not surprising. When a man or woman gives themselves licence as Raskolnikov did they have had it.

He met me at The Slaughterhouse where we talked about offender profiling and Ralph Ellison.

How effective do you think offender profiling is? 

Well, I don’t profess to be an expert on the subject; I will say that I’ve found criminal profiling to be effective in the apprehension of criminals who operate with a tenable pathology. Much of profiling today is based on typing but in many cases we’ve seen how that typing or generalizing can be problematic, as seen in the case of the ‘D.C./Beltway Sniper.’ The profile of the suspect that was proposed stated the ‘sniper’ would most likely be a white male in his thirties. But the true culprits, John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo, were both of African decent; Lee being a 17-year-old, Jamaican born immigrant. In some cases, relying on a psychological profile and various personality configurations could lead law enforcement investigators astray, but I’d venture to say, more likely than not the profiles aid investigators and provide a good point to work from.

 Tell us about ‘The Science Of Paul’. 

The Science of Paul: A Novel of Crime is my first novel. In many ways it was an experiment and became a kind of amalgamation. I wanted to combine my love of traditional crime novels, like the ones written by Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and Walter Mosley, with existentialism. The influence of novels like The Stranger, Crime and Punishment, The Prone Gunman, and the works of the Georges Simenon and Fred Vargas added to the melting pot as well. I suppose I wanted to write a novel that paid tribute to the classic crime novels I grew up reading, while taking some chances within the genre. I knew I didn’t want the character to be a cop or private detective, so I opted for an ex-con. But Paul really is an ex-con with a conscience, and it’s his conscience and intellect that sets him apart from some common street thug. I wanted Paul to defy stereotypes; I wanted his intelligence to be his weapon of choice, so to speak. He doesn’t carry a gun or any weapon, when things become critical he relies on his fists and wits. But first and foremost he’s human, so he does make mistakes that have dire consequences.

I set the novel in Philadelphia , PA , because Philly provided opportunities for Paul to come in contact with many different types of people in a small, intimate setting. Philly is a relatively small city compared to New York or Los Angeles, and it’s really made up of various neighborhoods that are ethnically polarized. Paul moves through the various neighborhoods while making astute assessments about the things he sees.

I see Paul in a tragic, Shakespearean way. He has so much potential to be something really great, to be a kind of hero. Although, I’m not sure I believe in heroes, as much as I believe in everyday human beings having heroic moments where they show their true characters. But Paul can be a positive force, if he can simply get out of his own way, and forgive himself for his past crimes. He’s not beyond redemption, and in this novel Paul is really just coming to grips with what ails him—his issues and the things that haunt him. He hasn’t figured out the remedy, he only knows he has to make a change.

Do you think that the best detectives have strong criminal shadows and do you think that certain sections of society are criminalised? 

I do think that detectives who can understand the criminal mindset are the most effective. Yet, it’s their ability to compartmentalize the darkness and not bring it home to their families and loved ones that makes their job even more difficult. It isn’t easy to erase the images of the dead and abused from one’s mind, which is one reason why there are high cases of alcoholism amongst police officers–the alcohol is a coping mechanism. Detectives on average are forced to contend with the ugliest aspects of human nature, they come face to face with horrific atrocities; murders, rapes, child abductions. In order to stay sane, they have to detoxify such things. Being a detective is by no means an easy job, and being a good detective means being able to dip into the psyche of the criminal. In many cases, such as detectives who work sex crimes, they are unable to work within the unit for more than a few years because of the affects the terrible crimes they encounter have on them—often crimes that are carried out against children act as a litmus test that lets a detective know whether or not they can cut it in the unit. I think the sign of a good detective is if the detective fantasizes about eliminating a criminal for good. Some may see it as controversial but I see it as healthy. It shows that the urge for justice, for retribution is so strong that a rational detective ponders enacting justice in the rawest form possible. Now the detective that actually goes beyond it being a fantasy is a whole other issue, but fantasizing about ending the life of a child rapist or serial killer seems normal. Sure it may sound a bit primal but if one were to study ancient cultures and civilizations they would find many cases where a village came together to banish or eliminate a threat to the whole; it was done for the greater good. The reality is, there are some profoundly evil people walking the streets freely and I believe they are simply beyond repair and should spend their lives locked away in prison cells, and I’d venture to say those ex-convicts who have spent time behind bars with these types of offenders would probably agree with me.

There are segments in most American cities that have been overrun with crime, and these segments are policed differently—more aggressively, simply because many murder investigations lead back to these neighborhoods. But I think the entertainment industry and Hollywood specifically has painted some of these neighborhoods as uncivilized slums. For example, some crime dramas set in Los Angeles often mention The Jungle—a cul-de-sac of housing units in South Central that are safe havens for The Bloods street gang—and they depict The Jungle as being a hopeless and helpless hell hole. But that’s not the case; there are many good people, working-class people, and retirees whose only disadvantage is that they’re poor and can’t afford to move. So it’s not accurate to portray a neighborhood monolithically, and profess that everyone living there is a drug dealer, a gang member or even related to one for that matter. It’s not so much a war on gangs or drugs; it’s really just a war on poor people. But just because people are living in these gang infested communities doesn’t mean they’re at home with the killers, gang members and drug dealers. Many people live like prisoners in their own homes—afraid to go out for fear of being the victims of  a random drive-by shooting. Everyone needs protection, even the poor. But the same crime element that exists in poverty-stricken neighborhoods exists in middle and upper-class neighborhoods. In my experience, I’ve encountered more drug dealers who have upper-class pedigrees than those who sell dime bags of marijuana on street corners. I examine this idea in the novel. Paul goes to University City , home of The University of Pennsylvania, where he’s tasked with collecting a debt from a drug dealing college student. While there the student gives Paul a lesson in racial profiling and contests the reason so many African-American men are in jail is because their crimes aren’t committed in concealment but rather they are done as brazen spectacle—this is just one of the ideas concerning race and class that Paul has to wrestle with. But crime is everywhere, it’s part of society and it transcends race and class, it has truly been democratized. Criminals come in many different packages, it’s just that the news media and stereotypes tell us a criminal must look a certain way. It’s one reason why people were so surprised by the swindler, Bernie Madoff; he didn’t fit the preconceived notion.

Ralph Ellison wrote a great novel with ‘Invisible Man’ in which he exposed the conditions of institutionalised racism inherent in the US. Do you think things have changed since he wrote it or has political correctness merely allowed the liberal middle classes to hide their prejudice beneath an acceptable veneer?

I remember listening to the radio one night back in 2008, it was one of those underground political stations common in Los Angeles, and the commentators were talking about how if then Senator Barack Obama was elected president it would be the end of political radicalism amongst African-Americans. They saw his election as the end to black revolution because with the institutionalization of a black president, racism would somehow become passé and an outdated subject—the idea being since there is a black man in the White House, the U.S. can’t possibly be racist. But the truth is in the past twenty years, black radicalism and political awareness has only existed within a certain segment of the black community, mainly older and educated. On average, the youth is no longer aware or even concerned for that matter about the issues Ralph Ellison was examining in his novel The Invisible Man. But racism hasn’t disappeared, it’s just that it no longer overtly permeates society as it once did—it’s been transfigured.

I’m a hopeful person but I don’t have any delusions about how I’m perceived at times, especially in public. I’ve walked into department stores only to be followed or questioned; it’s just how things are. I’ve always grown up with a kind of innate fear that my life could be taken away from me; that I could end up behind bars simply because I matched a description of a suspect. I used to joke that I was happy I was born short; since it’s rare a description goes out over an APB to be on the lookout for a short, black male. But when you’re black it’s a packaged deal; it makes you tough. As far as the liberal middle-class and the overwhelming pressure for people to be politically and socially correct, I find it to be somewhat problematic. I’ve witnessed people stutter and stumble over their words, trying to find the best terminology so that they don’t offend someone, and it always comes out forced and unauthentic. I’ve always said I rather people be upfront, if you don’t like me for something as trivial as my skin color then let me know and we can leave it at that. Or if you aren’t comfortable being around a person of color, why not let your being uniformed inspire a teaching moment. But in these modern times, racism has gone underground. Instead of it being overt, a person has to maneuver through passive aggressiveness and back-handed comments. I say let the rebel flags fly, don’t take Nigger out of Tom Sawyer because if we liberalize America to the point that all kids know about the Civil Rights Movement are a few of Dr. King’s speeches, they are only seeing a portion of the truth. But if they know about the gruesome murder of Emmett Till, the assassination of Medger Evers, and the four little girls murdered in a church explosion in Birmingham , Alabama , then that’s the only way to insure such atrocities won’t happen again. The only real hope of getting rid of racism is education, and not just what is taught in the public school system but I’m talking about an education that reveals the true decadence of American society—the type of education that can only come from parents and community leaders that care. As people become more educated, they will hopefully relinquish many of the ideas their parents or grandparents set forth, since racism is really learned at home and then reconstituted in society. But I choose to believe, or I have to believe that things are getting better because it’s important for me to live in a world where my future child won’t come home crying after being called a racial slur. I have to have that kind of faith, that kind of hope that people and society are changing for the better.

Do you think the police are racist and motivated to solve crimes that can win them promotion on the political bandwagon they serve?

Well, police departments are made up of people and people come equipped with all types of views and ideologies. I have law enforcement professionals in my family and I see police overall in a positive light, but I’ve spent enough time around police and in cop bars to have heard some unsavory color commentary. I think being a police officer is such a high stress job that it brings out the true nature of a person, there isn’t much room for political correctness on the streets. Although some police departments have created a culture of silence and do not address rampant cases of racism within their departments. In the case of the Los Angeles Police Department, the department has come a long way. People have to keep in mind, at its inception the LAPD was made up of discharged Rebel soldiers that came from down south and particularly the deep south after the Civil War. Most were out of work and uneducated. So when analyzing police departments and their level of cultural sensitivity, a person has to take history into account. But we are also living in modern times and police departments and their officers must evolve with a society that is forever changing and moving forward.

I’m sure some police are motivated by career advancement to go after prize collars. But the streets and the job can be unforgiving. A detective that gets tunnel vision and manipulates the evidence to work in their favor, just to make a case and end up on the front page of the newspaper normally makes enemies along the way. That type of ambition, the type that affects how well they do their job—whether they thoroughly investigate and follow procedure—has a way of coming back and burning a cop when they least expect it. No good deed goes unpunished.

Do you think it’s possible to merge existentialism with crime fiction?

Yes, most definitely it’s possible. I’d like to think I was able to successfully accomplish merging the two together with The Science of Paul. I was attracted to the characters and pacing of many existential novels I read, and I thought why not take those elements and introduce them into a noir plot. Doing so allowed me to strike a balance between Paul’s internal musings and the driving plot of the novel. In many ways it was an experiment—rather a controlled experiment and it allowed me to do something different within the genre.

Has anything ever truly terrified you?

As a kid many things terrified me. I used to have a great fear of nuclear attack, so much so I would have the most horrible nightmares. I dreamt of a horrific explosion and then the ensuing fallout, and not being able to reach safety in time—everything reduced to ash. It’s safe to say, I had a rather overactive imagination. I still have vivid dreams but they no longer involve nuclear attacks. These days I’m more afraid of time, or the lack of time. I have a lot of stories bouncing around in my head, a lot of ideas, and I’m afraid I may not be able to write them all. I often think about Georges Simenon, and how he was so prolific, and I’d love to be able to write with that kind of fervor but things always seem to get in the way. I’d also like to go back to documentary filmmaking. I found it to be very rewarding. I suppose that’s what terrifies me the most, not being able to accomplish all my goals before the end.

Tell us about your documentary film making.

I’m probably best known for co-producing the “Death of a Preacher” documentary series. The films centered on Jerry Grimes, who undergoes a religious conversion, leaving behind the fast life of the Hollywood film industry to become a preacher in rural North Carolina. The films were seen as rather controversial in the south, mainly due to their bold and unabashed approach to analyzing the relationship between the sacred and the secular. The films were used in an attempt to discredit Rev. Grimes this past year when he ran for U.S. Congress in North Carolina’s District 1. That part of the tale will be told in the third and final installment of the series.

I’ve also directed documentaries for The University of Pennsylvania and I’ve done a considerable amount of freelance work. In my opinion, documentary filmmaking is much like writing. The story is really constructed in the editing process, that’s when things really come alive.

Do you think we romanticise the past and is history a form of politicised fiction?

I think romanticizing the past is America’s favorite past time. If you tune into these political entertainers on cable news or on the radio, after hearing enough of their jargon you would think that 40 years ago the country was an idyllic paradise. I liken it to when a family member dies and all the family wants to do is talk about how great that person was, and the story they paint is of some saint-like individual void of all folly. It’s the same case with Pres. Ronald Reagan–there’s been so many myths when it comes to his beliefs and how he lead the country. But in the case of the past, as a whole, rational people, sane people know the past wasn’t a paradise. It’s just that now we know more about the condition the world is in because we’re exposed to a constant media stream—a plethora of information that streams 24/7 via cell phones and other digital devices. Just because hamburgers were 15 cents and coffee a nickel, doesn’t mean things were somehow better than they are now. In most cases, we’ve just traded in one potential crisis for another. Instead of Communism, we have terrorism and instead of the fear of nuclear attack, we have the fear of a dirty bomb—a biological or chemical attack. I think the world is just as dangerous as it was in the so-called good ole days. Only now the riffraff and predators don’t have to hide in the shadows, they have the Internet.

By all means, yes, history is a form of politicized fiction. It’s never been more apparent than in the last 20 years. According to Dr. Cornel West, “about 72% of Americans disapproved of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. right before he was assassinated, and 55% of Blacks disapproved as well.” Today, you’d be hard- pressed to find someone who is willing to say something negative about Dr. King. Overall, the fiction has been in Dr. King’s favor. In fact, his legacy has been used like a chess piece on both sides of the political firing wall. One moment he’s portrayed as a stanch conservative, the next as a revolting liberal, meanwhile his silhouette is being used to sell iPods. That’s the problem with history, only a small segment of the population is interested in getting it right, while the other segment will take the ramblings of someone on the radio as being the gospel truth—ramblings that aren’t even fact-checked.

I was told by a writing professor once, that all stories are a lie. His belief was that the moment you begin to tell a story, whether it’s considered fictional or fact, it must be considered a lie. The only way the story can be considered the truth, is if the person telling it is witnessing it at the same time, in a play-by-play fashion. The novelist, the biographer, the orator; all of them suffer from the same condition, the burden of imagination. And imagination is at the heart of story, whether it’s completely invented or based on factual information, the writer can’t help but infuse it with their own imagination, therefore rendering it a lie. But the greatest lies contain some truth and as a novelist, it’s always been my goal to make sure the truth is in the work.

Do you find distinctions between genre fiction and literary works and where do you see The Science of Paul fitting?

No, I don’t see distinctions at all. I think that has a lot to do with my writing. I think these distinctions are intended for publishing houses and booksellers, but as a writer and consumer I don’t pay much attention to what someone considers to be high literary or not. But don’t get me wrong, I think there all successful books and less successful books, in terms of what they attempt. When I wrote The Science of Paul, I wasn’t consciously concerned with what genre it would be considered. I was focused on telling the story. Now that the novel is finished and out for the public to purchase, it’s become much more apparent that readership is very segregated. Sometimes if I’m around crime fiction fans and I get to talking about how I was inspired by existential fiction or the works that came out of the Harlem Renaissance, I get these baffled looks. Or if I’m with the high lit crowd and I start going on about Dashiell Hammett, people disperse and I find myself by the wine table alone with a glass of Pinot and cookie. But if I’m the oddball, I’m okay with that. I guess that’s something Paul Little and I have in common. Some reviews have said, in not so many words, that Paul Little is too smart to be an ex-con—that essentially he’s odd or other, and unrealistic. I agree that Paul is other but he’s not too smart. I don’t even know how to qualify such a statement. Sure, Paul Little was in prison but how does that have anything to do with his intelligence? There are many people sitting in prison cells today that are bright individuals that could have been teachers, scientists, and politicians. When creating Paul, I wanted him to defy stereotypes and I wanted him to be complicated. His life is a science experiment, he makes mistakes. He’s a man who hasn’t been apart of street culture for six years and the streets have changed a lot. In Paul’s case his intellect is his greatest weapon but sometimes, like with any weapon or tool, it fails him. He’s no Sam Spade. Paul is an average man, educated behind bars, and he sets out on a journey to free himself of his emotional burdens. People can put him and the novel in whatever categories they see fit, but good fiction is free, unrestrained by what is common or stereotypical. If they’re looking for a confident, hard drinking, cigarette smoking cop or private-eye, they won’t find that in Paul Little, but perhaps they’ll find something else that’s just as satisfying.

Thank you Aaron for giving a brilliant and incisive interview.

 Everything Aaron Philip Clark—his bio, his book ‘The Science of Paul’, his jazz/spoken word band ‘Soul Phuziomati’, news & events—can be found on his website here.