Chin Wag At The Slaughterhouse: Interview With Robert Crisman

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Robert Crisman has had more stories featured on A Twist Of Noir than anyone else.

He has written novels, ‘Red Christmas’ and ‘Queen Of Chiva’ among them, as well as film scripts, and his tales are dark and edgy and full of the noise of the street. His dialogue is cutting edge and vivid as a smack in the face and his characters jump off the page at you.

He is passionate about many things, as this interview shows.
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How did Roanne come to you and what does she represent in your writing?

Roanne was a real lady I knew from downtown and from around Narcotics Anonymous. She’s been clean now for some years, but back in the day she was a real go-get-’em dopefiend who looked like she wouldn’t make it past 30. She was beautiful too, in a wild kind of a way, and her personality and physical appearance captured my imagination.

As to what she represented: Roanne is all dopefiends, and, specifically, me. What she faced is, in essence if not the fortuities, what we all have to look forward to on drugs.

I wanted to show her, first as a person in a world that doesn’t take prisoners.

Most literature, fiction and otherwise, seems to treat dopefiends as some sort of exotic species or something to be put under a microscope and studied, or as sensationalist fodder. Look underneath and all you’ll find are cartoons, nothing human. I think that’s largely because the people who write that kind of crap have never set foot in the muck.  Dopefiends are people, with hopes and dreams like yours or mine, whose fears leech those dreams to dust, and that’s what is necessary to portray. Or else, why bother?

I also wanted to show a bit of the dopers’ milieu and how, at bottom, it’s American capitalist society, with its wolves and its sheep and its businessmen, baby, as seen through sort of a funhouse mirror, but no less real for that. U.S. society gave this milieu birth, after all, and its principles are what drive the action down there. The street struts its stuff a little more nakedly perhaps, but there is essentially no difference whatever.

If I did my job, the Queen of Chiva brought that world a little closer to your doorstep than you might otherwise have imagined it to be, to the point where, hopefully, you can see that it’s seeping through your walls…

You write a lot about power structures and the way people inhabit them. Do you think that we are all politicised or that we’re simply inside power?

I’d pose the question another way, without the dichotomy. I think we’re all “inside” power, i.e., subject to it. Yet we are all very much politicized, especially those who would deny that fact.  Politics shapes everything from lifestyle to sexuality to religious belief, so how could it be otherwise? And in our society, as in all societies that have existed as yet on the face of the earth, the politicization is shaped by the fact that shit rolls downhill.

How has Jean Genet influenced you?

Genet showed me what sex roles consist of, and that they are social and historical constructs with which biology has had little to do. The guys have tried to go out and conquer the world–with tragicomic results–and women have been there to look good, have kids, work like slaves in the home, and pretty much keep their mouths shut. It hasn’t worked out that way, at least not to the guys’ satisfaction–and it’s always the guys who are the last ones to get the news. Their relative privilege in the war of the sexes acts as sort of a stupid pill I think…

Do you think you will write more film scripts?

I don’t know. I’ve got a ton of ’em I’m trying to shop now.

Who do you like reading and why?

I like Hammett, Ross Thomas, James Ellroy, Carl Hiaasen, and George V. Higgins, among others, first because they all write about crime. Seeing as this is a criminal society, reading these guys allows me to keep my fingers on the pulse, so to speak, of what’s happening in America.

Hammett was the first and most important because he laid the blueprint for hard-boiled fiction. And I’m not talking here about the decidedly soft-boiled Raymond Chandler, whose sentimental detective Marlowe–Chandler’s idea of a decent sort of a fellow, learned in the English public school system–was sort of a cross between Miss Grundy and Ward Cleaver after the divorce, and wouldn’t have lasted a day on real streets. Hammett had been there as a Pinkerton agent, had gotten down and dirty with crooks of all stripes, and knew whereof he spoke when it came time to put them down on paper. No one like him had ever existed in literature before.

Thomas wrote of crime in the suites with an accurate eye and sharp satiric wit, and was the most consistently entertaining writer I’ve ever read. Ellroy is a psycho, and his books are more a surreal nightmare than anything, with exaggerated, sometimes gratuitous violence, which, I think, hews close to the truth of American life as we live it today. I think he enjoys using the n-word way too much; regardless of the fact that it was part of the vocabulary of the “bad men” he writes about, he could throttle down just a bit and not lose a bit of verisimilitude. In this regard, he reminds me of Quentin Tarantino, whom he despises…

George V. Higgins wrote the greatest dialogue ever, and he stripped romance right out of the equation, except in his portrayals of bad-ass government agents sometimes. Higgins is the guy who influenced me the most. I learned from him that dialogue is action–action being defined as that which moves the story along. I read Cogan’s Trade, his third novel, virtually all dialogue, and felt like I’d had my ass kicked for 200-plus pages. Name me another author who could do that.

Hiaasen is funny and right on target with regard to Florida fuckwads. His use of adjectives and adverbs to comically devastating effect is by far the best in the business.

Name an experience that changed you and influenced your writing.

LSD, speed, opiates, then radical politics. I’ll save the whys and how-comes for my memoir.

While you write first rate noir, it is evident you are a political writer in many ways without foisting an agenda on your readers.

On the subject of radical politics, do you think it is possible to resolve false dilemmas and decentre the vital centre through fiction?

In terms of radical politics solving “false dilemmas,” I don’t quite get what you mean. It seems to me that radical politics attempts to deal with real ones. If you mean by decentring the vital center the shifting of the center leftward, I think fiction can contribute to the process by giving people a different set of eyes through which to see the world.

I think “vital center” is a misnomer, however. The political center is composed of both right and left elements, irreconcilables, and any attempt to reconcile them sooner or later is hoist upon the inherent contradictions found in trying to balance the “rights” of the fatcats, for example, with the democratic rights of the rest of us, when capitalist survival is predicated on ensuring that democracy for the hoi polloi is never any more than a formality.

Of course, these days, the “center” is increasingly the right dressed in drag–Obama, et al.–throwing scraps to “progressives” while extending the oil wars and allowing big business to keep right on plundering at home.

Jesus, it’s been awhile since I’ve talked this political stuff, and I feel like I’m talking with marbles in my mouth. I much prefer to stay off these issues generally unless I can find a way to work it into my stories, hopefully in comic fashion.

By false dilemmas I meant that often we are presented with two options to resolve a situation when there are more alternatives.

Let’s talk de-politicised fiction. Dashiell Hammett devoted much of his life to left-wing activism, imagine his left wing leanings removed from his prose, would you still rate him and why?

Hammett’s fiction wasn’t left wing. All that came later. What he was was a pragmatist, dealing with whatever showed up on the plate, but not in any consciously ideological sense. He was kind of like Deng Zhou Peng, the leader China after Mao, who said, famously, “White cat, black cat, what difference does it make–so long as it catches the mouse? Or something like that. Hammett wrote from a jobholder’s standpoint, the job being detection, concerned with doing whatever it took to fulfill that jobholding role.

OK, don’t move, that’s what I’m interested in Rob, what do you think it takes to catch the mouse within the mechanics of a great story?

I think catching the mouse is a matter of letting the story “tell itself” after I’ve pieced the general outline together. I approach the story in a series of calibrations, getting the lay of the land, so to speak, and locating my characters, and allowing those characters to interact plausibly with and within the milieu. The people I write about are people I knew out in the street, who talked, thought and acted in certain ways in different situations, and it’s up to me to allow the characters based on these people to act in a way that is true to them. It’s like recording the people I knew in a way, their voices and actions and whatnot.

The characters drive the story, are the story when all’s said and done, and, assuming I have the ears to hear them and the eyes to see them in action, along with the logic to get it all down on paper, I can’t help but catch all the mice that the story lets loose.

Do you feel there’s a point in the stories you’ve written that you’re the proudest of, that the characters start to live and breathe inside you?

All of them, really. And, talking about the novels, I’m proud of each in different ways. Red Christmas was my first, and it’s where I learned what works for me as narrative. Most people seem to find dialogue hardest to get “right.” I’ve been hearing voices all my life, I rehearse their lines for performances down the line, and I had the advantage of reading Higgins, who showed me what dialogue can do. My first three or so drafts of Red Christmas were narrated by someone steeped in the King’s English, and I know the rules of the language and can use it correctly—but I always felt that I’d begged, borrowed, or stolen it somehow off somebody’s back porch, and that regardless of possession being nine-tenths of the law, that language still belonged to them. Then, one day—in a flash!—it struck me that my narrator should, by logic, be a street guy—who would better know my protagonists?—and from that point my problem was solved. I’d put the narration in street language; it’s the language I think in anyway, and it provided a seamless counterpoint to the dialogue. Like I said, problem solved.

I’m proud of The Queen of Chiva because the protagonists were two women and I think I did them justice. When I first drafted the novel, I gave it to four women to read, including the woman on whom Roanne is based. All these women were recovering addicts and, who better to critique my book? They all said they loved it—God strike me dead if I’m lying!—and two of them told me the denouement had them in tears. Best of all, “Roanne” gave it her seal of approval. All of which told me I’d done what I set out to do, which was to make these two women’s story real as a dime.

I’m jazzed a little bit as well by the fact that as a man, I did justice to female characters. Most male writers I’ve read can’t write women worth a good goddamn. They’re all femme fatales or other stock figures, and not really, fully human, and kind of boring on that account. All the stock figures have been done and done. Women are people, just like men, so why not portray them that way?

I suppose this reflects my competitive side coming out…

Lastly, my comic novel, How George Bush And the Lovely Danielle Saved Planet Earth From Zork the Galactic Destroyer: this was a goof, written last year when I was in danger of going nuts for various and sundry reasons. I’d written two earlier novellas: Bone Thugs, about the Bush administration, and Two Rotten Weeks, about Joey and Danny, the world’s two dumbest crooks. I made the two one by introducing the threat of spacewar invasion by the Zorks who—Anyway, it was a goof, written for laughs, but it also gave me a vast amount of room to talk about the various crimes and follies our rulers commit, all day, every day, and how goofy the rest of us can get as well. Anyway, I had a ball writing this thing and have turned it into a screenplay because I’d love to see it onscreen.

Rob, this was a great interview, thank you for being so open.  Your passion, which is so obviously the driving force behind your fiction, and which is present in this interview, is one of the many reasons people want to read your stories.

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Chin Wag At The Slaugherhouse: Interview With Paul D. Brazill

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If you write crime and read it on the net you know him.

You can’t help but know him.

His stories are everywhere and they leave a deep impression once read. He writes cool and descriptive noir with a touch of humour.

His comments on key sites are omnipresent.

If you don’t know his blog you should.

You Would Say That, Wouldn’t You is full of great writing and information about the latest things happening in the world of net noir writing.

I Didn’t Say That, Did I?  is his column at PULP METAL MAGAZINE.

His story DRUNK ON THE MOON will appear in Dark Valentine Magazine on June 11th.

Paul Brazill agreed to meet me and looked sprightly and alert at 8 am.

Then he started on the shots.

 

How did growing up in the north of England influence your writing?

Oh, I think I’ve drawn on lots of characters and events from childhood and teenage years in my writing and I’m draining that muddy well more and more, it seems.  The harshness and the black humour of life in the north east is always there.

The north east, Hartlepool in particular, seems riddled with people who are on the margins and disconnected from mainstream, middle-class society and all the better for it, I think! That’s what interests me anyway, the flotsam and jetsam of life. I still consider myself one of them, too. Gabba gabba hey!

That brings me neatly onto my next question. Do you think the class system in England and crime are linked?

Well, there’s crime and there’s crime, it seems.  A doctor’s tax fraud is apparently ‘transgression’ and benefit fraud is responsible for the end of civilisation.

There is certainly a big lump of dispossessed at the bottom of the ladder engaging in petty crimes and at the top people getting away with ‘cutting corners’. I’d love to know how many braying city boys have been given ASBOS.

You’ve been called the Alan Sillitoe of noir, do you think the description fits you?

It’s shocking but I don’t know Alan Sillitoe’s stuff very well. I know I’ve read ‘Saturday & Sunday Morning’ & ‘Loneliness Of The Long Distance Runner’ – and seen the films – but that’s it. Great mind you.

I need to read more of his stuff. I don’t think he was as good looking as me, though.

Has Poland influenced your crime writing and does it have its own particular shade of darkness?

You know, I’ve lived in my own bubble most of my life so who knows what permeates the skin. I don’t plan what I write, I usually just start with a word, image or phrase, so pretty much anything could come out. Since I started writing, at the end of 2008, it seems like more and more stuff from life in Hartlepool has crept into the stories.

Poland, in the past 100 years has lived through Nazi occupation, Communism, Catholicism and cut throat capitalism, so, yes, I’m sure it has more than a few very peculiar shades of darkness. But, I’m no social commentator. I just make stuff up and write it down. Some those things are directly from life and some are complete fabrications and most are a Pick N Mix of fact and fiction.

Tell us about your novel.

This bloke, academic, like, discovers that Clint Eastwood is actually Stan Laurel’s bastard offspring and that Bob ‘Blockbusters’ Holness played sax on Baker Street. He starts to uncover the truth about a secret society of Opportunity Knocks and Junior Showtime contestants who have covered up the great showbiz secrets. It’s called the Vince Hill Code. Naw, it’s probably going to be a novella and it’s another Peter Ord Investigation, like The Night Watchman story, which is in Radgepacket Four and Play Dead Until You Die, which will be in the Harbiger*33 anthology.

You obviously like your music Paul, often using a song with meticulous precision as a backdrop to your stories. How does it relate to your writing and what are your musical memories of growing up in Hartlepool?

Well, my oldest brother – who died in Africa about fifteen years ago – was a singer and musician in lots of bands, playing the working men’s clubs, hotels, cruise ships etc – and I do have a vivid memory of being about five and his band – black Beatles suits, red guitars & drums – rehearsing in the front room.

As a teenager and in my early twenties, I was heavily into music – Bowie, Queen, punk, the Fall, Subway Sect, Scott Walker, Orange Juice, Tom Waits, – and I  played bass in a couple of post-punk bands in the early eighties.

That enthusiasm did taper off though and I haven’t actively sought out music for a very, very long time. In fact I’ve never even owned a CD player although that may have more to do with  boozing most of my money away.

I’ve named stories after people’s songs, though: Subway Sect, The Birthday Party, Scott Walker, The Clash, the Lurkers & my mate Peter Ord.

Paul you write vivid, dark, highly readable, detailed stories. Name an experience that changed your life and influenced your writing.

Well, I actually started writing when I moved in with my girlfriend Daria after jumping around Poland for about ten years. And then the floodgates seemed to open.

I’ve never seen my stories as particularly dark, though, apart from The Friend Catcher which is supposed to be, well, sad.

I’ve had some dark experiences growing up and over the years and they do creep out into the stories but not directly.

Do you think it’s true that living in exile sharpens your perceptions of your own country?

Well, it certainly gives you another perspective. One of the best things about living in Poland is that I can’t understand most of the things people say. I miss out on a lot of the crap, the moaning.

When I get back to Blighty it usually seems like a blitz of bollocks. Although I then start to enjoy and get into it. Give me a couple of months in England and I’ll be buying the Daily Mail and laughing at Jeremy Clarkeson. Or not.

You seem to be everywhere on the net, how do you find the time to manage so much?

Simple. I hardly work. I’m a self employed EFL teacher and earn just enough to pay for my keep, tax & insurance and the odd night out. Luckily I don’t have commitments like mortgages, kids and the like so I keep my head above water and faff around on t’internet in the meantime.

In the summer I’ll be teaching in Cambridge for six weeks so my presence online will be minimal since I don’t have a laptop. And after that I want to concentrate on giving that novel thing a good kick about so I don’t intend to be around quite as much!

If you had to pick one story you’ve written which you would want to be known for, which one would it be and why?

Oh, tricky, of course, but this afternoon I re-read The Sharpest Tools In The Box, which is at NEEDLE MAGAZINE, and I did like it. It sounded pretty much how I wanted it to sound!

With that, I left him propped against the bar.

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Chin Wag At The Slaughterhouse: Interview with John McFetridge

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John Mc Fetridge is often compared to Elmore Leonard and belongs to a new breed of Canadian novelist writing neo noir. He is at the top of his form. Novels like ‘Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere’ and ‘Let It Ride’ are multi-layered narratives written with sophistication and punch. If they’re not already sitting on your bookshelf, go out and buy them. Now.

He was kind enough to let me interview him and I found him to be a source of  great understanding about the crime novel.

We also talked sport. John wanted to play in goal for the Montreal Canadiens. Now he follows Toronto FC.

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Many comparisons have been made between your style of writing and Elmore Leonard’s and contemporary crime writing has inherited a tradition that stems from him and goes back to Hemingway. Conversely, we have writers using more descriptive styles and an interior approach to character: what do you feel about major writers like James Lee Burke with his descriptive and Gothic prose?

I admit I have a tough time getting into descriptive and gothic prose. I wasn’t one of those kids who read a lot of books and even now I’m often embarrassed that I don’t read more. I grew up reading mostly newspapers (and even then mostly the sports section) so I don’t have a great appreciation of “writing,” as much as I do storytelling. But I’ve really been enjoying Brian McGilloway’s novels recently and although they don’t have a huge amount of descriptive prose, he makes excellent use of the landscape of the Ireland-Northern Ireland border.

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Your novels are packed with action. ‘Let It Ride’ is typically high octane. You put a lot into your novels while maintaining a cleanly balanced and readable prose style. How much research do you carry out?

I do quite a bit of research. A few things in Let It Ride were inspired by actual events as they say – the three women robbing spas at gunpoint was real, for example. And I do a lot of research online. Right now I’m spending a lot of time researching money laundering and crime at casinos. And old rock music. And sometimes I treat my friends and family as research. My brother and my nephew are both in the RCMP and a few of my cousins have done jail time and they’re all storytellers to some degree.

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How do feel your writing is distinctively Canadian and distinguishes you from an American author?

In many ways, certainly literary tradition, Canadians have always been influenced by the UK and the USA. They may be two countries divided by a common language, but we’re stuck in the middle.

So, I try not to think about it too much. But I would say that what distinguishes my writing from American writing is the Toronto setting. Toronto is a big city that on the surface looks like an American city – the same chain stores, the same makes of cars on the streets and so on, but it’s definitely not an American city. Toronto was a fairly small, mostly British city twenty-five years ago. Now half the people who live here were born somewhere else and all those cultures are still fairly separate. The USA may be a melting pot, but Canada is hanging on to the idea that it can still be a mosaic.

I don’t make that a focus in my writing, but it is the background that everything takes place against.

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What’s it like working for the TV cop show ‘The Bridge’ and how does it link with your prose writing?

There are a lot of great things about working on a TV show. For one thing, it’s very social. There were six of us in the writers’ room, so that’s quite different than the isolation of writing a novel. And when outlining a story we all worked together so there was a lot of cooperation.

And the outlining process is also very interesting. An episode of a TV show has to fit a pretty tight formula – not just that the story has to be told in sixty minutes, but there are only certain characters and locations that can be used. At first that seems very limiting but when one of the more experienced writers said that writing episodic TV is like writing haiku, I had a better perspective. And that just sounds classier than it’s like writing limericks.

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We love football in England. Tell us about your passion for soccer and Toronto FC.

Ha, good question. I was thirty years old when I got married and moved from Montreal to Toronto and I certainly wasn’t going to give up my Montreal teams (although my baseball team, the Expos, abandoned me and moved to Washington to become the Nationals) so when TFC came along in 2007 it was my chance to have a home team again. I didn’t know much about soccer but my neighbour is from Glasgow and we go to the games together and he explains some of the finer points.

Going back to that point about so many people in Toronto being from somewhere else, many of them, of course, are from places where soccer is big. The crowd (other than me) is very knowledgeable and represents the ‘new’ Toronto more than a baseball or hockey crowd. TFC’s first star, Danny Dichio said, “No disrespect to those American grounds, but it’s a family-day-out thing. Here we’re playing in front of real football fans.” In Canada we’ve been connected to most things American forever and soccer is a chance for us to connect with the rest of the world. If TFC can win its qualifying games against Motagua of Honduras we’ll be in the CONCACAF Champions League for the first time with teams from the USA, Mexico, Central America and the Carribean. North American sports teams don’t have those kinds of international competitions.

And I really like the sport, it has a different flow than we’re used to in North America. Our football, hockey, basketball and baseball all have any stoppages in play. It’s not something I really noticed until I started following soccer and the game just keeps going. I’m sure that’s symbolic of something if I think about it enough.

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It’s been said that your novels mix police procedure with perp procedure, allowing analogies between the two to emerge. Do you think it’s true that great detectives have strong criminal shadows?

Interesting. Makes me think of another sports quote, a baseball player, Dave Winfield once said that the team had a symbiotic relationship with the fans and the joke was that every sports reporter had to scramble for a dictionary.

I do think it’s true that detectives are only half the equation. My brother told me he liked working in the narcotics department best because the crimes were ongoing, the detectives didn’t come in after it was over as in homicide. He described it as more of a chess game, the criminals are trying to keep doing what they’re doing and the police are trying to catch them. Of course, the police have to follow the rules and collect evidence that will be admissible in court. One thing I try to show in my books is that things are getting out of whack. Organized criminals have much better funding and resources than most police departments and, of course, criminals don’t have to play by any rules.

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Name an experience that changed your life and influenced your writing. 

Okay, one more sports reference. There’s a hockey commentator in Canada named Don Cherry, a much-loved (or much-hated in some circles) guy who was famous for failing to make the NHL (he played a handful of games and the rest of his playing career was in the minors). But then he made it to the NHL as a coach, except that his teams never won the Stanley Cup and the time they got closest they got a ‘too many men on the ice’ penalty (a coach’s penalty) and they lost. So, last year there was a TV biopic about Mr. Cherry and in one of the promos leading up to it a young reporter asked him, “Do you think your life is defined by your failures?” Cherry thought about for a moment and said, “Yeah, I guess you could say that.”

So, I don’t think there’s a particular experience that changed my life and influenced my writing, but I think my writing is more the product of my failures than my successes. I failed at a lot of things I tried for a lot of years. You know that expression, those who can’t do, teach? Well, I failed in my (many) attempts to get into teacher’s college, so what do you do if you can’t do AND you can’t teach?

The experience, then, that most influenced my writing was my realization that I was only writing for myself, only writing what I really wanted to read. Oh, lots of people had given me that advice, every writer says it, but I spent a long time trying to write for agents and editors and professors and failing. Now, of course, I think it’s good that none of that writing I did for other people sold because I’d be stuck doing that instead of what I love to do.

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This is a really interesting answer.

There’s another one which goes, those who can write do so and those who can’t make it as a writer go into publishing and those who can’t make it in publishing become literary agents and if you can’t make it as a literary agent, God help you.

That’s funny. My agent was in publishing, I’m not sure she realizes she’s on a downward spiral.

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There are a lot of fine writers on the net who would love to get into print, do you have any advice to give them?

As for the question, I don’t have any advice beyond the standard, ‘you write the best book you can and you keep sending it out.’ There doesn’t seem to be a standard way to do things anymore. My first novel was published by a small press in Canada (who still, thankfully, publish my books) before I had an agent.

Last year I met Stuart Neville and he told how he had a short story in an online magazine and got a call from an agent who read it and then placed his novel with a big publisher. Declan Burke co-published his first book. All bets are off, it seems.

My bold prediction in publishing is that we’ll see many small presses find solid niche markets. So, I guess if I have any advice it’s to look beyond the big publishers.

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Your writing contains a lot of information yet at the same time it never loses its flow. Because you put so much into your narratives do you find you have to structure your books carefully?

Yes, I am finding that I need to structure the books more. I like to start with a theme, a question. With Dirty Sweet it was, “Why do some people see everything as an opportunity and others wouldn’t recognize an opportunity if walked up and shot someone in the head?” So to speak. At first the book was just exploring the question of opportunity.

But with more books I did find that things could easily get away from me. There have been some negative reviews of Let It Ride complaining about just that, too many characters, too many sub-plots and not enough structure to hold it together. So now I’m more conscious of structure. Though I still think in terms of theme, of questions and I’m still more interested in characters than plot. Oh well, you write what you can.

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Name two novels you wish you had written and why. 

Two? At last you didn’t say one.

This year marks the fortieth anniversary of the publication of “The Friends of Eddie Coyle.” A lot of people like Elmore Leonard and Dennis Lehane have praised the novel so I’m not exactly going out on a limb here, but everything they say about it is true. For me, Eddie Coyle brought to life a world I really understood, filled with characters I knew. And the style of writing fits the characters perfectly. Many people have called Eddie Coyle the first “dialogue-driven” novel, but what George V. Higgins did was to let the characters tell the story themselves – in their own words and with their own values. Every character in the books has an agenda, everybody wants something. It’s really a complete novel.

And then I’d have to say something by Roddy Doyle. “The Woman Who Walked Into Doors,” and “Paula Spencer,” are fantastic books, deeply insightful and moving. And even funny in places.

I just realized that both writers I mentioned (well, at least those books by them) are almost completely character studies of people not doing so well in their lives. Maybe I like those books now because I turned fifty and things are going so well in my life that I can get into a story like that almost as a tourist. They certainly weren’t the kind of books I read when I was going through those kinds of things in my life. Have to think about that.

Thanks for the interview it was fun..

You’re more than welcome John, it was great talking to you.

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There you have it.  John McFetridge:

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Check him out here and here.

Posted in Author Interviews - Chin Wags | 8 Comments