James D.F. Hannah is the Shamus Award-winning author of the
Henry Malone series of private investigator novels, among other things. His
story "No Man's Land" was selected for Best
American Mystery and Suspense 2022, edited by Steph Cha and Jess Walter. Other
short fiction has appeared in Playing
Games, edited by Lawrence Block; Under
the Thumb: Stories of Police Oppression, edited by S.A. Cosby; Trouble
No More; Rock and a Hard Place; Shotgun Honey; Crossing Genres; and The
Anthology of Appalachian Writers.
He lives in Louisville, where the bourbon he hasn’t drunk
yet is.
One Bite at a Time: Your upcoming Henry Malone novel,
Because
the Night, drops June 19 from Down & Out Books. I’ve seen an ARC
and it’s likely to get another Shamus nomination. What’s it about?
James D.F. Hannah: Because the Night follows
up the events of the previous Malone novel, Behind
the Wall of Sleep, where Henry was offered a chance to run for sheriff
by Wallace “Bada” Bingham, owner of the local strip club, The Cherry Bomb.
While he’s in the midst of the campaign, he’s asked by a pregnant woman at an
AA meeting if he’ll look for her boyfriend, an ex-con who’s gone missing. Henry
finds out his missing person case overlaps with a homicide being investigated
by Jackie Hall, a state police lieutenant and probably the last trooper in the
state who still likes Henry. In the course of the investigation, Jackie’s
nearly killed, and Henry goes seeking revenge. He gets caught in a series of
betrayals where friends become enemies and he finds himself part of an unlikely
alliance in an effort to catch the man who shot Jackie and to bring down a
criminal empire.
OBAAT: A lot of books put me off because the
protagonist consistently makes wrong decisions just to raise the stakes. Henry
Malone makes as many unfortunate decisions as anyone, yet you manage to ground
them in such a manner that I can always understand why he did it, even while
recognizing this is likely to break bad for him. How do you keep from falling
into the trap so many others do?
JDFH: I’ve joked that the Malone books are a series
of Pinocchio stories, where the goal is for Henry to grow up and become a real
man. Part of that growth is making mistakes. I’m obviously a huge fan of Robert
B. Parker and the Spenser novels, but during the series, Spenser eventually became
infallible. He was always the smartest, strongest, toughest guy. Thus, he had
no growth; there was nowhere for him to go. For Henry to stay interesting for
me, and I hope for the reader, he’s got to keep growing as a character, and in
that comes making mistakes, but also in the pursuit of him doing the best he
can. That’s always Henry’s goal, to be a better person, typically in spite of
himself.
OBAAT: Henry Malone is a former West Virginia state
trooper and a recovering alcoholic with a bad knee and nine fingers, yet I, who
was none of the above, feel empathy for him, never sympathy. I know it’s no
accident, but how do you pull that off?
JDFH: Henry’s not really in that
Raymond Chandler model of “down
these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither
tarnished nor afraid.” He’s very often an asshole, and he has a complicated
series of relationships, ranging from Billy, his father, to Lily, his
girlfriend, to Woody, his AA sponsor. Plus, Henry is a character of scale. He’s not Reacher or Jack
Ryan—the guy you call to find a missing nuclear device and returns as a blank
slate in the next book. When Henry finds himself in circumstances which require
violence, he doesn’t become Rambo. He ends up damaged by these experiences, and
they become part of his personal history, and they affect how he reacts to the
world.
OBAAT: Why are the Malone stories set in West
Virginia? Why not Kentucky or western Virginia or North Carolina or eastern
Tennessee?
JDFH: Honestly, it was born out of necessity. I spent
most of my first 40-plus years living in eastern Kentucky or southern West
Virginia, with 16 years straight in the latter. I’d spent years trying to write
a crime novel with no luck, because I thought they had to be set in a big city,
and my metropolitan experience was, to be blunt, limited. So when it came time
to start writing what became Midnight Lullaby, the first Malone novel, I
decided I’d take the tropes I loved from PI fiction and just transplant them
into West Virginia. And while I don’t live in West Virginia any longer, so much
of it is just ingrained in me, and it’s easy to fall back into the rhythm of
that storytelling and that environment.
OBAAT: Woody is not the typical psycho sidekick. He’s
also a recovering alcoholic – Henry’s sponsor, in fact – and the voice of
reason, right up until he dips into his substantial store of armaments and
opens vats on whoop-ass on bad guys. What’s his backstory?
JDFH: Man, I wish I knew that myself. Woody started
out as a one- or two-scene character in Midnight
Lullaby, and the further I got into the book, the more I realized Henry
needed someone to play off of, and Woody became an increasingly important
character in the book. The benevolent sociopath is pretty stock in PI fiction
since Parker introduced Hawk in Promised Land—you’ve got Robert Crais
and Joe Pike, Walter Mosely and Mouse, S.A. Cosby and Skunk—but I wanted Woody
to also function as a Jiminy Cricket (again with the Pinocchio references) who
can be funny and earnest and balance against Henry’s abundance of bad ideas
while also providing both a strong arm and those aforementioned armaments when
needed. But outside of an anecdote he shares at the end of Complicated
Shadows, Woody hasn’t offered much backstory, and I’m content with him staying
mysterious. I’m sure at some point his past will come calling, and I’ll
probably be as surprised as anyone.
OBAAT: Henry has two primary female influences in his
life. Lily Wilder, the local high school principal; and Charlotte “Crash” Landing,
the current sheriff, who he is running against for the office. Both are
outstanding characters. (I confess to having a mini-crush on Crash, maybe
because she is unattainable.) Both serve important roles in the story, yet
neither reads like a character created to fill a role. Tell us a little about
them.
JDFH: When I decided to give Henry a steady romantic
relationship—the dating pool in Parker County is fairly small—I didn’t want
that character to be Susan, Spenser’s partner, who became so perfect after a
certain point that I dreaded when Parker would describe how slowly she ate.
Lily couldn’t be around just to affirm Henry and his decisions, or to tell him
how great he is, but she could tell him she loves him—the way a real partner
would. She has her own interior life and her own opinions and no problem
whatsoever in saying when Henry’s being an idiot.
Crash showed up in a non-Malone book, The
Righteous Path, and I loved writing her. Since she became the acting
sheriff at the end of that book, it made sense for her to play a role in these
most recent Malone novels. She’s young, she’s smart, she’s grounded, and she’s
very good at her job. She’s a wonderful contrast to Henry, and the dialogue
exchanges between them are some of the most fun ones in the book.
OBAAT: What’s next?
JDFH: Right now I’m working on a standalone novel set
during the week of the 1976 bicentennial. There’s a first draft completed, with
a lot of revisions planned. I’m also hoping to explore Crash a little more
in—fingers crossed—a series of short stories; we’ll see how that goes.
