A Conversation with James D.F. Hannah, Author of the Shamus-Winning Henry Malone Novels

 I’ve known Shamus Award winning author James D.F. Hannah since before I knew he was James D.F. Hannah. We’ve had many long-form conversations at conferences, sometimes alcohol-fueled, sometimes not. When I heard a comment of his on a podcast a while back I knew I needed to get into it with him. Since we weren’t going to see each other for a while, I started an e-mail thread that became more wide-ranging than I expected, much as our in-person conversations typically do. This week’s blog begins the conversation, which will conclude next week.

One Bite at a Time: Jimmy, thanks for stopping by. A few weeks ago you appeared on Terrence McCauley’s podcast Spies, Lies, & Private Eyes. The entire event is well worth our readers’ time, but you made a comment that particularly resonated with me when you compared the current thriller concept of constantly raising the stakes to the relatively lower stakes in your Henry Malone novels. I don’t have the exact quote, so forgive me if I don’t phrase it well, but the gist was that the average person rarely has to break government codes to defuse a bomb that will ignite a nuclear holocaust, so you don’t deal with things like that. Your stories may have what seem to be lower stakes, but they’re still life and death for those involved. Do I have that essentially right, and would you care to elaborate?

James D.F. Hannah: That's basically spot on. The books that interest me are never that near-operatic storytelling where the whole world is at risk, where there are biological weapons or computer codes or a billion dollars at stake—because how do you relate to that? My ideal stakes are finding out what a character will do for a few thousand dollars and a used car. What pressures can you put someone under that they'll do the worst for the least? 

Plus, I grew up in eastern Kentucky, reading Lawrence Block and Ed McBain and Robert Parker and Sue Grafton, and just the idea of a city felt exotic. But those writers really wrote about comparatively small stakes: Saving Paul Giacomin (Early Autumn), find a missing daughter (B Is for Burglar), or just maintaining a semblance of civilized order (basically all of the 87th Precinct novels). Plus, the main characters were relatable and human and (at least for a while for Parker and Spenser) fallible. As an early reader that felt like something I could attach to more than whatever was going on in most Ludlum novels.

But I know in your own work, you lean toward the relatable protagonist and the smaller stories that nonetheless are huge and vital to the characters. Your Penns River novels combine the scope of McBain's 87th Precinct books or Joseph Wambaugh's various California cop novels with the rhythms of a small town, so something about those smaller stakes draws you also, doesn't it?

OBAAT: Absolutely. I don’t think of my books – your books, all the books we’re talking about here – as having “smaller” stakes; I think of the stakes not being as broad in scope. Ludlum or Brad Thor may place thousands/millions/billions of lives at stake, but none of that matters to Mitch Fisher if Henry can’t find Mitch’s sister Bobbi.

And the motives of the grand stakes novels are typically…what? Millions or billions of dollars? Megalomaniacal impulses? Eeee-vil? (Bwahaha.) Bad things typically are done for relatively small or personal reasons, what Hannah Arendt called “the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.”

You and I agree, but we are clearly outliers; the big bucks are in potentially apocalyptic thrillers. That’s what people prefer to read, and I cannot for the life of me figure out why. Do you have any ideas?

JDFH: The easy answer is escape. Consider Reacher, for example. He's this outsized piece of fantasy fulfillment, for both men and women. He's intelligent, he's the size of a semi, he's attached to nothing and yet also fiercely loyal, he doesn't talk much, and wherever he goes, there's trouble, and he's there to fix it. He makes someone like Spenser—once the high-water mark for an infallible protagonist—look like Kramer from Seinfeld. Plus, you can read a Reacher novel and enjoy it and almost immediately forget it and move on to something else. Nothing lingers from a Reacher novel, nor it is intended to.

And if it sounds like I'm picking on the Child brothers and Jack Reacher, I'm not, and even if I was, I'm sure they've made more than enough money to salve those particular wounds. I've enjoyed several Reacher books, and other writers working in that genre. These are termed "airport reads" for a reason. They're the books you gift your dad at Christmas. The stakes are big, and they're entertainment, and not meant to be much more than that. I never feel a need or desire to return to these books, to relive passages I enjoyed, or to savor the closing pages.

I can't say the same for books where the stakes are merely life or death for a handful of characters I've come to love over a few hundred pages. Think about Scudder's final confrontation with James Leo Motley in A Ticket To the Boneyard, or the revelations at the end of Ross Macdonald's The Chill. For something more recent, consider the gorgeous poignancy of the last chapters of S. A. Cosby's Razorblade Tears, or the utter heartbreak at the end of Ivy Pochoda's Sing Her Down. These are endings which hang with you because you feel the immediacy of their lives, where you understand big-ticket heroism is easy; it's tougher in the smaller strokes.

But I think a larger answer is also the Marvel problem—where every Marvel movie seemed to be about saving the world, or saving the universe, and after a while, once you can't raise the stakes any further, do the stakes even matter? You know they're saving the world in the end, so then what? 

Whereas for me, some of the most successful Marvel properties were the series—Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage. Here you had those street-level stakes. Okay, sure, eventually there were ninjas, but you had flawed and vulnerable characters who were broken and made mistakes. No, they weren't your next-door neighbor, but they were more relatable than a six-five slab of muscle with a buzz cut.

Or what about the Nolan Batman movies, and The Dark Knight? That movie works for a variety of reasons, but chief among them is the point toward the end where the two boats are rigged with explosives and you see these characters wrestling with a decision. Sure, there's plenty of points where Batman has to save the city—he's always saving the city—but for me, the best storytelling wrestles with these ethical quandaries, and that's tougher to do on the larger scale.

Now, storytelling seems to be expected to always be those bigger stakes, and it doesn't leave much room for the smaller questions to be asked, but oftentimes, those are the things which make the story worth telling to begin with.

#  #  #

Come back next Friday for the second half of my conversation with James D.F. Hannah.

A Conversation with S.W. Lauden

S.W. Lauden get around. He’s had short fiction published by Out of the Gutter, Criminal Element, Dark Corners, Dead Guns Magazine, Akashic Books, WeirdBook, Spelk Fiction, Shotgun Honey, and Crimespree Magazine.

His short story, Itchy Feet, was published in Unloaded: Crime Writers Writing Without Guns (Down & Out Books). His short story, Big Shots, is included in the anthology Fast Women and Neon Lights: Eighties-Inspired Neon Noir (Short Stack Books). His short story, Customer, appears in Waiting to be Forgotten: Stories of Crime and Heartbreak Inspired by The Replacements (Gutter Books).

He is the author of the Greg Salem punk rock P.I. series including Bad Citizen Corporation and Grizzly Season (Rare Bird Books). His Tommy & Shayna Crime Caper novellas include Crosswise and Crossed Bones (Down & Out Books). He is also the co-host of the Writer Types podcast with Eric Beetner.

One Bite at a Time: Hi, Steve. It’s been a little while since we chatted. Welcome back. Shayna Billups and Tommy Ruzzo are also back in Crossed Bones. Tell us a little about those two and their story.

S.W. Lauden: Thanks for having me back, Dana. Tommy and Shayna are star-crossed lovers who first showed up in my novella, Crosswise. She's a femme fatale who cost Tommy his NYPD badge before luring him down to her hometown on the panhandle of Florida. She leaves him high and dry shortly after he gets a job as head of security at a retirement community where several of the tenants start dropping dead. He tries to solve the murders to win Shayna and his badge back, but things quickly spiral out of control in the most ridiculous and violent ways.

By the time we catch up with Tommy and Shayna in Crossed Bones, she's off partying in New Orleans and he's a drunken wreck stranded in Florida. A chance meeting with a mysterious older gentlemen at a pirate-themed bar sends Shayna on a treasure hunt in North Carolina. When things get out of hand, Tommy and his bartender/boss/best friend set off to rescue her. They soon find themselves caught between a biker gang and a band of cocaine-dealing pirate impersonators. That's when things get interesting.

OBAAT: I see you fell back onto Raymond Chandler’s famous advice, that when stuck for what happens next, have a biker gang and a band of cocaine-dealing pirate impersonators come through the door. I know you didn’t expect to drop that on us and not have me ask you where you got the idea.

SWL: Chandler truly was a visionary! I’m not exactly sure where the inspiration for Crossed Bones came from—might have been a fever dream, or maybe I ate too much sugar—but I do know that I set out to have fun with these characters. The folks over at Down & Out Books started referring to the Tommy and Shayna books as crime capers, and I think that fits. In general, they’re a little more freewheeling and fun than the Greg Salem books. Something about the length and pace of novellas sets me off in a different direction I guess. The books are still pretty dark and feature lots of bad people doing terrible things to each other, but some of the situations tend slightly toward the ridiculous.

OBAAT: I think of you as an L.A. guy, yet Crossed Bones takes place largely in North Carolina, which is about as far from California as one can get without a passport. Why there?

SWL: I’ve lived in L.A. most of my life, but I’ve done a fair amount of traveling. In particular, touring in a band offers up a unique view of cities you might not otherwise visit. It’s just a series of very short, very intense experiences in specific places that often only reveal the most extreme parts of their personalities to you. You don’t leave there pretending to truly know the place—how could you?—but it’s possible to develop some strong, often misguided impressions based on your limited experience there. Years later, I find that business travel and certain types of whirlwind vacations (weekend weddings, etc.) can have the same effect. That’s kind of the perspective I was writing from when I created the fictional locations in both Crosswise and Crossed Bones.

OBAAT: Did you plan to have Tommy and Shayna come back even before you wrote Crosswise, or was that a more recent decision?

SWL: Not originally. Crosswise itself grew out of a short story I wrote while on vacation in Florida. That short story never got published, but a few people who read it encouraged me to expand the story, which is how it evolved into a novella. My editor, Elaine Ash, was a big supporter so she passed the novella along to Eric Campbell at Down & Out Books and he agreed to publish it. One of the things we discussed back then was potentially turning these characters into a series, but that's as far as we got. And then one day last year I got an idea for a story that quickly evolved into the second Tommy & Shayna Crime Caper, Crossed Bones.

OBAAT: You describe Tommy Ruzzo as a disgraced NYPD cop. Greg Salem, protagonist of Bad Citizens Corporation and Grizzly Season, also had a police career that didn’t work out so well for him. What about fallen cops plays so well into the stories you like to tell?

SWL: Believe it or not, I didn’t really realize I had done this until after Bad Citizen Corporation and Crosswise were both published. Could be a uniform fetish, but more likely there's a pretty pragmatic reason—an ex-cop has certain skills and training that will come in handy when they try to solve crimes, or otherwise stick their nose where it probably isn’t wanted.

I also like the idea of failed authority figures. There’s a certain romance to a flawed person who tries to do the right thing, only to succumb to the parts of themselves they were avoiding all along.

OBAAT: Crossed Bones and Crosswise are billed as novellas. What appeals to you about the shorter form?

SWL: I really like novellas as a reader, especially for crime fiction. There's not a lot of room for exposition, so the writing and the pace of novellas tends to be quicker. And, if you're somebody who reads a lot, it's nice to be able to finish a book on a long plane ride or when you’re on vacation beside the pool or at the beach. It's a unique experience that's different than getting pulled into a novel that takes a week or two to finish. Novels can be more of a commitment, but novellas are like a one night stand or lost weekend. Both are enjoyable in their own special ways.

OBAAT: We talked a little about your life as a musician when last we chatted in December of 2015. As a recovering musician myself, I wonder if anything you learned as a musician carries over into writing. Not just story ideas, but craft elements.

SWL: When I was still playing in bands, I always thought that playing shows was a lot more fun than rehearsing. That might seem obvious, but I've known plenty of musicians who are perfectly content noodling away in their bedroom or studio. If your aim is to get your music (or books or paintings or interpretive dance) in front of more people, you have to do both. One feeds off of the other. As tired a cliché as it is, I have to remind myself to sit down in a chair and type...and just keep typing. As far as I can tell, that's the only way that you're ever going to make anything happen. It can be lonely, tedious, frustrating, and emotionally exhausting, but that's the gig. It makes those agent and publisher phone calls, book launch parties, writers conferences, and five-star reviews that much sweeter when and if they come along.

OBAAT: The hero of your novels Bad Citizen Corporation (one of my favorite titles ever) and Grizzly Season is Greg Salem, former cop and punk rock legend. As a punk rock legend yourself, how much of you is in Greg?

SWL: Greg is a punk rock legend in his hometown and other little pockets of super fandom around the imaginary world I've created for him. I'm not even a punk rock legend in my own living room—just ask my wife and kids. But I did play in bands for a long time and I'm not sure I would have written a trilogy about a punk rock P.I. if I didn't have a personal perspective on that world and an emotional attachment to the people who inhabit it. Music—whether it was punk, glam, alternative, indie, metal, or good old fashioned rock and roll—was pretty much my whole eco-system from the time I hit puberty until, well...what's the opposite of puberty? Let's just call it middle age. Even now I can get lost in songs in a way that is unlike almost any other experience in my life. That's something that I've tried to build into Greg's character, both as a foundational part of his backstory and as something that he struggles with as he gets older.

OBAAT: You mentioned last time you were here there would probably be three Greg Salem books. Is that still the case, and, if so, what’s the status?

SWL: The third book in the planned Greg Salem trilogy, Hang Time, is with my publisher, Rare Bird Books. I'm pretty thrilled with how it turned out and have gotten some great feedback from beta readers. That book should be coming out in October of 2017.

OBAAT: You’re currently partnering with Eric Beetner on a monthly podcast called Writer Types that I’ve already come to look forward to, and I’m not usually into podcasts. How did that come to be?

SWL: I'm really happy to hear that you're enjoying the podcast! Eric and I hit it off pretty quickly when I started poking around the LA crime writing scene a few years ago. We both have backgrounds in music, and we both see the need to support the Indie crime/mystery scene in our own ways. He is, of course, one of the founders of Noir at the Bar LA and has given countless authors the chance to read in front of a supportive, drunken crowd. I've been doing interviews (much like this one) on my own blog for a couple of years now, often featuring many of the same writers from the N@B LA events. We are also both big podcast listeners, so all it took was a road trip to a book signing in San Diego to bring it all together. That happened last October and the first episode was published in January of this year.

OBAAT: What impressed me right away about Writer Types is the caliber of guests you get. The first four editions had the likes of Megan Abbott, Lou Berney, Reed Farrel Coleman, and Sara Paretsky, just to name a handful. That’s truly skimming the cream. How do you and Eric decide who to invite, and how hard is it to work out schedules?

SWL: When it comes to the crime/mystery community, we're truly spoiled for choice. There are so many talented authors to choose from in various stages of their writing careers. And so far the vast majority of the ones we've contacted have been responsive and open to giving us a chance to interview them, or have a little fun with them on microphone.

So, recording an entertaining conversation with an interesting person is actually pretty easy. Getting the stars aligned so that all the players are available at the same time and with a stable internet connection? Not so much. Everybody involved is busy, including me, Eric, and our reviewers, Kate and Dan Malmon from Crimespree magazine. But this whole thing is a labor of love, so it's all been worth it as far as I'm concerned.

Ask me again after episode six.

A Conversation With Eric Beetner

Those who say perpetual motion is impossible haven’t met Eric Beetner. I don’t know anyone else who maintains his pace. I don’t know two people who combined can match his pace on Eric’s day off. To give a brief idea of his resume, his books include Rumrunners and its sequel Leadfoot, The Devil Doesn't Want Me, When The Devil Comes To Call and Book 3 in the trilogy, The Devil At Your Door (released last week), Dig Two Graves, White Hot Pistol, The Year I Died Seven Times, Stripper Pole At The End Of The World, and the story collection, A Bouquet Of Bullets.

He co-authored The Backlist and The Short List, both with Frank Zafiro, and, with JB Kohl, the novels One Too Many Blows to The Head, Borrowed Trouble, and Over Their Heads. He’s also penned two novellas in the popular Fightcard series, Split Decision and A Mouth Full of Blood, and two novellas in The Lawyer series of Westerns, Blood Moon and Six Guns at Sundown.

(Pause here to give the reader a chance to catch her breath.)

He co-produces, edits, and hosts the highly-acclaimed podcast Writer Types with S.W. Lauden and has designed over ninety book covers, three of which I am proud to call my own.

Eric has toured as a musician, painted, written screenplays, acted in short films, been to China twice, fished in the Mississippi, met Barry Manilow, and directed films and music videos. His name has been on television over a hundred times, and he owns a real human skull.

He lives in Los Angeles where he co-hosts the Noir At The Bar reading series in his copious free time.

In spite of all that, he still found time to shoot the shit with me. As you might expect, he started:

Eric Beetner: Your Penns River series is ongoing and I'm just wrapping up a trilogy, which

felt like the right amount of story for those characters. Did you have a plan going in about how many books [the] story would entail, or are you just following the stories as they come to you?

Dana King: I don’t know I had the idea it would even be a series when I started. Once I had the universe in place stories started to find me. I came to like that world so much I even made the PI from my other series into the cousin of the main character in Penns River so I could overlap the two. Now I’m curious to see how far I can take it.

I thought Lars and Shaine were great characters from early on in The Devil Doesn't Want Me. When you say three felt about right for them, is that an idea that came to you after you wrote the third, or did you have three stories in mind when you started, kind of how David Simon had a five-year arc in mind when he started The Wire?

EB: I really start every book as a standalone so at the end of The Devil Doesn't Want Me it could have been one and done. But at the same time the ending was very leading, at least for me, to wonder what came next for these characters. The relationship they establish in the first book is just beginning almost like he's adopted a new child. There was plenty of story left to tell. I haven't traditionally been a big fan of series work, or long series anyway. I think the Parker books over read ten or eleven. Beyond that I tend to tap out after three, with a few exceptions like Owen Laukkanen's Stevens and Windermere series, Joe Lansdale's Hap and Leonard series. I'm coming around to longer series. Maybe it's my age. J

But for me I like a story with real stakes and that means not knowing if a character is going to make it through to the end. If I go in knowing full well that Phillip Marlowe, for example, is going to be fine it takes a little away from the story. It might be why even in the sequels I've written I tend to still kill off a lot of people. That threat has to be there.

Part of me has wanted to do a series where the main character gets killed off and the books pick up with a minor character who gets pushed forward, then they die and so on. Something tells me a publisher might not be into that idea.

But for books two and three of Lars and Shaine I had a trilogy plotted out by the time I was pitching that book to publishers. Neither idea of the second and third books ended up being what they were about. I came up with new stuff when the time came.

All that said, I was sad to see them go. I've always wondered if writers who do a series 20-plus books deep, if there is some basic reluctance to let these characters go. Like if or when they do, do they go through a depression like losing a family member?

DK: I’ll let you know about that depression business if people can bear to read that many of my books. You do touch on a problem with many series: the reader knows the main character can’t die. That’s why I think—well, I hope—I can keep the Penns River series going. Because it’s an ensemble cast and the town is the continuing focal point, I can kill off anyone I want. Maybe not Ben Dougherty, but there’s nothing that says something terrible can’t happen to him and maybe move him off the front line.

I had an idea years ago for an anthology where the main character in each story played a minor role in the previous story. Ideally the last story in the book would include the first story’s main character in a supporting role to close the loop and make it truly a book you could start anywhere and read. Patti Abbott started a cycle of flash pieces like that and it was great fun to fill a niche.

EB: That anthology sounds like a lot of fun. A different approach to a collection.

I like your approach with Penns River, too. I think it's interesting to make a series more about a place than a person. Like you say, there is a central character in Ben, but if you populate the world around him with compelling people and situations, your limit of stories is endless.

Not to name drop but I recently had the chance to interview Sara Paretsky (for my podcast Writer Types with me and SW Lauden) and we asked her how her character of VI Warshawski ages as the series progresses. Without giving away her answer, it is an interesting thought that most writers probably don't consider at the start of a series. I guess there is always the option to have them perpetually one age like The Simpsons or something, but crime novels generally try to stick to the realism. My characters Lars and Shaine go through some significant changes in just the three books over the course of only a few years, but it was important to me to show that growth, especially since age is such an important thing in the first book, The Devil Doesn't Want Me.

Of course I'm always fighting my instinct to write a character who is fifty as the "older" guy while seeming to deny that I am approaching that milestone myself in the fast lane. I suppose time marches on for us too. We don't get the luxury of being frozen on the page. *sigh*

DK: I bleed for you. I vaguely remember being fifty.

I thought a lot and made conscious decisions about how characters aged in the Penns River books. I haven’t been writing them long enough for anyone but me to notice, but the characters do age, just not in real time. I drop into each story little hints about how long it’s been since its predecessor, even though there may have been a few years since the previous books came out. Doc’s parents will start to show their age, Chief Napierkowski will retire at some point, but most likely at times when those actions will be of most benefit to a story. I borrowed the idea—okay, I stole it—from Ed McBain’s 87^th precinct series. He wrote them for almost fifty years and the characters aged some, but not dramatically. The passage of time was most obvious in how Steve Carella’s kids grew up.

You mentioned the podcasts you’re doing with Steve Lauden a minute ago. I’ve heard both that are currently available, featuring names such as Megan Abbott, Joe Lonsdale, Reed Farrel Coleman, and Lou Berney. (Others became available since this interview took place.) What made you decide these were a good idea—they are, I look forward to the next one—and how do you get such good production values? They sound like they could’ve been lifted from NPR.

EB: Well thank you, I'm glad you are liking them. Steve and I both come from a music background that celebrated a do it yourself aesthetic that we both have stuck with into our forays in publishing. We had each been approached separately about doing podcasts as part of a larger "network" and while that appealed to us, we each had the same reservations of wanting to have total control over the product our names would be on. Add to that Steve's experience in marketing, my experience in editing and film and TV productions and we knew we could do something of the quality we required before we attached our reputations to it.

I'm glad to see you reference NPR because that really was our model. We wanted a variety show for crime and mystery fans. We have so many people we want to talk to and interview that we didn't want to limit ourselves to one guest per episode. Nor did we want the work load of doing a show a week. So we decided on once a month and heavily edited (there went that whole workload thing for me). It's been great fun for us to do and we look forward to doing it for a long time.

With being our own producers and engineers we can do it however we want. We recently have done mobile recording. We have two authors who are on tour out there with a list of things I want them to record and which I will then edit into a mini tour diary. We can play with those kinds of ideas.

Steve and I both try our best to promote other authors and build up the crime fiction community much like a music scene. Writer Types has provided us a new platform to do that which allows us to go national instead of just local with a Noir at the Bar or similar reading or event. If we can keep up the quality of the first four episodes, I'll be thrilled.

DK: You mentioned your workload. In addition to knocking out excellent books at a rate any 50s pulp writer would be proud of and everything else you mentioned just now, you also do book cover designs. Really good cover designs, if I do say so myself, having seen the three you did for me recently for the Penns River series. Not only are they good, you’re far more consultative with the author than are most cover artists. How did you get into that? Even better, how did you find time for that?

EB: Honestly, this gets back to the DIY thing and my lifelong curiosity of any art form, usually with the attitude of, "I want a painting in my wall. Why don't I paint one?" "I want to hear a song like the one in my head. Why don't I write it?" And in this case, "I need a book cover. Why don't I do it myself?"

I would not recommend this to everyone. That said, it's not like I have any special skills or anything. I am untrained in design or PhotoShop. I just like to get in and do things. I'm amazed people have trusted me for what is now more than 90 covers. There are many more talented designers, but I am happy to do it if it means helping out a fellow writer who doesn't have the means to do it on their own or a small press who needs it done on a small budget. (Yes, I come cheap.) For every cover I usually throw out four or five concepts and let the author weigh in, depending on the policy of the publisher. Sometimes that can backfire and it means a lot of cooks in the kitchen. But my overall goal is to have the author be happy with their cover.

As for the time, it's time I should be writing. You will see a slowdown in my output for the next year or two. My agent has three completed manuscripts yet to find a home, I'm working on a fourth now. I wrote some TV stuff that I doubt will ever see the light of day. But I did let myself get overextended in many ways and I am trying to really focus back on writing alone, at least for a while. The podcast takes time, other obligations come and go like signing on to write for anthologies or editing my own anthology (Unloaded Vol. 2 - out early next year) but I really need to be focused on only the book I'm writing when I get into it so I'm trying to clear the decks for the next few months to write this new one.

So quit bugging me, Dana! Are we done here? Sheesh!

Seriously though, it's been a fun chat.

Sincere thanks to Eric Beetner, the James Brown of Crime Fiction, for chatting here today. Eric’s newest book, The Devil at Your Door, Volume 3 of the Lars and Shaine trilogy, is available for Kindle now.

A Conversation With Todd Robinson

In an effort to keep everyone from being bored with this blog (including me). Today marks the first installment of a new feature. I’ll still do some Twenty Questions interviews, but those are really only good one time around. Once people have answered them, there’s not a lot left, even though I make an effort to swap out the questions from time to time.

A good interview should be more of a conversation, so that’s what we having here today. And not just some boring conversation with some droog off the street. The break the cherry of this new feature, we got Todd Robinson, founder and editor of the late, lamented Thuglit, and internationally published author of the The Hard Bounce and its sequel Rough Trade. Most of you already know Todd, at least by reputation. For those of you who haven’t yet had the pleasure…well, there’s a lot I could tell you, but it’s better to hear it from Big Daddy Thug himself.

You’re a Boston boy through and through. How’d you end up in Yankeeland?

 

A series of bad decisions. Add on another twenty years of bad decisions, and I'm still here. New York is that unforgiving kind of town that grants a person enough of a living to stay here without allowing the means to accumulate enough to fucking leave. It's insidious.

But at this point, my boy is here, so I'm here. I'm raising a New Yorker, so the best I can do is accept a lifetime with a Mets fan.

Needless to say, he is being raised with the concrete belief that the Yankees represent all that is wrong in the world.

Thuglit was considered by many to be the premier neo-noir outlet in the country. A lot of now big names were published there before they became big deals. What gave you the idea to start it up?

I got tired of the shitty longstanding magazines tendency to publish bland crime lit suitable for Nana. They weren't representing the kind of writing I was doing, and they sure as shit weren't representing the shit I liked to read.

What do you like to read? Not necessarily who, but what keeps you going through a book and what will bring you back for more?

I'm reading a bunch of different stuff. As much as I love crime fiction, I'm a little burnt out after eleven years of reading submissions for the magazine. It's important for me both as a writer and a reader not to burn out any further on a single genre. I just finished Birdbox (horror) by Josh Malerman, Deer Hunting With Jesus (current affairs/non-fiction) by Joe Bageant, and just cracked open Utu by Caryl Ferey (crime fiction).

I have to admit my reading focuses a lot—maybe too much—on crime. What is it about crime fiction that drew you in originally? Is it the same as what keeps you there?

What drew me in was that I recognized the characters and lives as reflections of the world I lived in. I recognized the desperation and the lack of societal care for people who were hurting and how they lashed out in a fashion that was sometimes criminal. And I also recognized the humanity underneath the surface of the people others might classify as damaged.

I write about my people. I like stories that relate to those experiences and emotions. Sure, I take those characters and scenarios down some fantastical roads, but do my damnedest to keep the innate truths about the people themselves intact.

I hear you’re going back to France for another tour. Who’s your French publisher and how did you get hooked up with them?

Gallmeister Editions publish my books in France. They have a unique way of finding authors. They find an author they want to publish, then ask that author who they think they should look at—someone that they might not have heard about. This is how they've gotten their fingers on so many authors who are considered "underground" here, and help them find a broader audience in France. Their stable includes some of the bravest and most ferocious writers in neo-noir...and then there's me.

Benjamin Whitmer recommended me into the company. I owe that man at least a steak.

Are French author events different from those you’ve been to here in the States?

Yes. People show up.

Forgive me for this, but I don’t get out much and live vicariously through my more successful friends, and I have a question I’ve wondered about since your first trip to France. Are the events in French or English? If French, do you speak French, or is there a translator?

The events are in French with an interpreter. God help me if I didn't have one. I learned some key phrases to engage people, and apparently my accent was convincing enough for them to sometimes believe that I was a naturalized speaker—perhaps one who'd suffered a recent head injury. Nevertheless, often people would just continue the conversation in French...at least until they saw the panic in my eyes as I frantically searched the room for my interpreter.

Here’s the big thing I wanted to talk about today: You’re a respected voice in and for noir fiction. The late Roger Hobbs referred to you as “the most important name in contemporary American noir.” I’ve read all three of your books (Dirty Words, The Hard Bounce, and Rough Trade) and, while I find many of the short stories to be noir (especially “Peaches,” which I consider one of the handful of best short stories I’ve ever read), the novels strike be as black comedies not unlike some of Shane Black’s films, such as Kiss Kiss Bang and The Nice Guys. What does “noir” mean to you, and how noir do you think you are?

Meh. Noir has become such a malleable term so as to become almost meaningless. It just sounds good because it's French. How noir am I? Who the fuck knows? I'm just telling stories how I want to tell them. Some darker, some with more of tongue-in-cheek sensibility. I call my own style Idiot Noir. And I'm sure there are some who'd argue that what I do isn't classically noir at all, due to the humor. That said, my French publisher has included me in their Neo-Noir collection, so there's that. And those beautiful bastards coined the term. Ergo, the noir purists can suck it.