An Interview with Joe Ricker, Author of All the Good in Evil

 

Joe Ricker is a favorite interview of mine. We’ve never met in person, but he’s a fascinating character who is an honest and forthright interview. I’ve interviewed him before (June 2015 and June 2020) and they‘ve always been a treat. His new book, All the Good in Evil, dropped in October from Down & Out Books

 

One Bite at a Time: Welcome back, Joe. Your new book, All the Good in Evil, launched a couple of months ago. Tell those who are late to the party a little about it.

Joe Ricker: All the Good in Evil is my fourth book with Down & Out. It’s gritty, hardboiled, and there’s no shortage of violence. Basically, a couple of bouncers in Southern Maine supplement their income by robbing drug dealers and construction materials.

 

OBAAT: Amos Swain can’t catch a break. Where did you come up with the character and what inspired you to write of his fall from promising college student to convict?

JR: The idea for Amos Swain as a character came years before I’d ever tried to write a work of fiction. In a lot of ways, Amos is an amalgamation of my own history, and a couple of guys I grew up with. When I did finally pursue All the Good in Evil as a work of fiction, I thought back to the summer before my sophomore year of college when I got arrested for armed robbery. I remembered sitting in jail and thinking that I’d fucked my entire life up, and there would be no future for me except for something criminal. That’s where Amos originated.

 

OBAAT: I’m not going out on a limb when I say you write dark. What is it about such stories that appeals to you and keeps drawing you back?

JR: I grew up a little rough and that made me pretty unstable for a long time. Too long, probably. I started writing as a way to curb some of the “unhealthy” tendencies that I had, which I felt was very mature of me. I guess I leaned more toward darker fiction because that’s where I felt most comfortable – that’s what I knew when I started writing.

 

OBAAT: You mentioned in our previous interview how those you cite as influences on your writing has evolved. Is your list still changing? What kinds of things have changed in your writing as your influencers change?

JR: I’m always adding to the list. Lately, I’ve been reading a lot of Anne Sexton. I think that the writing I’m doing now is a little less dark. It’s more apparent with All the Good in Evil coming out, because I wrote that book so long ago. Some Awful Cunning, Walkin’ After Midnight, and Porcelain Moths were all books I wrote after All the Good in Evil.

 

OBAAT: You spent two years living in your car while traveling the country. Your web site indicates you settled down, or are at least staying in one place. Do you still get the itch to hit the road? If not, what is it about Reno that keeps you there? (Editor’s Note: I have been to Reno, though only for a few days and over fifteen years ago. I liked it.)

JR: Being on the road for that long was the most liberating experience of my life. I’m always yearning to go back on the road, but I won’t be doing that again for a few years. I’ve been in Reno for a little over three years now, and it suits me. A lot of the old Reno is gone, because developers have basically leveled the weekly hotels to build luxury apartments that nobody working in Reno can afford to live in. But, I practically live on the Truckee River, where there’s excellent fishing, and I spend a lot of time in the mountains. Living in Reno gives me a lot of access to all of the other things I like to do.

 

OBAAT: When we spoke in 2015, I asked what you were working on. You replied, “Faking my own death.” How did that work out for you, or is it still a work in progress?

JR: I totally forgot about that. That’s when the first version of Walkin’ After Midnight came out. But the funny thing is that while I was working on ideas for that, I came up with the idea for Ryan Carpenter in Some Awful Cunning, my first novel with Down & Out. I guess I’m still considering ideas on how to drop off the grid/fake my own death, but I’m pretty content with being Joe Ricker right now.

 

OBAAT: When we were setting up this interview, you mentioned at one point, and this is a direct quote, “this strip club gig is a lot of late hours.” There’s no way I can’t ask you how that gig came about, and how it’s working out for you?

JR: A lot of luck, actually. I met the GM of the club at a bar I hung out at. He needed a guy to manage a couple shifts. I’d done some security work in the past, so he gave me a job. I was teaching at UNR, but I got beat out for a full-time position for a spousal hire. So, I was pretty annoyed with academia and just stopped teaching for them to work at the club. That turned out to be a better choice for me. The money is better, and I don’t have to work as much. It’s been a great gig, so far, despite the occasional violence.

 

OBAAT: Time for the obligatory wrap-up question: What are you working on now?

JR: I’m working on the sequel to Some Awful Cunning.

 

Joe Ricker, Author of Some Awful Cunning

Joe Ricker is a former bartender for Southern literary legends Barry Hannah and Larry Brown. He grew up in southern Maine and has lived in Alabama, Mississippi, New York, and New Mexico. Ricker spent several years travelling the country with his dog and working as a cab driver, innkeeper, acquisitions specialist, professor, lumberjack, ranch-hand, and strip-club bouncer. He lives in Reno, Nevada, where he hikes daily with his four-legged partner in crime. His new book is Some Awful Cunning, from Down & Out Books.

One Bite at a Time: Tease us about Some Awful Cunning. One hundred words or fewer.

                                                                                         

Joe Ricker: Some Awful Cunning is about Ryan Carpenter, an underground relocation specialist or “travel agent.” After betraying a client who solicits him for murder during a relocation, Ryan is forced to return to Ironwood, Maine, where everyone believes he died as a young boy in a brutal family slaying. In Ironwood, a local deputy takes a significant interest in Ryan and finding out who he really is, which inadvertently reveals his location to the betrayed client. Ryan’s fate is simply a matter of the deputy finding out who he is or if the betrayed client will catch up with him first.  

OBAAT: Ryan Carpenter works the flip side of witness protection and helps prospective convicts slip off the radar. Where did you get the idea for this unusual occupation?

JR: I’d gone through a bunch of personal and professional setbacks that were really frustrating. I thought a lot about just saying “fuck it” and dropping off the grid, so I moved back to Maine and started working in the woods cutting timber. I worked all winter and decided to take it up a notch by taking a road trip from Maine to the west coast because I’d never been west of the Mississippi except for some Army stuff in Fort Lewis. I was camping in Alamogordo, New Mexico, and there was a crew of prisoners cleaning up the campground. That was the start of it. From there, the idea took shape and it went from wanting to disappear to writing about a guy that helps other people disappear. At first it was a character who helped people escape persecution, but evolved into him helping anyone who wanted to escape. Battered wives, prostitutes, bikers, etc. Basically, Ryan Carpenter helps anyone who needs to get away from where they are or the situation they’re in and start over.

OBAAT: As your bio shows (I will have included it above) you are the quintessential “well-traveled author.” Was it your intent to move around so much, is that just how things worked out, or is that Witness Protection you’re not supposed to talk about?

JR: After that first road trip, I was hooked. I loved being on the road. I went back to teach at Ithaca College for a couple more years, but after continually being turned down for a full-time position, I decided that life would be better on the road. I thought about how fucking stupid it is for colleges to encourage people to take out student loans to get a degree so they can hire you to teach and those same colleges pay dog shit. And then I realized that I was fucking stupid for continuing to teach, so I went back on the road. I picked up work along the way and I did some freelance writing, so I made enough money to survive, which is a lot easier when you don’t have to pay rent. I loved the road. When I got sick of a place or I didn’t like it to begin with, I went somewhere else. It was insanely liberating, and it gave me more to write about, so it certainly became my intent to move around as much as possible. I did that for two years until I settled in Reno.  

OBAAT: Who are the primary influences on your writing? Were they people you set out to emulate, or was it a matter of looking back one day and realizing they’d had more of an impact than you thought?

JR: I’ve had some amazing people influence my writing – some authors I’d only read and a handful of writers I met while I was bartending at City Grocery in Oxford, Mississippi. Flannery O’Connor and Raymond Carver were probably the two authors I tried to emulate the most when I first started to make an attempt at crafting a story. I fell in love with Carver’s prose, and I really liked how dark O’Connor’s writing could be. When I started to focus mostly on crime fiction, Jim Thompson, Craig Clevenger, and Will Christopher Baer became the guys I really looked up to. Jonathan Lethem, too, was big for me. I walked out of a job at L.L. Bean just to finish Motherless Brooklyn, which I did while sitting in my car in the Bean parking lot.

In Oxford, I was fortunate enough to have some really great people who not only influenced my writing, but showed me enough patience for me to have the courage to get things on the page. Shay Youngblood and Cynthia Shearer were instrumental in helping me discover my strengths, which were few and often sparse. Tom Franklin and Ace Atkins took some time to help me figure out what I was doing wrong and how to make those adjustments. And Barry Hannah and Larry Brown were gentle enough to throw in a kind word here and there when I asked a dumb fucking question about writing. My time in Oxford is always a point of reflection, especially now that I’m getting things published.

OBAAT: We’re both Down & Out Books authors. How did you get hooked up with Eric and Lance?

JR: That’s kind of a sad turn of events. My first book Walkin’ After Midnight came out with another publisher. Jonathan Ashley, another author with the same publisher, reached out to me at some point, and we started talking crime fiction. When that publisher went under, Jon went to Down & Out and hooked me up with Eric. Unfortunately, Jon died shortly after that, so I never got to thank him for linking me up with them.

OBAAT: The classic final question: What are you working on now?

JR: Other than getting better at coloring in the lines, I’m doing some edits to the next two books I have coming out with Down & Out and finishing up the prequel to Some Awful Cunning.