July's Favorite Reads

Swann’s Last Song, Charles Salzberg. Not the typical way to start a series—declaring it to be the “last” of anything—but there are a lot of unusual things here. Henry Swann is a skip tracer. Nothing as glorious or sexy as a bounty hunter. Swann just finds people who have split on wives or husbands, debts, unfortunate circumstances. It’s a pleasure, Swann thinks, to take the hot upper-crust woman’s money to find her husband; not so much when the man turns up dead and she still wants him to keep looking. The case takes Swann from New York to LA to Mexico to Berlin and back to New York to a resolution that isn’t what Swann expected at all. Swann’s pretty much an undesirable until he gets his teeth into the case and comes to the realization he wants to do this one right for a change and shows more mettle than he thought he had. This is one of those books that grew on me. I thought it was good while reading it, and found my thoughts on looking back growing fonder all the time.

Dirty Sweet, John McFetridge. A re-read for me, as McFetridge hasn’t been writing books as fast as I want to read them, so I started the Toronto Series over from the beginning. An outstanding first novel—the author had previously collaborated with Scott Albert to write the underappreciated Below the Line—all the things McFetridge would build on in Everybody Knows This is Nowhere and Swap are here. Just the right mix of danger and fun. A lot of writers have been influenced by Elmore Leonard, but few have shown that influence more uniquely than is done here.

Twenty (One) Questions with the Authors of Triple Shot

I’ve said for years the greatest and longest-lasting effect e-books might have on literature is to make novellas financially viable as a form. Instead of being either too short or too long for wither of the main formats, e-books would release the novella from the price and size constraints by removing them altogether.

I still think that’s true, but left out another possibility: get a group of talented authors—three should be sufficient—and hook them up with a publisher who’s willing think outside the box. (Down & Out comes to mind.) Voila! You got yourself a collection of novellas.

Triple Shot launched August 15 from Down & Out Books and OBAAT is lucky to have not one—not two—but all three of the authors here for a special Bonus Question™ edition of Twenty Questions. Each author gets seven questions, with some overlap to be sure no one is bullshitting us.

So, in alphabetical order, here are Ross Klavan, Tim O’Mara, and Charles Salzberg to talk about Triple Shot.

Ross Klavan’s novel, Schmuck, was published by Greenpoint Press in 2014. He recently finished the screenplay for The Colony based on the book by John Bowers. Nominated for an Independent Spirit Award, his original screenplay, Tigerland, was directed by Joel Schumacher and starred Colin Farrell. He has written screenplays for InterMedia, Walden Media, Miramax, Paramount, A&E and TNT. As a performer, Klavan’s voice has been heard in dozens of feature films including Revolutionary Road, Sometimes in April, Casino, In and Out, and You Can Count On Me as well as in numerous TV and radio commercials. In other lives, he was a member of the NYC alternative art group Four Walls and was a reporter covering New York City and London, England. Ross’s contribution to Triple Shot is Thump Gun Hitched.

One Bite at a Time: Tell us about Thump Gun Hitched.

Ross Klavan: A freak accident forces two L.A. cops to play out a deadly obsession that takes them from back alley payoffs to hard time in prison, then deep into the tunnel networks south of the border to a murderous town that’s only rumored to exist. Before the last shot is fired, everything they thought was certain proves to be a shadow and everything they trusted opens into a trap.

OBAAT: I hate to ask where writers get their ideas, but where did you get this idea? Damn.

RK: One of my guilty pleasures is that sort of gritty style Western, you know, where everything gets peeled away until the characters are left to face off with what’s usually the worst of their own selves. So I wrote one. Added to that, there was a guy I met who was a private hand-to-hand combat instructor who was hired by the military and police. He said that he’d once been a cop but did something really stupid at a cop party and spent a year locked up. I always thought that might be useable.

OBAAT: How did you get involved in Triple Shot?

RK: Each of these pieces was on the way to publication for another company that went under. Tim, Charles and I all know each other from NYC and know that nobody wants to pick up the bar tab. I think it was Tim O’Mara who came up with the idea for the compilation for Down and Out Books, who’ve been terrific. Tim had a great idea and we didn’t even buy him a drink. I guess we’ll have to.

OBAAT: You’ve written both novels and screenplays with success. How different was it to write a novella?

RK: It seemed sort of like the bastard child of a screenplay and a novel. You can’t waste time or words. I wanted it to move and I wanted to keep the writing very physical…so that, too, was a way to mix what you can do in a novel and a film.  

OBAAT: You have quite a creative range, as you’ve acted in addition to you novels and screenplays, and worked on short documentaries. Which is your favorite and how do they influence each other?

RK: I can’t choose a favorite but everything influences the other. In a way, you’re always doing the same thing but in a different form, sometimes pushing the body into words, sometimes words into the body, but you’re always working on rhythm and timing and sound and image and how to make a world and people that somebody can get lost in…including yourself. 

OBAAT: Who are your greatest external influences? (Not necessarily writers. Filmmakers, other artists, whoever you think has had a major impact on your writing.)

RK: I think if you’re smart, you’ll let yourself be influenced by just about everything. Let me steer clear of naming writers, just for laughs, so, I’ve always loved film, even bad ones and I can watch individual scenes over and over, sometimes without sound…but of course, also, the usual great suspects like Kubrick and Scorsese and even someone a little more epic like David Lean. My wife, Mary Jones, is an abstract painter and also teaches at Rhode Island School of Design and School of Visual Arts—she’s taught me incredible things about composition that are as true for writing as for painting. Some odder influences…there’s a painter named Mark Tansey, I’ve always like his stuff. The great performance artist Allan Kaprow. There’s a teacher of theater and clowning, Philipe Gaulier. And then, besides the happenings and history of my own life, my writing’s been formed also by martial arts, tai chi, yoga, psychoanalysis and talking to people in bars all over the world.

OBAAT: If Thump Gun Hitched were made into a movie, who would play the major roles?

RK:  Y’know, I don’t want to influence any possible reader’s imagination—they’ll probably cast it better than I could. And if I actually name somebody—say, Josh Brolin—some clown in the business could say, “Gee, we were going to do this book…but Brolin isn’t available.” So cast it the way you want it and all I’d like is a small under-5.                              

Tim O’Mara has been teaching math and special education in New York City public schools since 1987, yet he is best known for his Raymond Donne mysteries about an ex-cop who now teaches in the same Williamsburg, Brooklyn, neighborhood he once policed: Sacrifice Fly (2012), Crooked Numbers (2013), Dead Red (2015), Nasty Cutter (January 2017). His short story, “The Tip,” is featured in the 2016 anthology Unloaded. The anthology’s proceeds benefit the nonprofit States United to Prevent Gun Violence. Tim wrote Smoked for Triple Shot.

One Bite at a Time: Tell us about Smoked.

Tim O’Mara: Smoked is a first-person monologue from a sketchy character explaining how he came to be in the uncomfortable position he now finds himself. The structure of the story—no chapter breaks, just thirty thousand words of him talking—was inspired by Stephen King’s Dolores Claiborne. The reader has to take the narrator, “Aggie,” at his word. Or not. 

OBAAT: You’re best known for your Raymond Donne series of novels. How different was it to write a novella?

TO: “…best known” is a very kind statement. Thanks. The biggest difference/challenge was creating a first-person narrator who was not only NOT Raymond, but also NOT a New Yorker. I enjoyed writing in another voice and making it a monologue instead of the usual dialogue-driven prose I usually find such comfort in.

OBAAT: How did you get involved in Triple Shot?

TO: Charles, Ross, and I each wrote a novella for an e-publisher who ran into some business issues. I had previously written a short story for Down & Out’s “Unloaded” and scheduled a meeting with its publisher, Eric Campbell, to see if he’d be interested in putting together a trilogy of the novellas. He said “Absolutely” and made the rest look easy.

OBAAT: I hate to ask writers where they get their ideas, but where did you get this idea?

TO: My lead character, “Aggie,” is based on someone in my life who lives by prevarications and rationalizations. I had his (or her) voice in my head and said to myself, “What would happen if she (or he) were put in this position?” Man, was it fun to let loose on this person and then humanize him (or her) in a way she (or he) has not been able to do in real life.

OBAAT: You’re a teacher in the New York City Public Schools by day. It’s easy to see how that has affected (for the better) your Donne series. Did your profession have any effect in Smoked?

TO: “Aggie” is basically a grown-up version of some of the kids I’ve worked with who you know are lying because their lips are moving. Beyond that, Smoked is as far away from my New York City teacher life as I’ve ever ventured in my fiction.

OBAAT: Who are your greatest influences? (Not necessarily writers. Filmmakers, other artists, whoever you think has had a major impact on your writing.)

TO: Hitchcock, for sure. He famously said, “Interesting people do interesting things.” I always keep that in mind when creating new characters or developing established ones like Raymond Donne or his buddy, Edgar. I’m also a big fan of Edward Hopper’s paintings. With a single image that—if you take the time to really soak it in—he brings up a lot of questions and tells a different story to each person. Also, I read The Friends of Eddie Coyle once a year just to remind myself how you can tell a story using mostly dialogue. 

OBAAT: What moves you most in a work of literature?

TO: Presently, I’m amazed at how certain writers use poetry in their prose. I just finished Richard Price’s The Whites, and the way he constructs a sentence can only be described as poetry. Reed Farrel Coleman also weaves poetry into his novels, as do Dennis Lehane and Megan Abbott. I’m at the stage now where—when I’m finished with a novel—I reflect and ask myself what I learned from the author. 

Charles Salzberg is the author of the Shamus Award-nominated Swann’s Last Song, Swann Dives In, Swann’s Lake of Despair (re-release Nov. 2016), Devil in the Hole (re-release Nov. 2016), and Swann’s Way Out (Feb. 2017). His novels have been recognized by Suspense Magazine, the Silver Falchion Awards, the Beverly Hills Book Award and the Indie Excellence Award. He has written over 25 nonfiction books, including From Set Shot to Slam Dunk, an oral history of the NBA, and Soupy Sez: My Life and Zany Times, with Soupy Sales. He has been a visiting professor of magazine at the S.I. Newhouse School of Communications at Syracuse University, and he teaches writing at the Writer’s Voice and the New York Writers Workshop where he is a founding member. Today he’s going to talk about his novella, Twist of Fate.

One Bite at a Time: Tell us about Twist of Fate.

Charles Salzberg: Trish Sullivan is an ambitious TV reporter working in a small, upstate New York market who receives a note from Meg Montgomery, a beautiful young woman convicted of murdering her husband and two children. Montgomery claims she’s innocent and Sullivan, smelling a big story that may garner some national attention, investigates and turns up evidence that the woman has, indeed, been framed. What happens next changes the life of both women in unexpected ways.

OBAAT: This sounds like a “ripped from the headlines” story if ever there was one. Was it?

TO: Nope. I guess it could have been but it was completely made up, a figment of my runaway imagination. The idea came to me after thinking about the legal concept of double jeopardy, and I took it from there.

OBAAT: How did you get involved in Triple Shot?

TO: It’s all because of Tim O’Mara. He came back from Bouchercon Long Beach a few years ago with news of a new subscriber website that was going offer brand new crime novellas each month. They were looking to sign up crime writers and Tim convinced me it would be fun and a good idea. I then convinced Ross, an old friend of mine—we have lunch every week at Dos Caminos here in NYC. We all submitted our novellas and they were accepted, but the site never got off the ground and so we got the novellas back. It was either me or Tim, sometimes we’re confused as the same person, but I have no problem giving him the credit, who suggested we package them together. He met with Eric Campbell of Down & Out Books, Eric loved the idea, and that was that. (Editor’s Note: That checks out with what the others said. See what I did there? Separating them like that and not letting them see each other’s answers?  Reminds you of Ed Exley’s masterful interrogation of the Nite Owl suspects, doesn’t it? Oh, come on. Not even a little?)

OBAAT: You’re best known for your Henry Swann series of novels. How different was it to write a novella?

TO: Very different. I didn’t want to use Swann. I wanted to create a whole new story, a stand-alone. I had actually written Twist of Fate as a screenplay years ago with a friend of mine—it was actually optioned several times but never made. I thought it would make a better prose piece because I could go much deeper (and darker).

OBAAT: You’ve written a lot of non-fiction. How much, and what kind, of an effect has that had on our fiction in general, and Twist of Fate in particular?

TO: I started out wanting only to be a fiction writer, but I had to make a living. I knew how to tell a story, which is what magazine writing is, and so I got a job in the mailroom at New York magazine and after three months I quit, sold one story to them and another to the Daily News Sunday Magazine. I found that writing nonfiction was the best thing I could ever have done, even though I looked down on it at first because I thought it didn’t take much imagination and wasn’t very creative. I was wrong on both counts. It also taught me how to write to a word count, which meant making every word count, how to tell a story efficiently, and how to create realistic conversation and dialogue. And beyond that, it gave me ideas for fiction. Swann was a skip tracer because I actually did a profile of a skip tracer once and learned what they did and how they did it. It also taught me research techniques and I was able to indulge my curiosity by doing stories on things I knew nothing about.

OBAAT: Who are your greatest influences? (Not necessarily writers. Filmmakers, other artists, whoever you think has had a major impact on your writing.)

TO: As far as writers, probably Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, Vladimir Nabokov, Saul Bellow and Dashiell Hammett. But I love films and some of my favorites are crime films, especially Goodfellas. But I’ll see every crime film that comes out, and some of them more than once. I especially like the old ones, the classics in black and white.

OBAAT: What are you reading now?

TO: I just finished reading Joe Clifford’s two Jay Porter books and I loved them. I’m also reading T. J. Stiles’s Custer biography, lots of works by students and a whole bunch of crime short stories. Next up is The Art of Fielding.

Twenty Questions With Charles Salzberg

Charles Salzberg is the author of the Henry Swann detective series: Swann’s Last Song, which was nominated for a Shamus Award for Best First PI Novel; Swann Dives In; and Swann's Lake of Despair, the most recent of the series featuring Henry Swann. Charles has been a Visiting Professor at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University, and has taught writing at Sarah Lawrence College, Hunter College, the Writer's Voice, and the New York Writers Workshop, where he is a Founding Member. He is a consulting editor at the webzine Ducts.org and co-host, with Jonathan Kravetz, of the reading series, Trumpet Fiction, at KGB in New York City.

His freelance work has appeared in such publications as Esquire, New York Magazine, GQ, Elle, Redbook, Ladies Home Journal, The New York Times Arts and Leisure section, The New York Times Book Review, and the Los Angeles Times Book Review.

He is also the author of From Set Shot to Slam Dunk, An Oral History of the NBA; On A Clear Day They Could See Seventh Place: Baseball’s 10 Worst Teams of the Century; and co-author of My Zany Life and Times, by Soupy Sales, Catch Them Being Good; and The Mad Fisherman.

Charles will appear at the Bouchercon conference in Raleigh, NC, where he is to participate on the panel, “Weaponry in Crime, Mystery & Thrillers,” on Saturday, October 10 at 10:00, after which he will be signing books. I’ve seen his panels at just about every Boucheronc I’ve been to, and always look forward to them. Given the topic and other panelists (Moderator John Gilstrap, with Dianne Emley, Seth Harwood, and Mark Troy) this year promises to be no exception.

One Bite at a Time: Tell us about Swann’s Lake of Despair.

Charles Salzberg: In Swann’s Lake of Despair I wanted to accomplished a couple of things. First of all, I wanted to move along and solidify the relationship between Swann and Goldblatt, a somewhat mysterious, shady, disbarred lawyer who is kind of a comic, almost Falstaffian character. I did this by getting Goldblatt to somehow insinuate himself as a partner to Swann. This may have backfired a little because now Goldblatt seems to have become almost as popular as Swann himself. The other thing I wanted to accomplish in this book was to push the envelope a little and have Swann work on three cases at once, none of them having anything to do with the other. Most detective novels don’t do this and it just seemed a little bit more realistic to have a PI, or in this case a skip tracer, juggle a few cases at once, in order to make a living. In the first, Swann gets involved in the search for a lost journal that might solve a decades-old death. It’s based on an actual case of a young woman, a party girl like Lindsay Lohan or Paris Hilton, who was involved with some very rich and powerful men. One morning her body washed up on the shore at Long Beach, Long Island, and it wasn’t clear whether she fell, was pushed, or jumped from a yacht anchored off-shore during a wild party. In the second case, again used something from real life. A student of mine, Julia Scully who, by the way, wrote a wonderful memoir called Outside Passage, was writing another memoir and she told the story of a photojournalist she dated in the ‘50s named Eddie Feingersch. He was a daredevil photographer who was also an alcoholic and depressive. He died early, but not before taking a bunch of iconic photos of Marilyn Monroe, while she was in New York City. The photos were published in Redbook magazine, and then they disappeared, as did the rest of his work. Eventually, the Monroe photos surfaced in a warehouse in Brooklyn, but none of any of the rest of his work has ever been found. Swann is hired to find those photographs and negatives, if they still exist. In the third case, he’s hired by a young man who goes to visit his girlfriend one night at her apartment and finds that she’s missing. But not only is she missing but the apartment is completely empty of everything, furniture, clothing, etc. Swann is hired to find out what happened to the woman and, if she’s still alive, where she is.

OBAAT: Where did you get this idea, and what made it worth developing for you? (Notice I didn’t ask “Where do you get your ideas?” I was careful to ask where you got this idea.)

CS The idea came to me when I got a call from a friend, writer Kaylie Jones, who was editing Long Island Noir, at the time the latest in the Akashic series. She asked if I had a story that took place on Long Island. I said, “sure.” A flat-out lie. I had no such story, but freelance writers learn to never say no. So I figured the easy way out was to take a character I already had, Henry Swann, and some how take him to Long Island. The only place I knew well was Long Beach and when I started to research it I found it had a very sordid past, including a mysterious death of a party girl, think Paris Hilton or Lindsay Lohan, who washed up on the Long Beach shore. It could have been an accident, suicide or murder. So I wove a tale around that, Kaylie accepted it for the collection and because we writers never let anything go to waste I figured I could tinker with it a little and make it the first chapter of the next Swann. To make things a little more difficult for me, because I love challenges, I decided to have him work three cases at once, none of them connected, and see if I could make that work. The Starr Faithfull death was one of them—and I was able to update it by creating a lost journal that might help solve the death.

OBAAT: How long did it take to write Swann’s Lake of Despair, start to finish?

CS: I’m a very lazy writer. I’m embarrassed to tell you how little time I actually spend at my computer. But I’m a very fast typist, about 90 words a minute, and I can focus very well when I put my mind to it, so I’d say I wrote it in about a year.

OBAAT: Where did Henry Swann come from? In what ways is he like, and unlike, you?

CS: Years ago I was a magazine journalist and one of my assignments, for a very sleazy magazine, by the way, was to interview a skip tracer. I was fascinated by what he did and when it came time to decide to write a detective novel I decided to use that knowledge. He’s like me in that he shuns violence whenever possible, he’s curious, and he’s literary, but otherwise he’s the person I’d like to be. Brave, bold, and money hungry. Believe me, if I were really money hungry I wouldn’t be a writer.

OBAAT: In what time and place is Swann’s Lake of Despair set? How important is the setting to the book as a whole?

CS: It’s set in the present, even though one of the stories is nailed to the past. And it’s set in places I’ve actually been to, for a change. Setting is very important. I think you need to give a feel to a place, make it another character in the book. In Devil in the Hole I invented a town in Connecticut, because I didn’t want it to be set where the crime really happened, New Jersey. But Swann is set in New York City, Long Beach, Long Island, Boca Raton, Florida, and Austin, Texas (where I’ve never been, by the way).

OBAAT: How did Swann’s Lake of Despair come to be published?

CS: I had two other Swann novels that people seemed to like and sold enough so I had no problem having my publisher, Five Star (I think they like me to say a division of Gale/Cengage) accept it only a few weeks after I submitted it. Actually, the first, Swann’s Last Song, was written as a stand-alone. I had no intention of making it a series. But when it was nominated for a Shamus and I lost I got pissed off and told myself I was going to keep writing them until I won something.

OBAAT: What kinds of stories do you like to read? Who are your favorite authors, in or out of that area?

CS: My favorites are Vladimir Nabokov, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Thomas Berger, Stanley Elkin, I could go on and on. Now, I’m trying to read novels by my fellow crime writers, so I recently finished a novel by Terrence McCauley, and I’m in the midst of reading my first Laura Lippman. I learn a lot just by reading my colleagues’ work, I just wish I had more time, but with teaching three classes a semester and trying to write, it’s not easy. I usually have two or three books that I’m reading at the same time.

OBAAT: What made you decide to be an author?

CS:  I had no choice. It’s the only thing I can do half-decently well.

OBAAT: How do you think your life experiences have prepared you for writing crime fiction?

CS: I have absolutely no experience in crime. I’ve never been arrested. I’ve never even shoplifted. So it’s all in my imagination. I’m just fascinated with it because it’s really all about human behavior. I think all books, no matter what genre they’re in, are really mysteries. If they’re not, why would you bother to turn the page? That’s why you do, to find out what’s going to happen next. As far as life experiences helping, I think being a magazine journalist was a great help because it taught me to be economical with words. Writing to a word count is extremely difficult but it makes you very aware of choosing the right words and getting rid of anything that’s extraneous.

OBAAT: What do you like best about being a writer?

CS: That I’m my own boss. I don’t have to go out when the weather’s really shitty. And besides, I actually get paid (not a lot) to make shit up.

OBAAT: Who are your greatest influences? (Not necessarily writers. Filmmakers, other artists, whoever you think has had a major impact on your writing.)

CS Nabokov, because of his incredible use of language, always choosing the right word, Hammett, for the grittiness. Carl Hiaasen, for the smart humor. And every other writer I’ve ever read, because I learn something, even if it’s what not to do. I had to read a lot when I was reviewing books for the New York Times, and boy did I read a lot of crap, which taught me what not to do. But I also got a chance to read people like David Simon, I reviewed his first book, Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, and was bowled over by it. (Editor’s Note: Anyone interested in crime and police work, whether you’re a reader or a writer, really needs to read this book.)

OBAAT: Do you outline or fly by the seat of you pants? Do you even wear pants when you write?

CS: I never, ever outline. In fact, when I sit down at the computer I don’t know what the next sentence is going to be, let alone the next page or chapter. I love doing it that way because I think it makes things fresh. I figure if I don’t know what’s going to happen next there’s a good chance the reader will be surprised, too. But then I don’t write traditional crime novels. Murders have played a part in a couple of the books, but they’re not murder mysteries. I find other crimes much more interesting. Broken hearts, for instance. In Swann’s Lake of Despair I just got the idea what if you went to your girlfriend’s apartment and not only was she not there but none of her furniture or her belongings? That was the start of a case, and it’s about a broken heart, not a murder.

OBAAT: Give us an idea of your process. Do you edit as you go? Throw anything into a first draft knowing the hard work is in the revisions? Something in between?

CS: Okay, here goes. I start with a sentence. Somehow that sentence leads me to another sentence. Then I have a paragraph, then a page. Then I go back and rewrite that page, after which I move forward. When I’m starting a novel each day I go back to it, and believe me, I wish I could be the kind of writer who’s disciplined enough to write each day but I’m not, I go back to the first page and read it through. That way I can get into the story and into the characters. I’ll do this until I have about fifty pages, and then I’ll just keep going ahead, but each time I write a chapter I go back and revise and rewrite it. And then, when I get near the end of a novel, I stop and go back to the very beginning and read through it again, revising, tweaking, etc. So, the answer is that I do edit as I go.

OBAAT: Do you listen to music when you write? Do you have a theme song for this book? What music did you go back to over and over as you wrote it, or as you write, in general?

CS: No, I have to have complete silence. Hey, I give in to enough diversions to keep me from writing. For instance, while I’m writing this I just stopped and checked my email, went to Facebook, then came back. So, no music. I do listen to music all the time, though, and it actually ended up in my changing the title of one of my novels. I was writing a novel based on a true crime, and I was calling it Skin Deep. But I never liked that title. I thought it sounded like a bad porn movie. So, one day I was walking around New York City, listening to my iPod shuffle, and Tom Waits came on singing, “Keep the Devil in the Hole,” and it just clicked. So, I changed the title of the novel to Devil in the Hole. Thanks, Tom Waits, and David Simon for using that as the theme of The Wire.

OBAAT: This is a digression, but you’ve also co-authored a non-fiction book (with George Robinson) titled On a Clear Day They Could See Seventh Place: Baseball's Worst Teams. As a confirmed seam head, I have to ask what got you interested enough to divert the time required to write this from your other work?

CS: At that time I was only writing non-fiction. I was a magazine journalist who morphed into a nonfiction book writer—purely to make a living (this was after I learned there was no way I was going to make a living as a novelist). I always loved sports and my friend, George Robinson, knew I’d written a couple of sports books, (From Set Shot to Slam Dunk was one—an oral history of the NBA—that’s gotten me mentioned in the obituary section of the New York Times on several occasions, without actually having to die) and George thought teaming up with me would help get the book published. I thought it was a great idea, and we sold it right away and worked extremely well together. I got five teams to write about and he got the same. Fortunately, I think I came out ahead because I got the 1962 Mets and the 1954 Pirates.

OBAAT: If you could give a novice writer a single piece of advice, what would it be?

CS: If I could just make that two bits of advice it would be, read as much as you possibly can because you’ll learn more about writing that way, and never, ever give up. My novel, Swann’s Last Song took twenty-five years to get published, but when it was it was nominated for a Shamus Award.

OBAAT: Generally speaking the components of a novel are story/plot, character, setting, narrative, and tone. How would you rank these in order of their importance in your own writing, and can you add a few sentences to tell us more about how you approach each and why you rank them as you do?

CS: For me, character comes first and then I try to fit these characters into a plot. I’m most interested in motivation. Why do people do the things they do? And how inside us is the potential for even the worst of the things the worst characters so. That’s why I wrote Devil in the Hole, about a man who killed his family. The best compliment I’ve ever received was from a young woman, a college student. Her class had been assigned the book and I visited the class. She stood up and said, rather sheepishly, “I feel a little strange about this but I actually felt a little sorry for the killer.” This made me feel so good because I wanted to portray someone who was real, not a stereotype.

The reason character is more important to me is because I’m always trying to understand myself and others. What we do and why we do it. Plot is secondary to me, but I know it’s important because it’s what keeps people reading.

Sometimes a novel can start with a first sentence, just a line that comes to me. For instance, in the next Swann novel, Swann’s Way Out, I was walking down the street and the line came to me, “What am I going to do with the rest of my life?” I gave that line to Swann, and then put him in the least likely place to say that and the least likely people to say it to—in the middle of a poker game. And then things just went from there—that’s where plot took over.

OBAAT: If you could have written any book of the past hundred years, what would it be, and what is it about that book you admire most?

CS: Easy. Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov. I admire everything about it. The characters. The plot. The word play. The humor. The use of language. And this was by a man for whom English was probably his third language—after Russian and French.

OBAAT: Favorite activity when you’re not reading or writing.

CS: Going to movies and having lunch with my writer friends.

OBAAT: What are you working on now?

CS: I’m working on something very new. Right now, it’s called “Second Story Men,” and it’s very loosely based on the careers of two incredibly successful burglars. It’s told from three points of view. A Cuban-born Miami detective, a former Connecticut State Investigator, and the criminal himself. I’m almost finished, which is a time of severe self-doubt—like, why did I spend so much time on something that’s turning out to be a piece of crap?

 

Based on his track record, the odds of “Second Story Men” turning out to be a piece of crap are right up there with me getting a phone call from Live Schrieber to say he’s tired of wasting his time with this Ray Donovan crap; can he please play Nick Forte in a series? The links to all of Charles’s books are up there. What are you still doing here?

Information Leak (Don’t Tell The White House)

This news isn’t breaking; it’s not even damaged much. Some of it will break soon, so don’t say you haven’t been warned.

The audio book of Grind Joint is complete and awaiting final approval by the powers that be at ACX. Based on their most recent communication, it should be available at Amazon, audible.com, and iTunes next week or the week after. Mike Dennis did a hell of a job with what is not the easiest book to read aloud if you’re not a native speaker of Western Pennsylvanian. I’m not sure of the price at this time, but it’s not going to be an arm and a leg; I draw the line at “or.”

Speaking of Grind Joint—and what else have I done without surcease for the past several months?—the e-book will release next week. Exact date TBD, but I plan to finish the formatting and post it to Amazon over the weekend, if not before. I do know the cost of this one: $3.99. That’s right; four bucks. I promised I wouldn’t be like one of those big publishers and charge damn near as much for the e-book as for the real thing, and I haven’t. And if I ever get a contract from a big publisher that wants to do that, I’ll tell them I forbid it. (Unless they pay me a lot of money in advance, in which case you’re on your own, dear and valued readers.)

The successor to Grind Joint is complete. Resurrection Mall is the counterpoint to the casino in Grind Joint, a religious-themed shopping center with a church as the anchor. It is hoped this will revitalize the decaying downtown area of Penns River. We’ll see.

Speaking of Resurrection Mall, that manuscript isn’t destined to sit on my hard drive until I get a bug up my ass and do something with it. I signed a deal to be represented by Bob Mecoy earlier this month, and the manuscript went directly to him, which frees me up for another couple of projects:

1. Right now I’m working on a chapter in a progressive novel called The Bank Job, where each of over fifteen writers contributes a chapter. It’s a multi-POV story, and that’s all I’ll say about it, except that I’m delighted to have been asked, considering the company I’m keeping. (Eric Beetner, Les Edgerton, Nik Korpon, Terrence McCauley, Tom O’Mara, Charles Salzberg, and about a dozen others who were willing to risk their reputations by allowing my name in the credits.) The plan is to have the book ready by Bouchercon in November.

2. The fourth Penns River book (working title PR4—I’m not wasting any of my limited creativity on a title I’m going to ditch) is undergoing final outline revisions. I’ll start on it as soon as my chapter for The Bank Job is finished. Doc and the cops have to solve what appears to be a random homicide while dealing with a new drug boss and a federal consent decree that mandated more female cops in Penns River.

Updates as they become relevant.