Lynn Kostoff, Author of The Length of Days

 I tend to think of Lynn Kostoff as a ‘writer’s writer’ because of his superior craftsmanship, though I realize that’s damning with faint praise. Lynn should be a ‘reader’s writer,’ as his books incorporate the aforementioned craftsmanship to create multi-dimensional characters, layered storylines, and twists that leave you shaking your head for a few seconds before you realize their inevitability. I call it ‘The Fiction Trifecta.’.

 

Lynn’s new book The Length of Days, includes all the elements that have made me a fan for years. It surprised me when I realized he’d never been on the blog. Today we take care of that.

 

One Bite at a Time: Welcome to the blog, Lynn. I’ve been a fan for a long time and was shocked – shocked! – to see this is your first interview here. Whether that shows you have lowered your standards or I have raised mine remains to be seen. Either way, welcome aboard.

 

It’s been eleven years since your most recent book, Words to Die For. What the hell?

 

Lynn Kostoff: Time and Chance happen to us all.

 

OBAAT: The Length of Days weaves together several plots that end up related to various degrees. How did the planning go? Outline? Several independent stories you wove together? In your head with going back to make things work out?

 

LK:  Weave is probably the operative term here. I drafted the first chapter which contained the primary plot hook: the death of the twelve young women. I liked the idea of an ensemble novel with multiple protagonists who, on the face of it, seemingly had no connection to or with each other.

 

Next, I spent a lot of time doing what I call “character auditions,” in essence creating a series of character sketches and trying to tease out a central problem each was struggling with.

 

Once I had the protagonists established, I began drafting the novel proper. I still did not know for sure how the characters were connected to each other at that point, but I trusted that the writing process would enable me to discover what I needed to know and help me recognize how the characters related to each other and the death of the young women.

 

Along the way, I began envisioning the novel as a spider’s web with the dead women and the killer nesting in its center, and that metaphor helped with structuring its events and character arcs.

 

OBAAT: The Length of Days reminded me a little of a Ross Macdonald novel, as hidden family secrets create or complicate problems in the present day. How prominent were the family angles when you were devising the story?

 

LK: While I admire Ross Macdonald’s works, I did not see the dark family secrets and their repercussions in Days until I drafted them. They came as a happy and welcome surprise and felt “right” on both the micro and macro level of plotting.

 

OBAAT: There is a Magnolia Beach in South Carolina, but no city with that name. (I checked.) Is the Magnolia Beach in the book based on a real place or wholly fictional? If fictional, did you create a map for yourself? I’ve read few novels that established the location as well as you did here, even when they were set in real places.

 

LK: My wife and I live a little less than two hours from the South Carolina coast and spend a lot of time there. Magnolia Beach is basically an amalgam of the beach towns comprising the Grand Strand (the towns and beaches running between Little River, SC and Georgetown, with Myrtle Beach at its center).

 

Researching the Low Country’s history, I discovered there was an actual Magnolia Beach at one time, but it had been destroyed by Hurricane Hazel in 1954. In the 1930’s Magnolia Beach was exclusively African-American and housed the Magnolia Beach Club which was listed in the famous (or perhaps infamous is the more appropriate term) Green Book. Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, and Ray Charles among others often performed there.

 

OBAAT: Every character is well-developed and well-defined. While there are several places where I thought “I did not see that coming,” none of them seem out of character in retrospect. How much of each character did you have laid out in advance, or did they develop in your head as you wrote them?

 

LK: Robert Frost once said “No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.” While I spend a lot of time planning and sketching and setting up rough working outlines, ultimately I trust the characters to take me where the plot and I need to go. Orchestrating those “I didn’t see that coming” moments comes from brutal revision and line-editing sessions. In The Length of Days, I ended up cutting over 175 pages to help sharpen the dramatic focus and placement for those moments.

 

OBAAT: Keith Rawson asked you in an interview for LitReactor, “Which fictional character would you most like to have a drink with, and why?” Your answer: “I would probably enjoy having a couple beers with John Yossarian from Catch 22 or Marlow from Heart of Darkness; they’re two characters who are close to my everyday temperament.”

 

It’s been ten years. Is your answer still the same?

 

LK: Given the current political and cultural reality, I would still invite Yossarian and Marlow for a beer because Yossarian saw through lies and Marlow hated them.

 

However, I’d like to add a few more for a couple rounds. One being Ben Doc Dougherty from your novel Grind Joint and Eddie Senta from Charlie Stella’s Eddie’s World. I’d also be remiss if I didn’t include Mario Balzic from K.C. Constantine’s Rocksburg novels. They’d all make fine drinking companions.

The Length of Days drops on July 4. 

 

 

 

 

July's Reads

A couple of books stood out in July.

The Burning Soul, John Connolly. Connolly has long been the only writer who could entice me into books with supernatural aspects. The Lovers and The Whisperers left me a little flat, and I almost gave up on him, thinking to re-read some old favorites. Good thing I gave him another chance. The Burning Soul has all the things I like about Connolly, and hardly any of the things that had created the doubts. The poetry of his writing rivals James Lee Burke, and Charlie Parker has grown into a man many first-person authors should take notice of: haunted by his demons, not controlled by them. There’s a coincidence in the denouement that’s a little convenient, but by then it didn’t matter. He’d kept me up well into the morning of a work day. Top shelf stuff.

Late Rain, Lyn Kostoff. Kostoff expertly handles a multi-POV story with well-developed characters and a sense of place, all while propelling the story and its sub-plots with perfect pacing. There’s a coincidence here, too, that I may have missed the explanation for, but, it’s a piddly bit that does not weaken the resolution. Late Rain is professional crime fiction suitable to be broken down by authors who want to know how to keep multiple balls in the air, and make the reader think it’s easy.

Make It Your Own

The following quote from acting legend Robert Duvall appears in a recent AARP magazine, when asked about leaving a mark:

“In America, we’ve got cowboys. As an actor, you don’t reinvent something like the Western. You make it your own: “If I were in this situation, what would I do as a cattleman?” Suddenly your fingerprints are all over the place.”

Writers are often counseled to be the new and shiny thing, to find something different. Not saying to be old and stale, but the opportunities available for the new and different are limited by public taste, your agent or editor’s handle on what’s going to be next, and where your primary skills as an author reside. Basically, it’s luck, using the definition, “Luck is where preparation meets opportunity.” If you’re not ready, you won’t get lucky. J. K. Rowling is the best example of this in recent literary history. To use “luck” in connection with her success is by no means a pejorative statement, but had she come out with Harry Potter a year earlier or a year later, she might have sunk like a stone. That kind of success is a little like winning the lottery: you only win if you picked the correct numbers on the right day.

A better long-term, if less spectacular, strategy is to find what you do best and make it your own. There’s no point in trying to climb onto the Fifty Shades of Gray bandwagon if you are most comfortable writing hard-boiled crime fiction. You’re not likely to be as good at it, and that train has left the station, anyway. Find what you’re good at, and make it your own.

Last week I read Late Rain, by Lynn Kostoff. (Highly recommended, by the way, I’ll have more in my end-of-the-month summary.) Here, Kostoff takes the hoary concepts of the femme fatale and the burned-out cop and plays them against each other in a multi-POV story that allows the reader to know more than any of the characters, which is the best way to foreshadow as I am aware of: trusting the reader’s intelligence.

About halfway through Late Rain, something popped into my head: what might Elmore Leonard have done with this woman, her hapless husband, and controlling father-in-law? The cop beset on all sides, with a relationship he can’t quite get off the ground? The lawyer who serves as the town puppeteer and his dim-witted henchman? It would have been an entirely different book. Not necessarily better—maybe even not as good—but it would have been Leonard’s book as much as Late Rain is Kostoff’s. Leonard would have made the premise and characters his own, just as Kostoff made them his own.

We’ve all read books and seen movies where the original premise draws us in, then the final result is disappointing. We’ve also read and seen things where the original premise doesn’t seem like much, but we give it a chance because we like an author in general or the enjoy an actor’s work, only to find we like it a lot more than anticipated. That’s because what’s a good idea for one person to develop may be a lousy idea for someone else. The reading public may be screaming for a story about a transgendered astronaut caught in a love triangle with a cowboy and a medieval monk; I can’t write that book. Know your strengths and play to them.

Arnold Schoenberg, the father of twelve-tone music, once told an acolyte, “There is still a great deal of beautiful music to be written in C Major.” There are many great lone wolf PI stories yet to be written. Traditional puzzle mysteries. Organized crime. Femme fatale. It’s not unreasonable to assume, whatever your chosen genre and style, there’s more that can be done by tweaking the mold for those who aren’t set up to break it. Find your niche. Make it your own. That’s where success is most likely to lie. 

A Choice of Nightmares

Every so often I’ll decide I have enough authors to read. Keeping up with their output is a full-time job, and I’m tired of feeling like I’m behind as I try to stay current with all the excellent writers out there. Not that I mean to limit myself, but I’ll never have time to read everything written by those I like best; why fall farther behind?

Right about then I’ll start tripping over references to someone I never heard of before. Comments from people whose opinions I trust. “You really ought to read this guy.” “This guy’s really good.” “You’d like him a lot.” (“Guy” is gender-neutral in this context.) I won’t do anything about it, mainly because I always have several books backed up, and don’t feel like adding one more.

Then somebody will catch me between books, wondering who to read next, and I’m on the Web already, anyhow, and Amazon’s just one click away so I take thirty seconds and buy Lynn Kostoff’s A Choice of Nightmares and it sits on the Kindle for a while till I read it because I got tired of looking at the title staring back at me and I remember how good people said he is and I read the damn book, okay, enough, now can I get on with my life, and then I start kicking myself because this book is really good and I’m wondering what the hell took me so long and how the book would make a great movie but is also a good character study of a man who, basically, lacks character and will pretty much follow his dick whichever way the wind blows.

Bad things happen to people like that. Boy, howdy, do they.

How bad? Don’t be cheap. Read the book. Kostofff writes believable characters, and, even though you don’t really like Robert Staples much, he doesn’t deserve what he’s headed for. The cast that leads Staples astray plays both sides of his personality, leveraging fear and desire to lead him down a path he knows better than to take. The plot points are unpredictable and plausible. As a writer, Kostoff is content to lay back and let his characters do the talking; the author’s hand is not noticeable.

I’ve heard great things about his newest, Late Rain. I guess now I’ll just have to add him to the list of writers who periodically lead me to decide I don’t need to look for new things to read, at least not as long as I’m still behind on him.