James D. F. Hannah, Shamus Award-Winning Author of Behind the Wall of Sleep

 

James D.F. Hannah and his protagonist , Henry Malone, knocked on the door of the Private Eye Writers of America’s Shamus Awards last year when She Talks to Angels earned a nomination. This year Jimmy kicked it down and won the best Paperback Original category with Behind the Wall of Sleep, placing him at the front of the line of PI writers redefining the genre for the 21^st Century.

 

Jimmy is in Amsterdam with the PWA-sponsored “Sexapalooza” tour, but he wanted to honor his acceptance of my interview request, so he sent his right-hand man, Chad Williamson, to handle the interview. Don’t feel slighted. I have it on good authority that Jimmy doesn’t do anything without Chad knows about it.

 

One Bite At A Time: Chad, thanks for making time for us today. The Henry Malone books cover some unusual ground for PIs, namely Appalachia. The books read as a bit of a cross between Robert B. Parker and Daniel Woodrell. Tell us a little about Jimmy’s background and how it played into Henry’s character and the series setting.

 

Chad Williamson: Well, Jimmy’s obviously an extremely troubled soul, and a childhood spent running his old man’s stills affected him deeply. But he managed to pull together a bit of a life in newspapers—mostly in delivery—and was a big fan of Banacek in his youth, so he thought writing PI novels seemed fun. He also occasionally plays in traffic, though, so he’s easily amused, one can tell, and perhaps doesn’t always think everything through. 

The Author.
(Image courtesy of U.S. Marshal's
Service, WITSEC Division

 

But in all seriousness, the Appalachian setting came about because it was just too damn hard to write about anywhere else. You grow up next to a one-lane holler road your entire life, and your first time in the big city all you want to do is ride an escalator, you come to realize you are not destined to write the next Bonfire of the Vanities. Crime novels, PI stories, felt like a natural fit, but to do them right, they needed a voice that felt comfortable, so setting them in West Virginia just happened.

 

OBAAT: The Malone books contain all the PI tropes people look for and love, but set on their sides a little due to the location, as Henry spends less time going down mean streets than mean two-lane roads. His clients live in doublewides rather than mansions. Is this freeing, limiting, or a little of both?

 

CW: Both. Entire communities in Appalachia would be considered “the bad part of town” anywhere else, but it would also imply there’s enough there to justify an entire town. Eastern Kentucky and Southern West Virginia are made up of blink-and-you-miss-it communities that still offer plenty of work for an enterprising PI, except it’s hard to find anyone with enough money to pay the bills. That said, we’re talking about an area where, in two years, drug companies shipped nine million doses of opioid painkillers to a pharmacy in a town of less than 400 people, where unemployment rates are some of the highest in the nation and test scores are among the lowest. There’s a hunger and desperation prevalent within Appalachia that opens up opportunities for storytelling.

 

OBAAT: One of my takeaways from the series is something the TV show Justified hinted at but didn’t do a lot with: the hills have their share of criminals, but the same proportions of good people can be found there as anywhere else. What’s different from suburbia is the number of people forced into the gray areas of legality due to pressures they have no real control over. Did I come up with that on my own, or is that part of the intent?

 

CW: You’re spot on. I grew up in a holler in eastern Kentucky where gunfire was as common as sunrises, but you never saw a police car; things got settled in their own way, not in a way that could be confused with being legal, but may have resembled justice. The police were the providence of “town folk,” those who had such exotic providences as sidewalks and streetlights.

 

But much of this particular chunk of Appalachia is a land of absentee landlords, where for generations the money all left the area via coal trucks and barges, and your fortunes were based entirely on what coal was selling per ton. Coal has been dying a painful death for more than a generation, and fracking took its place but offers a fraction of the jobs, but you still have all these people who’ve been told there was no need for them to go anywhere else, or to push harder than they needed to, because coal would always be there for them. They went all-in on the bet and they’ve lost, and now the struggle becomes how to stand by the Appalachian principle of remaining headstrong and steadfast and not budging an inch when everything under your feet is crumbling. The options aren’t always pretty, but they’re people who’ll do what they think they have to do.

 

OBAAT: I’ve heard that Jimmy is functionally illiterate and that you actually read everything he “reads” to him. Who does he enjoy listening to most?

 

CW: Like everyone, Jimmy loved S.A. Cosby’s Blacktop Wasteland and David Heska Wanbli Weiden’s Winter Counts. I also heard he’s looking forward to new Laura McHugh (What’s Done in Darkness) and Heather L. Levy (Walking Through Needles).

 

OBAAT: Illiterate as he is, I understand Jimmy also dictates the books to you for typing and editing. Given your intimate knowledge of his process, who would you say are his strongest influences?

 

CW: Robert B. Parker is the most obvious; he named the setting for the Malone books “Parker County,” after all, so he’s rather blatant. But he’s fond of folks like Loren Estleman and the Amos Walker novels, Bill Pronzini’s Nameless series, Dennis Lehane, Sara Paretsky, and of course the late Sue Grafton, who was from Louisville. But his biggest influence in a decision to tell stories is probably Ed McBain, who wrote the 87^th Precinct novels so well for so long.

 

OBAAT: You and I met at Bouchercon in Dallas. I never did catch up with Jimmy, though I have it on good authority the hotel bartender had strict orders not to serve him. What’s it like playing Remington Steele for James D.F. Hannah?

 

CW: It’s like an especially awkward marriage where you become comfortable answering to another man’s name.

 

OBAAT: What are you and Jimmy working on now?

 

CW: We’re hoping to have the sixth Henry Malone book out early next year, and we’re also working on a stand-alone 70s crime novel set in Kentucky, because it’s always good to write what you know.

Clif Berry 1931 - 2020

 

The virus not only disrupted things we had scheduled; it caused the unexpected not to receive its due. Today I’ll try to make amends for one of these.

 

I was beyond fortunate to have Clif Berry as my friend. Clif missed being part of what Tom Brokaw named The Greatest Generation, but they would have been proud to have him. Born 11 May 1931, Clif joined the fledgling Air Force in 1948 and served as an air controller for the Berlin Airlift through 1949. He later attended the U.S. Military Academy, but withdrew in his third year. After a brief stint in civilian life, he enlisted in the Army and served in the 82nd Airborne Division, receiving recognition as the Army’s Paratrooper of the Year in 1955 before accepted a direct commission.

 

Clif went on to command airborne and infantry units in Korea and saw combat in Vietnam, winning a Bronze Star for helping to evacuate wounded under fire. He later held staff positions in the Far East, Central America, and the Pentagon while earning a BA in Mathematics from George Washington University and an MA in Communications from Stanford.

 

After retiring as a lieutenant colonel in 1975, Clif became co-editor of Armed Forces Journal. In 1980 he became editor-in-chief at Air Force Magazine before going on to editing positions at Interavia, Air Power History magazine, and National Defense. He authored or co-author eleven books and edited fourteen others; five of his books were in the Bantam Illustrated History of the Vietnam War. He also wrote “Milestones of the First Century of Flight.” My signed copy has been a cherished possession since he handed it to me.

 

Clif then started a public relations/media company, FCB Associates, and in later life worked in media outreach for the American Battle Monuments Commission. In his free time he earned land and seaplane ratings as a private pilot. Clif died 13 March 2020 and rests in Arlington National Cemetery.

 

The Clif Berry I knew was the consummate gentleman in the best sense of what too often seems an archaic term. I never heard him speak a cross word nor disparaging comment; his good humor was infectious. We met as members of a writing group where his comments were always on point and gently phrased. He was a master of stories fewer than one hundred words.

 

I’m sorry I didn’t find ways to spend more time with Clif even after my attendance at the group became a rarity. It will be an eternal disappointment never to have followed up on the idea of accompanying him on a tour of the Air and Space Museum near Dulles Airport. It’s a shame he and the The Sole Son-in-Law never got together. They would have gotten along famously.

 

I never told Clif how much his friendship meant to me. This inadequate message will have to do, and I have only myself to blame. Clif lived as if he always had favoring winds, and anyone close to him shared the benefit.

 

(I extracted the details of Clif’s life beyond my acquaintance from an article in Air Force Magazine.)

 

 

Recent Favorite Reads

 My reading life has been good of late. Not all winners, one massive disappointment from a top-flight author, but a lot of good stuff I’m happy to recommend. (The disappointment is all on the publisher, who advertised a Robert Crais book as an “Elvis Cole and Joe Pike novel,” even though the only place either of their names appear is on the cover. The book was okay, but the bait and switch really put me off.)

 

Savage Night, Allan Guthrie. Guthrie takes a story I didn’t think I’d like, tells it in a manner that does not easily lend itself to the suspension of disbelief, and had me completely absorbed. There are multiple reveals, each well prepared, and the foreshadowing is so adept you don’t realize what he’s done until a couple of paragraphs before the reveal. Highest recommendation.

 

Imperial Valley, Johnny Shaw. Shaw is a master at combining suspense, violence, and humor. Imperial Valley is the third (and hopefully not final) Jimmy Veeder fiasco, and at least as good as its predecessors, which I also loved. Shaw is solidly on the list of authors I make sure don’t fall through the cracks.

 

The Killing of the Tinkers, Ken Bruen. No one can spend less time on the core story and engross you like Bruen in the Jack Taylor novels. I read a few at random; now I’m going through them in order. Wonderful writing, and Taylor is a fascinating character you root for despite his myriad of faults.

 

The Sins of the Fathers, Lawrence Block. Finding the proper entry point into a writer’s oeuvre is important. My first exposure to Block came through an anthology of Keller stories. I’m not a fan of hit man tales, so I never followed up. (I made a similar mistake by introducing myself to Ellroy with The Cold Six Thousand.) People wore me down on Block, so I tried a Bernie Rhodenbarr novel and enjoyed it a lot, which led me to tackle the Scudder books in order. I’ll be kicking myself for a while about leaving Block for so late in my reading life. This book rules.

 

The Cold Cold Ground, Adrian McKinty. (Re-read.) Book One of the six-volume Sean Duffy Trilogy. (McKinty’s a writer, not a mathematician.) Duffy is a Catholic cop working in a Belfast suburb during the worst of The Troubles, which is where and when McKinty grew up. Rarely have I read anything that placed me in a foreign place and time so compellingly. Reading it again was timely, because it reminded me (as if I needed it) we can’t let this country go too far down that road.

 

Which Lie Did I Tell?, William Goldman. Maybe the most entertaining book I have ever read. It’s a memoir of a Hollywood screenwriting legend (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Marathon Man, and The Princess Bride, etc.) that also serves as a screenwriting class and cautionary tale of what to beware of in the business. Engrossing, enlightening, and laugh out loud funny, this second such book of Goldman’s is leading me back to the first, Adventures in the Screen Trade.

 

The Devil at Your Door, Eric Beetner. The finale to the Lars and Shaine trilogy. I know I said I don’t like hit man stories. I meant it. That doesn’t apply to Beetner. He gets the ball rolling and I’m willing to go wherever he wants me. Lars and Shaine are complex and complementary characters you’ll come to care about. There’s also a laugh out loud scene that follows the Elmore Leonard Rule of humor as well as I’ve seen. (The ELRoH: The people saying or doing funny things should not know they are funny.) Why none of Beetner’s books are movies or streaming series escapes me. Lars and Shaine are perfect for someone like Liev Schreiber and Jennifer Lawrence circa Winter’s Bone. (Hailee Steinfeld? I’m too old to keep tabs on actresses that young. Pick someone.)

 

 

New Twit on the Block

 

I took the plunge into Twitter when I retired. I try to post every day; most days I’m successful. (By “successful,” I mean I tweeted, not that tweet was well received, or received at all. Or even grammatical.) I’m getting more comfortable with it over time (one would hope so), but it’s still a little like trying to tie one’s shoes while wearing mittens.

 

There are things I like. Twitter is a good for random thoughts expressible in 280 characters or fewer. This forces me to write tight ,as I refuse to resort to Twitter shorthand unless I have no choice. (I will shorten URLs when necessary.)

 

As the Twitter account I’m keeping up with is my author account, virtually all posts are writing related, things that came to mind that didn’t seem to have blog potential. Sometimes they come in bunches, so I have a file on my desktop where I save them to post over time instead of dumping them all at once.

 

Twitter is also good for coming across people you might not encounter on Facebook. As far as I can tell, re-tweeting has far more potential for sending a post viral than anything in Facebook. It’s a personal thing, but I’m more willing to follow someone I don’t already know on Twitter than I am to send a friend request on Facebook. This provides me a field of vision less incestuous than what I have on Facebook, where I rarely send friend requests, though I also rarely refuse them unless they are obvious spam.

 

The downside of Twitter is the character count, which makes it almost impossible to have a serious discussion. Write as tight as you want, there are thoughts you cannot express in 280 characters. Stringing tweets together is fraught with awkward breaks that increase the chances of readers taking comments out of context.

 

I’m sure my activity will increase as the drop date for the new book approaches. I want to give Twitter at least a year of honest effort, which I have never done. There will be highs and lows as I move along my learning curve. Check this space (or my Twitter feed: @DanaKingAuthor) for progress reports and feel free to send suggestions, either here, via Twitter, or on Facebook.

Abandoning Your Darlings

 I may have mentioned I now no longer edit first drafts; I re-write them. (I have so much going on right now I don’t remember what I told The Beloved Spouse™ ten minutes ago, so how am I going to remember what I might have written last month?)

 

Full disclosure: it’s not exactly a first draft I’m re-writing. It’s about a draft-and-a-half. Something like those 24 ouncers you get at some bars. I did an entire draft in Scrivener, which I like a lot because of how easily I can move things around. I let it sit a while, then read it through, making notes as I go. Another pass to address the notes, making additions and cuts as needed. Then I let it sit again.

 

Now I’m rewriting. (Or re-typing, depending on your opinion of my writing.) Scrivener is at the top of my screen, Word at the bottom. Some things come over verbatim. Nothing gets copied and pasted. Even if a large chunk comes over with no changes, I make myself retype it.

 

This is not because I’m super old school. This gives me every opportunity to make change. Typing can be a chore for me, so if I really don’t feel like transferring something, maybe that’s the Muse telling me that bit doesn’t belong. I rephrase a lot of things, and sometimes add several paragraphs if a new bit presents itself.

 

This is the second book I’ve done this way; the process is still under refinement. The downside is it’s far more time consuming than converting the Scrivener files to Word and doing a straight-up edit. (Scrivener is great for assembling stories, but shit for editing.) The upside is that it’s far more time consuming than converting the Scrivener files to Word and doing a straight-up edit, which forces me to think about everything.

 

As we all know, the most difficult, and important, aspect of writing is killing your darlings. You worked hard on them and it breaks your heart to hit the delete key. Re-doing the whole thing means that never happens. Now when I come across a darling and the realization strikes that it doesn’t belong, I just leave it out, as it’s far easier to leave your darlings by the side of the road than it is to kill them.

Staying Fresh

 

Last week I wrote about the convergence of my writing process with Joe Lansdale’s description of his before I even knew what his was. This week I’ll conclude those thoughts; great rejoicing may ensue.

 

We left off with how much more free time retirement provides, which doesn’t mean I spend all that time with fingers on keyboard. I try to write at least three times a day, in bursts of 45 minutes to an hour. Longer than that and my ego starts to intrude, and, as Milch says, the ego is the enemy of creativity. Set it aside, do anything else for a while, come back. Worries about this process being more indicative of sloth than art were put to rest in Joe’s post: “I try to write only about three hours a day. I stay fresh that way, and don't get so tuckered out that next day I do nothing.” Staying fresh is a big deal. I now look forward to the next session, rather than feeling as though I have to get it in out of a sense of duty.

 

Staying fresh is also forestalls burnout, as taking too many “maintenance” days can make it too easy to postpone writing altogether. Joe again: “I try to work five to seven days a week, and it takes something special to throw off that approach.” That’s exactly what I do. Paraphrasing Stephen King, “It’s true you do your best work when the Muse strikes. It’s helpful if the Muse knows when and where to look for you.”

 

All this cultivation of the subconscious is necessary and fruitful, but the subconscious is not the best arbiter of what’s good or we’d all get rich by transcribing dreams. Per Joe: “There's a lot of stuff there in the subconscious, and the disorganized materials have to be trained to line up, and this is a primary duty of the conscious mind, which for me works best after the subconscious has sorted things, and has in fact done a lot of secret plotting. The conscious mind scrapes off the edges, jettisons the useless, the materials that will not work in your story.” In other, less entertaining words, editing.

 

Two other great writers’ ideas come to mind:

Hemingway: Write drunk. Edit sober.

Milch: There are no mistakes, only things that need to be better.

How I think of it: The subconscious can create a baby but only the conscious can properly prepare the little bastard to go out into the world.

 

I could go on, but I won’t. As the philosopher Harry Callahan said, “A man has got to know his limitations.” Writing is not hard; it’s difficult. It’s not ditch digging, but it’s also not for the faint of heart. Understanding what we’re doing won’t necessarily make us better, but it will prevent us spending our free time learning to tie nooses and looking for open beams. If you have to take your medicine, it might as well come from someone like Joe Lansdale, who can make it go down so much easier.

 

(Thanks to Joe for allowing me to quote him in these posts.)

De- and Re-fining Process

 Last week I wrote about Joe Lansdale’s thoughts on first readers and got tangential a few times. This week I have more from Joe’s Facebook posts on writing, dealing with the process itself.

 

Again, it’s gratifying and validating for someone with my level of accomplishment to see my method has evolved along the lines of one of the greats. I am comfortable with not having the same level of talent or success. What matters is, however good my writing may or may not be, it’s not because of things that are under my control. I’ve done my due diligence.

 

The topic of Joe’s post was, “How Many Drafts Should You Write?” Joe’s answer fits in with what my practice and research have shown me: there is no right answer. Joe writes: “Each writer finds their path. I do one, and then a polish. Now and again I end up doing more polish than expected, and each day I revise as I go, so how many drafts do I do daily? No idea.”

 

I’m a bit more OCD, so I have a pretty good idea, but the number of drafts has changed dramatically over the years. I used to keep hacking until I couldn’t bear to look at the manuscript anymore and was spending most of my time adding and removing the same commas. Then I started using each draft for specific things: one for descriptions, one for each character to get their voices right and unique, one for action and narrative, then the overall polishing. That took forever and require too much polishing, as the multiple drafts left me with a story that didn’t seem organic.

 

I winnowed that down by beginning each day by looking over and tidying up yesterday’s work. This probably saved a draft and had the added benefit of reminding me exactly where I was the day before.

 

Then I came across David Milch’s concept of “resting transparently.” (It’s actually Kierkegaard’s concept, but since Milch distilled it into something I can understand, I give him the credit.) My version is to think as little as possible about what needs to be written today because that’s the conscious mind looking for a logical continuation of what I wrote yesterday, which is not always where the story needs to go. Now I sit quietly, letting my mind wander until I know what I want to do. At first I’d often as not fall asleep. Now there are days where I sit for as little as thirty seconds before I’m virtually propelled out of the chair and off to the keyboard.

 

This isn’t much different from Joe’s advice, though arrived at from a different direction: “The most important thing I learned as a writer was to work from the subconscious. This sounds easy, and pretty much is once you are able to tap into it, but it takes practice.” Resting transparently is my way of releasing my subconscious. With practice I find I barely need the actual process. My subconscious now knows when to feed me what it’s been working right when I need it.

 

What stimulates my subconscious? Many of the same things Joe describes. “Reading novels, stories, comics, non-fiction and viewing films, TV shows, are fuel for the subconscious…” I used to feel like I was stealing when I took an idea from a previous work and adapted to my needs until I saw a d read enough to realize how many stories are adaptations of things that came before. Just because I first saw a scene by Author A doesn’t mean he hadn’t seen a variant of it elsewhere. I used to feel bashful about changing the ending of my first Nick Forte book to use a concept I saw in the movie Three Days of the Condor, especially after it received a Shamus nomination. Now I’m looking forward to thanking James Grady the next time I see him, less for “giving” me the idea, than for putting something out there I was able to adapt to my own purposes.

 

The subconscious is not as low maintenance as one might suppose, especially when you hope to get some benefit from it. Milch tries never to think about writing except when he’s doing it. Unsaid is that his subconscious, left to its own devices, is always churning away, whether he’s aware of it or not. He likes to operate on faith and I believe a lot of that faith is that his subconscious will not abandon him.

 

Lansdale has a similar attitude: “But, during the day, if I could learn to relax and think about anything but story, ideas would develop, and certainly at night a seed would be found.” I retired at the end of last year and now, a month or so down the road, I find I’m much more creative. More story ideas, more ideas on how to improve what’s in progress, more ideas about what I might want to revisit. I believe that’s because I’m no longer tied to thinking about workaday things half my waking hours, five days a week, with those concerns also intruding on my “free” time. Now I spend an hour or three most days taking care of household business, then my day is free.

 

(Next week I’ll conclude this series with a post on pacing yourself to stay fresh. Thank to Joe Lansdale for allowing me to quote from his posts.