Twenty Questions With John McFetridge

John McFetridge isn’t a prepossessing figure. His Wikipedia article is two books out of date. His Amazon author page has no bio. He’s as level as any person I know, unless you want to discuss the virtues of The Departed after a few drinks. His writing is somewhat the same. No car chases or series of explosions. His Toronto series of novels about the Saints of Hell motorcycle gang (Dirty Sweet, Everybody Knows This is Nowhere, Swap (Let it Ride in the U.S.), and Tumblin’ Dice) show the qualities of both Elmore Leonard and George V. Higgins. Ongoing crimes told from the participants’ point of view, the police often no more than an inconvenience.

His current series, featuring Montreal Constable Eddie Dougherty, are almost police procedurals. Almost, but this is John McFetridge, so not quite. Set in Montreal during the early 70s, Black Rock is, on its surface, the story of a young cop working the periphery of a serial killer case. The bigger story is how people lived day-to-day while Quebecois separatists blew up buildings on a regular basis, the killing of young women hunted to the side. His most recent, ALittle More Free, uses the murder of a Yank draft dodger to explore attitudes about the Vietnam War from both sides of the border.

I didn’t just make up that Elmore Leonard comparison. Linda Richards, writing in January Magazine, called McFetridge's voice "colder and starker" than Leonard's. "McFetridge is one of a new breed of Canadian crime fictionists building neo-noir that seems touched by both the humor and self-consciousness of life north of the 48th.” Quill & Quire reviewer Gary Butler also compared his work to Leonard, writing, “both writers seamlessly mix the police procedural with perp procedural to underscore the parallel lives of members of the opposing teams. But where Leonard tends to favour Hollywood-homicide banter, McFetridge keep the quips to a minimum, preferring punch to panache. As a result, the only time his prose gets purple is when fists are flying.”

While researching John’s bio for this introduction, I saw on his Amazon author page that “customers also bought items by” Dana King. I can’t say how that makes him feel, but I felt damned good.

One Bite at a Time: Tell us about A Little More Free.

John McFetridge: It’s the second book in the Eddie Dougherty series. He’s a young cop in Montreal. In this book it’s 1972 and while still a constable in uniform patrol he’s also working with a homicide detective to find out who killed an American man who’d come to Canada to protest the war in Vietnam.

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.)

JM: The first book in this series, Black Rock, takes place in 1970 during something we call in Canada the “October Crisis.” It was really a movement that went on through the 1960s and involved a lot of bombs and armed robberies and in October of 1970 two political kidnappings. There was a lot of that in the world at the time, of course, over a dozen high-profile kidnappings in 1970 alone (including the American, Daniel Mitrone, in Uruguay). So that was a natural setting for a crime novel, I thought. (Well, actually I got the idea after reading Adrian McKinty’s excellent Sean Duffy novels.)

So, to follow up 1970 I looked for more historical events that would be interesting to develop into a novel. In September of 1972 there was a tragic nightclub fire in Montreal and 37 people were killed. It was arson and there was a huge hunt for the men who’d set the fire. But as I was looking at 1972 one of the things that came up a few times were stories about Americans who’d moved to Canada. The numbers are unknown, anywhere from 50,000 to 500,000, and each with their own reason. But it seems like it’s still a topic that people don’t know very much about. So that made it worthwhile developing, I thought.

OBAAT: How long did it take to write A Little More Free, start to finish?

JM: About a year. I’ve been a stay at home dad for quite a while and my schedule is really set by my kids. So, I usually start a book in September when they start school and I try to finish by the end of June when they finish. This one may have gone into July and August.

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

JM: A recent review of this book said Dougherty was, “dogged,” and I think that’s the feature that’s most like me. Dougherty isn’t special in any way, he’s not a brilliant Sherlock Holmes detective and he has no great defining moment in his life that drives him, he didn’t see his parents murdered or anything like that – it’s not personal in those kinds of ways. He took the job as a cop because he didn’t like school and thought being in an office looked like being in a classroom. And he got to drive fast. Once he became a cop he started to realize that a lot of the job takes place at moments in peoples’ lives when they are most vulnerable and if he’s just not an asshole he can help people make things better.

Eddie is a composite of a few people. He’s the same age as my brother and joined the police the same year my brother did (and for some of the same reasons) but Eddie’s mother is French Canadian, which is based on my best friend when I was growing up.

OBAAT: In what time and place is A Little More Free set? How important is the setting to the book as a whole?

JM: The book takes place in the fall of 1972. At first I thought the time and place was hugely important. I’m very pleased with a couple of reviews that say the book paints a very real portrait of Montreal at the time but as I write more in this series I have come to realize that the most important thing is Eddie and the other characters. The specific events could only be Montreal – the French-English divide, the American war resisters, the fanatic interest in the Canada-USSR hockey series, and so on – but really, the specifics could change, it could be the black-white divide in an American city or the Protestant-Catholic divide in Belfast and the fanatic interest in soccer games in Glasgow and the themes would be the same.

OBAAT: How did A Little More Free come to be published?

JM: After I wrote Black Rock, the publisher at ECW Press asked me if I could write another one and I said, “But there was only one October Crisis.” He said, yeah, but something else must have happened in the 70s. So now I just finished the third in the series which takes place in 1976 and I think the next one will be set in 1980. If I can keep going someday Eddie will be a cynical, old, alcoholic detective.

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

JM: Recently I realized that I like to read stories that have insight into people. That’s what I like about Elmore Leonard novels, there’s usually a few characters who are ‘regular guys’ but we get to know them pretty well. I’ve also started to like the kind of classic post-war American writers like John Cheever. I didn’t used to, I used to be one of those guys who complained about the ‘domestication of American literature,’ but I appreciate it more now. And also, thanks to the great work by Sarah Weinman, I’m starting to read women crime writers of the 40s and 50s, Dorothy B. Hughes, Elisabeth Sanxay Holding, Margaret Millar and others. And probably my favourite writer is Alice Munro. One thing I realized lately is that the part of our lives that usually means the difference between happiness and misery is mostly how well we get along with the people closest to us – for guys like us that usually means how well we get along with women. And I like crime stories and noir and all that but they don’t often have a lot of insight into how relationships work.

OBAAT: What made you decide to be an author?

JM: When I was in high school I started fooling around with an 8mm camera and I wanted to be a filmmaker. I tried that for a long time. I think I was intimidated by the idea of writing novel (a movie can be saved by great actors, great music, great editing). Every novelist I heard talk was well-read, well-educated and well-travelled and I was none of those things. But it turns out I’m a terrible filmmaker and these days every movie I like seems to be based on a novel (or some work of non-fiction) so I figured if I was going to tell the stories about the kinds of characters that interested me I’d have to write a book. That took quite a few years, too, but now I feel that I can tell the stories that interest me with no compromises. And, it turns out, books can be saved by great editing, too.

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

JM: I think the most important experiences I’ve had are the people I’ve met in my life. I use little things from real people all the time for character.

OBAAT: I’m a huge fan of your Toronto series of novels, all of which are set in the time they were written. What caused you to look back to fairly recent history in the Dougherty books?

JM: Thank you very much. I like those Toronto books, too. I started writing those books because I was fairly new to Toronto and trying to figure it out. It’s a rapidly changing place with so many new people moving in all the time. I started Dirty Sweet with the idea that people come from all over the world to Toronto for the opportunity to get something going. And some of them are criminals. As I was writing those books I was looking more and more into the characters’ backstories and that kind of naturally took me into the past. I was very interested in how the present day characters came to be and that meant I spent a lot of time thinking about their pasts.

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

JM: When it works. When I write a scene and I think it’s good and I can move on. I think it’s probably a similar feeling that a musician gets when a solo goes well.

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

JM: A lot of the people who have influenced my writing have been my family and friends and people I’ve met in my life. There’s a scene in Tumblin’ Dice in which a guy explains his theory on how to be a social drinker and not become an alcoholic and it’s word-for-word something my uncle told me.

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

JM: I do wear pants. I have tried almost every way of writing. And a lot of tricks. I heard a guy say once that he treated going to write like going to work and put on a suit and tie and sat at his desk. I don’t go that far but I do try to treat it like a job. For these novels set in the 70s I make a timeline of actual events and then fit my story, kind of on the fly, into those events.

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?

JM: I edit as I go and try to get a pretty clean first draft. But I am conscious all the way through that my editor will help a lot with the revisions. There’s the mystery aspect, of course, the way the crime happened and how it gets figured out but there’s also the character development, which is probably more important to me. Although I don’t feel that anything in the novel isn’t important.

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?

JM: I have made playlists of songs from each of the years the books are set. It’s been interesting to see the changes in pop music through the 70s. One thing that stands out for me is that disco music was a lot better than I realized at the time. Now, without my very fragile teenage ego involved I can appreciate the funk roots of disco and the liberating feeling of the music. And the horn sections.

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

JM: While I was doing research today, reading a newspaper from 1980 I came across this quote from Jack McClellan, a “legendary” Canadian publisher: “If you want to write commercially, abandon pretense and go for the throat. If your field is literature don’t worry about the market.” I think it still holds up today. It sounds simple but those two things, abandon pretense and don’t worry about the market aren’t so easy. Most of us think we can have a foot in both camps and that’s what sinks us.

As an aside here I want to say that on the drive back from Bouchercon in Raleigh to Toronto I stopped in a small town in Pennsylvania off the I-79 and felt I’d been there before. Then I realized it’s because I thought I was in Penn’s River. So you shouldn’t worry about the market.

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?

JM: That’s a good question. I think tone is very important. I like to have a clear idea what the novel is about when I start – the theme. A review (http://indextrious.blogspot.ca/2015/09/a-little-more-free.html) of A Little More Free said that the central theme of the book was, “… the ways in which we don’t really know those whom we consider our enemies,” and that was my starting point, thinking of the “other,” that set the tone. Then I work on a plot that can reveal that theme and then the characters that will inhabit that plot.

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?

JM: I admire the books that, to me, speak in the characters’ voices. When I read Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women it was kind of an opening for me to start to understand my mother better. But as for a book I wish I could have written I’m not sure, there are so many.

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

JM: I am a reluctant traveler but I am learning to appreciate it. I’m lucky enough to be in a position where I can travel a little. And for me that even means a weekend in Buffalo, an exotic American city.

OBAAT: What are you working on now?

JM: Another Eddie Dougherty novel. I just gave my publisher Dougherty #3, which will be published in 2016. It takes place in 1976 when the summer Olympics were in Montreal and it’ll be called, One or the Other (from the song, The Shape I’m In by The Band, “Save your neck or save your brother, Looks like it’s one or the other.” So now I’ve started #4 which will take place in 1980. No title yet.

The Hot Countries

Never let it be said Timothy Hallinan leaves well enough alone, which is a good thing. He’s one of the few who can make it better. Writing a successful series about an American expatriate living in Thailand? Start up an equally successful series about an LA burglar who serves as PI to the underworld. Still not enough? How about creating a trilogy within the world of the Thailand series? Done.

The Hot Countries is the final installment of the three-book sequence begun by The Fear Artist and continuing through For the Dead. Each book places progressively more importance on Miaow, the Thai orphan adopted by Poke Rafferty and his wife, Rose. Miaow is entering adolescence and all the problems that can create for parent-child relationships, but it also now more than just a potential plot diversion or complication. She serves a vital purpose in helping Rafferty understand a cadre of homeless children, chief among them Treasure, a half-Thai, half-Caucasian child brutally raised by a former Operation Phoenix spook.

Much of The Hot Countries takes place in or because of Rafferty’s associations at the Expat Bar, where farang of various nationalities get together to drink and commiserate. A newcomer has started to make appearances, and has asked about Rafferty, albeit obliquely. Time will show what this stranger is after are things not easily relinquished.

At the risk of starting a genre argument, Hallinan has mastered the literary thriller. His plots are tight and the stories are perfectly paced. That’s enough for most writers, but Hallinan—again, not content to leave well enough alone—adds context to the characters and situation few would dare.

At the outset, Rafferty would be hard pressed to call those at the Expat Bar his friends, with one exception. By the end he’s come to realize they’re more like a family, though none of them would be so maudlin as to say so. The onset of dementia is also a key element of the story, as well as the repair of Rafferty’s friendship with Arthit, a clean cop who can call on a small handful of those he trusts to work the law to their advantage, even if they have to stretch it a little. The relationship between Rafferty and Arhtit’s new wife is also stressed, and it was tenuous to start wife.

None of these are afterthoughts, applied after the first draft to add depth. Everything that happens in the book happens for a reason. To change how quickly Rafferty and Anna come to better understand each other would create a butterfly effect that could change the entire outcome of the book. And it would still make sense.

The Hot Countries is Hallinan’s seventh Rafferty book. The series shows no signs of wear or staleness. Each book explores the series’ universe in a little more detail, drawing from bits of predecessors while expanding horizons. Rare is the book that so affects me that I need to take time for reflection on what I just read when I finish it. Still more unusual is the book that had that affect and seems better when I sit done to write the review a couple of weeks later.

This is one of those books. The rarest of the rare.

A Veteran Father's Memoir

My father was drafted during the Korean War and was sent to Germany to patrol the border near Fulda, where Soviet tanks would have to come in the event of an invasion. World War III did not break out while he was there. Thousands of guys had similar jobs during the Cold War. He did what they asked him to do, and he came home. No heroism was expected of him and no heroic circumstances presented themselves. He, and thousands like him in many ways helped us from needing heroes; they served and did what was asked of them.

Last year my brother and his two daughters (21 and 19 at the time) flew in from Colorado to visit my parents in the Pennsylvania house my brother and I grew up. Old photograph albums came out the girls had never seen. Events were described they had no idea about. They were fascinated.

The next week Dad wrote them a letter and made a copy to send to me. Here is that letter, in his words.

I served in the 7^th Army, 14^th Armored Cavalry patrolling the East-West German borders during 1953 – 54. Our base was located near Bad Hersfeld, right off the German Autobahn. Regimental HQ was in Fulda, located about 50 km northeast of Frankfurt on the Rhine River.

A range of mountains runs north-south through Germany and the only place where Russia could mount a tank invasion was the flat terrain through the mountains at Fulda, called the Fulda Gap in General Patton’s autobiography on the war.

Great Britain patrolled the northern sector to the North Sea. U.S. had the most vulnerable sector at Fulda and France patrolled the southern and western sectors.

We patrolled the border from Erfurt on the north to Bad Kissingen in the south. Fulda was in the center. (Regimental HQ.) Hersfeld was the northern leg, where the Autobahn crossed the border, which was a 10 meter plowed strip. A small barbed-wire fence was centered in the plowed ground. Every place a road or lane went through the strip there was a barricade policed by Russian and East German soldiers in a 30-foot machinegun tower on larger crossings.

I was a scout section chief and in charge of a patrol to check crossings on a 12-hour shift. After dark, you set up a listening post. Any invasion would be by armored vehicles and you can hear them for miles.

A patrol consisted of a radio jeep with driver and patrol leader (me) and a machinegun jeep with a mounted machinegun and 50 pounds of explosives, a driver, a co-driver, and machinegunner; five in all.

We had to radio our position every half hour. If we missed two consecutive reports HQ would send someone to find us. There were some dead radio spots where we couldn’t transmit because of the mountainous terrain. If we missed one report, we headed for high ground so we wouldn’t miss the second one.

My patrol leader was a Sergeant First Class who had been in Germany for ten years and spoke fluent German. He was also an alky. I was his driver and after I knew the process, he would stop at a German gasthaus (bar) and tell me to pick him up later, so after one year I was essentially running the patrols.

In late ’54 I went to the regimental NCO Academy at Fulda for 12 weeks as a PFC. I graduated as Honor Student and was given a raise in grade.

In October 1954 I was promoted to Staff Sergeant and was the fair-haired man in camp. Any time the 7^th Army sent a rep to check our readiness, I was the first one to be interviewed. Buck private in February 1953 to Staff Sergeant in October 1954.

In late ’54 my platoon commander was transferred to Regimental HQ and wanted me to transfer with him but I would have had to re-up for four more years (with a $10,000 bonus).

Sorry I got sidetracked but your mother had said how much the girls enjoyed the photo albums. I’m sorry I didn’t get a chance to expound on some of the pics because I had a very interesting military career and I’m very proud of it.

Thanks for listening.

Love to all

Dad

PS

If the East Germans/Russians crossed the border, our mission was to alert the 2^nd Armored Division, stationed near Frankfurt and set our first line of defense: the Rhine River.

The patrol’s mission was to alert HQ and blow up any bridges, railroad tracks – anything vital as we retreated to base, then Frankfurt.

The 14^th Armored cavalry was the first line of defense in Europe during the Cold War. We were the eyes and ears of the 7^th Army.

Armored vehicles are very restricted in vision and maneuverability. A scout squad would be the eyes and ears of tanks and had to lead any tanks on the move, check weight restrictions on roads and bridges, etc.

Please excuse an old man for his memories when he was young and vital.

Love,

Dad

In his note he sent me along with my copy of the letter, he wrote: I have the Zippo lighter I was awarded by General Hodges as I graduated as honor student from NCO Academy. I planned to show it to the girls last week but never got to it. He hasn’t smoked in at least forty years.

Thanks, Dad.

Promotion (Self and Otherwise)

Before we get into my best recent reads, a brief moment of self-promotion. In fact, not even that. More like a grateful acknowledgement of a generous review. Jochem Vandersteen is a Dutch writer who is as active as anyone I’ve heard of in promoting PI fiction. A fine writer himself, he has not only edited two anthologies of PI shorts (The Shamus Sampler, foreword by Reed Farrel Coleman; and The Shamus Sampler II, foreword by Timothy Hallinan), he is the tireless owner/editor/author of the excellent Sons of Spade blog. Mijnheer Vandersteen recently flattered The Man in the Window with a review.

An excerpt:

I'm so glad Dana King decided to continue to write these Nick Forte books... He's just really good at it, understanding which dose of the legacy to follow and what new parts to add…There are multiple twists in the end, two cool sidekicks, good action scenes and some pretty nifty Chanderlisms in this book, adding up to a perfect PI read.

The entire review is available on Sons of Spade, along with a nice comment from Jack Getze, author of the Austin Carr series. (Big Numbers, Big Money, Big Mojo, and Big Shoes.)

Kind words are always appreciated, but kind words from those whose work one respects are the best of all.

Now to our regularly scheduled program.

I Used to be in Radio, Larry Matthews. A memoir that will hit every emotion, delivered in a matter-of-fact style that brings home the full effect. Matthews started in radio when he came back from Vietnam, mostly in the DC area. The first part of the book describes how he sort of fell into the business, and moved from station to station looking for the perfect gig. Much of it is laugh out loud funny and shows that WKRP in Cincinnati was not a stretch. A more mature Matthews finds himself freelancing in Washington, doing business reports for NPR and news stories for a variety of other stations, until a story on child pornography gets its hooks into him. He has a semi-informal agreement with a magazine to write a story, but doesn’t think to notify the authorities of the research he’s doing, and…well, you have an idea of where this leads. In Matthews’s case it led to a year and half in federal prison, after an arrest and trial story that would piss off the Dali Lama. Matthews’s mistakes are logistical, not moral, but seeing what’s coming doesn’t make it any easier to watch. Why this hasn’t been optioned for a movie is beyond me. Think A Civil Action or The Insider.

Every Contact Leaves a Trace, Connie Fletcher. Next to The Beloved Spouse™, Connie Fletcher may be the closest I have to a Muse. I read one of her books every year and never fail to come away with new appreciations. She gets law enforcement to talk to her the way they talk to no one else. Asked about research at my Bouchercon panel this year, I summed it up by saying, “I read everything Connie Fletcher writes.” This time she let the pros tell how CSI really works. If you have any interest in how law enforcement actually operates, hers is the series to read.

The Hot Countries, Timothy Hallinan. No one is more consistently excellent than Tim Hallinan. I’ll have more to say about The Hot Countries next week.

Last of theIndependents, Sam Wiebe. Hell, yeah, it won awards. Wiebe’s debut shows all the polish of a veteran as he makes the traditional tropes his own. He’s also at home in not trying to make Vancouver into LA, letting the unique qualities of his setting carry their parts of the story without trying to shoehorn them into anything.

For years James Crumley’s The Last Good Kiss has been acclaimed as having the greatest opening in crime fiction. Now there’s a competitor: The younger Thomas Kroon leaned forward on the clients’ bench and said, “There’s no real polite way to say this, Mr. Drayton. Someone’s fucking our corpses and we’d like it to stop.”

Twenty Questions With Sam Wiebe

Sam Wiebe is one of those writers people tell you to watch out for. No, not the way your mother used to tell you to watch out for people. I mean in a good way. His debut novel, Last of the Independents, won the 2015 Kobo Emerging Writer's Award for Fiction and the 2012 Unhanged Arthur Award for Best Unpublished First Crime Novel. The book was also nominated for both the Arthur Ellis and Shamus Awards for Best First Novel. His short fiction has appeared in Thuglit, Spinetingler, and Criminal Element's Malfeasance Occasional e-collection.

Sam lives in Vancouver

One Bite at a Time: Tell us about Last of the Independents.

Sam Wiebe: I like to think of it as an update on the classic private eye novel. The book covers PI Mike Drayton's search for the missing son of a junk dealer, someone who buys and sells secondhand goods. Along the way Mike encounters a rogue's gallery of shady characters who know more than they let on, and finds himself tested as to how far he's willing to go to find this child.

Also, there's some necrophilia.

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.)

SW: I finished grad school heavily in debt, pissed off, and without a job. A lot of my friends were in similar positions. I thought a private eye novel would be a cool way to look at how work informs our lives--a lot of those in-between jobs, off the grid jobs, are disappearing, and for people like myself who don't want a nine-to-five job, making a living has become a bit precarious. At least that's what I felt when I was 28....no, I still feel that way.

OBAAT: How long did it take to write Last of the Independents, start to finish?

SW: A year, maybe.

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

SW: He's like me in that he's something of a workaholic--his identity is tied to his work. For a lot of people that's not the case--they work to live, have hobbies, etc. Also his sense of humor is pretty much mine, for good or ill. He's got a worse temper, though.

OBAAT: In what time and place is Last of the Independents set? How important is the setting to the book as a whole?

SW: Vancouver, present day. Setting is really important--there aren't a whole lot of great crime novels set here, and I'd like to help put Vancouver on the crime fiction map.

OBAAT: How did Last of the Independents come to be published?

SW: I entered it in the Crime Writers of Canada manuscript contest sponsored by Dundurn Press. The book won, and Dundurn published it. All told it took about four years.

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

SW: This summer I started rereading the Ross MacDonald Lew Archer series. I just picked up the Women Crime Writers of the Forties and Fifties box set curated by Sarah Weinman, and I can't wait to crack that. For contemporary writers, I like Tana French, Peter Temple, James Ellroy, Michael Chabon...there's so many greats. Fellow Canadians like John McFetridge, Dietrich Kalteis, Owen Laukkanen, Robin Spano and Linda Richards are all great, too. And I can't wait to start David Swinson's The Second Girl. That looks REALLY good.

OBAAT: What made you decide to be an author?

SW: It sounds silly, but I tried pretty hard NOT to be an author. When I was younger I just wanted to play drums. But Vancouver is an expensive city, and a lot of my bandmates moved away, and I found myself going back to my first love of writing. I mean, I ALWAYS wrote, but suddenly it was put up or shut up time.

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

SW: No clue.

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

SW: The hours. I like to work a lot, but when and where I feel like it, preferably from the couch, in a flannel shirt, with some coffee or tea.

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

SW: Francis Ford Coppola, David Milch, Bret "Hitman" Hart. Also my parents.

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

SW: My outlines tend to be pretty flimsy and provisional. Usually I have an idea for a scene, maybe an ending, and then it's a matter of working backward to give that scene meaning. Although in the case of Last of the Independents, I got to the ending and changed it completely--the original ending seemed false, and I had to be honest with where the story was taking me.

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?

SW: I write by hand, pen and paper, and then transcribe as I go. It's not the most efficient process, but I think it allows a little more attention to be paid to word choice, and it definitely frees you from distraction. Plus you have an extra chance to edit as you type it up.

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?

SW: Yeah, usually jazz or alt-rock. I don't listen to lyric-heavy music when I write. I still have my Last of the Independents playlist, actually--a lot of John Lee Hooker, Heart, McCoy Tyner, and Mark Lanegan.

OBAAT: As a writer, what’s your favorite time management tip?

SW: It's not about how much you get done in a day, it's how many days you put in. I try for a thousand words a day.

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

SW: I was just writing about this on my blog. New writers sometimes try to cover up their feelings of insecurity to gain entry to the group of writers--you see that a lot at Bouchercon, and last year I definitely fell in that category. Just remember that it's those feelings of insecurity and fraudulence that ARE your ticket into the group--that everyone's been where you are.

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?

SW: I mean, Aristotle said plot was more important than character, because a character-driven book would meander or cover incidents that aren't dramatic. Who am I to doubt Aristotle? The truth is, most of what a reader thinks of as character is really plot, and what they think of as plot is just bad plotting. If it's well-plotted, it seems driven by the characters. One of the paradoxes of writing, I guess.

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?

SW: Can I say that I'd write the same book, but I'd make more people buy it? I'm pretty proud of Last of the Independents. Other than that...it's not a book, but I'm a huge fan of Deadwood and The Wire. I think those are the great American novels of the last twenty years, and it would've been cool to work on them.

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

SW: Sleeping, making coffee, walking around the city. Not at the same time.

OBAAT: What are you working on now?

SW: My second novel, Invisible Dead, comes out in June. I have a few short stories coming out, and I'm just working on the draft of my next novel. And of course reading through the giant stack of books I picked up at Bouchercon. Thanks again for the copy of A Small Sacrifice, Dana, and thanks for inviting me to do this!