I don’t remember what tipped the scales and made me pick up my first Ray Banks novel. I do recall that there was a lot of buzz around his first Cal Innes book, Saturday’s Child, and that buzz was justified. Innes, just out of prison, takes work as an unlicensed P.I., doing a job for local crime boss Maurice Tiernan. The cast of characters in the book resurfaces throughout the other three books in the series, with things coming full circle, to a certain extent, in the final Innes book, Beast of Burden.

But it has been a hard ride for Innes. When Beast begins, he has been addled by a stroke brought about by a savage beating. Despite his best instincts, he throws in with Tiernan again, this time charged with finding Tiernan’s speed-freak son, Mo, one of a handful of nemeses for Innes. The other, Detective Sgt. Donkin, known as Donkey (though few say that to his face). On Innes’ side of things is Paulo, a gay boxing gym owner who frets about his friend, and Frank Collier, a daft but well-meaning oaf who works with Innes as a P.I.

The thing that draws a reader to Banks’ work is the voice. Yes, these are dark tales, and sure, it can be hard going for an American reader unused to the dialect and the British and Scottish street slang. But it is that voice, the matter-of-fact recounting events that carries just the right blend of aggro, ennui, world-weariness and perseverance that keeps me coming back.

Those of us who have become fans of the Innes books are in a hard spot here; Beast of Burden — out since 2009 in the UK, but just out this month in the U.S. — is Banks’ last book about the P.I. What is best to realize, however, is that being a fan of Innes means being a fan of his creator, and there is plenty more Banks to go around. He has two novellas out – Gun and California – the former available Stateside as an ebook, and his novel Wolf Tickets is being serialized in the excellent crime fiction journal Needle. He even cranked out a bit of flash fiction for Shotgun Honey, which posted his “Pineapple Rings” last week.

TIRBD: You’ve said you had originally planned two more Innes books, but realized the story as you had conceived it over the final two should be condensed into one. Did you envision this arc from the beginning, or was this simply where the story needed to go as you began to tell it?

RB: I had a majority of it planned out. I mean, it wasn’t written down in any detail but I knew the ending I wanted, I knew I wanted to deal with certain things, and I knew I wanted the last book in the series to come back to characters from the first book. It was always going to be a limited series, too. As a reader, I prefer limited to ongoing because anything can happen in a limited series – there’s still a sense of drama with each book – whereas the assumption with an ongoing series is that your main character’s probably going to be pretty much the same person at the end as they are at the beginning, and that’s a real tension killer.

Of course some things changed as I wrote the books. Donna (from Saturday’s Child) was supposed to come back in No More Heroes, but I couldn’t make it work and so cut her sub-plot completely. It meant that her character wasn’t allowed the kind of progression I would’ve liked, but that’s the way it crumbles, cookie-wise. She was also meant to provide a counterpoint to Cal’s relentless misery, but that role was ultimately filled by Frank Collier, who doubled up as an inversion of the “psycho sidekick” trope. So, y’know, it all worked out in the end.

What are your feelings toward Innes? You are incredibly hard on him throughout the series, but there seems to be affection there, too.

I’m ambivalent towards him. I tend to be wary of any author who talks about their protagonists as if they’re real people – too many hours alone in the dark will do that to a bloke, or else it’s a precious little act. As with any first-person narrative, there’s a connection between author and character, and we certainly share a few things like a sense of humour (which is impossible to fake), but I’d be lying if I said he didn’t represent a part of my life that I’m more than happy to leave behind.

Detective Sgt. Donkin has a larger role here, and we learn more about him. Was that important to you, to have Innes’ foil be a more well-rounded character?

It was vital. I always felt I gave Donkey the short shrift in the earlier books – he stood out to me as a bit of a one-note character, but only because I hadn’t given him the space to be anything else. And it would have been a lop-sided conflict if Innes had been playing off the stereotypical “bent cop.” So, yeah, I wanted to do a bit more with Donkey, give him a little more emotional resonance than he previously had. I don’t know if I pulled it off – it’s a tricky thing to get right – but the response has been pretty positive so far.

You’ve been experimenting with different methods of getting your work out, from novellas to ebooks to the serial in Needle. Is that a function of the marketplace, or are you trying to do different things with different forms?

The novellas were a challenge to see if I could write to that specific word length (15k in the first one, around 20k in the second), and I found it a really comfortable length. The serial isn’t really a serial in the sense that it was made up on an issue-by-issue basis – Wolf Tickets existed in a form before I mentioned it to the guys at Needle, so it was just a question of revising it extensively for the three parts. Both were a way of circumventing the fact that I didn’t have a new full-length novel out this year – Beast of Burden doesn’t count as new to me, you see. Besides, I like to keep busy.

I put out an ebook of Gun to test the waters, see how easy it was to get something out there. As it turned out, Gun’s been a nice little seller, and the immediacy of the form as well as its bias towards content rather than aesthetics is appealing to me. I wouldn’t put out anything that hadn’t been thoroughly edited by a professional, but I can see myself moving towards e-publishing as a primary, simply because it affords me the chance to put out multiple books a year. That’s not to say I’m swearing off print, you understand. I’ve had some great experiences with print publishers. It’s never been an either-or situation, and it never will be. But I do believe if you can work fast and concise, the e-market is a wonderful opportunity.

Few writers are willing to end a series for fear, I’m sure, of the unknown that lies beyond it. Did you have that trepidation? Given that the series ended in the UK in 2009, how has the reality lined up with your initial thoughts/fears about how it would go?

No trepidation whatsoever. It probably would’ve been a different matter had the Innes series been long-running or hugely successful, but the unknown wasn’t an issue. For every Innes book, I wrote at least one more non-Innes which wasn’t put out to publishers, so I was keeping my hand in. It also meant I wasn’t putting all my faith in Innes to make me a household name which, let’s face it, was never going to be the case.

It’s been interesting to see the different reactions, though. In the UK, the novels weren’t really reviewed very much, nor did they find much of an audience. There are a load of reasons for this, none of which I particularly want to get into right now, but suffice to say the UK market isn’t as open to P.I. fiction as the US. American readers have been far more positive and far more vocal, which puts the lie to the old concern about Americans only wanting to read about America.

Now that the series is done, would you like to get on a single worldwide schedule so you’re not, say, promoting a two-year-old book?

Absolutely. Promoting a two-year-old book is tough when you’ve written a bunch of stuff since then. I don’t really remember a lot about the plot, to be honest, and reading the bloody thing again is just going to show up all those wee flaws I didn’t notice before, so I’d rather not do it unless I absolutely have to. I’d love to get on one schedule, though – the idea of different pub dates, and even different territories, in this day and age seems almost archaic.

Norma Desmond’s Monkey: explain.

Well, movies have been a long-time passion, but talking about them didn’t really fit into the plan for my own web site, so I decided to set up something elsewhere. My brief for the site was something along the lines of “Moviedrome,” which was a TV series that showed cult films with introductions by Alex Cox (and later, Mark Cousins). It introduced me to filmmakers and movies I wouldn’t otherwise have seen, and so I thought it’d fun to carry that on, or at least use it as a starting point. It’s also an excellent outlet to practice my non-fiction, which is something I’ve never felt I’ve been very good at, and I’d like to get better. I’ll hopefully have some very special guest posts coming up too, which I’m very excited about. Mostly it’s a goof, though.

At the rate things are going, I won’t be able to add many qualifiers when people ask me what I like to read. At one time, when asked what I read, I’d say something like, “pretty much anything… except science fiction, horror and Westerns.”

But the more I read, the more I find those exceptions are not needed. I do read science fiction, particularly when it comes from the like of Jonathan Lethem or David Mitchell. David Cranmer, writing as Edward A. Grainger, just showed me with his Cash Laramie and Gideon Miles stories, that I do like Westerns. And, with Southern Gods, John Hornor Jacobs has shown me that I like well-written horror as well.

The key to all of those expansions to my list of likes is that all came from talented writers. With Southern Gods, Jacobs has crafted a tale that reads like the best historical fiction, with a twist. Bull Ingram, a WWII vet who lives up to his nickname, is hired to find a missing record label promoter, and is asked to track down the mysterious bluesman Ramblin’ John Hastur. He is brought into contact with Sarah Rheinhart, a well-off woman who heads back to the family estate with her daughter after a failed marriage.

With Bull’s brawn and Sarah’s wits, they figure out the evil force that has been plaguing them both. It’s a mystifying journey, and one that I’m loath to share more about for fear of saying too much.

This trip through mid-20th century Arkansas, interspersed with vivid depictions of the era where country blues was about to birth rock ‘n’ roll, is fascinating.  I felt like I was learning something at the same time I was being endlessly entertained.

Jacobs is also a talented designer, having done several book and ebook covers, and is the creative designer behind Needle magazine.

TIRBD: This is a long-gestating project for you. How does your view of the book differ now from the way you saw things when you completed that first draft?

JHJ: That’s a great question, actually. I began writing Southern Gods in November 2007 during the National Novel Writing Month and completed the manuscript in early 2008. I spent a few months rewriting and revising the book, but at a certain point, I figured it was as good as it was going to get without a total overhaul and rewrite and I had other things I wanted to write. This might sound bad, but perfectionists don’t make very good novelists. In my experience, you have to be willing to let your book out into the world, flaws and all.

Of course, the book has run the gauntlet of editing – I gave it seven passes, taking in feedback from all the pre-readers (including a stint at the Borderlands Press Boot Camp where I workshopped the novel), then a thorough and professional edit from my agent with a corresponding rewrite. And then another pass with my editor at Night Shade Press, with a few small spot rewrites. Then a line edit. So the book’s been through the wringer. In the end, it’s cleaner, clearer, decidedly shorter and less gory of a book. My first manuscript was 95,000 words, which is a good sized, if not long, novel. When editing was through, it was 84,000 words. That’s quite an edit, but every cut made the final product stronger, I believe.

Since writing Southern Gods, I’ve written three additional novels and I’m wading into the fourth. In each of them, I’ve tried different things within the narrative, and I feel like my writing has become fuller, and it is near to capturing an individual style and voice, though I realize that’s a long, long journey. It is interesting to note, I’ve moved away from horror. Though I’ve stayed within the speculative genres.

You now have a lot of things in the pipeline, with your next novel due next summer and your young adult trilogy due in the years after that. Clearly you didn’t sit around waiting for Southern Gods to be published before jumping into something else.  How do you think what you’ve written in the interim is different that it might have been had you waited to see the reception to Southern Gods before jumping into the next thing?

Well, I touched on that in the last answer, but I’ve been thinking a long time about writing, and how it affects a writer when they have some sort of acceptance or success. When you’re starting out as a writer, the crushing weight of being unpublished is almost unbearable. Even though you might read a novel and see the poor characterization and plotting and you absolutely know you could do better, you’re still just some schmuck who hasn’t published anything and no one in the industry (including the industry hangers-on and wannabes) will give you the respect you might feel you deserve because you’re not published.

But with that first acceptance – be it a novel or a short story from a professional market – you’ve gained a true validation of your skill, talent, and imagination. With that first sale comes confidence. It’s weird, but after Southern Gods sold, I feel like I became a better writer because I then knew I was doing something right. So, scratch that one thing of the list of things I’m riddled with self-doubt over.

It is true, for the past four years, I’ve taken writing very, very seriously. After I finish a project, I start another and let the previous one sit. So, by the time I had an acceptance from an agent for representation, I already had three novels in the can. That’s important. We are what we do. I am a novelist. I write novels.

And with each novel, I became a stronger writer. In the editing process, you see what works, what doesn’t. I couldn’t write Southern Gods, now. The man who wrote that is gone, separated by time and experience.

In part because of your association with Needle, you move easily in crime fiction circles. While there certainly are crime elements to the book, it is as much horror as anything else. How would you characterize the fans of those two genres? Similarities, differences, etc.? Do you see yourself as a conduit to bring fans of one over to the other?

Horror and crime are kissing cousins. Someone should do Venn diagram for you.

Many crime novels could be considered horror and vice versa. They share a predilection towards violence and gore, they deal with the basest of human behavior. It’s the presence of the supernatural that really separates horror from crime, honestly. Both crime and horror are considered “pulp” entertainment and so, I think a lot of the audience moves fluidly between the two genres. I can think of many authors that straddle the genres, most notably Stephen King, who’s recently released a book on Ardai’s Hard Case Crime label. But other examples could be Joe Lansdale, Victor Gischler and Dan Simmons who all move with great fluency between the two genres.

Actually, the perfect example is Edgar Allen Poe himself. Everyone remembers his tales of the macabre – landing him firmly in the forefather of horror role – but few people remember his detective, C. Auguste Dupin, who paved the way for Sherlock, Nero, and even the gumshoes that followed in the post-WWII boom.

Crime and horror aren’t cousins, they’re siblings.

Setting is very important in Southern Gods. Could you have conjured this story if you were living somewhere else?

I’m sure I could’ve come up with something similar if I lived anywhere in the south. I can’t ascribe my home state THAT much influence on me.

But, on the other hand, I do always write from an Arkansas-centric viewpoint because of many reasons. First and foremost, it’s what I know, I’ve lived here all my life, so writing about it is natural and I feel like I can describe it, make people aware of it, in ways that you really couldn’t with, say, a place like New York, because people know New York. But Arkansas is, if not a mystery, an unknown.

And I think this is the reason why rural noir is burgeoning. People have read and seen every mob story ever set in New York or Chicago, but to see organized crime in action in the Missouri Ozarks like we do in Winter’s Bone — which is as horrific of a crime story as you could want to read — that is a new experience.

Was the story of Robert Johnson an impetus for this? Have you ever heard music that comes close to that of Ramblin’ John Hastur?

Well, I’ve been to a Grateful Dead concert and that music made me think I was going insane.

Joking aside, Robert Johnson had a definite influence on Ramblin’ John Hastur. How could he not have? However, I tried to keep away from drawing direct parallels between the two because I knew from the start that this novel wasn’t going to rely upon the Christian dialecticism of God vs. Devil. I was always too worried it would come across as Ralph Macchio’s movie, “Crossroads.” I needed to keep Robert Johnson at arm’s length. He could color and inform the story, but not be a direct example. At a certain point in Southern Gods, the focus on music falls away and we’re left with the antagonism of malevolent forces, regardless of delivery mechanism.

Manly Wade Wellman’s Silver John stories and novels were a huge influence. Silver John deals with a plurality of gods.

If I had to liken the music of Ramblin’ John Hastur to something, it would be to slave field hollers. But sung by the minion of an evil god. You can check out some field hollers collected from Arkansas and Mississippi and other Southern locales here:

As anyone who has seen the book covers you have designed can attest, you are extremely creative in the world of visual arts. Do you think that talent and the eye for detail it must entail have an affect on the way you write, the way you set a scene?

Thank you very much for the compliment and that’s another good question that I’ve never thought about before. Hmm. I don’t think I write particularly visually. Actually, I try, in my style, to address sound and smell far more than the visual because sound and smell are more tied into human sense-memory.  In the end, writers simply want to manipulate your emotions to give you a pleasurable experience, and while reading is a visual activity, when you describe something using solely visual descriptors, there’s a friction between the reader’s awareness of reading and what he or she is reading about. Not focusing so much on visual descriptions is a way to avoid that friction. So, saying a woman’s voice was as husky as a rasp and she smelled like cinnamon and a burning peach-grove in the height of summer evokes more for me than saying, she had blond hair, pink lipstick, carmine fingernail polish, and was wearing a blue dress. But that’s just a stylistic choice.

You use different parts of your brain designing and writing. I will say, writing successfully is more like music. There’s a grammar to music – musical theory – and once you have that sublimated through rehearsal it’s very much like possessing a solid grounding in English grammar, you’re free then to extemporize and experiment, riffing on certain things, coming back to phrases, expanding and exploring themes. Once you have the theory, you can start focusing on character, style, theme, plot, pathos and, well, artistry.

It’s up for debate if I’ve ever achieved artistry, but I’m working on it.

I have become familiar with several writers represented by Stacia Decker, and none of you are shy about letting the world know about that. Even though I’m an avid reader (and aspiring writer myself), I can’t say that I’m overly familiar with who represents other authors. What is it about her and her work that engenders such allegiance and celebration?

Well, Stacia has branded her stable of authors Team Decker. In some ways, this cadre of authors is a great mutual support group – we all help out the others in promoting blog posts, book releases, reviews, and all the other aspects of social networking that modern-day authors have to deal with. Stacia is young and vibrant and a lot of fun. That’s the fluff.

The serious bit is that she is my agent and that means that we’re business partners. This is her way of maximizing her unique position as a nexus between many, many artists who normally would not play very nicely together. At least I wouldn’t. I have a hard time now, just because I’m a crotchety septuagenarian trapped in a 28 year old body.

Okay, 33 year old body.

Okay. 40 year old body. Shut up.

Some of the best fiction takes things that haven’t happened and makes them so plausible that for one horrifying second you wonder if you maybe missed the news for a couple of weeks. Such is the case with Timothy Taylor’s third novel, The Blue Light Project. Set in the  “not-too-distant future,” it is the story of a four-day hostage crisis at “Kiddie Fame,” a televised children’s talent show where, when contestants are voted off, it is referred to as a “kill.” Brought into the orbit of this event are three people: former Olympic gold medalist Eve Latour, disgraced journalist Thom Pegg, and street artist Rabbit.

Their stories intersect in inventive and yet natural ways, and these intersections allow Taylor to deftly comment on myriad topics, including the state of fame in our society and our connections with (and isolation from) others.

A situation that at first seems only the stuff of fiction quickly becomes entirely plausible, and Taylor uses it to draw many parallels, both back and forth within the book and in the larger sense to situations occurring in our world. Terrorism (and the lengths we go to fight it), people’s pursuit of fame, our collective numbing at the hands of mass media… it’s all here.

Always in the background, and occasionally in the foreground, are two things:  the “blue light project” itself, a fascinating work pursued by one of the characters, and a quote from the filmmaker Werner Herzog: “We need adequate images or we’ll go the way of the dinosaurs.” These are woven in with the street art that runs as a thread throughout the book, which is itself a captivating strand. Having read this book, I’ll never again look at street art the same way.

Taylor is the author of the novels Stanley Park and Story House, and the short story collection Silent Cruise. He lives in Vancouver.

TIRBD: The quote from Herzog is obviously central to the story. When you first heard and/or read it, did it immediately spark an idea, or was it something that you held onto, knowing it might be useful someday?

I first heard Herzog say it in his film “Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe:” “We need adequate images or we’ll go the way of the dinosaurs.” Later I learned that Herzog had said this dozens of times, so it’s clearly a central idea in his work. I was writing The Blue Light Project around that time, and it occurred to me that Herzog’s comment might be exactly the kind of thing that would inspire my street artist character, Rabbit. So that’s how Herzog’s idea was used: his “adequate images” became the key inspiration for Rabbit’s own work in the novel.

As far as what Herzog really means, I have to interpret, so maybe he’d disagree. But by calling for “adequate” images, Herzog seems to be drawing our attention to the shortcomings of other images, especially television and advertising. And based on my research into the street art community in Vancouver where I live, I’d say that’s very much in tune with what my street artist friends were doing. They were reacting to the commercial and profit-driven with this more impulsive and illicit work.

In addition to the other themes, this is really a meditation on the varieties of fame. Everyone comes at it from a different angle, for a different reason and with different results. Are we spiraling toward a Warholian 15 minutes for everyone and if so, what does that mean for our society?

I think what’s interesting about Warhol’s famous comment is that it jokingly assumed the future would accommodate a bit of true fame for everyone. But that’s exactly what our culture seems not to accommodate. Everybody may be hunting fame, infected by its appeal – and social media makes us all fame hunters in a way, as we lobby the world to follow and friend and retweet us – but the distribution of fame is still the same. Some people get famous. Most don’t.

What are we spiraling towards, then, if not Warhol’s prediction? I think one thing we can say about a culture obsessed with fame, where people very commonly believe that they can/should/will be famous (“American Idol,” anyone?), is that the love of celebrities is twinned with resentment. We really see that when a celebrity has a public misstep. We take them down hard. Charlie Sheen may have had it coming (and may well rise again) but the feeding frenzy around his decline speaks volumes.

What led you to bring together these three main characters in Eve, Rabbit and Pegg? Did you try different tacks to get to this story before settling on these three, or did you perhaps start with these three and let them lead you to the story?

Eve and Pegg were the first characters on the page. I started with that image of Pegg seeing her and admiring her beauty, while the city was obviously in turmoil around them. And I knew she would be the one who handles fame well while not really wanting it, and Pegg would be the one who really wanted fame and messed it up completely. Rabbit came a little later, although I knew all along I wanted street art to weave its way through the book, a strand of hope in dark times. And a source of hope that really blossoms into a transforming thing at the end of the novel, which Eve and Pegg witness together.

It seems that reality television and terrorism serve two roles in the book: to comment on the larger themes and also to generate action. Is that a fair assessment? Was that your intent from the outset?

A fair assessment, absolutely. Reality television is an emblem of our desire for fame as well as for our desire to see a famous person fail once in a while. “Jersey Shore” is no different than “Top Chef” in that regard. But from the standpoint of action, the reality television show in the novel is where it all really begins when an armed man storms the studio and takes a bunch of people hostage. Terrorism is what follows, I guess you could say. The fact of the hostage crisis is what creates tension in the story since we all know at least one thing about hostage situations: they tend to turn out badly for one party or the other. But the terrorist act in this case is also motivated in a mysterious way. And when that is revealed, there is a kind of folding over, with the story doubling back on itself.

At this point, is there any more insight to be had about the Beatles and the Rolling Stones? Any images one could possibly see that one hasn’t already viewed? Just when you think the answer to those questions is “no,” along come two books that seek to color in the few spaces left open in the incredibly complete picture of these two bands.

Bob Bonis isn’t a name I was familiar with before receiving two books in the mail from It Books — The Lost Beatles Photographs and The Lost Rolling Stones Photographs. Bonis was the tour manager for each band during their U.S. tours in 1964-66. I was skeptical, for the reasons stated above, that I would find anything of value in either. But each is a revelation. Fans of either band surely have seen photos of the members in their earliest days, fresh-faced, earnest kids who don’t yet know that they’ll one day rule the world. In these books, which gather the best of the thousands of shots Bonis’ took of them over the course of three years, these intimate moments in aggregate capture the catalysis of the bands as they move from energetic relative unknowns to road-weary stars.

The Rolling Stones book offers more candid moments, with the photos largely divided into sections for each of the five members, plus founding member Ian Stewart and manager Andrew Loog Oldham. Whether by default or by design, the individual Stones seemed better able to be on their own, and this yields photos that feature moments of silliness intercut with those of introspection. Already you can see the personalities emerging. The engaging eccentric Brian Jones, the moody muso Keith Richards, the preening singer Mick Jagger, the aloof drummer Charlie Watts and the good-timin’ non-entity Bill Wyman.

The Beatles book is organized differently, sections mostly given over to 11 of the band’s dates during its U.S. tours. The most revelatory photos are from August 1964. The band was between shows — the Hollywood Bowl and Red Rocks — and spent a few days at the Bel Air, Calif., home of actor Reginald Owen. There, the boys goof for the camera and seem to be genuinely having fun.

From there, we get live performance pictures that span from Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto midway through their first U.S. tour in September 1964 to Busch Stadium in St. Louis in August 1966 toward the tail end of their last shows in the U.S. The crowds get larger, the band’s suits more elaborate and the sideburns longer. But the grins on the faces of John, Paul, George and Ringo never waver.

Uber fans of both groups likely have seen images like these, and know some of the back story shared here. But they haven’t seen these photographs. Bonis rebuffed attempts throughout his life to publish his photos. He died in 1992, and 15 years later, his son, Alex, connected with Larry Marion, who assembled the books. The result is two time capsules that shed just a bit more light on two very well-illuminated bands.

As I mention in the first question below, I got it in my head a decade or more ago that I would start writing a mystery with a newspaper reporter as the main character. There are many similarities between reporters and detectives, so it seemed like a no-brainer. And I was a reporter for a daily newspaper, so all of my source material was right in front of me.

I looked and found a few, but not as many as I expected, and few of any prominence. I decided that what the world needed was my take on things, and fired up my computer. That idea stalled about 5,000 words in as I realized that a great character was one thing; a great story is another. I had what I thought was the former, but nothing resembling the latter.

With his Carter Ross series, Brad Parks has both in abundance. In Ross, Parks has created a smart, witty, self-aware investigative reporter for the fictional Newark Eagle-Examiner, kind of like a transplanted Myron Bolitar without the athleticism (and without the creepily efficient sidekick). And, he has very well-plotted stories that blend ripped-from-the-headlines verisimilitude with the right amounts of action, grit and humor.

It’s no surprise that his debut, Faces of the Gone, became the first book to win the Nero and Shamus Awards, two of crime fiction’s most-prestigious prizes. The second, Eyes of the Innocent, picks up where the first left off, this time looking at the fallout of the home mortgage crisis (and yes, it is miles more compelling than that one-line description might suggest).

I have been a newspaper reporter and editor for 20 years, so I’m predisposed to like Parks’ work. Or rather, I’m predisposed to judge it harshly if he gets anything wrong. He doesn’t. These are as much a snapshot of an industry in evolve-or-die mode as they are engaging tales of crime fiction. Parks gets it right, and does so in a way that will have you coming back for more. The good news is that Parks has completed the next two Ross books, so while we’ll have to wait to read them, at least we know they’re in the pipeline.

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TIRBD: I remember a decade ago searching for mystery books with reporters as the protagonists and finding precious few. Now, there seem to be many more (probably correlating to the number of laid-off journalists looking for a new career). What are your thoughts about joining the fray and did you ever consider having a main character who wasn’t a reporter?

BP: Well, in fairness, I started writing Faces of the Gone in 2005. So in my mind, I originated the trend. All these other guys – Bruce DeSilva? Todd Ritter? Frauds! Wanna-bes! Gauzy imitators of my greatness! OK, seriously… I wish I could tell you I put all kinds of thought behind creating Carter Ross, my investigative reporter protagonist. But, really, I was still working full-time as a reporter myself, writing this thing during mornings, nights and weekends. I needed a world I could create without doing a lot of research. And I knew, having started writing for newspapers when I was 14, I could write a reporter off the top of my head.

Journalism is a very particular form of writing: short, declarative sentences, the most important facts at the top, nothing unverified making it to print, etc. What has the process been like to  transition to novel writing?

I probably never wrote much like a journalist should have. I tended to craft these longer, meandering sentences; I buried my ledes in the sixth, eighth or tenth inch whenever I could get away with it; and, as a sportswriter for much of the time, I got to play a little looser with the attribution than most. So I had less to un-learn than most of my journalistic brethren. But more than that, I’ve found there’s something universal about writing, and it applies no matter what media or genre you’re attempting. Writing is just articulating thoughts on paper. Sure, the conventions change based on the constraints of who you’re writing for or what you’re writing. But the basic act does not.

Did you always envision yourself as a novelist, and if so, was journalism a training ground?

In the back of my head, there was always this idea that, after a long and successful career as a journalist, I would transition into writing crime fiction as a semi-retirement career. Then the newspaper industry started going into its death spin, so I skipped the “long” and “successful” parts of the plan and made the jump about two decades earlier than originally thought. That said, I always knew journalism would be great training for whatever I did next. Working for a daily newspaper forces you into so many good habits as a writer and, for that matter, as a learner. You are constantly put into a position where you have to quickly master a subject and condense what you’ve learned into a concise, coherent narrative. That’s a rare skill in this world. I can’t recommend journalism enough for any young person who wants to have some kind of future with words.

Did you keep notes during your journalism career of things you might be able to use in fiction later?

Not in any organized sense. (Nothing about me, it turns out, is very organized). Mostly I rely on memory. And if it turns out that memory is slightly flawed? Well, what the hell, I write fiction now.

By setting your books contemporaneously, you have created a character whose profession is going to change drastically over the next decade or so. At the same time, you have already completed the next two Carter Ross books. Do you ever fear your writing might be outpaced by events?

Carter Ross is a reporter who is given time to flesh out longer stories and do the heavy lifting often required in serious investigative journalism. And, yes, I fear that means he is already being filed in the “Historical Fiction” part of the bookstore. But, at least for the moment, newspapers seem to have stabilized, albeit at a new normal that is something less than what they were. Hopefully they can stay there for a while. But if they really all do go over the cliff – and it won’t take much more than a strong breeze to send them toppling – well… did I mention I write fiction now?

You seem to have embraced the promotional duties that come with being a writer today. Frankly, you seem like a bit of a ham. Has the career change allowed you to indulge that more, or have you always been like that?

“Ham” is a much nicer word than the one most people use: “whore.” Either way, yeah, this is who I am and have always been – for good or ill. It’s not like I became an author and then suddenly started bursting into song everywhere I went. (Some of my ex-newspaper colleagues, who have shared a newsroom with me, have suggested I sing so much it’s more accurate to say I burst into speech). And  I know it’s popular for authors to gripe about having to promote themselves, but I actually sort of like it (does it show?). The writing is what I really love, of course, but I only get to keep existing as a writer if I sell enough books. So I might as well enjoy that part, too.

You aren’t going to be named honorary chair of the Newark Convention & Visitors Bureau anytime soon. Do you feel you’re fair to the city in your depiction? Have you received feedback about it?

I have yet to hear one bad word from anyone in Newark – and, trust me, Newark is the kind of place where folks aren’t shy about voicing their thoughts. The fact of the matter is, I walked those streets for a long time and know the city intimately. Anyone who shares that level of familiarity would know my depiction of Newark is dead accurate. I mean, yes, I’m writing crime fiction. But guess what? There’s crime in Newark – just like there’s crime in most places. If anything, one of the goals of my fiction is to humanize (as opposed to sensationalize) that crime. In Faces of the Gone, one of the victims is a prostitute. Be honest: If you hear “hooker killed in Newark,” do you give that story a second thought? Probably not. But in Faces, you meet her best friend, her mother. You hear about her life. She becomes not just a faceless victim but a real human being. Maybe that’s not going to make me Grand Marshall of any parades in Newark anytime soon, but I’d like to think I present a compassionate view of the city and its people.

I wouldn’t consider myself a huge Rolling Stones fan, but when the opportunity to read a memoir by guitarist Keith Richards presented itself, my interest was sufficient to make it a must read.

Now, I must qualify the above. I probably own 10 Stones albums, which is more than I can say about some bands about which my fanaticism is rather rabid. The band’s output is to credit for that, of course; it’s easy to amass a sizeable collection when a group has 30-plus albums to its name (and a solid dozen that are classics). But I’ve never seen the band in concert, never gone out of my way to learn about the band beyond what was available in general pop culture and before now didn’t think the band had made a decent album since 1981′s Tattoo You.

But Richards may well be the living, breathing flesh-and-bone embodiment of rock ‘n’ roll, and a memoir that promises this on the inside flap – “This is the life. Believe it or not, I haven’t forgotten any of it” – is pretty much required reading for a rock fan.

Richards doesn’t disappoint with Life. This may be the most candid, honest rock memoir ever written. Yes, Richards engages in the self-mythologizing endemic of the form. But it almost feels as if he’s pulling punches in that regard. Pulling out every reference to partying, drinking, drugging, sex and general debauchery would leave this 547 page book a spindly pamphlet, but one suspects there is significantly more to catalog.

The most surprising thing, however, is how brutally forthright he is. Original Stones guitarist Brian Jones seems to have left no one lamenting his early death, but Richards is downright scathing in his assessment. In his last mention of Jones, ruminating on his death, he refers to him as a “whining son of a bitch.” He also does nothing to soften his view toward singer Mick Jagger. Though he talks of him as a brother that he would stand up for against anyone, he also takes any chance he gets to knock Jagger.

What is most striking about the book is Richards’ willingness to embrace, analyze and discuss every story and rumor about him and the Stones. Again, I haven’t followed every twist and turn of the band’s story, but it’s difficult to avoid most of these stories. So, when the narrative reaches a famous police bust at Richards’ country estate in the ’70s, then the rumor about Jagger’s then-girlfriend Marianne Faithful and a certain candy bar are addressed head-on (and debunked). Did Keith really have his blood replaced at one point? Did he really fall from a coconut tree? It’s all here.

There are inconsistencies. At one point he discusses his drug use, writing “People think once they’ve got this high, if they take some more they’re going to get a little higher. There’s no such thing. Especially with cocaine. One line of good coke and you should be popped all night.”

Later, taking about the band’s 1975 tour, he writes about how he and Ron Wood would build “hideaways behind the speakers on the stage so that we could have lines between songs. One song, one bump was the rule between Ronnie and me.”

Thing is, amusing though this is, I’m sure Richards believes the first but didn’t yet during that tour. It’s not so much a contradiction as an unannounced lesson learned. That he missed the chance to draw attention to that was surprising given his earlier call of bullshit on himself when discussing his look. “I was never really interested very much in my look, so to speak, although I might be a liar there,” he writes, going on to detail exactly how much interest he had in creating and cultivating what has become a signature style.

The reader isn’t getting the full story here, of course, but it does feel as complete as can be expected. At first, this made me want to read Jagger’s take on the same tales, but I realized they would be expurgated and sanitized. Jagger is a businessman, not an artist. Perhaps a business book about the Stones’ ability to stay relevant for five decades would be more appropriate from the singer. The book I really want to read is the one drummer Charlie Watts might someday write. Watts, the silent rock holding everything together, sitting back there taking in everything. That will be the one to read.

Until then, Life isn’t just the best way to learn about the Rolling Stones. It is the best way to learn about rock ‘n’ roll.

So, anyone who has read this blog for the past few years has probably figured out that I’m a huge fan of Lawrence Block. In 2009, I figured that this would lead me down a frustrating, costly road where I tussled online against other fanatics to secure the few extant copies of long out-of-print titles. Block announced at that time that he was done with writing, or, as he put it to me in a May 2009 interview, “I may really not write another book,” he said. “I don’t know. It wouldn’t surprise me if I’m done writing novels. I may have tapped out that well.”

So, the fact that 2011 is shaping up to be the biggest year for Block fans ever makes that bait-and-switch statement worth the pain. Not only will Block return with a new novel in the new year — a novel featuring his best character, Matthew Scudder, nonetheless — but he also has more fully opened the door of the vault that long protected his ancient, pseudonymous work. I have a dog-eared list I compiled pre-Internet that lists every book of his I knew, with a tick mark next to each I’ve read. So far, 60 of them are marked, but a handful of those early book remain elusive.

No more. As Block mentioned earlier this year, he has inked a deal with Open Road Media to sell eBooks of many of his titles. The first batch of 37 has been revealed, and it includes 10 books that I either don’t own or haven’t read. All are under the category of “erotica,” which, while not my favorite of his endeavors, still constitute a remarkable opportunity for an unrepentant completist who was previously forced to scan eBay and similar outlets for expensive, yellowed copies.

So, the question now is, what eBook reader do I finally break down and buy so I can read all of these books?

While I ponder that (and feel free to weigh in with a comment if you have advice), here’s a video from the Open Road folks that features a nice, short interview with Block.

While my bank account doesn’t always agree, I must say it is a great thing to have someone at the local book store who knows my tastes. You walk in, converse for a moment as you are led around the store, and leave with your wallet lighter and your bookshelves bowed.

My last trip to Prairie Lights in Iowa City found Paul excited about several books, including Ghosted, the debut novel from Canadian journalist Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall. He pulled the book from crime and mystery section (always a good sign) and told me as he pressed it into my hands that he thought I’d like it.

I had (as always) a formidable reading stack, but time was of the essence. If I enjoyed the book as much as Paul expected, I had agreed to host Bishop-Stall’s reading two weeks hence. So, I added it to the stack of books I started that night. While I made good headway into all four, Ghosted is the one that I reached for most often, and the one I finished first. The first 70 pages sucked me in, and despite twists and turns that took it in several unexpected directions, I found it difficult to put down.

The book tells of Mason Dubisee, a 30-year-old drug-addled drifter who may list “writer” on his tax forms, but who hasn’t written anything more than cryptic notes for an eternally gestating novel in quite some time. He is starting pretty close to the bottom, but in the grand tradition of noir protagonists, there is nowhere for Mason to go but down. It is while working as a vendor at a “Godfather”-inspired hotdog stand that he hits upon a job that will help deliver him to the bottom: ghostwriter for suicide notes.

Along the way he meets a handful of people looking to end their lives, people who, in truth, are in a better place than Mason. Dealing with people in such dire straits has the expected effect, dragging Mason into untenable situations driven by drugs, drink, gambling and the breaking of a few laws.

About halfway through, the book takes a darker turn in to thriller territory, as Mason comes face-to-face with pure evil at the same time he finally finds something he doesn’t want to lose: the love of a good – though paralyzed and drug-addicted – woman.

All of this would be unbearable were it not for Bishop-Stall’s ability to leaven the darkness with sharp wit and gonzo action. The author knows from grit – his previous book, Down to This, chronicles a year living in Toronto’s Tent City – but he uses it just as often in the service of wackiness as he does chronicling despair.

Bishop-Stall is on tour in support of Ghosted right now, and any fans of crime fiction or noir would be doing themselves a service by checking him out. He just lost his U.S. publisher (Soft Skull put the book out here this fall), so he can use a little help getting the word out about this fascinating book.

Nov. 11, 7 p.m. at The Book Cellar, 4736-38 N. Lincoln Ave., Chicago.

Nov. 15, 7 p.m.  at Prairie Lights Books, 15 S. Dubuque St., Iowa City

Nov. 18, 7:30 p.m. at The Booksmith, 1644 Haight St., San Francisco

Nov. 22, 7:30 p.m. at Powell’s Books, 3723 SE Hawthorne Blvd, Portland, Ore.

TIRBD: Did the idea for Ghosted evolve out of the work you did for Down to This?

SBS: I would say, not so much. There are some similar themes of addiction and desperation. And there was one suicide in Tent City that affected me a fair bit, but that year was not consciously present in my mind as I was writing Ghosted. The only section that is very much informed by my time in Tent City is the passage on page 272 about “the war being with them.”

What was the first element to the story when you conceived it, and did that lead you in the direction the book eventually took?

All I had at the start was the premise: a man who ghostwrites suicide letters for other people. By necessity I knew it would have to be dark and hopefully darkly humorous, but I had no elements of character or narrative, at the outset.

In some ways this feels like two books, with a lighter tone at the beginning and a much darker one in the latter half. Was that a conscious shift, or just something dictated by the story’s progression?

It was not so much a conscious shift, more one dictated by the story arc, which I then embraced wholly. To me it is the movement of most things in life, from absurd to scary. And I also know they’re the two hardest things to do as a writer: to be genuinely funny and genuinely scary, so I tried to be one, and then the other, and hopefully sometimes a bit of both.

There is an interesting bit of relativism at work in the story, with the people Mason helps often seeming more with it than he is. Was that a commentary, intentional or otherwise, on our self-help, self-medicated culture?

I dunno, but it sounds good when you say it.

How did you bring your work as a journalist to this project? Was it difficult to write fiction where you had written non-fiction for so long?

Most of my journalism has been intensely immersive, experiential, whatever you want to call it. And in some ways I was experiencing some of what Mason experiences in the story – we have similarities, he and I, so there is that parallel. But really, writing non-fiction is a much different animal for me. It is much easier, because there are fewer choices to make. With writing fiction, I find it is very easy to become paralyzed by the overwhelming abundance of possibility – the fact that anything can happen at any moment. You are constantly having to limit yourself, which is something I’m not very good at.

Writing is a big part of the story, obviously. Did Mason’s notes about the book he was writing evolve out of your own about this book? Did Mason’s troubles mirror your own?

I guess so. In general, Mason is born out of my greatest faults, inabilities. My great hope is that I deal with my problems, both in writing and in life, better than he does.