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.

Want proof that Max Allan Collins works quickly? When I first conceived of doing this interview, it was to center around the publication of his latest collaboration with the late Mickey Spillane, The Big Bang. But, but the time I finished reading that book and prepped some questions, along came an advance copy of his latest Quarry novel in the mail from the kind folks at Hard Case Crime, Quarry’s Ex. Then, I learned that he would appear at the Iowa City Book Festival to screen the film version of his first original (as in non-reprint) HCC Quarry book, The Last Quarry, dubbed “The Last Lullaby” for the big screen. I decided that I had better get this taken care of rather than wait for a lull that likely would never come.

Yes, Collins is fast, and prolific. That wouldn’t matter if he also wasn’t good. These books are eminently readable. I was just reading one of the Chicago University Press reissues of Donald Westlake’s Richard Stark novels about Parker, and Luc Sante in his introduction to one volume wrote that you could read the entire series and never need a bookmark. That’s an apt description of a lot of Collins’ work as well. The Quarry books — and his collaborations with Spillane — are pageturners of the highest order. You want to know what happens next, and you don’t want to wait until tomorrow to find out.

As is often the case with those profiled on this blog, I came late to Collins, taking him for granted (much as I did his close friend, Ed Gorman) because of a sort of reverse local pride: He’s from just up the road in Muscatine, so how good could he be? Once I set aside that backasswards Iowa humble act and picked up one of his books, I was hooked. That was several years ago, and now, as with Gorman, the saving grace is that I have a few dozen books to catch up on.

For those new to Collins, they could do worse than to start with any of the works mentioned above. Quarry’s Ex is out in September, and The Big Bang is out now. The latter is a bracing read, blending Spillane’s proto-tough guy Mike Hammer with a churning plot and a bit of Collins’ humor thrown in to leaven things. It deals with the 60s drug trade and ends with, well, a big bang.

TIRBD: Big Bang was your third collaboration with Mickey Spillane to be published. In what order does it fall in terms of your actual work on the book projects? Does this get any easier, or is the difficulty of each specific to the state in which Spillane left the manuscript?

MAC: This has never been anything but sheer pleasure for me.  The three novels so far — Dead Street, The Goliath Bone and The Big Bang — have been published in the order I’ve completed them.  Kiss Her Goodbye is finished and will be published next year (Mike Hammer in the ’70s).  In some ways Dead Street was the trickiest, because Mickey had a fairly polished manuscript ready for everything but the last three chapters. So, all I did to the front end of the book was a fairly aggressive line edit, because there were some inconsistencies and plot holes that needed tending. Then I had to write three chapters on my own, with just a few notes from Mickey to guide me, and hope the blend was satisfying and not obvious to the reader.

The three Hammer novels I’ve done  were in various stages of completion. Goliath Bone was unusual because it was a rough draft of everything but the last couple chapters, and there was a rough draft of the concluding theater scene, as well. But Mickey knew he was in ill health, and worked quickly, and the manuscript was accordingly quite short — maybe 40,000 words. So, I wound up polishing and expanding the early chapters, which made the novel a true collaboration. I love working “inside” Mickey’s work, because I can really get into the groove.

The Big Bang had four or five very long chapters completed, and I expanded these and wove new material in and around Mickey’s so that those chapters lasted deep into the book, probably around chapter eight. That, too, made for a true collaboration, plus I had extensive notes from Mickey on where he was headed, including the shocking ending. The forthcoming Kiss Her Goodbye was unique in that Mickey had two substantial takes on the story, each going in a different direction — the two partial manuscripts had some repetition and some new material, and I wove these into a whole that, again, meant Mickey material went deep into the novel. Again, I had notes to guide me. What made this really different was that I used both directions Mickey travelled — one was a mob plot, the other a diamond robbery plot — and wove them into one story, so that I could maximize Mickey’s writing.

The end result in all cases (except Dead Street, which is more purely Mickey) is a genuine 50/50 collaboration.

You have mentioned that the sales of Big Bang will have a big impact on the future of other Spillane/Collins titles. Is it surprising to you that this is even an issue? Are there hard numbers the sales needs to hit? What happens to those books if you don’t reach that?

I don’t know what sales figures we have to hit, but I am astonished that we haven’t had more attention in the media, although Big Bang has received lots of Internet buzz.  I know Goliath Bone was hurt by when it was published — right in the midst of the financial meltdown, when all book sales were off — and I haven’t received any hard data on Big Bang sales. Goliath Bone comes out in mass market paperback next month, and that should be a boost.

There are three unfinished but substantial Hammer novel manuscripts left — Complex 90; Lady, Go Die! and King of the Weeds — and I feel confident someone will want them. There are around four more shorter manuscripts that can become novels if readers are responsive, and I’ve been turning even shorter fragments into short stories — two Hammer shorts have sold to the Strand.

By now everyone knows how prolific you are, but I wonder how you juggle all of your various projects. Are you able to work on many things at once, or do you finish something before you move on to the next? If it’s the former, is it a challenge to move from one voice/tone to another and to keep straight various plot points and such?

I work on one project at a time, with the exception of certain comics projects — monthly comic books (haven’t done one of those in ages), or a graphic novel, as if the case with the in-progress Return to Perdition that DC Vertigo is doing with Terry Beatty drawing. I sort of wait for Terry to need pages, then interrupt whatever novel I’m on and do a batch of ‘em for him.

I find moving from voice to voice, and sometimes medium to medium, keeps me fresh.

You seem to have become the house author at Hard Case Crime (you overtake Lawrence Block with Quarry’s Ex, your sixth; seventh if you include Dead Street with Spillane). What is it about that imprint and working with Charles Ardai that is so appealing?

Charles is a tough editor and he and I have had many, many fights over the books, so anyone who thinks I’m the Hard Case darling doesn’t know the real skinny. But I love being able to do short, tough novels of the sort I did at the start of my career.  I think why I’ve become a staple of the line is that I am the only author of the initial group of established mystery names that Charles intended to reprint who was also willing to do new work.

To what do you attribute the resurgent interest in a series that had been on the shelf for nearly 20 years?

Quarry, in my biased opinion, ranks with Heller as my most innovative work. Enough readers appreciated that to have a cult following group up around the novels. I sort of primed the pump by doing another Quarry novel in the ’80s and a few short stories in the ’90s.  The character was perfect for Hard Case and made a real connection. Also, we had the short film “A Matter of Principal” and the feature version that followed, “The Last Lullaby,” with me contributing as a screenwriter to both, and that attracted attention, too. I think these are very entertaining books — funny, sexy, violent. I don’t know what more a noir fan could want.

With all of that in the works, you also have your first new Nate Heller book in the pipeline after nearly a decade. What triggers your own renewed interest in characters that leads you to dust them off and check in?

Quarry came back chiefly because of the short film that led to a feature-length screenplay. The Last Quarry is a novelization of my first draft of that screenplay, and simply represents me recycling, frankly. Heller is more an obsession — I consider the Heller saga to be my main contribution to the genre, and potentially my legacy. I stepped away from it unwilling in 2001, and am returning to it eagerly now.

The 10 years away from Heller were productive, though, and probably good for me — the historical “disaster” series, the Perdition prose sequels, Black Hats, Red Sky in Morning, the latter two projects I had long wanted to do but Heller got in the way. Doing all those different lead characters in various time frames in the half dozen disaster books was extremely good experience for me — never too late to grow as a writer.

Despite your prolific nature, you don’t seem to write short fiction. You are a student of the form, however, if your introduction to the Thuglit anthology Blood, Guts & Whiskey is any indication. What do you think of the proliferation of web sites and magazines over the past few years that feature short crime fiction, and why don’t you write more of it?

I am not a short story specialist, but I actually have written quite a few.  I’ve even published three or four short story collections. My wife is a real expert at short stories, but she has been concentrating on novels, too. The problem is the shortage of paying markets, and I am endeavoring to make sure writing is my profession and not my hobby. But I’ve published stories in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and The Strand in recent years, and am always up for an anthology assignment. My only fiction Edgar nomination was for a short story, actually, the Ms. Tree story, “Louise.”

You have a full plate with Hellers, Quarrys, Hammers and everything else you’re doing. Is there room for new ideas to creep in, such as new protagonists or series ideas, or are you able to filter your ideas through existing outlets?

Matt Clemens and I just launched a new series at Kensington — J.C. Harrow, a sort of John Walsh type, in You Can’t Stop Me. We just delivered the second one, No One Will Hear You.  These are serial killer thrillers. Barb and I are exploring a second cozy series for the “Barbara Allan” byline — just talk so far. There’s lots of ideas to pursue — ideas are easy for me. But hope to be able to concentrate a lot of my effort and energy in a new group of Nathan Heller novels — Bye Bye, Baby, the Marilyn Monroe one, comes out next July. I’m prepping for the JFK assassination Heller novel right now — soul-crushing research on that one.

Despite the conceit that suggests otherwise, lists in magazines are not meant to be definitive. No, they are meant to spark debate, and to goose sales. So it is with the New Yorker‘s new list of what it says are the 20 top fiction writers in the U.S. under the age of 40. One could assume that a publication as esteemed as the New Yorker would put forth its list with a sense of finality; argue all you want, but these are the best. Period.

Nope. The editors admit to the futility of the exercise in the introduction: “The habit of list-making can seem arbitrary or absurd, leaving the list-makers endlessly open to second-guessing (although to encourage such second-guessing is perhaps the best reason to make lists).”

The problem is that the New Yorker didn’t even do that right. Seeing the list, no one would necessarily argue against any of their picks. That’s the problem. They’re safe. Here they are:

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, 32; Chris Adrian, 39; Daniel Alarcón, 33; David Bezmozgis, 37; Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, 38; Joshua Ferris, 35; Jonathan Safran Foer, 33; Nell Freudenberger, 35; Rivka Galchen, 34; Nicole Krauss, 35; Yiyun Li, 37; Dinaw Mengestu, 31; Philipp Meyer, 36; C. E. Morgan, 33; Téa Obreht, 24; Z Z Packer, 37; Karen Russell, 28; Salvatore Scibona, 35; Gary Shteyngart, 37; and Wells Tower, 37.

I’ve read some, have noble plans to read others. But even for those whose work I haven’t read (or even read about before now), seeing their bios and reading their excepts, I can’t make a compelling case for why they shouldn’t be there. And, if the New Yorker truly wanted to do a service with this list, there would be arguments galore.

Now, they defend themselves against such attacks by pointing out how edgy a similar 1999 list was. Hogwash. After admitting that Michael Chabon and David Foster Wallace already were stars, they suggest that they also “included writers whose breakthrough books were still ahead of them. Junot Díaz was the author of a popular story collection, “Drown,” but “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, was still eight years away. Jonathan Franzen had published two well-received novels, but “The Corrections,” his enormously successful National Book Award-winning work (which was excerpted in that issue), wasn’t published until 2001. Jhumpa Lahiri’s first book, the story collection “Interpreter of Maladies,” came out the same month as the fiction issue and went on to sell millions of copies worldwide.”

If The Corrections was excerpted, then it’s star was already on the rise, and Lahiri’s book, though it didn’t come out before the issue, was already tipped as a pick hit. Not exactly picking something out of the slush pile, here.

Now, it would be worse for the magazine to do just that, pick something from a complete unknown and herald it as the next big thing (It already did that with Freudenberger, who it conveniently includes on this list to perhaps bolster it’s “plucked from obscurity” practices back when she was made a star while sitting a couple of desks away from the fiction editor at… the New Yorker. But the magazine could have picked some under the radar people who don’t traffic in literary fiction. Where’s Duane Swierczynski? Or Joe Meno? Or Tao Lin? Each has shaken up fiction and storytelling in ways their peers on the list have not.

Don’t get me wrong; anything that raises the profile of young authors, and makes people think about/debate explore fiction should be praised. But the New Yorker had an opportunity to do something truly special here, and it squandered it with a predictable list that cements the status quo at a time when it ought to take pains to, in the very least nudge it just enough to induce mild discomfort.

For my look back on the 10th anniversary of the 1999 list, click here.

As with many people whose work wouldn’t normally pop onto my radar, I first read James Hynes as an assignment. The University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop graduate was in town to read from his latest novel, Kings of Infinite Space, so I read the book to prepare for an interview.

I was glad I did. Though I don’t usually go in for supernatural fiction, the book was a riotous satire of the working world, and a sign that I had a lot of catching up to do. It was Hynes’ fourth book, after the straightforward Wild Colonial Boy and two books dubbed “academic horror,” Publish or Perish and The Lecturer’s Tale.

Now, after a long six-year wait, comes Hynes’ latest: Next. As Hynes mentions below, there are no ghost cats or other supernatural elements like those used in other books; this is the straight-ahead story of Kevin Quinn, a 50-something academic editor from Michigan who decides to fly to Austin, Texas, to interview for a new job.

The book takes place on the day of Quinn’s trip. The airline flight sparks near-paralyzing fears about terrorism, and that is just one big notion that populates Quinn’s thoughts throughout the day — mortality and sex being the other parts of the main triumvirate.

Much of Quinn’s time is spent in pursuit of  women. The woman he sits next to on the plane reminds him of past lovers, and he stumbles into following her around Austin as the day’s blistering sun takes its toll on him. Other women cross his path, both in his mind as he reflects on his life and in person, leading to many flights of introspection.

The spectre of terrorism is never far from Quinn’s thoughts, however, as he deals with living in the post-9/11 world. What could seem mundane is rich and deep, and when this ruminative narrative leaps into action toward the end, everything that came before seems brought to bear on these few pages.

It is a masterful tale that shows Hynes need not rely on any gimmick or genre to be successful; he is a purely talented storyteller who can excel not matter the tools at his disposal.

This seems like a return to the straight-ahead storytelling of Wild Colonial Boy, eschewing the elements of science fiction and horror that have colored your other novels. Was that a conscious decision, to attempt something more straightforward, or was it a function of how the story unfolded?

A little of both, if that makes any sense. I didn’t decide to write a straight, mainstream novel and then look for an idea; rather, the idea came to me, and I realized that it didn’t require my usual genre touches–ghost cats, zombies, etc. That realization was something of a relief, because, while I’m proud of all my books (and I think all of them are fundamentally serious), I have to admit that part of me wanted to see if I could pull off a novel with no genre elements. My worst fear was that it would end up like Jerry Lewis’s infamous Holocaust movie–the clown tries to be serious, and ends up making an ass of himself. Actually, in the end, I think Next actually has more in common with my earlier books, especially the last two, than it doesn’t.

Living in Austin, did you walk where Kevin walked to see how this would work in real time? Was there any notion of balancing a need for accuracy with the desire to not offer so much specificity that it might turn off those who have never been to Austin?

I wasn’t too concerned with painting an accurate portrait of Austin. I moved some places around and made up some others, to suit the story. In early drafts of each scene, there did tend to be rather more detail than was necessary, and I pared a lot of it back while rewriting. But that’s okay, because as I used to tell my writing students, it’s easier to write too much and have to cut than to write too little and have to shoehorn more in later on.

The main problem with writing about Austin, though, was how much it changed while I was working on the book. Periodically, I’d have to go back to earlier scenes and add more skyscrapers, or cut out something that no longer existed. After a certain point, though, you resign yourself to the fact that every novel set in a real place is, in some sense, a historical novel. My long description of Kevin’s ride up South Lamar Avenue, for example, which becomes an extended metaphor for the changes he’s facing in his life, is no longer particularly accurate. What used to be a street of small auto repair shops, convenience stores, and propane dealers is now getting grown over with trendy little boutiques, fancy restaurants, and upscale condo developments. Developers have even given the South Lamar neighborhood an obnoxiously precious nickname–SoLa, like Soho.

Without giving too much away, the pace of the action shifts dramatically right at the end. Did you have that ending in mind when you started? If so, was it a challenge to keep the first section of the book grounded in Kevin’s actions knowing what was to come?

I knew two things right from the start — that I wanted to write a book about a day in a man’s life, and how the book ended. Neither aspect of the book would have worked without the other; right from the start, they felt to me like an integrated whole. So, no, the ending didn’t make writing the rest of it any more challenging than it already was.

When you began writing this in 2004, terrorism was still very much on people’s minds. It seems today that, while it is still an issue of concern, most people have taken an almost desensitized view of it (or maybe that’s just those of us here in the relative safety of the Midwest). Do you see the world in which Next was released as being fundamentally different from the one in which it was conceived?

No. I don’t think the Midwest is any more desensitized the rest of the country; rather, I think that most American probably think, subconsciously, at least, that because there hasn’t been a successful attack since 9/11, terrorism isn’t that big a threat anymore. But if you take a more global view, terrorism hasn’t stopped, it just hasn’t happened here. But it has continued to happen in Bali, Madrid, London, etc., and it happens almost on a daily basis in Iraq, a place most Americans simply don’t take note of anymore. And it’s not as if people haven’t tried to do something terrible here — it’s just that they’ve been caught before they could do it, or they’ve been incompetent, like the underwear bomber or that guy in Times Square. I’m no expert, and I hope I’m wrong, but it seems to me it’s only a matter of time before one of these jokers gets it right.
Given Kevin’s preoccupations and/or worries about sex, death, work and terror, this feels like a quintessentially American novel. Were these large themes or ideas you hoped to explore with the book, or did they naturally evolve from the telling of Kevin’s story? I guess the question is, which came first?

The story came first. I knew this was going to be a serious and fairly ambitious book when I started, but most of the ambition at the time seemed technical — how can I keep a novel about a guy wandering around a strange city interesting? — rather than thematic. I think the book certainly does address larger themes, and even capture something of the zeitgeist, but I really, truly wasn’t thinking about that stuff as I wrote; I never do. I was just trying to get Kevin from one place to another, step by step, and hoping that any matters of larger significance would simply take care of themselves. I know other writers who consciously layer thematic concerns into a story, but I’m not one of them. I just plod along and hope for the best.

Given your age, location and experience and how they relate to those of Kevin, I wonder if you came to any personal revelations while writing this book. It feels in a way like a chronicle of the onset of a mid-life crisis for Kevin. Did you exorcise your own mid-life crisis by writing this book as opposed to buying a sports car?

Well, it’s a funny thing, but when you’re a young writer, you’re often susceptible to two powerful illusions: that you can work out issues in your personal life through your writing, and that when you finally publish a book, all your problems will be solved. I’m here to tell you, boys and girls, not only are these propositions untrue, they’re laughably untrue. Luckily, at this point in my life, I already knew that, so in writing Next, even though I gave Kevin a few things from my own history and experience, I was keenly aware it was a work of fiction, and that Kevin was a fictional character whose fate I could arbitrarily shape at will. Some of Kevin’s preoccupations are mine, but most of them aren’t, so writing about him didn’t necessarily do me any good. And again, take it from me, there’s no exorcising your midlife crisis, you just ride it out, like a bad case of the flu. My own super slo-mo midlife crisis proceeds apace, and writing Next hasn’t changed it one iota.
What is the connection between Mrs. Dalloway and Next? Was it the primary model for what you were attempting to do narratively?

Dalloway absolutely was a model, especially the way Woolf hews closely to each character’s consciousness, and the way she switches from memory to the present moment and back again, sometimes in mid-sentence. That said, I didn’t study Dalloway in any rigorous way, or keep it on my desk while I wrote, or anything like that. I just read it a couple times, along with some other influential books — in particular, Updike’s Rabbit novels and Italo Svevo’s The Conscience of Zeno. And to hark back to your first question, while I did want to write a mainstream novel, I also wanted it to be comic, at least in parts, like my three previous books. So there is that difference from Dalloway, which is a vastly superior novel to mine, but, perhaps, not as funny.