Note: To read an interview with Lawrence Block about his first original book for Hard Case Crime, Getting Off, visit our sister site, GriftMagazine.com.

For those of us who have become rabid fans of Hard Case Crime books, the past year has been a long one. The series left its previous home at Dorchester in 2010, and has not re-emerged until this week, when it returns with three titles under the Titan Books umbrella.

Hard Case Crime is the brainchild of Charles Ardai, a top-notch writer, early Internet business guru and all around nice guy. Undeterred when circumstances led the line to pause publication, he soldiered on and has persevered. Now, the imprint seems stronger than ever, debuting with three great titles, with a fourth on the way next month.

First up is the line’s first hardcover book, Getting Off, “a novel of sex & violence” penned by Lawrence Block writing as Jill Emerson. It is joined by the final two titles announced by Hard Case while it was still with Dorchester, Max Allan Collins’ Quarry’s Ex and Christa Faust’s Choke Hold. They will be followed by Collins’ work on the latest Mickey Spillane novel (he finishes the late poet of pulp’s unfinished manuscripts), Consummata.

Ardai is a frequent guest here at TIRBD, and he consented to answer a few more questions about the re-launch and what is in store.

TIRBD: Supposing that the silver lining of this whole shift for Hard Case Crime was the chance to start over, are you doing anything differently this time around?

CA: Well, we’re publishing in different formats – hardcover and trade paperback – and our first four books are all new titles, rather than a mix of new books and reprints of obscure old stuff. But we will still be doing some reprints (for instance, Robert Silverberg’s Blood on the Mink next year) and our backlist is still in mass market format, so it’s not like we’ve abandoned our old approaches entirely.

The books are trade paper size as opposed to mass market, but you have kept all of the other design elements. Were you sad to see that connection with the pulps of old go?

Well, as I say, the backlist is still in mass market, so it’s not as though we’ve left the format behind entirely. And we might reprint some of the new titles in mass market at some point if there’s demand for it. There’s part of me that does miss the stylistic purity of working exclusively in the classic mass market format, just because doing so would be truest to the look and feel of the pulp-era paperbacks we’re emulating, but on the other hand, it’s not as though we were really pure to begin with. Old paperbacks weren’t 4x7” the way modern paperbacks are; they didn’t have modern glossy covers; the edges of the pages were often tipped in colored ink, which can’t be done anymore; the cover price was 25 cents rather than eight dollars…. Really, our mass markets were a good deal different from the older model, which makes me feel a little less bad about making further changes now.

The line has become more high-profile on this go-round, with a hardback from the resurgent Lawrence Block re-starting things. Do you worry about maintaining the edgy reputation of HCC given this higher profile?

I don’t think any company that publishes a book like Getting Off, with two completely naked women on the front cover and a sex scene in every chapter, needs to worry about not being edgy enough.

Might this help you to land anyone on your wish list? The higher profile certainly couldn’t hurt if you have more well-known authors in your sights.

It certainly never hurts to have a higher profile – though of course we were lucky enough to get Stephen King to write a book for us when our profile was low, so who knows. I think either a high or a low profile can work for you, if your line is exciting enough to the people you want to reach out to. We still don’t have much money in the bank and can’t compete with the big houses by offering big advances, so I’m sure there are many authors we’d love to work with who simply won’t be interested. But hopefully at least some will be.

Given the line’s title, it’s certainly OK that the books have been almost exclusively hard-boiled crime fiction. But you have ventured off that path, such as with Roger Zelazny’s The Dead Man’s Brother. Any thoughts to expanding the definition of a Hard Case Crime book, or is there too much within in that genre that you want to put out to allow straying?

The definition we’ve been working with is actually fairly broad already, encompassing everything from hardboiled comedy to searing drama, from private eye stories to crime stories with no detective in sight, from first-person narration to sprawling multiple-viewpoint novels, from intimate and disturbing psychological terror to popcorn entertainment of the action-adventure sort…in short any type of story where crime is central and the writing is hardboiled. We haven’t branched out into the fantastic or supernatural, and I think we still won’t, but beyond that, basically all other types of crime story are fair game.

Speaking of other genres, what is up these days with Gabriel Hunt?

We originally signed a deal with Dorchester Publishing to do six Hunt novels and we’ve done six. (The sixth, Hunt Through Napoleon’s Web, just came out last month.) There are no plans currently to do more, though if readers wanted more, they should let us know, since that makes it more likely. I don’t think it’s likely that we’ll do another spurt like first batch – six books written in 18 months! – but I could see doing one or two a year as long as people were enjoying them.

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.

Today my story “238″ was published on the great crime fiction site A Twist of Noir. The story has been kicking around for a while, and I was glad that Chris Grant at ATON was excited about it. Some other editors have praised it, but (perhaps wisely) chose not to publish anything with a hint of politics to it. I don’t have to administrate their comments sections, so I certainly won’t pass judgment. Please stop by ATON and read the story, and stick around for a while when you’re done. Just last week Chris published hard-hitting new stories from Hilary Davidson, Frank Bill and others. I’m happy to be in their company.

This kicks off what is going to be a pretty great latter half of the year for me publication-wise. I have stories coming in the print pubs Needle and Alec Cizak’s new Pulp Modern, and online at All Due Respect and Beat to a Pulp over the next six months. Add to that a couple of stories published earlier this year, my first published poems and my work as editor of and contributor to the forthcoming Grimm Tales anthology of fairy tale-based crime fiction (based on my contest earlier this year), and 2011 is shaping up to be a watershed year for my writing.

Now if I can keep plugging away on my now half-finished novel and get it done by the end of the year — and not allow the myriad other ideas I’m constantly scribbling away at to derail me — I’ll be set up nicely for an even better 2012.

I have been meaning to do a wrap-up of some recent ebook short story collections, but have postponed a couple of times because I keep coming across new titles. With most of the denting the pocketbook at a very reasonable 99 cents, it’s hard to say no.

With a handful of recent titles under my belt, however, I thought I would take a breather and share some thoughts about them.

First up is The Adventures of Cash Laramie and Gideon Miles by Edward A. Grainger. Everyone by now knows that Grainger is really crime writer/editor David Cranmer. I came to know of Cranmer and his work through his site, Beat to a Pulp, which is my favorite stop for crime fiction on the web. I’ll admit I was wary of his collection because these are Westerns. I had it in my head that I didn’t like them very much.

Well, my head was wrong. I do like Westerns, at least those written by Grainger/Cranmer. It’s often said with some degree of accuracy that Westerns are simply crime stories set in the West. That is typically the case here. It might take a bit of authorly sleight-of-hand, but Cranmer could recast the essential stories upon which these tale are based. But it’s better that he didn’t, for his eye for detail and vivid descriptions prove that this is clearly a strength.

The core of these stories are the characters. There’s Laramie, a Wyoming marshall who is part Native American; and Miles, a black marshall at a time when that is as difficult as it sounds. Cranmer is able to deal with issues of race, class, poverty and even children’s rights with compassion that in no way blunts these rough ‘n ready yarns. Cranmer is working on more Laramie stories, and I’ll be waiting.

Next is Collateral Damage, the second collection from the folks who blog at Do Some Damage. The first collection centered around airports; this one tackles Father’s Day. There is some powerful work here, which is no surprise given the caliber of talent behind it.

Joelle Charbonneau starts things off with a bang with “Reunion,” a story about a woman returning home to face her abusive mother. Things take an unexpected turn that make this the perfect Father’s Day story… for those of us with twisted minds. Jay Stringer’s “Father’s Day,” which looks at how Gypsys are tolerated (or not, as the case seems to be) by neighbors, has depth that truly resonates.  Dave White’s “Mr. Adler and the Missing Comic Book,” with its “Godfather” pastiche, offers a bit of humor in an otherwise uncompromisingly dark collection. Other contributors are Russel D. McLean, Sandra Ruttan, Steve Weddle, Scott D. Parker and John McFetridge.

The debut publication from Snubnose Press (brought to you from the folks at Spinetingler magazine) is the very impressive Speedloader. Like the Collateral Damage collection, it gathers stories from a variety of writers. Here, however, there is no overarching theme. Unless you count excellence. Nigel Bird’s “You Dirty Rat,” which offers a tale from the World War I trenches in the Battle of Verdun, kicks things off. I had the pleasure of reading an early draft of this one, and it was already good. Here, it’s great, a straight-up tale of revenge. W. D. County’s “Plastic Soldiers” is earning the most ink, and rightly so. It tells of boys who take on a horror almost beyond words, and despite the sorrowful events, County has deftly created an ultimately uplifting tale.  Strong stories by Matthew C. Funk, Nik Korpon, Richard Thomas and Jonathan Woods round out the collection.

Last up is the noir issue of Black Heart Magazine. This one has the most content from the largest number of authors, and is the most up in the air in terms of finding something you’ll like. The premise was this: Submit something of fewer than 800 words, keeping in mind the roots of classic noir. There is also some poetry sprinkled throughout. Writer Jimmy Callaway selected the pieces.  The results are lean mostly toward the good-to-great end of the spectrum. There are some pure ’40s and ’50s noir takes here, as well as some updates on the theme. And the great thing is, with 25 pieces this short, if something’s not working for you, you just move right along.

These four collections are just the tip of what is on offer in crime fiction ebooks, proving that there is a lot of quality to be found in the world of ones and zeros. Would I rather have read these on paper? Sure. Would that be possible? Probably not, and not for 99 cents (or $2.99 in the case of the Black Heart collection).

If you’re looking for something quick, cheap and compelling to read, you can’t go wrong with any of these titles.

I don’t usually draw attention to things on other blogs, figuring the rest of the web will take care of that while I cobble together my occasional (and increasingly rare) missives about whatever is interesting me at the moment. But a post (and the term does his effort a disservice) at Ethan Iverson’s blog Do the Math is worth noting.

Iverson is the pianist for the modern jazz trio the Bad Plus. As if that’s not enough talent for one man, he is also a very sharp observer of and commenter on mystery and crime fiction . He was granted an audience with Lawrence Block recently, and, as he writes, “He’s been interviewed so much:  what new questions could I possibly ask him?”

The answer? A “blindfold test.” Anyone who has read a jazz magazine is familiar with the concept. There, a musician is played songs by other artists and is asked to comment. The twist is that the person in the hot seat is given no information about the work, so any preconceived notions are lessened. In addition, it is always interesting to read about musicians who are so well-versed in the work of their peers that they can discern within a few notes the work of another.

For this feature, Iverson photocopied the first few pages of a dozen mystery and crime fiction novels, blacked out the titles and authors, and asked Block to read and comment. In some cases, he knows the work and offers interesting anecdotes. In others, he is stumped, but, once the creator is revealed, has fascinating things to say about the work or the author.

As a long-time fan of Block, I have read dozens and dozens of interviews (and have conducted a few of my own), so I must admit that I have skimmed some of the coverage that has been afforded his wonderful return with A Drop of the Hard Stuff.

For me, it is most interesting to see how the Block of today is different from the Block of old. In 2007, he told me there was one more out-of-print book coming from Hard Case Crime (A Diet of Treacle), but, “I don’t think there are any others I’d be happy to see reprinted, but greed does have a way of triumphing over principles, so we’ll have to see.”

Greed won, of course, as the then-still novel idea of publishing books exclusively in ebook form allowed Block to bring a couple dozen old book back into the marketplace.

Such analysis doesn’t necessarily add anything new, however. Iverson’s work, in contrast, does. I won’t spoil things and reveal the books or authors that he puts in front of Block, but suffice to say it sparks some very interesting conversation. If you want to take the blindfold test yourself, go here before you read the interview.

Here ’tis, the latest stop on the So Dark for April blog tour in support of the fourth issue of The Lineup, a collection of “poems on crime.”  The collection is edited by  Gerald So with Reed Farrel Coleman, Sarah Cortez and R. Narvaez, and features poems by Ken Bruen, Michael Casey, Reed Farrel Coleman, David Corbett, Mary Agnes Dalrymple, Mary Christine Delea, Jeanne Dickey, H. Palmer Hall, Paul Hostovsky, David Jordan, Laura LeHew, Thomas Michael McDade, Peter Meinke, Keith Rawson, Chad Rohrbacher, Stephen Jay Schwartz, Nancy Scott, Kieran Shea, J.D. Smith, J.J. Steinfeld, John Stickney, Caitlin Elizabeth Thomson, Randall Watson, Charles Harper Webb, Steve Weddle, Germaine Welch.

Want to know why I’m writing about The Lineup instead of appearing in The Lineup? Reed Farrel Coleman hits it on the head in his introduction to the great new fourth issue of the collection, subtitled, as always “Poems on Crime”: “You cannot read what follows and be left untouched or uninformed by how this group of poets has chosen to walk the mean streets and look around the dark corners so that the rest of us might understand.”

Oh, sure, in my burgeoning little “career” as a crime fiction writer, I have assayed those “mean streets,” purpled some prose over those “dark corners.” I might even have done so with what some would call a sharp turn of phrase. As I perused this new issue of The Lineup, almost embarrassed that I had bothered to send in my own tepid verse for consideration, I tried to discern what it was exactly that set this work apart from my own. My problem, as you’ll soon figure out if you haven’t already, is that I seem to need several words to get my point across. What the best poetry does is to slay you with a line, a word, a syllable. The best selections in this issue, as in the previous three, offer a gutpunch of realization in a moment captured.

Like Coleman’s “Slider, Part 7,” where, with the six words “the dirt/ more bullets/ more bodies,” he succinctly sums up the devastation of war atrocities.

Like Keith Rawson’s “A Story to Tell Our Daughter,” where he essentially tells that story in three lines: “She kept her daddy’s revolver cocked/ in between her thighs as she guided/ my right hand to her distended belly.”

Like Steve Weddle, who, in his poem “The Balance Lost,” offers a description – “Blood spreads, pools, shimmers,/ Like taillights in the rain” – that you might find in any number of crime fiction stories, but which here is the story, the culmination of a powerful clutch of lines that set the scene.

Like Ken Bruen, who… well, come on, this is Ken Bruen we’re talking about. Is there a writer with more references to “poetic” writing in his press clippings than Bruen who doesn’t have a published collection to his name? Everything he writes feels like poetry, because his prose is spare, razor sharp. Not a word is wasted, entire events are rendered in a line or two. It’s an oft-copied style, but one that, without the power of his words behind it

simply
rings
false.

His poem here, “Funeral: Of the Wino,” was drawn from The Hackman Blues, a poem that it both of a piece with the book and able to stand alone. It is among several poems that have appeared in his early fiction. If there’s any doubt that the man knows poetry as well as poetic prose, have a look.

Seeking wisdom, I turned to the man himself, who was kind enough to share his trademark brief responses to my wordier questions. Look no further than that ratio of question length to answer length to understand why Bruen is in the book, and I’m just writing about it.

TIRBD: Your prose already is very poetic. When you’re writing, do you made a conscious choice about whether something is poetry or prose, or do you follow your muse and then sort it out later?

KB: Write it as I sense it, then hope like hell I can make it sing.

What can poetry do that prose can’t, and vice versa?

KB: Truly move the stone heart

You sprinkled your early novels with poems, but told Ray Banks in an interview that a collection of your poetry will never appear. Why?

KB: Too many Irish poets. Did a pamphlet with Reed, Pete Speigelman for Bouchercon in Madison and loved doing it.

What are your thoughts about a collection of poetry on crime?

KB: Brilliant idea. Wish to fook I’d thought of it.

What poets do you admire and why? (Ed note: I’d like to think Ken was talking about poetic in the larger sense with this response, which lists blogs and novelists instead of poets).

Yours
Jen’s Book Thoughts
Murderati
The Rap Sheet
Crime Always Pays
Gerard So
Bill Crider
Ali Karim
Jason Starr new one

Because they are like a jolt to the soul, love ‘em.

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.

Sign up for Parks’ newsletter.
Follow Parks on Twitter.
Become a fan on Facebook.

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 first got to know Craig McDonald and his work through his first book, the interview collection Art in the Blood. As a reader of crime fiction, I found it to be a goldmine. It was full of interviews with some of my favorite writers in the genre. And the term “interview” doesn’t really do these justice, not when a handful of questions e-mailed back and forth like, say, this one, can qualify. These were insightful, in-depth conversations that likely taught their subjects as much as the eventual readers.

When I learned that McDonald was going to publish his first novel, 2007′s Head Games, I knew it would be worth investigating. Now, I’ll admit, while I was sure someone with McDonald’s depth and breadth of knowledge about crime fiction, and demonstrated way with words would mean he could write a decent book, I did worry that it would be like reading a term paper written by someone unwilling to leave a shred of research in his notebook. I shouldn’t have worried. Yes, his books are full of historical details, but those details are woven seamlessly into very crafty, intricate plots in such a way that the truth and the fiction blend into something that always places the story at the fore. McDonald’s novels are enriched by his knowledge and research, never burdened.

Which brings me to his fourth novel in as many years, the fantastic One True Sentence. It again follows Hector Lassiter, McDonald’s rakish pulp writer, and his friend, the very real Ernest Hemingway, as they work to figure out who is killing off the small literary magazine editors in 1924 Paris. Unlike earlier books that followed these two — Toros and Torsos and Print the Legend — here the two writers are much lesser known, their careers more promise than production. It is interesting to see these two in such a formative state (and yes, it feels like they are equals, in writing and in terms of character; McDonald’s real gift, on full display here, is in rendering his fictional characters in realistic fashion and the real people as believable characters within the story who happen to share the name, traits and accomplishments of those upon which they are based).

I won’t share more of the plot than this, because it is so intricate and captivating that readers deserve to discover it for themselves. Suffice to say that McDonald’s mix of characters both real (Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas and others) and fictional (the mystery novelist Brinke Devlin, Hector’s love interest and perhaps McDonald’s most fully realized character beyond his main protagonist) come alive in this altogether satisfying novel.

The bad news is that we’ll have a year’s wait to get the next of his books, which will be the fifth of the seven total Lassiter books. The good news is that we have three more coming.

This is McDonald’s record-setting fifth Monday Interview, and as always, he is gracious, candid and enlightening.

To read about McDonald’s first author interview collection, Art in the Blood, click here.
To read about McDonald’s first novel, Head Games, click here.
To read about McDonald’s second author interview collection, Rogue Males, click here.
To read about McDonald’s third novel, Print the Legend, click here.

TIRBD: I know you have all of the Lassiter books written. As they are published and met with reader reactions and critical analysis, have you been tempted to go back and rework anything in the yet-to-be-published novels?

CM: In theory, that’s the dangerous thing about having all the unpublished books sitting here on my iMac: the prospect of endless tinkering. But, really, no, I don’t do much of that at all. I read all the reviews I’m made aware of and take what I can from them. Sometimes they result in a small tweak here or there. But at this point, the series is so tightly woven, that I resist big changes. It would create an ugly domino effect.

The other thing is, because the novels have jumped around in time and Hector’s later years were explored more fully in the first few novels, there is now a timeline and biographical record in place for the man you simply can’t screw with. Each editor, in theory, has a chance to put a stamp on each new book, but to date, Print the Legend was the only one of the Lassiters that changed in any significant way in editing.

This is the last Hemingway appearance in the books, correct? What has his presence meant for these stories, and what will his absence mean for the rest?

There are those who began to theorize this was actually a clandestine series about Hemingway, so that’s why, at the very opening of OTS, I make it clear it’s Hem’s swansong. What I was really going after with Hem’s presence in the series was a portrait of a writer who came up through all the phases and stages of 20th Century fiction — the ‘isms’ movements like modernism, etc. — and a look at how masculinity plays into that century and in art. Hemingway had to be at once a focal point and a counterbalance for Lassiter’s own brand of machismo.

But now, having more or less charted the length and breadth of the Hector/Hemingway arc, it’s time to broaden the scope and let Hector carry us through the middle- to late-20^th Century after Hem had pretty much abandoned the field. Hem’ll have a tiny cameo in the next-to-the-last-book, but that’s about it. There are those who thought Orson Welles was going to be a constant in the series, too, but he had his role and Orson, too, ran his course. The novel after One True Sentence has no historical figures whatever. The three novels left after that one will bring in some real people, but nobody, I think, anyone would expect.

You have had a rather torrid publication schedule over the past four years. Does it feel like you’re always either promoting a current book or ramping up to promote the next?

In a word, yes. My one great advantage has been the fact I have a tremendous backlog of material and, in theory, could go two-books-a-year for several years and never pick up a pen. That’s a very good thing given the amount of web promotion required now. Honestly, I feel this year like I’m one of a very few still going out on the road with a traditional tour this season. At the same time, I’m putting down thousands of words for guest blogs and essays, and I try, for all kinds of reasons, to really write those pieces and say something in them. I take everything I put my name to very seriously in that sense, and it’s a huge time-eater.

I assume that you have been writing in the four years since the Lassiter series was first published, and you have three more to go. That means it may be 2015 or so before we get the chance to read what you’re working on now.  Is that frustrating?

If the publishing world stayed the way it has always been, you’d probably be right about that time frame. But in this age of disruptive innovation — i.e., the eBook — it’s tough to say what next week will bring. I retained my digital rights for all my Bleak House books, and Art In the Blood. At this point, I’ve put out my own eBook of Toros & Torsos, and not done a lot of promotion of that fact, but I can honestly say, in a royalty sense, I’m making more from that version of T&T than the printed version to date here in the States. (France is a much different beast, where significant advertising is done on my behalf and I’m actually printed in mass-market paperback). I may yet put something out as an eBook exclusive just to see what happens. Head Games will go to eBook format in early March.

That said, you will also be seeing a standalone novel later this year from Tyrus. It’s the novel I wrote between Head Games and Toros & Torsos, and I approached Tyrus with it primarily because I wanted to do something with Ben LeRoy and Alison Janssen again. It’s a brave new publishing world and terrain and I’m aiming to explore it in a lot of different ways, tactically speaking.

You have shifted the order of the Lassiter books a bit, having originally intended One True Sentence to follow Toros & Torsos, and seemed to expect Roll the Credits, which is thus far unpublished, to follow Print the Legend. Do the books mean something different taken in this order rather than another?  Have there been drawbacks or benefits to changing their order?

That’s more tactics. The order changes are a function of various editors coming and going and my own reading of the zeitgeist. I definitely have a sequence in mind for publication order in the series – one with an eye toward evolving reader sentiment toward the Lassiter character – and the publication of One True Sentence as number four puts the series back on its intended path.

Have you had any nibbles from Hollywood? One True Sentence in particular has a story that is compact and action-oriented enough to seem perfect for the big screen.

Many nibbles for the first novel, including one from the actor I once thought would be perfect to play Hector circa Head Games. It’s heady when they come courting, but getting asked out? Elusive. So far, no inquiries about OTS, despite the fact that it is the most traditionally structured of all the novels.

You talk a lot about musicians like Tom Russell. Do you listen to music as you write? If not, do you find inspiration in music that ultimately results in something creative on your part?

Nearly always, I write to music and lyrics and mood help set pace, and, once in a while, plot points. Head Games was dedicated to Russell because his music was playing throughout the writing of the novel and, in fact, his cover of Jim Ringer’s “Tramps & Hawkers” inspired the Lassiter character in the most primal form. Lassiter 2, Toros & Torsos, was written to standards and vintage torch songs, but probably the most played-song in that novel’s writing was Bryan Ferry’s cover of “Where or When.”

One True Sentence was directly affected by — and written to — an album called Thumbelina’s One Night Stand by Melissa McClelland. When you detect the strand of self-destruction that runs through Melissa’s album, and you read OTS, I think you quickly see the nexus.