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.

So this all started innocently enough. Most every day I post a “song of the day” on Blip.fm, and broadcast it to Twitter and Facebook. A couple of weeks ago, I posted a great live version of Matthew Ryan’s “Guilty,” the lead track on his first album. I wrote this:

“SOTD: Matthew Ryan – Guilty. With MR’s new album out, I went back to revisit his first. Anger w/guitars replaced by resignation and drum machines. http://blip.fm/~16kmew”

I’m friends with Ryan on Facebook, so he saw the post and responded with this:

“Surprised you hear resignation on the new album John.”

I countered with, “Ah, the perils of fitting a coherent thought into Blip.fm’s 140-character limit. The larger point was that you seem to have made the shift many so-called ‘Angry Young Men’ have, resigning yourself to the fact that things are the way they are and learning to cope with the aftermath (both personally and globally) rather than rail against it. Regardless, I love the new stuff as well as the old (though I do love it when you fire up the electric guitar).”

To Matthew’s credit, he responded, “Let’s discuss this!”

We took the conversation private, if only so that we wouldn’t be hampered by Facebook’s own limitations on length, with the idea of posting the entire conversation here. I typically conduct Q&As in lazy fashion, sending a batch of questions, getting responses and then running the results. Having already been burned by using shorthand to get a point across, I decided that something more organic and reactive was needed. Matthew agreed, and what follows is our conversation.

Before we get into it, let me thank Matthew publicly. Few artists have the guts to discuss their work so openly and candidly. The result is a conversation that I hope opens people up to what is not only one of Matthew’s best albums, but one of the best albums of the year, I Recall Standing As Though Nothing Could Fall.

TIRBD: I have come to realize that I am a music listener first, a lyrics/vocals listener a distant second. I can listen to a song for years without really paying attention to everything going on lyrically, only to be surprised when it finally registers. If something doesn’t grab me musically — a hook, a beat, a feel — it’s lost to me. I can think of one act whose lyrics alienated me after the music hooked me: Fountains of Wayne, a band I once loved, and whose music is right in my wheelhouse — well-crafted power pop with hooks galore — but whose lyrics I find too cute to the point that they’re now cloying.

So, I came to your music because of, well, the music. Your first two albums were a visceral rush; yes, the angry young man thing. I heard defiance, a simmering rage, some self-loathing. And again, this was largely divorced from the lyrics. It was the sound of the music that conveyed this, the medium as message, I suppose. Subsequent works seemed more resigned, more jaded, but also, as you have pointed out, perhaps cautiously optimistic.

Spending a lot of time with the new album on headphones, the songs have opened up lyrically for me, and what I took for resignation and frustration on the surface comes across now as a guarded sense of hope. It’s as if you are more hopeful than you think you have the right to be, and you’ve undercut yourself — consciously or not — but conveying these lyrics on a bed of melancholy only occasionally shot through with the verve that suggests conviction. There is doubt here, again more in the feel of the album than in the words.

I don’t mean to suggest that this is a failing on your part; far from it. Rather, it’s a way to make the songs more complex, more resonant. They can mean one thing today, another tomorrow. The result is probably your most finely crafted, textured album of your career.

MR: I’ve often wished I approached what I did when writing and recording in a more Amish light so to speak. Simpler. Because what I’m often trying to communicate is complex. Not that it isn’t direct, because it is. I admire what Justin Townes Earle has done. And I love what Gillian Welch does with Dave Rawlings. The Gaslight Anthem, Frightened Rabbit. These are all some fairly recent things that I like as well. And they all communicate directly from a point of view.

But I guess in my work I’m looking for our humanity in what feels like a chaos of sorts. Again, both in the intimacies of our lives and in the larger plots of social and literal upheavals. A lot of the characters I write about are both heroic and sometimes complicit in the wrong turns we take. But above all they persevere because I guess in my heart of hearts I believe that we are good engines.

The music that I’ve been laying my stories over for the last few years is intentional. And I believe I do it to symbolize the numbing beauty of the information age and how it surrounds (particularly) us in western culture. These are very new challenges to our humanity. New technologies always ease things for us, but they also confront, change and challenge us in ways we rarely expect. The explosion of media, information and speed in our culture has made for a fascinating landscape. Both dangerous and incredibly useful. But as always, we’re still human.

I guess in short, what you may have initially taken as resignation is in my mind what the act of perseverance sounds like. It’s an inch-by-inch reclamation of intimacy with the self in a blizzard.

I’m all for simple, but complexity is what keeps people coming back, be it musical, lyrical or otherwise. I love the idea of you trying to convey the “numbing beauty of the information age” in your music. That would certainly explain my takeaway of resignation.

That word, resignation, seems to be our flashpoint, the unfortunate choice when trying to sum up your recent work in a word. Are you familiar with Greg Brown? He’s an Eastern Iowan, like me, writing often about the Midwest. He is singing more directly, but gets at some of what you’re talking about. It’s less resignation than a warning: This is how it is now, and in some cases it’s exactly what you wanted. Good luck. The best is “Your Town Now” (http://youtu.be/tDLn29ByeoY).

And yes, perseverance is a much better word. It doesn’t connote giving up. Perhaps an acceptance that things are the way they are, but not assuming (or allowing) it will always be thus.

Greg Brown is one of my favorite writers. I swear I can hear shadows of his song “Brand New ’64 Dodge” in the melody of the song I keep mentioning, “This Is the Hill.” I’m not afraid to admit my influences and they range from dirty soil gravel like Mr. Brown’s and Bob Dylan’s to the ethereal beauty of Eno and The Blue Nile to the melancholy of early Sinatra and Joy Division; to the grand fists of The Clash and U2. All of it leans to define our humanity’s ability to remain a glowing hopeful heart vs. all the things that undermine and oppress. We are living in uncertain times with a confluence of technology and philosophies seemingly determined to tear us apart and isolate us. I am committed to be part of something that glues us back together and gives us maybe just a glimpse of our skin in all the flash and quickness. I believe that’s an important part of my occupation.

Much of I Recall Standing As Though Nothing Could Fall is trying to communicate with the generations younger than us, John. I wrote the songs with them in mind. Some are even talking just directly to them. I hope some of them hear it. It’s understandable that it overwhelms us at our age. Every generation is and should be challenged by the ideas, culture and dreams of the generation behind it. But today there is something more troubling going on. And I worry how young people will respond, or how they feel about what they see and experience. They’re marketed to in ways we never experienced. Or at least by the time the flood started, we we’re old enough to discern. The disinformation via outlets is constant. I’m not saying they can’t find their truths and their happiness. But it sure seems a higher wall to climb these days. All of this and I haven’t mentioned the political landscape and the friction between philosophies and the debates over global issues and climate change and water and capitalism and unions and farming and food and pollution and security and work and religion and on and on and on. Geez, most peculiar times.

This leads perfectly into a topic I’ve wanted to cover: the evolution of the sound/style of your music. You began as a pretty straightforward guitar-bass-drums guy, and then introduced more textures with subsequent albums. Did that feel like a natural evolution, using the sounds you needed to properly convey the songs the way you wanted them to sound? I wonder too if it had anything to do with moving to a smaller label and doing things more on your own. It’s easier to use a drum machine than to book studio time and line up a drummer, I would imagine.

Then, as you’ve moved more fully into your current sound, which blends folk, rock and electronics rather seamlessly, do you embrace that as a better way to communicate with the younger generation?

That’s an interesting question and I want to try and answer it as honestly as I can. I wouldn’t say it’s been a necessarily conscious decision. More like a series of trees lying over the road that lead me to take several turns to get where I was headed. And I promise you, the sound will change again. I’m still searching.

But from there to here… I guess the first thing that I noticed when touring with May Day was that the room was full of men. And at that time, they were generally older than me. It was kind of weird, ya know? I wanted to reach all people. All races, nationalities and sexes. So that kind of put me off a little. Not that I have anything against men. Just, you know, diversity is a sign of real communication.

Second, and I don’t mean this creepily, I felt like there was some sex missing in a good bit of my earlier records. Though East Autumn Grin started to rub up against something. Pun kind of intended. But that would be my one complaint about the Alt Country/Americana scene that I came up in, the music generally has no sex. I know how this sounds. But real sex operates on a very primal level. Sex is part of Rock ‘n’ Roll. It’s essential to it actually. So that led me to want to understand feel and groove a little better. I actually experimented quite a bit with that on an album that never came out between East Autumn Grin and Concussion. If that album had come out, none of what I’m doing now would be a surprise. It was very ambient and beat driven and yes, even in 2000 I had one of the songs remixed by a NYC DJ whose name escapes me. I thought the emergence of house and techno was exciting because it was all about sex and freedom. Yes, it was formulaic and they had no songs, but they presented a degree of liberty and rage that rock music wasn’t really dealing in.

God, I’m going on and on. But I also grew up loving Eno and Joy Division as much as I love Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen. So honestly, these were all elements I wanted to welcome and hopefully help to redefine what a singer/songwriter can be. Because to be blunt, I love songs but the production for a lot of singer/songwriter stuff bore me to tears. It has no cinema. The good stuff always has cinema. Whether it’s produced into to it, or it’s just there by some magical means. Nick Drake had cinema. It wasn’t insert white guy here. He was special.

The other reasons were utilitarian. Particularly after I left the majors. The budgets were such that I couldn’t fully cast my records in the way I could on A&M. And that led to just accepting at times what I felt were performances or approaches on songs that weren’t quite right. There are few things worse for a songwriter than feeling that you did a disservice to a song. It’s hard enough to get a song heard, let alone if it’s wearing a funny hat and has got a wedgie because that day in the studio was clown car day. So I concluded that it’s unfair to hold others responsible for what imagination or my mouth seems unable to communicate. They weren’t getting paid enough to be put through too many paces. So I decided I would take the responsibility on myself and do the very best I could to get the music from inside my head to some recorded medium. Lately that’s a computer and some dented mics. And it’s been a very exciting journey into the unknown for me. These albums have been real exploratory and visceral challenges. I’m just as proud of them as I am of my big budget albums, partially because I shaped them with my own hands. This process is more like painting than being in a street gang. But like I said, that’s changing again. I feel a more gang approach guitar oriented album coming very soon. The idea is exciting me again. And that’s only when you should do something creative, when it excites you.

“This Is the Hill” is obviously a very hopeful track and clearly means a lot to you. Why is it a bonus track and not on the album proper? It fits with other tracks thematically (“I Want Peace,” “I Still Believe In You”).

“This Is the Hill” was intended as a postscript to the album, almost a summation or a provocation of sorts for a solution to the themes, troubles and heartaches on I Recall Standing As Though Nothing Could Fall. This album is looking at the small in us to find the big so to speak.

My writing over the years has changed from introspection and probably a fair amount of self-obsessed to a wider screen. There are some lines in a song called “We Will Not Be Lovers” by The Waterboys that have always stuck with me, and I’m pretty sure altered how I view us, all of us.

“Now the world is full of trouble, and everyone is scared. Landlords are frowning and cupboards are bare. And people are scrambling like dogs for a share. It’s cruel and it’s hard but it’s nothing compared to what we do to each other.”

Those lines kill me. They ring truer to me now than when I first heard them. The macro is found in the micro and vice versa. “This Is the Hill” traces a similar line, it is far from resigned. In fact it’s frustrated and disgusted. Many of the songs on I Recall Standing As Though Nothing Could Fall are tricky, they look like one thing, but they’re about something else. For instance, “I Still Believe In You” could be taken about two people, maybe lovers. But, it can also be about the minutia that separates up from our dreams. YOU in that song could be the dream itself, or YOU could be all of us, and our ability to preoccupy ourselves with diversion and entertainment while on many levels checking-out on the real plots in our lives as individuals and collectively.

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.

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.

The knock against free jazz (or avant garde or creative music or any other nomenclature) is usually that the listener doesn’t “get” it. The lack of a definable rhythm or melody challenges the listener to such a degree that, rather than put in the time to find a way in, he instead takes a powder, opting for something more easily digested.

That’s fine; there are times where three chords and a heavy backbeat are all I need. But other times, I want to work at my music, knowing the rewards will be that much greater. That’s why I have spent so much time with the music of Matthew Shipp.

I first heard Shipp on 1999’s DNA, a duo album the pianist made with bassist William Parker. I recognized both from David S. Ware’s Wisdom of Uncertainty, the first non-traditional jazz album I purchased. A fawning review of that album made me take the leap at a time in my life where I craved something more than I was getting through the usual channels. I’ll admit that I still don’t fully understand or appreciate that album 14 years on, and I certainly haven’t figured out the dozen-plus Shipp albums I have acquired since that first.

But I have discovered enough; more than enough. A new Shipp release is an automatic purchase for me (or thanks to the largesse of the Thirsty Ear publicity department, a highly anticipated promo arrival), because I know it will enlighten, engage, challenge and delight. Whether he is playing solo, performing in various acoustic configurations or collaborating with electronic artists on some melding of hip hop and jazz, I know I’ll take something away each time I listen.

His new album, The Art of the Improviser, is a landmark of sorts. Shipp turned 50 in December, and his long-time label, Thirsty Ear, clearly wants to use that occasion to reintroduce the artist to the masses. It’s a double-disc set, with one CD capturing a solo performance, the other his trio with new bassist Michael Bisio and longtime drummer Whit Dickey. He tackles newer songs like “4D” and older tracks like “Circular Temple #1,” as well as oft-covered standards like “Take the A Train.”

It doesn’t fully capture Shipp’s oeuvre, but nothing short of a boxed set could. What it does offer is a snapshot of the artist today, a constantly striving artist who is increasingly able to bridge the distance between lyrical classicism and questing exploration.

And no, I don’t write that as someone who “gets” everything Shipp does. Far from it. But I get enough to keep me digging.

TIRBD: The press materials for your new album state that “for the better part of fifty years, Matthew Shipp has been on a tireless journey to innovate a musical language…” At first that brought a chuckle, thinking of you in diapers nearly 50 years ago trying to “innovate a musical language.” But then I stopped and wondered: At what age did you actually start playing music, and at what age do you feel you began creating a musical language of your own as opposed to recreating that of others?

MS: I started at 5 got serious at 12 – with classical, started jazz at about 14. As far as really trying to find myself on an instrument, that started around 18, but I love the image you have of being in diapers and trying to innovate a musical language. At 18 my style was part McCoy (Tyner)-part Bill Evans, but I was cognizant that I was looking for myself even though I used that style to do regular gigs

This release offers two sides of your performing persona: solo and as part of a group. Do you prefer one over the other? What does each afford that the other does not?

No – I do whatever is before me. My focus will be on the trio though, for that is a direct link to the jazz tradition – even though I have said some things that could be construed as anti jazz trad, I am looking for a way to fit in that tradition believe it or not. I love solo also because as a pianist there is such a great tradition of solo keyboard work including Bach, Chopin, Debussy, Tatum, Monk’s beautiful solos, Cecil, etc., etc.

What did you take away from your work curating the Blue Series for Thirsty Ear? From the outside, it seems to have afforded you the opportunity to expand your sonic palette considerably.

It takes me outside myself, which as an artist it is so easy to be completely self absorbed – but bringing in other people and having a hand in some CDs is very gratifying because it reminds you that there is a whole big world of music out here and it’s not just about you. And it’s easy to think it’s just about you because it’s so hard to survive as a jazz musician that that mindset kicks in just as a defense mechanism. And also, yes, it’s giving me a chance to explore how others deal with organizing sound in a way that I would not if I was not as involved.

Having explored those sounds, you have returned to more organic, acoustic settings on recent albums. Did anything in particular motivate that shift, and do you foresee ever venturing again into more electronic-based music?

I am open to doing collaborative electronic projects if an artist comes up that I would want to work with – and of course they would want to work with me – but at the end of the day, I am a jazz pianist and I am actually very comfortable with that idea.

I had the pleasure of seeing your “Boxing and Jazz” performance in Minneapolis several years ago. Do you still follow the sport? Do you take similar inspiration from any other extra-musical interests that you can see manifest themselves in your work?

Oh yes, I am a boxing fanatic. I follow it very close and I find it a very interesting subculture in the way that jazz is an interesting subculture – or at least used to be. I get most of my inspiration from metaphysics though, for what I explore in music is mind – vibration-pools of language fields of  intelligence and process – and all that could be summed up in the stupid word of god.

You have played with a wide array of people. Is there anyone left, either in the world of what is considered jazz or beyond it, with which you would like to collaborate?

I would love to do a collaboration with Ikue Mori. I think she is a laptop genius.

Musicians talk about recreating the music they hear in their head, and I wonder what you hear when you are thinking about music. Have you been able to capture that in your recordings and performance, or is there an ideal that you still seek?

Well, Cecil once said if you hear it, why play it – what you hear is memory – but I do have a field of language that I “hear” that I push against.

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.