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.

The previous meeting of these two camps was billed as a fight: Antipop vs. Matthew Shipp. Perhaps that was a statement about the times, though by that point jazz and hip hop already had met, circled each other warily and eventually shaken hands. Or, more likely, it was marketing; check out this rumble between the genres! Alas, it was a respectful summit rather than a fracas.

Here, the simpatico nature of the meeting is reflected in the title. Much as on a jazz record, where the participants are simply listed, the album is credited to Matthew Shipp, William Parker, Beans and HPrizm (formerly Priest). Four men enter… and one band exits. Yes, this really is a band. As on the first album – more so, even – these musicians combine their talents to create something that often transcends the individual contributions.

At its heart, Knives From Heaven is a hip hop record. The beats and rhymes are simply too dominant for it to be anything but. However, the base of the songs is most definitely jazz. There is a swing to these songs, a skittering pulse that is uniquely Shipp’s, that grounds the music.

The person who seems to get lost here is Parker. Bass is such an important part of hip hop that this comes a surprise. It’s not that Parker isn’t there, of course, but that his work is obviously subsumed by the whole more than Shipp’s. It’s easier to here Shipp’s block chords rise and fall through some of the quieter passages of these tunes than it is to discern Parker’s low-end rumbling through.

The musical base of the individual tracks is more sample-based than on the previous album. For every tune like “Terra Cotta” or “Deadpan Stare” that is essentially Shipp and Parker as an unaccompanied duo, there are tracks where their presence would be unremarked were their names not on the CD cover. Part of this stems from the fact that drummer Guillermo Brown, vibraphonist Khan Jamal and trumpeter Daniel Carter – who all performed on the first disc – are absent here.

Interestingly, tracks like “Half Amazed A/B” and “Rockers Hifi” owe their hooks to short sampled saxophone lines. Too bad long-time Shipp/Parker collaborator David S. Ware wasn’t called in to really add some fire to these sessions.

At its heart, Knives From Heaven continues what Antipop vs. Matthew Shipp started, a fruitful collaboration that isn’t likely to draw hardcore fans from either genre, but which will please the open-minded few in the overlap.

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.

listening to the 25th anniversary reissue of R.E.M.’s Lifes Rich Pageant didn’t spark the kind of nostalgia I perhaps expected, and if I think about it, that’s not a surprise.

Nostalgia comes from remembering the past. But with Lifes Rich Pageant, I’ve never allowed it to gather dust, to fall out of rotation. It might go a couple of months here or there, but it’s the R.E.M. album I come back to most often. That stems in part from the fact that it was the first I heard around the time of its release.  A stash of records left home one summer by a friend’s older college brother coupled with my box of Maxell XLIIs  meant that I discovered R.E.M. and a lot of other great music midway through high school, and never looked back.

One reason I return to this album again and again is that it is the most fun the band ever had. I love the three albums that precede it, and will readily admit that all three are artistically superior. But this one, particularly coming after the dour Fables of the Reconstruction, lets it all hang out.

So, with no real revelations to be had from the album itself, I looked instead to the disc of demos that accompanied it. There, one realizes that the album could have been very different.

I’ve always been a fan of the band’s earliest, pre-Chronic Town music. One of my favorite R.E.M. albums has always been the bootleg So Much Younger Then, which collects a dozen songs from an early set at Tyrone’s in Athens. I’ve since digitally collected several bootlegs that capture the same handful of shows, always hoping to discover one more early gem.

The band has let some of these songs leak out previously. “All the Right Friends” ended up on the soundtrack to Cameron Crowe’s “Vanilla Sky,” “Mystery to Me” was on the band’s double-disc IRS Years best-of, and “Permanent Vacation” was on a live iTunes collection a few years back. But with this demo disc, the best contemporaneous collection of these songs is now available. Early staples like “Wait” and “Mystery to Me” can now be added to the official canon.

These songs were demoed for Lifes Rich Pageant but ultimately left by the wayside. Can’t say I blame the band. I could do without “Underneath the Bunker,” but that’s the only thing I’d ever think of leaving off the finished album.  I have advocated for the band to get Bill Berry back in the saddle and spend an afternoon cutting a fanclub-only release of those early tracks, but I’m confident the drips and drabs of these archival releases is the closest I’ll get to that.

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.

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.

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.