Megan Abbott interviewing Patti Abbott

I really loved this small item: Megan Abbott interviewing her mother, Patricia Abbott, on their family reading habits, her (Megan's) tuition into crime fiction and lots of other matters. I still have Patricia's first novel, Concrete Angel, to read, but I will in the near future.

Interview with Ed Gorman

Check out this good interview with Ed Gorman at The Rap Sheet.

William Gibson on Chandler and Hammett

This quote from a recent interview was posted to the Rara-Avis e-mail list:

GIBSON
I was never much of a Raymond Chandler fan, either.

INTERVIEWER

Why not?

GIBSON
When science fiction finally got literary naturalism, it got it via the noir detective novel, which is an often decadent offspring of nineteenth-century naturalism. Noir is one of the places that the investigative, analytic, literary impulse went in America. The Goncourt brothers set out to investigate sex and money and power, and many years later, in America, you wind up with Chandler doing something very similar, though highly stylized and with a very different agenda. I always had a feeling that Chandler’s puritanism got in the way, and I was never quite as taken with the language as true Chandler fans seem to be. I distrusted Marlow as a narrator. He wasn’t someone I wanted to meet, and I didn’t find him sympathetic—in large part because Chandler, whom I didn’t trust either, evidently did find him sympathetic.

But I trusted Dashiell Hammett. It felt to me that Hammett was Chandler’s ancestor, even though they were really contemporaries. Chandler civilized it, but Hammett invented it. With Hammett I felt that the author was open to the world in a way Chandler never seems to me to be.

The whole interview here.

Little interview with JT Ellison

Some years ago I published a small flash fiction story, called "Madonna in the Grass", by American writer JT Ellison in one of my mags, Ässä. So it was nice to notice she made it pretty big with her Nashville-set Taylor Jackson series. Especially nice was that Taylor Jackson also made it to Finland. Her first novel with Jackson, All the Pretty Girls, came out in Finnish before Christmas. I managed to find a copy, though the MIRA paperbacks have a very short shelf life and they are not available everywhere, and I read the book during the holidays. I'm not big into serial killer, but I thought All the Pretty Girls was entertaining and pretty plausible in its solutions. A fast, solid read.

I sent some questions to JT and got some answers back - the thing that usually happens with interviews, right? Okay, here's the Q&A.

Was it always clear to you that you'd write about a woman character?

Yes. From the very beginning, I wanted to have a strong female lead, one that was strong without being strident, who commanded the respect of her peers not from fear, but because she’d earned it. A female Lucas Davenport, that was my goal. Half cop, half rock star. On a deeper level, I see Taylor as Athena, the warrior goddess of Nashville. She is the city’s protector in every way. A hero.

But having a strong male lead was important to me as well. That’s why Baldwin has such a big role in the story from the get go.

Taylor Jackson is not the main character and actually not all the time very crucial to what's happening in the book? Why is that?

Taylor is definitely the main character of the book, she’s just working on a secondary investigation. That’s just the way the story played out in this first book. Because she is a police office with Metro Nashville, she can’t go jetting off to other jurisdictions to follow the Southern Strangler. John Baldwin is the profiler tasked with finding the Southern Strangler, but Taylor’s role in that investigation has to be focused on the Nashville aspects only. Real cops can’t move into other jurisdictions without a lot of paperwork and headaches. I thought it would be fun to show what it’s really like for a cop dealing with a multi-state investigation.

You've published six books about Taylor Jackson? What's happened to her after the first book (mind you, I haven't read them before this). What's going to happen to her later?

Taylor faces all sorts of challenges in the following five novels. In 14, she’s investigating the case of a long dormant serial killer who seemingly has returned from the dead. In JUDAS KISS, she’s working a single murder of a young mother, and dealing with a major invasion of her privacy that results in her being demoted. In THE COLD ROOM, she’s up against another serial killer, The Conductor, and chases him across Europe with a new character to the series, James “Memphis” Highsmythe, from New Scotland Yard. THE IMMORTALS has her back in Nashville hunting for a killer who’s tied to the occult, and the newest book, out March 1 in the US, SO CLOSE THE HAND OF DEATH, sees her up against her nemesis from 14, the Pretender. The girl has a full plate. I’ve just finished the seventh, WHERE ALL THE DEAD LIE, (Oct 1) which is more of a gothic suspense than my usual thriller. No killers to hunt, just Taylor, working through some rather serious issues.

Do you have any other series characters or one-off books in mind?

Yes, I do. I’m starting a new series right now, but I’m not ready to talk about it yet.

There are quite a lot police procedural influences in the book, which I found refreshing. Could you name some of your influences in that genre?

I’m a big fan of John Sandford. He’s the one that got me going on police procedurals. Tess Gerritsen, Alex Kava, Erica Spindler, Karin Slaughter, John Connolly and Lee Child all inspire me too. I breathlessly await their new books.

In your earlier web-published stories, there were more noir and hardboiled influences in sight. Will you go back to those influences someday?

I find that most of my short stories have the darker, noir feel to them. I love experimenting though, love to stretch my wings and try new genres. I absolutely have some more noir up my sleeve.

How do you see the future of books and publishing? You made it big from the webzines to Harlequin/Mira, but that leap is not possible to everyone.

I am quite bullish on the future of publishing. We’re in flux, yes, with the advent of ebooks and their popularity. But readers will always want a well-crafted, well-told story, and publishers will continue to bring those stories to them. I was very blessed to have an excellent agent who had a plan for me, and followed through on that. I know it doesn’t always happen that way. My work is more commercial in nature, I think, and that’s what helped springboard me to the place I am now.

How about e-books and all that?

Love them. I have a Nook Color and think it’s the bomb. I hate that they’re putting bookstores out of business though. It’s painful to watch. I adore going to bookstores, feeling the weight of the books in my hand. But I travel so much that an ereader is a great solution for me. I read probably 50% of my books on the Nook now.

BTW, seems like JT's "Madonna in the Grass" is available as an e-book, with some other short stories of hers. Check the collection Sweet Little Lies out here. And JT has also another book out in Finnish, check it out here. It's called Lumikkimurhat (as in "The Snow White Killings").

Toni Johnson-Woods on Carter Brown

I interviewed the Australian scholar Toni Johnson-Woods about her book project on Australian paperback crime fictioneer, Carter Brown. I posted the interview in Finnish here, here are the Q&A. Toni's blog on Aussie pulp fiction is here.

Just what are you doing regards to Carter Brown?

Carter Brown is part of a larger project of mine. In 2007 I received a grant from the Australian Research Council to document the spread of Australian “popular” (more often called pulp) fiction of the 1950s throughout the world. Carter Brown was one of the most widespread authors. Carter Brown is really Alan Geoffrey Yates who wrote nearly 300 books as Carter Brown between 1951 and 1985.
What got you attracted to Carter Brown in the first place?

Carter Brown is the person about whom I talk the most because he is probably the best known of all Australian writers. It started, as most research projects do, from a very simple question – who is Australia’s most *popular* author…my colleagues at the University of Queensland and I were having a cup of tea asking this question. Someone said “Carter Brown”. I’d never heard of him so I went to our national library and discovered that he’d written nearly 300 novels. After ten years of studying Australian literature I couldn’t believe that I hadn’t heard his name mentioned once. Then I dug a little deeper and found dozens of Australian writers had written thousands of books in the 1950s — romances, westerns, and crime. And yet not one academic in Australia had investigated them more fully. So I decided it was time for the academy to get a bit of a wakeup call.

What's interesting about Brown to modern readers? Does he still hold up?

He is of interest to readers because his stories are so representative of the time in which they were written. The language, fashions, technology, consumerism, representations of women, women and sex are all snapshots into the various decades. For instance, the earliest stories are very hardboiled and reflect the James Hadley Chase style of fiction – mean streets, political corruption and dangerous dames. Later the stories are much more light-hearted and poke fun at the “heroes”. The final stories are pretty much sex and sadism. I prefer the light-hearted funny ones and they still are amusing.

Why was he so popular around the world?

I think it was the funny Carter Browns who amused people all over the world. It seems that some humour does transcend national boundaries. My favourite character is Mavis Seidlitz who is a ditzy blonde – she

is like a detective Lucille Ball. I think his steady stream of fiction meant that a publisher could rely on a new title every

month to fill the bookshelves and so maybe it was just because he was there.

How could he be so prolific?

Yates never owned the name “Carter Brown” – it was owned by the publisher Horwitz. So when the owner Stanley Horwitz sold the licence for Carter Brown to Signet in the USA, he signed at 10 books a year deal. So if Yates wanted to earn money he had to supply those ten books. It was a harrowing deal—as often Yates was writing a current book, editing his last book and plotting his next one. He confessed that he took Dexedrine (which was legal then) and would write the whole book in 48 hours. The book then was edited by the Sydney offices of Horwitz, they sent the edited version to the USA where their editorial team fixed mistakes and then the manuscript was sent back to Australia for approval. Can you image the pressure? So from 1957 – 1985 he was writing between 6 and 10 books a year. Most of the earlier “books” were really short – about 34 pages -- and he wrote two of those a month.

I spoke with Yates’ widow last year and she said he didn’t even have a full collection of his books. So I’m unsure if there is a complete collection anywhere in the world. Even the Australian National Library, our legal repository, does not have all of his books.

What can you tell us about your research about Brown in Finland? Did you find any explanation why there was so much of Australian stuff published here?

I was in Finland to present a paper on Carter Brown at the annual SHARP conference. I focused on my findings in Nordic countries; earlier this year I was in Copenhagen and Oslo (I didn’t have time to visit Sweden). I spent the first week in the Finnish National Library; and I spent some time with some enthusiastic collectors. Finland has a unique relationship with Carter Brown because it was the FIRST overseas country to translate him—between 1957 and 1985 Finland published 140 Carter Browns…second only to France (222 books). Finland also has different covers to those in Denmark, Norway and Sweden: it reused the Australian covers. This suggests that Finland had an agreement with Horwitz (the Australian publisher) and not with Signet (the US publisher). Why or how this happened is still unknown. Unfortunately the Horwitz archives are not available and the company was sold last year so we

will probably never know.

Any interesting anecdotes you can share about CB?

Australia’s popular crime writer Peter Corris tells how he used to steal Carter Browns from his local newsagency. He says Carter Brown influenced his writing style. Mickey Spillane trashed Carter Brown on American television once – apparently Spillane had been drinking and Yates found it amusing. Yates had been writing about the USA for half a dozen years before he finally visited there. He was very popular in Japan – and his Japanese covers are the most beautiful of all I think. His material was turned into two French films (both are pretty ordinary). Richard O’Brien of The Rocky Horror Picture Show fame has written a musical, The Stripper, based on the CB book of the same name. It is supposed to be playing in the UK at the moment.

You've read some other Australian writers and I've understood they are pretty bad compared to Carter Brown. Is this true?

Yes. Because CB was so successful a rival publishing company started Larry Kent. Kent lacks the humour of CB. He is just a little too violent for my taste. Marc Brody’s stories are just poorly written and an effort to read. Carl Dekker has an interesting “hook” each story is written in a different location – again, the writing is pretty poor. The best of the ‘second’ string CB is K T McCall – the author is supposed to be the girlfriend of Johnny Buchanan, but really the series was written by two women.

Could you name some other interesting Australian writers?

I believe that Australian Peter Temple is one of the leading crime fiction writers in the world today. But as to the fiction of the 1950s – I find myself more engaged by the westerns—Marshall Grover, Emerson Dodge…there are dozens of them. I think I’ve read way too many crime fiction novels and so I find

Why was there so much pulp and paperback publishing in Australia? Could you share some of that history?

In 1939 the Australian government imposed taxes on non-essential imports such as books. After the war was finished the taxes were not lifted and so Sydney publishers found a gap in the book market. Previously the majority of cheap fiction had come from America – Australia hadn’t developed its own publishing ethos. Suddenly there was a ready market for cheap fiction – these publishers desperately looked for authors who could write genre fiction (romances, westerns, crime, science fiction) quickly. They wanted to fill the stands at railways with reading material each month. As there weren’t that many experienced writers, the publishers asked all sorts of people to write. The result was that anyone who could provide enough words got published – hence the poor quality of some of the material. Still it provided extra income for railway workers, accountants, teachers and those willing to spend their weekends writing at their kitchen table. Many of the writers I interviewed admitted that they wanted the extra money to buy a house. It was the post-World War Two boom in Australia.

What's next after your CB book is completed? More Australian pulp?

After I’ve finished the CB book (which has taken me about three years) I am going to publish a complete list of all of the Australian authors and editions I have found—that should be a couple of volumes. At least that’s what I hope. My next big project is to trace all the Australian westerns published around the world. Western fiction is the least researched of all ‘pulp’ fictions.

The pictures are Finnish editions of Carter Browns, the latter two are with original Australian covers.

Q&A with Christa Faust

I finally got around to ask some questions from Christa Faust, the writer of the admirable Money Shot, out now in Finnish as Koston enkeli ("Avenging Angel") from Arktinen Banaani, with the cover illustration by Jukka Murtosaari.

Money Shot/Koston enkeli is about a former porn actress Angel Dare, who's now running an agency. She finds herself mixed up in an attempt to get back a bag of money belonging to the East European Mafia - she's beaten up, choked and thrown in the trunk of a car. She decides she'll get her revenge. It's a magnificently written piece of hardboiled pulp.

Christa Faust is a versatile writer whose career has ranged from hardcore horror written with Poppy Z. Brite to movie novelizations, like Snakes on a Plane. She blogs here and occasionally posts gorgeous examples of her collection of vintage shoes. She's been posting very interesting and enthusiastic comments on the Los Angeles Film Noir Festival screenings, so be sure to check out her blog!

You are one of the few female practitioners of the new hardboiled or neo-noir writers. Why do you think this genre doesn't gather more female writers - there were more in the past, like Leigh Brackett and Margaret Millar.

Maybe there aren't a lot, but there are strong, talented women writing hardboiled and noir fiction today. Women like Megan Abbott and Cathi Unsworth. What I really like about today's female noir authors is that they don't hide their gender with masculine cliche and try to write just like the boys. They bring a new, distinctly female perspective to the genre.

You've created an amazing character in Angel Dare. Someone might think that this kind of book - violent thriller about porn industry - would be about an ultracool vixen whacking men, like in the film Bitch Slap. Was this something you deliberately set out to do?

I never had any interest in telling a story like Bitch Slap, because that's already been done a thousand times. I wanted to create something a little more complicated. More grown-up. And more realistically female. I'm also very tired of superhero chicks that weigh 12 pounds, but can still magically kick a 200 pound man's ass. In high heels, no less. That's a porn scenario, not a real story.

You don't really criticize the porn industry in your book, and I've already received some negative comments on that. What would you say to that?

I portray both the positive and negative sides of the industry in a very realistic and even handed way, just like I would for any other setting. People are free to form their own opinions. As a pulp author, it's not my job to "criticize" anything, just to tell a good story.

The other characters in Money Shot also seem very real. How much did you use people you know personally?

I always use bits and pieces of people I know personally in my fiction, though never an exact copy.

You've already written a sequel to Money Shot. What is Choke Hold about?

Choke Hold, which may or may not be the final title of the new book, involves Angel getting mixed up with unsanctioned cage fighting and drug smuggling. It will be coming out from Hard Case Crime in February of 2011.

Who or what are your influences? You've dedicated your book to Richard S. Prather - can you tell us more about that?

I always had a thing for Prather's Shell Scott novels. They're addictive, like potato chips, and I love his outrageous sense of humor. When Hard Case Crime announced they were planning to reprint Prather's more serious novel The Peddler, I was very excited and posted about it on my blog. Hard Case Crime editor Charles Ardai read my post and asked me to submit a novel of my own. The rest, as they say, is history. I'd been a Prather fan for years, but it wasn't until I got accepted by Hard Case Crime that I got up the nerve to write to him and tell him how much I loved his books. He wrote me back, a single warm and encouraging letter that I have framed on my office wall. Sadly, we never had a chance to develop an ongoing correspondence. He died before Money Shot hit the stands.

Koston enkeli available in bookstores and through net shops, for example here.

Ellroy and me: The Final Countdown

Some things you need to know about James Ellroy:

1. he doesn't like journalists or interviewers
2. he likes women more than men
3. he doesn't like fans
4. he wants to control the interviewing process (I believe he controls those made by women reporters by flirting)

Okay, I know I'm not necessarily the world's best interviewer, even when I conduct them in Finnish, but you'd think the interviewee would want to take some of the responsibility. Apparently not, when we talk about James Ellroy. Just before me he talked with a young female reporter who asked what Ellroy's first impression of Finland was and such pretty light-fare stuff. Ellroy seemed relaxed and talked with his feet up on the coffee table. Okay, I can handle this, I told myself - being of course very, very nervous about the whole thing.

But when I walked up to Ellroy and told him I'm a fan and have been reading his novels for over 15 years, I noticed instantly he stiffened up and went into a defensive mood. What gives here? You don't want to hear someone likes your novels? That shouldn't be my problem, should it? I can understand there are fans who are pains in the ass, but I wouldn't call myself that.

We started off pretty well, though, with me speaking in rather clumsy English - I don't know why this sometimes happens, but it just did. Then I made a mistake in my questions: I asked Ellroy about Haiti. "Haiti?! What have I got to say about Haiti?!" Well, I tried to reason, you write about Haiti in Blood's a Rover, CIA and the mob are taking it over... "Wait, wait, it's not Haiti, it's the Dominican Republic, they are two different things." Oops! I had got fixated on Haiti for some reason and honestly thought it's Haiti they are invading with casinos and all and hadn't bothered to check my copy of Blood's a Rover. My bad, totally. Apparently after that I was nobody in Ellroy's books: total moron who hasn't even read the books. I said I was sorry about my mistake, but it was all downhill from there.

Especially when I wanted to talk about politics. I think Ellroy's books are hugely political - they are mostly about how politics and the negative feelings (anger, jealousy, lust, aggression) intertwine in national and global level -, but clearly he doesn't want to talk about that. I know he's said that he doesn't want to write about later times, i.e. Nixon, Carter, the Bushes, Reagan etc., but I still wanted to ask about that, especially the Reagan era. "Don't you think there would be many fascinating characters, like Oliver North..." At this point, Ellroy gets mad, waves a finger at me and yells: "Don't! Stop right there! Reagan is one of my heroes. I'm sure history will prove him right. He defeated Communism." This, of course, made its way into my article and has, perhaps deservedly, become somewhat of a cult item, alongside with Ellroy's rant that he hates Communism, since he doesn't want to pay more taxes. "Look at Sweden! They pay fucking huge taxes and they are still all drunks." I seriously don't know what Ellroy meant with this.

But as I said, I got a great article about this. I had to write it on spot, in two hours and send it along right away, the article of 5000 characters. I knew instantly that I had to write it from the viewpoint of the author getting angry at the interviewer. It worked miraculously well. This is one of the best pieces I'll ever write, period. Someone said to me that it was better than the interview published in Helsingin Sanomat, the largest newspaper in Finland. Don't know about that, but at least it was different from any other interview Ellroy made during his three-day visit in Finland.

Any new info from Ellroy himself? Well, he'll have a new book out next Fall: The Hilliker Curse is about the women in his life. And he'll be writing another quartet set longer back in time. He'll abandon the stylistic excess (he didn't want to elaborate). He's not going to write the Warren Harding novel.

I'll post the interview here. Use Google to try to make sense out of it. Hope it works. And here's, with a Google translation, a short news item about how Ellroy got mad at a Swedish reporter, mainly for similar reasons.

Scott Phillips: The Ice Harvest in Finnish

I finally got around to posting the interview I made with Scott Phillips, the author of the admirable The Ice Harvest, published in Finnish as Jäätävää satoa by Arktinen Banaani whose paperback series I edit. The cover is by Ossi Hiekkala, who's just as admirable as Phillips.

The Ice Harvest was your first novel. It's a remarkable accomplishment. How long did you write it and what goals did you have in mind?

I wrote the first part of it over the course of a year or so, in fits and starts. Then I decided to finish it and as I recall the second half went much more quickly. All I wanted to do was write the kind of pulpy novel I liked to read.

I've compared your book to David Mamet's writing and his axiom: enter late, exit early. Was this something you tried to do? Can you tell us something about your writing and plotting technique? Based on your other novels, you seem to be changing your technique and style from book to book.

No plotting technique at all, apart from creating a situation that allows oter things (bad ones, mostly) to happen. The styles and techniques change from book to book mostly because I get bored. My latest book is called "Supply Sarge," and it's very much inthe vein of the 1950s chapters of The Walkaway, and it's also very short like The Ice Harvest.

What other influences did you have, besides Mamet (if you had Mamet)?

I love Mamet, but if he's an influence it's unconscious. James Crumley and Charles Willeford, Richard Russo, who adapted The Ice Harvest for the movies, Derek Raymond, were all important to me early on. Lately writers I find myself cribbing from are Jack Pendarvis, William Gay, Ken Bruen...

The Ice Harvest is full of irony and black humour. Is irony something that comes naturally to you?

I don't know about irony, but I do find humor in dark things. I'm always in trouble for making jokes at inappropriate times.

There's been a lot of talk about noir renaissance of the 2000s and The Ice Harvest has been hailed as one of the most important novels of the movement. Do you feel there's a movement and what lies behind it?

There are a lot of good writers working that particular vein at the moment: Megan Abbot, Christa Faust, Vicki Hendricks and Anthony Neil Smith come to mind. There are also a number of people working in what you might call a noirish style writing about rural America: Chris Offutt, Daniel Woodrell, William Gay and Tom Franklin, as well as an up and coming group consisting of Frank Bill, Jedidiah Ayres, Kieran Shea, Greg Bardsley, Malachi Stone, Daniel O'Shea and a few others. In Scotland you have Allan Guthrie, in Ireland Declan Burke, in France any number of practitioners of the genre, loosely defined. So there's a lot of really good noir being written right now; it's just a question of whether the general public starts reading more of it or not.

Do you have any favourite books amongst the new noir books?

I loved Dope Thief, by Dennis Tafoya. He just sent me his latest in manuscript, which I'm very excited to read.

What did you think about the film that was based on The Ice Harvest?

I loved the movie, apart from the change in the ending. I have to admit that I supported that change along with everyone else at the time, because the studio thought they had a big hit on their hands (they didn't), but only if the ending was changed. Harold Ramis had a very good feel for the tension between the humor and the bleakness.

What are you working on now? I hear you have a novel coming out, can you tell us something about it?

The new novel is called "Supply Sarge," it's the story of a corrupt US Army quarter master who comes out of the army in 1946 and finds himself in Wichita trying to lead that quintessential postwar American life: husband, father, businessman. The trouble is that at heart he's a psychopath. His name is Wayne Ogden, and I've written about him before. In my second novel, The Walkaway, he was the villain. I found myself enjoying his voice so much that when [crime fiction publisher] Dennis McMillan asked me a few years later for a short story set in the 30s, I went back to Wayne's adolescence, when he was a bit more innocent but still a villain waiting to be born. Then I wrote another story, set in that same period, where Wayne and his friends kill a bald eagle. In this novel he's teereing on the brink between wanting to be a good citizen and feeling the need to be a pimp and a thug.

Anthony Neil Smith at Hardboiled Wonderland

Anthony Neil Smith is the writer of Psychosomatic (which I liked, like Elmore Leonard on speed) and Yellow Medicine (on which later). Here's his recent interview at the Hardboiled Wonderland blog. (Thanks for the link to Allan Guthrie's tweet!)

Allan Guthrien Viimeinen suudelma ei ole kivaa kamaa

Allan Guthrien Viimeinen suudelma (Kiss Her Goodbye, 2005; suom. Mika Tiirinen) on toinen kirja Arktisen Banaanin uutta kovaksikeitettyä dekkaria esittelevässä pokkarisarjassa. Se on ankara kertomus Joe Hopesta, jonka työnantaja on koronkiskuri ja työväline baseball-maila.

Guthrie on skottilaisen dekkarin, ns. tartan noirin, mestari, jota on verrattu sekä Irvine Welshiin että Denise Minaan. Hänen muita romaanejaan ovat mm. rankka mustasukkaisuus- ja ristiinnaulitsemisdraama Hard Man ja silvotun ruumiin eri osien löytymisestä kertova Savage Night. Guthrien uusin romaani on tänä vuonna ilmestynyt Slammer.

Tuottelias Guthrie ehti vastata muutamaan kysymykseemme.

K: Viimeinen suudelma ei kerro sympaattisesta päähenkilöstä. Itse asiassa yksikään kirjoista ei kerro sympaattisesta päähenkilöstä. Miksi pidät sosiopaateista ja väkivaltaisesta käytöksestä, vaikka itse olet selvästi niin mukava mies?

V: No kiitosta vain - luulisin. Kirjoitan sellaisista ihmisistä, jotka kiinnostavat minua, ja minua kiehtovat epänormaalit persoonallisuudet. En voi kuvitella mitään niin epäkiinnostavaa kuin jostakusta mukavasta kirjoittaminen. Viimeisen suudelman Joe Hope on totisesti kaikkea muuta kuin mukava. Hän on koronkiskurin kovistelija ja hakkaa ihmisiä työkseen. Kun päätin kirjoittaa hänestä, se oli osittain reaktiota muutamaankin kirjaan, jotka olin lukenut - niissä gangsterit olivat loppujen lopuksi hyviä tyyppejä. Halusin kirjoittaa jostakusta, joka ei ollut vähäisimmässäkään määrin hyvis, koska se tuntui minusta realistisemmalta. Toivoin kuitenkin, että pystyisin luomaan henkilön, jota kohtaan lukija tuntisi empatiaa. Minun mielestäni se on mahdollista, koska huolimatta siitä että Joe Hope ei ole mukava tyyppi hänen tunteensa ovat vereslihaisia ja hän paljastaa lukijalle paljon omia heikkouksiaan.

K: Kirjoissasi on myös paljon mustaa huumoria. Miten onnistut löytämään niin paljon hauskuutta kaikissa kuvaamissasi hakkaamisissa ja tappamisissa?

V: Minusta olisi todella vaikea lukea jotain, mikä on pelkästään synkkää ja mustaa ja huumoritonta ja minusta olisi vielä vaikeampi kirjoittaa sellaista. Joskus yritän, mutta tuloksena on aina se, että henkilö joutuu johonkin absurdiin tilanteeseen ja siitä seuraa aina pelkkää mustaa komediaa. Minusta absurdi ja noir-kirjallisuus ovat lähellä toisiaan, melkein sama asia käytännössä. Absurdin tunne on tunne elämän merkityksettömyydestä. Noir kertoo siitä, että olemme kaikki tuomittuja. Kun ne yhdistää, tuloksena voi olla aika synkkää hupaa.

K: Kirjasi ovat myös melko lyhyitä (Viimeisessä suudelmassa on 255 sivua). Mikä sinua kiehtoo lyhyessä muodossa aikana jolloin rikos- tai jännitysromaanin vakiopituus on 400-500 sivun paikkeilla?

V: Kirjojeni pituus on yleensä jotain 60 000 ja 75 000 sanan väliltä. Kirjat varmasti tuntuvat lyhyemmiltä kuin ne oikeasti ovat, koska kirjoitan tiiviisti ja yritän pitää juonen niin nopeassa liikkeessä kuin mahdollista. Yleensä jännäreissä sankarille jää paljon aikaa parantua kaikista hakkaamisista, mutta minä en juuri anna sankarireppanoilleni paljonkaan rauhallisia hetkiä. Minusta olisi vaikea kirjoittaa 500-sivuista kirjaa. Olen tehnyt sitä joidenkin varhaisten versioiden kohdalla, mutta niissä on paljon roskaa ja ylimääräistä täytettä ja tarpeettomia kohtauksia, joten kirjat tulevat aina paljon ohuemmiksi jahka rupean käymään tekstiä läpi.

K: Suomeksi saattaa ilmestyä myöhemmin muitakin kirjojasi. Mitä voit kertoa meille uusimmasta romaanistasi, hyviä arvosteluja saaneesta Slammerista?

V: Slammer on tosiaan saanut pari hyvää arviota, mikä on todella mukavaa. Se on vankilakirja kokemattomasta vanginvartijasta, jonka elämä on nopeasti muuttumassa suunnattomaksi sotkuksi. Slammer kertoo vartijan yrityksistä päästä irti tuosta sotkusta ja niistä seurauksista, jotka hänen toimintansa aiheuttaa. Olisi upeaa nähdä kirja myös suomeksi. Arktisen Banaanin kirjoissa on todella upeat kannet ja olisi hieno nähdä, mitä kuvittaja Slammerista keksii.

Q&A with Allan Guthrie

Here's another short interview with an author whose work I've had pleasure getting to print inside the paperback covers of Arktinen Banaani's new crime series. Allan Guthrie is the writer of Viimeinen suudelma (Kiss Her Goodbye, Hard Case Crime 2005; translated in Finnish by Mika Tiirinen), a hard-hitting tale of Joe Hope, bad guy whose main tool is a baseball bat and whose daughter commits a suicide and whose ex-wife gets killed. (I'll be posting the interview also in Finnish, as soon as I get it translated.)

Q: Kiss Her Goodbye doesn't tell about a sympathetic character. None of your novels features a sympathetic character. Why do you like sociopaths and violent behaviour, while you're yourself such a nice man?

A: Why, thank you. I think! I write about the kind of people who interest me, and I'm fascinated by abnormal personalities. I can't think of anything more boring than writing about somebody 'nice'. Joe Hope in Kiss Her Goodbye is certainly not nice. He's an enforcer for a loan shark, and beats people up for a living. When I decided to write about him, it was in part as a reaction against a few novels I'd read around that time where the gangster was a good guy at heart. I wanted to write about someone who wasn't even remotely a good guy, because I felt that was far more realistic. I hoped I'd be able to create the kind of empathy that would enable the reader to feel something for the character nonetheless. I think it's possible, because despite the fact that Joe Hope's not a nice guy, his emotions are fairly raw, and he exposes a lot of weaknesses to the reader.

Q: There's also lots of black humour in your books. How can you find humour in all those beatings and killings?

A: I'd find it hard to read something that was consistently dark and bleak and humourless, and I find it just as hard to write. Sometimes I try, but what usually happens is that a character will get into an absurd situation and there's a bit of comedy as a result. But that's fine with me. I think absurdity and noir are very closely connected. Almost the same thing. Absurdity is about the ultimate meaninglessness of life. Noir is about the fact that we're all doomed. Put them together and you can have some dark fun.

Q: Your books are also very short. What attracts you in the short form now when the crime novels and thriller are almost always 500 pages?

A: My books range from 62,000 to 75,000 words. I think they probably feel shorter than they are. That's possibly because I tend to write quite sparsely and aim to keep the plot moving as quickly as possible. Most thrillers have significant downtime for the character to recover from the ordeal he's facing, but I don't give the poor guy much peace at all. I'd struggle to fill 500 pages, I think. I've done that with early drafts, but there's so much rubbish and padding and unnecessary scenes in those that they soon slim down a more athletic size once I start revising.

Q: We may have more of your books in Finnish in the near future. What can you tell us about your latest novel, Slammer, that has been getting lots of good publicity?

A: Yes, Slammer's had one or two nice reviews, which is most pleasing. It's a prison novel about an inexperienced prison officer whose life is rapidly turning into an almighty mess. It's about his attempts to extricate himself from that mess and the consequences of the choices he makes to do so. It'd be great to see it published in Finland. Arktinen Banaani's book covers are superb, and I'd love to see what the artist comes up with. Here's hoping...

Two interviews of two western writers

Two great interviews of two great western writers at the Western Fiction Review: James Reasoner and Jory Sherman. Both are not very well known in Finland - were it not for me and my fanzines, there would be no Reasoner translations, and Jory Sherman has had only a handful of his western series translated under a pseudonym. (And two of his horror novels.) Well, it's of course possible that one or two of Reasoner's thrillers he does secretly for big names is translated without anyone else knowing. It's also possible that one or two Sherman's sex paperbacks, from his early days, was translated in the early seventies.

By the way, do check out the Jory Sherman bibliography I posted here a while back.

And, oh, I forgot to mention that Sherman is mentioned in Neeli Cherkovski's biography of Charles Bukowski. (Sherman started out as a beat poet and he's still writing poetry. He once sent me a handful for translation, but I haven't had much time to do anything to them.)

Pelecanos

A long interview with George Pelecanos. It's a crime that a writer of his fame, stature, quality and readability has had only novel (King Suckerman) translated.

Jory Sherman's interview

A nice interview with Jory Sherman, ex-beat poet and Western paperbacker, who's had a long career, starting out with poetry and eating free in poetry cafés, then writing paperbacks for low-end paperback houses and then getting on with the adult Westerns of the eighties and then rising to prosperity. In Finland he's not well known, even though he's had a handful of Westerns translated, mainly in his Gunn series, and two horror paperbacks.