Stephen Mertz died on Nov. 5, 2024. He was a friend of mine, and one that is missed very much. This interview was conducted in the Spring of 2016. I wish we had done another one since then, but this one is pretty good. Rest in peace, Steve.
Mr. Mertz’s first published novel, Some Die Hard, was published as by
Stephen Brett by the long ago Manor Books in 1979, and his most recent is an
installment in his pulp western series Blaze!
published earlier this year. In between, he created and wrote a few
successful men’s adventure series: M.I.A.
Hunter and Cody’s Army come to
mind. He wrote twelve Mack Bolan books, including the pivotal, and still
popular, Day of Mourning, and over
the last 15 years he has hit his stride as a novelist writing about a
fictional meeting between Hank Williams and Muddy Waters, Hank & Muddy, and an international thriller set in the 2008
Beijing Summer Olympics, Dragon Games.
Mr.
Mertz was kind enough to answer a few questions, and patient enough to keep
answering when a few grew into more than twenty. The questions are in italics. The personal photographs are used courtesy of Stephen Mertz.
Your first
professional sale was a short story, “The Busy Corpse,” to The Executioner
Mystery Magazine. Would you tell us a little about that
experience?
Well, I guess every writer remembers the
glorious day he sold his first story or she sold her novel and it’s a red
letter day for sure. I was living in Denver at the time. I was running a
second-hand record store. I was playing in a blues band, and I’d been writing
unpublished (make that unpublishable) stories for years. In 1975, the magazine
you mentioned bought that story. The funny thing about it is that I went on to
become fairly well associated with the name of Mack Bolan, The Executioner,
because about seven years later I ended up writing books for the Mack Bolan series.
Actually, it was a coincidence that The
Executioner Mystery Magazine bought that story. The editorial staff was out
in LA and had nothing to do with Don [Pendleton] other than to use his name on
the cover and he had nothing to do with them. The Table of Contents are
interesting because it’s a mix of people that I never heard of again and then
there are a few old hands like Talmage Powell who are placing some of their
final work and there are a handful of new names like me and John Lutz and
Margaret Maron who are just breaking in.
Your early career
was spent writing men’s adventure fiction; The Executioner, and your own M.I.A. Hunter
and Cody’s Army. Were there any particular pleasures or
displeasures of writing these types of books?
And let’s not forget The Tunnel Rats! The greatest pleasure was being able to practice
the writing craft in anonymity while making money doing it. Because of course
my name wasn’t on the Mack Bolan books; that was Don’s series. The other
action/adventure books that I wrote were originally written under pen names.
There are a variety of reasons that writers use pen names. You don’t want to be
labeled in the popular or the editorial mind as a writer who only writes a
certain type of novel, especially when you are as restless creatively as I am. It
keeps you from being typecast. In a field like that, frankly, you are judged by
the company you keep. There was Don Pendleton and one or two others but when I first
broke into that field, even the established writers weren’t getting much
respect. Not like today. So I thought it best to stay anonymous for that period
of time. At the same time you’re delivering four to six books per year so you
are honing your skills as a writer. It was a wonderful way to learn how to
write. For instance, I wrote each of my first six action novels as a conscious
nod to some writer who I felt influenced me and in that way I got it out of my
system, to purge my writing of the sound of any other writer’s voice. I guess
you could say that I arrived at my writing style through a process of
exclusion. What was the displeasure? Having
to meet deadlines. Having to constantly
work variations on the same formula. That generally applies to any sort of
genre fiction. But all-in-all it was a good way to get started in the business.
Speaking of Don
Pendleton, I know you are a great admirer of both him, as a person, and his
work. You have said his work was a
direct descendent of what Mickey Spillane did with his hardboiled Mike Hammer
novels and the pulp writer Carroll John Daly.
Would you expand on this idea?
I would refer anyone who’s interested in
this subject to a book that came out back in the 1970’s called The Great American Detective, edited by
William Kittredge and Steven M. Krauzer. It’s a collection of stories that
trace the development of the fictional American Detective from the days of the
dime novels and Carroll John Daly and it ends with the only Bolan short story that
Don ever wrote. My point: the editors certainly saw Don in that tradition. The
Introduction those guys wrote for that book presents the case more effectively
than I could in an interview.
Are there any of
Don Pendleton’s books you particularly admire?
Don’s major contribution is in creating
the action adventure genre. Probably the most important lesson that I learned
from Don was to consider yourself a serious novelist even if you are slanting
your work for a genre market. I have tried to adhere to that and Don very much
adhered to that in the sense that his
Mack Bolan saga is character-driven, as in “serious” fiction. It’s character
driven in the sense that Bolan is not the same person in the first book as he
is in the last of Don’s original novels. It’s like one gigantic novel that came
to us in a bunch of volumes.
Then there’s one of Don’s last books, Copp in Shock; not his best, but one of
my favorites. It’s a detective novel narrated by a private eye suffering from
amnesia. Well, Don was enduring some challenging health issues at the time he
wrote that one and in fact was suffering from severe memory loss. His wife,
Linda, heroically assisted him. Of all the thrillers written about characters
with amnesia, this is the only one I’m aware of that was written by an author
recovering from amnesia while he wrote it!
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| Stephen Mertz (right) with Don Pendleton (left) and Richard S. Prather |
I know you are a
fan of the early pulp stories – your terrific short story “The Lizard Men of
Blood River,” featured in The King of Horrors and Other Tales is an homage to the work of Lester
Dent. Are there any other pulp writers
you particularly like?
There are writers who wrote for the pulps
but aspired to greater things. There I am talking about Dashiell Hammett,
Raymond Chandler and, for my money, Mickey Spillane. But then there were
writers who only stayed in the pulp field. That’s all they wanted to do. That
is what they did do. Those guys are mostly fun. That is the word you have to go
with. If you measured them up against people I just named, most of them aren’t
going to cut the mark…but then, who does? We’re in a Golden Age of pulp
reprints so I don’t know what’s kept them from rediscovering Cleve F. Adams, a
very funny hardboiled PI writer who wrote for the detective magazines in the
1930’s and ‘40’s. Of course, pulp writing is always with us. When the magazines
faded away, pulp fiction just moved over to paperback novels. I’d have to go to
the 1950s-60s for my second favorite unknown and that is Ennis Willie. I helped
edit a collection of his work that Stark House published. It’s great hardboiled
tough guy stuff.
Your later work,
starting with Blood Red Sun (1989), is more ambitious than
your earlier work. What, as you see it, is the major difference between writing
the more formulaic adventure novels of your past, and these bigger and more
robust novels you have been producing over the past few decades?
Well, they’re more fun to write for one
thing and I hope that translates into the fact that they are more fun to read.
I am not reinventing the wheel. I am falling back on things I learned writing
pulp fiction when I write the more ambitious novels.
Blood Red Sun was published by
Diamond Books, which was a publishing house started by Warren Murphy. Did you
work directly with Mr. Murphy during its publication, and if so, what was the
experience like?
No, I never had any contact with Warren Chandler
Well yes, but no more so than, say, the Middle East . The primary engine for fiction has got to be
conflict and normally that is personal conflict, but you take entire cultures in conflict and, man, you are
really working with something there. If you look at the history of those regions
you just named and the culture of those countries and you stack that up side by
side with the American way of looking at things, rarely if ever will they connect
or even brush into each other. So in terms of being a novelist, there’s a lot
to work with. And plus, let's face it, Asian chicks are hot.
You have written
two novels, Fade to Tomorrow (2004) and Hank & Muddy (2011), which are set in the music world. In
the Afterword of The King of Horror & Other Stories, you wrote that you performed as a professional musician – vocals and
harp (harmonica) – for seven years: Do
these titles hold any special meaning for you since they are centered around
music and musicians?
Oh, very much so. I think Hank & Muddy is the best novel I’ve
written thus far, although it is certainly not cool to admire one of your
children more than another. But still, music just flows through me. In fact,
most of the years I was writing my early pulp fiction I didn’t write with any
photograph or icon of any writer near me for inspiration; I had a picture over
my desk of Chuck Berry doing the duck walk. The music we listen to says so much
about us. Just like the food we eat and the movies we watch and the clothes we
buy.
Hank
& Muddy is a fictional imagining of
Hank Williams and Muddy Waters meeting in Louisiana in 1952. The narrative is
loaded with biographical information of both men. What type of research did you
do?
This one pretty much ties into the last
question. I’ve been listening to what they today call roots music since I was
in high school. The Rolling Stones opened the door to a lot of us kids to what
the blues was and soul music and everything else. So really the research for
that book, I never really sat down and researched that one. I seem to remember
almost every liner note and every musician’s biography that I’ve ever read. It
was my long suffering mother who once observed that if I could only remember my
multiplication tables as well as I remembered who played bass on Chuck Berry
records, I’d be a brilliant mathematician. Mom, rest her soul, was right. I’ve
been living music and writing since the day I found out about either one. I
guess it’s inevitable that each would influence the other.
The title story in
The King of Horror & Other Stories
features a bitter writer who is no longer able to sell his work. In your
Afterword you wrote it was an “open letter” to your friend Michael Avallone who
had similar difficulties at the end of his writing career. Mr. Avallone had a
wild reputation of self-promotion and an uncanny ability to bring others to
anger. Do you have a story or two about Michael Avallone you would be willing
to share?
I not only loved Michael Avallone but I
also loved his wife, Fran, who was a great woman. She was everything that
someone who loves a writer should be. I’ll always remember visiting them at 80
Hilltop Boulevard in East Brunswick, NJ. Fran cooked up a fantastic Italian
dinner; this would have been 1983. Mike was pretty much in the state that you
just mentioned. He and I were sitting in
his office which was within easy earshot although not within view of the
kitchen where Fran was slaving over a hot stove. Mike went on about his
travails, the challenges that were facing him and any number of complaints. He
went on and he went on and he went on. I loved every word and I loved every
minute of it. But I have a clear memory of Fran periodically calling up to us,
“Michael, shut up and listen!” I am
happy to report that Michael did not, could not, heed her advice. I walked away
the richer for it.
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| Stephen Mertz (left) and Michael Avallone |
Your more recent
work has a quiet humor to it. An example
is Kim Jong-II using terrified prisoners as personal barbers in The Korean
Intercept. Was this imaginary on your
part, or is there some truth to it?
No, that was my sick imagination running rampant
through my fingertips. By all accounts, the guy was totally bugfuck. You have
two ways to look at that when you’re portraying it: you can either shake your
head and let it happen or you can try to pull something out of it. It seems
that if the guy was going to be crazy, he would be crazy in every department,
not just in what he was doing to his own people but also getting a haircut. He
was probably no fun to go shopping with.
You wrote two dark
suspense novels, Night Wind (2002) and Devil Creek (2004), which are different from anything
else you’ve written. They both have significant elements of horror, suspense,
and even a touch of romance. These novels, to me, showcase your range as a
writer. Would you tell us a little about
these books?
Actually, when we get to the novels and
stories published under my own name, nearly every one is different from anything
else I’ve written. That’s my restless nature. I bore easily. I develop a story
about people when I feel compelled to do so and when I’m finished writing that novel
or story, I’m ready to move on; meet new people and write new stories. I think
that is probably the overriding aspect of my work over the past fifteen years. Most
of the novels are different from each other. The main similarity is that I
wrote them. The idea for Night Wind had
been in me since I moved to a remote rural area in Arizona
Funny story about Night Wind. One evening I had dinner with Joe Lansdale and a friend
of his, Dean Koontz. Dean had just written a book, How to Write Best Selling Fiction. I had never read any Dean Koontz
but after meeting him, I bought that book. It’s probably the best book about commercial
writing that I’ve ever read. I perused that book meticulously. Then, still
without reading any of Dean’s novels, I wrote Night Wind. People still come up to me after reading that one and
say, “Hey, that reminds me of reading a Dean Koontz novel!" Considering Dean’s enormous success, I’ve
decided to interpret that as a compliment.
Do you have plans
to write any other dark tales?
I will let you know when I get there.
You have been very
prolific in the past few years. You have published a handful of novels,
including creating a new adult western series called Blaze! Would you tell us a little about the
series, and its genesis?
Now we’re back to the latest medium for
pulp fiction. I created that series to establish a presence in the digital
reading world; a series was the best way to go, so I worked a twist on the
western genre that I’d never encountered before. Its genesis is a short story I
wrote called “Last Stand,” which introduces a pair of gunfighters who are the
two fastest guns in the West…who just happen to be married to each other. Kate and
J.D. Blaze. I couldn't get away from the idea that those two deserved more than
one story. I am happy to say that Rough
Edges Press felt the same way and, in fact, wanted to amp up with a
bi-monthly publication schedule. I’m too slow a writer to accommodate that, so
a handful of topnotch writers stepped in to maintain consistent scheduling. They’ve
just published Book #10 and presently there are enough books in the pipeline to
get us through the year. J.D. and Kate. She’s a little smarter than he is but
dog-gone-it, J.D. is a standup gent. They banter back and forth in between
shooting the bad guys and sorting out various marital issues. These are western
tall tales for today’s audience.
J.D. stands for
Jehoram Delfonso. Where did you come up
with such an awkwardly intriguing name?
Well, it’s method writing. You try to be
the guy, y’know? Would you want to be
called Jehoram Delfonso, or J.D.? I know I'd prefer J.D. Jehoram is a warrior
king in the Old Testament. At least once per book, Kate gets so mad at J.D.
about something that she’ll call him by his given name in public. She’s the
only person alive who has ever called him that besides his mother.
Many of your early
works have appeared in eBook format over the past few years and you have
several new titles that are primarily available as eBooks – Sherlock Holmes: Zombies Over London, the Blaze! series. EBooks have seemingly opened new markets for many writers. What
are your thoughts about eBooks, and how have they impacted your career?
It doesn’t make sense not to write for the
digital market. Writers write to be read and these days that’s where the action
is. It’s an exciting time to be a writer. I’m reminded of the 1950s. From what
I know of the history of those years in popular writing, between the invention
of the paperback novel, the advent of television, and comic books, all of a
sudden there were all of these new ways to make money writing but everyone was
still trying to figure out just how. It
was a wild frontier. That’s the way it is now. The M.I.A. Hunter series has gotten a second life. The new novels like Dragon Games and Hank & Muddy are doing well as eBooks. It’s a mixed blessing.
As a reader, I prefer to sit under a light with a real book in my hands but as
a writer, I’d have to say that much of my writing income today comes from eBook
sales. So, it’s hard to be less than happy about success.
No, it’s actually already happening. I’ve
written a new Mark Stone, a reboot set in the present. Also, years ago when we
were both hungry young lads, Joe Lansdale and I collaborated on three M.I.A. Hunter books. They’ve just sold out a Subterranean Press hardcover omnibus of those so they’re now available
in eBook format and trade paperback.
Bonus material is included in the new editions to take readers behind the
scenes of the development of the novels.
I heard this
question in an interview on a BBC
program a few years ago. If you were stranded on an island and you had only one
book, what would it be?
Well, of course, we all have our favorite
novels but once read, the great ones are remembered. I’d have to cheat. I snuck in two. If I was
looking at eternity all by myself on a deserted island and wanted
entertainment, wisdom, and to stay in touch with the universe beyond the end of
my nose, reckon I’d pack along a Bible and The Collected Plays of Mr.
Shakespeare.
The opposite side
of the coin. If you were allowed only to recommend one of your novels, or
stories, which one would you want people to read?
Hank & Muddy.
That one just has a life of its own. I love that book and I hope I write a few
more that are as good.
1 comment:
A great interview with a great writer -- and a great guy.
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