BEATING THE BUSHES by Christine Matthews

Vincent Lloyd is broken. His six-year old daughter disappeared a few years earlier, and he was the prime suspect. He was suspected by the police and hounded by the media. When a teenage boy named Steven Kracher disappears from the small town of Kimmswick, Missouri, Vincent sees his participation in the search as an atonement for his inability to protect his daughter.

The search is fruitless, and the media, recognizing Vincent, takes a few punches before turning its attention to Steven’s father, Baylor. Vincent and Baylor bond and as the years pass help each other heal, but Baylor, against all reason, is convinced his son is alive. A conviction that turns to hope, but leads to dark conspiracy.

Beating the Bushes is smoothly told with multiple perspectives—some in first and others in third—in an unrushed style. Its storyline is provocative in its depiction of the relationship between the media, ratings based television news sensationalism, and those left behind after the disappearance of a child. The initial sympathy turning quickly to insinuation and ultimately accusation. The characters are complicated and believable, and the relationship between Vincent and Baylor has a subtle depth.

The plot develops unexpectedly. It twists away from the expected in interesting and satisfying ways. It is less mystery and more thriller with a stylish grittiness—

“Rain, heat and claustrophobic humidity. While my feet swell, my boots shrink, and as much as I want to put on the dark glasses in my pocket when the migraines come, I don’t for fear of missing something. Something important.”

It viscerally depicts the sadness if losing a child, and preys on the fear of a parent. The possibility. The horror. Beating the Bushes is my first experience with the work of Christine Matthews, but it will definitely not be the last.

This review originally went live at Ed Gorman’s blog on November 8, 2015.

THE BIG NEEDLE by Ken Follett (Symon Myles)

The Big Needle is Ken Follett’s first published novel – as by “Symon Myles” in 1974 – and what it lacks in complexity and subtlety is readily overcome with its streamlined, almost men’s adventure-like, plotting and enthusiasm.   

Apples Carstairs is a wealthy London real estate investor. He is divorced with a seldom seen teenage daughter, Jane, and two live-in lovers he enjoys as something more than wanton distraction. Apples’ world shudders when his ex-wife arrives at his doorstep with dark news: “Jane is in hospital in a coma.” Jane’s coma is the result of a heroin overdose. Apples is stunned with guilt for ignoring his daughter for so many years and then anger toward the heroin pushers. In an instant, Apples decides to destroy the man responsible for importing heroin into London. Not the street pusher, or distributor, but rather the top-level executive of the enterprise. A man he calls, “Mr. H”. His mission leads him from the underworld of London to the streets of Marseilles and back.

The Big Needle is more action than crime novel. It is plotted from car chase to shoot out to sex scene, of which there are many, and back again. The criminal element – identifying and destroying London’s heroin syndicate – is less mystery and more obstacle to both Apples and the reader. And Apples uses a methodical, if unbelievable, approach to accomplishing his mission. Unbelievable, because of Apples’ easy access to the crime syndicate in England and its French supplier, which is forgivable because of the novel’s quick, linear plot and lean prose. It doesn’t hurt that there is a subtle tongue-in-cheek feel to the whole enterprise.

Thrift Shop Book Covers: "Death is My Shadow"

Death is My Shadow was published as a hardcover by Thomas Bourgey & Company in 1957. The edition that caught my eye is the mass market published by MacFadden Books in 1965. The clean white background perfectly frames the little black dress attired gun toting dame. The artist: Unknown.

The opening paragraph:

“The doctor offered Byrum a cigarette, shoving the pack across his desk. It was hot in Los Angeles, but the air-conditioner that Stein had swindled from Government stores made his office comfortable. Stein was small and dark and totally unmilitary in his khakis, rumpled, sweaty, his beard a dark swath along his rounded jowls. His black eyes were friendly.”

Edward S. Aarons is best known for his Assignment novels featuring CIA Agent Sam Durrell, but he wrote several excellent standalone novels under his own name and the pseudonym Edward Ronns. The Gold Medal edition of his novel, The Decoy, was previously highlighted in a Thrift Shop Book Cover post. 

Reading Ed Gorman: The Dwyer and Walsh Novels

Today, November 2, 2016, would be Ed Gorman’s 75th birthday and it has been dubbed as Ed Gorman Day around the blogospere. I struggled with what, if anything, to post. I settled on this essay I wrote as an introduction for Stark House's edition of Ed's fine private eye novels The Autumn Dead and The Night Remembers. 

When I asked Ed earlier this year if he would mind my reprinting it here, he told me - and this made my day, week, month, year - “This is a major piece for me.” It is a major piece for me, too.

Happy birthday Ed.  

Ed Gorman is an unheralded writer of uncommon ability. He is a writer with a conscience—his characters reflect the world and he has an uncanny ability to make them sympathetic—but he is also an immensely entertaining storyteller. Mr. Gorman’s work has ranged wide, but he is particularly good at the first person detective story and two of his best are collected in this omnibus: The Autumn Dead and The Night Remembers.

In 1985 Ed Gorman, in his second published novel, introduced his first private detective, Jack Dwyer. Dwyer is a former cop who got the acting bug after being cast in a local public safety commercial. He started acting lessons, quit his job, applied for his private investigator’s license, and took a security job to keep the wolves away. Jack Dwyer appeared in five novels and The Autumn Dead is the fourth.

The Autumn Dead is the definitive Jack Dwyer novel. It fulfills the potential and promise of both Dwyer as a character and Ed Gorman as a writer. It is a richly detailed detective novel strong on story and scored with a thought provoking working class commentary. Jack Dwyer is the principal instigator of the novel’s action, but he is also a spectator of the melancholy and hard world he inhabits. He is not a saint, and is unable to right many, if any, wrongs, but he notices the humanity around him. More importantly, he understands humanity in all its beauty, frailty and brutality. In an early scene from The Autumn Dead, Dwyer describes a housing development built in the 1950’s.

“They’d built the houses in the mid-fifties and though they weren’t much bigger than garages, the contractors had been smart enough to paint them in pastels—yellow and lime and pink and puce, the colors of impossible flowers, the colors of high hard national hope—and they were where you strived to live in 1956 if you worked in a factory and wanted the good life promised by the Democrats and practiced by the Republicans.”    

It is a neighborhood forgotten by time and left to crumble and tarnish new generations with a hard scrabble existence. It is a place where dreams die, girls become hard and old before they reach maturity, and a place where the lowest rung of humanity struggles to survive. In the novel this hopelessness and poverty is juxtaposed with the comparatively well off.  The professional classes and the downright wealthy. Dwyer is unable to claim membership in either class—he was raised in one and has never been able to fully gain access to the other. The conflict of class is personified by an old classmate and friend named Karen Lane.

Karen seemingly escaped her childhood poverty, but she gave herself away in the attempt. She is described much like Truman Capote’s Holly Golightly. She is a woman-girl desperately trying to erase her own bitter world with her sex, and while her surroundings changed, for a time at least, she was never able to completely overcome the poverty of her childhood. A passage describing Karen’s borrowed room in the home of a friend captures the rub between the dream of something more and reality.

“The clothes—fawns and pinks and soft blues and yellows, silk and linen and organza and lame and velvet—did not belong in the chill rough basement of a working-class family. There was a sense of violation here, a beast holding trapped a fragile beauty.”           

There is a bitter melancholy in much of Ed Gorman’s work and The Autumn Dead is no different. It is a narrative of loss and disappointment; the loss of time, the slow crawl to death, and the disappointment of failure.

“‘You know what his problem is?’

“‘What?’

“‘He isn’t a boy anymore.’”   

In 1991, Ed Gorman introduced his second private eye, Jack Walsh, in The Night Remembers. Jack appeared in only one novel, and while he would have made a wonderful serial character, his story is seemingly complete in a single volume. Jack is 62, a World War II veteran who fought at Salerno, a retired cop—Linn County Sheriff’s Department headquartered in Cedar Rapids, Iowa—and a live-in manager of a rundown apartment building in a decaying neighborhood. Jack operates a one man private investigation shop, smokes six cigarettes a day and has an on again off again relationship with a woman nearly half his age named Faith Hallahan.

Faith is a major player in both the novel and Jack’s life. She is the mother of an 18-month old boy named Hoyt—she claims Jack is the father—and Faith is nearly certain she has breast cancer. Faith, like many of Mr. Gorman’s female characters, has a gentle sadness, an almost broken quality, about her. She is described with an intimate fondness.

“[R]egal, imposing, and, even at times such as these, a little arrogant. The hell of it is—for her sake anyway—she’d had one of those terrible childhoods that robbed her of any self-confidence her looks might have given her. ‘I’m only beautiful on the outside,’ she’s fond of saying in her dramatic way.”

Amazingly Jack takes Faith’s indecision about their relationship in stride. He truly loves Faith and Hoyt. There are several tender scenes between the three, which develops a visceral intimacy. Jack has an indistinct role in Faith’s life. He is a mixture of father, priest and lover, which summarily describes his outsider role in society.

Jack’s personal strife is a backdrop to the mystery, but it is an important and rewarding element because it focuses an understanding of his viewpoint, and it is Jack’s view of the world that shimmers in the narrative. It is offhand references to real world people like Lyndon LaRouche, George McGovern and Jimmy Carter—“…Carter I never could stand. Maybe it was that psychotic smile.”—and the sympathetic brush Mr. Gorman paints his characters with that pushes the novel beyond. He is particularly good at capturing a mood, a sorrow, an ill, in a few simple, sparse sentences.

“The little girl watched me as I started down the stairs. She looked sadder than any child her age ever should.”

In another scene, a rambling bigot who justifies his hate with religion, is described with a keen sense of understanding—or maybe pity—without allowing for credibility or justification of the hate.            

“In his plaid work shirt and baggy jeans and house slippers, he looked like the sort of melancholy psychotic you saw roaming the halls of state mental institutions just after electroshock treatment, the pain and sorrow only briefly dulled by riding the lightning.”

Jack, like Dwyer, is an observer of a world he doesn’t quite understand, but a world he has a wistful empathy for. A world filled with desperate, scared people behaving in ugly and malicious ways, but allowances are nearly always provided. Small understandings, if not always completely satisfactory, are conveyed in the narrative explaining the ugliness.   

“She enjoyed making you despise her. I suppose she hoped that somebody would despise her almost as much as she despised herself.”  

The Night Remembers and The Autumn Dead are similar—first person narrative with a sentimental, intelligent, and watchman-like protagonist—but beneath the surface both are very different novels. The Night Remembers is a wistful, sentimental novel filled with betrayal and an exhausted weariness while The Autumn Dead is very near angry. The novels are both dark, but there is humor. Jack Dwyer is a self-deprecating wise-ass. There is a Jim Rockford moment in The Autumn Dead when a bartender wants five dollars to tell Dwyer where he can find a man.

“‘It worth five bucks to you?’

“‘That’s only in the movies. Just call Chuck.’

“‘I need some grease to do it because I got to walk all the way down the basement stairs. The intercom is on the blink.’”

Jack Walsh is less smart-alecky than Dwyer, but the humor pops up unexpectedly—the reference to Jimmy Carter’s “psychotic smile” and an exchange between Walsh and the owner of the building he manages. A man he refers to as “young Mr. Banister.” His description of Banister is one of the highlights.

“He was approximately thirty-five with a short earnest haircut, black earnest horn-rim glasses, an earnest white button-down shirt, an earnest blue five-button cardigan sweater, and a pair of earnest chinos that complemented his very earnest black and white saddle shoes. It was the wrong sissy touch, those shoes on a man his age, and told me more than I wanted to know about young Mr. Banister.”

Jack Walsh also appeared in the 1990 short story “Friends,” but he was disguised under the name Parnell. The primary backup players were there—Faith and Hoyt—and the story is worth finding. Jack Dwyer appeared in five novels, New, Improved Murder (1985), Murder in the Wings (1986), Murder Straight Up (1986), The Autumn Dead (1987), and A Cry of Shadows (1990), and three short stories, “Failed Prayers” (1987), “The Reason Why” (1988), which is the basis of The Autumn Dead, and “Eye of the Beholder” (1996).

SHERLOCK HOLMES: ZOMBIES OVER LONDON by Stephen Mertz

I have always wanted to hear Sherlock Holmes say—

“Zombies.” and “The undead.”

—but I didn’t know it until I read those words in Stephen Mertz’s Sherlock Holmes: Zombies Over London. It features, as the title suggests, Arthur Conan Doyle’s timeless detective Sherlock Holmes. It is, as are the bulk of Conan Doyle’s original stories, narrated by Dr. John Watson and the narration is close to perfect – the cadence, noun and verb selection, characterization, and setting very much capture the feel and time of the original stories.

It opens with a punch. Holmes and Watson are inflight aboard the futuristic military dirigible Blackhawk, approaching Castle Moriarty to rescue Watson’s wife, Mary Morstan, from the clutches of Professor Moriarty. Moriarty kidnapped Mary as a form of extortion to keep Holmes and Watson from investigating his most recent criminal endeavor. An enterprise Holmes knows nothing about, except Moriarty’s plan to auction off its results, whatever it is, to the highest bidder. The two men jump from the dirigible, a “flight enabler” – very much like a hang glider – strapped to their backs, landing safely on the roof of the castle. Once on the castle they notice a group of empty-eyed workers loading wagons in a precise, rigid manner; to Watson’s confusion, and incredulity, Holmes labels the workers as zombies. And Moriarty, always the master criminal, has more than zombies in his plans.   

Sherlock Holmes: Zombies Over London is a hybrid adventure and detective novel. Its mystery is genuinely interesting. It features more than one nicely turned sub-plot, which effectively adds texture and confusion to the primary mystery without cheating. Its cast is unique and includes H. G. Wells and a teenage Albert Einstein. There are several scenes that display Mr. Mertz’s keen ability to develop action in a sparse, believable manner without losing the voice and tone of a Sherlock Holmes story. It is an impressive display of storytelling. It captures the essence of Conan Doyle’s stories while being wholly original, and it is a showcase of Mr. Mertz’s range as both storyteller and writer. And, it is damn fun.

Ed Gorman, A Writer of Our World

I found out yesterday Ed Gorman died late Friday night, October 14, 2016, after a years long struggle with multiple myeloma. A disease he had for as long as I knew him, and a disease I thought would never really kill him. I have corresponded with him, mostly through email, for somewhere close to ten years. I always looked forward to his emails because they made me laugh – he promised more than one Maserati – and he had such keen insights about writers, books, writing, and politics that he also made me think. He supported me, and this blog, more than you (or I) can imagine.

Ed asked me to write an introduction for Stark House’s reprint of his fine novels The Autumn Dead and The Night Remembers in 2014. He put me in touch with a couple editors at Mystery Scene Magazine a year later who gave me a shot at writing book reviews. It went well, I think, since they keep sending me books to review.

But the best thing Ed gave me, and at heart I’m really a fanboy so this is something special, was his friendship. It wasn’t anything grand. We didn’t speak on the telephone for hours, meet for drinks, or anything else most friends do, but we did get to know each other in that fuzzy, Twilight Zone, way the internet allows. He sent me books. His and other writers he thought I would enjoy. He always inscribed his own titles with a funny little note and signed it simply, “Ed”. One of my favorite inscriptions arrived on the title page of his novel, The Midnight Room, in 2009—

“That million+ I owe you is on the way as soon as Bernie Madoff pays me back!”

He often asked about my daughter, and he always, and I mean always, thanked me for everything I did for him. Just so you know, I didn’t do nearly as much for Ed as he did for me. When his illness really started to wear on him a few years ago he asked me if I would review a few books other writers had sent him, hoping for a review on his blog. I readily agreed and after I sent him the second review he insisted that I be paid. I demurred since I know how much revenue literary blogs generate – none at all – but he remained insistent and from then on every so often he would send me a small payment in my Paypal account.

Ed Gorman was a great writer. It is true he was a great mystery writer. A great western writer. A great suspense, both dark and straight, writer. He was all that, but he was, simply, a great writer. He could write anything and he frequently escaped the genre where he wrote and created something very much like literature. His stories always said something about the human condition, the world we live in. His characters, always vivid, were three dimensional. He never wrote a wholly good hero, or a completely stained villain. He wrote about us – our experience in the world – in stories that were larger than life with players so real we can very nearly see them in our bathroom mirrors.

Ed Gorman was a great writer, but he was an even better friend. And I think it is going to be a very long time before I open my email without a glimmer of hope that there will be an email from Ed. I miss you already, my friend, and my thoughts are with your family.

Mystery Scene Reviews: Issue No. 146

The latest issue of Mystery Scene Magazine—No. 146—is at a newsstand near you. The issue is packed, as usual. It features a detailed and illuminating review of Karen Huston Karydes’ Hard-Boiled Anxiety, which is study of Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and Ross Macdonald. A fine article about Erle Stanley Gardner’s DA Dough Selby novels, and interview with mystery wrtier S. J. Rozan and much more.

Issue No. 146 also includes four book reviews by, um, me. The titles: The Babe Ruth Deception by David O. Stewart, Smoke and Mirrors by Elly Griffiths, Death of an Avid Reader by Frances Brody, and Survivors Will Be Shot Again by Bill Crider.

The Babe Ruth Deception is an historical mystery set in New York City of 1920 featuring none other than Babe Ruth.

Smoke and Mirrors is an enjoyable traditional mystery – British style – featuring DI Edgar Stephens and master magician Max Mephisto.

Death of an Avid Reader is a whodunit set in Leeds, England of the mid-1920s and featuring private eye Kate Shackleton.

Survivors Will Be Shot Again is Bill Crider’s latest Sheriff Dan Rhodes, and it is an excellent addition to the series.

The reviews are available online at Mystery Scene’s website—click the titles above.

Mystery Scene is available at many newsstands, including Barnes & Noble, and available for order at MS’s website.

H. A. DeRosso is Back in Print

This morning I made a wonderful discovery. Three of H. A. DeRosso’s books are back in print as trade paperbacks and low cost ebooks. Two are novels, the third is a collection, and all three are westerns. The titles: .44, The Dark Brand, and Under the Burning Sun. I reviewed Under the Burning Sun several years ago—

“It tended toward the unusual and bleak, the mythical and surreal, but it also vitalized the characters with a hard-bitten sadness and self-awareness that is rarely found in genre fiction. A major theme in the stories is one of hope, but it is hope that is never fulfilled.”

—and the stories are as vibrant in my memory now as they were when I originally read them.

.44

Publisher’s description: “Dan Harland was a man with a reputation—a reputation earned through killing. He was a hired gun, and the speed of his .44 was the stuff of legend. He never enjoyed his work, but he did it well and the pay was good.

But even the money didn’t help when Harland was hired to hunt down a man who seemed all too ready to be killed. The look in that man's eyes as he died stirred something almost forgotten in Harland's soul...his conscience. All at once, Harland knew he couldn’t rest until he found the mysterious man who had hired him for the job—even if the trail led to his own grave.”

The Dark Brand

Publisher’s description: “Stuck in a jail cell with a man due to be hanged, Driscoll found out that the guy had robbed a bank and killed a man. He also found out that the money was never recovered. Now out of jail, Driscoll realizes that the townspeople think the condemned man had told Driscoll where the loot was buried before he had died. Now it seems that everybody wants that money enough to kill for it.”

Under the Burning Sun

Publisher’s description: “Of all the amazing writers published in the popular fiction magazines of the 1940s and '50s, one of the greatest was H.A. DeRosso. Within twenty years he published nearly two hundred Western short stories, all noted for their brilliant style, their realism and their compelling vision of the dark side of the Old West. Now, finally we have a collection of the best work of this true master of the Western story.

This collection, edited by Bill Pronzini, presents a cross-section of DeRosso's Western fiction, spanning his entire career. Here are eleven of his best stories and his riveting short novel, ‘The Bounty Hunter,’ all powerful and spellbinding, and all filled with the excitement, the passion, and the poetry of Western writing at its peak.”

THE SUNDOWN SPEECH by Loren D. Estleman

The Sundown Speech is the most recent entry, 25^th overall, in Loren Estleman’s justly celebrated Amos Walker private detective series. Dante and Heloise Gunnar were swindled out of $15,000 by a would-be director named Jerry Marcus. Jerry hooked the couple for an investment in a film dubiously titled Mr. Alien Elect, and when he stopped returning telephone calls the couple contacted Walker. It is a straight missing person case and Amos reluctantly takes it; reluctantly because the Gunnar’s, particularly Heloise, are off-putting to his working class sensibilities, and all the leads are in Ann Arbor, Michigan. A scant 45 minutes from his beloved Detroit, but worlds apart—

“The place looked as far away from the Motor City as Morocco.”

The setting is post 9/11, but not by much. The preamble is as cool and stylish as anything I’ve read:

“Roll the clock back a dozen years, maybe more; Michael Jackson was still alive, Iris, too. I could walk all day without limping. Tweet was bird talk, the chain bookstore was the greatest threat to civilization since ragtime music, and the only time you saw a black president was in a sci-fi film. Going back is always a crapshoot.”

And it only gets better. Amos Walker is his usual smart ass and hard-boiled self, and the mystery is something of a locked door job. This time, however—and not to give too much away—the locked door is in the police forensics lab. The supporting cast is college town unusual; big and brassy while lacking experience and boasting excessive aspirations. A photographer who photographs nudes in public places not minding the accompanying public decency ticket and bail money for his model. The local police have a thing for writing parking tickets, and the detective working the case keeps giving Amos a polite, but resolute “sundown speech”—thanks for your help, please go back to Detroit. Amos doesn’t much want to stick around either, but the facts keep him there as the case turns more and more serious, and more and more curious.



This review originally went live on Ed Gorman's blog December 22, 2015.

Mystery Scene Reviews: Issue No. 145

The latest issue of Mystery Scene Magazine—No. 145—is at a newsstand near you. The issue is packed, as usual. It features an in-depth article about eleven non-mystery novelists—Stephen King, Louis L’Amour, J. K. Rowling, etc.—who wrote one or more excellent private eye novels, an interview with Marcia Clark and much more.

Issue No. 145 also includes two book reviews by, um, me. The titles: Not Dead Enough by Warren C. Easley and We Were Kings by Thomas O’Malley and Douglas Graham Purdy. Not Dead Enough is an entertaining mystery featuring Cal Claxton, former big city prosecutor turned small town lawyer, set in rural Oregon. We Were Kings is a big, in both length and complexity, noirish crime novel set in 1954 Boston. The reviews are available online at Mystery Scene’s website—click the book titles above.

Mystery Scene is available at many newsstands, including Barnes & Noble, and available for order at MS’s website.

Interview: Rick Ollerman

Rick Ollerman is the author of four crime novels. His first two novels, Turnabout and Shallow Secrets, were published as a “double” by Stark House Press in 2014 and he has produced one published title each year since. His most recent novel, Mad Dog Barked—a Sarasota, Florida Private Eye novel—was released earlier this week. His work is consistently good, and each novel is better than the last; increased complexity in both plot and characterization and a creeping moral ambiguity that suits the genre he writes.

Mr. Ollerman was kind enough, and showed an amazing amount of patience, to answer a few questions. The questions are italicized. The author photograph is used courtesy of Rick Ollerman.

You have written several excellent introductions for the Stark House editions of classic crime novels from writers as varied as Peter Rabe, W. R. Burnett, Charles Williams, Andrew Coburn, and Ed Gorman. Do you have a favorite author or novel from the essays you’ve written for Stark House?

I’ve written something like fifteen of them, I think. They’re actually going to be collected into their own book (at Ed Gorman’s suggestion) sometime soon. I don’t think I can really pick a favorite. For each one, I try to find something unique to say about the writers themselves, or express a perspective that I haven’t seen explored.

For instance, one I wrote on Peter Rabe tries to get to the heart of why his writing is so much different than other writers’. The one I wrote for James Hadley Chase that talks about his being duped by the actor George Sanders and the Hollywood mafia. He ended up in exile as did his friend, Graham Greene, and it was fun to do because it was only discovered the two men had been friends after both had passed.

For the Charles Williams piece, I tried to do something somewhat comprehensive because he was a very private man and not much is known about him (there’s a Spanish biography out there, which I have but cannot read or easily have translated). The essay is probably too long but I tried to offer a credible opinion of why he isn’t as well-known as many readers think he should be. Also, there were three versions out there of how he died, the most poetic of which followed the endings of several of his books. I sent for a copy of his death certificate and at least settled that question.

Along the same line, do you have any specific writers, stories or novels that have inspired your writing?

“Inspired” is the tricky word here. I’ve always been inspired by any author and any book that is fun to read and offers something I haven’t seen before. Writers like Harlan Ellison and Charles Dickens seem to have a direct wire into my brain when I read them, and others like Jack Vance and James Lee Burke write so beautifully that I would never attempt to do what they’ve done but their work often strikes me with awe. Specific books are another matter. The first two books by Randy Wayne White in his Doc Ford series felt like the Florida I wanted to live in for so long. The same for the first couple of Thorn books by James W. Hall. But really, there are so, so many….

Your first two novels, Turnabout and Shallow Secrets, were published as a “double” from Stark House in 2014. Would you tell us a little about each and how you came to write them?

Other than writing Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigator-type stories when I was in elementary school, it was difficult for me to get very far into writing a novel. I did not have a supportive family as far as doing the things I wanted to do. I’d be told things like, “You can’t do that, it’s too hard,” or “Very few people can make that happen,” or even “Other people do those things.” But I never stopped trying, as well as writing a short story here and there.

Then I saw an ad in the newspaper for a writers’ retreat to be held in the Everglades with two-time National Book Award winner Peter Matthiessen and Randy Wayne White. We all stayed at this small resort on the edge of the glades with dozens of alligators lining both sides of the man-made channel out to the Gulf of Mexico. And we wrote a lot during the long weekend. Both Peter and Randy (as well as everyone else) said very nice things about my writing and when I got home, just like that I could keep going, and I sat down and wrote Turnabout.

One of the most important things every writer has to overcome is whatever lack of confidence may be lurking in their subconscious. I tell people who are struggling not to reread what they’ve already written but to go ahead and write the book they think they’ve written, continue with the version that’s in your mind. Early on, when you read your own stuff all you do is find the faults. In some ways it’s like hearing your own voice on tape: what’s coming back doesn’t sound like you, at least to your own ear. A writer has to get past this, and for me it was some little switch that got turned on at that conference.

There was some publisher interest in it when I was finished but this was back in the day where every protagonist had to be an alcoholic vet ex-cop who accidentally killed a kid on the job (enough already; Lawrence Block already gave us Matthew Scudder). One editor told me the book was publishable but she didn’t like the main character. What I had done was take an ordinary guy, mess him up for a while, then give him his life back. You can do that now, but you couldn’t do that so much then. Another editor had me overnight the manuscript to her but then she lost it and I let it go.

There’s only one thing you can control in this business and that’s the writing itself. Everything else is someone else’s doing. I thought rather than flog the first book to death, I’d just start writing the second, which became Shallow Secrets. I wanted to do some things differently from the first book, and hopefully better. You always want to get better without repeating yourself. Back then, there was no e-mail so making copies and sending queries and synopses and sample chapters and entire manuscripts was really time consuming so I just took the attitude that if I just kept writing, and if I had talent, and if a bit of luck came my way, the rest would take care of itself. And more or less it has.

My understanding is you wrote these novels several years before their publication, and both take place in the past. When were they written? Was there any temptation to update the novels’ settings to match the publication date?

They were certainly contemporary when I wrote them, and they’re not even horribly outdated now. There were no cell phones, which would have made a difference, and there was the internet but no world wide web at that point. The problem was that after I wrote those first two, I experienced the beginning of what has become a chronic health problem. I went to a doctor for a series of epidural injections in my back and on the third one he punctured the dura mater in my spine and caused my spinal fluid to leak away. I lost feeling in my legs and he knew what he did but he sent me home anyway. I ended up bedridden for eight months, unable to be upright for more than seconds at a time. The brain sags in the skull and they call these things “spinal headaches” but the pain is so far beyond anything you would think of as a headache.

Anyway, when I finally recovered from that, I ended up with more symptoms. Long story short I was diagnosed with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and then more than a decade later, Lyme disease, which I’d probably had all along. I had to quit my job and severely curtail what I did physically. When they finally identified what was going on with me and I got treatment, some of my symptoms improved and finally, finally, finally, I could write again.

I did give updating the books a brief thought but I realized they would just end up being different books. Technology had advanced so the plots would have to change, I wouldn’t have written them the same way, in the same style, etc. A book is always a point in time thing, affected by whatever’s happening in your life, in the world, everything. Ultimately I thought they needed to stand as they were. More writing was going to be new writing.

How did it feel to see the novels in print for the first time?

Like I could do better. I know that’s not what you mean but that’s really how I felt. Anyway, I think that with each book I have.

The protagonist in Turnabout is a regular guy who gets caught up in extraordinary events. As a writer, what is appealing about writing this type of character?  

To me, not every story has to come out of Joseph Campbell or written to a three-act structure or feature the same sorts of characters that happen to be hot at the moment. Is it possible to write about an upper middle class sort of guy who isn’t a government employee or weapons or Krav Maga specialist? Of course it is, or at least it should be. It certainly seems to be more acceptable now than it was when I wrote the book. There are no terrorists here, or superheroes and villains. But there are ordinary vices taken to extraordinary levels and when there’s a man to stand up against them, he can be more easily to relate to when he’s more or less the guy living down the street.

That’s just that book, though. I haven’t written a series and each of my main characters is different, and probably more complex with each book. Whenever you write about someone, you go through the same sort of universe building you do for the book itself. Each character has their own set of morals and ethics, there are things he or she would and wouldn’t do, and there are things done to them to which they’ll react according to who they are. The thing you must not do is violate those “rules” you’ve given yourself; you can’t have a reader think, “He would never do whatever he just did, that changes my whole image of the character.” That’s probably one of the easiest ways to get your book thrown against the wall.

Your third novel, Truth Always Kills, features multi-layered protagonist, Jeff Prentiss. A self-destructing St. Petersburg, Florida homicide detective under investigation for corruption. He is in danger of losing his marriage and his adopted daughter. His decisions, driven by the desire to protect his family, seem to make his situation graver page by page. Would you tell us a little about where the idea for Truth Always Kills came from, and maybe a little about how you kept Jeff Prentiss likable and believable?

Truth Always Kills was my “what if” book, where I asked a series of questions that gave me the plot and the crime and the characters. For instance, if the FBI tells us the only accurate predictor we have of murder is stalking, what do you do if you know that and that your significant other is being targeted? You can get a restraining order but that usually makes things worse, and you’d also be revealing yourself to the cops. So how can you stop this and protect your wife? Can you do it mentally? Do you have the practical know-how to make someone “disappear”?

Why in a courtroom are the lawyers the only ones not sworn to tell the truth? I was involved in a court case once where the public defender said my client is innocent repeatedly and then when the judge found in my favor, the first thing the defendant did was turn around and apologize to me, hoping to mitigate his sentence. But how should the lawyer feel about that? Clearly she was lying in court….

Why is prostitution illegal and pornography not? (This gave me the crime.)

If a cop finds evidence during a search that was outside the scope of the search warrant, it is excluded. In what I wrote in the book, it hands down proved a man was a killer. But the evidence was tossed and it went free. Why, Jeff Prentiss asked? If I did an illegal search prosecute me for that, but you can’t let this guy go….

I always want to make the reader feel something and in this case, it was Prentiss’s pain as he did what he knew to be right even though other people could get hurt. It weighs on him, tears him up, but in the end, he can’t really see any other choice. But this creates secrets and keep him from trusting the people that really want to help him. Prentiss is trapped in a pool of quicksand that’s mostly of his own making but still, he can’t get out.

Ed Gorman gave a cover blurb that says, “This one has the power to hurt you.” I didn’t know that was coming until I saw the printed book and when I did I thought, that’s absolutely perfect. That is precisely what I was trying to do. Prentiss is a tragic figure through circumstance; in a way, what happened to him could almost happen to anyone. What helps keep the book interesting as well is when innocent people suffer for what Prentiss has done. He starts out screwed and ends up screweder.

The catalyst for Truth Always Kills is a character that never makes a live appearance on page, Roy Lee Evans. He is the source of most of Prentiss’ problems. Why did you choose to leave him as a background character—a decision I liked very much—rather than give him an active role?

It was more powerful to do it that way. When people ask me what happened to him I just tell them, “You know.” But I never explicitly say, or rather I never have Prentiss explicitly say. In a way he can’t because he’s trying to protect his wife. Which, ironically, leads to more problems for him, but that’s exactly the kind of thing I meant when I said he does what he thinks he has to but people close to him get hurt anyway. And leaving such a key element to be resolved by the reader’s mind is, I think, a really powerful way for them to figure out that particular part of the book.

Your forthcoming novel is titled Mad Dog Barked. It is a Sarasota, Florida based private-eye novel. Would you tell us a little about it?

Too many people seem to think the PI novel is dead, or that there’s nothing new to say there. But if you think about it, if someone is arrested for something, the DA’s office has their own investigators, the police force, police labs, the FBI, and all the resources of government at his disposal. But what does the defendant have?

I wanted the PI in Mad Dog specialize in those criminal cases where the defendant simply has very few options in the face of all that government firepower. The agency also does the run of the mill background checks and cheating spouses cases, but the protagonist has other people that work those things.

A theme materialized somewhere in the book when I realized that several characters had betrayed other people in the book. When I recognized that as a theme, I was able to use that and make a good guy turn out to actually be a bad guy and it helped define the main character’s background throughout the book.

Scott Porter, the protagonist for Mad Dog Barked, is your most complicated character yet. He is, if not quite morally ambiguous, a character with a moral code all his own. Would you tell us a little about how you created him?

I wanted Porter to be his own man. He’s free and open around the office, but his employees don’t even know where he lives or even his home phone number. He’s a charismatic guy, very capable, but he’s got a private side. Part of it is convenience for his work—he can do things that the law would certainly frown upon but he’s arrogant enough to think that it’s something appropriate for him to do. His own employees often don’t know what he’s working on or where he goes when he leaves the office. I wanted him to be mysterious in that way, but also charming and likeable but with an edge: when push comes to shove, Porter is really capable of anything. That’s what I wanted to come across anyway, and it’s a subtle thing.

Is he a good guy or a bad guy? Can you trust him or not? If he is a good guy and is trustworthy, why does he so assiduously protect his “outside the office” activities? Again, it’s subtle but when Porter is on the page, I want the reader to never quite be certain who this man is they’re supposedly rooting for.

Florida has been the setting for many terrific crime stories over the past sixty or seventy years. It has been used by both native and non-native writers such as John D. MacDonald, Carl Hiaasen, Elmore Leonard, Lawrence Block and others. It is also the setting for all of your novels to date. As a writer, what do you find appealing about Florida?

Anything goes in Florida, and that’s too bad. After flooding in the 1930s the governor of the state had levees built around Lake Okeechobee, helping to choke off the slow moving fresh water supply for the Everglades. Big Sugar comes in and does the same. Unchecked development is a wonderment to watch. When a new subdivision goes in, the developers bulldoze the land flat then burn the trees and bushes that were there. It’s like they’re taking Florida a bite at a time and remaking it into communities of cardboard houses that stand six feet apart.

When I lived in St. Petersburg, we’d go to the beach at Pas-a-grille, where Day Keene had a house and Harry Whittington and Gil Brewer would hang out. Now you can swim in the water until mid-July and then the red tide blooms and you can choke on the air and swim with dead fish carcasses bumping against you or just stay away.

Disney World and the other theme parks used to be destinations for people like us but now they raise ticket prices two dollars every week—I don’t know who can afford to go. No one obeys traffic laws. There was a time using your horn in Miami was taking your life into your own hands. Everyone owns a gun. Burglary is everywhere.

One time when I was playing basketball at a park, two guys kept jawing at each other over a foul call. They finished the game and then each one went to the trunks of their cars and pulled out hand guns. Fortunately there was a cop down the street and someone ran down to get them, otherwise we’re all just sitting on picnic tables wondering what’s going to happen next.

Ted Bundy. Danny Rolling. Serial killers like the sunshine.

Giant cockroaches, or palmetto bugs, that give you vertigo when you flick on the light switch and waves of waxy brown bodies flow to the drains. Corroding aluminum gutters. Termites. 

Hurricanes and flooding.

So really, what’s not to like?

What about as a reader?

If you can convey some of those things I listed in your writing, the reader can get a sense of a very vivid, almost larger than life atmosphere. When the sun goes down but the temperature is still warmer than the highs from the plains states, when the mosquitoes make so much noise it sounds like someone blowing in the end of a Coke bottle, if you can get the reader to feel the dampness in the air, that humidity that causes loose papers and book covers to curl, and the unrelenting sunshine—it’s a target rich environment for setting an atmosphere.

Do you have any favorite novels or writers that use Florida as a setting?

Randy Wayne White’s Sanibel Flats and The Heat Islands. I want to live in that Florida. James W. Hall’s first two or three Thorn books. Peter Matthiessen’s Watson trilogy is just brilliant. And then there are so many other authors who capture one or two elements of Florida that are just spot on, even if their books as a whole don’t stand out. And of course John D. MacDonald, Harry Whittington, Day Keene, Gil Brewer, all from the PBO (paperback original era) give a feel for a Florida that to a large degree will never be again.

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?

You know that’s an impossible question, right? I’d have to say John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany, which to me, if there’s such a thing as the Great American Novel, has to be right up there. Another choice might be a collection of essays from Harlan Ellison called An Edge in My Voice.

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?

That’s actually an easy one. First, I never want to write the same book twice. I don’t want to phone one in and I always want to push the characters, the plots and the endings as much as I can, trying to make each book more un-putdownable than the last. So the answer is the most recent book, in this case Mad Dog Barked. Then I’d suggest work your way backward to the beginning books. I don’t write a series so this works fine and as an author, it’s really a way of putting your best foot forward to new readers.