Chin Wag At The Slaughterhouse: Interview With Jill Edmondson

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130x200_Dead LightCrime writer Jill Edmonson has created a great female private eye in her character Sasha Jackson, as the reviews of her novels testify. Her writing balances humour and mystery, and her Sasha novels have been optioned for development as a TV series. Dead Light District is out and she is working on Sasha 4, Frisky Business. She met me at Slaughterhouse where we talked about sexual motivation and Sasha’s appeal.

How much crime do you think is sexually motivated?

Probably less than at first blush. The knee-jerk reaction for many people if asked this question might be that any type of sexual assault is a sexually motivated crime, but as far as I know from various readings (and not all that many of them), those kinds of crimes are NOT actually motivated by sex. (Experts can weigh in here to correct me, cite case studies, or give stats…).

I think crime motivations most frequently relate to: greed, anger, revenge, jealousy, desperation and addiction. Greed is probably number one. There are enough well-known greed examples to sink a battleship (Bernie Madoff anyone?), but greed also goes to (many instances) of petty theft, burglaries, counterfeiting, forgeries, fraud, insider trading, and the list goes on.

Your Sasha books have been optioned for development as a TV series. Do you think it is possible to write a novel made for TV?

130x200_Lies Have ItThe first three Sasha Jackson Mystery novels were published before the TV option came about. Sasha book four is about half done, and book five is well underway. The Sasha novels weren’t originally written as a script or a screenplay, so they will have to be adapted for TV.

Do you think Sasha appeals to your female readers or your men?

Now this is interesting… If you look at publishing statistics, the biggest group of mystery readers are (traditionally) women, I think about age 30 to 50 (or something like that…). Some (small scale) personal experiences/observations bear this out. Before I even penned my first manuscript, I was pretty involved in mystery fiction. I started (and for a long time ran) two separate mystery book clubs. All the members were women. There were never any guys asking to join. Then there are groups like Sisters in Crime (members are authors and fans or aspiring writers), and you see from them how very, very loyal female readers are. As well, when I was doing my MA (Cultural Studies), I did three research papers on women and crime fiction.

So, I kind of wrote with women in mind, and – at least initially – when I did store signings, I’d focus more on women than men.

The weird thing is that 99% of my fan letters are from men!!!!

I definitely sell more books to chicks than guys at any given store signing. Female readers will often put a quick comment on the Sasha Jackson Mysteries fan page on Facebook, but men actually send emails to me complimenting the books, saying very nice things about Sasha, and telling me they want to read more!

The above may be attributable to all sorts of different things (e.g. perhaps women are more inclined to join book clubs, maybe men use Facebook less… I dunno!) In any case, it’s really neat that the response from both guys and gals has been great: People really like Sasha.
I think, perhaps, my agent said it best: “Sasha Jackson: Girls want to BE her. Guys want to DO her.”

Do you think female killers are motivated by different things than male killers?

Short answer for this one! No, I don’t. I think the same motives (greed, revenge, etc.) are as likely to apply to female villains as to male villains.

Is there a particular event that has changed your life and influenced your writing?

There’s no particular event that influenced my writing in terms of style or how I approach and feel towards writing. There is, however, an event (actually two separate but related events) that gave me the plot for an upcoming Sasha Jackson book. It will be the fifth book in the series.

The event was the purchase of my first home. I guess you could say that I bought a “lemon.” The house had been renovated top to bottom and looked great. The home inspection I had done before purchasing didn’t suggest and areas of concern. When I took possession – in January 2009 – the nightmare began. There were a TON of “behind the scenes” problems, starting with frozen water pipes (remember, this was January in Canada… brrr!) I found that the house had more that twenty building code violations. Long story short, I got a lawyer, went through a ton of hoops, chased a lot of paper trails. Eventually, I got an out of court settlement that I was happy with, and the house was 100% fixed.

Meanwhile, as all this was unfolding (throughout the winter of 2009) another event happened. The house right next door to my new lemon went up in flames… as it happened, it was Friday the 13th of March (not that I’m superstitious…) I’m the one who called 9-11. The windows from next door blew out and landed on my front porch (that was the noise that prompted things…) When I looked outside, there was this guy, on fire, with chunks of skin falling off him! I called 9-11 and stayed with Dude until the fire and ambulance came.
Turns out the fire was started because the house was actually a METH LAB!!!! Meth Dude was in I.C.U. for a long while. Eventually, he was tried and is now locked up.

So, these events will make up part of the plot for the fifth Sasha Jackson mystery.

Do you think writers are motivated by a fear of death?

Hmmm… I’ve never really thought about this before… I’d have to say: Nope. I don’t think a fear of death motivates writers. Perhaps, though, a sort of “quest for immortality” (the author’s words live on…) may motivate some writers (but my guess would be that this is at a subconscious level). It’s also possible that with certain kinds of crime fiction – such as medical thrillers – a fascination with/curiosity about death may be the writer’s underlying motivation.

How would you like to be remembered?

Hmmmm… Is it a wrong answer to say that I just want the books to be remembered? I guess I’d like to be remembered as a good friend, a good writer and a good teacher. Just those three things. Maybe also as someone with a wicked sense of humour and a degree of creative talent.

Graham Greene said writers have a piece of ice in their hearts. What do you make of his observation?

Hmmm… I have heard of Greene, but haven’t read any of his works. The quotation has me curious now to check him out and try to figure out why he said that.

“A piece of ice in their hearts” is such a cold (ignore the pun) and negative way of describing writers, or at least to me it feels negative. Not surprisingly, most of the writers I know are mystery writers, and I’d describe the bunch of them as fun and funny, crazy (in a good way), curious, and very warm. If one were going to apply that quotation to mystery writers, maybe it should be changed to “have an ice pick in their hearts…” Aha! Now we’re talking… Who plunged the ice pick into the heart and why…?

I lean more towards other quotations about writers and writing, such as the following:

“A writer without interest or sympathy for the foibles of his fellow man is not conceivable as a writer.” – Joseph Conrad

“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection.” – Anais Nin

What are you working on now?

Lots!

Sasha #4 – which will be called Frisky Business. It’s about a murdered porn star, no wait, TWO murdered porn stars!!! The plot was inspired by Chapter 2 in “Empire of Illusion” by Chris Hedges. Hedges is a provocative writer (nonfiction), and Chapter 2 had me SEETHING! Mad enough to kill… at least, fictionally…

I also have rough starts for Sasha #5 and #6. Just because I know what order they’ll be released in, that doesn’t mean it’s the order I’ll actually write them in. I’ll open up whichever manuscript I’m having the most fun with, or have the most ideas for.

I also have two pet projects that I have been tinkering with for a while; both are nonfiction. The first is a Canadiana/History/Popular Culture book. The second is a biography of a blues guitar player, whose name I won’t reveal just yet… I keep changing my mind about the angle or tone of the first, and I’m a bit overwhelmed by the research (I’ve dug up way more than anticipated!) for the second. So, I need to figure out what my approach will be with each of them before I dive in again.

If you were paid a sum of money to carry out a hit how would you do it to avoid detection?

Richard! You are diabolical! What a question! You want me to plan the perfect crime, and then share my brilliant plan with you and your readers? Tsk, tsk.

I’ll play along, but for the record, no matter how much money was offered, I’d never do such a thing. But IF IF IF I ever did, I’d choose poison.

Quite some time ago, I attended a lecture about poisonous plants found in your backyard (or the neighbour’s). It really was quite an interesting discussion. Number one thing I learned that night: The camper’s or outdoorsman’s rule of thumb, that if you see an animal eating leaves or berries of a certain plant, then that plant is probably safe for human, is false. The presenter talked about plants that are safe for dogs, but fatal for horses, or berries that are safe for squirrels but unsafe for people. The list was surprising. Innocent and deadly all at once.
Something that stuck with me from that night is: With a certain kind of flower – a kind you’d normally stick in a vase and display on the dining room table – well, the WATER in the vase of said flower is very toxic to humans. How a murderer could get his victim to actually drink that water is something I haven’t figured out yet. But, it strikes me as a cool idea that I may use in a future Sasha book. You could have the “murder weapon” right there in plain sight! Household poisons or toxic things commonly found in nature seem like a neat plot for a mystery novel.

Thank you Jill for an intriguing and perceptive interview.

240x300_JEdmondsonJill Edmondson links:

Website

Blog

Follow Jill on Twitter

Dead Light District on Amazon US and UK

The Lies Have It on Amazon US and UK

Posted in Author Interviews - Chin Wags | 6 Comments

Chin Wag At The Slaugherhouse: Interview With John Domini

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John Domini has won awards in all genres, publishing fiction in Paris Review, Ploughshares, and anthologies, and non-fiction in GQ, The New York Times, and elsewhere, including Italian journals. The New York Times has praised his work as “dreamlike… grabs hold of both reader and character”. His novel A Tomb On The Periphery is now available as an E Book.

He met me at The Slaughterhouse where we talked about genre writing and identity.

There has been much ongoing debate about the relative merits of genre writing as opposed to literary writing. Do you think literary writing is just another genre?

A significant question for some folks, and a legitimate one, but nonetheless the issue of genre doesn’t much interest me. If by genre we mean some sort of category, SF or Fantasy or Crime or Spy, identifying that category matters far less to me than identifying whether the book’s imaginative, perceptive, well-rendered, vital… whether it’s, y’know, good work. Fitting William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition in some sort of SF slot (and to be sure, the earlier Neuromancer makes a better fit) ignores the sturdier qualities of the 2003 novel: its character richness and insight into the times. Another way to put my objection is to point out that the “literary novel” is a genre cooked up just recently, just over the last couple of decades, for the marketing purposes of major publishers. Promoters and booksellers use it to designate a realistic novel, written with some attention to style (though nothing too freaky, please), set among the contemporary bourgeois, folks with decent money and education, and concerning their life’s quiet challenges and changes. The model in English would be Austen, call it Austen brought up to date, but the larger challenge remains: is the irony and intelligence anywhere near Austen? Alternatively, should John Le Carré, at his best rich in social and personal acumen, be excluded from the “literary” because he tells stories of spy-vs.-spy? On top of that, the “literary” as category suffers further confusion over the place of anything freaky, anything experimental. A novel with some aspect of the uncoventional, even something so familiar by now as long passages in stream-of-consciousness, can be termed “literary” for this aspect of style. Indeed, it can be criticized as “too literary!” I renounce the “literary novel” — while embracing, ever more tightly, literature.

A writer like Donald Barthelme is playful in his fictions, which inhabit what has been called postmodernism and its metafictions. Do you think the fragmentation of identity seen in postmodernist works are connected to the excess of information that characterises the modern era?

In one of Barthelme’s interviews (Paris Review, I believe), he points out that we’ve already got a working list of guidelines for good behavior, ten items only: the Commandments. With Moses and Exodus in mind, continued Barthelme, didn’t it stand to reason that fiction occupy itself with something else? Something other than exemplars of How to Live? He’s got a point, and that’s my point — I’m one of those who sees the storyteller’s job as expressing ancient truths in new, even startling, ways. I’m not sure the “narrative arc” of a life, as they say in Hollywood, will end in a new place, but I’m positive that the “arc” will follow something other than stale B-movie geometry. How about a rhomboid, say? Or the saddle-shape of the universe? I mean, we all know that feeling we had as a child, that scary, meditative moment when we were suddenly aware of infinity, the vastness beyond our ken. A wonderful climax, that, a story moment. Yet too many narrative artifacts ignore that kind of honest awe in favor of reassurance or simple closure. Barthleme devoted a career to the difficult work of resisting closure: “worst of all,” he wrote in “The Dolt,” “is to begin, to begin, to begin.” The storytellers who matter to me always have that quality of beginning. When their work arrives at some conventional wisdom or another, like for instance a coming-of-age, it surprises us by its unexpected form, its new geometry. Thus what your question terms “the fragmentation of identity” is one search for new paths to the old place of awe. It’s not exactly Barthelme’s path, I’d say, he’s more interested in love, but in any case, while his work matters enormously to me, since he was once a teacher a later something (something) of a friend, nonetheless my story shapes can’t be his, can they? Not if they’re to have some absolute value of their own? Still, I’ll wrap up this answer with another of his blink-inducing lines: “The death of God left the angels in a strange position.”

Do you think that those who claim writers should be moral in their fictions are deluding themselves about what it takes to write a good story?

Well, yes.

I mean, couldn’t I leave my answer at that? And if I did, wouldn’t it deliver something like a story surprise, here? Surprise seems to me intrinsically bound up with what’s moral about fiction. The integrity that matters is the storyteller’s fidelity to his or her imagination. The imagination opens up surprises, the dream exposes the shadow as well as the light, and, if I wanted to get all Yoda on you, I’d ask, what good would the light be if not for the shadow? Yeah yeah yeah. The point is, stories have to disturb. What shocks and upsets — assuming the teller’s got the gift, of course — is what enables us first to identify with the sufferers or voyagers or whoever and then to take whatever pleasure or profit we get from a narrative. This much was in the nature of drama long before Aristotle wrote his Poetics. But of course your question refers to a more recent work of criticism, a silly, flimsy screed by the American writer John Gardner, On Moral Fiction. Back in 1979, OMF raised a defense of Gardner’s own feeble imagination (his novels, nowadays, get far less attention than this book) by attacking the much richer ones around him. In particular he went after American Postmodernists like Barthelme, though Calvino and a number of other Europeans also put up steep challenges to convention (just think of filthy, fascinating Houellebecq), because Gardner sought attention in the U.S. The book’s single strong point remains its media-savvy title. Otherwise it’s mostly lists, good guys versus bad guys, and witless misreadings. Look, John Barth’s 1960 masterpiece The Sot-Weed Factor is all about morality; the point of of its wild Colonial comedy is the main character’s spiritual trial. But then Barth has a magnificent imagination, an omnivorous thing with a dozen busy tentacles.

In relation to Gardner, do you think that the US is in danger of succumbing to theocracy, and to what extent does Houellebecq encapsulate the ongoing desire in Europe to epater la bourgeoisie?

Two very different different questions, there! The first, I must say, lies well outside my competence. Foretelling the future of American society, whew, that might be a fool’s errand. I can say that what threatens the U.S., just now, isn’t so much the issues with roots in religion, like the right of gays to marry. Far more dangerous is the terrible inequality in wealth and income, which continues to eat away at the middle class and add to the population of underemployed and unemployed, often on the verge of homelessness. Combine that large pool of the disenfranchised with an ever-more-remote Congress, the “people’s representatives” ever more beholden to the very wealthy, and you’ve got the recipe for widespread unrest. I wouldn’t be surprised — though I would be dismayed — to see shantytowns and rioting such as we had in the 1930s, or back in other badly depressed eras. Occupy Wall Street could be a harbinger. Scarier still, these days there are a lot more guns in circulation… But what was your other question?

Houellebecq?

Right, right. Elementary Particles was the first of his I read, in this I’m like most Americans (though it was an Italian who recommended it to me), and I’ve caught up with the later novels. The first I still haven’t read, I believe the English title’s Whatever, and folks I trust say that’s his most humane. From where I sit, though, the one that matters looks to be Particles, and not just because it jabs the complacent and well-off. The novel’s sex stuff, like its misanthropy (i.e., better to kill yourself than grow old in a wheelchair), isn’t so new or outrageous, really. The smut and sneering are well done, but they’re not the breakthrough. Rather, that novel makes its mark for its extraordinary new take on science fiction. Houellebecq displays marvelous moves as he sneaks up on his brave new world. That’s how the best artwork guts the bourgeois.

Tell us about A Tomb On The Periphery.

Ah, a subject I know! Or I ought to… Hmm, you and I have been talking a lot about genre, and I can say that Tomb has its genre elements, in particular out of the crime novel. A bit of the ghost story too. The crime novel is about a lifestyle, whereas the mystery novel needs to solve a particular bloodletting, and while my Tomb makes room for some bloodletting — at the climax, I’ve got knives out and guns going off — what really makes the story go is a classic internal wrangle for the criminal, namely, how bad is he going to be? My young man Fabbrizio (the name is usually spelled with just one “b,” but I have secret reasons for the second) works on the fringes of the Naples malavita, the “bad life,” the crime syndicate known as the Camorra. He has his reasons, family problems, economic pressures, and from the first he’s nosing into more dangerous risk and exposure. Further prompting him to these excesses is a femme fatale, sure, a devious American girl, and by the end of the first scene there’s a MacGuffin, a piece of valuable contraband. Elements of the crime novel, as I say. And not much further along, the ghost speaks up, or what might be a ghost. Still, I’d like to think that my combination of these elements takes us to character development and social insight. I’d like to think my sentences are open to edgy, playful effects, and free of dead language, opening up fresh perspectives on experience. So. The book has depth of personality (ideally, anyway), plus perceptions about a complicated old city and a moment in history, and unexpected pop in the style as well. If these make my Tomb into a literary novel, so be it. You know, Fabbrizio’s rough-and-tumble also builds, in a rickety way, on the story of my previous novel, Earthquake I.D.140x210 Earthquake

That story, like Tomb, is set in Naples after the next earthquake, and the books are the first two of a loose trilogy, set in that perilous place and time, each with a very different point of view. Given this larger conception, Tomb on the Periphery would seem doomed to wear the scarlet letter of The Literary! But as I said before, the category “literary” comes from the folks in Marketing, not from the creative end of the calling. Did Joseph Conrad fret over whether Nostromo would wind up on the Adventure shelves? Or, God help us, the shelves labeled “Latin-American Interest?” The liveliness, not the label, is what matters.

Graham Greene said that writers have “a piece of ice “in their hearts. What do you make of his observation?

Richard, for starters, I’m honored just to appear on the same web page as Graham Greene. Talk about an omnivorous sensibility, even in the books he called “entertainments.” As for ice in the heart, I could again confine myself to a single syllable: Yes. Sure. Word, as they say in Hip-Hop Nation. Greene’s raising another warning, there, about trying to impose a moral while creating a story. That’s what I hear, at least, and the quip goes to the conception of the drama, the need to prize what works as narrative over sentimental attachments. I mean, I brought up Jane Austen earlier, and I hope I showed respect, though I don’t write much like her or think literature should keep put where she was. Still, think about Austen a moment. Her tales show a lot of restraint, don’t they? Everyone keeps their clothes on, and no one brandishes so much as a fireplace poker, let alone a Glock 9. Yet Austen had Greene’s ice in her veins, no question. When it comes to her women’s hard choices, and to the mortal threat they faced, during her era, in a chill or in childbirth, Austen writes with surgical detachment. Of course the natural companion to such a bracing clarity is a profound sympathy. Austen has compassion as well, she knows just how badly her people are hurting, and I’d argue Greene had that compassion too. His understanding embraced, even, the complexities of his villains. And that balance of warmth and cool seems to me why Pride and Prejudice can strike home more poignantly than, to pick a novel that’s far more violent, the splatterfest American Psycho. Easton Ellis, there, isn’t to be faulted for a failure to treat women nicely — homicidal mania has always been a perfectly good option for fiction. Rather, he suffers a failure of imagination. Psycho’s target is such an easy one, the broad side of the American capitalist barn, and the arrows he sinks into it spell out a simple moral fable, another portrayal of the wickedness of greed. Small wonder that book worked well as a movie, within the narrow confines of 90 minutes, where stick figures have their best impact. In a novel, in fiction, the medium of language tends to the multifarious, it works down in the back of the brain where words and concepts couple and uncouple bewilderingly, disturbingly, serendipitously and the hands that seek to sculpt order out of that chaos need to be steady.

Do you think religion has been displaced by the rise of the technocrats?

Again, we’re no longer in my bailiwick, here. I’m no sociologist, much less a soothsayer, though I can point out that the question reveals a cultural bias. Outside our Enlightenment-framed Euro-American gated community, religion clearly remains a driving force for millions. Even as the Navy Seals gunned down Osama, the militant Al-Shabbab was gaining power down on the Horn of Africa. Come to think, wasn’t your earlier question about America becoming a theocracy rooted in the threat of born-again Christianity? The recognition that such narrow-minded believers might become powerful enough to derail democratic systems? I mean, I read the newspapers, even if I they’re on the web. I can see that much. But what I understand better, as a fiction writer, is how the place of religion in people’s lives often proves fruitful, when it comes to developing character. In the opener of my Naples set, Earthquake I.D., my protagonist Barbara may have first come alive for me as a Catholic. When I discovered what I call her “spiritual muscle,” impossible to pinpoint yet undeniably powerful, I got my first concrete sense of her character. Now, Barbara has a lot else going on, of course. She’s in middle age, long married, a mother of five. But her belief has a lot to do with her coming to the earthquake zone — her and the family — and with the hullabaloo that breaks loose once she arrives. That’s the impact religion still has, in the Enlightenment-framed culture you and I share. God speaks in private; he breaks up families, not nations. I can’t help but notice, for instance, that the best dystopian novels (the ones that truly scare me, at least) don’t deal in futures defined by religion. I mean, I just can’t buy Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, in which an America taken over by Christian militants strips women of all rights. I just can’t buy the premise, though Atwood follows through with great verve. But the shriveling human space of William Gibson, his slow crumble, that I recognize and believe in. Gibson’s mechanistic Purgatory is often compared to the world of Philip K. Dick, but the root pattern, the Ur of the dystopic future, was set down by righteous old George Orwell. The totalitarianism of Big Brother didn’t depend on religion; 1984, rather, is a nightmare ruled by technology.

What do you see as the ongoing influence of Wallace Stevens on poetry?

Oh-ho, someone’s been browsing my blogs and comments for Big Other! That’s a discriminating and heady place, http://bigother.com, and my hat’s off to its administrators John Madera and Greg Gerke; I hope you also got a peek, on there, at my Dante materials. They were doing “A Week of Wallace,” something like that, when I posted my thoughts. Not that they were thoughts you wouldn’t expect, given what I’ve been saying here. I can’t deny that Stevens was a metrical master, always bringing off an astonishing amalgam of rigor and silk, like the yawn and murmur of iambic pentameter in “Sunday Morning,” or the marching in place, marching yet joshing, in the foursquare “Anecdote of the Jar.” But what I celebrate about his work, and what I discern as his “ongoing influence,” is his imagination. Stevens is nothing without those off-kilter details, like the orange peels in “Sunday,” and the expressions from out of left field, like “took dominion” from “Jar.” His formal rigor wouldn’t leave a scratch if it weren’t for his barbed leaps of thought. That’s why the latter-day “Formalists” like Mary Jo Salter generally can’t touch him; they’re on the beat, yes, but the substance rings hollow. But stop me before I sound too much like an old curmudgeon. Stop me, and let me admit, sheepishly, that in fact I’m more a man for Stevens’ radical contemporary William Carlos Williams. Williams’ accomplishment in verse looks to me like the high-water mark of that Stateside generation, no less. The New Jersey ob-gyn man reinvented the poetic line and its vocabulary, using what came “out of the mouths of Polish mothers.” All due respect to Stevens, the great challenge for a young talent now is to come to grips with work like “For Elsie” and “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower” and “By the Road to the Contagious Hospital” — and then wrestle their way past. Makes me think of wrestling with Antaeus…

How important is Italy to your writing?

Italy, hmm. Il Bel Paese has tended to endure either feast or famine, when it comes to Italian-American writers. Salient cases would be Don DeLillo and Gilbert Sorrentino, each a magnificent fictioneer in his own way — yet similar in how they turned their back on their heritage. Granted, DeLillo’s late masterwork Underworld sets a section in the old Little Italy of Queens, but for almost half a century the only exceptional Italian-American novel might’ve been Mario Puzo’s The Fortunate Pilgrim, lovely New York stuff. But of course Puzo went on to The Godfather — on assignment, for the money — and a large part of that book’s entertainment value, its undeniable scary fun, was the free use it made of Italian clichés. The Godfather played to expectation, which also helped it translate to film (that, plus Coppola’s superb eye). More refined sensibilities, however, wanted no part of such stuff. When Sorrentino dropped in an Italian character, it was a buffoon. Of course I’m leaving out a lot, friends of mine, even. Apologies, guys. Still, I’ll stand by my basic argument, namely, that in my tribe it’s been feast or famine. And I’m trying to follow a more sensible diet. I don’t deny my genetic coding, but I’m not all wrapped up in its helixes either. I’m the son of a man born and raised in Naples, I’ve lived there myself, and why shouldn’t Naples emerge eventually as a major subject for me? Why shouldn’t I rise to the challenge? It makes a lot more interesting material than my love life. Also I can discern traces of an Italian nature in the characters I’m drawn to, in my scenes and sentences — oh, I could bloviate about it for hours! But as I say, I’m striving for better balance. I want a aesthetic that embraces both Pulcinello and the postmodern. If I were to generalize, I’d say my Italian makeup has taken me towards social realism, a lot of history and economics, while my training in the American university (my teachers, the trends of the moment) has taken me the other way, prizing niceties of craft. The amalgam may appear unworkable, but it’s mine, all mine. Why not make the best of it? Isn’t every successful piece of imaginative writing some sort of Rube Goldberg contraption?

What do you see yourself getting up to next?

Hey, thanks for asking! Thanks for all this, really, Richard. Next, well, the Naples-quake set is complete, with the novel from the African point of view, The Color Inside a Melon. That’s out with the first editors now; light a candle. My desk remains cluttered, though, in particular with one more Naples project, non-fiction, a memoir I suppose. God help us! But I’ve published a number of the materials, published them pretty well and won grants with them too. So I’ll see that one through. I have the structure now, the tick and tock of the text, and the full title may be Cooking the Octopus: Discovering Naples, my Father, and Myself. As I work through that, of course I’ll keep the antennae extended, I’ll see if I can tune in another novel. But… and now for something completely different. Now for my own Monty Python, some funny business, or I hope it’s funny. Lately I’ve published a number of stories without a narrative. Maybe a better way to put it would be that these stories both relate a narrative and undo it at the same time, always by way of our moneyed story industry, a/k/a Hollywood. Everything’s “in development,” as they say around the studio, and I’ve got some more of those anomalies in me, a book’s worth. Movieola, how’s that sound for a title? Also, from time to time, poems leak out, nubby meditations on the hard knocks of an academic gypsy. Again, I believe I have the title: The Grand McLuckless Road Atlas. I like that. Then there are the reviews and essays, the criticism. My latest is a long piece on Jaimy Gordon for Ploughshares. I’ve culled through those, and I’ve got a book there too, a selection, everything newly edited and revised, in which I redefine and defend the postmodern. If anyone’s interested…

Richard, seriously: thanks.

Thank you John for a brilliant and informative interview which I hope will draw new readers to your work.

201x300 John Domini

LINKS

John Domini’s website

‘A Tomb on the Perphery’ at Amazon US and UK.

‘Earthquake I.D.’ at Amazon US and UK.

Posted in Author Interviews - Chin Wags | 4 Comments

Chin Wag At The Slaughterhouse: Interview With Libby Hellmann

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133x200_BitterVeilLibby Hellman is a crime fiction/thriller author with 8 novels. A BITTER VEIL, a literary thriller set largely in Revolutionary Iran, will be released April, 2012. It’s a stand-alone, but it follows last year’s SET THE NIGHT ON FIRE, which goes back, in part, to the late Sixties in Chicago. Her publisher, Allium Press of Chicago, jokes that she’s writing a “revolutionary” trilogy, because the novel after VEIL will be set in Cuba and spans 3 generations of a Mafia family.

She met me at The Slaughterhouse where we talked about politics and paranoia.

Do you think politics and crime are natural bed fellows?

If by crime you mean “crime fiction,” yes. If you mean “crime in general”, yes again. I grew up in Washington DC, and when we were sitting around the dinner table gossiping about the neighbors, we were essentially talking politics. The discussion unfailingly led to corruption of one sort or another. It can’t be avoided. Some politicians are tainted less than others, but no politician — on a local or national level — has clean hands.

The issue is whether or how much good comes from that corruption. I think we tend to turn a blind eye to some forms of corruption if, like Willy Stark in ALL THE KING’S MEN, some good comes from it. Especially some public good. What makes it fascinating to me, and what I love to write about, are the variables. Who becomes corrupt when, and why. How idealistic they were to begin with. What crimes were committed to cover up or broaden the corruption. What the effects are on loved ones, underlings, or the community at large. It’s one of my favorite topics — and probably for many crime fiction writers as well.

I’m not the first person to say this, but I believe the modern crime novel is the perfect template to explore social and political issues. The trick is not to preach or excoriate. We are storytellers and are expected to entertain. If we happen to set our stories within a political framework or even slip in a message or two, it’s okay — as long as we’re not spouting dogma.

How fertile is the soil of Iran for a good crime thriller and how much of a part does paranoia play in your novel?

I think any society that is swept up in conflict, whether it’s war, revolution, or oppression of one sort or another, is fertile ground for a crime thriller. I suspect there’s a natural inclination to treat crimes committed during these times as just another manifestation of the major conflict (ie the war or the uprising). Which means people who might not ordinarily commit a crime might see an opening to do so, hoping it will be overlooked or dealt with in a superficial way. I’d be interested to know what percentage of burglaries, sexual assaults, and other urban crimes were thoroughly investigated during the Nazi occupation of Paris, for example. (I don’t know the answer). What I like to do is place my characters in the middle of the turmoil and see how they react. Some become heroes, others cowards, and still others become opportunistic and/or evil. That’s the fun part. I’m never sure who is going to do what until I start writing. In fact,

As far as paranoia, that’s a great question. I’ve never really isolated it as a factor in and by itself. Although now that you raise it, I would have to admit that some of the characters probably do suffer from paranoia. In their cases, however, the paranoia was justified. In Iran the scales tipped so far in reaction to the Shah that everything and everyone was suspect. And encouraged to be.

Do you think there is less propaganda in the West or it is better hidden?

You made me laugh with this one. No, there is no less propaganda in the West. (By West, I’m confining myself to the US) Particularly now that the Supreme Court has sanctioned unlimited corporate contributions to political candidates, etc. And the Koch brothers along with a few others concocted the Tea Party. In fact, I wonder if corporations and wealthy individuals have taken a few lessons from oppressive governments like China, Iran, even Nazi Germany, watered them down, and are trying to apply them here. What makes the difference here, though, is the first ammendment. Thankfully — at least so far — people and the press can call out the behaviors for what they are. Which tends to weaken the propaganda, and in some cases, causes a backlash against it. I realize we’re talking in generalities here, btw.

Tell us about Set The Night On Fire.

133x200_STNOFI came of age during the Sixties. I remember the era and I’ve always had unresolved feelings about it. Namely, where did “we” go wrong? Were we too naive? Too arrogant? Or were there powers much stronger than we were that virtually assured our failure? I still don’t know the answer. But I wanted to explore the issue. At the same time, I also love thrillers and wanted to write a “pure” adrenaline-fueled thriller, as opposed to a mystery-thriller, a term that some critics have used to describe my other books. So I combined a story that, for the most part, takes place in the present. A young woman is being stalked by someone she doesn’t know for a reason she doesn’t understand. That, btw, is probably the most frightening thing I can imagine. As she tries to figure it out, the evidence leads back to her parents, who lived through the Sixties in Chicago. In the process, she discovers her parents were not the people she thought they were. Essentially, it’s a three act play with Acts One and Three in the present, and Act Two starting at the Democratic Convention in 1968 and continuing through Kent State.

Do you think the sixties was a sexual revolution and did it impact more on gender relations than feminism?

It’s interesting that you ask that question, because I’ve been thinking about it recently. Was there really more sex in the Sixties than in previous decades? Probably , although there’s always been a lot of sex going on. Certainly there was more conversation about sex during the Sixties, and whether you were having it or not, and why/how it was contributing to the liberation or the dissolution of society, depending on your point of view. But don’t forget that the birth control pill, more than the culture or laissez-faire attitudes of the time, made the “sexual revolution” possible. For the first time, women could have sex without fear of “payng a price.”

In fact, as far as feminism is concerned, I think the biggest impact on it has been the pill. Women could take charge of their bodies, and over time that take-charge attitude spread to other areas of their lives. The whole area of gender relations is the natural consequence of feminism. My kids’ generation has a decidedly casual attitude toward sex –even more than in the Sixties. It’s almost a non-issue. Not gender relations. Now everyone spends a lot of time talking about roles, disparities, and interaction between the sexes. Much more than we talk about sex itself.

The Jazz Age is analogous to the sixties. What do you think the reasons are for this and has the control of the female body been corrupted by the pharmaceutical companies?

Interesting question.

There were a lot of similarities between the two “ages” — the music, the rebelliousness, the independence of women (who in the Jazz Age smoked, did the Charleston, wore short skirts, bobbed their hair). Experimentation…pushing the envelope. There were economic similarities too — an age of prosperity, even affluence was dawning and young people were spearheading what was perceived to be valuable. But there were differences too. In the Jazz Age, the world had just emerged from a horrible war; there was no war in the early Sixties, unless you want to include the Korean War in the 50s and the civil rights battles in the early 60s. I think there was a perceived superficiality to the Jazz Age — people just wanted to have fun. They didn’t want to delve too deeply into their beliefs or other people or institutions.. . while in the Sixties, everyone — well — a lot of people at least — were searching for a deeper meaning to life. There was a strong current of going against the mainstream in the Sixties as well. A rebellion against crass materialism. A return to nature, to a holistic and spiritual place that didn’t exist in the Jazz Age. (Remember “Plastics” in The Graduate?)

Control of the female body by Big Pharma: Now that’s a subject worthy of a doctorate. Hell if I know. I tend to think not, though. The pills that I take (and I am a walking pharmacy) are pretty much all intended to make me feel good or keep me healthy. That would put me in control. What is disturbing, though, is the ease with which some meds get through the FDA when we know they haven’t been tested thoroughly. Which is why we have all these sudden scares and recalls. It didn’t used to be this way as I recall. But Big Pharma has big pockets and they too contribute to the process whenever they can. Would be interesting to see how much they contribute to the FDA oversight committees in the House and Senate. Actually, I don’t want to know. Leave me a little idealism.

Ancient Sparta had the most feared army in Greece, encouraged lesbianism, was the only State to allow women to own land, and removed sons from their mothers at an early age. What does that tell us about families as they exist today?

I thought the Jews always allowed women to own land in their own name. Before Sparta. But my knowledge of Greek (and Jewish) history is sketchy, so I might be off on which came first. The examples you cite seem schizophrenic. On the one hand, women are “allowed” to own land, encouraged to bond with other women, and give up nurturing their male children. In other words, they were being asked to deny or repress their femininity. For what? Why? So they could be ersatz men?

I could probably make the case that it presupposes a latent (or maybe not so latent) fear of women by the men of Sparta, to the point that they wanted women to behave like “men”. Again, why? Of course, it wouldn’t be the first — or last — time men have felt threatened by women. The Salem witch trials… the draconian restrictions on Islamic women… the prominence of male primogeniture… the “good little Maxwell Housewife…” It’s interesting how many ways men have used to keep women in their place. And how deeply women have acquiesced to it. But that’s an entirely different conversation, isn’t it?

As far as what that tells us about families today, I don’t know, Richard. It’s a stretch from Sparta to the white picket-fence land I live in. The roles of men and women are in flux.. have been for a hundred years. The old model of the nuclear Ozzie and Harriett family is dead; the new models include lots of single mothers, a few single fathers, extended families living together (especially in today’s economy.. which might not be such a bad thing in the long run)…I don’t really see a direct correlation to the past. I think family structures today are more dependent on economic factors.

Is there a particular incident that has changed your life and influenced your writing?

Actually, there is. It’s why I started writing in the first place, but I didn’t realize it until ten years later.

Probably the most common question writers are asked is “what made you start writing crime fiction?” I’ve always answered that I could tell you how and when I started writing, but I was never exactly sure why. Thanks to events a few years ago, I finally got it. In fact, it was one of those smack-yourself-on-the-forehead, how-could-I-have-been-so-stupid moments. It was the OJ Simpson trial.

Back in 1995 I was free-lancing, and I had a flexible schedule. So I was able to watch a lot of the trial. I remember being glued to the TV, and what I remember most was the theater: a hideous crime, a compelling story, eccentric characters, drama, conflict—in other words, everything you could want in a crime novel.

First there were the characters. Central Casting couldn’t have come up with a better collection: the earnest but scattered female prosecutor, the urbane, witty defense lawyer, the dullard judge who yielded control to everyone. The racist cop. There was even a California surfer dude, the requisite expert witnesses, and the avuncular king of defense lawyers.
Then there were the forensics. I knew nothing about police procedure — and less about forensics. DNA tests, blood spatter, the bloody glove, the footprints—all those issues opened up a new world for me. And when the defense suggested that some of the evidence had been mishandled—maybe even manipulated—it played to all of my latent conspiracy theories.
Finally, of course, there was the denouement in October 1995. How absolutely noir an ending! The victims are denied justice. The bad guy goes free. Chandler or Ross McDonald couldn’t have done it better.

By spring of 1996 I’d written my first mystery. It was a police procedural, btw, about the murder of a female judge who was also president of her synagogue. It was never published, and it shouldn’t be. Still, I kept going and eventually published the first Ellie Foreman book.
Curiously, it wasn’t until 2007, when O.J. was arrested in Vegas for trying to steal his own memorabilia that the light bulb flashed. THAT’s why I’m writing crime fiction. Because he got away with it! The injustice – the unfairness of it all had percolated up from my subconscious.

In a way, I’ve been hesitant to own up to this, because who wants to give the devil his due? At the same time, though, I have to admit that OJ changed my life.

Do you feel fiction needs to be moral or does morality destroy a good story?

No. Morality is not a pre-requisite for a good story. “They” say, and I agree to some extent, that crime fiction is all about justice and restoring order. But I always think the more interesting stories are those where justice is denied at the end. And disorder reigns. If there is a compelling reason NOT to serve justice or restore order, I can live with it. Just makes the story more noir. However, there still needs to be some kind of resolution — so that the reader understands clearly why justice is not being served.

Having said that, I do admit that most of my books do have morally upright protagonists and justice is usually served. It’s the convention of the genre. In fact, the “Western” and crime fiction are closely related in those respects.

What are you working on now and what do you make of the rise of the E Book?

My ninth novel will be out in April. It’s called A BITTER VEIL and it’s set in Revolutionary Iran. (Did I already mention that? If so just delete this part..) Short version: American girl falls in love with Iranian boy. Moves to Tehran with him in 1978. The revolution erupts around them. He is subsequently killed, and she’s accused of killing him. It’s more of a literary thriller than I’ve previously written. (Happy to send you an ARC next month, if you want…).

Right now, I’m just finishing the third leg of my Revolution Trilogy (as my publisher calls it). This one, as yet untitled, is set in Cuba and spans three generations of an American mafia family, starting in 1958, then jumping to 1991, then to the present. I’m going to Cuba in February to fact check, and I can’t wait.

Speaking of revolutions, we are going through one now with the explosion of e-books. It is changing everything, and at an incredibly accelerated pace. What I thought 3 months ago has become obsolete today. However, I’m all for revolutions, (and all my books are available as e-books) although I don’t have a reader. I do have both Kindle and E-pub apps on my computers, though. So I do read them. The biggest problem is separating the wheat from the chaff. Gatekeepers have yet to emerge, although they will be different kinds of gatekeepers, which is probably good, because the Big Six were and continue to be more-of-the-same. I write about e-book issues on my blog, SAY THE WORD (http://libbyhellmann.com/wp) so that’s probably the best place to get more of my opinions, predictions, and rants.

Libby thank you for a great interview whose insights I hope will draw new readers to your work.

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LINKS:

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