Josh Stallings is your average ex-criminal, ex-taxi driver, ex-club bouncer, film making, script writing, award winning trailer editing, punk.

Over his time in Hollywood he wrote and edited the feature film ‘The Ice Runner’, a Russian/American co-production. ‘Kinda Cute for a White-Boy’ an independent feature he directed and co-wrote with novelist Tad Williams, won best picture at the Savannah International Film Festival.

He writes gritty hard edged prose in a strong highly readable narrative voice. His first novel ‘Beautiful, Naked & Dead’, published March 2011, is garnering great notice from readers and reviewers alike. Its sequel, ‘Out There Bad’, was published three months later to equally stunning reviews.

He met me at The Slaughterhouse where we talked about Noir and gender.

Do you think Noir with no sex is lacking and if so why?

Naa, there is plenty of good sexless Noir, BUT being who I am I like my Noir with a heavy smell of lust and desire. Sex is one of the strongest human motivators, it drives people to all sorts of dark behavior and thus is good fodder for… shit I’m starting to talk like a lit professor instead of the undereducated mug I am. Truth; strippers, prostitutes, lap dance queens, bouncers and low rent gangsters are the world I understand. The world I write about. Is this because my pop dated a stripper or the fact that my sister was dancer? Hell I don’t know. For whatever reason I write graphic sex like I write graphic violence. Here is the deal, if you put sex in, make it real. No fucking waves breaking on the beach metaphors, give me an erection. If you write about violence make it hurt, make me cringe.

Do you think killing and fucking are related?

They are definitely kissing cousins. Primal. Both can be acts of passion. Then again both can be cold calculated acts. Good question. There is a scene in Saving Private Ryan where a US soldier and a Nazi are struggling over a bayonet, it is as close to sex scene as Spielberg has ever directed. In Moses’ (the protagonist in my novels) case I think they are polar opposites. Sex is his way of fighting to feel wanted, killing is how he protects those he loves, it is the net result of protecting others. To do it he lets loose his inner berserker. For the Russian pimps in Out There Bad fucking is all about control over others, the same goes for killing, so for them I’d say they are identical.

You’re given a large sum of money to carry out a hit no questions asked. How would you do it to avoid detection?

Years ago I read an interview with a hit-man, he said that he always killed people in public places with the biggest loudest gun possible. Scare the shit out of the witnesses and their minds go fritz, they would alternately say he was a tall white man and a black midget, a bald hispanic, an albino. So I would buy a Colt Walker black-powder pistol. They were made in 1847 and until the 357 Magnum came along in the 1930’s to combat mobsters, they were the most powerful handgun made. Italian replicas are plentiful and in the States you can buy black-powder guns without needing ID or registration. The Walker has a 9 inch barrel and when fired it shoots flame and smoke 10 feet out. Fire that in restaurant and I guarantee no one will remember anything but the boom, the smoke and the ruin.

Do you think female killers are motivated by different things to male killers and what do those differences show about gender?

Yes, no, um maybe. Ok I’ll go with yes. I think in a broad sweeping generalization, women are more bound to protect life than take it. That said the most ruthless killer I have written is a woman. I think once you push a woman to kill, look out. When my son Jared was little I asked him if he was afraid of me. He thought it over and said “No.” When asked if he was afraid of his mother he didn’t even wait a millisecond, “Oh hell yes.” I think he was pointing out a true fact, I’m a big bruiser of man but at my core I’m a softy, their mother has a will of steel. She has never stuck our boys and maybe once or twice did she even raise her voice, but the potential for mass destruction is there if pushed.

We socialize women to think that to get mad or god forbid violent is a sin. Once let go of it’s a powerful lot of pent up rage waiting to come out. Hum, none of that answers your question… Men are motivated to kill by lust for power or pussy, women kill to protect those they love or for revenge on those who have harmed them or those they love. Moses McGuire kills to protect those he loves, and with the hope for future pussy. He is a dualistic character.

Thank you for asking a question sure to get me in trouble with every woman I know.

Do you think traditionally the gods are messengers?

I suddenly have a vision of Thor on a bicycle bag full of parcels. I want to act all smart and shit so I sneak a quick goggle, get Hermes, I try and come up withy clever way to construct a sentence with him in it. Truth is I don’t know about god or gods. If they are messengers they must have deemed me unworthy of letters, because I have been stumbling blind my whole life.

Tell us about Beautiful Naked and Dead.

Beautiful, Naked & Dead is a hard-boiled redemption tale. When it starts Moses McGuire has a gun in his mouth. He is trying to decide if he should pull the trigger. This was the scene I saw that made me want to write the novel. The thought that there was nothing more dangerous than a man who doesn’t give a shit what you do to him.

Fuck it, I’m crap at pimping my own work, so here is what others said about it…. “gritty, bad-ass, crime-drama. This book is sick.” -Julia Madeleine. “Stallings is masterfully understated in his handling of the seamy underworld that is sex for sale in America.” -Elizabeth A. White. “a violent, boozy road trip… From Los Angeles to Las Vegas, from the mean streets to the mountains, from bars to bordellos, this is a vivid, exciting, funny and touching piece of hardboiled noir.” -Paul D. Brazill. “It is a rough, bleak yet heart warming tale of hopelessness, evil and love.” –McDroll. “Moses McGuire is the most elaborate, strong and charming protagonist since Dennis Lehane’s Patrick Kenzie… Josh Stallings might be one of the most talented newcomers in the literary landscape this year.” -Benoit Levievre “It truly is an amazing book. Hard-boiled, dark, full of suspense and fast cars… Seriously. I didn’t call Moses hubba-hubba superlicious in a previous post for no reason, ladies.” -Sabrina E. Ogden

Not bad for dyslexic kid from the poor side of town. The head of a local college’s English department told a friend how much he loved Beautiful, Naked & Dead. I laughed and was real proud. When most kids were going off to university I had a wife and baby and was knocking out the bills. But the one thing I did was read like a hungry monster, still do.

William Burroughs used addiction in his fictions as an analogy of power structures and explored addicitons to violence, sex, word patterns and power as an extension of the more obvious addictions to substances. What do you make of his view?

Well he was an unrepentant old junky so I’ll have to take his as the final word on addiction. Having danced, myself on that dark side of the road it is clear that anything and anyone can become tangled in addiction. The best definition of addiction I know is “when the pleasure to risk equation becomes way out of balance.” If getting a blowjob could cost you your marriage and the presidency of USA, and you still get that blowjob, I’d say you are addicted to blowjobs. Modern culture is addicted to the all mighty stuff. If we just get enough stuff it will make us whole. We are willing to mortgage our lives and pound away our futures to get more stuff. Storage space is a huge growth market in the US, we have more stuff than we can keep in our homes and still the addiction continues. There is a real advantage to the power structure at large in us continuing to be addicted. Junkies of any kind are easy to control, keep them supplied and they will whore themselves out just to keep it coming. If we didn’t have these irrational fears and desires ruling us, I don’t think any one would be ok with the sixty-hour workweek. Hell we would strike to get it down to twenty.

To return to my novels for a second, Moses is dangerous for two reasons: He doesn’t care if he lives ore dies, and he doesn’t give a rat’s ass about stuff, so he can’t be bought. Of all the addiction out there I think the need to own more is the most dangerous. I’ve never seen a heroin addict start a war because he was jonesing.

Do you think the need for degradation is tied to the need for redemption in the human soul and is that in itself an addictive pattern?

I think degradation comes when we take shortcuts to normal human needs. The need to be loved is shortcut by spending shekels to have someone pretend to love us. This degrades both hooker and the John. I’m sitting in a diner, the waitress with a by god beehive hairdo, drops twenty and some singles for change. I notice she miss counted and give her back fifteen dollars. I do this because my self worth can’t be bought for fifteen dollars, there is a price I’m sure, hell we all may have one, but it sure as hell isn’t fifteen dollars. If it had been two hundred I might have kept it. Hard to say. That is a short cut to money I didn’t bother to earn. As a youth I broken into houses and stole, I sold some drugs, ran around with guns, hurt more than one lover with infidelity. I was and am a flawed human, because of this I have to believe redemption is possible. If not then once we slipped why ever try and do better. Striving for redemption is more than a addictive behavior, for some of us it’s our only shot at surviving.

Has one particular event influenced your writing?

I have been writing most of my life, I was eight when I wrote my first play. Awful I’m sure, I remember lots of sword fighting. When I was twelve I wrote a sequel to “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.” Awful again I’m sure, lots of shootouts and saloon girls. Writing has been part of my life, thus it is hard to think of one event, when all events influence my writing. I went to high school in East Palo Alto, a notorious northern Californian ghetto, the violence there effected my writing. Having kids changed how I viewed the world, it stripped away my nihilistic teenage world view. In my early twenties I was hit on my Harley and snapped my femur, I learned about pain in a visceral way, I know my writing got more painful after that. Yeah, it all effects my writing. My friend Tad Williams, writer of epic fantasy novels, says he puts a lot of characters in play when plotting a large multi volume book, it will take him six or seven years to complete, and by the time he gets to book four life will have changed him, so he’s not entirely sure who he will need standing to tell the tale that is both true to the novel and true to who time has morphed him into. I write short noir novels but each new Moses book is changed by what life has tossed my way. Writing is an echo of my life, a shadow cast on the page by the events I live through.

Why noir crime fiction, out of all genres, why not one that has more, um, money attached to it?

I am a hungry reader, have been all my life, odd seeing as I am also hopelessly dyslexic. I fell in love with Raymond Chandler as a teenager. It was at this same time I discovered Martin Scorsese, I was watching Mean Streets, and committing crimes at the same time. I was a shitty criminal, but that’s another story. In Scorsese I saw that it was possible to tell stories that were true to how it felt to be me. This also set me on my path to filmmaking. It wasn’t until I got hooked on James Crumley that I started to think about writing crime novels. I read everything he wrote, and then had to wait painful years until he wrote another. I decided that if I wanted that flavor more often I would have to write it myself. Early, um, bad, short stories were mock Crumley. It wasn’t until I discovered Moses and wrote Beautiful, Naked & Dead that I discovered my own voice. Now I can’t shut it up. Truth is, if I could write a more profitable genre I might take a crack at it, but it’s not as they say, in my personal wheelhouse.

Thank you Josh for a low down dirty and honest interview.

Josh Stallings is currently working on the third Moses McGuire novel. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife Erika, his bullmastiff Nelson, Lucy the lab pit mix and Riddle the cat.

Stallings links
Website
Out There Bad at Amazon US and UK
Beautiful, Naked & Dead at Amazon US and UK

Mystery and crime writer Gary Phillips has led an interesting life. He was involved in easing racial tensions through community organizing and policy after the 1992 LA riots.

He is a widely published novelist and author of numerous graphic novels, including recently the brilliant ‘Cowboys’, illustrated by Brian Hurtt, in which a nightclub shooting changes the lives of two undercover officers.

Gary met me at The Slaughterhouse where we talked about the graphic novel and crime writing.

Do you think kindle lends itself to the graphic novel and what are the differences between writing one for kindle and writing for traditional paperback?

Not sure if the Kindle lends itself well to the graphic novel format. I know from the guy now converting Angeltown: The Nate Hollis Investigations — out now from Moonstone, y’all — for the e-book format told me he’s had to break up some of the pages as Kindle scrunches graphics and so say a page with seven panels would have to be two pages on the machine, four on one page and three on the following. That suggests as a writer providing a script to the artist, I would handle the pacing different, where are the dramatic breaks, mini-cliffhangers from one page to the next, and so on, differently if I was writing for the electronic medium.

For instance I’ve talked to younger guys at the comic shop I frequent, Comics Ink in Culver City, and some have talked about they prefer the printed comic book page as opposed to say scrolling panel by panel on an iPhone. I’m sure there are others who dig it that way. Clearly the various electronic formats create a different set of challenges to storytelling. Fact, I believe there’s been a graphic novel written solely for the so-called Smart Phone. I wonder how well it did, how many hits it got — how much was cost a factor?

To what extent do you think writers are motivated by a fear of death?

That’s a great question. Yes, I do find some small comfort in the notion that when I’m gone there will be, like this image from the recent film version of Wells’ The Time Machine, this massive crumbling library of marble and Ionic columns where among the stacks of crumbling books, there will be a copy or two of my books. Of course as soon as you touch the outside of one, it’ll disintegrate into dust. But what about this age of the Kindle? How will my bid for minimal immortality be realized if my books are only in electronic format? For surely there will be this world wide electromagnetic pulse the aliens or our mad scientists unleash and all this information is wiped in the Ethernet. Then what? Man.

Do you see the struggle of Social Darwinism at work in your novels as they portray crime and to what extent do you think the same forces are at work in the police force?

That’s a pretty high-minded concept but certainly on some level isn’t the crime and mystery story about that? We know there are various levels of crime from the street hoodlum to the Wall Street insider. We also know the one as Woody Guthrie sang, can do more thievery with a pen than with a gun. But really the lowly detective is hard pressed to truly bring down the powerful. Maybe the detective, be they private or on the police force, can hope to alter events to protect an individual or a small group but it’s not realistic to think they could say bring down a massive, multi-tentacled entity say in the mold of Halliburton or a Blackwater or whatever it is they calling themselves these days.

That doesn’t mean your protagonist can’t expose the wrong-doing of such a global spanning organization, but of course they would have at their command a phalanx of lawyers and public relations personnel to spin, obfuscate and delay, for years, justice. The detective at best seeks a modicum of balancing the scales. Not that they wouldn’t want more, but I think gone are the days when at the end of the novel or the movie the hero has managed to get the incriminating evidence in the hands of the intrepid reporter and the bad guys goose is coked. These days it’s just as likely the evil corporation owns the news outlet and can kill the story that way or more likely, get a few underlings to take the fall.

Conversely, it’s still compelling to read stories of thieves who operate in their own underworld and when they clash, it’s a head up kind of confrontation be one of the thieves a crime lord or even a crooked politician. There are rules after all to screwing the public and these chaps step too far out of line.

In terms of the police versus the little guy, that’s a different story. There are far too many stories of the poor and people of color being ground up in the machinery of the criminal justice system. There are now numerous cases of men who were convicted by juries of their peers, where damning eyewitness testimony was introduced against them who now 10, 20, 30 years later DNA evidence clears them. How many studies have demonstrated the unreliability of eyewitnesses. Or the power of the police to coerce confession after grilling you over and over for hours in the interrogation room. Big dog eat little dog indeed.

Tell us about ‘The Underbelly’.

The explosion of wealth and development in downtown L.A. is a thing of wonder. However, regardless of how big and shiny our buildings get, we should not forget the underbelly, the ones who this wealth and development has overlooked and pushed out. The Underbelly is a novella with this as context as a semi-homeless Vietnam vet named Magrady searches for a friend in a wheelchair gone missing from Skid Row – a friend who might be working a dangerous scheme against major players. Magrady’s journey is a solo sortie where the flashback prone protagonist must deal with the impact of gentrification; take-no-prisoners community organizers; an unflinching cop with whom he has a past in Vietnam; an elderly sexpot out for his bones; a lusted after magical skull; chronic-lovin’ knuckleheads; and the perils of chili cheese fries at midnight.

Roland Barthes introduced the concept of anchorage, in which linguistic elements can serve to ‘anchor’ the preferred readings of an image, he used this primarily in relation to advertisements but also to comics. How much more freedom do you find as a writer when writing comics and do you think the juxtaposition of image and words allows you to do things that you cannot when writing pure text?

So, on comics, well, it’s this great bastard form of storytelling, isn’t it? relatively cheap and disposable, tales of super heroes and monsters and all manner of fantastic going-ons. Then there’s crime comics too and even mixtures where the incredible mixes with the criminal. Batman certainly embodies this has he is both costumed adventurer yet employs the classic methods of detection — computer analysis, hairs and fibers catalogued in his brain, and so on — and like Mike Hammer on steroids, can beat the holy crap out of a suspect.

Anyway, scripting comics is great because the writer gets to use visuals along with words to tell the tale. It does allow you a certain short-hand you can’t do in prose. After all in prose, you have to describe the PI’s seedy office, what the nightclub looks like in the smoky gloom and what have you. In comics these atmospheric ques are the purview of the artist and colorist. How much more then does it make the stuff in your head be realized on the page. But comics scripts like teleplays and screenplays have their limitations in the form of little room for long passages of text — dialogue in particular. This is a short hand process so the leisure you have of real estate in a prose novel is severely curtailed when the idea is to have visuals and text work in concert in comics.

It’s not inherently more freedom, rather another way to excite the senses…I hope.

Is there a particular experience that has influenced your writing?

Huh, I’d say all of it but in particular when I wrote what would become my first published novel, Violent Spring, set in the aftermath of the 1992 civil unrest, riots, uprising, describe it as you will (this the result of the not guilty verdict for the four cops who beat motorist Rodney King) here in L.A., I drew on immediate experience. I was a co-director of a non-profit begun after the riots to better race relations through community organizing and affecting policy. So I would be at some meeting in the morning in a downtown highrise talking with the so-called insiders of the city, the movers and shakers, and at night be in a meeting in a housing project (estates you call them I believe) with gang members looking to spread their gang truce — which had been formulated prior to the uprising.

Do you think political correctness is workable and has improved racial equality or is it the patronising attempt by a white liberal mentality to ease its own conscience and has it exacerbated racial tensions?

Oh what a loaded question. Like most things, and I’m not exactly sure where political correctness sprang from, though I suspect the halls of academia, the initial impulse was a good thing. Certainly it was a reaction to having others define the realities of people of color and what we used to call the Third World and now we refer to as Emerging Nations. I’m down with that. But as these matters go, some practitioners of PC-ness took themselves too damn seriously and there was a backlash. But I don’t feel PC has contributed to racial tensions. There’s plenty of teabaggers, gun nuts, GOPers and neo-nazis out there who did that day in and day out.

Do you think sexual pathology is behind extreme crime and how does it differ between the sexes?

I can’t say on the first part of your question as I’m no headshrinker. I will say as someone who utilizes pop psychology in hardboiled stories that sexual tensions, lust and mutual attraction of course play a role in the make up of the male and female characters who populate those tales. These attractions are part of what compels these folks, people who pay the gas bill and mow the lawn and do the dishes, to take a step out of line or pursue what any reasonable person –you the reader — can see is a foolish undertaking. But they are engulfed in a hormonal fog…they are in its spell and what chance do they have?

What do you think of the present administration in the US and its relationship to the pharmaceutical companies?

I don’t know what the Obama Administration’s relationship is to Big Pharma other than, like any administration, Dems or GOPers, I assume they dance to their tune to a lessor or greater degree. I’ve always been fascinated by Big Pharma concerns, their inter-locking boards, other companies their have monies in, and of course, as an example, withholding a pill that can help prevent HIV infection – or really charging way too much for it — can literally adversely affect countries in Africa. That is immense power. In the past I’ve tried to plot out a storyline involving Big Pharma with little success. The lone scientist who invents the miracle cancer drug and the scramble to either kill this guy or buy this guy off by the forces of Big Pharma. But we’ve kind of seen that. Your question has me thinking more on this…

Why did you become a writer?

I became a writer somewhat by default. When I was a kid growing up in then South Central L.A., I read comic books – still do in fact and occasional do some story writing in that medium. Anyway, me and my cousin Wayne used to trace over these dynamically drawn panels in say Captain America by Jack Kirby and put in our own dialogue. This hooked me to want to write and draw my own comics and tried to do that over the years, creating my own characters and taking art lessons and so on. Turned out I’m not much of an artist but the idea of being a storyteller – it also helped that while I played sports in school I was a big recreational reader – had me hooked. I’ve at least been able to “paint” with words.

Thank you for an insightful and wide ranging interview Gary that I hope will introduce your work to many readers.

Gary’s graphic novel ‘Cowboys’ can be had at Amazon in the US and UK and many other online bookshops – see Goodreads for a complete list of online stores. Read a review on Barnes & Noble here.

‘Send My Love and a Molotov Cocktail!’ is an anthology Gary co-edited with Andrea Gibbons. Read more and see the full list of contributors at PM Press. Get a copy there or at Amazon US and UK, Barnes & Noble, or Powell’s.

Check out ‘The Underbelly’ and all of Gary’s other books on his website.

Paul Brazill is the irrepressible force of online Noir that is kicking its way into traditional publishing by dint of its sheer resilience and readability.  He writes crackling good Noir stories, always observant of the traditions of Noir, and always pushing them to stretch the envelope.  His support for online writers is well known, as is his humour.  He is currently releasing his brilliant Drunk On the Moon Series as E Books, based on his werewolf detective Roman Dalton. So far contributors are Julia Madeleine, Allan Leverone and BR Statetham. My story Getting High On Daisy is the next one up.

Paul met me at The Slaughterhouse with some hooch that we cracked open as wolves gathered by the windows. And as we talked about Britain today and E Books a surprise visitor turned up.

Do you think Noir without sex is lacking something?

Well, noir is about making a bollocks of things, and most people make a bollocks of sex and/or relationships at one time or another but I don’t think you need to have sex in a story for it to be noir, no.

Tell us about your present writing projects.

Okay, hey ho, let’s go:

The Drunk On The Moon horror, noir series continues. I wrote the first story -about werewolf/PI Roman Dalton – and a host of other writers are continuing the series. Book Two -by Julia Madeleine- is out now and future stories will come from Allan Leverone, Br Stateham and Richard Godwin, amongst others.

This weekend will see the launch of Brit Grit Book One, a little collection of my short stories. The second Brit Grit book will be an anthology of short stories from some of Britain’s best new crimewriters- including Ian Ayris, Nigel Bird, Richard Godwin and Nick Quantrill.

I have another short story collection-13 Shots Of Noir coming out soon, though no date yet.

I have a story in Nigel Bird and Chris Rhatigan’s Pulp Ink anthology and in the debut issue of Noir Nation- An International Journal Of Noir.

Anne Frasier’s Deadly Treats Halloween antholgy will be out soon, with one of my stories in it and I’ve a story due up at The Flash Fiction Offensive.

After that: well, I will have a book coming out from Pulp Press, but I can’t say much more about that at the moment, and a story in the December issue of CrimeFactory.

To what extent do you think male criminal sexual pathology differs from female and what do the differences show about gender?

I don’t think it does too much.I assume the general view is that male crime is more violent and power based, but I’m sure there are millions of examples that don’t fit that view! generalisation is always dodgy, I think.

What makes you passionate?

Oh, I don’t think I’m very passionate person. I try not to anyway. Indifference is the secret of happiness, eh?

Do you think Bob Holness could save Britain?

Well, since he was the first James Bond, it is quite likely.

How do you feel about Britain today?

Well, I only visit once a year but it mostly seems the same as it ever was. The rich are rich and the middle classes are as dull as a Coldplay B-side – and just as whiney. The only difference is that the working class seem to be melting away and the underclass- with their gleeful nihilism seem to have a much more amplified voice than before. This seems to frighten or worry some people, it seems, but it doesn’t bother me. It still seems a varied and vital country.

I’ve heard the phrase dumbing down bleated loads, apparently because they don’t show Becket & Pinter on TV anymore or something. But no one ever watched that stuff anyway and Match Of The Day and The Black and White Minstrels always were more popular. And is there anything more dumb than sport?

The Rolling Stones, classic band or a bunch of wankers?

Both, of course. It’s impossible for me to feel exactly how significant they were at their peak but they did create some amazing music. It took me until Martin Scoerse’s Shine A Light documentary to appreciate them as a live band and funny people. Wyman’s a kiddy fiddler, though.

If you redirected Scum today what changes would you make?

I’d make it in the style of the Step-Up films… No, I wouldn’t touch it. It made a great impact on me when I saw it as a young person and every time I’ve seen it since then it hasn’t disapointed me.

Alan Clarke knocked out some cracking stuff. I was thinking of him when I saw Fish Tank recently. Cracking film. Shows you, like Clarke did, that the style of social realism doesn’t have to be a heavy handed one.

Who is the most famous drunk you’ve seen in real life?

The Pink Panther’s Bert Kwouk in Gerry’s bar in Soho, before I was kicked out by someone who may or not have been Cathi Unsworth.

At this point Paul gets up to pour some more hooch from the fridge and Darren Sant, covered in icicles, jumps out clutching a bloody Mary.

‘What am I meant to say, not now Cato?’, Paul says.

We sit Darren down by the fire and I ask them both about the digital publishing revolution.

How effective a marketing tool do you think it is to use the E Book for the serialisation of short stories?

Paul:  There are two groups that, I think, will embrace the ebook series/serial:

Young people who are into technology but would be put off by reading a massive whopping book.

And older folk who are not really into reading longer pieces on a screen.

Darren:  The good thing about digitally downloading literature is the immediacy of it. You don’t have wait months for new releases, things move quicker than that. There is no waiting for the book shop to open either. You don’t have to spend a fortune. People are going to take a chance on a new series when all they have to shell out is 86p or 99p. Everyone loves a good series too. There is a degree of emotional investment in the characters and setting. Reading from the same setting feels satisfying if you have enjoyed the previous volumes. You don’t have to “start” all over again, everything feels familiar. From a personal point of view I know I sometimes put off reading a stand alone novel because I don’t always have the time to get too involved. Whereas with Paul’s Drunk on the Moon series with the third story due for imminent release I can immediately dive into that as I know the main character and the world it is set in. TV producers have always known this and that is why programmes like 24 and the Sopranos do so well.

Pricing is important. You want people to buy that initial story and there are so many low priced e-books out there that you risk selling a lot fewer if it is overpriced. With a series you are not putting all of your eggs in one basket. If people like the first volume they will most likely buy the second.

To what extent do you think that historically the publishing world has invited its own disaster if that means we no longer need distributors or the conventional publishing route?

Paul:  It depends on how quickly publishers get on board the ebook train.

If they ignore it, they do so at their own risk.

I think the comparisons that have been made between the new ebooks and the golden days of the pulps seems about right.

Darren:  I think there will always be a demand for print books but the traditional publishers will have to seriously consider pricing more competitively if it wants to stand a chance against the digital market. They need to diversify and speed things up too.

It’s a fast world out there and everybody wants their goods immediately. The traditional publishers are victims of their own greed. They want to move large volumes of books fast and don’t want to take a chance on unknown authors. They’ve always turned their noses up at speculative fiction or books that don’t fit neatly into a genre. This snobbish attitude and frankly avaricious mentality has been their undoing. New writers now have somewhere else to go and they are going there in droves.

To conclude I’d answer that to a very large extent their inability to move with the times has been their undoing.

Thank you for an entertaining and thought-provoking interview Paul. Darren good to see you here, thanks for your insights and perceptions.

Paul D. Brazill
Get Drunk on the Moon at Amazon in the UK and US.
Paul’s world-famous blog, ‘You Would Say That, Wouldn’t You?’ is here

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Darren Sant
Darren Sant is a 41 year old writer from Stoke-on-Trent who has lived in Hull with his wife Julie for over a decade. He writes short fiction that could be called urban and gritty. He has been published in Byker Books excellent Radgepacket series of anthologies twice.

He has a collaborative short story in ePocalypse: emails at the end by Pill Hill Press with his friend Nick Boldock.

He has been published online by The Flash Fiction Offensive, Shotgun Honey, Pulp Metal and Thrillers Killers ‘N’ Chillers.

He has a book of three stories published by Byker Books currently available in Kindle format:
Tales from the Longcroft at Amazon UK and US

He writes for the following blogs:
‘Near to the Knuckle’ (as Old Seth)

‘Daz’s Short Book Reviews‘