Tim Hallinan has had an interesting career. He started writing in the 1990s with a series of LA private-eye books. At the time he owned an international television consulting company advising corporations like IBM, GM, ExxonMobil, Hallmark, Bank of America. In 1993 he had the idea for the Bangkok novels. In 2001 he wrote A Nail Through The Heart and found himself in an auction situation for the series. Since then he’s written several novels in the Poke Rafferty/Bangkok series. Little Elvises and Pulped will be released this summer.

He met me at The Slaughterhouse where we talked about E books and revenge.

How has your experience of owning a television consultancy company and advising large businesses on their corporate image influenced your writing?

I found my way into business after having spent years in college and then other years as a sort of post-hippie guy in bands (one of the bands I was in went on to sell a trillion records as Bread) and as a somewhat substance-addled free-lance writer.  The business experience was like a rocket into another world, or several other worlds. To put it mildly, it greatly expanded my frame of reference.

At one time or another I spent time with everyone from the then-CEO of General Motors to Cary Grant.  I spent huge amounts of time in corporate boardrooms and got a pretty good sense of how corporate culture works.  There are bits and pieces of that in the Simeon Grist books.  I also spent months and months on the sets of films, television shows, and plays.  I got to know stars, extras, directors, producers. I learned a lot about how the television industry works.  There’s quite a bit of that in the Junior Bender books (especially CRASHED, with its doped-up former child star and the film sets in the book) and it also plays a role in the Simeon Grist books, probably most heavily in SKIN DEEP, in which the sadistic dream-boy TV star is based on a real star I worked with back then — a total horror show who looked like the boy next door if the boy next door were a TV star.

And business also took me to Thailand, where the Poke Rafferty books are set, for the first time.  I was working on a PBS documentary about the first tour of Japan by a Western symphony orchestra (the LA Philharmonic) and I had a few weeks of vacation scheduled, but Japan was like zero degrees, so I headed for warmer climates and ended up in Bangkok.  Within five days I’d taken an apartment there.

What kind of killings do you relate to and at what point do you cease to relate to a killer?

I “relate” to all killings and killers, although I relate to some of them very badly indeed.  The kind of killings I find most interesting, though, are the ones in which the killer feels he or she is acting morally – that the killing is an appropriate and justifiable thing to do.

I don’t mean spur-of-the-moment self-defense, because that may be thrilling if it’s written well, but I don’ t think it’s any more interesting than any other largely instinctive behavior.  To take an example from the Poke books — without giving the story away — when I wrote A NAIL THROUGH THE HEART, which is the first in the series, I was trying to establish Bangkok as an environment that’s especially rich in gray areas, which is the moral territory in which I’m most interested.  (I think an absolute sense of right and wrong is a luxury of the well-fed.)

So I was taking this middle-class American guy, Philip Rafferty — nicknamed “Poke” because as a little kid he poked his nose into everything — and plunking him down in a city that’s all gray areas.  I figured one way to do it would be to turn the detective story part of the first book inside-out — to make all the murderers innocent and all the victims guilty.  I wound up giving a lot of thought to what comprises a justifiable murder, and in the end Poke commits one himself.  It’s partly self-defense but there’s a conscious decision before he pulls the trigger, and that very brief decision process is one of my favorite parts of the book.  Some readers have said they laughed when it happens, and I take that as a high compliment.

I don’t actually believe that murder is ever truly justified, but at the same time I do believe that there are people who shouldn’t be allowed to live.  So that puts me in a moral conundrum.  Generally speaking, Poke doesn’t kill people because my concept of his character won’t allow it.  In NAIL he does it partly in self-defense, but there’s a really glaring exception to this rule in THE QUEEN OF PATPONG, where he quite deliberately administers the final, fatal injury to someone who’s already down, helpless, and badly hurt.  I deliberated over this for weeks and then went with it, in part because the man HAD to die, and in part because it prompts my favorite line in the book: “A sigh escapes the circle of women.”  (Obviously, that line needs to be read in context.)  I was surprised when my publisher accepted it.

Poke, I always have to remember, is a writer, not an action figure.  He doesn’t have killing skills, as Jack Reacher does.  He’s not an ex-cop, like many fictional private eyes are.  He’s a writer who fell in love with a city and then with his wife and the street child they adopted, and all he really wants to do is have a traditional, healthy, loving existence with his wife and daughter.  He wants to build a family to replace the one his father abandoned, and he wants to preserve that family.  So he can’t be running around killing people all over the place.  In the book I’m writing now, all he really wants to do is paint the apartment.  So I have to structure a relationship with violence and murder that’s consistent with a guy who just wants to paint the apartment for his wife and kid.

Do you think e books are revolutionising the publishing world and do you see a future for the traditional paperback?

In my opinion, e-books are the most important transformation in publishing since the mid-19th century, when the surge in the popularity of novels gave birth to the triple distribution whammy: the practice of serializing novels in magazines, the publication of hardcover editions, and the rapid growth of “circulating libraries.”

That’s pretty much what we’ve had ever since, until about five years ago.  Books were printed at substantial cost, sometimes serialized in magazines, sold in stores, and circulated through libraries.  What changed?  Prices, mostly — cheaper hardcovers and paperbacks made books available to the lower (economic) classes and made publishing a big business.

But even with a more democratic distribution system, barriers to publication remained in place.  There were two big ones: first, cost and know-how — publishing and distributing a book was expensive and required an encyclopedia’s worth of info about stores, critics, etc.  Most people simply couldn’t afford it and didn’t have the expertise.

The second barrier was geographic — if someone’s book didn’t appeal to a small number of people living and working in a few blocks of Manhattan, the rest of the country would never read it.

Well, e-books have lowered the cost of self-publishing essentially to nothing, and broken the New York stranglehold over which books Americans get to choose.

But when we disposed of traditional publishing, we also eliminated the biggest crap filter.  I’m not saying that the big publishers don’t put out crap — of course, they do.  But they rejected 1000 pieces of crap for every one they published.

Now all that crap is available.  Tens of thousands of terrible books, at our fingertips.

Of course, there are also thousands of absolutely terrific books that would never have found a way into a legacy publisher’s spreadsheet.  They weren’t “commercial” enough or they weren’t “trendy” enough or the publishers who rejected them were boneheads.  So now the people who wrote then have a way to make their voices heard, and that’s great.

But still, this new publishing phenomenon needs to develop its own crap filters, or at least a sifting mechanism that makes it easier for readers who are looking for a specific kind of crap to find it.  And I think that’s what’ll happen next.  I just hope that when it comes, it’s not elitist and based in New York.

Tell us about your Poke Rafferty thrillers.

The Poke Rafferty books are intended to be thrillers, as opposed to mysteries.  For me, the difference between a thriller and a mystery is the central question asked by the book.  In a mystery, it’s “Whodunnit?”  In a thriller, it’s “How do you survive it?”  Thrillers often gain in suspense from the bad guys/girls being on the page, apparently out-thinking the protagonist or setting traps for him or her.  One of the tools thriller writers can use that mystery writers can’t is the kind of irony where we see our hero planning meticulously for something we know in advance is doomed to fail.  Or going somewhere, feeling as safe as an oyster, when we know that he’s walking into a giant shucking knife.

Still, there are mystery elements in the Poke books, too.  We don’t know who’s behind one sequence of events in BREATHING WATER until just before the book ends.

But for me, the center of the books is the continuing story of that little hand-built family made up of Poke, the American travel writer; Rose, the former bar girl he’s married; and Miaow, the street child they’ve adopted.  They’re what interests me most, and when I look at story ideas, the first criterion is always, “What’ll it do to the family?  How will they get through, and how might it change them?”

You have three people from vastly different backgrounds, different religions, languages, expectations, ranges of experience — and they’re trying to find their way to each other across these very deep divides.  With all the moral gray areas in Bangkok, all the violence, the amorality, the exploitation, the victimization, they’re trying to build a life together that’s based on love.

I think that’s the bravest thing in the books.

I gave Poke a family in the first place because I thought it might serve as a kind of moral counterweight to some of the other story elements.  I didn’t expect it to move front and center to the extent it has, but it makes me very happy that it did.  The series has turned into a continuing family saga, told in chapters that take place about eight months apart, each of which has a thriller wrapped around it.

There are times I look at the whole series as Miaow’s story — abandoned on a sidewalk at the age of three, surviving an enormously cruel environment, being adopted by two people she initially distrusts and comes to love, although she’s never secure.  In the book I’m presently writing (or trying to write), Rose learns that she’s pregnant, which is a life-threatening development for Miaow.  They’re going to have a kid who’s REALLY theirs.  Where does that leave her?  That, combined with one of the book’s sub-plots, takes her pretty close to the edge, an edge she might not be able to re-cross.  And since I haven’t finished the book, and I never plot ahead, I don’t know for sure that she will re-cross it — at least, in this book.   In this series, nothing is necessarily safe.

Do you think revenge is lawless justice and its appeal lies in the fact that it involves men and women stepping outside the law?

I think that the appeal of revenge in crime fiction is the same appeal exerted by the genre in general — in an age where most of us feel we live increasingly passive lives, our concerns dwarfed by the sheer complexity of the problems and challenges of the day, in enacting vengeance (or solving a crime in a whodunit, or surviving the challenges of a thriller) the protagonist takes direct action.  Cuts through the complexity and the equivocation and does something we probably all fantasize doing from time to time: going from Point A to Point B in as direct a line as possible, no matter what’s in the way.

Then, of course, there’s the difficulty with the word, “lawless.”  We all know that the law these days (and probably throughout history)  is flawed. It’s weighted to the advantage of the rich and powerful.  It’s made to look stupid by skillful, amoral defense attorneys.  A merciless serial killer dies of old age in prison twenty years after being sentenced to death.  The letter of the law is manipulated (or so it seems) until the spirit of the law becomes almost beside the point.

So vengeance and vigilante behavior have a strong appeal.  And, when you think about it, we’ve always wanted to read about people who went out and challenged the beasts, one on one.

Who are your literary influences?

I have two sets of literary influences, one for quality of writing and one for approach to writing.

Those who influence my writing style — the “quality” crew — are people who write character-driven books that push the envelope in one way or another, and do so in prose that doesn’t call attention to itself, but instead serves as a sort of clear window through which we see the action. I strongly dislike books in which people do stupid or uncharacteristic things because the plot demands it, and I dislike even more strongly writers whose prose seems continually to be saying, “Look how clever I am.”

These writers include Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, T. Jefferson Parker, Sue Grafton, Thomas Perry (whose prose is virtually invisible), the early Thomas Harris, Bill James, Robert B. Parker, and many, many others.  John Lescroart wins applause from me for how skillfully he wove the story of Dismas’ family into the books.

The other group — the “teach me how” group — are Chandler (again), whose letters provide more good writing advice than any other single source I know of; Anthony Trollope, my favorite Victorian, who wrote five hours by the clock every day, seven days a week — at home, on ships, in jolting carriages, wherever he was — and who, if he finished a book with four minutes to go, would grab a blank piece of paper and begin a new one.  And among writers who have written writing books, Anne Lamott, for the amazingly helpful “Bird By Bird.”

And then there’s a third group, writers I just hopelessly admire for the length of their reach and who inspire me, although I know I’ll never be listed among them, to go up on tiptoe in my own work.  They include Haruki Murakami and Banana Yoshimoto for magical realism and (in Yoshimoto’s case) a surgically precise knowledge of the human heart; Trollope and Anthony Powell for the depth and breadth of their multi-volume novels, respectively THE PALLISERS and A DANCE TO THE MUSIC OF TIME, both of which tell stories far too complex and highly populated to be crowded into a single book; William Gibson for the spiderweb-dry, deeply three-dimensional worlds he creates; and many, many others.

The trouble with answering this question is that I’ll be up for several nights thinking of all the people I’ve left out.  Everyone I’ve ever read who made a character breathe, or convinced me that he knew what was behind the windows in every building he or she described, or startled me with a recognition of something I felt I’d known all along but had never verbalized — they’re all my influences.

Do you think crime fiction is about resolving moral conflict?

I actually think that crime fiction is about the restoration of moral order and is therefore one of the most optimistic of all genres.

It always puzzles me when people say crime fiction is too dark for them.  In 95% of crime novels — whether they’re mysteries or thrillers or something in between, you can trace this essential line: a break in the moral universe — a theft, a murder, an injustice — prompts at least one character to take action and, after a certain number of failures and reversals, the moral order is restored — crime solved/culprit apprehended/death avenged/some sort of closure, to use a modern word, achieved.

This is an ancient progression, when you think about it — all the way back to Greek tragedy, and certainly forcefully present in Shakespeare.

I find a lot of so-called literary fiction to be more bleak and less reassuring than most of crime fiction.  There’s a kind of fashionable nihilism that’s crept into modern literary fiction (and practically taken over modern literary criticism).  Anything that ends happily, or even moderately well, is scorned as Hallmark pabulum, unrelated to “real life,” whatever that means. Personally, I find that real life is full of happy endings, however temporary they may be — the X-ray is clean, the automobile accident is averted, people actually fall in love and marry (or not) without one of them being mangled, mutilated, or killed somehow.  Sure, they’re both going to die eventually, but that’s what picture frames are for — to tell you that the part of life we’re looking at begins over here and ends over there.  Otherwise, all paintings would have to be infinite and all books would have to open with the Big Bang and not end at all.

So we’re taking a segment of life as our story, and I think there’s nothing more “real” about a bleak ending than there is about a happy one.  It’s not at all necessary for me to have a story end with the family shattered, fog on a beach, and a child’s colored sneaker washing up onto the sand.  Actually, thanks anyway.

I’ll stick with good crime fiction and literary fiction by people who actually enjoy some aspects of being alive.

Do you think literature should disturb us?

I don’t know that literature needs to disturb us, except in a broad sense of the word.  It should penetrate our surface deeply enough to provoke some thought or feeling, and it can’t do that without stirring the waters of our consciousness, so to speak.  Maybe my problem with the word “disturb” is that I equate it with sensational effects — skyrockets of violence or noir for noir’s sake – noir that isn’t rooted in any kind of real world vision but simply in the conviction that noir is cool.  Fireworks are spectacular, but they’re the shallowest form of entertainment, beauty without connections to the world we live in.

I think good writing opens us up to speak to something inside us and because it does that, we’re able to use what we’re reading as a sort of mirror that reflects light, even if it’s only for an instant, on things that matter in our lives.  It can do this with a joke or a tragedy or anything in between.  If we put down a book with the feeling that it’s touched us in a personal way, then it probably has.  Doesn’t have to be a conversion or a massive illumination.  The word “recognition” used to be used a lot, especially in religious literature, and I think good writing provides us with recognitions: I do that; I should have done that; oh, that’s what she meant; why didn’t I appreciate that when I had it; that’s a blessing I share.

Even if if’s just on the level of That reminds me, I think that’s good writing at work.

Let me finish this woolly answer with something even woollier: I think the responsibility of good writing is to entertain, if only because it has to hold the reader before it can do anything else at all.  Lots of bad writing and bad films entertain without doing anything else, and I think we’ve come to underestimate the importance of a writer being entertaining.  But when you think about it, almost all “great” writing is entertaining writing, or readers wouldn’t have stayed with it.

To what extent do you think that sexual pathology is a motivating factor in extreme crimes and how relevant do you think it is to crime fiction?

I imagine crime more than I research it, but I’d venture a guess that sexual pathology is ninety-five percent of serial killing, whether the victims are of the same or the opposite sex as the murderer; I’d say that virtually all sadism is sexually based.

But to answer the question, I have to divide myself in two.  As a person, I’m certain that these crimes are in large part sexually motivated and that the psychosexual tangle is Gordian in complexity.  As a writer, though, I don’t usually deal with this kind of material.  Having read dozens and dozens of serial killer and sadism novels, some brilliant and some dreadful, I decided that in my books we’d meet these people the same way their victims do.  This is partly an aesthetic choice — I don’t really want to spend time in these monsters’ heads when I could be exploring the almost equally complex tangle of good and not-so-good, love and resentment, love and loathing that characterizes people who are (I hope) more like my readers.

I’ve only written a couple of serial killers, and I have to admit that I didn’t find them the most interesting characters in the books.  What I thought was interesting was how a life is blown to pieces when one of these beasts lumbers into it.  In THE QUEEN OF PATPONG, I could have spent tens of thousands of words on how Howard Horner got that way.  But I decided that it didn’t matter a damn how he got that way.  What mattered was how my characters would deal with him, how they would try to survive him.  And in retrospect, I’m glad I did it the way I did.

Other writers handle this materially very well, so I’ll let them have it.

What is your view of cozies?

Cozies trouble me — not that I don’t think they should be written or that people who like them should be denied an unending stream of them — but they bother me.

First, I think they’re sort of literary Neanderthals — they evolved for a different environment and then a new species arose, better suited to the environment of today.  So far (as I’m sure happened to the Neanderthals, too, for awhile), the cozies have found a niche where they can continue to exist, even if they’re now exchanging genes among close relatives at an alarming rate.

The sensibility of the cozies is of course the sensibility of the so-called “classic” mystery, in which murder, blood, spattered brains, and bone fragments are banished just beyond the margins of the page, in favor of focus on the dry logic of detection and a wistfully envious glimpse of the so-called upper classes (or, in America, the rich).  In essence, they take one of the human world’s most emotional acts, murder, and turn it into an intellectual puzzle.

This is in turn (I think) a reflection of the post-Victorian world in which these books came into being, a world in which the man of the house scanned the papers first to delete the more vivid bits before the little women read them.  The classic cozy had it both ways — a thrilling jolt of evil, relegated to a tiny, well-fenced corner of the book, and an Age of Reason response.  In a time in which Darwin was thought to be in bad taste, these books demonstrated that man/woman had risen from, rather than descended from, the apes that represent the natural world.  (And one of which Poe even uses as an instrument of murder in RUE MORGUE.)

But the cozies seem increasingly sterile and artificial to me in today’s post-Darwin, post-Freud, post-Hitler, post-Pol Pot world of the 24 hour news cycle and Huffington Post fascination with the more scabrous human crimes.  Murder is no longer a rumor.  Murder is a daily, perhaps hourly fact, an act in which someone’s life is brought prematurely to an end, often painfully and messily.  We’ve seen the pictures.  We understand (or think we understand) that it could happen next door,or even closer than that.  We even think we might understand the reasons some people choose to kill.

So Colonel Mustard in the conservatory with an exotic Amazonian blowpipe doesn’t cut it for me any more.  I know, that’s an extreme and dated example, but hundreds of books are published every year in which murder is just an excuse for wisecracks or amateur sleuths armed with the exact piece of stamp-collecting arcana that’s required to solve the crime.  And I think that dishonors murder victims.  I think it trivializes a great sin.

To finish, I’m not saying all good books need to wallow in gore.  To pick just one series, Donna Leon’s amazingly resonant Guido Brunetti books pretty much keep the murders offstage, but she uses the crimes to focus on the human heart and the unending question of how to live honorably in a world in which honor is a debased currency.  There are lots and lots of books that keep the spatter off the reader’s face but still look at serious questions of good and evil, revenge and forgiveness, the sliding scale of contemporary morality.  I love these books, just as I love some of their harder-edged cousins.

But you can keep Colonel Mustard.

Thanks for all this, Richard. It’s been a lot of fun, and it’s made me think about things I almost never focus on.

Thank you Tim for giving an informative and great interview.

Timothy Hallinan books and ebooks can be bought here.

Find out more about Tim and his books at his website.

Jayde Scott is a widely published fiction and non-fiction author who is enjoying success in the YA genre. Her novel ‘A Job From Hell’ is a paranormal story that is highly readable and elegantly and tensely written.  As an author she creates strong characters and delivers a narrative that manages to unsettle. Her latest novel ‘Beelzebub Girl’ is out now and it is the second book in the paranormal series ‘Ancient Legends’.

She met me at The Slaughterhouse where we talked about E books and fantasy.

Young Adult literature is enjoying widespread commercial success. Why do you think this is and what drew you to writing it?

I attribute YA literature’s current appeal and commercial success partly to Twilight. Obviously, Stephenie Meyer wasn’t the first author to write a teen book with crossover appeal and market it well, but she was the first one to write a teen book that catered to a broad audience by turning adult elements, such as a broader context than just school and teenage love, into an easy read. Adult fiction has become too targeting in the sense that there are too many similarities and cliches in books across one genre because genre boundaries aren’t crossed. In Young Adult literature, authors and readers find more room for experimentation. Genres are often combined, and that makes both reading and writing YA more fun. Before A JOB FROM HELL, I actually never figured I was a YA writer at heart. It only occurred to me after an editor made me aware that the manuscript didn’t belong in her adult urban fantasy slush pile. Her elaborate email made sense to me and everything clicked into place. So, writing YA literature wasn’t really a conscious decision.

What were you writing before then?

As a teen, I used to write poetry and song lyrics in the hope of becoming a poet one day. Needless to say, one’s career prospects as a poet aren’t very promising, so I moved on to fantasy. I was inspired by Norse and Greek mythology and kept starting new projects based on ideas and characters in my head, but never really finished anything because I didn’t take writing seriously. People kept telling me to focus on obtaining a degree first and get a proper job, so I ended up putting off writing fiction for a few years, and only started again at twenty-four when I joined critiquecircle.com. It took me about a year to complete my first novel, a paranormal thriller, which is gathering virtual dust now. I guess every writer needs that first bad book to help them learn the craft, establish their style and their preferred genre, and realise a thick skin is a must-have in the publishing industry. In the last few years, I’ve been going back and forth between women’s fiction and fantasy, and have just started pitching my first completed women’s fiction novel, The Divorce Club, to potential publishers.

What do you think are the advantages to the author of the e book as opposed to the traditional paperback and do you think there is a future for the printed book?

The advantages are endless. For one, starting costs such as printing and distribution are almost non-existent. Considering that many authors decide to self-publish just to see their name in print, not having to pay hundreds or thousands, like it used to be the case a few years ago, is fantastic. Another advantage is that everyone can publish their book since e publishing completely eliminates the need for an agent or publisher, meaning readers get greater variety, a chance to try new talent and more choice. With many indie books flooding the market, readers also experience a drop in prices. Nowadays, one can get a bestseller for just $0.99. Isn’t that unheard of? The probably biggest advantage is being able to maintain titles on sale for as long as one wants because there is absolutely no paper printing or physical storage involved. And designing one’s own cover art and book trailer is a bonus too. Being my own boss in the design process is probably my favourite part of e publishing.

Whether there’s a future for print books is questionable. I think in the next ten years there will still be a demand, but it will gradually decline. Everyone’s so open to new technologies nowadays that it’s only a matter of time until eBooks take over. As an environmentalist, I’m all for saving trees and keeping our world green, and hope many people will embrace this development.

Do you think it is possible to write a made for film novel and if so what ingredients do you think it has to have?

Yes, it’s definitely possible. Obviously, the techniques of movie making aren’t the same as novel writing, but I dare say most writers pen a novel in the aim that it might be turned into a movie one day since film adaptations are all the rage right now. So they pay attention to the types of details and scenes that build the core of a good script. A first example that comes to mind is Interview With The Vampire by Anne Rice. That book has ‘made for film novel’ written all over it due to its originality, creativity and general appeal, but also its clear plotline that is easy to follow.

The right ingredients depend on genre, subject and target audience, but I guess drama, a conflict that is new and different and can keep the audience’s attention, and a love interest are the three key elements that can be found in any novel to film adaptation. Another ingredient would be a plot that is not too complex and layered with too many subplots or characters so it can be oversimplified without losing its appeal.

I wouldn’t go as far to say that all books could make a great movie. But I do believe that contemporary literature has a stronger focus on clear plot elements and a faster pace than a century ago, meaning that many new novels would make an excellent movie if pitched to the right target audience.

Who are your literary influences?

I’ve always been a huge Tolkien fan and consider The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy to be the most spectacular works of fiction in history. It’s not the content or messages as much as the writing style and Tolkien’s ability to convey a sense of reality through his fantastic description. Tolkien’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but to me he was a literary genius and one of the most talented writers of our time. I used to study Tolkien’s long passages of description and wish I could put my thoughts into words like he did. Whenever I write a difficult scene, I tend to grab one of his books to flick through, and I find it helps me focus every time.

Another influence is Anne Rice. I just love everything about the way she writes, the way she can send shivers down my spine. Thanks to her, vampires will always be beautiful and terrible at the same time, dangerous beings who seek companions to share their century old knowledge and understanding of the world, beings who will see their transformation as a curse rather than as a blessing to elude mortality. This notion together with a tendency toward description and bringing in a darker side of beauty is something that I very much see in my own writing.

Would you describe yourself as a romantic and what do you think distinguishes good romantic literature from the cliched?

Well, it depends on one’s definition of romantic. I don’t dream of a white wedding and of a knight in shining armour. However, like every woman out there, I do like the odd romantic gesture, like a flower bouquet and gifts, to make me feel special. Who wouldn’t like a bit of attention? But I wouldn’t call myself overly romantic with a fairy-tale attitude toward relationships and a prospective partner, which I think I convey in my writing. My heroines are perfectly capable of taking care of themselves. Finding love along the way with a down-to-earth guy who loves and respects them is just a bonus and usually builds the backdrop to a story, which focuses on the heroine’s personal journey and other elements.

I like to read all kinds of romance from Jane Austen to Sandra Brown and Nora Roberts. I draw the line at Barbara Cartland. Not that she was any less talented than other romance writers out there. In fact, I think that lady had an amazing imagination, but I prefer romance intertwined with a bit of mystery so that the romance part is not overly pronounced.

I’m not going to slag off clichéd romance novels because for many women they fulfil a certain role and purpose in life. Besides, I believe all romantic literature uses some cliché, such as the evil ex, a big misunderstanding between the main protagonist and her love interest which ultimately leads to drama and a series of disastrous events, and probably the most common, the naïve heroine. The romance market, be it paranormal, young adult etc., is extremely crowded, and we’ve probably read it all before, meaning clichés are hard to avoid since romantic literature is all about love and relationships, but it’s how the protagonists get there that makes a reader root for them. So, what distinguishes good romantic literature from the clichéd is not avoiding clichés altogether but coming up with new perspectives and twists to give the book a refreshing angle and voice.

Rosemary Jackson in ‘Fantasy The Literature Of Subversion’ writes ‘The fantasy of vampirism is generated at the moment of maximum social repression: on the eve of marriage (a similar balance is established in Frankenstein, when the monster murders Elizabeth on the wedding night). It introduces all that is kept in the dark…’. What do you think that good horror literature brings to light in terms of what is repressed during the day?

I see the role of horror literature partly as an enlightening one because it focuses on making readers aware of topics such as death and, indirectly, growing old, which are seen as taboo and are often not discussed in our society. Particularly death is a topic we tend to push to the back of our minds because it emphasizes the fact that physical existence has a shelf life. Since mortality plays a huge part in any horror novel, the fantasy of vampirism tries to provide a solution to the fear of growing old and ceasing to exist.

Of course, anything that is dark in nature is mysterious and fascinating, appealing to us depending on our personality traits such as openness for experience. I see horror literature as a means of sensation seeking, hence a way of tension-creation to help us escape the mundanity of everyday life, particularly when we repress our need to be different and settle down for what we have.

One could argue that horror literature also mirrors repressed emotions and forbidden desires, but without the necessary empirical evidence, this theory remains philosophical.

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

I do agree with one of the greatest writers of all times and his observations on emotional investment as a writer. Even though it’s not scientifically proven or backed up by personality research, there has to be some truth to it. We authors can detach ourselves for the sake of our writing, be it when we observe events, or when it comes to the actual writing process and creating characters and situations. I believe writers’ detachment is particularly prevalent in authors who write about difficult topics that require strong emotional investment such as crime fiction and drama where one can get very close to a character and then might end up causing them quite a bit of pain, which may trigger an inner conflict. Without some sort of defense mechanism, authors would probably suffer psychological damage when getting too close to a character or situation. When I started writing I used to be obsessed with some of my fictional characters, and still tend to dream about them when I’m really into a scene and story, but it’s getting better. So, some authors coping better than others might be due to individual differences, or a form of learned attitude. Either way, it certainly exists.

How much do you think the average reader likes to be frightened and why?

Well, it depends on the genre. Readers of horror literature and thrillers will probably be more keen on frightening elements than those of chick-lit. I’m someone who’s easily scared, so I’ll say a bit of a scare makes for an interesting, memorable read but anything that induces nightmares is too much. Of course, what some might find scary, others won’t. But, as said, it all depends on the genre and individual differences in taste.

Amber keeps hanging on to her cheating ex throughout the book and doesn’t want to give Aidan a chance. Why?

That’s actually a hint at the dynamics of abusive relationships. It’s something a great number of people will go through in their lives, and can take the form of physical, emotional or verbal abuse. In psychology, it’s well known that victims often find it hard to disentangle themselves emotionally because their self-esteem and confidence have been shattered and now they’re emotionally dependent on their abuser and don’t know how to break free from that vicious circle. I really wanted to incorporate that psychological angle into my writing and give Amber a bit of emotional baggage to struggle with because it’s such a common phenomenon, and one that is socially misunderstood and regarded as inconsequential.

The ex Cameron’s the abuser and cheater. He’s insecure, hence the need to boast and prove his worth by ridiculing Amber, and so he projects that insecurity on his relationship with Amber, making her doubt her self-worth. Throughout the book, there are several hints at Amber’s non-existent confidence, but Aidan’s commitment and loving attitude help her heal. People like Amber are emotionally scarred and find it very hard to trust. They also criticize themselves and feel inferior to others.

I hope this angle of the story will help young people, who suffer some sort of abuse, recognise patterns and habits in their own relationships in order to find the strength to break free.

Thank you Jayde for giving an insightful and fluent interview.

Links:

Jayde Scott’s website is here.

You can buy ‘A Job From Hell’ here and ‘Beelzebub Girl’ here.

Hank Schwaeble is a thriller writer and practicing attorney in Houston, Texas.

His debut novel, DAMNABLE (Berkley/Jove 2009), won the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a First Novel. The sequel, DIABOLICAL is scheduled for a July 2011 release.

Prior to his first novel, he was also the recipient of a previous Bram Stoker Award and a World Fantasy Award nomination.

He met me at The Slaughterhouse where we talked about law and Melville.

How has your experience as a practising attorney influenced your writing?

Law school teaches you to read carefully, and to be precise with your wording. It also forces you to identify and explore issues from a variety of angles. Even more importantly, just like fiction, the law deals with conflicts, and practicing law gives you a ringside seat–sometimes even a better view than that–to all forms of it. Sometimes the conflicts are direct, as in cases of litigation, sometimes they’re less overt, like in a business transaction. And one way or another, the resolution of those conflicts comes down to how persuasive a story a given lawyer can tell, and how well that lawyer can write. Many people probably don’t realize that most lawyers spend a large percentage of their time writing, nor do they understand how much care and consideration lawyers have to put into each writing, even when it’s something as simple as a letter. In light of all that, I can’t think of many professions that could do a better job of honing an aspiring writer’s skills.

When it comes to my writing in particular, my experience as a lawyer has certainly had a pervasive influence. It’s simultaneously refined and expanded my understanding of both government and business, and exposed me to a range of career fields and lifestyles, and the various challenges people face when dealing with them. That, coupled with my military experience, accounts for a lot of what I’d like to think of as my ability to create an authentic framework for the events in my novels.

Do you think that the best detectives have strong criminal shadows?

One of the things I find so intriguing about noir and hard-boiled detective stories is the way the memorable ones explore the Janusian qualities of the characters. Good fiction relies on tension to keep the reader gripped, and few types of conflicts create more tension than those that involve internal struggles. When a protagonist has a criminal shadow, as you put it, you not only infuse him or her with a dark aspect, but you also create opportunities for redemption, as well as pre-existing obstacles that have to be surmounted in that character’s quest to achieve his or her goals.

I’ve always found it interesting that the psychological profile of the average police officer is not all that dissimilar to that of the average criminal. They are, in many ways, like two sides of the same coin, and I think readers instinctively suspect as much, just as we all understand that few, if any, people out there are entirely good or entirely bad. When you take a detective–be it a police officer, private investigator, or a person simply trying to solve a mystery–and you force them to face up to this duality, this contradiction, you present readers with one of the primal conflicts we all face–the struggle between different aspects of ourselves: the person we are trying to be or want to be versus the person we fear we may revert to.

Tell us about ‘Diabolical’.

Diabolical is my second novel, the sequel to Damnable. It picks up almost a year after Damnable lets off, following Jake Hatcher as he’s attempting to start a life in California, on the opposite side of the country from what he endured in Manhattan. He’s approached by a retired General and asked to help track down and stop a Hellion, a soul that’s escaped damnation. The General believes the Hellion has crossed over as part of a plan to open a pathway to Hell, and he also believes the Hellion is Jake’s brother. Because there are aspects that make the request an offer he can’t refuse, Hatcher is drawn back into the underground world of Carnates, demonic creatures, and freaky sociopaths.

For those unfamiliar with Damnable, Hatcher is a character trailed by one of those long shadows we were just talking about. He’s a former special forces interrogator, an expert in coercive interrogation techniques, who was disgraced and imprisoned as a political sacrifice after doing what he thought he had to–and exactly what what was expected of him. He’s a man who always believed in his heart he was going to Hell for the things he’s done, if there was such a place, and who seemed to get confirmation of it after stopping the fulfilment of an ancient prophecy that would have ended the reign of Heaven.

To what extent does religion inform your writing?

While there certainly are some religious underpinnings to the mythos of my Jake Hatcher novels, involving demons and demonic elements as they do, they don’t necessarily have a spiritual or theological message. The idea of damnation, of eternal punishment, is a powerful one, and while it definitely has a religious basis, it’s primal in our society, appearing throughout works of literature, movies and television on a recurring basis. Hatcher is a skeptic, not an atheist per se, but not what anyone would consider a person of faith, either, and he has to reconcile his worldly skepticism with the creatures and events he’s faced with, and the possibility that there really is a Heaven and there is an actual Hell, and what that implies.

What I’m really trying to explore is the human condition; specifically, what motivates certain people to do certain things. The question that I was tossing out there with Damnable was, what does it mean to be damned? Surveys show that most people have at least a vague expectation that there may be a just reward waiting after this life, and concerns over what happens to our “immortal soul” have occupied mankind’s thoughts for millennia. Given that, what formed my idea for Hatcher more than anything was the question of whether someone who considers himself damned for the things he’s done–damned in every sense of the word–would be willing to risk everything, at least, everything he has left to lose, to make sure others don’t share that fate, even if there may not be any reward in it for him. What makes a good person do bad things? What makes a “bad” person do good things? These are powerful questions with extensive—if not existential—relevance in our society.

Of course, first and foremost, these books are intended to be thrillers, supernatural suspense with a real-world edge that delivers horror and action. The themes presented are subordinate, I hope, to the characters and the story. More than anything I really just want to entertain my readers and to give them exciting, intriguing–and perhaps thought-provoking–stories.

Who are your literary influences?

First and foremost I’d have to say Edgar Allan Poe. He was my first introduction to horror literature, and the writer I remember more than most that made me want to read, and then want to write. Herman Melville had a big impact on me for the powerful themes he tackled in not just Moby Dick, but lesser known works like Billy Budd. No author with even the slightest connection to horror from my generation could not include Stephen King on a list of influences, and I can vividly remember greedily devouring Night Shift as a kid, and thoroughly enjoying Salem’s Lot when I was just starting high school. Clive Barker also made a huge impression on me with his Books of Blood. Flannery O’Connor did, too, with her brilliant short story, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” Ayn Rand deserves a mention, as does Donald Hamilton with his Matt Helm novels.

It’s funny, but as I get further into my writing career I’ve started to notice some authors that I hadn’t realized influenced me actually had. Orwell, for example, and Hammett.  I’ve recalled The Maltese Falcon more often than I ever expected to when I first read it, and reminders of 1984 and its warnings seem subtly to bombard us every day. I also find myself remembering lines and scenes from Dickens I never anticipated I would. I should also mention that I’ve grown to appreciate Richard Matheson many years after I had initially thought of his work as enjoyable pulp. Yet at the same time, numerous others I thought significant when I read them seem to have faded and diminished in my regard over time. The great ones really do stick with you, I suppose. Even if you don’t expect them to.

Do you think Melville’s portrait of Claggart in ‘Billy Budd’ is one of evil?

Yes, in some respects. But I think he was more meant to represent a mundane, almost banal source of injustice. He embodies everything we loathe; pettiness, jealousy, deviousness, vindictiveness, abuse of power. These are characteristics we have to deal with routinely in people, and they often cause us endless headaches and sometimes outrageous unfairness, and it’s common for us to shake our heads in befuddlement at how some people can be the way they are. Consistent with that, there’s no backstory given regarding Claggart. He’s just “there,” depicted almost as a force of nature that it would be pointless to try to understand or reason with. We’re never told why he hates Billy Budd or what possessed him to falsely accuse the man, simply that he did. But what Melville was showing was that what makes people like this tick is not the real question we have to deal with. Claggart, after all, is rather easily and summarily dispatched by Billy Budd, so it’s not that such a man is untouchable or invulnerable. Instead, it’s the collateral effects and aftermath of “evil” like this rearing its head that Melville is concerned with. Actions have consequences, even if morally justifiable, and what you have in a situation like the one presented by Billy Budd is a story about a conflict between two differing sides of good, rather than a battle between good and evil. On the one hand you have Billy Budd, who represents innocence of heart and, you might say, the individual soul, and on the other you have Captain Vere, who represents order and the rules of a civilized society and who is concerned with the larger picture. There’s no right answer, no easy choice. Billy Budd didn’t deserve any of what he got, but if allowing him to escape punishment creates an atmosphere of mutiny on the high seas, certain to lead to many more deaths and unrest, where do you come down if, rather than having the luxury of reading about it on a sofa or in bed, you’re actually in a position of authority and responsible for what may result? I think we all instinctively side with Billy Budd and would say let the chips fall where they may, but even Billy Budd understands Vere is only doing his job and, more importantly, his duty. Both men die with each other’s name on their lips, and Billy Budd’s execution obviously haunts Vere for the rest of his life. I think what Melville is saying is, good versus evil is not the conflict that shapes who we are, it’s where we side when the fight is one version of good pitted against another, competing version of it that reveals our true nature, and that it’s an eternal question with no objective answer. It’s the stuff that makes us human, this ongoing process of revelation and introspection we undertake through things like literature.

To what extent do you think crime and horror fiction overlap?

I think they navigate a lot of the same terrain. They both tend to highlight the darker side of human nature, and they both frequently expose a cause-and-effect relationship between doing something bad and having bad things happen. I’ve always seen the two as being closely linked. Kindred spirits, if you would.

Commercial fiction–and I don’t think of that term as a pejorative–relies on tension to infuse it with a page-turning quality, a compulsive vibe. Both crime fiction and horror fiction implicitly promise readers even higher levels of tension than normal just by presenting themselves as being one or the other (as opposed to, say, a cozy mystery), and that can be difficult to sustain. So they also share a lot of the same challenges.

I think the key is that with either, a good story focuses on the characters’ reactions to the events as they unfold. In the end, it’s not a story about a casino being robbed or a demon being raised, it’s about the people involved. It’s the human element that we identify with, whether or not we’re reading about an over-the-hill crew of losers trying to pull off a bank swindle, or a band of overmatched teenagers trying to slay a monster.

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

There’s definitely some truth to that. You have to be merciless to your characters. One problem that many aspiring writers have is that they bleed the tension out of their stories by avoiding scenes of emotional conflict. I don’t mean scenes where the good guy fights the bad guy, I’m talking about scenes where their protagonist who can’t afford to lose her job has to face her boss after missing the entire morning because of her involvement in something she swore she wouldn’t divulge, or having the main character have to make a gut-wrenching choice between saving one person or another. It’s only natural as a human being for things like that to make you uncomfortable when you care about your characters. But that’s exactly what fiction is, placing characters that you (and, just as importantly, the reader) care about in awful situations, so you can follow their reactions and experience how it affects them. It’s what makes readers want to turn the page and read into the wee hours of the morning. But it can also be difficult for a writer who hasn’t mastered the art of ruthless detachment.

Being a writer means you have to create fascinating characters that you care deeply about, and then do absolutely horrific things to them. It’s the nature of the beast.

How much do you think the average reader likes to be frightened and why?

It’s going to vary depending on the individual, but overall I’d say people generally like to be frightened a good deal, just like they like to be thrilled. Modern life is all about the avoidance of risk, and advanced societies are set up to minimize danger as much as possible. Yet our minds and nervous systems are wired in a primal, almost atavistic, ways to deal with threatening situations. What fiction and movies and television allow us to do is to indulge this aspect of our nature in safe way, to give us the life-affirming feel of our nerves being charged and our adrenaline surging, without actually being in peril. Books provide opportunities for deep and intimate immersion into worlds of vicarious excitement without the reader having to endure even the slightest inconvenience. It’s a welcome respite from the stresses of everyday life, which are more psychological and emotional–not to mention far less easily conquered–than those our ancestors faced back when forests sheltered fierce, predatory creatures in the dark just a few dozen yards away, when the oceans concealed kraken and who knew what else, and when simple things like travelling from one place to another could be a death-defying adventure that presented myriad types of threats.

While I think most people truly enjoy a good, safe scare, what I find interesting is how many of those same people have a completely inaccurate sense of what horror fiction is. For some reason, most likely because of an association they make with cheap horror movies that started getting churned out for teen audiences in the 80s, many people think horror is all blood and guts. But that’s really splatter, not horror, and its something that crosses genres. True horror tries to inspire a feeling of dread and fear, for sure, but it really isn’t all that different from other genres in the sense that its the characters and the tension that make a given novel feel alive in your hands. Even people who say they don’t like scary books or movies still tend to like thrillers, which deliver the same type of excitement. They just don’t employ haunting imagery or creepy, ofttimes disturbing scenarios when they do.

What three authors do you think have influenced modern horror literature the most?

I would say Edgar Allan Poe, Richard Matheson, and Stephen King. Although it’s true that some would give the credit to others, Poe arguably wrote both the first modern horror story as well as the first modern detective story, each remarkable achievements in their own right (and, I would note, the first modern detective story that Poe gave us was also a horror story). What’s absolutely amazing to me is how fresh some of his work reads to this day. “The Casque of Amontillado” and “The Tell-Tale Heart” are both studies in tension and pacing that are just as powerful now as they were in the 1840s. It’s hard to believe they were written over a century and a half ago. Richard Matheson built on Poe’s legacy and shaped the modern horror novel as we know it, bringing a lean, professional prose-style and a Hemingway-like exploration of issues. What struck me when I read I Am Legend was how obviously ahead of its time it was, and how profound the ending (that gave the title its meaning) was. King single-handedly brought horror into the mainstream and changed the face of it forever with his re-imagining and modernizing of classic tropes and his invention of countless new ones. What’s incredible about him is how he’s topped the best-seller list in every way imaginable. He’s done it with numerous stand-alone novels (like Carrie and Salem’s Lot among dozens of others) as well as with a series (The Dark Tower), he’s done it with supernatural premises and with completely real-world, psychological horror. He’s done it under a pseudonym in addition to under his real name. He’s been successful at it in all the ways one can conceive of, and that’s not something just anyone could have done.

Thank you Hank for giving a perceptive and engaging interview.

Find everything Hank Schwaeble at his website here.