Crimespree Magazine #56 Page 7

  With THE PROFESSIONALS, I started with the basic idea for a crime, gave it to a bunch of unemployed college kids, and let them take me where they wanted to go, and I still find it really remarkable and kind of mind-boggling that that strategy produced a readable book.

  With KILL FEE, on the other hand, I had a collection of ideas and a vague notion of what the book would look like, and the coolest moment for me is holding the book in my hands, three years after I dreamed up that vague notion, and seeing how faithfully the book adheres to that initial idea, despite all of my best efforts to the contrary.

  The cool thing about writing, for me, is the journey of discovery. That sounds cheesy, but I like starting a book without having a real idea where my characters will end up. It makes the whole process fun, whereas I find if I outline, it starts to seem a lot more like work.

  D (&K): What was the moment that made you say, “Writing books is amazing”?

  OL: My writing career has been filled with those moments. I call them “pinch-me” moments, because they’re so surreal and wonderful and out of this world. They’re the moments of validation I talked about earlier, and I’ve been lucky enough that they seem to come faster and faster as my career builds.

  If there’s one moment, though, it’s probably pretty simple: holding the first finished copy of THE PROFESSIONALS in my hands and knowing that in a few weeks, it was going to hit bookstores. I’d spent a large chunk of my life dreaming of that moment, and it was just as wonderful as I’d imagined it would be.

  D (&K): Our standard Beatles or Rolling Stones question: Hammett or Chandler?

  OL: Chandler all the way. I don’t even need a crime if I’m reading Chandler; I could read Marlowe narrating a trip to the grocery store and be captivated.

  D (&K): You’re a hockey guy who lives in a hockey town in a country that is kinda good at hockey. Congrats on those Olympic gold medals, btw. But come on. Even you have got to admit that the Sedin twins, who play for your beloved Vancouver Canucks, are creepy. So creepy in fact, that “Sedin twins creepy” is the fourth suggestions when entered into Google. This part is not a question. It’s just our opportunity to rail against the Canucks. (Note to the readers: Until last season, the Canucks and the Minnesota Wild were bitter Divisional rivals.)

  Here’s the question: What do you think are the chances of the Canucks hoisting a Cup in our lifetime?

  OL: First of all, I’d like to focus on the Olympic hockey medals, if I could. We won. Both of them. There’s a vast collection of videos on YouTube of Canadians responding to the gold medal winning goal in the women’s hockey finals (Canada 3, USA 2), and your question reminded me it was time to go back and rewatch them all. So, thanks.

  Second, I’d like to point out that I’m younger than you. And I think I’ll definitely see the Canucks hoist a cup in my lifetime.

  As far as the Wild go, I’ll hold off on predictions. In CRIMINAL ENTERPRISE, I wrote a throwaway line about the Wild being a crummy hockey team, which was true when I wrote it, but by the time the book was actually published, the Wild were first in their division. They’re still a crummy team, though.

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  Anthony Neil Smith Interview

  By Kent Gowran

  Issue 56

  Anthony Neil Smith is the author of many crime novels and short stories including All The Young Warriors, and The Baddest Ass. The film adaptation of his novel, Hogdoggin’ is slated for release in early 2015 from Killing Joke Films. His newest novel XXX Shamus was written under the pseudonym Red Hammond and published by Broken River Books.

  Additionally, Neil is the publisher of Plots with Guns, which he recently announced will be ending its run and he’s the Director of Creative Writing at Southern Minnesota State University.

  Kent Gowran interviewed Neil prior to his recent brush with death. We’re all thankful that Neil’s heart was only “mildly” attacking him and wish him a speedy recovery.

  Kent Gowran: You’ve built and impressive body of work with your novels over the last ten years. I’m also a fan of your short stories, but I think I had forgotten about “Find Me” when I started reading XXX Shamus. Still, it didn’t take long to recognize the writing as that of a writer I’d read before. The way you wrote about New Orleans also seemed to be a tip of the hand. Did you think people might pick up on that?

  Anthony Neil Smith: Not really. I’ve made an effort for each novel to feel a bit different from the last, at least the ones not connected by a series. So it never occurred to me that a book from earlier in my timeline (this one was pre-Yellow Medicine) would be recognized as mine still.

  KG: I like the way the title XXX Shamus might be misleading to a reader. The sex is certainly explicit, but rather than being any kind of a turn-on, it’s uncomfortable. It might even be a total bummer for some readers. For me, that’s what sold the sex in the book, made it part of the story instead of a dirty interlude. What were your intentions with the explicit sex when you were writing the book?

  ANS: Whenever I write sex scenes, I consider the reality along with the porn value. So it has to be a little like porn but with all the awkwardness, sounds, and smells of real sex intact.

  I went into “Find Me” after watching Kiss Me Deadly and seeing one of those “pan to the curtains” moment where you know the P.I. is bangin’ the broad. And in some of these movies/books, he bangs a lot of ’em. So I wondered what would happen if we show a P.I. who just fucks everyone in the story. Just everyone. And as I wrote, I realized the answer: he gets tired. Really, really body-and-soul tired.

  KG: I suppose this really goes back to “Find Me”, but which came first for you, the character of Hopper, or the plot of the story you wanted to tell?

  ANS: I workshopped “Find Me” in grad school before publishing it, and while many of the students in the class were shocked and kinda impressed, the prof (Frederick Barthelme) shrugged and said it wasn’t as shocking as I thought it was, and he then proceeded to describe a possible scene even more disgusting than what I had written. While I never used that particular scene, it still kept percolating in my brain until I just had to write an even more awful novel.

  KG: Is there a part of the book that you are particularly pleased with as a writer, or perhaps surprised you when you wrote it?

  ANS: I’m scared of most of what I wrote for it. Terrified.

  I would tell my friend Victor Gischler about the scenes I was writing, and we would laugh at the horror of it all. It was just awful. When I finished, I sent him the whole thing. He called and said, “That was *not* funny! It was funny on the phone, but this was not funny at all.”

  KG: Broken River came out with a hell of a strong showing. Jedidiah Ayres’ Peckerwood finally seeing the light of day, and it’s great that Pearce Hansen’s Street Raised is getting another crack at a much deserved audience. How has your experience with Broken River been?

  ANS: It had been outstanding. Something about David’s first note to me, asking if I had something to show him, well, at first I said no, but since I’d read his Low Down Death, Right Easy, I let him see XXX on a hunch. He loved it. Accepted in within a day. And since then, it’s been neat watching a new, exciting small press launch. I gave advice when I could, but this guy has so much of the crime and bizarro arenas wired already, it was instant explosion. He’s got good writers, risky books, and amazing covers from Matthew Revert. I’m rooting for him.

  KG: Let’s say someone is on the fence about making with the clicking action on the purchase of XXX Shamus. How would you pitch it to them?

  ANS: Don’t do it. Really. I don’t need to give anyone another reason to hate me.

  KG: Plots With Guns is 15 years old. How do you feel about that? I know it might be a logistical nightmare, but has anyone ever approached you about releasing the Plots With Guns anthology that was a limited edition hardcover from Dennis McMillan in paperback or e-book?

  ANS: I don’t think I can release that book. I think it’s Dennis’ officially. But it was fun
to do it.

  I wish I had the time to keep reading and designing for PWG. I liked having control over it, but man, I love my day job (busy as hell) and I need to write novels, so I’m much happier that it’s in someone else’s hands rather than dead or one of those sites that gets taken over as trojan-horse porn zombie site.

  We started PWG because the other mags out there were either not printed often enough or widely distributed enough, and the big ones (“ahem” AH “cough” EQ) were, let’s face it, boring. And I’m stunned now when I look back and all the writers we found while simply looking for the types of stories we didn’t think we’re getting published enough. And then again when I rebooted it. So so many new voices. That’s the legacy I’m most proud of.

  Sean and Gonzalo and Erik have made PWG even better-looking with a wider range of great stories. I’m so glad they are doing the hard work. Many kudos.

  Kent Gowran lives in Chicago where he is currently engaged in a dead heat between hair loss and going gray, though he still knows if it’s too loud, you’re too old. His stories have appeared in Plot With Guns, Needle: A Magazine of Noir, Beat to a Pulp: Hardboiled, Horror Garage, A Twist of Noir, Beat to a Pulp, and other wild venues.

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  Behind the Books

  By Kristi Belcamino

  Issue 56

  I was on the cop reporter beat for the Contra Costa Times when a little girl in Vallejo was snatched off the streets on her way to school one morning. Xiana Fairchild’s kidnapping and murder wasn’t the first missing child story I covered as a reporter, but it was the one that struck me hardest, took me out at the knees, laid me out flat.

  The story became my life for the next nine months. Every day I worked it harder than I’ve ever reported in my life. A few weeks after she disappeared, the story took a turn—another little Vallejo girl was kidnapped. But she escaped. Her abductor was arrested and behind bars.

  Reporters from across Northern California flocked to interview this man. He granted jailhouse interviews to some. Others, he refused.

  He agreed to speak to me and in the end, I spent dozens of hours interviewing this man, trying to get him to reveal his secrets to me, to tell me where Xiana was and if she was still alive. It wasn’t long before he revealed that Xiana wasn’t the first.

  I’ll never forget how he did it. He held a small square of paper up to the glass separating us. It said:

  1st Kidnap 1981

  Rape

  Kill

  And then he led me on, with a promise to tell me about Xiana if I would just be patient.

  Each night, I came home a little shell-shocked from a day wallowing in an underworld inhabited by hookers, drug dealers, common thieves, killers, and child predators.

  Nothing could wash away the dirty feeling I had from talking to this man and immersing myself in his fucked-up reality. I self-medicated to shed this slimy film covering my heart and mind and soul, smoking a half pack of Camel lights and sitting on the stairs of my Oakland apartment downing vodka.

  It only offered temporary relief. I was strung out, on the edge, obsessed.

  I spent my days with Xiana’s family, growing to love them, and my nights at the jail trying to convince a monster to give up the goods.

  One day I found myself talking to him like I would anyone else in the world. And that scared me. Badly.

  But this is what mortified me the most out of all the horrific things he told me:

  “I’ll let you in on a little secret—there are hundreds more people just like me out there.”

  I continued to visit him in jail, took his collect calls at my work phone, and exchanged letters with him.

  Then one day I quit. I packed up and moved to Minnesota.

  I had two children. Two girls. And I tried to push down the terrible firsthand knowledge I had that there were people out there who could snatch my babies away from me and do unspeakable things to them.

  I knew if something like this happened to my child, the only thing that would keep me from killing myself would be the slim hope, the slightest sliver of a chance, that they might still be alive out there.

  I’d seen that look in so many parents’ eyes—that “I’d rather be dead” look—that grasping for the slimmest, slightest chance.

  Then one day in my cozy, safe Minnesota world, I got a call from my old newspaper. That man—the child killer—had died in prison. Supposedly of natural causes, though I still wonder. Before he died, he confessed to Xiana’s kidnapping and several others.

  Instead of relief, the death brought everything back to me. I had to face the fact that my experience with his man had warped me, that it had shaped me as a mother. Although our backyard was fenced, I had to sit by the window when my girls played outside to make sure they were safe.

  That’s when I realized that something needed to change. I had to purge this monster from my head.

  I’ve always believed in the therapeutic powers of journaling. I have stacks of journals I’ve kept since I was a teen, which document my hopes, joys, fears, and anxieties.

  So one day, I carted this gigantic box up from the basement and sifted through the contents—dozens of reporter’s notebooks filled with interviews with this man; reams of printed-out stories I’d written about him; letters he wrote me from jail and later prison.

  Then I sat down to write.

  Three months later I printed out Blessed Are the Dead.

  It was my purging. What came out was the story of an Italian-American reporter who is forced to deal with her own dark past when a little girl is kidnapped. Her investigation into the girl’s disappearance leads her to a convicted kidnapper who reels her in with promises to reveal his secrets to her alone.

  This reporter—Gabriella Giovanni—is not me. She took on a life of her own on the page. She is cooler, smarter, and a better reporter than I ever was.

  The missing little girl is not Xiana. Instead, she is a composite of all the missing little girls whose names are engraved on my heart after writing about their stories.

  But the monster—the antagonist I created—he is very, very close to the man I knew. In fact, I used some of the exact conversations I’d had with this man in my book. He is the character closest to the real person who inspired him.

  So ultimately what emerged was a work of fiction, a way for me to make sense of the horrors in my mind, a way to pay tribute to the girls I would never forget—Xiana Fairchild, Traci McBride, Christina Williams, Polly Klaas, Amber Schwartz and Nikki Campbell.

  Kristi Belcamino is a writer, artist and crime reporter who also bakes a tasty biscotti. Her first novel, Blessed are the Dead, (HarperCollins June 2014) is inspired by her dealings with a serial killer during her life as a Bay Area crime reporter. As an award-winning crime reporter at newspapers in California, she flew over Big Sur in an FA-18 jet with the Blue Angels, raced a Dodge Viper at Laguna Seca, and watched autopsies. Find out more at www.kristibelcamino.com or on Facebook here: https://www.facebook.com/kristibelcaminowriter.

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  Erin’s Reading Roundup

  By Erin Mitchell

  Issue 56

  THE DAY SHE DIED by Catriona McPherson

  This was the very first book I read this year (thanks to an advance copy from the publisher, the superlative Midnight Ink), and I knew immediately that it would be one of the best I read during all of 2014. Catriona McPherson is perhaps best known for her Dandy Gilver cozy series; THE DAY SHE DIED demonstrates, though, that her storytelling skill extends into what is a far darker story.

  When we meet Jessie Constable, her life is decidedly…ordinary. She has a job and friends and a routine. Then, in one strange moment in a supermarket, everything changes. How—and, ultimately, why—is the story of THE DAY SHE DIED, and it’s one of those books that once you start reading, you won’t want to stop until the very end.

  This is not an easy book to classify. It’s a psychological thriller, for sure, but it’s much more than that. Its prose is beau
tiful…dare I say literary? It contains not one, but several mysteries. It has crimes (nothing gruesome). It explores many aspects of family relationships. It has moments of humor. It is, ultimately, a superb story.

  THE PROFESSOR by Robert Bailey

  I love a good legal thriller. It started lo these many years ago with TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, and I’ve never stopped relishing the high drama of a story that centers on a (preferably scrappy and always brilliant) lawyer and is replete with intense courtroom scenes.

  The titular Professor in THE PROFESSOR is one Tom McMurtrie, who teaches law (evidence, specifically) at the University of Alabama. When the family of a dear friend of Tom’s is killed in a horrific car crash, he refers the case to a former student. It all sounds pretty simple, but there are numerous sub-plots and side stories that give THE PROFESSOR the kind of richness one finds all too rarely.

  Robert Bailey is himself a lawyer in Huntsville, Alabama. I hope Huntsville can do without his legal services, though, because I would love to see him writing novels full-time. If THE PROFESSOR is any indication at all, it would be a service to readers.

  THE KEEPER by John Lescroart

  I’ve long enjoyed John Lescroart’s books, and THE KEEPER is his storytelling at its finest.

  In it, detective Abe Glitsky is retired…and hating every minute of it. When his best friend (and attorney) Dismas Hardy asks him to look into a case for him, he jumps right back into the proverbial saddle. Naturally nothing is quite as it appears…and while the case itself is interesting, that’s not why I enjoyed THE KEEPER.