El Gavilan

by Craig McDonald

  Not as often as I’d like. I sort of like that part of Texas more than the part where I grew up, which was outside of Corpus Christi.

  There’s a songwriter who lives in El Paso who I like a lot, guy named Tom Russell, and he has written about how the sprawl is starting to affect even El Paso.

  That’s funny—he just sent me a CD the other day. I just remembered that. I get things in the mail and they get on my desk and my desk looks like my garage and my garage looks like the dump. I’d completely forgot about it.

  Tell me a little bit about your writing process. How many times do you go over a draft, typically?

  It doesn’t seem to take me as long as it used to. I used to say I get one page out of ten. I think now I get one page out of three or four. Something like that. You know, I’ve been doing it for forty years, so I should learn something. But every time you start another book, it’s like, “I don’t know how I did the last one.” That sort of thing. I’ve always had trouble with openings.

  The opening of The Last Good Kiss has become an icon within the crime world. You have people who have actually committed those opening lines to memory. They are revered by so many writers: Dennis Lehane and George Pelecanos cite that book as the novel that really kick-started them. Do you have a sense of what that book means to other writers within the genre?

  I have some idea. But I don’t take myself too seriously. It’s really nice when writers like Connelly and George Pelecanos—who is a friend of mine—meet you and like what you’ve done. Writers who like writers are good. But sort of the strangest person that ever mentioned it was a woman who was a librarian on NPR. It was a piece about best first lines. I’m not up in the mornings much, so I didn’t hear it myself, but somebody sent it to me on the e-mail. It was very nice. Pete Dexter, in Seattle, recently said something at a reading about that line. So that part’s good. It’s just a lot of pressure: they want you to do the same thing over and over again. It would be like keeping my characters the same age over and over again. Those guys have gotten old and it shows on them.

  Yes, their bodies are starting to betray them and they can’t bounce back from those beatings like they once did. Is there an upward limit on how far you would go in portraying them? Is there an age you draw the line at in terms of trying to depict them?

  No, not really. I’ve never written anything set since 9/11. I’m trying to do that now, but it’s really hard to do something without acknowledging the effect that 9/11 had. Some things are just simply too traumatic to write about. So, we’ll see. I haven’t killed ‘em off yet. At one time—maybe Final Country or somewhere—I was trying to move to a third-person voice and kill Milo, but my wife talked me out of it.

  That’s what they’re there for—to save us from ourselves.

  Right. She was right. Plus, I’ve never written a third-person novel and I’ve never written a first-person short story, as far as I know. If I knew how this stuff worked, I wouldn’t be doing it, I guess.

  Do you have a preference between your two guys—Milo and C.W.?

  Not really. They’re older than some of my children—I’ve got two sons in their twenties—but they’ve been in my head for years. One of the reasons I wrote Bordersnakes was because of those people who were always telling me all the books were in the same voice. I didn’t get here by being smart, I got here by being crazy: there’s nothing that works better than telling me not to do something.

  Have any of your children shown an interest in following you into writing?

  I’ve got daughters who are artists and readers. My one son is a twenty-three-year-old who just finished art school and he’s fiddling around with film. My younger son, if he could be whatever he wanted to be, he’d be a basketball player [laughing].

  He’d need to be about six-seven or six-eight …

  Yeah, it really broke his heart when he didn’t get tall. But then, I know how that feels. I was telling somebody the other day that I knew I had to get old, but I didn’t know I’d have to get shorter—that seems really unfair.

  I think Elmore Leonard has said the same thing—the fact that he was afraid he was just going to vanish.

  He’s a great guy. I sure like him. A lot of the guys of that generation are really great gentlemen. Wonderful writers.

  I’ve been reading a lot of your short fiction recently and really enjoying it. You had a remarkable football story in the Otto Penzler collection, The Mighty Johns. I enjoyed another one in a recent Penzler Best-of-Year anthology. Were these stories you wrote on request, or do you write short fiction and then try to place it?

  There’s no way to tell. Sometimes I just sit down and a story starts. It’s pretty much impossible to make myself do something like that, but every now and then, it works.

  A number of crime writers I’ve interviewed have said they would happily make their living as short story writers if they could make a living doing it. They much prefer writing those stories to writing a novel. Are you of that school of thought?

  I’m not a natural short story writer. I have lots of friends who are. It’s just never sort of been my format. I wrote ‘em when I first started because it seemed easier to throw something away that was short. I think for short stories you really have to think that way. You’ve got to arc very quickly. My short stories tend to be truncated novels or the sort of things where I haven’t got any idea what’s going on. Sometimes I will write one on purpose. There’s a story called “Hostages” that was in Dennis McMillan’s collection Measures of Poison which has suddenly been anthologized several places. It’s a ten-page short story set in the Depression. I don’t know where that one came from, but my wife made me do it again because it was so short: “It’s nice, but it’s just too short.”

  I was in Arizona a few weeks ago and I briefly met Dennis McMillan. He was frustrated that your publisher had not allowed him to go ahead with a limited edition of The Right Madness.

  Yeah, I could not seem to be able to get anybody to do that. For one thing, we went after it a little late. And nobody could seem to understand what he was trying to do. Writers don’t have any influence over that kind of thing. I was disappointed, too. Dennis and I are old friends. He does good books. The books are artifacts. It doesn’t do anything to the sales of the trade copy, so I just never understood what happened. They even made him pay for the disc they sent him.

  Music comes up a lot in your books. You were friends with Warren Zevon … you mention Lucinda Williams in the new book. Who do you listen to now?

  Oh, I pretty much listen to everybody. I go all the way from Shostakovich to Steve Earle. Warren was a wonderful guy. I told him he was probably the smartest songwriter in America and he told me, “The words are just something I hang the music on.”

  Have you been pressured to put up a Web site?

  I have. I’ve been using a computer for a long time, but the maintenance of a Web site is not something I want to take on. I don’t know if it works or makes a difference. I have enough trouble cleaning out my e-mail. I don’t know that my fans are interested in sitting down in front of a computer, either. I’ve often thought most of my fans were in jail, or should be … on the lam or in the slam.

  Do you still do film work at this point at all?

  [Laughing] Not as much as I used to, unfortunately.

  Well, the money is certainly there. I tend to dwell on the books screenwriting may have cost us from Faulkner, from Fitzgerald and some others. But you do have to make money …

  I had to pay for a fairly expensive divorce, yes. And you know, I like movies. But like every other idiot writer in the world, when I went to Hollywood I thought, “It’s easy to do because it’s a lot of white space.” But you have to learn a new form. I’ve never not gotten paid for a script, although I have as many good Hollywood horror stories as anybody else.

  You’ve done quite a range of work: from Judge Dredd to Ellroy’s The Big Nowhere.

  Yeah, that one was a chore.

  Bet it was … that’
s such a sprawling piece of work. How do you approach something like that by another crime writer?

  Well, I just sort of did something else. The producer that owned the option, Tim Hunter, and I had a drink with him the day he picked up the option. I said, “I feel sorry for the poor screenwriter that has to deal with this.” A year later, it was me. That was a real chore. The guys who figured L.A. Confidential out, I thought were geniuses. I spent a lot of that time working with Robert Towne on Dancing Bear and couldn’t do anything else at the time. Wrote a couple of books during that time and couldn’t get any screenwork.

  And I live in Montana and nobody quite knows where it is.

  Flyover country.

  Worse than that. Some woman from ABC News in the recent past wanted to talk to me about something. I was going to do a soundbyte. I said sure. She said, “How will I find you? Where would I land?” I said, “Well, you could land at the jet airport here in Missoula, Montana.” And then maybe she wasn’t so interested as she thought she was. Another friend of mine, when he joined The Writer’s Guild, they put him in The Writer’s Guild East because they thought it was Missouri.

  I was guilty of that, too, when I first came to Montana to teach Freshman Comp. When I got out of graduate school, I had all the schools in the west listed to start sending vitas out—except Montana, where I got to by pure wonderful chance. I’ve never been able to quite successfully leave.

  There were a lot of writers living there at one time.

  There still is. I knew a guy from Dallas who sold his advertising firm—one of the few people I ever knew who sold a novel over the transom. He moved to Missoula because he didn’t think there would be any writers here. But he knew Dorothy Johnson lived here, so he went over and had tea with Dorothy one afternoon. Then he finds out that two novels doesn’t buy you anything in Missoula. You can find a cocktail party full of fifteen people who have published four or five novels. So finally he moved away somewhere. back to Texas maybe.

  It is easier to live someplace where people understand the problems with writing. I’m mostly not much of a literary guy. It’s like when two writers get together, they don’t talk much about literature. They talk about contracts … the complicated parts. I’ve always said that in these writing programs they should teach a course in the business aspect.

  I could see that—in terms of the contracts and taxes and investment and budgeting. You get these big checks, then you go fallow for a period until the next check for the next book.

  [Laughing] Budgeting? Excuse me? Yes, but there are lots of things you don’t know until it happens to you. I often think that working in Hollywood helped me to understand how to deal with publishers. The business is so strange now. I sold my first book in 1967. It still occasionally is like a gentleman’s business, but that’s almost all gone.

  Vietnam—you’re very associated with that topic and the war runs as a thread through your books. The Vietnam generation is getting up there; it doesn’t loom as a shaping event or a prism through which to view the world for those forty or so and under … is that a good or a bad thing?

  Well, it’s another piece of traumatic history we would have been better off not to know … not to have ever happened. Must have been summer before last, there was this organization of guys who did what I did in the Army, except they did it in Vietnam. These guys asked me to join them because of One to Count Cadence. I went down to their convention in Colorado Springs. I never knew any of these guys before. They were a little bit younger than me and they were some great guys. They were obviously connected in that way and they still are. I haven’t been back to another convention, but I’m in touch with them all by e-mail. It’s clear that war had a terrific effect on their lives and it doesn’t go away. I figured out some years ago that almost all of my old friends are either writers or Vietnam vets. Just one of those sort of accidental things.

  Oddly enough, I did all the research for that first book [Cadence] and I sort of changed my mind about the war in the middle of it, which was a good thing. I never have been to Vietnam—been to Southeast Asia—but I was concerned I would do something wrong … really stupid … like have the sun go down in the east. The vets who read it in manuscript said the only thing I got wrong is there is not a tree in Vietnam that two guys can carry, ‘cause they’re so heavy from being wet.

  But it’s like Eliot said: “Bad writers imitate, good writers steal.” Although he then said that he may have stolen that from a French poet. You build on the people who did the work before.

  Speaking of Europe, you take C.W. to Scotland in the new novel. The Final Country ends with Milo thinking about maybe moving to Paris, France. Scotland and Paris are a long way from Montana, or El Paso. We’re not going to hear of you moving to Europe, are we?

  The Scottish part comes from Richard Hugo. When he was living on Skye I went to see him. Then my wife and I went back, shit, seventeen years later. There is something about Scotland—the landscape and the skies—that just felt good and still feels good. It’s a very odd place. The first time I went, I was by myself and wearing cowboy boots and a leather jacket and nobody would talk to me. But I couldn’t understand them, sometimes, anyway. Over the years, I’ve become quite fond of France. But I can’t live someplace without cable TV and American football.

  Do you have a personal favorite among your own books?

  That’s like choosing among your children [laughing]. The Last Good Kiss was pretty easy once I got it figured out. It’s like one of those books where you do a lot of work and then it drops out of you very nicely. The Wrong Case—that was my first attempt and most of which I owe to [Raymond] Chandler. I owe Chandler to Richard Hugo. He came here the year before I did. When he found out I had never read any Chandler, he was like [feigning a smack to the head] whack … “What kind of smart-ass graduate student were you?”

  That first summer I was in Mexico working on Cadence, the Chandler books had come out and were in the grocery store with those wonderful Tom Adams art deco covers. So I read ‘em all at once. I thought, after failing at the Texas novel for six years or something, “Maybe I’ll write a detective novel”—little knowing that it would be taken more seriously and do better than the first book. It’s been an up and down thing. The Last Good Kiss only sold forty-four hundred copies in hardback. But it’s never been out of print.

  It’s not a sprint, it’s a marathon?

  I don’t know what it is, anymore. I just know I can’t stop doing it.

  You’ve criticized the depiction of the Old West and of American Indians in a number of films. Have you seen Deadwood? Any thoughts on that?

  I have seen it. Great technical work. Someone in the New York Times, I think, said that I have a fine ear for filthy speech. But I think David Milch doesn’t quite understand that profanity is about rhythm—it wears me out, just watching it. It is a very interesting show and I think probably as realistic as anything ever done about the West has a chance to be. It has that real grit to it. I tend to watch it every week and I usually watch it twice: the second time is when it starts to make sense again.

  Is there anything you’d particularly like to get out about The Right Madness?

  Well, it was a great feeling to finish … a great feeling to finish again. Not only all that time I lost in the middle there, but a funny thing about the drugs they gave me—I lost all my compound words: steamboat, motorboat, machine gun. If it was a compound word, I didn’t have it any more. I’ve pretty much gotten those back. The other thing I lost was touch-typing. I simply couldn’t touch-type anymore. Maybe because of my arthritis, maybe because of my brain. I was always the “touch-type with one hand and hunt-and-peck with the other” sort.

  Anything else in the works right now?

  Oh, I’ve always got something in the works.

  Do you have a strong sense of where you’re headed for the next one? Maybe that’s the better way to phrase the question.

  No, because I don’t have a hundred pages. It takes me abou
t a hundred pages to be sure that I’m going to finish a book. I have a notorious inability to write before another book comes out. You’d think I’d be used to this. I was telling somebody Saturday, “Jesus, you’d think I’d know about this by now.” But it always makes me antsy and nervous.

  I was going to ask you if it is still a thrill for you when a new book comes out, but it sounds like a big anxiety.

  The thrill comes when you pick up a finished manuscript. All the rest is kind of fluff. But, you know, if you’re going to make a living at it, the fluff is what counts. But, God … I’d just as soon not have to do it again. But I don’t have any choices anymore. I guess I never did have any choices.

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  Copyright © 2011 by Craig McDonald

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  ISBN 10: 1-4405-3194-3 (Hardcover)

  ISBN 13: 978-1-4405-3194-1 (Hardcover)

  ISBN 10: 1-4405-3191-9 (Paperback)

  ISBN 13: 978-1-4405-3191-0 (Paperback)

  eISBN 10: 1-4405-3192-7

  eISBN 13: 978-1-4405-3192-7

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  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, corporations, institutions, organizations, events, or locales in this novel are either the product of the author’s imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. The resemblance of any character to actual persons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental.