TH: If work of Humphrey Bogart was your entry point to the crime genre, how did you get started writing?
JH: I’ve been writing stories since I was a kid. I used to staple eight blank pages together and write comic books. Then I progressed into doing a knockoff imitation of Encyclopedia Brown (my real entry into crime fiction). In about the fifth or sixth grade, I took a shot at a novel. A mystery. By high school, I’d discovered Hammett and Chandler and Parker. I tried my hand at private eye stories, but my problem is that I can’t really write heroes, even hardboiled heroes. I’m constitutionally incapable of writing a hero. Understand, I like heroes. I need Marlowe and Spenser in my life. But the characters I create are expressions of what I deep down really think about human beings, and what I deep down really think about human beings is that we’re essentially weak, selfish, and stupid. Maybe that’s why noir is a good fit for me. Hardboiled crime fiction is about toughness. Noir is about weakness.
TH: Your short fiction and both of your novels feel very rooted in an older classic noir sensibility, but are contemporary work that feels timeless. When you start working on a piece do you have a specific style or approach in mind?
JH: I usually have a rough idea of where I’m going. The difference between an outline and the finished book, though, is like the difference between a roadmap and the trip itself. You discover things as you go along, you divert from your course when something interesting catches your eye, you blow past things that you thought were going to be interesting but turned out not to be, and so on.
The same thing is true of style. I have an idea of what I’m doing, but it’s a creative act, so it’s always a little surprising. With Hell On Church Street, I found the voice of the main character right away. It jumped right out of me. I just loved the duality of Geoffrey Webb, his surface politeness and deep-seated contempt. Once I locked into his voice, everything came pretty easy.
The Posthumous Man was a knottier story in many ways. Elliot Stilling is a damaged man rather than a bad one. For all his sins, he’s looking for some kind of redemption. That’s harder to pull off, but I knew, from the very beginning, that I wanted to go through a Long Dark Night of the Soul with that character. I knew that his descent into this grotesque underworld was his way of trying to find some kind of atonement for his sins.
TH: Many of your stories are in the first person and have a very natural and distinct voice. As you mentioned, Geoffrey Webb’s voice came to you very easily, but do you ever struggle to create a voice strong enough to carry a first person narrative?
JH: I don’t know if “struggle” is the right word because, generally speaking, first person narration comes easily to me and is a tremendous amount of fun. I think I have a good ear. I like listening to people, and I like listening to people with distinct voices. Having said that, it is work. Some characters are thornier than others.
With The Posthumous Man, the voice of the main character was tricky because he’s a guy who, as the story begins, has just tried to commit suicide. I pitched my first couple of attempts at his voice too high. Then I realized that I had it all wrong. When the story begins, he’s already gone as high—or as low, depending on how you look at it—as you can go. So the story is existing in that moment after he’s bottomed out. He’s the posthumous man, after all. He dies in the emergency room for three minutes, and then wakes up to find that he has this bizarre second chance presented to him in the person of a deeply troubled nurse. He’s more philosophical than emotionally frazzled. I mean, after you’ve been dead, what’s there to be frazzled about? Once I realized that, everything clicked.
TH: With each of your longer works you’ve written protagonists that are all in the midst of a downward spiral. What attracted you to creating three proudly self-destructive guys?
JH: What’s funny is that I don’t know that any of them would be proud of being self-destructive. Webb thinks he’s smart enough to get everything he wants, but he’s not. Elliot in The Posthumous Man is living in a spiral shame and self-loathing. And Daniel in Saint Homicide thinks that he’s sacrificing his life for a higher good. So I guess you can say that they represent three distinct forms of self-destruction: hedonism, guilt, and fanaticism.
As far as what attracted me to those characters, I guess I would say that I’m wired to write noir, and noir is about screwing up big time. My books aren’t moralistic, but if they do have a moral perspective it is of the “Hey kids, don’t do this at home” variety. Noir is a psychological examination in one sense, but in another sense it is a good old-fashioned cautionary tale. With guns.
TH: Does genre or character come first when you start working on a story?
JH: Always character. I don’t really think about genre. I love Flannery O’Connor and I love Jim Thompson. William Faulkner and Robert B. Parker. I’ve been influenced by Shakespeare and Spillane. It’s all punk rock to me. It all comes down to characters.
The same thing is true of my taste in film. The last two movies I watched were Kurosawa’s Drunken Angel and Eddie Cahn’s Main Street After Dark. Kurosawa would be considered a high artist and Cahn would be considered a B-movie hack, but at the end of the day they both lined up actors in front of cameras and tried to make some drama happen.
I think of writing the same way. No matter if you’re writing “literary fiction” or “genre fiction” you’re putting words on a page and trying to stir up some drama. Vonnegut—who, of course, straddled genre lines—said the chief responsibility of the writer was to be a good date to the reader. That’s all I’m trying to do. I’m just trying to get laid here, people.
TH: Your work has been justifiably described as the bastard offspring of Flannery O’Connor and Jim Thompson. Has being such a student of the crime genre made it easier or harder to find a niche for your own work?
JH: I don’t know, honesty. You don’t pick your influences, they pick you. Any craftsman studies the masters—Chandler studied Hemingway, Orson Welles studied John Ford, Lennon and McCartney studied Chuck Berry. You learn from your betters simply because you’re fascinated by them. It’s like a teenager patterning himself or herself on some older, cooler kid at school. It’s an attraction that takes place on some unconscious level. There’s no reason I should love Flannery O’Connor as much as I do except that when I read her work it struck me as being the best thing I’d ever read. (The Complete Short Stories of Flannery O’Connor is a masterpiece worthy of deep contemplation. I’d love to spend a year just reading and writing about those stories.) The same thing was true when, a few years after that, I first read Jim Thompson. I read A Hell Of A Woman and Savage Night within a few weeks of each other and knew that I’d discovered someone who’d disguised the bleakest, most beautiful art as pulp fiction. I’m the result of my influences. I can’t say to what degree I’d be better off if my influences would have been more mainstream or commercial or whatever. I’d have to be a different person altogether.
TH: Growing up in a religious environment clearly impacted you enough that it’s a reoccurring theme in your work. Your protagonists struggle with their faith in different ways, but in Saint Homicide, Daniel is so self-righteous in his relationship with God that he alienates himself from everyone. Did you have any apprehension exploring a darker outward expression of religious devotion?
JH: I was raised in a very all or nothing religious atmosphere. There’s a line in Saint Homicide where Daniel says, “I simply don’t know what religion means to people for whom it doesn’t mean everything.” Having been raised as a fundamentalist, I can relate to that. I mean, intellectually I understand what might be termed religious moderation, but deep down I really only get fanatics and atheists.
As far as Daniel goes, you know, the idea of a saint is a person who hears a voice that no one else hears and who heeds that silent voice at great personal cost. According to the Bible, God told Abraham to take his son to an altar and slit his throat. And Abraham was prepared to do it. Today, we’d lock up a guy who wanted to kill his child becau
se a voice told him to do it, but clearly we’re still intrigued by that level of faith. Every so often you hear a story about some snake handler dying of a serpent bite. People always mock his death as some backwoods insanity, but I always saw a kind of terrible beauty in it. That guy believed, really believed. I’m utterly fascinated by that kind of faith.
So I was always very excited to write this book—I loved writing this book—because I knew I would get to explore a mindset that holds endless fascination for me. I’m thankful to the folks at Crime Factory Publications for giving me the opportunity to write this novella because this short format is the perfect way to tackle this character. Anything shorter would shortchange him or turn him into a cliché of a religious crackpot, and anything much longer would be too much. The novella form is ideal for the story of this guy.
TH: One of the elements of your fiction and film criticism that I really admire is your ability to concisely articulate conceptually big ideas. How have you learned to keep the language spare, but not lose any of the impact or intelligence?
JH: That’s kind of you to say.
I just tend toward a certain concision. I’ve tried to hone that, of course, but a big part of it is a disposition toward economy. You work like a sculptor, shaving away everything that’s not the sculpture. Get in, get the job done, get the hell out.
Of course, I’m not placing one style above another. I love writers who are expansive, who can “write long” or who employ a certain lushness of language. I admire that facility if it’s put to good use.
But I always improve by stripping away. That’s just where my instincts go. I like black and white movies; I like two hundred page novels; I like two-and-a-half minute songs.
TH: One of the cooler projects you’ve been a part of is Crime Factory’s Lee anthology. How did you approach writing a story about an iconic star, who led such a colorful life, but there isn’t a wealth of biographic information to draw from?
JH: The Lee antho was lot of fun. I had a story idea I’d been kicking around for a while about a down-and-out ex-con who’s approached by a mystery woman to perform a robbery. I had the kernel of the idea but something was missing. Then Andrew Nette from Crime Factory approached me about doing something for Lee and in a flash the whole damn thing came together. Originally the Crime Factory folks suggested I do something on The Big Heat, which is one of Lee Marvin’s best known, and most highly respected, film noirs but one that has frankly never really interested me that much. I was more interested in this piece of shit he made in 1955 called Shack Out On 101. It’s a wretched film—shot on a pauper’s budget with an execrable script and sloppy directing—and I thought it’d be fun to set my story around that time. The down-and-out ex-con becomes a B-movie actor making a Z-grade film, worrying if his career is all washed up. Then our mystery woman shows up with an idea for a robbery. Chaos ensues.
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My Five Most Influential Movies
Jeff Crister
Issue 56
People gravitate toward a favorite film for a variety of reasons—for a hearty laugh or needed escape—but there are always a few movies that are profoundly mesmerizing, ones that we keep coming back to time and again. As a writer of thriller fiction, I’m typically drawn to movies that either have exceptionally fascinating dialogue or uproot our perceptions and challenge archetypes, a visceral assault of sorts. Rare is the film that can do both, but there are a few worthy of that distinction. Admittedly, some of these movies are edgy and disturbing and difficult to view without looking away, but it’s precisely for those reasons that I’m drawn to them. Each time I view the following five films, I take away something that I missed previously, a little nugget of detail that eluded detection but then shined in its own right.
The Godfather
This film is on the top of many lists, having earned its place by the exceptional acting, intriguing plot, and beautiful cinematography. I’ve always been fascinated by the Italian Mafia, and I’ve dissected every aspect of the movie in exhaustive detail. The ruthlessness the Mafia imposed to enforce their loyalty and omerta and their traditions and culture captivated me like no other movie, before or since. Like many moviegoers, The Godfather was my first glimpse into the La Cosa Nostra way of life and underscored the depth that greed will plunge people—so deeply, in fact, that often there was no point of return. A timeless masterpiece.
Requiem For A Dream
This film flew under the public’s radar, but being a fan of Hubert Selby’s writings (from which the movie was based), I stumbled upon it years ago when there was a Blockbuster on every street corner. Darren Aronofsky riveted me with this film, profoundly more than Pi or Black Swan did. The four principal characters, trapped within their own addictions, spiral down into hellish despair, all brilliantly captured by Aronofsky’s masterful filmmaking. The last third of the movie literally throbs with anguish and fear, complemented with an eerie instrumental score and a flurry of scene changes. When the end arrives, you are left exhausted and stunned at the dissoluteness and torment. Not a film for the squeamish, but one of my all-time favorites.
The Thin Red Line
A beautiful and haunting film, two traits not often associated together in a WWII movie. The all-star cast and spectacular cinematography helped distinguish The Thin Red Line above others in this genre, but what drew me to the movie were the poetic elements interwoven throughout the storyline. The letters exchanged between Pvt. Bell (Ben Chaplin) and his wife provided a deeply emotional connection to the movie, only to be shattered when Bell learns that his wife has left him while he was in combat in the South Pacific. Watching Col. Tall (Nick Nolte) berate Capt. Staros (Elias Koteas) for abandoning a seemingly suicidal mission highlighted the moral dilemma that many face in the field of battle. Despite the horrific violence and personal betrayal in the film, director Terrence Malick managed to capture stunning scenes of beauty and grandeur that leave an indelible mark in your imagination. A film of sweeping images and beleaguered souls orchestrated perfectly onscreen.
The Usual Suspects
There are a few movies that you have to pay very close attention to (never excuse yourself for popcorn or a trip to the bathroom) or you will lose the entire thread of the story. The Usual Suspects is one of those films. The dialogue is brilliant and rapid-fire, with an enticing cadence akin to a campfire story told in dark, haunted woods. The repartee among the suspects is beyond witty; it’s cutting and clever and tense. The major actors delivered phenomenal performances, but the supporting cast had a chemistry that worked flawlessly onscreen. Stephen Baldwin, Benicio del Toro, and Chaz Palminteri had a style and coolness that were fun to watch but difficult to emulate. Perhaps Christopher McQuarrie’s finest script and one of the best screenplays ever written for film.
Sexy Beast
Sexy Beast would do well with subtitles for those not accustomed to British accents and nuanced dialogue. This caper film is a large departure from the typical fare in this genre and is very British. While not loaded with cockney rhyme, the idioms and slang are distinctively Ol’ Blighty and delivered with machine-gun rapidity. Gal Dove, an affable thief played by the incomparable Ray Winstone, is recruited for one last heist by the despicable and mercurial Don Logan (Ben Kingsley). Mix in the wicked Teddy Bass (brilliantly performed by Ian McShane) and the result is a sometimes funny (yet always edgy) plot that swallows you whole. The deadpan iniquity of Teddy Bass and Don Logan’s energetic psychopathy help create a tension that is palpable throughout the entire movie. Vividly crafted characters and a dark, fun script make Sexy Beast unique in this category of film.
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Three Albums and Two Books that Changed My Life
By Ben H. Winters
Issue 56
When I was in middle school I, like most people at that age, was “really in to” the same music all my friends were “really in to”: A lot of U2, a lot of REM, and a lot of late 80s DC-area punk rock, since this was the late 80s in the DC area. (I
stand by all this music, by the way, and think everybody should have to listen to the Jawbox song “Savory” every day). But then the summer after eighth grade I “discovered,” Elvis Costello, courtesy of some kid named Zack at a summer camp I went to for nerds. The album this Zack kid had was Spike, which now I wouldn’t even rank in my top ten EC albums, but looking back that was the first time that I discovered an artist and knew that this was me—this music wasn’t just the music that everybody likes, this is the specific music that I, specifically, am into. I think that was probably the beginning of me having taste, good taste, my own personal taste, and to this day the song “Deep Dark Truthful Mirror” (Spike side A, track 3) sends special shivers down my spine.
Readers of The Last Policeman series will not be surprised to hear how much I love Bob Dylan’s 1979 album Slow Train Coming—the epigraph of the first novel comes from the title track, and “Slow Train Coming” was actually my working title for the series. I love everything by Bob Dylan and everything about Bob Dylan, including even the strange evangelical-Christian phase that produced this record. What it sings to me, this passionate album about Jesus, is the permission Bob has given himself over the course of a long career to do what he feels he is obligated to by his imagination, by his ideas, by whatever his weird brilliant heart is telling him to do at any given time. There’s courage there, and I love it.
Among the many gifts my wife has given me over the years—along with honest feedback, health insurance, and three gorgeous children—is a love for Tom Waits. Just marrying into Diana’s collection of Waits CDs was absolutely life-changing, and I’ll just pick Heart of Saturday Night as the exemplar, because it includes one of the greatest and most sensorially evocative couplets in pop music: “Crack of the pool ball, neon buzzin’ / telephone ringin’, it’s your second cousin.”
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