All Due Respect Issue #2

by Owen Laukkanen

  CH: One of the things I love about your writing is your sympathetic approach to your antagonists. You avoid mustache-twirling villains, instead creating nuanced characters with understandable motivations—and thanks to that, the reader winds up feeling almost complicit in their crimes. How important is it to you to relate to your antagonists on a personal level?

  OL: It’s extremely important. If I’m going to write about a villain for three- or four-hundred pages, I need to be able to empathize with him or her. I don’t want to write about people who were born bad, or whose motivations are one-dimensional attributes like greed or lust or simple malevolence. I don’t know people like that, and I don’t think I could make them interesting for very long.

  What I do know are people who make poor decisions and have to live with them, and people who maybe rationalize a little bit of rule-breaking here and there, who keep sneaking across a line until that line means nothing, and they find a new line to cross. I think people get into crime incrementally, down the proverbial slippery slope, and what interests me is finding people who are at the top of that slope and watching them slide their way down. And I think if you start with a character who is at the top of that slope, the audience can relate to them, and it becomes this kind of horrifying, car-wreck situation where you’re really invested in the character’s survival.

  CH: You studied creative writing in college—and your program, like many of its kind, discouraged genre writing in favor of more literary endeavors. What impact did that have on what and how you write? Do you think the anti-genre bias exhibited by the majority of creative writing programs is justified?

  OL: I don’t think I’d be writing crime fiction if my university’s creative writing department hadn’t been explicitly anti-genre. The expectation at my school was that students were to focus on producing work of artistic merit, and straight genre work was unacceptable unless it really pushed the boundaries.

  I’d had no prior interest in writing genre fiction, but I was a bit of a smartass who liked pushing boundaries, so I wrote about android girlfriends and caped superheroes and hardboiled detectives, and not only managed to avoid being expelled, but realized I really kind of liked the noir stuff, and so later when I set about trying to carve out a writing career for myself, I remembered how much fun the hardboiled stuff was to write and decided to try my hand at a crime novel.

  As for whether the anti-genre bias is justified, I think the aim of the program was to encourage artistic exploration, where I’d maybe expected a more practical, “how to get paid to write novels” kind of education. I certainly think the program encouraged its young writers to challenge themselves instead of looking for an easy formula for fame and fortune, and I think that mindset has helped me write novels that—I hope—are a little more than just by-the-numbers thrillers.

  CH: I recently came across a quote of yours in which you said, in response to what you look for in a crime novel, “I like to be wowed by technique.” So let’s talk technique. Your books are often praised as page-turners, and it’s easy to see why. Your language is lean and economical, your chapters brief and hooky. But I think the label sells your writing short, because your language also manages to be incredibly evocative, and those short chapters read like self-contained short stories that somehow work together with clockwork precision. What’s your process like? How cognizant are you while you’re writing of how you’d like the book to sound, to read? Is page-turning prose borne of writing, or of editing?

  OL: I’m always trying to keep the language spare. I had a professor in university who would take his red pen to my short stories and hack and slash them until they were pared to their most essential parts, and as traumatic as I always found the experience, it really stuck with me, and I’m a ruthless editor of my work. I find the hack and slash cathartic.

  In my mind, the way to keep a reader turning pages is to avoid burdening them with the unnecessary bits. Give them the basic facts, and let their minds fill in the blanks. We all have a picture in our minds of what a sandwich shop looks like, for instance; unless it’s absolutely necessary for the plot, I’m not going to tell you about the soup of the day.

  And I think short chapters, paradoxically, keep readers reading longer, especially if you can end each one with a cliffhanger. I know I fall into the trap of always promising myself just one more chapter before I turn out the light at night, and then all of a sudden it’s three in the morning and half the book is gone. That’s the kind of problem I’m hoping to cause for my readers.

  That said, if I could write the kind of poetic stuff that Michael Chabon writes without it coming off as gooey and purple and embarrassing, I would do it. I love technique, and I love beautiful writing, but I just don’t think I have the chops to pull it off myself.

  CH: The Professionals, quite rightly, made major waves when it was released—garnering uniformly excellent reviews as well as a number of award nominations, including the Anthony, the Barry, and the International Thriller Writers’ Thriller Award. What effect did that have on crafting your subsequent books? Did you feel pressure to live up to so auspicious a debut?

  OL: I felt tremendous pressure. The award nominations came later, after the book had been out for a while, but certainly the reviews and the blurbs hammered home that I was playing in the big leagues now, and I’d better be able to prove I belonged.

  I felt like I was learning to write all over again when I wrote Criminal Enterprise, the second book. I’d been given a two-book deal, and I’d never written something that I’d already been paid for, so I was really conscious of the expectations and the pressure, and I kind of froze up, like a terrified minor-leaguer taking his first big league at-bat. I stressed about the book all the way from the first draft to the day it hit stores, convinced that somebody was going to realize it was crap and point me out as a phony.

  It’s still something I worry about, though with Kill Fee, I’ve learned to try and separate my internal sense of a book from any external reviews or reaction. I like Kill Fee a lot, and it’s the book I set out to write when I started the first draft. I’d like to get to a point where that’s satisfaction enough for me, and I’m not pinning my sense of writerly self-worth on external accolades or achievements, but I’m not quite there yet.

  CH: Despite the professions of your protagonists, your series eschews the regimented case-of-the-week vibe of a procedural. How do you ensure each book in the series has its own rhythm, its own feel?

  OL: Well, I think I wrote each book with a different objective. The Professionals was supposed to be a one-off, standalone about these four kidnappers, and so when I sat down to write Criminal Enterprise, I had these law enforcement characters to flesh out and make whole, and kind of prove they could carry a series together.

  With Kill Fee, I’ve reached a point where I have a good idea of Stevens and Windermere as characters, and when I sit down to write them they feel like friends. I know pretty well how they’ll react to most situations, so I can give them a case and let them take me along for the ride.

  I think, also, that each book has had a certain underlying theme to it, and that theme dictates what a lot of the secondary plots and characters are going to do. I try to have a motive when I’m writing that’s more than just giving my cops a case to solve; I’d like them to explore something a little bit deeper, and that helps differentiate the books from just straight procedurals.

  CH: The best crime fiction, in my opinion, holds a mirror up to society—reflecting its ills, as well as its deepest anxieties. Your books do that in spades. In The Professionals, your antagonists are a group of recent college grads who, after struggling to find gainful employment in the midst of an economy in ruins, turn to a life of crime—kidnapping comfortable upper-middle-class types for ransom. Criminal Enterprise, on the other hand, features an antagonist that, at first blush, looks like one of the comfortable upper-middle-class types who might’ve made for a good kidnapping target for Pender and his gang. But when he loses his cush
y job and winds up under water on his house, he’s forced to either admit to his family and his peers that he’s a failure, or turn to a life of crime to make ends meet. And one of the antagonists of Kill Fee, out this March, is a hit man who kills because he’s haunted by the traumas he endured serving his country overseas. Society has failed each of them in some way, which lends their crimes an air of tragic inevitability. Is social commentary something you strive for when you sit down to write a novel, or does is come about organically during the writing process? What comes first, plot or central metaphor?

  OL: I do strive to write something a little bit deeper. I think it begins with characters who are more than just one-dimensional bad guys, or cops for that matter. If you have a character whose motivations you can understand and whose circumstances you can empathize with, you can start to say something about those circumstances and what society might have done to push him to make the choices he made.

  I think the plot comes first, and the theme starts to emerge as the story unfolds, and when I go back and read the first draft, I can see the first hints of theme and try to play them up in the later drafts. With Criminal Enterprise, for instance, I wanted to play with the similarities and differences between Carter Tomlin and Kirk Stevens, who are both, ostensibly, family men, but who treat their roles as fathers and husbands very differently.

  CH: You seem to love to send your readers down the rabbit-hole with your antagonists, escalating the tension and violence relentlessly as if testing our capacity to sympathize with them, or perhaps seeing how close they can get to the end of their rope before they fall off. To that end, have you ever written anything that made you wonder if you’d gone too far? Have you ever, in the course of writing, made yourself uncomfortable?

  OL: I have. I have a weak stomach, for a crime writer. I don’t like gore, and I don’t like needless murder or sexual violence. There’s a scene in Kill Fee where a character kills a cat, and it was tough enough to write. I tried to just sketch it out as quickly as I could and move on, because it really didn’t sit well with me.

  On a broader scale, I get uncomfortable when I start treating the violence in my stories as nothing more than good thriller fodder, as opposed to a reflection of real-world situations. My fourth Stevens and Windermere book is about sex trafficking, and when I sat down to do research I was pretty focused on finding angles that would make for a good yarn, without the horrible reality of the trafficking business really registering. That changed in a hurry, though, and I’m glad for it; I think it can only be bad news if a writer loses empathy for his subjects.

  CH: Last year, you were gracious enough to blurb a debut novel called The Cuckoo’s Calling by a then-unheard-of author named Robert Galbraith, and as I recall, you were effusive in your praise. A few months after the book was released, The Sunday Times revealed that Robert Galbraith was none other than J.K. Rowling—a revelation that catapulted the book to instant bestseller status, and spawned a media frenzy. What’s it like to discover you blurbed a novel by the most successful novelist in history? Did you have any inkling while you were reading it that Galbraith was not who he appeared to be? Has lending your name to Galbraith’s work sparked interest from Rowling’s fans in your own?

  OL: Ha! I actually learned that Robert Galbraith was, in fact, J.K. Rowling from a tweet my agent showed me while we were at a banquet together. I didn’t think anything of it at first, and then it was all very surreal. I’d never read any of the Harry Potter books, so I really had no background knowledge of how J.K. Rowling writes, but I do remember being wowed by the language in the book, which struck me as particularly elegant and beautiful for a debut crime novelist. So I wasn’t entirely surprised to learn that the writer had written before, but I was pretty bowled over to learn the author’s true identity.

  I’m not sure that my attachment to the book has had any tangible benefit on my own career, though I’m still holding out hope that Ms. Rowling will see fit to return the favor and blurb one of my own books someday. I don’t expect anything out of it, though; I’m happy enough to have a cool story to tell.

  CH: Who is Owen Matthews? What can you tell us about his forthcoming YA novel, How To Win At High School?

  OL: Owen Matthews is my Cinnamon Toast Crunch-eating, violent video game-playing alter ego, and How to Win at High School is his first novel. My agent describes it as Scarface meets Ferris Bueller in a high school, though it owes a lot stylistically to Don Winslow’s Savages.

  I actually wrote the first draft of the book about ten years ago. It was the first novel I ever finished, and I imagined that it would bring me instant fame and fortune. It did not, and after a number of drafts, I decided to shelve the thing and focus on other projects. I always liked the idea, though, and about a year and a half ago I mentioned it to my agent, who liked it, too, and I found the file on my hard drive and dusted it off and did some major surgery and, lo and behold, it’s finally found a home. It’ll be out from Harper Children’s in early 2015, and in the meantime, I’m looking forward to channeling my inner wild child through Owen Matthews.

  CH: What’s next for Stevens and Windermere?

  OL: Stevens and Windermere have at least one more book in them, the aforementioned sex trafficking book. A sheriff’s deputy is murdered in the woods where Stevens is vacationing with his family, and the prime suspect is a beautiful, terrified young woman who doesn’t speak any English. As Stevens and Windermere dig deeper, they realize the woman is part of an international trafficking organization—and that her sister is still in the organization’s clutches.

  I’m working on revisions to the book now, and it’ll be out in the spring of 2015. As soon as I’m finished, I’m going to start working on the fifth book in the series, which I’ve been wanting to write ever since The Professionals came out. It’s basically a return to the kidnappers in The Professionals, who have some unfinished business with the mobsters who they crossed in the first book. I loved the kidnappers like they were real people, so I’m really looking forward to revisiting them and seeing how their lives have unfolded, a few years after the dust settled the first time.

  Dock Talk:

  How I Came to Write “N.F.G”

  By Owen Laukkanen

  Fishermen love to talk.

  I used to work on fishing boats. In university, I worked summers on my uncle’s prawn boat off the west coast of Vancouver Island. Later, when I decided to give up my steady, good-paying reporting gig to take a stab at writing crime fiction, I went back to sea to help keep the bills paid.

  I come from a fishing family. My dad’s brother owned the prawn boat. My dad fishes for lobster in a boat of his own. I’ve fished with him, too, on the East Coast of Canada. I’ve debated buying my own boat, bearing down, pursuing my own career on the water. In my mind, fishing is a natural complement to life as a working writer.

  It’s not just because fishing picks a writer up off his ass and drags him off of his couch and away from his laptop and out into the fresh air and sunlight for a while. It’s not just because the writer benefits from a couple hard, solid months of manual labor, or that fishing gives him long, mundane stretches in which to organize his thoughts, or that, at season’s end, the writer finds himself dropped off on the dock with a good-sized paycheck and a lot of free time to spend organizing those thoughts into his next novel. It’s all of those things, but that’s not the meat of it. The reason I love fishing, from a writer’s standpoint, is that fishermen love to talk. And they have a hell of a lot of good stories.

  The story that appears in this issue, “N.F.G.,” was born out of dock talk. Mostly, it was born from my third summer on the water, a two-month prawn season I spent sharing forty-two feet of fishing boat with three other men—my uncle and Chad and Earl. The real life Chad was a cowboy from a little town on the coast. He talked about breaking horses and work in the oil patch, the monster truck he was building. Earl, though, was a fisherman through and through.

  Earl was sixty-some years old, and near
ly all of them spent on the water. He’d seen boom times and busts. He’d fished for prawns, salmon, halibut, herring, tuna. He’d fished dogfish for pennies a pound, spent long nights in leaky boats hundreds of miles out at sea. He’d cheated death in winter gales, and raised hell in every one of the little towns that dot the British Columbia coastline, and at the end of every workday, as we gathered in the wheelhouse, he’d tell us about it. So would my uncle. So would every other old salt who poked his head in the wheelhouse for a drink and a couple hours’ worth of bullshit.

  I was a wide-eyed city boy. I was a greenhorn. I was a bookish, skinny kid with a head full of theories and no practical knowledge, or much of any knowledge whatsoever beyond the vague idea that I was going to be a writer, and damned if these grizzled veterans weren’t giving me a mother lode of material. Every night, I’d sit in that galley and listen to Earl hold forth over coffee and the odd slice of pie, and when the coffee pot was empty and the pie’d all been eaten, I’d duck down to my bunk and my ragged little notebook and scribble down as much of what he’d said as I could remember.

  The Black Mamba. The ninety-seven dollar potato salad. The criminal who brought the ringer into the courtroom and walked. I copied down Earl’s stories and swore I would do something with them, someday.

  The summer ended. I came ashore and wrote a novel about kidnappers and watched my writing career start to take hold. I put that notebook away and lost touch with the guys. Earl’s probably fishing, somewhere. Chad’s breaking horses deep in the oil patch. Even my uncle’s retired, and his little troller mostly does duty as a pleasure cruiser, now. I put that notebook away around the same time as I abandoned my fantasies of a career as a fisherman.

  Writing “N.F.G.” brought me back, though. To that notebook, and with it, that cramped wheelhouse, Earl’s voice, the dim galley light and the creak of the boat as it swung on the anchor. To the stories, pages and pages and hours and hours of them, to the wide-eyed greenhorn who sat in his corner and listened with equal parts fascination and urgency, clinging to every detail and desperate to write it all down.