Interview by Mike MacLean

If you read Dave Zeltserman’s guest spot here at Murderati last week you know all about his trials and tribulations in the publishing world.  While many a man would’ve folded under such adversity, Dave kept swinging.  And we’re all better off for it.

Not only did Dave pen the critically acclaimed Fast Lane, and the soon to be critically acclaimed Bad Thoughts, but now he has a well-deserved three-book deal with ultra cool Serpent’s Tail publishing.  And if that isn’t enough, Mr. Z. runs the HardLuck Stories webzine, providing a place for new noir voices.

Dave’s latest novel, the aforementioned Bad Thoughts, is a hardboiled mix of detectives and supernatural horror.  To quote Edgar-winner Steve Hamilton the book is "hypnotic, gripping, even terrifying."  High praise indeed.

Dave was kind of enough to chat with me about his book, noir on the web, and writing in the dark.

MM: What inspired Bad Thoughts?

DZ:  I was reading a lot about metaphysics and astral projection around that time, doing some experimentation with it, and it had a heavy influence on the book. The PI in the book, "Pig" Dornich, who is one of my favorite characters that I’ve written, was inspired by an ex-Boston cop who was working as a PI and taught a one-day PI course that I took. Mostly, though, Bad Thoughts came about by working out what I thought would be an exciting story, with of course a thematic subtext worked in.

MM:  Considering the number of serial killer books out there, did you have any reservations about writing this story?

DZ:  I wrote Bad Thoughts over 10 years ago, and I don’t think there were as many serial killer books then, but I also don’t think of Bad Thoughts as a serial killer book. Yeah, there’s a serial killer in it, but it’s more an exploration of evil and rage, and at its heart it’s about survival-about going through tremendous emotional and physical abuse, and somehow surviving it. My dad would always say whenever someone was going through something tough, "ah, jeeze, he went through hell". Well, without any exaggeration, my main character in this one goes through hell.

MM: Writing Bad Thoughts required you to get into the head of a sadistic killer, which you pull off quite effectively.  How did you do it? 

DZ: It’s a gift. Some people can throw a baseball 95 miles an hour, others can sit down at a piano and play a piece perfectly after hearing it once, while still others can do magic with landscaping. Me, I can get into the heads of losers, psychos and sociopaths. My wife and parents are very proud…

MM: Did you face any personal repercussions delving into such dark material?

DZ: None. In a way it’s therapeutic. I work out a lot of issues in my writing. BUT as dark as my fiction might be, there’s nothing nihilistic about it. Justice is preserved in my fictional worlds. The guilty pay a price for their crimes. Now if evil triumphed in my books, it probably would have some effect on my psyche.

MM: Why are serial killer books so popular with readers?  Why are we so fascinated by the twisted and terrifying?

DZ: I don’t know about serial killer books, but with the brilliant psycho noir books that Jim Thompson wrote, it can be an exhilarating experience being suckered into the head of someone you think is maybe a down on his luck loser, but who’s still sane, and turns out to be completely crazy. I don’t know why this is, but few books have given me the ride that Thompson’s "Hell of a Woman", "Pop. 1280", and "Savage Night" have.

MM: One of the most gripping scenes in the novel is the confrontation between the killer and Shannon’s lovely therapist.  While you’re in the thick of writing it, how can you tell when a scene like this is working?

DZ: I think I can read my books mostly objectively and can tell when I’ve written something that’s working or just plain sucks, and I keep hammering away at the sucky parts until I’m relatively happy with it. With scenes like the one you mentioned, yeah, I can usually feel a buzz when I’m writing it-I guess it’s the lizard part of my brain taking over, and I just kind of go along for the ride.

MM: What is the advantage to working with a smaller publisher like Five Star?

DZ: To quote the coach of the three-time Super Bowl Champions, the New England Patriots, (I never get tired of saying that) "it is what it is." Five Star sells mostly to libraries, and aren’t really geared for bookstore sales. Their discount policy really only allows bookstores to carry your books if there’s an authors event involved. Practically speaking, with a publisher like Five Star you’re only going to sell 1,000-2,000 copies. I knew this going in, and everyone at Five Star has been great, very professional, but a newer writer is obviously better off if they can get their books into a larger house. BUT-smaller publishers like Five Star are more open to certain books that the larger houses won’t accept.

MM: How do you plan to promote your novel?

DZ: I’m going to order MWA’s library listing and try to contact as many libraries as I can to try to do readings. I’ll also try to organize some bookstore events. Small Crimes is out in March and will be much more widely distributed, and probably much more widely reviewed-and I’m hoping that will get people searching out Bad Thoughts.

MM: In addition to writing, you’re also the editor of the very cool HardLuck Stories webzine.  What motivated you to launch HardLuck?
                               
DZ: I had a bunch of reasons initially for starting Hardluck. Early on I justified the time I was spending on it as a way to promote myself as a writer, but I was doing it more as a creative outlet and to publish something that I was proud of–if I wasn’t I would’ve pulled the plug. What’s kept me going, though, is what Hardluck’s been able to do for newer writers. A lot of very generous writers–including Ed Gorman, Vicki Hendricks, Ken Bruen, Jeremiah Healy and Bill Crider to name a few, have been amazingly helpful to me as a newer writer, and I’m happy that I’ve been able to give back a little with Hardluck.

MM: Despite the fact that HardLuck offers zero compensation to its writers, you’ve been able to nab some heavy hitters of the crime fiction world, including Ed Gorman, JA Konrath, and even Murderati’s own Ken Bruen.  What drew these guys to HardLuck?

DZ: Generosity of spirit. The writers you listed, plus the other professional writers that I’ve published,  can sell everything they write. The reason they’ve provided stories to Hardluck-and in the cases of Ed Gorman, Jeremiah Healy, O’Neil De Noux, Miki Hayden-also acted as guest editors, was to promote a crime fiction magazine that’s helping to draw attention to newer writers. That’s really the reason. These writers can all be described by the Yiddish word "mensch", it’s in their makeup to give of themselves to help us guys coming up, and it’s something that has made a big impression on me.

MM: What future do you see for fiction on the web?

  DZ: I think the quality on Hardluck and other sites like Thuglit and PulpPusher is very good-we’re probably publishing some of the best short noir and pulp fiction available anywhere. The problem is 99.9% of the readers for this type of crime fiction have no clue that these web-zines exist. You see stuff about these web-zines being the new pulps. Well, that’s true in the sense that these zines are a breeding ground for some very talented new writers, but there’s no money in it. With the pulps, writers could make a living, plus readers knew about them. It’s going to take a cataclysmic event to change that-something like USA Today, New York Times, or maybe CNN, championing these zines. If that were to happen, it would cause a chain reaction that would change everything. Readership would jump to the point where these zines would be able to charge for advertising and then be able to pay a good rate for stories. This is mostly a pipedream on my part, but I’m giving it a shot with Hardluck’s Stephen Colbert "truthiness" issue. If I’m able to pull it off I’m pretty sure I’d get Colbert mentioning it on their show-they jumped on putting the call for submissions on their web-site. At the moment it’s not looking like it’s going to happen, though-I think the theme ended up being too conceptually difficult. We’ll see, I still have some more submissions to go through. If this doesn’t work out, Todd Robinson at Thuglit will probably be the guy to make something happen. He’s in New York, which is the right place to be, he’s got a ton of energy, and has been doing a great job branding Thuglit. If anyone’s going to do it, I think he’s the guy.

MM: We share an interest in martial arts.  What drew you to Kung Fu?  Has the study of martial arts had any impact on your writing?

DZ: I knew little about martial arts when I started. I always admired people who had the tenacity to stick with it and get a black belt, and it was something I always wanted to try. When my cousin started working on his black belt in Karate and I saw the physical changes in him, I made up my mind to finally do it. The first guy I talked with had a third degree black belt in Aikido, and he got me psyched to do that, but a little research showed Aikido probably wasn’t a good idea for someone with back problems. There’s a Kung Fu studio a few miles away from me, I liked the head instructor, so I gave it a shot. At first I was pathetic, maybe one of the worst students he ever had, but six years later I’ve gotten pretty good at it and will be testing for my black this October. The first few years we did Northern-style longfist, weapons training, and Southern-style Hung Gar. The last three years the focus has been purely Hung Gar 5-animal form. I enjoy it a lot. It’s a great mix of aerobic, strengthening, self-defense, and meditative movement. The last couple of years I’ve also been doing Tai Chi with a martial arts focus. Love that internal stuff! It’s helped a lot with my Kung fu, especially balancing and rooting.

I don’t know if it’s had any impact on my writing other than I understand fighting much better now and how much damage you can do, and my fight scenes-or more accurately-my beating up scenes, are more realistic.

MM: What will we see next from Dave Zeltserman?   

DZ: I have a noir trilogy being published by Serpent’s Tail. The first book, Small Crimes, will be out next March, the second, my South Boston Irish Mob book, Pariah, will be out 1/09, and the third, Killer, sometime after that. I’m very excited about this-Serpent’s Tail is doing great stuff and is a publisher I’ve been wanting to get into for a long time. What’s also pretty cool about this is that all three books start the same way-a dangerous guy being released from prison, and Serpent’s Tail is going to be marketing these as a "Badass out of Prison" series.

Another project that I’m very proud of is a Western Noir anthology that I’m co-editing with Ed Gorman and Martin Greenberg, and is being published by Cemetary Dance. This is an offshoot of Hardluck’s Western Noir issue. All 14 stories from that issue are being included, as well as 7 other original stories and an introduction by Jim Sallis. All of these stories hit what Ed and I were originally going after-a mix of very noir and western, the type of stuff fans of Deadwood are going to like. There are some great stories in this anthology, and one of the things I like most about this is that for at least one issue of Hardluck, I’m going to be able to pay my writers the going rate for stories. Who knows, maybe we’ll be able to turn more issues into print anthologies. I always thought the Bank Robbery, Horror Noir and Borderland Noir issues were deserving of an anthology.

MM: What’s that you say…a Borderland Noir anthology?  Sounds like a great idea.  And that’s my totally unbaised opinion.

Thanks for taking the time to chat Dave.

DZ: Mike, it’s been an absolute pleasure talking with you.

Interview by Mike MacLean

I read much of Allan Guthrie’s latest novel sitting in a baby’s nursery, surrounded by painted flowers and cute stuffed animals.  As you might guess, I wasn’t in the appropriate setting. 

Hard Man, like the rest of Guthrie’s writing, is a million miles away from cute.  It’s a nasty story… a dark story… a story with grit under its fingernails.

Right up my alley.

So of course, I jumped at the chance to interview Edinburgh’s Guthrie concerning his new book, his work as an editor for the very cool Point Blank Press, and his sideline as a crime fiction agent.   

MM: Thomas Perry says about Hard Man, "I promise this is a story you haven’t read before."  I’d say Perry is dead on in his description.  What makes Hard Man so different than most books on the shelves?

AG: That’s very flattering of both of you. If Hard Man is different, then I don’t think there’s one single thing I can pinpoint. Let’s see. Could be that most crime novels tend to deal with heroes and/or detectives, and have author-smart protagonists. Hard Man has none of those. Or it could be the nods to Jacobean Revenge tragedy, Grand Guignol, Theatre Of The Absurd. Or the multiple character-specific voices. Or it could just be the very high level of swearing. Or the combination of humour and horror. Could also be that I break the rule about having an active protagonist. Not only is Pearce (my protagonist) passive and largely reactive, but he spends the first third of the book trying his hardest to do nothing, and then when he does try to do something, he’s quickly incapacitated and rendered immobile for a good chunk of the rest of the novel. But whatever the reason, it’s great to hear you think it’s different.

MM: It seems your writing style has changed since Kiss Her Goodbye?  How do you think you’ve evolved as a writer?  Were these changes the result of a conscious effort on your part?

Two major changes between Kiss Her Goodbye and Hard Man, I think. First, the latter was written to be read aloud – a decidedly conscious effort on my part so’s I wouldn’t have to edit the book for reading aloud at events after it was published as I had to with the previous one. That’s why Hard Man has far more dialogue attribution than Kiss. The other major stylistic difference is that whilst both books are written in multiple limited third person, Hard Man is also character-specific. There’s an indication of that in Kiss, where I use a teenage suicide’s diary to tell part of the story. But in Hard Man I had to come up with a raft of different voices (seven, I think), and tell the chronological narrative in their voices, with their vocabulary, linguistic tics, etc. Technically, it was a much, much harder book to write.

MM: Instead of chapters, Hard Man is divided into sections that are given movie titles (Ghost Dog, History of Violence, True Romance).  What made you break up your novel this way?

AG: I’ve never been a big fan of numbering chapters. Seems pointless, unless you’re counting backwards. So in the original draft I gave each ‘chapter’ a heading, but those were deemed a little cumbersome and disappeared in the edit. Consequently, I needed to link the headings that remained, and movie titles seemed appropriate and added a little metafictional touch. I especially like the one that’s called "EI8HT". I’d have used Jacobean revenge tragedies as titles, but I already used a lot of references to those in Kiss.

MM: What role do you think setting plays in your books?

Oh, various, I think. It’s crucial for my debut novel, Two-Way Split. Edinburgh’s a divided city. There’s the Old and New Town. And the city’s volcanic legacy (the Old Town is built on a volcanic ridge) is a spectacular visual backdrop, which at the same time conjures up images of massive violent activity. For Kiss, part of the action takes place on a remote Scottish island, so there’s a lot of interplay between urban Edinburgh and the rural Orkney. With Hard Man, setting’s least important. After all, a large chunk of it takes place in a dark cellar! I’m always aware of trying to ground the reader in the physical world, though. So in that sense, setting is the first thing I think about in every scene I write. I always ask myself the questions: what can the point-of-view character see, what can they smell, is it hot or cold, what’s that noise, etc …

MM: There are a few instances in Hard Man where the internal dialogue of characters disintegrates into streams of consciousness, which isn’t always easy to follow.  It was a bold choice and pretty effective.  What made you write these scenes like this?  Were you ever afraid of loosing readers?

AG: A terrific Scottish writer called Ray Banks made me write scenes like that. Seriously. He’s my first reader and provides invaluable editorial feedback. After reading an early draft of Hard Man he mentioned that he thought some of the characters sounded too similar. So I decided to give him different. With knobs on. I confess it never occurred to me that anyone would find the various narrative voices difficult to follow. To me, they’re all just third person written as if first (or at least that’s the idea). I have heard that some people don’t like multiple viewpoint novels at all though, preferring to stick with just the one viewpoint throughout. As a writer I usually find single-viewpoints too restrictive for the stories I tell. Although, come to think of it, I did write a single-viewpoint novel between Kiss and Hard Man but it never got out to play.

MM: A character in Hard Man who believes he is Jesus is literally crucified.  Is there a statement about religion here?  If not, what made you include this image in your novel?

AG: Walter Mosley. Originally Jesus was going to be Satan, but Mosley brought out The Man In My Basement, which was just too close for comfort (I won’t spoil it by saying why). So I performed a 180, decided to see what happened if Jesus was in the basement instead. First thing that occurred to me was that he’d have to be crucified. Otherwise, he wouldn’t be a very convincing Jesus. And there’s a sort of shared insanity going on, where Jesus and his captor both, at times, believe that he really might be Jesus. I’m hugely drawn to the idea of shared insanity – a fascinating concept, brilliantly exploited in a terrific Belgian horror movie called Calvaire, which I hadn’t seen at the time I wrote Hard Man or it might have been a section header. Anyway, in Hard Man, the guy who carries out the crucifixion has something of a God complex – and I figured that crucifixion would spring rapidly to mind. He’s not the kind of guy who’d just give you a stiff reprimand if you piss him off, and he’s really pissed off, so crucifixion seemed a good choice.

MM: According to the Point Blank Press website, you are an acquisitions editor.  What exactly do you do for Point Blank?

AG: The title says it all, pretty much. I acquire and edit books. That means I’ll read submissions (when we’re open), negotiate contracts and carry out all forms of story- and copy-editing.

MM:  What can a small press like Point Blank do for its authors that a bigger company cannot?

AG: We’ve always seen PointBlank as a potential launching pad for new writers. The original novels we publish are primarily by debut novelists, and for the first five original novels PointBlank published, it’s certainly been significant in terms of getting deals with publishers who actually pay advances (those four novels are my own Two-Way Split, Ray Banks’s The Big Blind, Duane Swierczynski’s Secret Dead Men, Dave Zeltserman’s Fast Lane and Anthony Neil Smith’s Psychosomatic). So I guess we can get writers noticed, generate some critical acclaim, occasionally sell a few books, and provide a foot on the lower rungs of the publishing ladder.

MM: You wear three hats in the publishing world: writer, editor, and agent.  How does being a writer affect your work as an editor and agent?

AG: I don’t think being a writer makes much difference to how I edit. It makes a lot of difference as to how I am as an agent, though. I spent a long time in pursuit of an agent myself, and dealt with various frustrations along the way that only writers are familiar with. I know how it is to feel out of the loop and utterly ignorant of what’s going on. I know how it is to feel like I’m the lowest priority. So I use all of that to MAKE MY CLIENTS’ LIVES HELL.

MM: As an agent, what makes you decide to represent a writer?

AG: I tend to take on clients because I want to spend time with them and their manuscripts and because I think those manuscripts should be published. It’s hard to be specific. 

MM: As an editor, what do you look for in a book?

AG: You’ve probably heard of manuscripts getting rejected with the phrase "It’s good, but I just didn’t love it enough." I don’t think I appreciated what that meant until I starting editing. On average, I’d say that I’ve ended up reading the manuscripts I’ve edited up to half-a-dozen times each, so I have to know that the book is one that can stand up to a lot of readings. And that’s a tall order.

MM: What are you working on now?

AG: I have a novella, Kill Clock, for adult reluctant readers coming out in August. That’s another Pearce story, written with typical Guthrie adult content but for anyone with a reading age of 8+. Working on the edits for that was a terrific learning experience. It’s fascinating to know what readers struggle with. And I’m now finalizing my next novel, Savage Night, before embarking on the screenplay for Two-Way Split.

My thanks to Allan for taking the time to speak with me.

So Murder fans, here is a question for you.  If you were a small press editor like Mr. G, what kind of books would you publish and why?

Don’t forget to watch Murderati’s own Ken Bruen on THE LATE LATE SHOW with Craig Ferguson tomorrow night!!! (technically Tuesday morning)