ROGUE MALES: SUBJECT #13, DANIEL WOODRELL

(Author’s note: Rogue Males: Conversations & Confrontations About the Writing Life, is a collection of author interviews. It includes Elmore Leonard, Stephen J. Cannell, Pete Dexter, James Ellroy, Alistair MacLeod, Craig Holden and James Crumley. Rogue Males also features an account of a trip to the desert to interview crime fiction greats Ken Bruen and James Sallis about the craft of writing. During the next few weeks, I’m sharing a little bit about each of the 16 writers featured in Rogue Males.)

My first reading of Woodrell: The Ones You Do. I was a pool fanatic, then, turned onto the game by my grandfather Bill Sipe — ironworker and sometimes hustler — and by a 60 Minutes profile of Texas pool shark Utley Puckett.

The Woodrell dust jacket illustration with its poolroom imagery caught my eye. James Ellroy’s blurb (“A bayou Dutch Leonard”) impelled me to open the book. I read the first chapter, then bought that sucker.

I fell in love with the voice, the atmosphere…the attitude. I tracked down the two earlier installments in what publishers, rather deceivingly, pitched as the Rene Shade “series.” Not an accurate description — they were discrete works that happened to have characters in common.

Muscle for the Wing: a killer opening sentence: “Wishing to avoid any hint of a snub at the Hushed Hill Country Club, the first thing Emil Jadick shoved through the door was double-barreled and loaded.”

I found a copy of Woodrell’s Civil War novel, Woe To Live On — a work that drew comparisons to Pete Dexter’s Deadwood and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.

Then I waited for four years for my next Woodrell fix — the sly, semi-autobiographical Give Us A Kiss.

The novel touched on its author’s own experiences in the Iowa Writer’s Workshop — a resume bullet Woodrell shared with another of my favorite crime-inflected novelists, James Crumley.

To me, the two authors represented something precious: authentic, wholly original American voices gifted with poetic tongues tempered by brawny, salty vernacular. Two writers in touch with the ground; knowing and in tune with their chosen regions — the country they so evocatively captured in the pages of their novels.

Woodrell’s great coming of age novel, The Death of Sweet Mister, appeared in 2001, just shortly before I began my years-long series of author interviews. I had to wait until 2006 and the release of Winter’s Bone to finally get a chance to speak with Woodrell directly.

He hadn’t given many interviews at that point — there were just a couple of stray Q&As to be found online…no audio recordings at that time…no filmed interviews on YouTube.

So I really didn’t know what to expect. His male characters might lead one to expect an author with a public persona verging on Ellroy, or Hunter S. Thompson territory.

The Daniel Woodrell I got was something else again: Soft spoken…thoughtful, but candid.

We talked Hemingway. Talked pool…. We talked about craft and career and racial heritage and its possible effects on story and character.

We also talked about genre collars and the perfidious compulsion to type and pigeonhole contemporary authors.

To my mind, Daniel Woodrell stands well outside genre or any easy tags. For me, he’s a major American novelist, period, no qualifiers — one whose influence and reach is growing as more discover his brilliant novels, and, lately, his equally accomplished forays into short fiction.

Daniel Woodrell interview quote: “There are certain experiences you’ve already had now. I remember once, a long time ago, Elmore Leonard saying he didn’t want just another book, he wanted a book that did what he wanted it to do, or something to that effect. That’s more of what I’m feeling now. I’m excited about publishing books that I think are going to give me the opportunity to publish more…more that maybe range more widely afield than this one. I’ll never be very far from dramatic criminal things, probably. But there are so many ways of getting at it, that’s what’s exciting about this world — call it crime writing or whatever you want to call it. I just call it dramatic writing now, because, who knows? I don’t ever seem to come up with an idea that doesn’t at some point have a crime in it.”

NEXT UP: PETE DEXTER

NEWSLETTER CONTEST

To celebrate the Feb. 16, 2010 launch of Print the Legend, a weekly drawing is being held through mid-February in which winners are randomly selected from among newsletter subscribers.

Prizes include limited edition hardcovers of Toros & Torsos, signed hardcover and trade paperback books and ARCS, and collectible chapbooks of "The Last Interview," the short story that introduced Hector Lassiter.

To be eligible, simply sign up for the newsletter.

The winner in one round of the contest is from Austin, TX and will receive one of a run of 100 limited editions of Toros & Torsos.

Print the Legend is now available for pre-order. Details here.

ROGUE MALES: SUBJECT #12, KEN BRUEN

(Author’s note: Rogue Males: Conversations & Confrontations About the Writing Life, is a collection of author interviews. It includes Elmore Leonard, Stephen J. Cannell, Pete Dexter, James Ellroy, Daniel Woodrell, Craig Holden and James Crumley. Rogue Males also features an account of a trip to the desert to interview crime fiction greats Ken Bruen and James Sallis about the craft of writing. During the next few weeks, I’m sharing a little bit about each of the 16 writers featured in Rogue Males.)

Ken Bruen: Irish crime novelist…the “Pope of Galway Bay.”

Most of the conversations recorded in Rogue Males are presented in Q&A format. The exception is the closing section of the book entitled The Desert Dialogues. That capstone on Rogue Males — what I regard as the heart and soul of the book — is a longish narrative focused on James Sallis and Ken Bruen…on the craft of writing and the dedication and sacrifices stylists make for their art.

In the introduction to the piece, I noted that much had changed for the two authors since I’d sat with them in the Arizona desert in March 2005. Then, they were both arguably cult writers. Since the interviews were conducted, Sallis drew the most publicity of his career to-date with the release of Drive and an ensuing film option by actor Hugh Jackman. I wrote, “Ken Bruen’s public profile was just beginning to peak” that winter in Arizona.

Well, there are tipping points and there are tipping points.

At this writing, several Ken Bruen projects (and the author himself) are before television and movie cameras including London Boulevard, Blitz and Bruen’s sublime Jack Taylor series. A number of other Bruen-related properties are also under option.

When these projects hit big and small screens next year, Ken Bruen’s public profile will grow exponentially and Galway Bay will likely never be the same.

Ken Bruen interview quote (regarding American Skin): “This book has become the bane of my life. I’m sorry I ever mentioned it. I originally set out to write it as an Irish guy trying to pass himself off as American, which goes against the whole world opinion at the moment, because of all the anti-American feeling and that kind of thing. The crucial thing is that at the very moment when he needs to be Irish, he finally passes for American. All his other attempts, people say, ‘Geez, I love your Irish accent. That brogue and etc.’ At the one crucial moment he needs to be Irish, he passes for American.”

NEXT UP: DANIEL WOODRELL

ROGUE MALES: SUBJECT #11, LEE CHILD

(Author’s note: Rogue Males: Conversations & Confrontations About the Writing Life, is a collection of author interviews. It includes Elmore Leonard, Stephen J. Cannell, Pete Dexter, James Ellroy, Daniel Woodrell, Craig Holden and James Crumley. Rogue Males also features an account of a trip to the desert to interview crime fiction greats Ken Bruen and James Sallis about the craft of writing. During the next few weeks, I’m sharing a little bit about each of the 16 writers featured in Rogue Males.)

Lee Child was enjoying a successful career in television when the economy cratered and he was “downsized”…out of a job during our last great “economic downturn.”

Child recently wrote a candid essay about that experience and his dawning awareness at the time that he lacked “transferrable skills.”

Anyone who finds themselves in similar harrowing straights during today’s hard times — cast off from a career they thought would carry them to retirement — will find much to identify with in Child’s account of his own ousting.

But it’s unlikely they’ll choose the same highly unconventional path to reinvention Child selected for himself — that is, to become a thriller writer.

I’ve interviewed Lee Child three times. The first of those interviews can be found in Art in the Blood and touches on Child’s maverick career course correction.

The Rogue Males interviews date from the release of Child’s novels One Shot (2005) and Bad Luck and Trouble (2007). In the latter interview, Child discusses his next-envisioned novel, which would take his character, Jack Reacher, in a slightly more topical/political direction.

Lee Child interview quote: “The way the series is set up, there is a tremendous amount of flexibility given he doesn’t have a job or a location. Those are the two things that tend to suffocate a series. If you’ve got to write your twelfth book about a police lieutenant in Chicago, already you’ve cut your options down drastically. The fact is Reacher can be anywhere and do anything. It’s really not very restrictive so I don’t feel the need to break out of the straightjacket.”

NEXT UP: KEN BRUEN

ROGUE MALES: SUBJECT #10, RANDY WAYNE WHITE

(Author’s note: Rogue Males: Conversations & Confrontations About the Writing Life, is a collection of author interviews. It includes Elmore Leonard, Lee Child, Pete Dexter, James Ellroy, Daniel Woodrell, Craig Holden and James Crumley. Rogue Males also features an account of a trip to the desert to interview crime fiction greats Ken Bruen and James Sallis about the craft of writing. During the next few weeks, I’m sharing a little bit about each of the 16 writers featured in Rogue Males.)

Florida-based thriller writer Randy Wayne White has traveled extensively and spent many years as a fishing guide. He has written highly praised accounts of his travels, as well as a series of adventure novels under the pseudonym “Randy Striker.”

He has frequently appeared on television as a host and correspondent.

But White is best known for his crime fiction novels featuring marine biologist Doc Ford, a man with a nebulous and violent past linked to covert operations.

Ford’s rag-tag crew of misfit friends around Dinkin’s Bay, Florida, include his “drug-modified” chum Tomlinson, a guru of steadily-growing influence and following; he also has surprising computer skills. Tomlinson’s past — made hazy by his own spotty memory — is slowly being revealed to be at least as dark and bloody as Ford’s own.

White also owns a new rum bar inspired by his character. In the interview included in Rogue Males, White opens up on some of his experiences abroad, as well as his efforts to help revive a youth baseball league in Cuba originally started by Ernest Hemingway.

Shortly after the interview featured in Rogue Males was conducted, a category 4 hurricane struck the area of Florida where White makes his home. His house sustained severe damage. In 2006, White published the Doc Ford novel Dark Light, which explores the aftermath of a hurricane.

Randy Wayne White interview quote: “I’ve been all over the world. I was in Cambodia during its most recent revolution… Vietnam shortly after that… Cuba, Nicaragua after the war. I’ve never been anywhere where people didn’t like Americans. That’s just been my experience. I haven’t been in the Middle East in years, but I have been in many Muslim countries — Sumatra. It’s a dangerous world. I’ve been stabbed…shot at with intent…and I was in a hotel that got blown up.”

NEXT UP: LEE CHILD

ROGUE MALES: SUBJECT #9, KINKY FRIEDMAN

(Author’s note: Rogue Males: Conversations & Confrontations About the Writing Life, is a collection of author interviews. It includes Elmore Leonard, Lee Child, Pete Dexter, James Ellroy, Daniel Woodrell, Craig Holden and James Crumley. Rogue Males also features an account of a trip to the desert to interview crime fiction greats Ken Bruen and James Sallis about the craft of writing. During the next few weeks, I’m sharing a little bit about each of the 16 writers featured in Rogue Males.)

Kinky Friedman:

Country singer/songwriter
Mystery novelist
Animal rescue ranch founder
Proto-Peace Corps member
Nonfiction writer
Former Texas gubernatorial hopeful

I caught the “Kinkster” at a transitional point in his career.

In March of 2005, Kinky Friedman was promoting what he claimed would be the last in his popular series of mystery novels featuring a crime-solver named Kinky Friedman.

In a Sherlockian twist, Friedman really did seem to close out the series with a decidedly doom-tinged end, and, to date, he’s not written another mystery.

Friedman was also embarking on what appeared to be a rather quixotic run for governor of Texas as an independent candidate.

The Lone Star State wasn’t making it easy: elections laws seemed deviously calculated to thwart independent candidacies (as Friedman put it, “It is so perverse. The ribbon-cutters have devised a way where nobody that votes in the primaries can sign the petition. They’re not only not sending the elevator back down to us, but they’ve cut the cable.”).

That said, Kinky Friedman thwarted scoffers by actually securing a ballot position and garnering more votes for governor than many of his supporters probably would have predicted.

Although Friedman is a frequent fixture on cable news talk programs, his cowboy-hat-wearing, cigar-brandishing cross between Groucho Marx and Will Rogers persona is not the Kinky Friedman most in evidence in Rogue Males.

Kinky Friedman interview quote: “I haven’t written a country song in 20 years. Too happy. Well, I haven’t really been happy, but I haven’t been able to recreate that ambiance. And, on the other hand, a lot of great writers like Kristofferson and Willie Nelson and Bob Dylan probably haven’t written a great song in fifteen or twenty years, either. I think success kills greatness. I mean, it makes you not what you’re supposed to be. To really write well, you do have to be, I think, pretty unhappy and unfulfilled. If you’re signing books for a hundred people at Barnes & Noble, well…that’s the kiss of death, yeah.”

NEXT UP: RANDY WAYNE WHITE

ROGUE MALES: SUBJECT #8, MAX ALLAN COLLINS

(Author’s note: Rogue Males: Conversations & Confrontations About the Writing Life, is a collection of author interviews. It includes Elmore Leonard, Lee Child, Pete Dexter, James Ellroy, Daniel Woodrell, Kinky Friedman and James Crumley. Rogue Males also features an account of a trip to the desert to interview crime fiction greats Ken Bruen and James Sallis about the craft of writing. During the next few weeks, I’m sharing a little bit about each of the 16 writers featured in Rogue Males.)

The first novel of Max Allan Collins’ I read was True Crime, picked up on a whim at an Ann Arbor bookstore. Chances are, I already knew his work from the Dick Tracy comic strip, or maybe a stray Batman comic.

The man’s work was (and remains) so pervasive, it was damned near impossible to miss.

I followed him from his series of historical private eye novels featuring Nate Heller, to his other series centered on Mallory and Quarry, then drifted in other reading directions before stumbling across the just-released original version of Road to Perdition.

Because he started so young (publishing his first novels at age 21), in terms of years in the business — and number of published works — Collins might have been a reasonable fit for the section of Rogue Males dubbed “The Legends” along with James Crumley and Elmore Leonard.

The Rogue Males interview finds Collins holding forth on the strategy of weaving crime fiction around historical events and people, expanding the Perdition saga across multiple formats and the strategy of writing novelizations.

Max Allan Collins interview quote: “I tend to work on one project at a time. The only exception to that is if I’m involved in something ongoing, as when I was doing the Dick Tracy strip or a monthly comic book. If I’m doing a monthly comic book, even if it is a miniseries — five or six issues — that gets woven into the sort of main project I’m doing. I’ll say take ex-number of days off from the main project to get that monthly work done. But I don’t ever work on two novels at the same time. That way lies madness, I think.”

NEXT UP: KINKY FRIEDMAN

ROGUE MALES: SUBJECT #7, STEPHEN J. CANNELL

(Author’s note: Rogue Males: Conversations & Confrontations About the Writing Life, is a collection of author interviews. It includes Elmore Leonard, Lee Child, Pete Dexter, James Ellroy, Daniel Woodrell, Kinky Friedman and James Crumley. Rogue Males also features an account of a trip to the desert to interview crime fiction greats Ken Bruen and James Sallis about the craft of writing. During the next few weeks, I’m sharing a little bit about each of the 16 writers featured in Rogue Males.)

Stephen J. Cannell first entered my world, as a name, in 1974, when at age 12, I tuned in one Friday night to catch James Garner in this new TV series called The Rockford Files.

The episode was titled, “Tall Woman in Red Wagon” and found P.I. Rockford hired by a small town journalist to look for her “stunning,” statuesque friend, a gone-missing co-worker. It was quintessential Rockford, opening with a grave robbery and finding Garner masquerading as sundry professionals — false identities bolstered by bogus business cards printed on a nifty little press Jim kept stashed in ’74 Pontiac Firebird (license # 853 OKG…the things we remember…).

The episode was scripted by Stephen J. Cannell and hooked me on Rockford.

Turns out, I already knew Cannell’s work: an earlier series he was tied to, Adam-12, was destination viewing in the McDonald household during those days of three network channels and one PBS affiliate.

I began to track Cannell’s work, following him through the brief run of Richie Brokelman, to Tenspeed and Brown Shoe. (In the latter, in an odd, premonitory inside joke, Jeff Goldblum’s character read detective novels penned by an author embodied by a dust jacket photo of future thriller novelist Stephen J. Cannell.)

In the Rogue Males interview, in addition to talking about his own novels, Cannell also discusses his television career, working with James Garner, and, at some length, the art of storytelling and his experiences adapting his own novels for the screen.

Stephen J. Cannell interview excerpt (on writing for Adam-12): “When I got there I decided, ‘You know what I’m going to try and do with these comedy bits, if I can?’ — almost like in a writing class, where you’d come on a character in page 7 and you’d be out of the character on page 8 or 9. But that character had to exist during those three pages or four pages and be funny and at the same time, real. I sort of developed this technique of saying, ‘Every character has to have a yesterday and is going to have a tomorrow.’”

NEXT UP: MAX ALLAN COLLINS

ROGUE MALES: SUBJECT #6, ELMORE LEONARD

(Author’s note: Rogue Males: Conversations & Confrontations About the Writing Life, is a collection of author interviews. It includes Pete Dexter, James Ellroy, Daniel Woodrell, Kinky Friedman and James Crumley. Rogue Males also features an account of a trip to the desert to interview crime fiction greats Ken Bruen and James Sallis about the craft of writing. During the next few weeks, I’m sharing a little background about each of the 16 writers featured in Rogue Males.)

Rogue Males opens with a section called “The Legends” focusing on James Crumley and Elmore Leonard.

Across the spectrum of writers spotlighted in Rogue Males, Elmore “Dutch” Leonard is the true veteran with a fiction career extending back to 1953 — the year Argosy published Leonard’s first Western short story.

Leonard continued to work in the Western field, juggling low-paying fiction writing with his day job in advertising.

In 1969, Leonard switched genres — moving to crime fiction with his novel The Big Bounce.

Yet Leonard’s crime fiction breakout novel didn’t come until 1995 with the release of Glitz, the novel that transformed Leonard into a 32-years-in-the-making, overnight sensation.

The interview in Rogue Males was conducted the day after Leonard’s 82nd birthday.

Elmore Leonard interview excerpt: “My editor will tell me more and more books are sounding like mine and that I’ve opened the door for a certain type of writers. It’s funny though, because when I’m sent a manuscript by the publishers, there’ll be a reference to the fact that this guy supposedly sounds like me. I don’t see it at all.”

NEXT UP: STEPHEN CANNELL

ROGUE MALES: SUBJECT #5, ALISTAIR MACLEOD

(Author’s note: Rogue Males: Conversations & Confrontations About the Writing Life, is a collection of author interviews. It includes Pete Dexter, James Ellroy, Daniel Woodrell, Elmore Leonard and James Crumley. Rogue Males also features an account of a trip to the desert to interview crime fiction greats Ken Bruen and James Sallis about the craft of writing. During the next few weeks, I’m sharing a little background about each writer and interview featured in Rogue Males.)

At first flush, Alistair MacLeod’s inclusion in a collection such as Rogue Males might strike some as odd. But the overarching theme of Rogue Males is the idiosyncratic, highly independent approach the profiled authors have taken in shaping their own writing careers.

Alistair MacLeod put himself through college working in the mines of Cape Breton.

As a college professor, he began writing short stories that were immediately acclaimed as brilliant, even classic works of the form. He published two excellent, pitch-perfect short story collections: The Lost Salt Gift of Blood, and As Birds Bring Forth the Son.

With their rich characterization, evocative description and attention to (mostly) working-class people yoked to their land and their cultural traditions, the shorts stories appealed to the part of me that admired similar elements in the finest of Ernest Hemingway’s short fiction.

In 1999, MacLeod published his first novel — a work decades in the making — titled No Great Mischief. The American edition of that novel followed in 2000 and was a critical and commercial smash. In June 2001, the novel received the Impac Award.

One month after making the same journey to Ann Arbor, MI, to interview James Ellroy who was appearing at Shaman Drum Bookshop, I returned to Shaman in the throes of a wicked case of kidney stones to interview Prof. MacLeod a week after he accepted the Irish literary prize.

In the interview, MacLeod discusses the craft of short story and novel writing, and examines the art of the word from the perspective of reader, distinguished literary professor and superb fiction writer.

He also considers his remarkable success in the commercial fiction market, despite never having many of the infrastructural elements most consider necessary for launching even a modest literary career.

The interview with Alistair MacLeod that now appears in Rogue Males was originally posted to a Web site of author interviews I offered for a few years. Based on site traffic reports, with the exception of an interview that I conducted with Dan Brown that was later collected in Secrets of the Code and featured in expanded form in my first interview collection, Art in the Blood, the MacLeod interview drew more online readers — many times over — than all my other interviews then-available, combined.

Alistair MacLeod interview excerpt: “I have never had an agent. So when I got the big write up in The New York Times I had people saying, ‘You don’t have an agent — how’d you get in The New York Times?’ But I think for young writers, particularly, there is this feeling that you’ll never get anywhere unless you’re sleeping with the father of the editor, or that kind of feeling that talent is not quite enough and that you have to have some backroom, high-powered agent or something. I think when this happens, it leaves people thinking, ‘Well, maybe you don’t have to do these kind of things at all. Maybe you just have to write good stories.’”

NEXT UP: ELMORE LEONARD

ROGUE MALES: SUBJECT #4, CRAIG HOLDEN

(Author’s note: Rogue Males: Conversations & Confrontations About the Writing Life, is a collection of author interviews. It includes Pete Dexter, Alistair MacLeod, Daniel Woodrell, Elmore Leonard and James Crumley. Rogue Males also features an account of a trip to the desert to interview crime fiction greats Ken Bruen and James Sallis about the craft of writing. During the next few weeks, I’ll be sharing a little background about each writer featured in Rogue Males.)

I first heard of Craig Holden at a James Ellroy signing in Ann Arbor, Michigan several years ago. Holden was in the audience that rather cold night and Ellroy took the trouble to tout Holden’s most recent novel — it was a rare and ringing endorsement on the part of the Demon Dog.

I secured a copy of Four Corners of Night (1999) and was pole-armed. Set in a mythical city in northwestern Ohio — a kind of re-imagined and combined Toledo/Detroit — the novel turns on the uneasy axis of two cops and the woman who stands uneasily between them. It’s a classic triangular dynamic that informs everything from Bruce Springsteen’s noirish “Highway Patrolman,” to James Ellroy’s own watershed novel, The Black Dahlia.

The language sparkles from its richly evocative opening in an all too-real Denny’s along the Ohio-Michigan border (“‘Buck ninety-nine,’ Bank says. ‘Who can afford not to eat this shit at that price?’ He’s said this over the years maybe fifty times in this restaurant with me.”), to wonderfully evocative lines that touch poetry (“We have no business at this scene…standing in the river of some mother’s grief and feeling my own worthlessness.”).

Four Corners' exploration of the ramifications of a child’s abduction shows that in the right hands, a novel centered around a crime can be both a page-turner, and an atmosphere-rich and wrenching character study.

Whenever the words won’t come — or if they come too easily — Four Corners of Night is one of the two or three books I consistently dip into for inspiration or humbling.

Craig Holden interview excerpt: “The first one I wrote might have had some mystery element to it, but that’s the closest I’ve ever come. Four Corners had a mystery element, but it’s not a mystery. As far as genre goes, that’s not what I do. I don’t even think of them as crime novels or thrillers. I don’t think this book (The Narcissist’s Daughter) is a thriller. I know it’s being marketed as a thriller, but I don’t think it is a thriller. Not to me it isn’t.”

NEXT UP: ALISTAIR MACLEOD

ROGUE MALES: SUBJECT #3, JAMES ELLROY

(Author’s note: Rogue Males: Conversations & Confrontations About the Writing Life, is a collection of author interviews. It includes Pete Dexter, Alistair MacLeod, Daniel Woodrell, Elmore Leonard and James Crumley. Rogue Males also features an account of a trip to the desert to interview crime fiction greats Ken Bruen and James Sallis about the craft of writing. During the next few weeks, I’ll be sharing a little background about each writer featured in Rogue Males.)

The author interview odyssey began in earnest with James Ellroy in Spring 2001.

For that interview, I made a road trip to Ann Arbor, MI where Ellroy was going to be reading at Shaman Drum Bookshop. We met in the lobby of the Bell Tower Hotel for an hour’s discussion that is recorded in my first interview book, Art in the Blood. The rawness and candor of that interview is closer in tone to other interviews contained in Rogue Males.

At the time, Ellroy was literally touring the world in support of The Cold Six Thousand, the sequel to American Tabloid and the second installment in his Underworld USA Trilogy.

Rogue Males contains two subsequent interviews I conducted with James Ellroy. The first of these was keyed to the release of Destination: Morgue!, his second collection of articles composed for GQ. The second interview anticipated the release of Brian DePalma’s adaptation of Ellroy’s breakout novel, The Black Dahlia.

Ellroy asserted in that second interview it was one of the last in which he would address his personal life, his mother’s murder, or The Black Dahlia murder case.

At this writing, Ellroy is contributing a series of articles for Playboy Magazine.

This fall will at last bring the final entry in his Underworld USA Trilogy with the release of Blood’s A Rover.
Ellroy has said Rover’s release marks the end of the “second phase” of his fiction-writing career.

James Ellroy interview excerpt: “I’m a sixteen-book writer and I’ve got four signature books: The Black Dahlia, L.A. Confidential, American Tabloid and My Dark Places. That’s pretty great. It’s my first signature book. It may be my signature book. It is the last gasp of my pure unconsciousness as a writer. I mean I just wrote that book on instinct — and no lack of skill, certainly. But that book is my heart. That book, and My Dark Places, that’s my heart. American Tabloid, L.A. Confidential, White Jazz…Cold Six Thousand, especially, that’s my intellect. It’s just an uncommonly obsessive book. It’s an uncommonly obsessive book about a certain kind of unvarnished maleness.”

NEXT UP: CRAIG HOLDEN

ROGUE MALES: SUBJECT #2, JAMES CRUMLEY

(Author’s note: Rogue Males: Conversations & Confrontations About the Writing Life, is my second collection of author interviews. This one includes James Ellroy, Pete Dexter, Daniel Woodrell, Elmore Leonard and the late, great James Crumley. Rogue Males also features an account of a trip to the desert to interview crime fiction greats Ken Bruen and James Sallis about the craft of writing. During the next few weeks, I’ll be sharing a little background about each writer featured in Rogue Males.)

Setting aside the wonderful and sublime Lew Griffin series, for me, there are precisely three great private eye novels.

I’ve never really cared for — or bought into — the whole licensed private eye thing. Probably my favorite non-print spin on the concept was The Rockford Files, which did such a sly and devastating job of mocking the P.I. tropes and clichés.

That said, there are those three special novels:

Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon is undeniable, particularly as it got the whole dubious ball rolling. Second, there’s Chandler’s The Long Goodbye, which nearly makes up for all the damage old Ray did in terms of inspiring far too many writers to the notion they could and should perpetrate their own series of simile-laden, private eye series populated by “tarnished knights” and “mean streets”…Marlowe knock-offs who seem to favor surnames lifted from English poets too dead to sue for damages.

And then there is James Crumley’s The Last Good Kiss — the last great private eye novel. Crumley drove the P.I. novel home, parked it, then broke the key off in the ignition switch. The world didn’t really require another private eye after J.C. put his idiosyncratic spin on the sub-genre.

The opening paragraph of Kiss is justly famous and was widely quoted when James passed away on Sept. 17, 2008:

“When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonora, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.”

Many have made the case The Last Good Kiss is Crumley’s spin on The Long Goodbye; you can make an equally strong argument that Crumley’s The Wrong Case is his take on Chandler’s The Little Sister.

But Crumley’s world, and his way with words, is distinctly his own.

My interview with James Crumley was one of the last he gave. He was just coming off a health scare and enjoying the release of The Right Madness.

If you don’t know Crumley, learn a little more in this profile. Check out Eddie Muller’s tribute to JC — probably the best of the pieces written upon James’ passing.

Then pour yourself a few fingers of bourbon. Crank up Steve Earle’s “Copper Head Road” — a Crumley favorite. Settle in with The Last Good Kiss.

James Crumley interview excerpt: “I've been working on it off and on since, jeez, since I finished my first novel…’69? 1968? Somewhere in there. It’s a Texas novel. It’s very difficult for me to write about Texas. I have had numerous attempts. That was the second time I’d burned all the pages…not all the pages…not 800 pages in a line, but it was a lot of work. The unfortunate thing is I remember every goddamn word. I hate that.”

NEXT UP: JAMES ELLROY

ROGUE MALES: SUBJECT #1, TOM RUSSELL

This year finds me briefly veering back over to the nonfiction side of the publishing world with Rogue Males: Conversations & Confrontations About the Writing Life, a second collection of interviews with authors including James Ellroy, Pete Dexter, Daniel Woodrell, Elmore Leonard and the late, great James Crumley. Rogue Males also features an account of a trip to the desert to interview crime fiction greats Ken Bruen and James Sallis about the craft of writing.

Rogue Males is published by Bleak House in two simultaneous editions: a durable hardcover edition, and a trade paperback edition.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be giving a little background about each writer featured in Rogue Males. We kick it off with singer/songwriter Tom Russell, who on face might seem a curious interview subject for a book dominated by crime novelists.

In fact, Tom Russell is probably the only singer/songwriter with a degree in criminology. His song catalogue also contains a number of crime inflected compositions including the James Ellroyesque “Tijuana Bible,” a tribute to Texas über defense attorney Richard “Racehorse” Haynes and his Orson Welles-inspired, Borderland masterpiece “Touch of Evil,” among many, many others. (I actually dedicated my debut novel, Head Games, to Mr. Russell, because the book was written to a steady soundtrack of his music.)

Russell also penned his own crime novel, although the work has only appeared in Norwegian translation.

To get a sense of Russell the prose writer, check out his Borderland blog. If you haven’t sampled his music, his recent posting to YouTube of a new song, “Guadalupe,” is a pretty sublime place to start.

Tom Russell interview excerpt: “In this culture, I’d hate to be an insider. I’d be playing 18 holes of golf a day and listening to country music. This other crap. A fear-driven culture. If they call me an outsider, that’s fine because it leaves me alone to do whatever I feel like, really.”

NEXT UP: JAMES CRUMLEY