"Oh, how the ghost of you clings..."
We’d finished touring the Recorded Books studios and offices
and had settled in to discuss my recurring character, crime novelist Hector
Lassiter, and how Hector and all those real, now-gone people who populate the
Lassiter series of historical literary thrillers might best be transitioned to
audio.
Tom Stechschulte was already a virtual lock to “be” Hector.
But when I mentioned there would be shifts in point of view from book to book
in the latter going — some presented in third-person, others narrated by Hector
— it raised the issue of whether a second
reader might be in order. Say…an actress.
“If Hector was to have a recurring love interest,” she said,
“well, then…”
I assured the Recorded Books studio director that was not
the case; that each novel would likely have a different female character
playing against Hector.
That was true up to a point. But across the several novels in the
series, there are two women in Hector’s life who potentially hang in there for more
than a single book or even two.
There was this one formidable woman, in particular, whom I
had already committed to paper.
In original publication sequence, ONE TRUE SENTENCE is the fourth novel about Hector Lassiter, a man
variously known as “the man who lives what he writes and writes what he lives,”
as well as, “the last man standing of the Lost Generation.”
If, as noted, OTS is the fourth novel in publication sequence, it was actually conceived to be number three. But it doesn’t stop there in terms of “backward time.”
If, as noted, OTS is the fourth novel in publication sequence, it was actually conceived to be number three. But it doesn’t stop there in terms of “backward time.”
Long before OTS' original 2011 publication, but with several of the Lassiter books
already written or in my head, I figured after just two previous installments,
readers would likely form a fairly strong and fixed notion of Hector Lassiter,
the man.
In this cycle of novels that has never taken the direct,
chronological route that ninety-nine percent of other mystery series hew to, it
seemed to me that around book three the time would be ripe for a major change
up.
Through newspaper articles and magazine profiles excerpted
in the first Lassiter novel, HEAD GAMES — through other characters’ asides and Hector’s own admissions — a kind of
informal biography of Texas-born Hector Lassiter emerges through the first
three published books.
But most of that biographical material is confined to the
late 1920s and beyond.
We know little, if any, about Hector’s childhood. We haven’t
been afforded a glimpse of how Hector became Hector.
ONE TRUE SENTENCE is the first of two, back-to-back books that supply those answers.
While previous novels have sprawled across continents and
decades, ONE TRUE SENTENCE occurs
across a single week in Paris, circa February 1924.
OTS introduces the woman in Hector Lassiter’s crowded life,
the fetching and bewitching mystery writer Brinke Devlin.
Brinke was name-checked in PRINT THE LEGEND (Lassiter #3 in original publication sequence), but she’s always been lurking in
the background. Hell, I’d fully written her story before my debut, HEAD GAMES, ever saw print.
It is Brinke, who, at base, “created” the Hector Lassiter
his readers know. Brinke is a darkly creative woman who moves Hector from the
path of a struggling, often-blocked literary writer to the pulp-frenzied,
dark-end-of-the-street, crime fiction novelist Hector is fated to be. As the series continues to unfold, it becomes clear that Brinke becomes a kind of dark template for the women who will attract an older Lassiter.
But there's even more of a lingering effect Brinke exerts on Hector that goes to his core as an author.
But there's even more of a lingering effect Brinke exerts on Hector that goes to his core as an author.
Years before Hector is tagged with his designation as a novelist who writes what he lives and puts his turbulent life down on the page,
slightly older and much more worldly Brinke is already pioneering the dark art
of living one’s life to feed one’s fiction.
From conception, Brinke was formulated to be très formidable. Visually, and more than a bit biographically, Brinke was modeled on silent screen siren Louise Brooks, a globe-trotting woman who eventually left acting and became a writer of sorts.
I put at least as much effort into shaping Brinke and her
back-story as I did Hector’s. Though I never envisioned writing a series about
her, I approached the task with the notion that I actually intended Brinke to
stand as her own series character. (Some nights, I still think about writing novels about her, pre-Hector. Like Hector, I've come to miss her company.)
At the same time, ONE TRUE SENTENCE also casts Brinke as a potential villainess — a complication
that further kick-starts the evolution of Hector’s own eventual, shades-of-gray
persona and sets him up for the still-rather controversial and Goodreads
debated-over love affair(s) depicted in TOROS & TORSOS.
If, as the saying goes, the boy is father to the man, then
equally true, I think, is the fact that a bewitching, dark muse arriving at the
right wrong moment in that man’s life makes him the author he’s fated to be.
ONE TRUE SENTENCE charts the beginning of Brinke's shaping of Hector; a process that is completed in its sequel, FOREVER'S JUST PRETEND, also available (but for the first time ever) on Aug. 21. More details on ordering coming soon.
NEXT: The story behind the story of ONE TRUE SENTENCE.
ONE TRUE SENTENCE charts the beginning of Brinke's shaping of Hector; a process that is completed in its sequel, FOREVER'S JUST PRETEND, also available (but for the first time ever) on Aug. 21. More details on ordering coming soon.
NEXT: The story behind the story of ONE TRUE SENTENCE.
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Great post. I will feature this from the 17th.
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