Crime series: They
tend to revolve around cops, private eyes, journalists or medical examiners…
Possibly sundry, similar fields of illicit investigation.
(My new novel Forever's Just Pretend actually doubles down, featuring not just Hector, but fellow author Brinke Devlin...)
A number of factors drove my decision to use an author to
center my series of literary thrillers.
Partly, I wagered that I could pump up the language and
dialogue a couple of extra notches if my central guy was a man who makes his
living with words. Writers, on the whole, tend not to talk like other people.
Sometimes that’s probably conscious on their part—call it a kind of performance
art. But hang around enough of them and you’ll see: as a breed, we tend to use
words differently.
There was also the fact that in the typical crime series,
when your protagonist is a cop or a private eye, you expect that fella to
pretty much tell a story in straight-up fashion.
But when a storyteller
is telling you the story?
Then all bets are off.
A fiction writer might well trump fact for effect, and maybe
he’ll do that nearly every damned time. He’ll possibly bend events in tricky
ways to tell a richer story. In short, it seemed to me that a particularly
gifted storyteller would, perhaps paradoxically, be the most untrustworthy of
narrators: mysteries within a so-called “mystery.”
Now couple that possibility with the reputation that Hector
Lassiter has earned in his universe for using his life as fodder for his
fiction (Hector is best known as “The man who lives what he writes and writes
what he lives”), and there’s some built-in latitude to let the story go a good
bit deeper than the average mystery ever
dares go.
As his years pile up across his body of “fictional” work, at
some point, Hector Lassiter ceases hiding behind fictive personas, and in fact
uses himself as his own character, by name.
I wish I could claim that notion was original to me—candidly,
it’s an homage.
Back in the early 1990s, I took a stab at writing a series
using a then-contemporary reporter turned crime novelist (since released as a
series of eBook exclusives as the “Chris Lyon Series," consisting of Parts Unknown, Carnival Noir, Cabal and Angels of Darkness, to date. With their
1990s settings, they now read as inadvertent historical fiction, after a fact).
That series was a kind of forerunner to the Hector Lassiter
novels I see now, and it in fact introduced characters I later brought over into
Hector’s novels, including Irish cop James Hanrahan. (Chris returns the favor, cropping up in the concluding pages of Print the Legend, and a still-to-be-published Lassiter.)
But after writing several of those manuscripts
about that other journalist/writer, I
began to steep myself in the sublime works of novelist James Sallis.
I was most enthralled by Sallis’ Lew Griffin series and
immersed myself in those books. I loved the notion that Griffin, among other
trades and professions, was also a crime novelist.
As Sallis’ series unfolds, things begin to blur and even the
titles of Sallis’ novels, and those of Lew Griffin’s, converge in vexing and evocative
ways.
Because of Sallis’ Griffin series, I became enthralled with
the notion of taking my original concept of crime novelist as hero and pushing
it backward in time. Hector Lassiter became for me, a writer who would begin as
an aspiring literary author, then move through all those “–isms” that shaped 20th
century literature, eventually resulting in postmodernism and meta fiction.
Through Hector’s journey as a fiction writer, it became my
plan to explore 20th Century pop culture as a driver of history and
art.
In a dizzying development, I ended up appearing at the Poisoned
Pen Bookstore in Arizona with James Sallis one February 2011 evening—a surreal
and humbling experience for me and one I’m grateful to Mr. Sallis and Poisoned
Pen for making possible.
At one point, there was even a video of our resulting discussion
online. Hopefully, it will one day reappear, if only for the purpose of archiving
and extending Mr. Sallis’ end of our conversation.
With that man, with that author, every exchange ends up being a kind of life and/or writing lesson.
And, being such an accomplished author, Prof. Sallis surely uses the words as so few do.
——————
The first five novels in the Hector Lassiter series—One True Sentence, Forever's Just Pretend and Toros & Torsos—are newly available from Betimes Books. (Ordering information below)
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