TRIBUTE: ELMORE LEONARD, THE ROGUE MALES INTERVIEW

The following is the interview I conducted with Elmore Leonard in 2007. The interview originally appeared in my second collection of author interviews, ROGUE MALES.

ELMORE LEONARD: TEN RULES

Elmore “Dutch” Leonard was born on October 11, 1925 in New Orleans. During World War II, Leonard served in the U.S. Naval Reserve from 1943-46. (Vision problems kept Leonard out of the marines, with whom he’d tried to enlist.)

Following his military service, Leonard studied at the University of Detroit, graduating in 1950 and launching a 17-year career in advertising.

Leonard published his first piece of fiction — a Western short story — in Argosy in 1953 (he scored a $1,250 advance for his 1961 Western novel, Hombre; so he was a long while quitting his day job to write fiction fulltime).

After a long run writing Western novels and short stories — and faced with the decline of the genre he’d made his name in — Leonard shifted to crime fiction in 1969 with the release of the paperback original The Big Bounce. That novel’s publication followed a reported 84 rejections.

His crime novels drew critical praise for their taught, clean prose and ear-true dialogue, but his audience didn’t really begin to grow until the 1980s. Leonard’s ’83 release, LaBrava, earned an Edgar Award. In 1985, Newsweek published a cover story on Leonard, declaring him “the best American writer of crime fiction alive.”

On his way to that success, Leonard quit drinking in the 1977. He endured the break-up of his long, first marriage to his college sweetheart (the couple wed in 1949) and struggled with a middling screenwriting career (among his screen credits is an ill-advised TV-movie sequel to High Noon that starred Lee Majors).

In the late 1970s, “Dutch” (the nickname is a nod to a Washington Senators’ pitcher) began to hit his stride with Detroit- and Miami-based crime novels such as Stick, Swag and The Switch.

Leonard’s 1985 novel, Glitz, hit the best-seller lists and sat there for sixteen weeks — Leonard’s breakout book had finally arrived after 32 years as a published author.

Elmore Leonard was interviewed in conjunction with the publication of a slim little book entitled, Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing. The interview was conducted the day after Leonard celebrated his 82^nd birthday.

***

Let me start off by wishing you a happy birthday.

Oh, thanks, that was yesterday. I got a lot of calls, too.

Did you do anything grand for the day?

I tried to work, but I don’t think I wrote anything down. Maybe a line. The phone would ring. So then my family — we all went out to dinner last night and that was it.

Are you one of these writers who feels a driven need to write every day?

No, I don’t feel driven, but when I’m writing a book I definitely want to write every day, because if you miss a day, you forget. You’ve got to keep it with you. You’ve got to keep it going all the time in your head.

There are writers who claim they get knocked off stride for a week or so, and then the book dies on them.

Oh yeah. If you are away from it for a week it will take more than a week to get back to it.

Do you practice the Hemingway technique of re-reading what you’ve written every day to kick-start the writing process?

Yeah, or in the morning, before I’ll start out, I’ll read from an older book. One that I like. I like ’em all, but I’ll read something just to get the sound back that I want. The attitude. Then I’m off. Once I start to write, then I’m into it. I get lost and the time just flies by. That’s the beauty of this work. I look at the clock and it’s three o’clock in the afternoon and I say, “Good, I’ve got three more hours.” You know — after fifty years.

Is there still an excitement for you when a book comes out? You’ve had this extraordinary run. Not to say you’d be jaded about it, but…

My last two or three books, I’ve gone back into the 1930s or 1940s, beginning with the serial in the New York Times. That was a different pace. I was experiencing different things then in the research. Memories. I was in the service at that time — in the forties. So many things came back to me, like food rationing…gas rationing. That kind of stuff. That was interesting. I’m glad to get back to the contemporary. I like to keep my books fresh — references to what’s going on today.

I interviewed a lot of crime writers immediately after September 11, 2001 and the terrorist attacks. They all said they were having a hard time writing anything contemporary or relevant in the wake of those events. It swamped their ability to write and seemed to shrink the importance of what they were writing. Several subsequently began to write books set in pre-911 eras. Was any of that sentiment factoring into your decision for your own writing trips back into the 1930s or ’40s?

No, no I hadn’t thought of that. There are writers of course who have used it — working it (the attacks) into a plot.

The novel you’re writing now is going to bring back Foley from Out of Sight?

Yeah. In fact, I’m bringing back three characters from three different books. Right away, I thought well, “Foley, definitely. I’m going to do Foley because George Clooney likes Foley.”

That’s a compelling reason to do it…

And Foley is easy to write for me because I know him pretty well, now. So then I brought another character in, Dawn Navarro, who is a psychic. I brought her in out of Riding the Rap and then Cundo Rey. Cundo Rey is a character in LaBrava. He was a very smalltime hustler and a Go-Go dancer. He was just a hip little guy. I was hoping that he was still alive. I didn’t remember.

So you had to go back and revisit your own book?

Yes, I had to look it up. He got shot, three times, in the chest. And I thought, “Oh my God.” But Joe LaBrava shot him and then immediately left. He knows he’s dead. But he wasn’t.

You had some wiggle room…

Yes, the emergency guys picked him up and see, “My God, he’s bleeding, he’s bleeding.” He’s still alive. So they rush him to the hospital and he’s in a coma. He extends the coma — pretends to be in a coma longer than he is — to find out where he is and what’s going on. Then he has one of the guys working in the hospital who was also Cuban, also in the boatlift — the Mariel boatlift — sneak him out. Then he goes to L.A. and gets into dealing drugs to people in the movie business. He makes a lot of money, but then he’s arrested but they’re not sure they can convict him in California. So they send him back to Florida where there’s a detainer on him on a homicide. He gets a very good lawyer and he’s out in seven-and-a-half years.

Now Foley, he’s back in prison, so he’s talking to Cundo Rey. Foley is facing thirty years. He doesn’t think he’s going to make it — this is terrible. Cundo Rey says, “Hey, I’ll get you my lawyer,” who is a young woman — very very savvy…knows what she’s doing. She gets Foley’s conviction reduced from thirty years to thirty months. And so they both get out about the same time and go out to Venice, California where the story then will take place.

And that will be an ’08 release. Let’s talk about the book coming out now — Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing. The rules have been around for a while. What was the catalyst to put them out in book form now?

My researcher is the one who kept pushing me.

Greg Sutter?

Greg Sutter. Yeah. He’s been getting stuff for me for, say, 25 years. He said, “It’s time to have these rules published because people are using them all the time…referring to them.

They are all over the Internet…

Yeah. We proposed it my editor at HarperCollins and she thought it was a great idea so we did it. We have it illustrated (by Joe Ciardiello).

It’s a slim little book. Were you under pressure to throw in another ten rules?

(Laughing) No, we got 95 pages out of 10 rules.

That’s impressive…

That’s not bad at all. You see, this started in the year 2000. I was guest of honor at Bouchercon. That afternoon in the hotel in Denver, I wrote up these 10 rules. They’re in much different form. Then, when I came down off the stage, a guy approached me and said, “Can I have those?” These two pieces of yellow paper… I said, “Sure, here,” and handed them to him.

Hell of a collectible…

Well then, a few years later, The New York Times asked me if I would do something for their column Writers on Writing. I made up the 10 rules again and put them in an order that I thought was right. I also made reference to different writers who wouldn’t need my rules. For example the rule about don’t describe your characters in detail. I said, “Hell, Margaret Atwood can do it all she wants because she’s good at it.”

It’s funny, because the two sheets of paper all of the sudden appeared for sale at a bookstore on the Internet. My researcher who was just looking around happened to see them the day that they were offered. A friend of his was a lawyer in L.A. and he told him about it and bought them immediately. Then Greg said to the lawyer, “I was going to get them.” The lawyer said, “We’ll both put in to buy them.” They got this page-and-a-half, at most, for six-hundred bucks. If the guy had waited until the rules book came out…

He’d have had a five-figure collectible…

I know! My researcher has for years been trying to get me to save all my papers because I write everything in longhand.

I would think universities would be all over you to donate those manuscripts.

I tried saving the longhand sheets but it’s not a perfect sheet. It’s mostly just crossed out. There’s more crossed out than is there. That’s why I started doing it longhand because it’s so hard to x-out things on a typewriter.

This might be too precious a question, but I’m wondering if the rules and your instinctive commitment to them — even if you hadn’t formalized them or written them down — shape you as a writer? I’m trying to chicken and egg it a little…

When I started out, I thought they’re kind of tongue-in-cheek. But then the more I looked at them I realized “No, they’re not.”

A lot of people certainly don’t read them that way.

The way I wrote the rules seven years ago, I say, “Forty-nine years ago last month, I sold my first story. Since then I’ve come up with 10 rules for success and happiness in writing fiction. One: try to leave out the passages that readers tend to skip. It’s the ones you spend the most time on. Number two: Never open a book with weather.” That is number one, now.

You mention exclamation points and that you only get to use two for about every 100,000 words. I think it’s a great rule.

Two or three.

Two or three. I was at a book conference recently and I picked up the paperback Three-Ten to Yuma and other stories. I started reading the very first story, “Calvary Boots.” By my count, you’ve got about 11 exclamation points in that story which can’t be more than four or five thousand words long.

Don’t tell anybody! When those stories came out again, ones that I wrote in the 1950s, I hadn’t read them in more than 50 years.

I wondered if you have a real strong temptation to go through and kind of massage ’em.

No. No, I had to leave them alone because this is what they sounded like.

I also wondered if editors had inserted some of those exclamation points.

Maybe. I had adverbs in there, too… “ly”-adverbs. That’s the worst sin of all.

You praise some contemporary writers in the book, but also, obviously, Steinbeck and Hemingway are prominently mentioned. Are there writers working today whom you admire for having tight, clean economical prose?

There was one I learned a lot from in the fifties and that was Richard Bissell. He’s probably very hard to find right now, but I loved his books set on the Mississippi River. He was a pilot. “7 1/2 Cents” became The Pajama Game. Then he wrote a book, Say Darling, about the making of the play. I learned more from him than I did from Hemingway. Because Hemingway I learned a lot from, I know. But he didn’t have a sense of humor.

I’ve seen you remark on that before, and I’ve heard a lot of people say that, I see some humor in some of the early stories and novels. A Moveable Feast is funny in places, though it’s a nasty kind of funny…very mean humor in that one.

I was giving a talk and someone said, “What do you mean he doesn’t have a sense of humor?” I said, “What are you going to tell me about? Sordo’s stand on the hill (in For Whom the Bell Tolls)? Because that’s very ironic what he’s yelling at and so on.

Which of Hemingway’s works do you admire? In terms of the novels I’d guess For Whom the Bell Tolls.

Yeah. And of course I couldn’t wait to read The Old Man and the Sea when that came out. I was working at an ad agency and I remember getting the issue of Life Magazine at the cigar store downstairs in the General Motors Building and running back up to my office and starting to read it right then. I was really in love with his prose at that time. I still have his Forty-Nine short stories on my desk. And I can look at those at any time. Some of those are really terrific.

I notice there are no Faulkner references in the 10 Rules of Writing.

No, I’ve never been able to read him.

Hemingway remarked, “Writing is architecture, not interior design.” That sounds like something you would subscribe to as an axiom. You say in the Rules that if something reads like “writing” you have to strike it. It sounds from your description of your hand-written drafts that’s still something you do quite a lot of.

Oh yeah. If it sounds like writing, re-write it. Someone will ask me, “What do you mean by that?” And I say, “Upon entering the room…”

There you go. Knocks you right out to the story.

That’s it. It’s the way we were taught to write in school, with the dependent clause first.

I guess what you’re saying is a key to good writing is unlearning formal writing, first.

Yes.

You wrote an introduction to George V. Higgins The Friends of Eddie Coyle a few years back. In that introduction, you quote Higgins as saying “Writing can’t be taught.” Do you subscribe to that notion? Is it an innate skill?

My son just got a two-book deal at St. Martin’s. He started writing fiction two or three years ago, maybe. He started out writing screenplays because he figured that would be the fast buck. I said, “You’re crazy — you’ve got to be out there if you’re going to be a screenwriter. You should be out there because all of the people who went to film school, that the screenwriter went to film school with, they’re studio executives and they’re buying the stuff.” Then he started to write a book. All of his friends and his sons loved it. They told him, “This is great. This is bound to sell.”

Then I read it, and I said, “Who’s the main character?” He said, so-and-so is. The woman.” I said, “Well, she doesn’t come off as the main character to me.” So he sent it to my agent in New York, Wylie, and they gave it to eight different publishers and they all said the same thing: “Who’s the main character?” So now he listens to me. He’s really into it. He’s older — he’s in his fifties. I said, “Why didn’t you start earlier?” He said, “I didn’t want to.”

Is he going to publish under the name “Leonard?”

Oh yeah, Peter Leonard. Sure. They just made a deal for him in England with Faber. He’s really into it now. He’s got his own company — an ad agency. He’s got two partners and he’s just trying to write his way out of it the same way I did back in ’61.

There’s much said now of the death of midlist authors, and the death of book reviewing, and the computer monitoring of sales and the effect of that on writers who don’t sell great numbers of books. What would your advice be to someone just going out into the market as a beginning author? I mean, you’re above and outside much of this because of your level of prominence and your readership…

But I don’t sell nearly as many books as…

…As I would think?

(Laughing) Yeah. If I sell 100,000 hardcover, that’s good.

That is a hell of a lot, still.

It is, it is, but there are people who their first printing is 800,000 copies or two-million.

That guy, James Patterson, he’ll have three books sometimes on the list. But you know that the other guy whose name is printed much smaller on the cover than his (Patterson’s) is doing all the work.

Patterson has more or less become his own corporate brand now.

And his chapters are never more than three pages.

If that. Do you still regard The Friends of Eddie Coyle as the best crime novel ever written?

Definitely.

You’ve had this extraordinarily long career…do you think a career like yours can be replicated in today’s market?

I think the reason that I’m still going is that I didn’t really hit the big time until the mid-eighties. But I started in the 1950s.

You more than paid your dues.

Yes. By the time I got on the Times list, boy, I had a backlist, you know? And that was great. Then the backlist gets bought by whomever is publishing me.

You finally get your money back on those early works?

That’s right — everything…everything. Even the short stories that I got two-cents a word for. Like Three-Ten to Yuma I got ninety bucks. I sold the screen rights for $4,000. The publisher of Dime Western could take twenty-five percent of a film sale and he did because the pulps were starting to go out of business then.

All the magazines…there were so many magazines that would publish short stories in the 1950s. You’d aim for the Saturay Evening Post and Colliers. Then you’d come down through Argosy, and then the pulps. There were a couple of dozen pulps, at least.

What’d you think of the new Yuma film?

I liked it. It looked good. The ending made no sense at all… But on the whole, the reviews have been good.

Ever get the itch to write another western novel?

If they were to pay as much as crime novels do, yeah, I could do one.

I was Googling you earlier today and I came across an item that for the first time in years, Halloween costume rentals of western outfits are up. They attribute the spike to the new Yuma film.

There’s another use of Yuma in Cuba, where they call America “La Yuma.” And individuals from the United States are referred to as “Yuma.” And this is because of that movie that was released in the 1970s in Havana, because Castro wouldn’t allow the picture to show originally.

Did you find yourself watching Deadwood on HBO?

No, I never got into that. The language amazed me.

You’ve often cited movies as an early influence on your writing. Do you still find films you can enjoy? So many seem to be put together by committee and test-audience…

As many as I’ve sold and have been made from my work, there have only been a few good films. I think it’s mostly luck that good movies are made because there seem to be so many people in the business, studio people, who are just trying to wreck things. There’s that joke about the two agents who are out in the desert. They’re dying of thirst. Finally, they come to this well. “Oh, here’s water we can drink.” And the one says, “Wait, let’s piss in it, first.”

Are you comfortable with gauging or trying to characterize your own influence on crime writing?

I really don’t know what that is. I hear good things from George Pelecanos and some others. 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.

SITTING ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE INTERVIEW TABLE

I more or less first planted my flag in the crime novel world as an interviewer, having conducted discussions with a wide range of authors that eventually resulted in two interview collections focused on the craft of writing and gathered under the titles ART IN THE BLOOD and ROGUE MALES.

In recent years, I've mostly found myself on the other side of the interview process.

In addition to all of the interviews I've been engaging in on radio and in newspapers in Mexico in recent weeks, a couple of other interviews Stateside are now available in eBook or paperback format.

A few years back, I participated in a Q&A with Jean Henry Mead for her site that has since been collected along with interviews by Lawrence Block, Sue Grafton and J.A. Jance, among many others, in Mead's THE MYSTERY WRITERS: INTERVIEWS AND ADVICE.

My discussion with Ms. Mead focuses largely on Hemingway and my third novel, PRINT THE LEGEND, about Papa's death and entanglements with the FBI during his latter years...about Hemingway's legacy to present-day writers and so forth.

In addition to the interview, I also contributed an original essay on the craft of writing that is only available in Ms. Mead's book.

You can find it on Amazon.com for Kindle here or in trade paperback here or visit Ms. Mead's site for newer interviews here.

Casting farther back in time, when HEAD GAMES, my debut was fairly new, fellow novelist Tony Black interviewed me from his base in Scotland.

That interview, along with others by Ian Rankin, Ken Bruen, Andrew Vachss and a number of other crime novelists is now available in Black's HARD TRUTHS: CROSS-EXAMINING CRIME WRITERS.

NEW INTERVIEWS FROM MEXCIO, #3 ZÓCALO SALTILLO

Original illustration from
Zócalo Saltillo

Number three in a series of English translations of new interviews I've given to newspapers and radio stations in Mexico over the past several weeks in support of the first Spanish-language edition of HEAD GAMES (Or, in Mexico, LA CABEZA DE PANCHO VILLA).

This interview is with Sylvia Georgina Estrada who is based in Saltillo, Coahuila (north Mexico) and it appeared originally in Zócalo Saltillo. (You can read it in the original Spanish here.)

Q) How did your interest in Pancho Villa’s life start? Why did you decide to write a book about the stolen head of this brave man?

A) I first heard of Villa because a famous fiction writer from my birth state, Ambrose Bierce, disappeared into Mexico allegedly trying to meet Villa. To this day, nobody knows what became of Bierce. There were also two men in my hometown (I use their names in the novel) who were part of the Pershing Expedition, and who chased Pancho Villa through Mexico after the 1916 attack on Columbus, New Mexico. One of them shared a photo album of that campaign with me one afternoon when I was a young reporter. That started me reading novels and histories in which Villa figured, and I became fascinated by him.

Ambrose Bierce

I was also seized by the robbing of Villa’s grave and the theft of his still missing head. As I began to write my novel, I ran across this newish biography about the man who was arrested for stealing the head, and the fact he supposedly did so under the payment of President George W. Bush’s grandfather, Prescott Bush. That suggested the entire plot, in a flash.

Q) Sometimes we forget that people could move history. Do you think that Pancho Villa changed, one way or another, the perception of US about Mexico?

A) In a word, yes. It’s interesting to me to read contemporary newspaper accounts of Villa and his early efforts in the Revolution when he was kind of America’s great hope or favorite son in terms of the various players in your Revolution.

There’s that famous photo of Villa with General Pershing (and Rodolfo Fierro lurking in the background) when Pershing was taking Villa’s measure as an ally or figure to potentially support. Villa was regarded as a kind of Robin Hood crossed with George Washington here, at the time. Then President Wilson chose poorly in casting his lot with other, less worthy figures in the Revolution and the attack on Columbus ensued. And, of course, of all men sent to lead the chase for Villa, it was Pershing. I think Villa has a very mixed reputation in the borderlands and American Southwest to this day. Elsewhere in America, his reputation has drifted back into a more romantic/heroic light.

Rodolfo Fierro

Q) What kind of research did you require to write this book? Did you find something unusual? I like the references to the golden age of American cinema or Yale fraternities such as Skull and Bones.

A) In a way, all the many college years and those after I spent reading about Villa and the Revolution represent my research efforts. All of my (eight) novels with Hector Lassiter turn on historic events to one extent or another, but I don’t really choose topics or events and then research them to write about them. I have longstanding preoccupations I write books around, so I end up doing more fact checking against memory than digging around for materials.

On that note, Orson Welles is another of my preoccupations, and in his classic film, TOUCH OF EVIL, that is featured in my novel, Welles doesn’t just direct, but stars in the film as an aging, once macho, grieving widower moving through a dark border town on a dubious quest. In a sense, that pretty much describes my narrator Hector Lassiter’s status in the novel, as well. Skull and Bones required a bit of light research, but it’s a self-declared Secret Society, so it lends itself to informed invention.

Hector Lassiter, by Kevin Singles, from the forthcoming
graphic novel of HEAD GAMES.

Q) Hector Lassiter is a veteran writer and also daredevil, How did you create this character?

A) I first created Hector for a short story contest and that story got a fair amount of attention and was anthologized in a book or two. I decided to take the character and put him in a novel, which quickly grew into a series. Hector started as a kind of blend of the great crime writer James Crumley and a bit of Ernest Hemingway, but evolved quickly into being his own man, who has become known, to his frustration, as “the man who lives what he writes and writes what he lives.”

As the Lassiter series unfolds, I also explore the life of the writer and this notion of a man who lives his life with an eye to how it will play on the page, and more frighteningly, how those around him start to adopt the same attitude and strategies in terms of how they will appear in Hector’s novels. You get some of that in the Villa novel, particularly with the character of Alicia, who starts to model herself after a Lassiter heroine.

Character concept
sketch of "Alicia"
by Kevin Singles
for forthcoming
HEAD GAMES
graphic novel.

Q) What are the satisfactions behind Head Games? The novel was a finalist for the Edgar, Anthony, Gumshoe and Crimespree Magazine Awards for best first novel. I read that you also have more books about Hector Lassiter…

A) I spent many years and wrote a number of other novels before Hector’s first book found an agent, a publisher, and then went on to be translated in many languages. Hector is an engaging character who I never seemed to run out of material about and who constantly surprised me when I was writing him. He appeals strongly to male and female readers who “get” the books and the character. Hector has opened the world up to me and my family, as we’ve gone here and there (Paris, Quebec and other wonderful places), as Hector has gone out into the world through translations and I’ve had to promote the books.

I wrote a total of eight novels about Hector (four have been published here in the States and in Europe; four are pending). Seven of them were complete before the first even appeared. The series is tightly interconnected, yet isn’t chronological in its presentation. I wanted to do what nobody else to my knowledge has ever done, and essentially write a planned, contained series with a beginning, a middle and an end. For me, too many genre writers just reel off an endless cycle of novels around the same character, and, sometimes, the author dies and the series passes into other hands. I’m offering eight novels about this man, his life and times, and that’s all. I don’t want Hector or the series to wind down like some boxer who doesn’t know when to leave the ring.

Q) What do you like about Mexico and the Mexican border? It’s a recurrent theme in your books.

A) I love Mexican culture, art, music…everything. The second Lassiter novel published here in the States, in fact, uses a painting by Diego Rivera, whose rights I negotiated for myself with the Bank of Mexico. Like Hector, one of my favorite songs in life is “Cancion Mixteca,” and my iPod is jammed with various versions of that song ranging from Mexican folk singers, to pub performers, to the great Tom Russell and the American actor Harry Dean Stanton.

Also, immigration is a huge issue where I live, even now, in this still-shattered Obama economy, and it drove much of the news I have covered as a journalist. Most of all, I have a deep regard for Mexican literature and poetry, and read as much of it as I can get my hands on.

(By the way, Hector Lassiter ventures into Mexico, significantly in two others of the seven books remaining.)

A) Head Games is available in the libraries of Mexico and is about a character who is in love, particularly, with the north of Mexico. What would you like to say to your readers?

A) I would thank them first and foremost for being readers. As a journalist and an author, I value every person who still finds the time and takes joy in reading.

Like my character, I am an ardent student and lover of your culture and history, and while I’m writing fiction, I do so always with the notion that fiction can bring us closer to truth than history or nonfiction. That might be a startling assertion for some, coming as it does from a man who is still a fulltime journalist, but it is what I truly believe, and, as they say, journalism is, at best, merely history’s first draft.

NEW INTERVIEWS FROM MEXICO, #2 VANGUARDIA

Continuing with English translations of new interviews I've given recently to media in Mexico regarding the release of HEAD GAMES (LA CABEZA DE PANCHO VILLA) there.

This one is with journalist Laura Luz Morales for Vanguardia (Original version in Spanish can be read here). We talk about movies, TOUCH OF EVIL, the continuing mystique of Pancho Villa,  Borderland Noir, Latin American literature and poetry, among other wide-ranging topics.

Q) For the people of the United States, who is Pancho Villa? Why do they find him an interesting character?

A) Villa is more of a historical figure of renown in the American southwest, where his legend and actions still resonate. Otherwise, he is unfortunately known to most Americans through films, where he has never really been well or accurately portrayed.

Q) What did you discover about the legends of Villa? What most attracted your attention?

A) I heard tales from old men in my hometown who were among the last of the horse soldiers who chased Villa and they filled my head with his legend and what was, in a way, a kind of last gasp of romance of the mythic American West. Most of the men who rode into Mexico in pursuit of Villa were then quickly shipped to Europe to fight in the trenches of WWI. The notion of this man evading the American Army, then retiring to prosperity, being assassinated many years later, and then having his tomb raided and his head stolen years after that suggested many story possibilities.

Q) Although not the main character or even a character itself (only the head), Villa is present throughout the novel. What is the narrative power of Pancho Villa, 90 years after his death?

A) He speaks to Americans, particularly, in a way I don’t think Zapata or others of the Revolution can because Villa was raised a peasant, supposedly became an outlaw avenging a sister’s assault, was self-schooled and became this natural leader of men and a cunning tactician. He’s one of these larger-than-life figures who fortunately, you don’t have to invent. In many ways, he emerges or is portrayed in most histories as a real life Robin Hood. He’s also a very appealing masculine figure, and my novel, among other things, tries to explore the issue of masculinity—its price and cost—particularly in the 20^th Century.

Q) It was a great chapter! Why did you bring death to Rodolfo Fierro?

A) As romantic a figure as Pancho Villa is, warts and all, I’ve never found an appealing portrayal or description of Fierro. He appears to have been, by nearly all accounts, an extremely bloodthirsty man and one devoid of conscience. For the purposes of my story, I decided to allow Fierro to fake his drowning and allow him a few more decades of inflicting misery upon the world. His death, as depicted in the novel, was a nod at one of the many brutal means of execution employed during the Revolution by some of its fiercer participants.

Pancho Villa (center) with Black Jack Pershing. Rodolfo Fierro is looking over Villa's left shoulder.

Q) In Head Games, how much of the historical elements are real and how much is fiction, as required by the crime novel or a thriller?

A) The novel—one of eight featuring Hector Lassiter—does what I try to do in all the Lassiter books, which is to find voids in history where I can insert fictional elements, attempting to tie them into the historical record. When push comes to shove, I’ll opt for fiction over reality for story reasons, but so far, I’ve never really bent history much for my novels. The Skull and Bones materials in my book are based on nonfiction accounts of that secret society. Shortly after my novel appeared, there were actual lawsuits filed here in an attempt to get Skull and Bones to surrender the head of Geronimo, which allegedly is held by them, along with Villa’s skull and perhaps Che Guevara’s hands.

Q) Head Games is a pretty surreal novel, how did you get the ideas to write this book?

A) It was strange serendipity. I wanted to write a novel with Hector, who I had used in a short story that had won praise, and I wanted to do something tying him in with Pancho Villa. About the time I was toying with this idea, I found a biography of Emil Holmdahl, who supposedly stole Villa’s head. Then I found this story about Prescott Bush, grandfather of the most recent President Bush, supposedly hiring Pancho Villa’s head stolen for Skull and Bones’ trophy room. One afternoon, I was listening to a song about Villa’s raid of New Mexico, a song written by Tom Russell, who lives in El Paso right at the border, and it all came together very quickly. The first chapter just flowed and the book flowed from that.

ORSON WELLES

Q) What is the secret to fitting in the same story to Orson Welles, Marlene Dietrich, Ernest Hemingway and Pancho Villa?

A) A couple of years before I wrote the novel, I edited an online magazine of fiction set along the border that I called, “Borderland Noir,” (a phrase since co-opted and almost turned into a branding slogan by others) and it shorthanded many of the elements of the novel. “Touch of Evil,” the last great noir movie written and directed by Orson Welles, was in a similar vein as my novel, and set in a fictional Mexican border town. The film is about compromise, loss, widowhood and the tension between Mexico and the United States—all themes I wanted to explore in this book. All of the Lassiter novels involve historical figures, particularly in terms of film and literature. In the three novels following my Villa book, Hemingway is an on-the-page character, or even sidekick. Hemingway and Welles were also both fascinated with Latin culture, and the bullfight (Hemingway more with Spanish bullfighting; Welles with Mexico’s version of the fight.)

Q) Hector Lassiter is also a crime novelist. How much can we find of you in this character?

A) Hector was inspired in the early going by some other crime novelists, including the great James Crumley. By the second novel, one titled in America TOROS & TORSOS, about surrealist art and murder, the distance between Hector and myself narrowed alarmingly. There’s a line in that second novel, one modeled after a telling observation about two famous crime writers. It’s said crime novelist Raymond Chandler wrote the man he wanted to be; Dashiell Hammett wrote the man he feared he was. In Hector, I’m sometimes writing the man I wish I had the courage to be, and sometimes the man I’m afraid I might become. There comes a point, I fear, where life and the page can blur in a dangerous way, if a writer isn’t wary to keep his characters at a safe distance.

JAMES CRUMLEY

Q)  In Mexico, this year Discovery Channel presented a documentary on the assassination of Pancho Villa. After investigating, although for a novel, do you have your own theory?

A) I’ve read some stories about that documentary but haven’t seen it or heard its final thesis on who killed Villa. As the anniversary of his death approaches, my own guess would probably lay the blame at the feet of American oil interests.

Q) How much you delved into Mexican culture to write this book? Have you visited Mexico? What do you like about Mexican culture?

A) Mexico fascinates me on nearly every level—its music, its art; its geography and its culture. (I actually negotiated with the Bank of Mexico for use of a Diego Rivera painting for the cover of my second novel’s American cover.) There is something at once reckless and life affirming, it seems to me, in so much of Mexican culture; a swooning bravado. The history of the United States and Mexico are also entwined, deeply and fundamentally, in my mind, and I believe our countries will ultimately rise or fall together. My most recent novel here in the States is entitled EL GAVILAN, and is about Mexican immigration tensions in a small Ohio town. It’s based on my own observations as a journalist and things I’ve observed or reported on related to the issue over the past several years. I’ve been to the edge of the border, but have not crossed, although I look forward to doing so.

Q) Do you know Mexican thriller novelists or any crime novelists of Mexico? Do you like Mexican or Latin American authors?

A) I’ve read many Latin American and Mexican authors and poets (particularly Octavio Paz, among the latter). I’ve read much of Carlos Fuentes and I love Paco Ignacio Taibo II’s mysteries and own many of them, as well as his Villa biography and his non-mystery works. Manuel Ramos was one of the authors in my Borderland Noir project, and we’re still in touch here and there. Luis Alberto Urrea is a favorite and THE DEVIL’S HIGHWAY a masterpiece. While touring in Texas, I picked up a copy of Martín Solares’ THE BLACK MINUTES in Austin and read that throughout my book tour and admire if very, very much. I had the honor of meeting Martín a few months later at a crime writers’ festival in Lyon, France. Right now, I’m reading through all of James Carlos Blake’s novels, and I am very much taken with them.

NEW INTERVIEWS IN MEXICO FOR HEAD GAMES (#1)

I've been doing a lot of interviews with newspapers and radio stations in Mexico recently in support of the Spanish language release of HEAD GAMES (LA CABEZA DE PANCHO VILLA) there.

Here is the translation of one of those exchanges, with a couple more to follow over the next day or two:

PREGUNTAS PARA EL AUTOR CRAIG McDONALD

Q) Why the figure of Pancho Villa?

A) I knew a couple of old men in my hometown who rode into Mexico behind General “Black” Jack Pershing, chasing Villa after the attack on Columbus, New Mexico in 1916. That led me to novels about Villa, which in turn led me to biographies and histories about the man. Villa’s personal story and his idealism speak to me, and he’s one of those larger-than-life, very masculine figures who appeals to me as a character study, much like Ernest Hemingway, to name another “character” who figures in much of my fiction.

Q) How much fiction and how much of reality is in your novel?

A) A surprising amount of the novel is rooted in history. Most all the material about Villa, with the exception of the treasure map attached to his stolen head, is rooted in the historical record. The material about Skull and Bones—the secret society believed to have engineered the theft of Villa’s head as depicted in my novel—is also based on some fairly convincing documentation. Emil Holmdahl, a character in the novel, was actually arrested for raiding Villa’s grave. George W. Bush’s family has repeatedly been linked to the theft of Villa’s head, as well as that of Geronimo, and it became a campaign issue for his father, George H.W. Bush.

Q) "La Cabeza de Pancho Villa" — can it be considered a historical novel?

A) I believe it is an historical novel. I try to look for voids in the historical record and insert my fiction into those cavities while not violating the history too much if I can. In the end, I’ll bend fact to further fiction, but I rarely find myself doing that in my Villa book, or its three historically-grounded sequels featuring narrator, Hector Lassiter, known as, “The man who lives what he writes and writes what he lives.”

Q) Cinema is a very important element in your book, why?

A) The protagonist/narrator, Hector, is a man noted for drawing on his life for his fiction, in a manner similar to Hemingway, who appears in the three novels that follow “La Cabeza de Pancho Villa”. Hector is also a screenwriter who is friends with such legendary movie directors as Orson Welles, another character in the novel. At the end of the day, one of the themes of this novel is that of legend and myth and also of being a man. Our attitudes toward those topics, particularly when it comes to noted figures like Villa, are unfortunately too often shaped by cinema, which in the case of Villa, has not been very kind in terms of casting or Villa’s reputation.

Q) How has the American public received your book?

A) The novel was my American debut, and was nominated for the Edgar Award, the highest honor in American crime fiction, as well as several other key awards. There was some early movie interest but nothing has come together yet. It has gone on to be translated into French, Russian and Japanese, as well as Spanish, among other languages. At this writing, an artist in Austin, Texas, is finishing up artwork for a graphic novel of the book from a script I wrote. The main character of Mr. Lassiter has gone on to appear in three sequels, all of which have also been translated in many languages. Four more are yet to be printed. I wrote all eight Lassiter novels before the Villa book appeared, doing so with the notion of having a fully integrated and executed series with a beginning, a middle and an end.

FIRST eBOOK ORIGINAL WITH HECTOR LASSITER AVAILABLE

ANGELS OF DARKNESS, the concluding novel in a quartet of thrillers featuring Chris Lyon, is now available exclusively for Kindle. The novel also features Hector Lassiter in his eBook original debut, as well as introducing a new character who shares Hector's last name.

ANGELS OF DARKNESS concludes the Chris Lyon story arc to date—one that begins with PARTS UNKNOWN, continues in CARNIVAL NOIR (available for free download Saturday, Aug. 3-Wednesday, Aug. 7, 2013) and on through CABAL.

CARNIVAL NOIR introduces the pivotal woman in Chris Lyon's life, Salome Arnaud. (Sharp eyed readers will have made Chris and Salome's acquaintance in my standalone novel from Tyrus Books, EL GAVILAN.)

The new novel also ties up some loose ends from the second Hector Lassiter novel, TOROS & TORSOS, and sheds important light on other aspects of Hector's life and eventual fate leading into the final four, still-to-be-published Hector Lassiter novels.

Here's the pitch for ANGELS:

"Chris Lyon and Hector Lassiter join forces for the first (and last?) time: For centuries, a secret cult has contrived to satisfy its blood lust while quietly prodding history this way or that. For nearly as long, an ancient order of Scottish knights has fought them.

"Stretching from the Scottish Highlands to snow-swept Chicago, ANGELS OF DARKNESS is the fourth and final novel in the 'Dark Cabal Quartet,' an audacious, breakneck saga of serial murder and secret history; a wildly original thriller about the efforts of two long-persecuted men caught in the crossfire not just to survive, but to turn the tables on both sides to devastating effect."

In other news, HEAD GAMES is at last available in Mexico.

HG was the novel that introduced Hector Lassiter, putting in his hands the stolen head of the Mexican Revolutionary general Pancho Villa, and launching the Lassiter series.

(HEAD GAMES is still forthcoming in graphic novel format. For a glimpse of some of the art, see this blog post for its publishers from a while back.)

Some new interviews in Spanish regarding the novel can be found here and here. Also, there's this great book trailer for the Mexican edition...

PARTS UNKNOWN (& more), currently free for Kindle

PARTS UNKNOWN, the first entry in the Chris Lyon, exclusive-for-Kindle eBook series, is presently free for download for the Memorial Day weekend. You can get your copy here.

The Lyon series was the forerunner of my Edgar-nominated Hector Lassiter series. Using various overlapping characters, the worlds of Hector and Chris combine—a union that will reach its apex in Chris Lyon #4, ANGELS OF DARKNESS, coming in June. (More about the Lassiter/Lyon nexus here.)

Like the Lassiter novels, the Chris Lyon novels also frequently spin from historical events. PARTS UNKNOWN is built on the still-unsolved crimes of the Cleveland "Torso-slayer," a fiend whose mutilation murders extended from the 1930s into the 1940s, and possibly several decades beyond.

The killer was pursued by legendary "Untouchable" Eliot Ness, who transitioned from harassing Al Capone to serving as Public Safety Director of Cleveland.

In addition to my novel, if you download PARTS UNKNOWN, you also get my extensive interview with James Jessen Badal, who has written two definitive accounts of the Cleveland toros murders. An excerpt of that interview follows. Download your copy of PARTS UNKNOWN now for the full interview, and, ahem, the novel...

You'll also get the first chapter of ROLL THE CREDITS, a future entry in the Hector Lassiter series, which features a certain Cleveland cop named James Hanrahan (PRINT THE LEGEND). In addition to being Hector's primary sidekick in the forthcoming Lassiter novel, he is also a key player in PARTS UNKNOWN.

INTERVIEW EXCERPT OF DISCUSSION WITH JAMES JESSEN BADAL

Sweeney (the primary contemporary suspect in the torso slayings) actually ended up in Dayton for a period of time?

Tracing his movements through the V.A. system is extremely difficult.

He was a World War I vet?

Yes, he was a World War I vet. He was a medic. I quote one doctor who gives as clear a description of his odyssey as is possible. Part of the problem is fifty percent of the facilities, well, we just couldn’t find out what or where they were. He was in the Dayton psychiatric facility at least from the mid-1950s on. That’s where all of the postcards came from.

That’s fairly close to Yellow Springs. There was a Torso-style case in Yellow Springs.

I had heard that. I talked to one guy who tried to link the case to Cleveland. He wasn’t sure it was Frank Sweeney, but he was trying to bring it in because of the similarities and disposal technique and such.

The average serial killer, according to contemporary profilers, tends to fall into the twenty to thirty age-range.

Sweeney would have been older. He would have been in his forties. What complicates everything in his case is, that, yes, you can say he fits the serial killer profile to a degree, but he was a paranoid schizophrenic, and he had the manic-depressive disorder and alcoholism and drug abuse. A lot of the things I would show to the psychiatrists, and they would say, “Well, if he follows the pattern of this, this and this, then this is true, but then again, he could just have been crazy. Who knows?” That was a help...

Now, there is another recent book which puts forth the notion that there was no single killer and that these were disparate cases linked by the newspapers to sell copies... Now, that presumes there were a dozen or more people running around Cleveland beheading people.

No way. I am willing to concede that maybe even some of the canonical 12 weren’t done by the same person, but I think it’s ludicrous to say the newspapers were calling the shots. They weren’t. (Coroner Samuel) Gerber was. Gerber was far too much of an egotistical ego-maniac to allow anyone else to do that.

I have always been bothered by Gerber. In many ways, he benefitted from the crimes—not to say he committed them—but he essentially built a career around those crimes until the Sam Sheppard case came along. Then he made a name for himself with that one, until it came around with F. Lee Bailey and bit him on the other end.

Having read more newspapers than I care to think about regarding all of that, if you distinguish between the articles and the editorials: The articles—don’t get me wrong, they are filled with inaccuracies—but they were good enough in those days to always attribute what they said to someone. “So and so said...” Now, you get to some of the editorials, and, oh, this is just right out of the war between Hearst and Pulitzer. They’re just incredible. Wild stuff. In that sense, yeah, they did call the shots.

Well, there was a newspaper that was funding Ness’ cadre of secret people, right? That’s the supposition?

That’s not a supposition, that’s apparently a fact. Nobody knew that until I wrote about it. No one knew there was that secret a group of people. That was contained in a taped interview with David Cowles, who was the ballistics expert of the day, the head of the forensics science department and that was one of the things that absolutely blew our minds.