In autumn 2007, HEAD GAMES was published by Ben Leroy and
Bleak House books.
It went on to earn best first novel nominations for the
Edgar Award, the Anthony, and the Sélection du prix polar Saint-Maur en Poche in
France, among others.
It also launched a series of ten novels featuring
protagonist Hector Lassiter, pulp magazine writer, crime novelist and sometimes
screenwriter.
Betimes Books has just published the climactic novel in the
series, THREE CHORDS & THE TRUTH, set in Nashville about a year after HEAD
GAMES, and bringing back several characters from that first novel.
CHORDS was always envisioned as a kind of HEAD GAMES sequel
and definitive circle-closer.
I actually wrote the “last” Lassiter novel many, many years
ago, much of it in situ in Nashville,
Tennessee. I interviewed various songwriters and sat in on sound-checks to
gather source material and atmosphere.
But mostly, I focused on putting a capstone on the Hector
Lassiter saga.
Few are the mystery series in my experience that round out
with the fulfillment of a charted character arc or larger story.
Most series simply trail off into oblivion because of soft
sales, or the death of their author.
If the series is particularly popular, when the creator dies,
some other writer is brought in to keep churning out inferior, never quite
satisfying continuations, again toward no planned end.
There are very few exceptions to this rule of the
never-ending series.
Most of those that occur still don’t typically deliver a
unified story arc carried to a planned climax built toward across the span of
the series.
More often, some poor author gets a dire diagnosis and so
races the clock to close out their series before they too are “closed out.”
Others elect to do something mirroring Agatha Christie’s
strategy of writing a series closer well ahead of time, then holding it in
reserve for posthumous publication.
(Though in the Dame’s case, even killing off her character
didn’t stop others from publishing further Poirot novels following the
appearance of CURTAIN.)
I’ve long acknowledged James Sallis’ cycle of Lew Griffin
novels as the inspiration for the Lassiter series.
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| JAMES SALLIS |
Sallis wrote an interconnected and finite series of novels
that together tell a larger story and build to a final revelation regarding his
central protagonist.
With the Lassiter series, I wanted to do something similar:
Construct a series toward a known end, allowing each book to stand alone, more
or less, but in sum telling a much larger story regarding the character of
Hector Lassiter and his eventual fate.
It was an audacious or perhaps even foolish goal to write a
whole series ahead of any contract commitments. Certainly, given what I now know
of the vagaries and failings of much of the publishing industry, it was a very
naïve and hopeful thing for a baseline cynic like myself to undertake.
Yet I wrote first drafts of the novels in the series in the
space of about three months per title, back-to-back, working toward the known
conclusion of this last, Nashville-set series-closer.
The later entries in the series were mostly well into
composition before the second novel, TOROS & TORSOS, was even contracted
for publication by Bleak House Books.
Please let me run a highlighter over that point: Most of the
series, including the last volume, was virtually written before the second book
reached the galley stage some time in the summer of 2008.
There was never any guarantee the books would all see print.
There was every chance the project might stall around book four or five and the
rest of the novels would remain in limbo.
But the series has hung in there, collecting an
international audience through translations in Spanish, French, Italian,
Russian, Korean and Mongolian, among others.
In English language form, the Lassiter series currently encompasses
four different publishers.
HEAD GAMES was also quickly optioned for graphic novel
adaptation by First Second Books, prior to its Bleak House publication. I wrote
the script for that project over a weekend nearly ten years ago (the art came
much more slowly).
Next October, nearly ten years to the day that HEAD GAMES
the novel was released, HEAD GAMES the graphic novel will at last appear.
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| An early sketch by artist Kevin Singles of Hector Lassiter for the coming HEAD GAMES graphic novel. |
A short story collection will also follow next year from
Betimes Books, which now prints uniform editions of the entire series.
The short story collection will feature a
never-before-published Lassiter novella set in the 1920s that roughly approaches
the word count found in HEAD GAMES.
So while THREE CHORDS does
represent the climax of the Hector Lassiter series as originally set forth, the
Lassiter saga still has some moves left.
Hector has opened remarkable doors for me and provided
international travel opportunities for my family.
He is forever there somewhere in my head, sometimes
whispering in my ear. When you write this much about a single character for so
long, you actually begin to see the world through his eyes.
Telling this storyteller’s story has resulted in years of
wonderful correspondence and conversation with readers of all ages,
nationalities and interests who’ve followed his saga.
I very much look forward to hearing the reactions to this
“last” Hector Lassiter novel.
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