10(ish) questions with Ken Bruen & Craig McDonald

Ken Bruen, author of the Jack Taylor series, and I recently traded questions regarding our new fall 2017 releases (THE GHOSTS OF GALWAY and HEAD GAMES THE GRAPHIC NOVEL, respectively), writing long-running characters and more, courtesy of Crimespree Magazine:

More HERE

ORDER HEAD GAMES: THE GRAPHIC NOVEL

HE HECTOR LASSITER SERIES, AS PUBLISHED BY BETIMES BOOKS:

#1 ONE TRUE SENTENCE: Paperback/eBook

#2 FOREVER'S JUST PRETEND: Paperback/eBook

#3 TOROS & TORSOS: Paperback/eBook

#4 THE GREAT PRETENDER: Paperback/eBook

#5 ROLL THE CREDITS: Paperback/eBook

#6 THE RUNNING KIND: Paperback/eBook

#7 HEAD GAMES: Paperback/eBook

#8 PRINT THE LEGEND: Paperback/eBook/audio

#9 DEATH IN THE FACE: Paperback/eBook

#10 THREE CHORDS & THE TRUTH: Paperback/eBook


ORDER HEAD GAMES: THE GRAPHIC NOVEL

MY INTERVIEW WITH STEVEN POWELL: CRUMLEY, BRUEN, SALLIS, 007 & MORE

My most recent interview with the masterful Steven Powell (expert in all things James Ellroy) is now available HERE. 

Ernest Hemingway, James Sallis, Ken Bruen, James Crumley are discussed, among a host of other topics, including some deep contemplation of Ian Fleming and James Bond.

There's also an exclusive cover reveal of the last Hector Lassiter novel coming later this year, THREE CHORDS & THE TRUTH.

In the meantime, here's a music video from Sara Evans that invokes that key and telling title phrase for the last Hector Lassiter novel, coming later this year from Betimes Books.

MY FAVORITE READS OF 2015

As a novelist who’s released several titles in late November and early December in recent years, I always get more than slightly irked when critics start issuing year’s best lists several weeks before Thanksgiving.

Now that 2015 is well and truly at our backs, some thoughts on the handful of books that best reached me this past year.

(Last note for context: Many, many more books were read over the past twelve months; far fewer were fully enjoyed. Sadly, 2015 might well represent the year in which I more or less began an indefinite hiatus from reading most mystery and crime fiction releases. I seem to find myself much more drawn to westerns, historical novels and novellas heading into 2016.)

Nonfiction:

My favorite nonfiction read came this year from Palgrave and James Ellroy scholar-supreme Steven Powell. My full review of this one is forthcoming via Crimespree Magazine, but here’s a capsule take on Mr. Powell’s excellent study on Mr. Ellroy, “James Ellroy Demon Dog of Crime Fiction”:

“Focused most squarely on Ellroy’s fiction, Powell’s richly researched study pays intelligent and valuable attention not just to Ellroy’s early, often neglected or overlooked novels, but some of his uncompleted projects, as well.

“Powell’s book is a must for Ellroy’s fans and his detractors: a clear-eyed study and assessment of an audacious author who has in many ways subverted and reinvented crime fiction while simultaneously crafting a persona that sometimes threatens to overshadow those achievements.”

Fiction:

At least a couple of these titles fall only loosely under this heading—I confess that up front.

The novel I wholly savored (both in bound form, and as an audio book via Recorded Books and narrator John Lee) was the latest in an ongoing series from the Godfather of Irish Noir.

Ken Bruen’s “Green Hell,” the eleventh entry in his Jack Taylor series, was a bracing pleasure. I most loved this latest entry for its meta-fictional, funhouse take on Bruen’ Galway investigator.

A young scholar decides to write the book, so to speak, on our Mr. Taylor, the ex-Irish cop turned private detective.

As a result, we get a very different point of view on the sardonic, addiction-plagued and bibliophilic Mr. Taylor.

Bruen also takes us on a kind of “darkest hits” tour of Jack’s past disasters as this would-be Boswell traces his subject’s wicked history ala the faceless reporter who tracks the losses of a certain newspaper tycoon in Orson Welles’ “Citizen Kane.”

It’s no mean feat to come up with something truly fresh in a continuing series roughly a dozen installments in, but Ken Bruen does so, brilliantly.

“The Rose of Roscrae, A Ballad of the West” by Tom Russell, accompanies his brilliant double album that I reviewed earlier this year (and which remains my favorite 2015 musical release). The annex book is touted as, “A program guide with Libretto.”

The slender volume, which also contains the lyrics to said album, is equal parts artistic mission statement, director’s-cut audio commentary and a sort of Cliff Notes songcatcher’s treasure trove that gives us a tour of the songwriter’s craft reaching back to handed-down Celtic airs and indigenous American folksongs we know but don’t really know nearly enough about.

But Mr. Russell knows.

Here’s an opening line to sink your reader’s teeth into:

“In the 1970s, workers tearing down the fun House at the Long Beach Pike, near where I grew up in L.A., discovered a dummy on the wall—which turned out to be the mummified remains of an old gunfighter… It got me to thinkin’…”

“Roscrae” leads to another, late-in-2015 favorite.

Among the many artists who perform on Russell’s album is the brilliant Nashville-based singer-songwriter David Olney.

Mr. Olney penned a song about a French prostitute and her World War I veteran “client” that I first heard and fell in love with a few years back via an Emmy Lou Harris cover and titled “1917 — The French Prostitute.” (Here's a killer version from the writer himself.)

That track was first made known to me via the afore-praised Ken Bruen. (These sort of strange, cross-connections between my favorites seem to come up in my life as audience, a lot.)

Olney recently released a first smattering of collected lyrics under the title, “The Songs of David Olney, Volume I.”

Mr. Olney has tremendous range and reach as a songwriter and composer. I keep finding songs I’ve been attached to here and there that prove to be his babies.

Along with a revelatory introduction, the songwriter provides little vignettes or histories explaining the spark or epiphany behind each piece of writing.

Here’s an excerpt shedding further light on one of my favorites of his songs, “If I Were You”:

“This song seems so simple and yet, to me, it’s very complex. As soon as you say, “if I were you …” It becomes murky as to who is being referred to. Is it me or you? Who put a candle in the window, me or you?”

Here’s a video of Mr. Olney performing that tune with the also brilliant Sergio Webb:

My last favorite was a book of poetry by James Sallis, “Black Night’s Gonna Catch Me Here: New and Selected Poems” from New Rivers Press.

Mr. Sallis also has the distinction of having penned two of my favorite “crime novel” series, a brilliant biography of Chester Himes, wonderful volumes of short story collections and various translations and scholarly books on the guitar. He is also a frequent and gifted reviewer of other authors, as well as a noted fiction writing instructor.

Here’s just a snippet, from “Excuses for Rain”:

“Words roll between us,

the old words, and I have come to tell you

how rain regrets its decision,

“how very hard it has tried

to make the world something else

for you.”

(Mr. Sallis has a new novel coming in 2016 that sounds quite promising. Preview, and pre-order, here.)

There were some other good and savored reads last year, to be sure, but these were exclusively older books that were new only to me, or which I chose to revisit for a sure-fire read when the new stuff was disappointing.

Heading into 2016, I have some new volumes on Ernest Hemingway, some Les Edgerton and a couple of can’t-talk-about-them yet ARCs to explore.

My resolution—the only one I feel truly comfortable making on this first day of the uncertain new year—is to use this space more aggressively in the coming year as a kind of reader and music-fan’s diary.

COMING THIS FALL: BORDERLAND NOIR, THE ANTHOLOGY

——SUBMISSIONS ARE NOW CLOSED——

“Swing for the fences…Gut-shoot me and/or break my heart, because, tonight, I just want to feel something.”

In the beginning, there was BORDERLAND NOIR, the ezine.

This autumn, Betimes Books will be releasing BORDERLAND NOIR, the print anthology, a mix of old and new stories and essays about life and death as lived along the Mexican border—about dangerous crossings to build new lives that sometimes result in losing that old life in every sense.

This new edition of BORDERLAND NOIR also provides the opportunity to let in some fresh voices. More on that in a moment; first some background on this project...about its birth in 2005 and its return in 2015.

An old quote from a crime novel: “Nobody cared if I died or went to El Paso.” Raymond Chandler tossed off that line in The High Window.

Tom Russell, the brilliant songwriter, essayist and painter who lives in El Paso—an artist in every sense and one who also holds a master’s degree in criminology—excerpted that nugget for the sleeve of his album Borderland.

James Crumley, the godfather of the flavor of crime fiction I most revere, lifted the same line from Chandler as an epigraph for his novel, The Mexican Tree Duck.

As I said, the dark heart of BORDERLAND NOIR, and its title, go back many moons, to the waning days of 2005.

I had just completed drafts of two novels that were still a few years from publication. The first was Head Games (2007), my 1950-era, Edgar Award-nominated debut about an aging novelist called Hector Lassiter and his trials along the Mexican border after acquiring the long-missing skull of Pancho Villa.

The second was El Gavilan (2011), a novel about illegal immigration and its stresses on a small Ohio town. Games was written mostly from my imagination; El Gavilan was inspired by things I was seeing and covering as an Ohio-based journalist.

Back in 2005, before the economy went bust, it seemed as if the border was, well, everywhere. Border stresses—and all the bloody baggage tied to that invisible line—were very much on my mind as ought-five drew to a close.

A few days after wrapping El Gavilan, I was invited by Dave Zeltserman to guest-edit an edition of his distinguished but now long-gone e-zine, Hardluck Stories.

I impulsively pitched a theme of stories set along the border and sold Dave on going live with the collection on Cinco de Mayo, 2006.

I dubbed the collection BORDERLAND NOIR, partly in tribute to Tom Russell’s album, as well as the brand of fiction I felt I was writing at the time.

The term “borderland noir” has subsequently become a publishing branding slogan and a slice of frequently-seen book reviewer shorthand for typifying a certain sort of dark fiction set along the border.

With Mr. Zeltersman’s blessing, I wrote a solicitation pitch for stories that was really a thinly disguised mission statement for my two still-unpublished novels.

It went like this:

"La frontera … what El Paso-based songwriter Tom Russell describes as 'that delicious, dark-eyed myth of the border.'

"We’re headed way out west, out past where you’ve dared to go before. Out to Touch of Evil country (that’s the film, not the book, hombres).

"Our troubadours are Russell, Dave Alvin … Marty Robbins and Ry Cooder. Mariachi bands dominate the shortwave radios down this way, where tortured widower Orson Welles hands out justice with his ham-sized fists, all the while muttering under his boxy Stetson.

"We’re not looking to be slavish about the coordinates: The Border is a state of mind every bit as much as it is a geographic boundary. But fiction or nonfiction, I will be seeking that Malcolm Lowry/Day of the Dead/Cinco de Mayo vibe.

"Focus on that uneasy friction between Old Meh-hi-co and El Norte … because, way down deep, we all know that you can leave Brownsville, but you can never get Matamoros out of your soul.

"Give me stories about young lives snuffed out chasing the dream of more money and better futures up north.

"Show me guilt-stricken 'coyotes' who can no longer stand to roast peasants in locked freight cars, or to abandon babies and their too-young mothers in the scrub-oak purgatory of the Sonoran desert.

"Tell me tales of Narcotrafficante madmen with too much cash and bent imaginations who build crazy tunnels under miles of wasteland to smuggle drugs. I’m craving stories about bad bastards who kidnap tourists and mail them back one-finger-at-a-time, seeking impossible-to-pay ransoms from gringo wage-slaves whose one foreign vacation has gone so terribly south on them.

"To this day, cherry boys with butterflies in their bellies steal across the border to get laid … to drink rum at TJ’s infamous 'longest bar in the world' and to find out exactly what the hell a 'Donkey Show' is. But sometimes things take a turn. Rum and tequila and first sex are a treacherous mix. Show me how treacherous.

"Emiliano Zapata said, 'It’s better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.' So, in that spirit, swing for the fences, amigos. Give me strong and original voices. Gut-shoot me and/or break my heart, because, tonight, I just want to feel something."

Well, we at last put that issue out on May 5, 2006.

The sucker took on a life of its own. The next year, Head Games came out with its own borderland noir vibe and Touch of Evil aspects. El Gavilan followed a time after. Ken's and Manuel's stories were promptly anthologized. One of the other participants, Sam Hawken, has gone on to a distinguished career penning whole novels that fit the description of borderland noir.

Betimes Books will bring BORDERLAND NOIR back this fall in eBook and trade paperback editions.

At this writing, with another Cinco de Mayo looming, I'm looking up the original contributors and trying to get them back on board—putting the old band back together—while simultaneously seeking some fresh talent. 

I'm very interested in adding in one or two new stories to the mix, from really new voices. If you write fiction (or even nonfiction: this edition will carry at least a couple of subject appropriate essays) — if you've read the original solicitation pitch and think it's something you want to try—shoot me a line and give me a sense of what you might have in mind for consideration.

——SUBMISSIONS ARE NOW CLOSED——

HEAD GAMES RETURNS!

This month, Head Games, my debut novel and the book that launched the Hector Lassiter series, returns in some slick new packaging from Betimes Books.

Of all my novels, HG has traveled the widest, become the most translated, and is now in the final steps of being transformed into a graphic novel.

The book has been out of print in the U.S. for a few years, so this is a chance for newcomers to get the novel between actual soft covers.

Some extras for this version include a new afterword, the short story “The Last Interview” that was my first Lassiter work (and one that informs the latter going of Head Games). This version of Head Games will also include reader discussion questions for book groups interested in further exploring the novel’s themes.

You can preorder Head Games for Kindle here. The paperback version will be available in just a few days.

HEAD GAMES WAS:

• 2008 Edgar® Nominee for Best First Novel

• 2008 Anthony Award Finalist

• 2011 Sélection du prix polar Saint-Maur En Poche

• 2008 Gumshoe Award nominee for Best First Novel

• Head Games shortlisted for 2008 Crimespree Magazine award for Best First Novel

"One of the great American road novels."

   —Heirloom Books

"This slick caper novel touches chords of myth, history, loss and redemption just enough so you can hear echoes faintly under the gunfire."

   —PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

ABOUT THE BOOK:

“In a dusty cantina on the far side of the Rio Grande, larger-than-life and recently widowed crime writer Hector Lassiter and Bud Fiske, a callow young poet sent by True Magazine to profile Hector, are handed a carpet bag. Inside they find the stolen head of Mexican general Francisco ‘Pancho’ Villa—a long missing relic that may point the way to a fortune in lost treasure or a blood-and-thunder death...

“In the dank, hallowed halls of Yale University creep the members of the Skull & Bones, a secret society shrouded in whispers. They are a fraternity whose members include media barons, über executives and politicians, including three generations of men called Bush—and their sanctum sanctorum's trophy cabinet is purportedly packed with the stolen bones of long-dead luminaries...

“In a '57 Bel Air, Hector, Bud, and the beautiful Alicia tear through the desert with a trunk full of human heads. Caught in a crazy crossfire, they lead all manner of headhunters on a breakneck chase across Lost America. U.S. intelligence services, murderous frat boys, the soldier of fortune who stole Pancho's head from its grave, and the specter of a dead Mexican legend all want Villa's head—though they might settle for Hector's...”

*********************

What some other authors have said about Head Games:

"Head Games is terrific, a real discovery, informed by—but never weighed down by—Craig McDonald's intimate knowledge of pulp fiction, politics, history, literature, film noir and all manner of frontiers. A truly original debut that leaves one eager to see what this writer will do next."

   —LAURA LIPPMAN, author of What the Dead Know

"Moves like a bullet, like a trajectory of magnificent artistry and line-on-line of almost casual, throwaway description. The beautiful, understated humor running like a sad song all through the whole novel...I'm beyond impressed."

   —KEN BRUEN, author of American Skin

"Reading Craig McDonald's Head Games was like reliving those wonderful and exciting, tequila-fired weekend border-town tours of my youth in the '50's. A different character, vivid and lively, waiting around every new corner of the artfully twisted plot. The time and place are captured perfectly, and story never falters as it dashes to the surprising ending. It made me homesick for El Paso the way it was."

   —JAMES CRUMLEY, author of The Last Good Kiss

"Few writers can blend a contemporary feel with what drew us to old-style pulp and original paperbacks: that momentum, that craziness, the thrill of the downhill slide and crash. Head Games is smart, it's funny, and it moves like a roach when the lights go on—what's not to love?"

   —JAMES SALLIS, author of Drive

"Head Games is fast, funny, furious, heart wrenching, real smart and totally unapologetic...a five-star page turning sizzler in a four-star world. Talk about nailing your debut...Head Games seals the deal and establishes McDonald as the new badass on the writing block. Kick back with a shot of Cuervo and a cold Tecate chaser. Enjoy the search for Pancho's missing head in this fast-paced thriller of lost and sorely missed Americana."

   —CHARLIE STELLA, author of Shakedown

"Head Games is contemporary noir at its finest. Prose that bites like a guillotine blade. A voice that sings in your skull. And in aging pulpster/adventurer Hector Lassiter, a hero who's the real deal—morally complex and damned funny."

   —ALLAN GUTHRIE, author of Hard Man

Selected as one of The San Francisco Chronicle's Top 10 crime books of the year: "Craig McDonald, a genuine expert on the history of crime fiction, gives free rein to all his obsessions in a debut novel that's a berserk 1957-based caper running roughshod through the politics and pop culture of the latter half of the 20th century. Strap in, hold on, enjoy the ride."

   —EDDIE MULLER, SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

"Head Games is a gravel and mescal cocktail, a one-day burn, a novel of genuine piss and vinegar, the kind of book you thrust on people with the wild eyes and intent of a PCP freak. It's Tom Russell singing ‘Tonight We Ride’ with a gut full of tequila and a loaded Colt. Craig McDonald knows the tough guy, has created one of the very finest, a pulp writer called Lassiter who knew Hemingway, Welles and Dietrich, and who I wish wasn't fucking fictional so I could hunt for his books. He spits in the eye of the pansy-ass authority hero that has glutted the crime market, reminiscent of Crumley at his best and with Ellroy's sick historical verve. Bottom line, McDonald's a talented bastard."

   —RAY BANKS, author of Saturday's Child

"A booze-soaked tribute to those great gonzo noir writers of days gone by."

   —ANTHONY NEIL SMITH, author of The Drummer

"Yeah, I'm late catching up to this guy, but damned if this 1950's set tale of a crime writer carrying the head of a Mexican rebel in a bag across some kind of crazy road trip didn't set my pulse racing. There's a strange switch at a late stage in the novel which might divide some readers in the way the ending of No Country For Old Men did its audience, but for my money it's a bold move that more or less works exactly as intended. This McDonald guy is definitely one to keep your eye on."

   —RUSSEL D. MCLEAN, author of THE GOOD SON