HECTOR LASSITER SERIES TOPS AMAZON.COM.AU

Thanks to Australian readers who pushed the Hector Lassiter series to the top of Kindle sales across all of Amazon.com.au during the past 24 hours!

ENTIRE HECTOR LASSSITER SERIES AUSSIE AMAZON DAILY DEAL

Hello, Australia!

The first five Hector Lassiter novels are currently just $0.99 each for your Kindle! 

That includes ONE TRUE SENTENCE, FOREVER'S JUST PRETEND, TOROS & TORSOS, THE GREAT PRETENDER and ROLL THE CREDITS, just in time to prepare you for the December release of Lassiter #6, THE RUNNING KIND.

HONORING THE PAST & KNOWING YOUR LITERARY ROOTS

Sometime past, a bookseller asked me to answer a few questions via email following an appearance in his store. I'm not so sure anything ever became of that interview, which I recently ran across while going through some old files.

I'm therefore presenting it here, I think, for the very first time...
--Craig McDonald

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When you did the signing you talked about how things seemed more real in the era you wrote about. Can you elaborate on that and how it appears in the crime writing (or writing in general) of those times?

My personal belief is that crime fiction — both novels and films — stand as inadvertent documentary testaments to their time in a way “literary fiction” and more stilted, studio films do not. The great film noirs were often shot on shoestring budgets, off the back lots and outside studios, and, so, on actual L.A. street locations. Pick the right film noir, and you get to see Los Angeles in its 1940s or 1950s glory, as it was: how the city looked, how people dressed and moved and interacted. Those films are grounded and real. Similarly, you’re best served to go to Hitchcock’s VERTIGO if you want to see the San Francisco of yore.

And crime fiction novels? It’s much the same. They were written fast and in the moment and serve as time capsule glimpses of their era in a way the so-called literary fiction of the time doesn’t. In 1953, the Pulitzer Prize went to my own favorite novelist, Ernest Hemingway, for THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA. Yet that novel by the quintessential American stylist is not set in America and in fact depicts life in a destitute Cuban fishing village. It’s a parable, at best. That same year, Raymond Chandler published THE LONG GOODBYE, the only Chandler novel I truly love, and which gives you a stronger, realer sense of American life in that year of ’53 than Hemingway’s most awarded work could hope to.

Which of the crime fiction masters influence you the most?

Hammett is often compared to Hemingway and you can find partisans arguing long into the night which writer influenced which the most profoundly. (If you’re clear-eyed, Hemingway certainly got their first, but he did eventually read Hammett.) Yet for all his perceived similarity to my favored Hemingway, Hammett leaves me rather cold. Chandler enamored me for the first two books when I was in college, but I quickly lost fascination with him and came to regard him as too-clever-by-half…too posed and kind of primping, except for THE LONG GOODBYE, which I think is a more naked and wrenching book than Chandler intended. In terms of the great writers of the 1930s and ’40s, I was most profoundly influenced by the one-hit wonder William Lindsay Gresham and his carnival noir NIGHTMARE ALLEY, and the fever dream output of the haunted and diabolically prolific Cornell Woolrich. There was a period in the 1980s when a paperback company was churning out glossy black, matched editions of Woolrich’s novels and I collected and devoured them all, reading two or three a night.

Why is it good for writers to read those that have gone before them?

When you write mystery or crime novels, you’re working within a tradition. It’s the same for any genre or sector of fiction writing. Like it or not, you’re the next link in the chain and you best be prepared for the fact that your readers are schooled, formally or informally, in that same tradition and come to the banquet with certain culinary expectations.

It’s the classic caution — you can’t be revolutionary and push the envelope until you know backwards and forwards all the rules you’re breaking in order to effectively expand the boundaries. I remember taking a course in epic poetry and being walked through the fact that all these great epic poets, though sometimes separated by hundreds of years, knew that they were bound by tradition and expectation to make tacit references to the works they were hoping to build on or unseat, and, in fact, to incorporate some element of the immediate predecessor epic poem in their own work. In a very real sense, as Hemingway asserted, as writers, we compete against the dead. As readers, we’re doing something along the same lines — reading within a tradition and a canon. Not knowing what came before you is, frankly, lazy or stupid.

What do you get the most out of reading the vintage stuff?

For me, the classics of crime fiction embody the strategy I strive for in my own writing — the notion that plot arises from character. For me, too much contemporary crime fiction seems contrived, and, too often, pitched for a movie deal, frankly. Consequently, I don’t read much contemporary crime fiction written these days…perhaps two novels a year, if that. Instead, I try to ferret out all those 20^th Century novels in genre still to be plumbed. The older I get, the more I find myself re-reading rather than reading. Life is short and getting shorter so I tend to favor known quantities. Also, the very best books speak to us in different ways at different stages of our lives.

ONE TRUE SENTENCE: Paperback/eBook

FOREVER'S JUST PRETEND: Paperback/eBook

TOROS & TORSOS: Paperback/eBook

THE GREAT PRETENDER: Paperback/eBook

ROLL THE CREDITS: Paperback/eBook

WORLD WAR II SECRET HISTORY

ROLL THE CREDITS is the latest in my series of historical thrillers featuring author Hector Lassiter.

RTC, like most of the novels before it in the Lassiter series, turns on secret history and little-known or long-buried facts underlying what we sometimes erroneously accept to be 20th Century historical fact.

In CREDITS, Hector engages in a decades' long battle of wills and wits with a German filmmaker modeled on an all-too-real Nazi movie-maker who trucked with Hitler and Company.

Another aspect of the Hector Lassiter/Werner Höttl duel turns on the revelation that German filmmaker Höttl enjoys protection from shadowy U.S. intelligence agencies for reasons unfathomable to Hector and ally Jimmy Hanrahan.

Again, this matter of my novel's Nazi filmmaker and U.S. intelligence protection is not a matter of invention or some fictional flight of fancy.

As a new nonfiction book, “The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler’s Men,” by Eric Lichtblau details, countless Nazis were courted, recruited and even rewarded with U.S. citizenship by the FBI and CIA because they were somehow viewed as useful tools in the war against Communism.

You can check out Mr. Lichtblau's work for a nonfiction treatment of this highly dubious strategy on the part of former FBI and CIA leadership.

For a fictional spin on these issues, please consider checking out ROLL THE CREDITS.

ONE TRUE SENTENCE: Paperback/eBook

FOREVER'S JUST PRETEND: Paperback/eBook

TOROS & TORSOS: Paperback/eBook

THE GREAT PRETENDER: Paperback/eBook

ROLL THE CREDITS: Paperback/eBook

COVER REVEAL OF BETIMES BOOKS VERSION OF HEAD GAMES

So my friends, it seems the time is right for a Friday night reveal. This is the new cover for the 2015 re-release of HEAD GAMES, the novel that started the Hector Lassiter saga. The design is by Mr. JT Lindroos and the newly expanded version of the novel to come is once again from Betimes Books. More on what you can expect from HGv.2 soon, so please stay tuned.

EL GAVILAN: HOW I CAME TO WRITE THIS BOOK

As our national leadership squares off on the issue of illegal immigration and proposed "amnesty," a series of posts looking back at the themes and controversies informing my novel regarding illegal immigration and its toll on the heartland, El Gavilan. This one is from circa December 2011.

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My signature novels are historical literary thrillers. They feature a 20^th Century author and globetrotter named Hector Lassiter. The Lassiter books span many decades and continents.

My novel El Gavilan, is more contemporary and hits closer to home: it’s set, more or less, in a fictionalized version of Grove City, the central Ohio town where I grew up.

In the 1990s, the Buckeye State began to undergo a sea change triggered by tidal waves of illegal immigration.

The America southwest grabs all the national media attention with its insanely over-the-top cartel violence, self-appointed “Minute Men” roaming the desert with guns and calls for construction of Berlin-reminiscent, soaring border walls.

Fact is, exploitation of illegal workers, human trafficking and all the strife spinning out of the Mexican methamphetamine trade know no boundaries.

As a county sheriff declares to El Gavilan’s presumptive hero, small town police chief Tell Lyon, in a very real sense, “The border is now everywhere.”

As a central Ohio journalist, I saw communities changing as native Ohioans and assimilation-resistant undocumented workers and their families grudgingly struggled to strike some kind of live-and-let-live balance, mostly unsuccessfully.

I experienced this nexus of intimations:

An illegal cockfighting ring was broken up a few miles from my hometown.

In that same Westside enclave, a former blue-collar neighborhood of GM factory workers, nearly all of the signage was suddenly of a decidedly Spanish bent. The local library was scrambling to accommodate a growing population of English-As-Second-Language patrons.

On the opposite side of a looming overpass, an apartment complex became a target of arson. It proved to be a racially motivated firebombing. Lives were lost in that fire…mostly those of children.

The fallout came in many dark flavors and it came down hard. 

The residents of the complex, recent immigrants to Columbus, had no English. First-responders spoke no Spanish. The controversy spinning out of that case drew national attention.

A few counties away, word came of a sheriff who chose to use his slice of post-9-11, Homeland Security grants not to update radio equipment or to obtain bomb-sniffing dogs as so many others were doing.

This lawman instead bought up billboard space and posted warning messages directed at illegal immigrants. He sent bills to the federal government demanding reimbursement of jail costs his department sustained resulting from the feds’ failure to exercise adequate border enforcement.

All of these developments conspired to inspire El Gavilan. They also suggested the title character, conservative hardliner and Horton County Sheriff Able Hawk.

My notion was to take a damaged Border Patrol agent, a man literally running from borderland grief and bloody cartel violence—a grieving recent widower—and drop him into this maelstrom…and to confront him with Hawk.

Tell Lyon accepts the appointment to the position of small town police chief expecting to have a kind of Mayberry-like ride. Tell arrives in New Austin, Ohio, expecting to sort out nothing more serious than some drunk and disorderly hi-jinks…family dramas and little traumas of shoplifting and teens using fake I.D.s to try and buy cigarettes or the like.

It’s a miscalculation Tell comes to rue. He lands in town just in time for the murder of a local Latino woman—a brutal crime that triggers a firestorm of unexpected menace and threatens to trigger a race war.

It’s a cliché to say some novels read as if they were ripped from the headlines.

Clichés become clichés, as journalist-turned-author Ian Fleming once observed, because they’re typically so curiously valid.

In the case of El Gavilan, the novel is indeed ripped from the headlines, but they were headlines I sometimes wrote.

EL GAVILAN: THE DEVIL'S HIGHWAY TO THE BUCKEYE STATE

As our national leadership squares off on the all-important issue of immigration and proposed "amnesty," a series of posts looking back at the themes and controversies informing my novel regarding illegal immigration and its toll on the heartland, El Gavilan. This one is from December 2011.

——————

My 2011 novel, El Gavilan, examines the effects of illegal immigration and a single murder on one Ohio town. Many of those undocumented workers came to the Buckeye State via a torturous path dubbed the Devil’s Highway.

The Devil’s Highway technically runs between northern Mexico, across desert wastelands of blasted-out ironwood and saguaro, and on up into Arizona. It’s considered the deadliest stretch of ground to cover for those who would flee Mexico to America, yet thousands try every year and many don’t make it to the other side.

El Gavilan opens with a quote of unknown provenance: “Never attach more feeling to a thing than God does.”

The poet Ofelia Zepeda said of the region through which the Devil’s Highway runs, “You need a new kind of prayers to negotiate with this land.”

I’d argue the Devil’s Highway knows no true end. The ones who do reach the American portion of the borderlands don’t always opt to live out their days in Arizona, California or Texas. They head in deeper, trekking further north to make their meager living at myriad Mexican food restaurants…by mowing lawns or picking fruit for half-minimum wages in Georgia or Michigan and all points in-between.

Like the Oakies chased from their homes by the Dust Bowl tragedy nearly a century before—the destitute immortalized in John Steinbeck’s novel, The Grapes of Wrath—men and women fleeing Mexico for El Norte found their path hastened by the American highway system. Route 66, “The Mother Road,” may not be doing so dandy these days, but the U.S. interstate system is cranking right along.

A recent immigration study puts a fine point on it: “Ohio has the nation’s 10th largest highway network and is within a single-day drive for half of North America’s population. Ohio contains 70 percent of the country’s manufacturing capacity.

My home state links the Northeast and Midwest; thus, much business and cargo traffic passes through its borders on this well-developed highway network. Ohio’s economy is primarily based in agriculture and industry.”

In other words, and in any language: Ohio=Prosperity. (Or it used to; these days, Ohio is just about the hardest hit state economically outside of Michigan.)

But circa 2005, or thereabouts, before the housing bubble burst, my corner of Ohio was literally swamped with undocumented workers. Like drunken sailors, developers were plowing under acres of corn and soybeans and platting out vistas of cookie-cutter subdivisions constructed largely through the sweat and effort of illegal immigrants. The bastards trucked them in by the dozens in old Ford Aerostars to frame-out houses for chump change wages. (An exposed wall of one side of my garage—a house built circa 2000—is covered with Spanish writings scrawled in Sharpie).

The influx of undocumented, unassimilated workers changed the face of central Ohio, nearly overnight. As a journalist, I saw results some while before the average Ohio citizen maybe took notice. When the citizenry of central Ohio realized what was happening, handwringing ensued. Racial tensions rose, then spiked.

The impact on infrastructure and public services here in Ohio was profound.

The immigration report put it this way, by the numbers: “Seventy-two percent of the total population growth between 2000 and 2006 in Ohio was directly attributed to the immigrant population…The annual fiscal cost to Ohio taxpayers for emergency medical care, education and incarceration is currently $224 million and is estimated to rise to $372 million per year in 2010 and $627 million per year in 2020.”

When the Great Recession hit, a number of undocumented workers ventured back across that dusty line, suddenly finding prospects more enticing in the Mexico they’d earlier fled than in the financially decimated wastelands of post-recession America.

My aim in El Gavilan was to take one family’s immigrant experience, trace it up into Ohio, and then watch the ripples flare out when a member of that family falls prey to a seemingly racially motivated spasm of fatal violence.

But before the murder that fires the story of El Gavilan occurs, there is another scene of violence and loss, very near the start of the book:

El Gavilan opens with a tragic fire that claims more victims than necessary when first responders and Latino firebombing victims aren’t speaking the same language. Failure to communicate literally kills. The scene is based on all too real firebombing in Ohio that occurred in a mostly Latino, non-English-speaking apartment enclave in what had formerly been a white, working class neighborhood.

The victims were part of a family who’d chased prosperity from central Mexico all the way to Ohio’s Capital City—braving and surviving the passage through the desert wastelands only to be taken down deeper along The Devil’s Highway, taken down in Ohio, “the heart of it all,” as our state’s publicists liked to phrase it in the day.

Craig McDonald is a novelist and journalist whose first novel, Head Games, set along the Mexican borderlands, was a finalist for numerous literary awards in the United States and France. His new novel, El Gavilan, is available from Tyrus Books. Visit his website at craigmcdonaldbooks.com