The Shape of What Remains in Character

How do you choose your characters? Do you base them on people from real life? If so, how do you disguise your characters so their real-life counterparts don’t recognize them?

 

The characters in my Shane series are composites and amalgams. They were part of my ecosystem. They’re all dead, which is convenient. As for The Company Files, my characters are part of a narrative strategy. For you to understand me, I need to provide context.

I didn’t do writing right. I wasn’t the child who knew he wanted to be a writer at seven, Crayola in hand, the plot outlined in cursive, back when they taught Penmanship and Geography. I was seven in 1975. For those who remember Arithmetic, I was born in 1968.

I’ll spare you the stereotype of Gen X as feral latchkey kids who learned self-reliance. My childhood was starker and stranger than that. I had a room that wasn’t mine. My clothes were elsewhere, in two parts of the house. A bedside table held a .357.

Home was not where I wanted to be.

If asked who I was then, I might say: listen to the opening of Billy Joel’s Vienna. That was me. Ambitious. Afraid. Moving too fast without knowing why.

By twenty-one, I had lived and experienced more than most, and internalized trauma.

Reviews and readers say I write hard-boiled crime fiction tinged with a quirky sense of humor, or that I write intelligent historical fiction.

Yes and No.

What I write isn’t trying to look like 1975; it’s that I learned something from 1975. A reader can take the work at face value, or read between the lines and see it as metaphor—for society, and for trauma normalized.

Walker, from The Company Files, survived World War II. He floats, unmoored, and slowly learns that he is a writer. That’s me. I survived things most people don’t, and I didn’t come to writing until my early forties—after cancer, after learning how to live with what remained.

Shane Cleary, in my series set in 1970s Boston, is displaced. He doesn’t belong.
He navigates dangerous systems because he has no faith in benign ones.

I was betrayed by every institutional authority figure there was.

I was the cub fed to the wolf as a child. Those who should have offered sanctuary provided betrayal—psychological and physical violence. Shane’s long arc is learning to live with the violence he committed in Vietnam and recognizing Bonnie as home. His cat, Delilah, is his conscience and the one living thing he trusts. I’ve spent years trying to reconcile the violence visited upon me and what I did in self-defense.

I was an inquisitive kid—call it intelligent or precocious—but I saw patterns early and asked questions. Too many questions. I was told, explicitly, to shut up. Nobody cared what I thought. Nobody wanted to hear it.

I write spare and compressed because fear is an efficient teacher.

Some contradictions I observed at a young age:

• We say separation of Church and State, but recite the Pledge of Allegiance and mention God.
• If we don’t know geography, “conflict” is out of sight and out of mind.
• If you’re bombarded with media nonstop, you don’t think—you react.
• If you don’t know how to write cursive, thought and connection are lost.
• We buy stuff we don’t need with money we don’t have to impress people we don’t like.

Style for me isn’t about being current. It’s about being coherent.

I write between categories, which makes me a challenge to agents. I write what I know and what I knew. I know the Seventies because I lived them as a child. This isn’t nostalgia. It’s integrity. The decade has been labeled the Me Decade, but it’s really the graveyard of Sixties idealism. The Eighties, for me, were Conservatism, Consumerism, and Cocaine. After that, the pattern repeats—same impulses, new packaging.

Are my characters based on people I knew?

Yes and No.

Composites and amalgams, like I said earlier. I won’t name-drop because the dead can’t defend themselves. I didn’t write them to exploit them. I write to work through trauma. Catharsis. I write to reveal uncomfortable truths. All my fiction is about pattern recognition.

A reviewer once declined to cover my work because I write about organized crime. I found that ironic and unfortunate. My protagonists are anti-heroes. They live at the intersection of personal history and History with a capital H. Nuance is lost these days. I’d like to think I write about living in the Upside Down. My “bad” guys have ethics. My “good” guys and the ‘System’ are corrupt and amoral.

Look outside your window and tell me it isn’t a mafia democracy.