Time to Be Inspired, by Josh Stallings

Q: Are there crime fiction books so good you hold on to them and re-read them? Name a few classics and inspirations.

A: I evolve year to year not only as a writer but also as a reader. That’s true for most of us. As a teenager I attached my identity to the bands I listened to, books I read, movies I dug. It was a way to connect with like minds. I wore tight pants, long scarves, platform shoes, a leather jacket. 6’4” and skinny, I must have looked a sight, but I was a walking billboard to attract my people. 

We listened to Bowie, Velvet Underground, Eno, Queen. We read Hunter S. Thompson, Edward Albee, we did scenes from Harold Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter. I read S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders, but doubt I told anyone. I loved Cotton Comes To Harlem and Superfly. As an adult I find Curtis Mayfield’s classic Superfly soundtrack holds up better than the film. 

At sixteen I moved to LA. I was alone a lot and Raymond Chandler kept me company. I slowly discovered what I personally loved to read. Hard Boiled Crime consumed me for a long time. Here are a few writers that gave me a good grounding in the field:

Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye is my favorite, but you can’t go wrong reading anything he wrote.

Charles Willeford, the Hoke Moseley series is gritty brilliance. Miami Blues is worth more than a few reads.

James Crumley, is the poet laureate of brutally self effacing hard boiled crime. Dancing Bear remains my favorite, and has the best last paragraph of any book I’ve ever read. 

Andrew Vachss, the Burke series introduced me to the possibilities of what a crime family of choice could look like, that and Bullmastiffs. He wrote about the pain of childhood abuse and the need for avenging knights in tarnished armor. Flood is the first in the series and the place to start.

James Lee Burke has published twenty-three Dave Robicheaux books. The first, Neon Rain is amazing, as are all that follow. Dave and Clete Purcel are opposites in some ways, but maybe more, they are two sides of a tarnished and pitted coin. They give Burke a chance to examine morality from two perspectives. Dave who does hard violent things to set the world right, but suffers guilt and spiritual pain for having done them. Clete acts to protect those he loves and if he feels any guilt, he drowns it in whisky. 

If you dig your crime fiction Hard Boiled these five writers will give you a grounding in the sub-genre. They did for me.

My evolution as a reader is taking me farther away from crime fiction. Don’t get me wrong I still read a ton of crime books. Just finished the amazing Naomi Hirahara’s Evergreen. A brilliant, tough LA novel that we all need to read.

I recently read Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy. WOW! She is a bloody master of style and form. The three books are set in the same time and have many crossover characters, but each book feels stylistically entirely different. She has her characters drive the prose. I find writers working in speculative and sci-fi are freer from tropes and reader’s structural expectations; this is exciting as a reader and maybe impossible as a writer. All writing is a high-wire act, but Atwood walked over the Grand Canyon without a net or a wire. Moments in it took my breath away. 

A well written book will entertain. A brilliantly written one inspires.

Which books inspires you? Your list will be different from every other writer or reader’s.

What book am I waiting for today? 

Lou Berney’s A Dark Ride, out 9/19. Lou is one of my favorite authors, his work is full of thrills and chills and buckets of heart. He creates people you will not forget. Where ever he’s going in this new novel, I’m buckled up and ready to go. 

Overnight $uccess

If you knew anything you wrote would be published and successful, what would you write?

By Dietrich Kalteis

Doing what you love is anybody’s best shot at success. And I love sitting at my desk and making stuff up. And I don’t think any of us can predict what’s going to be a best-seller. I know if I tried to write what I guessed would sell, rather than writing what I loved to write about, it would be crap.

Okay, it sounds corny, but it’s the best thing in the world to get to do what I love every day, and that’s success in it itself. And if money follows, then that’s even better. Who’d turn it down? 

For most of us, it’s more of a slow grind than instant success. So, anytime I need a shot of perseverance, I recall that J.K. Rowlings was turned down a dozen times on the road to becoming the first author billionaire, Stephen King’s first novel Carrie was rejected thirty times, and Elmore Leonard’s The Big Bounce was bounced back over eighty times. The New York Times ran an article about him some years ago, the headline: Writer discovered after 23 novels. 

Writing every day is my best shot at standing out in a crowded field. And that need to write is an in-the-blood kind of thing. Being able to stay focused and positive helps, so does not thinking about success or the lack of it. And almost as important is reading and being inspired and influenced by great books.

And speaking of great books, since the Holidays are rushing up, I’ve listed some of the crime novels that I’ve read over the past year which stood out. As I’m writing this I just finished my friend Sam Wiebe’s second novel Invisible Dead, and I can tell you the guy writes like a champ. Then there’s Black Orchid Blues by Persia Walker, a bright and funny book. The Force by Don Winslow had to be the best-paced novel I read all year, and Razor Girl by Carl Hiaasen had to be the funniest. Also very funny and well done (and Canadian) are No Fury Like That by Lisa de Nikolits or One Brother Shy by Terry Fallis. 

I reread a couple of crime classics that stand the test of time, ones that I’d highly recommend: Miami Blues, from 1984, and New Hope for the Dead by Charles Willeford, published 1985, and The Moonshine War by Elmore Leonard, published 1969. As much as I enjoyed Robert B. Parker’s Spenser novels, I started his Jesse Stone novels and I loved Trouble in Paradise, the second in the series, published in 1999.

All the best to everyone over the Holidays.

Closing thoughts on opening lines

by Dietrich Kalteis

As a writer, what do you make of readers who flip to the end and see what happens last first?

Flipping to the end of a novel to find out how it ends is like reaching under the Christmas tree when no one’s around and unwrapping a present, getting a sneak-peek, then rewrapping it, and trying to act surprised Christmas morning. To me, that just ruins the moment. 

The ending to a good novel is the wrap up of everything that came before. At times the author may hint at several possibilities to a story’s ending, or throw some last minute twists and surprises to keep the reader from predicting the ending. Maybe for some people, novels should come with spoiler alert stickers. 

William Goldman said, “The key to all story end­ings is to give the audi­ence what it wants, but not in the way it expects.”

While the ending to a good story is like the punchline to a good joke, I’m more interested in the first few pages of a book — the opening. If it doesn’t grab me, I may not read much more before putting the book down. If it doesn’t grab me, I won’t keep turning pages to see what the ending holds in store.

There’s a lot of promise in a strong opening, and it’s hard to imagine putting a book down that starts like this:

Some years later, on a tugboat in the Gulf of Mexico, Joe Coughlin’s feet were placed in a tub of cement. Twelve gunmen stood waiting until they got far enough out to sea to throw him overboard, while Joe listened to the engine chug and watched the water churn white at the stern.

— Dennis Lehane, Live by Night

As Roy Dillon stumbled out of the shop his face was a sickish green, and each breath he drew was an incredible agony. A hard blow in the guts can do that to a man, and Dillon had gotten a hard one. Not with a fist, which would have been bad enough, but from the butt-end of a heavy club.

— Charles Willeford, Miami Blue

When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon. — James Crumley, The Last Good Kiss

Dennis Lenahan the high diver would tell people that if you put a fifty-cent piece on the floor and looked down at it, that's what the tank looked like from the top of that eighty-foot steel ladder. — Elmore Leonard, Tishomingo Blues

Great opening lines are real grabbers, but a great book is a combination of all the story elements that have to work together to keep me turning the pages. It’s the writer’s voice, the pace, plot, conflict, setting, and the characters and their dialog. And when it’s all working together, it’s like magic. I recently finished The Force by Don Winslow and it was like that for me, the story just fired on all cylinders. Another one I just read that was hard to put down was Trouble in Paradise, Robert B. Parker’s second Jesse Stone novel, and one of his best.

While I love to discover authors I’ve never read before, the greats are always worth revisiting because they just did everything so well. And although I already know the story’s outcome, I like to reread classics by Hemingway, Steinbeck and Salinger from time to time — those rare authors who mastered every aspect of a great story, from the opening line to the final scene. And there are great crime writers who I’ve read more than once — authors like Raymond Chandler, Elmore Leonard, James Crumley, and Charles Willeford.

So, if a novel can be this great adventure, with a killer opening, interesting characters and dialog, with exciting and unexpected twists, and told in a voice that resonates, why flip to the last few pages to see how it ends?