Bullet Points: Kicking Off Autumn Edition

• Former U.S. President Bill Clinton, ex-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and country singer Dolly Parton have all claimed authorship of crime or thriller novels over the last few years, so why not James Comey? The ex-U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York and onetime FBI director was bluntly fired from that latter post in 2017 by Donald Trump amid the worsening scandal over Russian influence on Trump’s 2016 presidential bid. Comey has since delivered speeches and written op-ed pieces for newspapers, but those endeavors were apparently not satisfying enough. So now he has signed with The Mysterious Press, an imprint of Penzler Publishers, to produce a pair of crime novels. As explained this week in a press release,

Central Park West, the first book of a planned series, features an assistant U.S. Attorney whose case against a high-profile mobster is derailed when a shocking turn of events reveals possible ties between the Mafia and the headline-making murder of a local politician. Drawing from the author’s personal experience, this high-stakes legal thriller reveals the detective work, backdoor dealings, and tradecraft involved as the FBI and Department of Justice attempt to build a case against an elusive member of one of the oldest criminal organizations in the world.

“I’m excited to take readers inside fascinating worlds I’ve come to know from my time in government and the private sector,” Comey is quoted as saying. “These stories are fiction, but, inspired by real work I’ve done, they will offer a rarely-seen view of interesting people and institutions. And I’m honored to be doing it with a legendary publisher.” Central Park West is scheduled for release in late spring 2023. There’s no word yet on the plot of book two.

• Literary Hub managing editor Emily Temple surveyed 25 reading lists for this fall season from 22 notable outlets (newspapers, magazines, and some Web sites) in order to come up with a tally of the 72 most-recommended books, fiction and non-fiction. Of those dozens of choices, I believe only two novels—Deanna Raybourn’s Killers of a Certain Age and Richard Osman’s The Bullet That Missed—can unquestionably be defined as crime or mystery fiction.

• The annual Irish crime-writing festival Murder One was launched only in 2018, and for the last two years—ever since the COVID-19 pandemic struck—it has had to be presented exclusively online. Not this year, though. From October 4 to 9, Murder One is scheduling events to take place at the DLR LexIcon Library and Cultural Centre in Dún Laoghaire, just south of Dublin. Among 2022’s scheduled guests will be U.S. novelists Laura Lippman and Jean Hanff Korelitz, English fictionists Ann Cleeves and Mick Herron, Irish writers Catherine Ryan Howard and Brian McGilloway, and Agatha Christie biographer/TV presenter Lucy Worsley. Many of the in-person events will also be live-streamed online. For booking details, click here.

• In Reference to Murder reports that actor Shaun Sipos (Outer Range) “has been tapped as a major lead opposite Alan Ritchson in the upcoming second season of Reacher. From writer and showrunner Nick Santora and based on the novels by Lee Child, the series follows Jack Reacher (Ritchson), a veteran military police investigator who has just recently entered civilian life. In a one-year deal, Sipos will play David O’Donnell, who served with Reacher in the Army’s unit of special investigators and is like a brother to Reacher. While Season 1 was based on the first book in Child’s Jack Reacher series, Ritchson revealed in May on Instagram that Season 2 will follow the eleventh book in Child’s series, Bad Luck and Trouble. David O’Donnell is a prominent character in that book, the only novel in the series he is featured in, which explains Sipos’ one-season deal.”

• Congratulations to the Sisters in Crime organization for 35 years spent “fighting the patriarchy.”

• How does Peter Falk’s Lieutenant Columbo compare with the great Sherlock Holmes? “Despite being a very different character, and harking from an entirely different time and space,” The Columbophile blog opines, “Columbo may be the closest to Holmes of all their peers in terms of mental dexterity. But how much do these men really have in common when making a detailed comparison? Well, despite one being an upper-crust, cynical and occasionally drug-dependent Victorian-era Brit, and the other being from humble Italian-American stock, a grafter who has worked harder than others to get ahead, there is much to connect the two detectives—and those similarities expand way beyond a mutual love of tobacco.” Enjoy the whole story here.

• So much for that dream... In answer to the question, “At what point in human history were there too many (English) books to be able to read them all in one lifetime?,” Randall Munroe, the author of What If? 2, estimates the threshold was passed “sometime before the population of active English writers reached a few hundred,” which would have been right around the year 1500.

• Sadly, my book radar sometimes fails me. For instance, I entirely missed noticing this last July’s release of The Blood Ogre, the latest novel from Craig McDonald, best known for his pulpish Hector Lassiter series. Steven Powell offers this description:

The story revolves around the reputation of two remarkably prolific writers, Lester Dent and Walter B. Gibson. Dent suffered a nervous breakdown and early death in 1959, perhaps brought on by the impossible schedule of churning out Doc Savage novels by the dozen and averaging two million words a year on his typewriter. In his final days, Dent had hallucinations in which he would see and interact with Doc Savage characters. In 1965, Doc Savage and The Shadow novels are enjoying renewed popularity. The Shadow author Walter B. Gibson has a knack for publicity rooted in his parallel career as a magician. People start witnessing a black-clad figure looming around the Greenwich Village house where Gibson penned the final Shadow novel in 1949. Gibson claims it is a ‘living mind-projection’ of The Shadow. But if a hero can rise from the pages of an authors literary output, then what other, more sinister, characters will follow him?

Powell calls The Blood Ogre “devilishly good” and “an affectionate tribute to a bygone era.” Frankly, it’s meta-fictional conceit reminds me rather too much of Paul Malmont’s The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril (2006), a novel I was unable to finish. Nonetheless, I’ve enjoyed McDonald’s books in the past, so will likely look this one up, too.

• Not long before he starred in the high-tech NBC-TV private eye drama Search, actor Tony Franciosa appeared in an unsold pilot for the same network called The Catcher. The weekly program would’ve starred Michael Witney as Noah Hendrix, a former agent with the Seattle Bureau of Missing Persons, who now operates as an investigator chasing runaways and fugitives. I’ve never seen the full pilot, but I did discover a four-minute clip on YouTube that features Franciosa, Witney, Jan-Michael Vincent as Hendrix’s associate Sam Callende, and blues musician Piano Red. See it while you can!

• My, how times—and budgets—have changed! Back in 1968, it was considered extravagant for NBC to fork out $400,000 for every 90-minute episode of the crime-drama “wheel series” The Name of the Game. Compare that with some of today’s most expensive small-screen shows. According to the Internet research company VPN Overview, the Amazon Prime production Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power costs $60 million per installment. The Disney+ programs Hawkeye (2021), The Falcon and the Winter Soldier (2021), WandaVision (2021), Loki (2021), and Obi Wan Kenobi (2022) each budgeted $25,000,000 per episode, while Netflix spends $13,000,000 per episode on The Crown (2016-).

• Have you ever wanted to watch the first, black-and-white, half-hour episode of Jack Webb’s police drama, Dragnet, dating back to December 14, 1951? Well, here’s your chance.

• I didn’t realize, when I applauded the recent revival of The Washington Post’s Sunday Book World section after a dozen years, that its return would coincide with the end of another Sunday Post component I have come to appreciate immensely: the nearly 68-year-old Outlook section of commentary and news analysis. “The decision to retire the Outlook section,” Robert G. Kaiser and Steve Luxenberg explained in its last edition, on September 16, “and to consolidate the paper’s opinion journalism in the editorial department, is a measure of how dramatically the newspaper business has changed in its march from print to digital publication.” Outlook was one of the models I used when I created a four-page editorials section for my college newspaper, and I’ve enjoyed reading it whenever I have been in D.C. since, or have picked up the Sunday Post from a newsstand. Rolling its variety of contents into the Opinions pages is not an unreasonable solution, but it’s also not a happy one for those of us who once traveled directly from the front section of the Post to Outlook.

The Story Behind the Story: “Forever’s Just Pretend,” by Craig McDonald

(Editor’s note: Ohio journalist and fiction writer Craig McDonald has been a periodic guest here at The Rap Sheet. He’s penned two previous “Story Behind the Story” essays, one about his 2010 novel, Print the Legend, the other focusing on 2011’s One True Sentence. Below, he not only introduces us to Forever’s Just Pretend, his fifth and latest novel featuring historical writer-cum-detective Hector Lassiter--he also kicks off a competition specially made for veteran Lassiter fans. If you’d like to read more from McDonald, check out his blog here.)

For the uninitiated, the Hector Lassiter novels usually incorporate historical events and figures, including Ernest Hemingway, Orson Welles, and myriad other 20th-century luminaries who interact with the main character.

The series returns this month, though not with just a single new novel, or with a re-launch of the previously printed four entries centered on crime novelist and screenwriter Lassiter, “the man who lives what he writes and writes what he lives.” Instead, European publisher Betimes Books will unveil the entire series of Lassiter novels, released in an aggressively accelerated combination of “old” and new titles. Within a matter of just a few months, the whole of the Lassiter saga will be available for the first time.

I’m fairly certain we’re headed into uncharted publishing territory here, strategically speaking. But then the Hector Lassiter series has always been a genre maverick.

In a kind of premonition of this unusual publishing schedule, the Lassiter series was written in rapid-fire fashion, one book after another, long before the original second novel in the series, Toros & Torsos, was even contracted for publication. I had written the books with an eye to an overarching storyline that would bind the series into a larger tale focused on Hector’s life journey and climaxing with the mystery of whatever became of Hector, the author and the man.

After all the first drafts were completed, I went back over them en masse, polishing and pulling the series together in meticulous detail. To be clear, while other authors carry a series forward one book at a time, I plotted and wove the Lassiter novels together to form that larger story, from the jump.

Several of the individual Lassiter installments sprawl across decades. So a novel here may at points intersect or overlap with a novel or even two over there. Most series treat life as a chain of compartmentalized episodes, each book standing more or less alone. Real life more closely resembles an oil spill, of course. Events and episodes bleed together. I aimed to come closer to that mixing of mile-markers in shaping the Lassiter series.

At conception, it seemed this strategy allowed readers to tackle the novels in any order they chose. In their original publication sequence, the “first” Lassiter novel, the Edgar Award-nominated Head Games, opened in 1957. Its sequel took flight in 1935. The third novel, Print the Legend, explored the death of Ernest Hemingway and was largely set in 1965. The fourth, One True Sentence, was a Lassiter/Hemingway origin story, of sorts, set in 1924 Paris.

But as the series extended to four published novels, increasing numbers of new readers reached out, craving a recommended reading sequence. A striking number told me they wanted to read the novels in something approaching chronological order. I came to see readers’ attitudes toward Hector were dramatically affected by which Lassiter novel they read first.

When Betimes proposed publishing the entire series in a concentrated burst, and it was suggested we present the books in something like chronological order, I immediately embraced the notion.

Strictly speaking, the fact that some of the novels cover three or more decades makes truly chronological presentation of this series an impossibility. We’ll therefore be offering the novels in order of when each book opens.

In this new publishing sequence, One True Sentence--a story encompassing one week during February 1924--is now novel No. 1. OTS was released last week, followed by its never-before-published sequel, Forever’s Just Pretend, which is set across successive holidays in Key West, Florida, circa 1925.

Those two installments will appear simultaneously with a re-release of Toros & Torsos, which opens in 1935. A few weeks later, two more previously unpublished, World War II-era Lassiter novels will debut: The Great Pretender (1938) and Roll the Credits (1942). The remaining novels, a similar mix of old and new installments, will quickly follow.

I wrote an essay for The Rap Sheet about One True Sentence when the novel debuted in February 2011. That tale traces aspiring novelists Lassiter and Hemingway as they confront a cult of nihilist artists.

One True Sentence also introduced the character of Brinke Devlin, a fetching female mystery author who resembles sultry screen siren Louise Brooks but writes like Craig Rice. Brinke was established in OTS as the woman who shaped or even “created” the Hector Lassiter we come to know.

The previously unseen Forever’s Just Pretend delivers on the promised Hector-Brinke reunion teased in the final pages of One True Sentence.

Forever’s Just Pretend breaks the Lassiter template in significant ways. Most notably, for the first time, there are no historical figures; the focus is kept squarely on Hector and Brinke. Also, for the first time, we meet a Lassiter blood-relative.

This new novel introduces Hector’s paternal grandfather, a thinly veiled homage to a beloved, recently passed actor who helped inspire the meta-fictional, sometimes irreverent tone of the Lassiter series.

While no overt historical personages haunt the pages of Forever’s Just Pretend, the crimes that drive the plot are based on a real cycle of murders and arsons that rocked 1920s America.

Now, here’s a challenge to all you Lassiter series readers: the first three people who can correctly identify the inspiration for the “Key West Clubber” killings in Forever’s Just Pretend will be rewarded with signed and numbered copies of the now über-rare, limited-edition hardcover version of Toros & Torsos, complete with the “booking sheet” for yours truly and a personalized fingerprint. Submit your answer in an e-mail note to jpwrites@wordcuts.org. And please be sure to write “Key West Clubber Contest” in the subject line. We’ll let you know when we have our three winners.

Casualties of Controversy

My Kirkus Reviews column for today is devoted to an interview with Ohio journalist, editor, and author Craig McDonald, whose new standalone thriller, El Gavilan, has been released by Tyrus Books more than two weeks ahead of schedule. As I explain in the intro to that piece,

This tale takes place in a fictional Ohio town that’s struggling with its growing influx of Latinos. Racism and violence have both reared their ugly heads in what used to be a quiet community. Now, the rape-murder of a Mexican-American woman, Thalia Ruiz, threatens to cause those tensions to boil over, and it falls to the town’s just-installed police chief, former Border Patrol commander Tell Lyon, along with a corners-cutting, hard-line county sheriff, Able Hawk (“El Gavilan”—The Hawk—of this book’s title), to bring down Ruiz’s assailants before more blood and divisiveness are spread.

You’ll find my discussion with McDonald here. Feel free to comment on our exchange or on El Gavilan itself, if you’ve already read it.

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As is typical with my interviews for Kirkus, there was more to my conversation with McDonald than I was able to fit into the column. So I offer the remainder below

J. Kingston Pierce: What sorts of research resources did you employ while crafting El Gavilan?

Craig McDonald: Mostly it was written from first-hand observation and some stories we were covering that revealed just what a financial and social impact illegal immigration was having on social services and school systems. There was also a very demonstrable impact in terms of illegal narcotics--particularly meth production--that was spiking crime in central Ohio.

JKP: Are there many real towns in Ohio and elsewhere in the Upper Midwest facing the sorts of immigration pressures seen in your fictional New Austin?

CM: As I’ve described, it’s a pervasive issue across the entire state. You can drive down two-lane county roads in any direction in Ohio, hit a town with little more than a single stop light, and still find illegal immigration stresses ... particularly because Ohio remains so agriculturally centered. As Able Hawk says to Police Chief Tell Lyon in El Gavilan, “the border is now everywhere.”

JKP: Is this truly a standalone novel, or might we expect to see more from Tell Lyon, Able Hawk, and Lyon’s fetching new wife, Patricia Maldonado, in the future?

CM: It’s a standalone. I had a series I wrote prior to the Lassiter series that centered on a journalist turned novelist. That guy was named Chris Lyon, and he actually has cameo appearances in El Gavilan and in the third Hector Lassiter novel, Print the Legend. I have several books centered around Chris that are sort of sitting on my computer, but Tell and Able have had their day, so to speak.

JKP: So, after doing the research and writing this story, how do you think the United States ought to deal with its growing problem of illegal immigration? Build a ridiculously expensive wall? Ease the path to legal immigration? What?

CM: If I had that answer, I’d probably have a clear path to elected office. It’s certainly not a new dilemma. I know a lot of people living in border states and who are living on the front lines. They’re as vexed as anyone else in terms of a strategy that’s financially supportable. The notion of a wall is absurd. On the other hand, not so long ago, it was projected that medical and prison costs tied to illegal immigration could cost the state of Ohio somewhere in the range of an additional $300 million by 2020 or thereabouts.

READ MORE: “The Monday Interview: Craig McDonald,” by John Kenyon (Things I’d Rather Be Doing); “El Gavilan: The Hector Lassiter Connection,” by Craig McDonald (Spinetingler Magazine).

The Story Behind the Story: “One True Sentence,” by Craig McDonald

(Editor’s note: A year ago, The Rap Sheet hosted Ohio journalist-author Craig McDonald’s essay about his third novel, Print the Legend. Now comes his follow-up, the post below, which looks back at the literary inspirations behind the newest of his delightful Hector Lassiter historical mysteries, One True Sentence [St. Martin’s/Minotaur].)

Although my series centers on 20th-century crime novelist and screenwriter Hector Lassiter, as many critics and readers have noted, the novels sometimes seem nearly as much about Lassiter’s longtime friend, Ernest Hemingway.

But the sun also sets: One True Sentence, the fourth novel in the Lassiter series, represents Hemingway’s last significant appearance across the projected eight-book cycle. Papa is leaving the building with this book.

In the first Lassiter installment, the largely 1957-set Head Games (2007), Hem was a kind of off-camera presence. Yet Hemingway cast such a long shadow in my debut, that considerably more than one reader or critic mistakenly left Head Games believing Hemingway to have been an actual character in the book.

In Lassiter #2, the decades-spanning Toros & Torsos (2008), Hemingway was Hector’s sidekick across years of the story’s action.

Last year brought Print the Legend, a novel turning on the possibility that Hemingway’s death in the summer of 1961 might have been something other than the suicide history records. Hemingway loomed over Print as a kind of restless ghost, and, at key points, he was seen in flashback.

Now we come to One True Sentence. In a more traditionally structured series, this novel would be a series launcher. The novel is set during one week in Paris, in February 1924.

Paris. The 1920s. We all have firm and fixed notions about how it must have been. I’m wagering that most of us have had those notions set for us by at least some of the writings of Ernest Hemingway.

As One True Sentence opens, Hector Lassiter and Ernest Hemingway are in their early 20s. They’ve each had some short stories printed, but neither has yet published--hell, even completed drafting--a proper novel. It’s the youngest we’ll ever see Hector and Hem in the Lassiter series.

Already, the questions are coming my way again from early One True Sentence interviewers and newcomers to the books: Why Hemingway?

Partly it’s because I intended the Lassiter series to be as much about key artistic movements--modernism, surrealism, post-modernism, and so on--as about solving mysteries. Hemingway was a key figure who straddled or helped to define all those -isms.

Blame it, too, on my overlapping reads, as a young man, of The Sun Also Rises and A Moveable Feast. Mostly the latter.

From biographies and letters, I see now how contrived or even disingenuous much of Hemingway’s posthumous memoir truly is. Doesn’t matter. I’m a trust-the-art, not-the-artist kind of guy. I was seduced, early and powerfully, by Hemingway’s portrayal of what it was like to be a young journalist and aspiring fiction writer in Paris in the 1920s; the place, Gertrude Stein famously said, “Where the 20th century was.”

As a new-fledged journalist drafting novels in the evening and on weekends--albeit doing all that writing in Ohio--my life was changed by A Moveable Feast. I wanted to live that book. Hemingway became my master and kind of the literary equivalent of what Elvis represents to rockers--the goal and the cautionary example.

Knowing I couldn’t really live Hem’s memoir, I promised myself to write my own Paris novel that I could live in--to put my own vision of the City of Lights on the page. The question was what would that novel be about? Who would anchor that book? Years passed.

Between January 2005 and December 2007, as a fiction writer, I had what Hemingway used to term “a belle époque.” I wrote most of the Lassiter series, as well as a standalone that’s scheduled to see print later this year, and the non-fiction book, Rogue Males (2009). The pages were piling up. Simultaneously, I was re-reading a lot of Hemingway. I came back to A Moveable Feast with a grown man’s eyes.

I wrote Toros & Torsos between Halloween and Christmas of 2006. On January 1 of the next year, I began to write One True Sentence (then traveling under the working title of City of Lights). My own 1920s Paris novel was unfolding in my head even as I was in the early going of composing Toros.

From the jump, One True Sentence was envisioned to be a noir turn on A Moveable Feast and a kind of post-modern dark comedy about the mystery genre itself.

As Dick Adler wrote in a January post here in The Rap Sheet (“Hem and Gert Talk Mysteries”), Gertrude Stein was an unabashed mystery fan. She called her favorite mystery writers her “mystifiers.” In an early meeting, Stein urged on a young Hemingway a copy of Marie Belloc Lowndes’ Jack the Ripper tale, The Lodger (1913).

I envisioned a series of murders of literary magazine editors along both banks of the Seine--crimes that would hit a commercially inviable writer like Gertrude Stein where she lived. In desperation, Stein--fixed in the Nero Wolfe-like comfort of her favorite chair in her salon--gathers to her a collection of Paris-dwelling mystery writers to stop the killings.

The detectives in One True Sentence include an Agatha Christie-esque British writer of locked-room mysteries who has long been established as Hector’s bête noire. We meet a fetching American female mystery writer named Brinke Devlin, who looks like Louise Brooks and writes like Craig Rice. Representing the hard-boiled school, we have Hector (and, in his way, Hemingway). Bouncing up against this collection of unlikely amateur detectives is a Maigret-like French inspector.

As One True Sentence unfolds, we meet characters and witness events that will inform the early novels of Hector Lassiter and Ernest Hemingway. We’re witnesses to a secret history of events living between the lines of Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast. We’re afforded a glimpse of the portion of the iceberg lurking below the water line, to put it in Hemingway’s own artistic terms.

For Hemingway, particularly, February 1924 was a kind of pivotal moment in time. Intimations of a tipping point being reached for the young writer were just being felt.

Hem was back in Paris after a disastrous return to daily journalism in Toronto, Canada. He came back with one small-press collection of his writings behind him, and another pending in the fall. He became a subeditor to Ford Maddox Ford’s literary magazine, The Transatlantic Review--a plot point in One True Sentence. Despite no novel to support it, Hem’s reputation as a fiction writer to watch was beginning to spread.

All of the key literary and artistic figures who appear in One True Sentence were actually in Paris during that winter--crowding in some last good food and wine before abandoning the city to an expected influx of tourists anticipating Paris’ role as host city to the Summer Olympics.

And then there were the suicides.

Paris always had its share of men and women intent upon killing themselves. The always-suicide-preoccupied Hemingway even wrote an early, undistinguished poem about all that.

Yet as the winter of 1924 unfolded in a haze of snow and freezing rain, the suicide rate in Paris spiked, particularly in artistic circles.

Hand-wringing journalists and the like blamed the young artistic community for the spate of self-inflicted deaths (“Terror Sweeps Latin Quarter” one 1924 French headline read). All those deaths suggested to me the key plot point for One True Sentence. They inspired a Dada-like artistic clique called “Nada”--a dark cult embracing murder and suicide.

This, then, is the milieu of One True Sentence: A single week in Paris in all of its winter 1924 glory. Murder, sex, and all those great writers and painters colliding, many of them treacherously bent upon screwing one another in something other than a carnal sense.

It’s Hector Lassiter and Ernest Hemingway at ground zero. It’s the key romance in Hector’s life with the woman who makes Hector, well, Hector.

It seems appropriate that Papa should have the last word on the time and the place: “But Paris was a very old city and we were young and nothing was simple there, not even poverty, nor sudden money, nor the moonlight, nor right and wrong nor the breathing of someone who lay beside you in the moonlight.”

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FREE BOOKS, ANYONE?: One True Sentence goes on sale today, but thanks to Minotaur Books, you could win one of four free copies of Craig McDonald’s new novel. To enter this latest Rap Sheet giveaway competition, all you have to do is e-mail your name and snail-mail address to jpwrites@wordcuts.org. And please be sure to write “Craig McDonald Contest” in the subject line. Entries will be accepted between now and midnight next Monday, February 21.

Winners will be chosen completely at random, and their names listed on this page the following day.

The Story Behind the Story: “Print the Legend,” by Craig McDonald

(Editor’s note: Even coming up on 49 years now since the sudden death--by shotgun blast--of Ernest Hemingway, that American novelist and inveterate adventurer seems not to have lost one iota of celebrity cachet. There are still Hemingway look-a-like contests; his home-turned-museum in Key West, Florida, remains a popular tourist attraction; and the author continues to be a subject ripe for fictionalized treatments. The latest littérateur to incorporate “Papa” into his prose is multiple award-nominated Ohio resident Craig McDonald, a journalist and the creator of series writer-detective Hector Lassiter. With his third Lassiter tale, Print the Legend, being released this week by Minotaur Books, we asked McDonald to tell us a bit about what led him to create his protagonist and to drop Lassiter, in this new tale, into the “mystery” surrounding Hem’s demise.)

It’s been said that history is written by the winners. It might as easily be said that history is written by people with agendas. As a career journalist, it pains me to say this, but I just don’t trust a lot of the history I read.

Journalists are, by reputation, a cynical breed. “If your mother says she loves you, go and find a second source,” an old journalism saying goes. I came to my own cynicism about the reliability of received history at an early age.

Never much of a science or math student, I was that kid who always had his nose stuck in a book; that kid who lived mostly in his head. My tastes, from the get-go, ran to pulpy crime fiction and selected slices of 20th-century history.

No generalist, I tended to get obsessed with a person or specific historical event and read everything I could find about that particular preoccupation that fleetingly fired my imagination. Reading history in that intense and idiosyncratic way, from very early on, I started to notice contradictions--some fairly profound. It seemed that for these historians, nailing down even a single event in a definitive way was a task nearly as elusive as trying to nail down mercury.

History, I came to decide, was a quicksilver and frequently treacherous thing.

In my new novel, Print the Legend, my continuing character, Hector Lassiter, remarks that “Historical events ... are too often symptomatic of deeper, darker machinations hatched by conspiring men and devious cabals with impossible-to-fathom aims.”

That could serve as a kind of mission statement for the Hector Lassiter series--novels exploring the artistic tradition and romanticism as the clandestine catalyst for real events. I’ve come to believe that in some cases, one can come closer to “truth” through the vehicle of fiction than biography.

When you write around real topics such as the mysterious theft of Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa’s head and the Bush dynasty’s potential involvement in same (Head Games, 2007), about the possible influence of the surrealist art movement on the slaying of Elizabeth Short in Los Angeles (Toros & Torsos, 2008), or about the prospect that author Ernest Hemingway’s death was something other than the suicide history records (this year’s Print the Legend)--when you pepper your novels with historical figures such as Orson Welles, John Dos Passos, and Marlene Dietrich, to name just a few--you nearly always get these three linked questions:

How much research did you do? Where’d you find all this crazy stuff? What’s real, and what did you make up?

That last question is the one you always try to deflect. The primary objective of writing historical fiction is to create a seamless blend that foxes the mind and leaves the reader tantalized and trying to ascertain where the facts end and fiction begins (“When the legend becomes fact, print the legend”).

Those remaining two questions, on the other hand, are owed some kind of honest answer.

As to where the ideas come from, and how much research goes into shoring up the Lassiter novels, I told author Tom Piccirilli during a 2008 interview that I construct novels around elements or events that really engage my imagination, and I plot to my passions.

That’s about half of it. In my introduction to my collection of author interviews, Rogue Males (2009), I quote Joseph Campbell, who said that it’s the obligation of every journalist to be educated in public.

A great deal of the history underlying the Hector Lassiter stories represents longstanding preoccupations. Many can be traced back to my fledgling days as a journalist.

In my hometown of Grove City, Ohio, I had the experience of knowing, and in one case, interviewing, a couple of old-timers who, like my protagonist Hector Lassiter, rode behind “Black Jack” Pershing in pursuit of Pancho Villa, after Villa attacked the town of Columbus, New Mexico, in 1916--a crime that in terms of national outrage, and military response, in some ways anticipated those ensuing in the wake of the bloody events of September 11, 2001.

Those two members of the Pershing Expedition were name-checked in my first novel. One of the men had this hefty album of photographs recording the fruitless desert pursuit of Villa. As a young reporter, at his invitation, I spent a couple of hours with the man, listening to his war stories and pouring over his images. When we were finally wrapping up, he said, “Of course, none of this is for publication.” The old guy, it seemed, just wanted a new ear ... some company to pass an afternoon.

About 20 years later, I found myself drawing on my memory of those historical photos and his Pancho Villa stories as I was writing Head Games, investing fiction with the history the old soldier had, those decades before, denied me access to for the purposes of a perishable weekly newspaper story.

Toros & Torsos was informed by my own obsessive readings around the dark lives of the surrealists and a growing body of true-crime books, attempting to indict those artists in the brutal murder of Beth Short, the so-called Black Dahlia, on January 15, 1947. I found myself also writing in reaction to assertions/claims I’d picked up from interviews I had conducted with James Ellroy and John Gilmore (Severed), among others.

The seeds of conspiracy and doubt that inform Print the Legend probably have the deepest roots of any of the historical events or people centering the Hector Lassiter novels I have composed.

As a student, when I first heard an English instructor’s account of Hemingway’s death and the fact that he was alone with his fourth wife on the morning of his passing--a marriage that retained little, if any love--I wondered a bit whether the case for suicide was truly open-and-shut. When I read that Mary Hemingway (shown with her husband, below) had hidden in plain sight the keys to a storeroom where all Hem’s firearms were locked away from the self-destructive writer, I saw more dark story possibility there. Mary’s remark in defense of her actions--“Nobody has a right to deny a man access to his possessions”--struck me as beyond the pale.

I thought someday I’d write a story or a novel around the notion that Mary might have had a more direct hand in her husband’s death than anybody realized. It was just one of those things I’d get to.

Man proposes; God disposes. Lots of plans get made; many projects are contemplated. Time passes. But this thing with Hemingway and his death kept getting pushed back at me.

In the mid-1980s, a local racetrack’s promotion brought Hemingway interviewer George Plimpton through my little corner of Ohio. He was one of several notables slated to race in a celebrity event. All the local journalists went after the other celebrities (Oleg Cassini was quite the draw). I had Plimpton to myself. We spent the time talking about Hemingway, about the just-released posthumous Hemingway novel, The Garden of Eden, and about Mary Hemingway and her dubious handling of Hem’s unfinished works.

Unwittingly, Plimpton left fingerprints all over Print the Legend.

About the time I was busily engaged in doing a final revision of Print the Legend--back when it was still entitled Papa’s Last Wife--I had the opportunity to interview Valerie Hemingway, the author’s onetime secretary.

Valerie had just published her own memoir, Running with the Bulls. As a young Irish journalist, she’d found herself pulled into Hemingway’s orbit as he made a last, tumultuous run through Spain in pursuit of bullfighting materials that would eventually become his posthumous non-fiction work, The Dangerous Summer. Following Hemingway’s death, Valerie fleetingly became a kind of assistant to Mary and traveled to Cuba with the widow in order to gather Hem’s manuscripts there. Eventually, Valerie married Hem’s third and youngest son, Gregory.

From Valerie, I received a bit more insight into Mary Hemingway, and I derived a very different view of Ernest Hemingway’s last years--a profoundly different sense of the arc of his physical and psychological decline--than I’d gotten from a bookcase of biographies collected over a period of two decades or more. Received history.

In Print the Legend, I incorporate a quote from Longfellow: “If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man’s life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.”

Hemingway, a journalist turned novelist, and a modernist who in some ways pioneered the art of blurring fact and fiction, had his own, prefatory take on historical reality and its slippery nexus with fiction. Hem cautioned: “If the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as fiction. But there is always the chance that such a book of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact.”

Perhaps Print the Legend can do that same thing.

READ MORE: “The Man Behind the Legend,” part I and part II, by Jen Forbus (Jen’s Book Thoughts); “Monday Interview: Craig McDonald,” by John Kenyon (Things I’d Rather Be Doing); “Tuesdays with Tyrus--Guest: Craig McDonald” (Tyrus’ Podcast).

Running with the Bulls

It’s good to be Craig McDonald. The Columbus, Ohio-based journalist came on strong in 2007 with his debut novel, Head Games, which introduced the world to Hector Lassiter. Lassiter, a pulp writer and member of the Lost Generation, counts Ernest “Hem” Hemingway and Orson Welles among his best friends and “lives what he writes and writes what he lives.” Far from being merely a creature of wishful thinking on the author’s part, Lassiter is a terrific lens through which readers can watch history unfold in the troubled 20th century. Head Games is nothing if not bold.

If palling around with the biggest author and biggest filmmaker of the 1900s isn’t bold enough, McDonald includes a tryst with Marlene Dietrich and features Senator Prescott Bush as an unseen villain. The result is a cross-country chase that includes one of America’s most powerful political families, aging Mexican revolutionaries, the FBI, and a bunch of inept frat boys from Yale’s elite Skull and Bones society.

Not content with that, McDonald puts “Hem” front and center in his brand-new follow-up novel, Toros & Torsos, which opens with a string of grisly murders ahead of the killer hurricane that struck the Florida Keys in 1935. As Bleak House releases Toros, McDonald has already racked up Edgar, Anthony, Crimespree, and Gumshoe award nominations for Head Games.

Shortly after McDonald returned home from this year’s Bouchercon convention in Baltimore, I spoke with him about the creation of his protagonist, his interest in Ernest Hemingway, his move from Bleak House books to St. Martin’s Minotaur/Thomas Dunne, and whether Marilyn Monroe might follow Dietrich into Hector Lassiter’s bed.

Jim Winter: You were nominated for an Edgar and an Anthony this year. You have to be floating to have made that kind of splash.

Craig McDonald: It’s the kind of thing you can’t think about or plan for. It’s also particularly wonderful to have nominations for those two awards, as the Edgar judges are fellow authors and the Anthonys are, at base, reader-chosen awards. Head Games was also a finalist for the Crimespree and Gumshoe awards and made several year’s-best lists, so it was a dizzying, gratifying reception for a fairly unusual debut novel. I’m still bowled over by it all.

JW: Hector Lassiter seems to be very much in the mold of James M. Cain and Jim Thompson. He even arrives on the scene bearing the all-too-common disdain for Mickey Spillane.

CM: Part of that is just depicting a writer’s natural competitiveness regarding sales figures and public standing; and in that sense, Spillane was kind of the Dan Brown of his day. It’s also emerging from book to book that Hector was one of those writers in Paris in the 1920s and had serious literary ambitions. The third novel (set largely in 1965) will give you more of a sense of Hector’s real literary range and standing as the 1960s are getting on.

JW: How much of Hector is you? And how much is Hector more a product of his times?

CM: I’m going to come clean here for the first time. Usually I say Hector is an amalgam of people like Hemingway, Jonathan Latimer, Cornell Woolrich, and the like, and that’s true to a degree. But there was a particular writer I had in mind. I wasn’t going to point to him as the real inspiration for Hector while he remained alive. All too sadly, I can now confess. Ken Bruen, who read Head Games very early, got it. Craig Holden [Matala, The Jazz Bird] was the other one. Craig wrote me a short note that said, “Hah! Lassiter is James Crumley.” Craig Holden is right. I even gave Hector the same number of wives. Mr. Crumley also very kindly blurbed Head Games, and I still wonder if he maybe tumbled to his inspiration for the character as he read the novel.

That said, in Toros, the Lassiter character is moving much more my way; and in the Hollywood section of Toros, Hector is, for the only time in the series, really about my age and the distance between us is pretty narrow there. But Hector is a 20th-century man, and a veteran, with all that implies.

JW: Some would say bedding Marlene Dietrich would be fanboy fantasy, yet you make the interplay between your protagonist and Dietrich very believable.

CM: Thanks so much, Jim. She’s an interesting woman to write. Marlene approached love and sex in the manner of the men of the time. She wasn’t one for love affairs and wasn’t possessive or one to be possessed. She was a kind of force of nature and very tight with Orson Welles, with Hemingway, and with several other writers of the time. She and Hector would have been inevitable, on many levels.

JW: Some would say George W. Bush’s cameo in Head Games cuts him more slack than usual. Was there a reason for that, or did the story dictate using him as a reluctant player in the game?

CM: Actually, I’ve taken heat from both directions: those who say I was too hard on him, and those who say I didn’t go nearly far enough. For me, Head Games is now nearly four years old and a lot has obviously happened in those years.

But the fact is, I’m writing George W. in period, and writing him as we all are when we’re young and in college (and in his case, coming of age during the 1960s). I was also depicting him as a guy with some real deep and grudge-bearing father issues. My inclination was to go for the character study over the political commentary or subtext, because at the end of the day, I’m writing a novel, not trying to score political points, though I can think of a few crime and mystery writers who would likely disagree with me about those aims.

JW: Do you plan to see Oliver Stone’s movie W?

CM: Nah. Stone’s Kennedy movie left me with enough disquiet about his approach to historical figures and materials [that I decided] to give his Nixon movie, his Castro movie, and this one a wide pass. I’m sitting here now and trying to remember the last decent Oliver Stone movie …

JW: Turning to Hemingway, he is probably your most fully realized character outside of Hector.

CM: Hem’s one of the two or three key figures in Hector’s life. Their relationship to one another, and their respective approaches to writing and the writer’s life, is a major component of this seven-novel-cycle that is the Hector Lassiter series. All seven books are complete and I have the rare luxury of being able to tweak and tie them together to form a bigger, tightly integrated work so I know exactly how Hem fits into that bigger plan. In essence, we’ll eventually get the whole span of their creative lives. One of the novels (the one I originally envisioned being the third to appear, but which will now appear later), is set in one week in Paris in 1924 and we see Hector and Hem as young, unknown writers.

JW: How long have you been interested in Hemingway?

CM: Since my teens, really. I’ve read it all … too much, probably--all the novels and short stories, many times. The posthumous stuff, the letters, the journalism. And I have, literally, a bookcase of stuff on Hem ranging from biographies to memoirs to deep-think scholarly studies. I’m steeped in Hemingway to a level that might well be unhealthy.

JW: I was particularly impressed with how you showed Hemingway in his decline, how he had trouble living up to his own image of himself.

CM: Edmund Wilson said Hemingway was his own worst-invented character, but it goes deeper, for me. As I have a character in Toros say, and I believe this, Hem could only write what he could live or do himself, and as the distance between his fiction and his failing health deepened and widened, he was destroyed by his own self-forged public image. Hem is for many writers what Elvis [Presley] is for musicians: the goal, the tragedy … the great cautionary example.

JW: I notice the follow-up to Toros & Torsos focuses on Hemingway’s death. Was it your original intent to write a sequel about Hemingway?

CM: Print the Legend (coming fall 2009) will really explore those last crazy days of Hem’s, and the FBI’s role in his self-destruction. As I said, I wrote seven novels and Hem figures as an on-the-page character in three of them. He casts a long shadow across the first, Head Games. Originally, I had a planned sequence for these novels in terms of publication order. But my new editor, John Schoenfelder, read all seven novels and wanted to reboot the series at Thomas Dunne with what I regarded as the sixth and seventh novels. So I went with his proposition, and those will now be books numbers three and four to be printed. As John reminded me, time is used in a very unusual way in the Lassiter series, so I don’t need to be slavish to chronology. Originally, Print the Legend would have been book number six, but as it comes right off the closing lines of Toros, it’s going to look planned and inevitable in terms of this now being the third installment.

JW: Toros begins during the run-up and aftermath to the 1935 killer hurricane in the Florida Keys. It might interest you to know I started reading that book the weekend Hurricane Ike reached Ohio.

CM: I was actually working on some promotional things involving Toros and the Great Keys Hurricane when our Midwestern state was struck by Ike. That hard, sustained, hours-long wind was about what I imagined for Toros. Then I went outside and looked at all the roofs stripped of shingles … the broken trees and houses stripped of siding. A Gulf Coast hurricane laying waste to Ohio? It was like another sign of the apocalypse.

JW: And how long did you go without power?

CM: A little over a day. But parts of Columbus went more than a week without power. Then there were water shortages because the water-storage tanks were depleted and took a while to refill because of electrically driven pumps that power them.

JW: Orson Welles also plays a big role in your fiction. Did you find that his voice came naturally, given his larger-than-life persona?

CM: He’s the filmmaker equivalent of Hemingway for me. I know his stuff, backward and forward, and there are many, many interviews with him available to explore and help get at that voice and attitude. He’s comparatively easy for me to catch, I suppose for that reason. For Hem’s voice, I went back to his letters, which are informal and frank and very conversational--a world apart from Hem’s fiction-writing voice.

JW: Did you see the film RKO 281, with Liev Schreiber playing Orson Welles? If so, what did you think?

CM: Afraid I haven’t seen RKO 281. I’m going to have to look it up. The other piece I’d love to see, but haven’t gotten access to yet, is a short film (Five Minutes, Mr. Welles) that Vincent D’Onofrio put together in which he plays Orson Welles prepping to do his famous scene with Joseph Cotten on the Prater Park Ferris Wheel in The Third Man. The story goes [that] Vincent did it to vindicate his own acting skills, because D’Onofrio was upset that after being cast as Welles in the movie Ed Wood, his voice was dubbed by Maurice LaMarche, the guy who voiced the Brain on the [TV cartoon series] Pinky and the Brain.

JW: Getting back to the magnetic Marlene Dietrich, she appears to be the final piece in this trinity in Hector Lassiter’s life: Dietrich, Hemingway, and Welles.

CM: They were a trinity in real life, and they were all iconic; so, yes, there is a tight link there. That said, Orson’s pretty much out of the series after Toros & Torsos.

JW: Any chance that Hector might come across, say, Marilyn Monroe? (OK, I admit: that’s more the interviewer’s fantasy.)

CM: In Head Games, there’s an article written about Hector by his young poet-interviewer, Bud Fiske, that mentions Hector having been spotted with Marilyn on his arm, once, but no, I won’t be doing more with that. The seven books are all in my rear-view mirror, and while there may be tweaks in editing, I know what happens, and when, and there’s a real concentration of stuff in this series that tends to eat up the 1950s and most of the 1960s, taking us well past [Monroe’s] death. Hector just wouldn’t have had time, or he’d have been married. When he’s single, Hector’s quite the lady’s man; but when he’s married, even badly, Hector is still faithful. So I don’t think he and Marilyn happened, or would have--he tends toward strong, self-possessed women.

JW: What about other writers? I’d be curious to see how Hector reacts to Raymond Chandler or William Faulkner. Or perhaps even Ross Macdonald.

CM: Hector was introduced in a short story called “The Last Interview” where he gives short, sharp impressions of [Dashiell] Hammett, Chandler, Woolrich, and [Agatha] Christie, among others. That said, other volumes will give us in-person glimpses of Gertrude Stein, Ford Maddox Ford, Lester Dent, and a young Rod Serling, among others. We also will meet the key woman in Hector’s life, another crime novelist more in the Craig Rice-mold, who really made Hector the kind of writer he is.

Hector, like me, would have found Faulkner unreadable. I truly believe there are two camps: Camp Hemingway, and Camp Faulkner.

The Great Connector

Fiction writer and editor Craig McDonald consents to a grilling by John Kenyon of the Things I’d Rather Be Doing blog, in which he talks primarily about his latest book, Art in the Blood, a collection of interviews with such notable wordsmiths as Ken Bruen, Karen Slaughter, Peter Lovesey, James Ellroy, Steve Hamilton, and others. However, their exchange also plumbs McDonald’s thoughtful opinions on the state of modern crime writing--his own, and that of others. Read the whole piece here.