7 Questions: Ed Lynskey

Interview by David Cranmer

Tell us about your new Appalachian noir, Lake Charles?

Set in the Great Smoky Mountains during the 1970s, Lake Charles is narrated by Brendan Fishback, a pressman in his early 20s. His story is a coming of age one in several ways. He self-detoxes from his pot habit. He is curious to find out about his dad gone since his birth. He scrambles to beat a homicide rap pinned on him for his dead girlfriend Ashleigh. Events turn darker on his bass fishing trip taken up to Lake Charles, a TVA-constructed reservoir. His twin sister Edna and his best pal Cobb accompany Brendan. She and Cobb, their marriage on the rocks, argue before she tears off and vanishes into the boonies. Brendan now has to deal with both Ashleigh's murder and Edna's strange disappearance. Thus the stage is set for the next acts.

At the same time, the introverted Brendan experiences vivid dreams, even during the daytime hours. He's quick to blame them on the symptons to his pot withdrawal. The late Ashleigh speaks to him, striking a deal whereby she'll help him expose her true killer and get him off the hook if he'll do her bidding in the corporeal world. The noirish slant comes in from Ashleigh's spirit manipulating Brendan with her deceit and half-truths. She's a rich girl, and he understands the corrupt, jaded nature of the affluent. He wise to her ways, but he also feels trapped by her until he can win back his good name and get on with his young life.


Is LAKE CHARLES a departure of sorts for you?

Right, LAKE CHARLES is my first standalone novel after the five titles published in the P.I. Frank Johnson mystery series. For some reason. I'm drawn to mountainous settings like the West Virginia ridges in THE BLUE CHEER. Anyway, LAKE CHARLES takes place in the Great Smoky Mountains. Reviewers have said it moves fast and can be read in a single setting. That must be a positive since they rated it five stars. I know it sure went through a long, rigorous process to see print. Eight years and three fried PCs to be exact. The late George W. Scithers, first editor at Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, was the final editor to suggest changes to LAKE CHARLES. I tossed out the various paper drafts (fire hazard), so I don't know how many rounds of edits I knocked out. I can recall once huddled up at our public library to log in some work after a thunder storm zapped a neighborhood transformer. Libraries can be noisy places. (That's not a bad thing. Readers are our life force.) LAKE CHARLES was a deliberate stab to just spin a gritty, pedal-to-the-metal tale like the stylish, literate Gold Medal PBOs, say, written by Charles Williams, Gil Brewer, or John D. MacDonald. One of Ed Lacy's books suggested the dream sequence thread that I used. The nasty pressman's strike (scabs v. union) was based on a real occurrence. So, all told, LAKE CHARLES was like a breath of fresh air for me.


Will Frank Johnson be returning with your next novel or are you planning another standalone?

One book, THE ZINC ZOO, in the series is slated to appear later this year. I turned in next year's title, AFTER THE BIG NOISE. Beyond those two installments, I'm unsure right now if I'll go on with the series. I still like hanging out with Frank, and I believe there are enough studs to nail up the future stories. Other top-notch private eye series like Sue Grafton's alphabet titles and Bill Pronzini's Nameless Detective books have enjoyed long runs, and still appear to be going strong. I know I'm enjoying the recent titles. To go on will hinge on energy and, of course, if there's any reader interest. As far as the stand alones are concerned, I've completed several books needing various levels of editing to complete for presentation. My hope is that Lake Charles does well enough in this down economy to pave the way for the next books to appear.


What is a typical writing day like for you?

Right now, my days outside of my freelance work are spent pretty much spent plugging and pimping my two current books. Quiet Anchorage, a small town cozy mystery, is out in paper and e-book. That title is slanted to appeal to a different readership than the noirish Lake Charles due out in June (but up for pre-sales at 33% off on Amazon and B&N). Why write the soft-boiled and hard-boiled type of products? Short answer: to sell more books to a wider base of customers. For me, it's also a change of pace to stay fresh. I like to test out different things. For instance, I've done a weblog (63 entries) on Goodreads. We'll see where that goes. Something that puzzles me is why other writers out of the blue pitch me their books, say, on Facebook. I must get a half-dozen of those everyday. While I can appreciate their efforts and try to be supportive as I can, it seems to me you should be promoting your books on cold calls to readers, not writers. I mean are you anymore interested in buying my book than I should be in buying yours? Probably not. On balance, though, I enjoy my day.


What was the spark for writing?

I like being a one-man band. For my novels, the delight of spinning a story, whether dark or light, is to entertain readers whom I don't know and never will. The profound satisfaction stems from the validation by others (the readers, critics, peers) that I've turned out a quality product. I've had the good fortune to work with some great pros. Allan Guthrie and the late George H. Scithers were my editors. The late James Crumley blurbed PELHAM FELL HERE's front cover.


How do family and friends support your career?

My wife is always my beta reader. My mom and sisters, the big readers in my family, read my books. My in-laws do the same thing. My old high school friend helped me out on some of the technical stuff in my writing THE BLUE CHEER. My dad likes to buy my books, and his wife reads them. I guess that's enough support because it's working out okay, at least up to this point.


Away from writing, what preoccupies Ed Lynskey’s time?

Writing (my own and paid freelance) and the attendant activities also known as pimping burn most of my time. I do have a life away from the keyboard. Rain or shine, I force myself to take daily 2-mile walks. Otherwise I'll stack on weight and build up vile things in my veins. We're avid National fans and train downtown to catch a few home games during the summer. Reading is fun. I don't use an e-reader. Staring at a screen again after all day at the laptop doesn't appeal to me.

News from the GUTTER

Out of the Gutter 7, the "U.S. vs. U.K. Issue," is finished and printed and will ship right away when you place your order. And don't forget, the more you order the cheaper the per-book shipping, so if there are any issues missing from your Out of the Gutter collection, fill them in now. When the present print runs are sold out we will be switching to the POD model, and collectors who want the original punk zine feel will be out of luck! Learn more about Issue 7 and other issues by going here.

All kinds of news on the Gutter Books front! Dig our new web site, our new covers delivered by the graphic design geniuses at Outland Grafix, and the announcement of three new titles coming this year!

We get to the very essence of pulp publishing with The Flying Saucers are Real, the world's first book-length treatise on the UFO phenomenon, published by Gold Medal Books in 1950. If you want to take a break from gangsters, violent retribution and hardboiled prose, take a journey into the unexplained with Marine aviator Donald Keyhoe, the foremost expert on UFOs during the 1950s and '60s.

If you enjoy federal inmate Seth "Soul Man" Ferranti's gritty articles that appear in every issue of Out of the Gutter, you will want to reserve your copy of Notes from the American Gulag, which features Seth's most outstanding work from Gutter and other publications, all selected and edited by Gutter editor, Matthew Louis.

First time novelist Sean Dennison breaks through this October with Deadlock. Ever wonder what would happen if an amateur MMA fighter was pitted against a psycho cop in a no-holds-barred fight to the death on the city streets? If so, you're about to find out. When John Reed finds himself the only witness to an act of unspeakable brutality by Sergeant Vincent Fallon, Reed learns what it really means to be on the wrong side of the law.

And, of course, available for order right now are Dodging Bullets, The Baddest of the Bad and On The Make. And don't forget the fashionably late March arrival of The Wrong Man, the hard-as-nails regular guy revenge tale from William Ingsley that Tony Black describes as "A first-rate, fly-through-the-pages freakshow."

Check it all out by visiting http://www.gutterbooks.com/.

Thanks for reading, and thanks as always for your interest and support!

7 Questions: Fred Zackel

Interview by David Cranmer

What is a typical writing day like for Fred Zackel?

Writing is self-indulgent, and I try never to forget that. After thirty-odd years of writing, I write for myself, not for New York or Hollywood or magazines or anthologies. I have no idea what they want and I cannot write to their expectations. But I write all the time every day. I am OCD about it. I compose by hand, so I am always taking notes. And if the moment allows me, I keep writing until I have to eat lunch or teach or take out the trash. If I wake up at 4 am with an odd but interesting dream, I'll sit in the dim-lit living room and write until the story is done or until I run out of ideas or new ways to develop them. I carry a small notebook around. At the gym, I carry paper and pen ... and later trying to figure out what I wrote with sweaty trembling hands on wrinkled paper. "Molasses and Murder? What the hell is that?" If I get an idea while driving, I'll ask my wife to write it down for me. Later each day I collate what I have garnered and input it into the computer. I usually spend an hour daily at that. But I will stay at the computer until I run out of new developing ideas or a favorite TV show comes on or it's time to go to bed. As they pop out and onto the screen, the various ideas get parceled out into whatever story file they most likely belong. Ninety minutes of every morning is for editing or composing, whichever strikes my fancy, and then an hour around suppertime is set aside for inputting. Since I always have four or five writing projects unfinished at any given time, I write about whichever project grabs my attention. With juggling that many unfinished projects, I never sweat Writers Block. And since I don't give a s--- about my writing career anymore, I just write compulsively about whatever I want. Lots of freedom, once you abandon the concept of a writing career. But what vindicates this self-indulgent behavior of mine, sooner or later everything I write gets accepted somewhere.


Who are your primary influences on writing?

Although I was too young to ever meet her, the science fiction writer Andre Norton was the librarian at my local (the Nottingham) branch of the Cleveland Public Library, so she was a role model in so many ways. Through her books, I fell in love with reading. With genre and Adventure. When she became a full time writer, she moved to Florida, where it's so much warmer than Cleveland. As a teenager, I fell in love with writing first through Lawrence Durrell's Alexandrian Quartet. I must have read the novels a half-dozen times in all. I never wrote like Durrell at all, but geez the poetry and the lyricism and the sensuality are enviable.

In mystery I learned most from Ross Macdonald, first through reading and then by asking specific questions. He was a very generous man. Then, over time and repeated readings, I learned minimalism from Hammett and then I learned attitude from Chandler. James Cain taught me about dirty sex and postmen. Elmore Leonard taught me visual shortcuts in form and structure a writer can take that work wonders in a manuscript. Thanks to teaching lit in college classrooms, I re-discovered as a writer, instead of just a reader, the joys of the classics. Once a year I re-read Shakespeare's Othello just to be awed by a master craftsman. He can turn on a dime from comedy to horror within a sentence. Voltaire's Candide is the most ruefully funny novella ever. Read that at least once every year for the proper attitude toward life and the Big Picture. Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol is the most under-rated novella in English. Of Mice and Men is a perfect thriller. Marcus Aurelius' Meditations is the wisest book ever written; it teaches you how to deal with Daily Assholes. C.F. Cavafy's poems were a huge influence on how I write character. (Both of those last two books are still bedside, close at hand.) Albert Camus' Notebooks gave me a strategy I use daily about how to gather my thoughts in one place. Giovanni Boccaccio, who wrote The Decameron in 1353, a collection of one hundred novellas, still teaches me to write any goddamn genre I want.

I have to include Thomas Pynchon, Jimmy Buffett's early songs, Rod Stewart's early songs, and a lot of Motown, just for How to View Life in General. Novelist Joe Kanon was my editor when I was first published. He knows the forest and the trees, and I am still learning how to look at what to leave in and what to leave out. I am flat-out in awe of Loren Estleman, his drive, his vision and his oeuvre. Compulsively I also read Robert Crais, Michael Connelly, Ken Bruen, Andrea Camilleri, Philip Kerr. I love Megan Abbott's voice, and I think I have read all of Sue Grafton. She cares more about structure than most writers give her credit for. Two new guys, Michael Koryta and Declan Hughes, impress the hell out of me. Koryta, who writes about Cleveland but who is moving towards the supernatural which I think is the future, and Hughes, who writes like an Irish Ross Macdonald and makes me think of each character's family history and psychology. A third, Dave Zeltserman, has influenced me, too, with his skill and his drive. A fine writer of the hard-boiled, yes, but he also works twice as hard as any other writer and is incredibly determined. But then his last name begins with a Z. So he has to try harder. You think I'm joking? Readers go into a bookstore and they rarely get past the C's. Think: Agatha Christie, Joseph Conrad, Bob Crais, James Cain, Ray Chandler, Bill Crider, Al Camus, Harlan Coben, Mike Connelly, Dave Cranmer, John Connolly, Lee Child, Reed Coleman, Leslie Chateris, Peter Corris ... oh, you know I could go on. If you are a Z, forget about readers noticing you. They never get past the C's. But Dave will succeed brilliantly and deservedly. After he changes his name to Dave Celtserman. How do you make a smiley face emoticon?


Aside from the writing, what did you admire about Ross Macdonald?

As soon as I saw this, I knew this question would be the hardest to put into words. Nobody outside of family ever treated me nicer or gave me such hope. First off, he had me call him Ken, which in light of who each of us was still amazes me. You see, he was the Literary Lion of Santa Barbara. There was no one greater in those days. He had two dozen novels under his belt, had that huge feature article about him in Time magazine, he had a PhD from U of Michigan, Eudora Welty praising him the New York Times, two big movie studio feature length movies starring Paul Newman, all that talk about a TV series. Me? I was a kid driving taxicab at night in San Francisco. I worked for a Chinese cab company operating out of a unmarked garage at the edge of Chinatown; my bosses were refugees from Mainland China; they were both the owners and the mechanics. I drove a fifty buck canary yellow ex-taxicab too old and too beat to be a cab anymore. Another thing ... He was always Ken Millar to me. He wrote letters and signed them Ken. He wasn't Ross Macdonald. He was Ken. The first image I remember reading your question was ... how he walked alongside me. And I know how stoopid that sounds. When I was with him, we walked a lot, usually with a handful of dogs trying to run between our feet and topple us. I don't recall him ever using a leash on any of them. He truly loved dogs. His house was geared for the thundering paws of big dogs playing rough. We walked sidewalks and boardwalks and dusty creek beds and ... and ... I knew I didn't deserve that heartfelt warmth and generosity and friendship and patience, but he gave it to me without reservation. Two very public places where I met up with Ross Macdonald was the Santa Barbara Writers Conference two summers in a row back in the mid-1970s. The second time I was there, a woman showed me a photograph from the previous summer, with Ken Millar and I walking together under the palms in Santa Barbara, lost in talking together. We looked like two college math professors debating a math problem. An odd picture in so many ways. And I saw the woman's photograph of the two of us and I clicked on Ken walking alongside of me. He listened to me and talked to me and argued with me and advised me and ... We even swapped gossip about who was sleeping with whom at the conference ... and worse. At every opportunity he was kind and he was generous and nobody outside of my family has ever been that encouraging to me. I still have and read his letters; how he encouraged me, geez. Like nobody else has. There is other stuff, too, from him that my kids will get when I'm gone. Anyway, that woman got my address and said she'd send me the photo. I waited and waited. I asked around about her and the photo, but I never heard again from her. I never saw the picture again. About thirty-five years ago now. I would dearly love to have that photograph.


Did you ever get the sense that Mr. Macdonald recognized his importance alongside Hammett and Chandler as one of the leading architects of the hardboiled school of writing?

I can't answer your question. I know he thought Hammett was the absolute best. Hammett we talked about. He also talked about some writers (at that time) who were writing near or at that level. Writing at that level, to Macdonald, was the greatest goal in our field.


Your poem, "Squish, You Babe," featured at BEAT to a PULP, was disturbingly unique. How long have you been writing poetry?

The poem came easily. On a rainy day I saw pink worms crawling across white concrete. A little later I saw a bunch of little kids in red rubber boots stomping in rain puddles, while their mother despaired. Combined, a nice pair of images, but not noir-y enough for what I wanted to write. But the polar opposite was a huge powerful man stomping on little pink worms in the rain. Why would a huge powerful man act like that? Well, he's feeling powerless and frustrated. Why? Because of a woman, of course. But where would a huge powerful man be so powerless and frustrated? Once I saw the prison, all the rest was detailing work, like using cotton swabs around the dashboard of your car.


What are your thoughts on eBooks?

Today I just happened to notice that in 48 hours it will have been one year exactly since I put my first manuscript up on Kindle. Maybe a celebration is in order. That book MURDER IN WAIKIKI is my biggest seller, and this month my wife and I are both surprised by how briskly (for us) it is selling. I don't market much (and always quit early at it) because I always feel, well, inept at it, like a giraffe pretending to be a ballerina. Nor do I feel I have to sell any writer, either, on the benefits accruing her if she puts her work up on Kindle. Stuff that's out-of-print, stuff your agent couldn't sell in the marketplace because another type of story was selling, stuff your agent had little faith in ... why, that's what Kindle is about. You get to be your own publishing house. New York turned down MURDER IN WAIKIKI three times. That's the reason why my first short story collection TIGHT FIT IN A LONG COLD BOX is freshly available at Kindle, smashwords and the Nook. So fresh, it doesn’t yet have a cover.


What is next for Fred Zackel?

An old Irish saying is that there are more great Irish novels spilled out on the floors of saloons than have ever appear in print. So you will forgive me if I skip over what's not yet completed. (Although I have a half-dozen short stories half-done, and a couple novels I have started, and ...) But there is a new novel, yes, it is completed, and it is in final edit. Soon it goes back to New York. Or Kindle.