Read PART ONE here
Order PENANCE here
Order OLD SCHOOL here
In case you didn't remember, this week is launch week for Dan O'Shea's debut novel PENANCE. You might have missed my review, but I may or may not have called it epic, ambitious, complex, humble and understated all in the same sentence. I try not to say stuff like that unless I really mean it and Dan's novel didn't leave me any other alternative.
So in the later part of this interview, Dan and I talk about his other publication OLD SCHOOL, his frequent use of mortality as a theme in his fiction, writing, Clint Eastwood, Lee Marvin and his long path to publication. Hope you enjoyed it, don't hesitate to pull the trigger if you see PENANCE in your friendly neighborhood bookstore. You can drop by and thank me after you read it!
In OLD SCHOOL, you openly tackled the issue of old age and discuss death as a part of life, rather than the ultimate punishment, like most crime fiction does. To a certain extent, PENANCE embraces this vision too. What is it about growing old that fascinates you? Why do you think it meshes so well with your blend of crime fiction?
Mortality is the engine of life. If it weren’t for the yawning maw of the grave, none of the rest of it would mean anything. There’d always be more time, another chance, no real possibility of loss. But that’s not how it works. We are all on a short clock, we just don’t know how short.
In most crime fiction, the only deaths are those that result from crimes. But death is all around us, all the time. That makes murder more heinous – to accelerate that final loss.
I don’t know if it’s my age, that might be part of it. But I’ve always had a weakness for the elegiac. Whatever you want to call the genre, whether it’s hardboiled, crime fiction, noir, whatever, without the context of mortality, then all the violence is just mindless brutality, more violence porn.
What are the issues you think are plaguing art in this day and age, namely narrative arts like novels, movies and television series. Do you think your fiction addresses any of these?
Ah hell, now you’re asking questions above my pay grade. I wish people read more, or really that more people read. I think that television has supplanted movies as where the best video narrative art is being made these days. When I was a young man, you had movies like TAXI DRIVER and MIDNIGHT COWBOY and A CLOCKWORK ORANGE. You went to the movies for serious, thoughtful narrative art. You watched TV to see Fonzie jump his motorcycle over the shark tank. The movies were for grownups, TV was for dumbass kids. Now the studios are tripping over themselves to release the next G.I Joe film or the next Transformers film or some piece of shit based on a video game. And TV is giving us THE WIRE and JUSTIFIED and THE WALKING DEAD.
Don’t know what if anything that means. And Jesus, I’m just a schmuck publishing his first novel. I’m not trying to address any great deficit in popular culture. I’m just trying to write a decent story.
Dead End Follies has been (and still is) critical of the writing advice market. What are your opinions about it? Did you use any to help you write to publication?
Not unless you mean Strunk & White.
All the necessary writing advice there is everybody already knows. Read a lot. Write a lot. Other than that, you’re pretty much on your own. It’s an esoteric process. What works for you is what works for you.
You catch nuggets here and there that are useful. Be suspicious of adverbs. Don’t get carried away with dialog attribution. Stuff like that.
Over the years I’ve had people give me a few writing advice books as gifts. Probably my fault. I’d talk about writing fiction and never wrote any, so they probably figured I didn’t know how when the real problem was I just wasn’t making the time. The only one of those books I thought was worth a shit was ON WRITING by Stephen King, and it wasn’t really advice, more of a memoir along with some reflections on his process. He wasn’t selling anything (and certainly doesn’t have to).
Even back when I hadn’t gotten serious about fiction writing, when I was freelancing, just doing the tax and finance stuff, there was all this advice rolling around about how to make that work. But everything important I remember learning I learned on my own. I remember one of my former in-laws giving this book they’d picked up at a garage sale – HOW TO MAKE 25 000$ A YEAR WRITING. I just smiled and said thank you. Didn’t have the heart to tell them I was making four times that.
Mandatory manly question. Clint Eastwood or Lee Marvin? And why?
Lee Marvin. Because Clint Eastwood has never had a Crime Factory anthology named after him. I wasn’t even man enough to contribute to that one. Cam Ashley asked me to. Liam Jose even made a trip to Chicago to beg me in person. But I knew I was unworthy.
Anybody you wish to thank for making PENANCE happen?
My agent, Stacia Decker. When I finally got off my ass and wrote a novel, I knew exactly fuck-all about the writing business. I wasn’t online, didn’t know anybody, had no idea whether getting published was even realistic. Here’s how informed I was. When I was happy with the draft, I Googled “I wrote a novel, now what do I do?” Google said “Get and agent.” So I Googled “How do I get an agent?” Anyway, I ended up signing with Stacia pretty quickly and am damn glad I did. I know there’s this whole self-publishing world out there and all this talk about traditional publishing dying, people going on how agents and publishers are just evil gatekeepers trying to maintain some outdated order for their own benefit and yada yada yada. And I don’t know near enough to weigh in on all of that. All I know is she was the first person with a track record in publishing, whose opinion actually carried some demonstrable weight, who told me that my work was good enough. Then she helped me make it better. And then she spent three years selling it and found it a home. To date, the 15 percent she has to show for all that maybe covers the drinks she’s bought me at various Bouchercons. I know writing is a solitary business and we have to be self-motivated and all of that. But if I hadn’t had that early validation, that support, who knows? I might have said “OK, you wrote your damn novel, got that off your bucket list, now get on with your life.” Instead, I’ve got my first novel coming out, I’ve got three more under contract, and I’ve become part of this whole crime fiction community that Stacia pretty much dragged me into.
Look, compared to most of her client list, I’m small potatoes. Joelle Charbonneau’s already got a hell of a track record in her unique little not-quite-cozy corner of the mystery market and now she’s about to go thermonuclear in the YA world with her Testing trilogy. Frank Bill’s got a growing rep as the raw voice of America’s post-industrial underbelly. John Hornor Jacobs has a pile of well-deserved recognition in both horror and YA, and just wait until his Romans in the demon-infested American west stuff comes out. Chuck Wendig is the interweb’s favorite writing guru, his Miriam Black novels are hits and he’s got enough other irons in the fire to make Andrew Carnegie look like a piker. Adam Christopher is a rising sci-fi star. The buzz over Fiona Maazel’s WOKE UP LONELY just keeps building. Seth Harwood, Jon McGoran, the list goes on. I just hope I can keep up. That’s a hell of a peer group to be part of.
So you can say all the bad shit you want about agents. PENANCE would not be hitting the shelves if Stacia hadn’t helped make it happen. If that’s self-serving gate-keeping, I’ll take all of it I can get.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t give a shout out to Emlyn Rees, my editor and the head honcho at Exhibit A, along with the larger Angry Robot family. Given the state of the publishing world, it took some stones to say “You know what the world needs? Another crime fiction imprint. Oh, and you know who the second author we sign oughta be? This old fart in Chicago who nobody’s ever heard of.” As far as I can tell, the Exhibit A business model isn’t the usual timid follow-the-market mentality. It’s find books we love and push the hell out of them.
And my dad. Probably wouldn’t have ended up as a writer if I hadn’t been raised in a house where reading was cool and you couldn’t turn around without tripping over a book. I know regrets are a waste of time, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have them. The biggest regret I have over all the years I didn’t write is that my dad isn’t around to see my book come out. He would have got a thrill out of that.