All Due Respect Issue #2 (17 page)

CH:
Last year, you were gracious enough to blurb a debut novel called
The Cuckoo’s Calling
by a then-unheard-of author named Robert Galbraith, and as I recall, you were effusive in your praise. A few months after the book was released,
The Sunday Times
revealed that Robert Galbraith was none other than J.K. Rowling—a revelation that catapulted the book to instant bestseller status, and spawned a media frenzy. What’s it like to discover you blurbed a novel by the most successful novelist in history? Did you have any inkling while you were reading it that Galbraith was not who he appeared to be? Has lending your name to Galbraith’s work sparked interest from Rowling’s fans in your own?

OL:
Ha! I actually learned that Robert Galbraith was, in fact, J.K. Rowling from a tweet my agent showed me while we were at a banquet together. I didn’t think anything of it at first, and then it was all very surreal. I’d never read any of the Harry Potter books, so I really had no background knowledge of how J.K. Rowling writes, but I do remember being wowed by the language in the book, which struck me as particularly elegant and beautiful for a debut crime novelist. So I wasn’t entirely surprised to learn that the writer had written before, but I was pretty bowled over to learn the author’s true identity.

I’m not sure that my attachment to the book has had any tangible benefit on my own career, though I’m still holding out hope that Ms. Rowling will see fit to return the favor and blurb one of my own books someday. I don’t expect anything out of it, though; I’m happy enough to have a cool story to tell.

CH:
Who is Owen Matthews? What can you tell us about his forthcoming YA novel,
How To Win At High School
?

OL:
Owen Matthews is my Cinnamon Toast Crunch-eating, violent video game-playing alter ego, and
How to Win at High School
is his first novel. My agent describes it as Scarface meets Ferris Bueller in a high school, though it owes a lot stylistically to Don Winslow’s
Savages
.

I actually wrote the first draft of the book about ten years ago. It was the first novel I ever finished, and I imagined that it would bring me instant fame and fortune. It did not, and after a number of drafts, I decided to shelve the thing and focus on other projects. I always liked the idea, though, and about a year and a half ago I mentioned it to my agent, who liked it, too, and I found the file on my hard drive and dusted it off and did some major surgery and, lo and behold, it’s finally found a home. It’ll be out from Harper Children’s in early 2015, and in the meantime, I’m looking forward to channeling my inner wild child through Owen Matthews.

CH:
What’s next for Stevens and Windermere?

OL:
Stevens and Windermere have at least one more book in them, the aforementioned sex trafficking book. A sheriff’s deputy is murdered in the woods where Stevens is vacationing with his family, and the prime suspect is a beautiful, terrified young woman who doesn’t speak any English. As Stevens and Windermere dig deeper, they realize the woman is part of an international trafficking organization—and that her sister is still in the organization’s clutches.

I’m working on revisions to the book now, and it’ll be out in the spring of 2015. As soon as I’m finished, I’m going to start working on the fifth book in the series, which I’ve been wanting to write ever since
The Professionals
came out. It’s basically a return to the kidnappers in
The Professionals
, who have some unfinished business with the mobsters who they crossed in the first book. I loved the kidnappers like they were real people, so I’m really looking forward to revisiting them and seeing how their lives have unfolded, a few years after the dust settled the first time.

Dock Talk:
How I Came to Write “N.F.G”

By Owen Laukkanen

Fishermen love to talk.

I used to work on fishing boats. In university, I worked summers on my uncle’s prawn boat off the west coast of Vancouver Island. Later, when I decided to give up my steady, good-paying reporting gig to take a stab at writing crime fiction, I went back to sea to help keep the bills paid.

I come from a fishing family. My dad’s brother owned the prawn boat. My dad fishes for lobster in a boat of his own. I’ve fished with him, too, on the East Coast of Canada. I’ve debated buying my own boat, bearing down, pursuing my own career on the water. In my mind, fishing is a natural complement to life as a working writer.

It’s not just because fishing picks a writer up off his ass and drags him off of his couch and away from his laptop and out into the fresh air and sunlight for a while. It’s not just because the writer benefits from a couple hard, solid months of manual labor, or that fishing gives him long, mundane stretches in which to organize his thoughts, or that, at season’s end, the writer finds himself dropped off on the dock with a good-sized paycheck and a lot of free time to spend organizing those thoughts into his next novel. It’s all of those things, but that’s not the meat of it. The reason I love fishing, from a writer’s standpoint, is that fishermen love to talk. And they have a hell of a lot of good stories.

The story that appears in this issue, “N.F.G.,” was born out of dock talk. Mostly, it was born from my third summer on the water, a two-month prawn season I spent sharing forty-two feet of fishing boat with three other men—my uncle and Chad and Earl. The real life Chad was a cowboy from a little town on the coast. He talked about breaking horses and work in the oil patch, the monster truck he was building. Earl, though, was a fisherman through and through.

Earl was sixty-some years old, and nearly all of them spent on the water. He’d seen boom times and busts. He’d fished for prawns, salmon, halibut, herring, tuna. He’d fished dogfish for pennies a pound, spent long nights in leaky boats hundreds of miles out at sea. He’d cheated death in winter gales, and raised hell in every one of the little towns that dot the British Columbia coastline, and at the end of every workday, as we gathered in the wheelhouse, he’d tell us about it. So would my uncle. So would every other old salt who poked his head in the wheelhouse for a drink and a couple hours’ worth of bullshit.

I was a wide-eyed city boy. I was a greenhorn. I was a bookish, skinny kid with a head full of theories and no practical knowledge, or much of any knowledge whatsoever beyond the vague idea that I was going to be a writer, and damned if these grizzled veterans weren’t giving me a mother lode of material. Every night, I’d sit in that galley and listen to Earl hold forth over coffee and the odd slice of pie, and when the coffee pot was empty and the pie’d all been eaten, I’d duck down to my bunk and my ragged little notebook and scribble down as much of what he’d said as I could remember.

The Black Mamba. The ninety-seven dollar potato salad. The criminal who brought the ringer into the courtroom and walked. I copied down Earl’s stories and swore I would do something with them, someday.

The summer ended. I came ashore and wrote a novel about kidnappers and watched my writing career start to take hold. I put that notebook away and lost touch with the guys. Earl’s probably fishing, somewhere. Chad’s breaking horses deep in the oil patch. Even my uncle’s retired, and his little troller mostly does duty as a pleasure cruiser, now. I put that notebook away around the same time as I abandoned my fantasies of a career as a fisherman.

Writing “N.F.G.” brought me back, though. To that notebook, and with it, that cramped wheelhouse, Earl’s voice, the dim galley light and the creak of the boat as it swung on the anchor. To the stories, pages and pages and hours and hours of them, to the wide-eyed greenhorn who sat in his corner and listened with equal parts fascination and urgency, clinging to every detail and desperate to write it all down.

Stories are a kind of currency when you’re out on the water. There’s not much else to do but talk. You struggle with the gear and sweat the catch and live and die with each haul. You hurt and you stink and you don’t sleep and when you do sleep, you dream about fish. You tell your loved ones your stories from a payphone at the end of a dock, but the connection is bad and anyway, they don’t get it, and at the end of the season you walk away with a paycheck and a notebook full of half-remembered tall tales.

And if you have any sense, you’ll keep that notebook close to you, even after the money’s gone. You’re going to want to remember those stories, someday.

Reviews

The Gutter and the Grave
by Ed McBain

A Hard Case Crime novel
reviewed by David Bishop

I’ve long been a McBain fan (I’m currently working my way through his 87th precinct series, in order), but I hadn’t realised how much he’d published early on under pen names. When it first came out in 1958,
Gutter
was originally titled
I’m Cannon—For Hire
, and authored by “Curt Cannon.” This also meant that McBain’s protagonist had his name changed to match that of the author, but thankfully the more recent Hard Case reprint goes with McBain’s original (and preferred) choice of Matt Cordell.

Cordell is a drunk, which we know right from the beginning because he tells us. He’s spending a quiet afternoon with a bottle, on a bench close to the Cooper Union in Lower Manhattan (a college that McBain attended), when an old friend finds him and asks for help. Reluctantly, Cordell accompanies him back to his tailor’s shop, where they find the body of his business partner—at which point, it all kicks off.

When his friend is arrested, Cordell agrees to try and find the murderer, returning again to the life of a private eye, which ended when his marriage broke up and he began crawling into a bottle for a living. Cordell’s investigations lead him to the heart of a complex, sordid family, as well as reuniting him with a much-hated fellow PI. Needless to say, in the finest noir traditions, Cordell takes both a physical and emotional beating before the book is finished; it ends exactly where we found him, a drunk on a park bench, waiting for a cop to move him along.

I liked
Gutter
a lot, largely because Cordell is such a fine protagonist—painfully self-aware, guilt-ridden, and afraid of doing the right thing because of what it cost him in his past. In spite of his faults, he’s also determined to get to the bottom of this case, even though he’s only acting on it as a favour to a friend. There are glimmers of the 87th precinct squadroom here; McBain’s police detectives are no fools, but ordinary men trying their best to do a decent job while everyone else seems intent on lying to them.
Gutter
is an efficient noir thriller, which also points toward some of the preoccupations that McBain would revisit in his other work.