On the Trail with David Edgerley Gates

As the World Crime & Mystery Convention. Bouchercon fast approaches; I was making my preparations which include reading some of the work nominated for the various awards [which I hadn’t sampled as yet] that the event showcases; especially the Barry, the Macavity, Anthony and the Shamus Awards. I mentioned to our Editor Mike Stotter, about a remarkable story I just read - THE SLEEP OF DEATH a Placido Geist story from the Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, which was nominated for the PWA Shamus Awards, [to be presented at the Private Eye Writers of America PWA Shamus Banquet] during Bouchercon New Orleans 2016. It was written by David Edgerley Gates, a familiar name, but a writer who I hadn’t sampled before.

Mike Stotter knew of his work, as our Editor is a big follower of Westerns, a genre that David E. Gates writes in [as well as Crime, Thriller and PI fiction]. Apart from Editor-in-Chief of Shots, and his duties at The Crime Writers Association, Mike Stotter is also co-publisher with David Whitehead at Piccadilly Publishing. It is interesting that this niche British publisher has become a key outlet for Westerns; publishing many big names of the genre, including the PWA Founder’s Gunsmith series.

I will be attending The 2016 PWA Shamus awards with my colleagues Jeff Peirce [The Rap Sheet]; Peter Rozovsky [Detectives Beyond Borders] and Mike Stotter. I have enjoyed being a long standing [and a non-American] Associate Member of The Private Eye Writers of America; so we will see how David’s story The Sleep of Death gets on, as one of the nominated short stories for the 2016 PWA Shamus Short Fiction Category.  

So after checking out David’s website, which I found piqued my interest; I downloaded a couple of his works including the remarkable The Bone Harvest, and I tracked him down to New Mexico, and sent him a list of questions.

David kindly humored me, and answered my questions; in fact he produced a fascinating essay, which Shots are delighted to feature here, so over to the very interesting writer I discovered Mr David Edgerley Gates -

Thanks for inviting me to Shots Ezine and in answer to your questions, here goes -

My dad used to read aloud to me, at bedtime, before I could read for myself, so story-telling hooked me early on.  Kipling first, PUCK OF POOK’S HILL, and the Howard Pyle ROBIN HOOD, and then Stevenson, TREASURE ISLAND.  (Of course, those fabulous Wyeth illustrations, too.)  I’ve mentioned Carl Barks before, because I had a subscription to Walt Disney comics, and the Donald Duck stories were an enormous influence on me.  I think the economy of them.  Barks didn’t drag his feet.  He was off and running in the first four panels.

Reading dark fiction is maybe about relative safety.  This is counter-intuitive, I know, but you’re statistically more likely to be hurt by somebody you know than by a Ted Bundy.  I had a friend who once told me she didn’t want to think about domestic violence – her husband was a sweetheart, as it happens, but he was physically a really big guy – so she took a certain comfort in SILENCE OF THE LAMBS, and the odds of being struck by lightning factor.  Agatha Christie has a trick, even though her stuff is thought of as cozy, of scaring the living bejeezus out of you about ten pages from the end of any one of her books, the vicarious shiver.  SLEEPING MURDER (which I always remember as “Cover Her Face,” a title P.D. James used, probably in homage) is a good example.

BookShots is a great idea, Patterson a demon marketer, and a strong voice for the reader community.  (I’ve met Mark Sullivan, who does the PRIVATE books, and Brendan DuBois, who himself has a BookShots coming out.)  I personally love the novella as a form, although conventional wisdom has it that it’s not marketable – or at least not in the magazine or print publishing world.  It’d be nice to see that change, and I hope writers are lining up for the opportunity.  I plan to.

The first of the bounty hunter stories, “Undiscovered Country,” began simply as a wavering image in long shot, ‘figures in a landscape’ was the phrase I used, and the old guy himself didn’t show up until Page 16.  I hadn’t expected him, but when he made his entrance, he was already fully-formed.  He was necessary, if that makes sense, a character you could hang your hat on.  THE WILD BUNCH is a big presence in these stories, although I’d shy away from calling them elegiac, a word Peckinpah disliked.  I don’t think I realized in the beginning that I’d happened on a theme, but people in the middle of historic change probably don’t recognize it at the time.  Then again, the Great War was so damaging, materially and psychologically, that it left nobody untouched, and that’s the shadow that falls across the Placido Geist stories, the coming darkness, the acceleration of technology, not with the promise of a better future, but more efficient death mechanisms.  The obvious historical irony. 

I wouldn’t say Dutch Leonard was a big influence, or at least not a conscious one in the way Mary Renault or John le Carré have been.  I came to Leonard later on, and I enjoy him a lot, but I think I’d established my own style at that point.  As for Western writers per se, Jack Schaefer, Walter Van Tilburg Clark, A.B. Guthrie, Alan LeMay.  I don’t know that they influenced me, though.  I’d have to say John Ford, more than anybody, his horizon line.  I find it interesting that both Jim Harrison and Larry McMurtry, and James Lee Burke, can’t help falling into the epic voice in their stuff.  It conjures up that sense of Manifest Destiny, like it or not.

This answer follows on the last.  One of the things you experience in New Mexico is a feel for the landscape, the sky and the earth.  And the blood soaked into the ground, enough of it before the coming of the Europeans, but a larger share afterwards.  True of the West, generally, the Indian Wars.  History in the Southwest is about Indians, then Spaniards, then Anglos, and contemporary New Mexico mirrors this, sometimes a hostile dynamic, certainly a wary one.  It’s disingenuous to pretend otherwise.  The landscape informs character, in life and in fiction.  Tony Hillerman, for one, the guy himself, and his books.  You can’t imagine Leaphorn or Chee outside of the terrain they inhabit.  So landscape is character, but the people there reflect the environment, not the other way around.  Call it erosion, either way.

The question about Alistair MacLean could be about any writer, and why they fall out of fashion.  Sir Walter Scott was hugely successful in his lifetime, and then lost his grip on the popular imagination.  The only book of Scott’s anybody reads these days is IVANHOE, which is a shame - OLD MORTALITY is a much livelier book.  My point about THE GUNS OF NAVARONE was actually how well it stands up.  I don’t know why MacLean’s gone past his sell-by date.  It’s probably because of the kind of books he wrote, which are essentially ripping yarns.  Not too many people re-read John Buchan nowadays, either (which is also a shame).  There’s always a kind of surface tension in the writers we go back to, that gives their writing a weightless grace, but you sense a deeper purpose, a moral gravity.  I don’t mean that MacLean is frivolous; I mean his facility works against him.  He goes down too smooth. 

Where did “The Devil to Pay” come from?  I agree with my pal John Crowley that ideas are easy, and execution is hard.  In this case, though, I know exactly how I came by it.  I was in New York for the Edgars a couple of years ago, and I went to visit a friend’s grandma up in an assisted living place north of the city, as described.  Then, back in the Oyster Bar, there was an overheard conversation I later turned to my own devious ends.  The thing about “Devil to Pay” is that when Tommy goes back upriver to the old folks’ home, the story he tells his grandma is of course the story that you’ve just been told.  This was an accidental foray into meta-fiction.  I felt very sly about it.

I think of myself as undisciplined, because I’m completely all or nothing.  I’ve either got the lid screwed down tight and I’m working to the exclusion of everything else, or I’m fretting and kicking myself because I’m not working.  OCD, in other words.  The difference between stories and a novel is that a story gives you something closer to instant gratification – in that it might take a couple of days or a couple of weeks (or even a couple of months) to write – but with a book you’re in it for the long haul, and it’s all about stamina.  The satisfactions are very separate, and it’s not just degree.  There’s the prejudice that a novel shows more seriousness, on the writer’s part.  In a way, it’s true, because there’s no easy way out.  You’re stuck with it.  On the other hand, a novel never has the shapeliness of a short story.  It takes too long, and it’s too ungainly.  You imagine its finished shape, and can only approximate it. 

Award nominations are incredibly cool.  I don’t see them as pressure points.  More ratification.  (Maybe a marketing hook, too.)  And awards ceremonies are a lot of fun.  You get to meet great people.  Ali Karim, perchance, at this year’s Shamus dinner.

I’ve liked being a Hillerman judge, although I never picked a winner, and the Sleuth Sayers crew reliably conjures up the unexpected – I’m pleased to be included.  As for which present-day writers hold my attention, I have a stable of favorites.  Lee Child, Alan Furst, Steve Hunter.  No surprises there.  My sister recently turned me on to Stuart Neville.  Laura Lippman got me started on Mark Billingham.  My pal Jane Kepp recommended David Downing.  I found Chris Morgan Jones and Charles Cumming on my own.  I dig Debra Coonts and Chuck Greaves, although I’m probably not supposed to promote my friends.  But why not?

Somebody once remarked that reading Alan Furst’s KINGDOM OF SHADOWS was like seeing CASABLANCA for the first time.  I think the ‘trick’ of his books - if you want to call it that - and this goes for Philip Kerr as well, is that we know how the war against Hitler turned out, but people at the time had no such certainty.  If you were in Occupied France, or Eastern Europe, or anywhere under the Nazis, your daily life (and whether you lived or died) was completely arbitrary, and subject to the whim of sociopaths.  For the characters in these stories, the smallest act of  disrespect can be a death sentence.  That’s what makes the stakes so high. 

Chris Morgan Jones spent 11 years in the corporate espionage world, and it shows in his books.  One of the things I particularly like in the Ikertu novels is that both Ben and Ike are principled guys in a slippery and ambiguous world, and that accords with my own experience of the intelligence community.  I’ve remarked before that the people I knew in the trade were dedicated professionals, mission-oriented, and that ‘honorable’ isn’t too treacly a word to describe them.  I don’t want to inflate my résumé, however – I served four years in the U.S. Air Force as a Russian linguist, stationed in West Berlin during the Cold War, with the Warsaw Pact and Soviet forces in the Forward Area as our immediate targets.  It was a great duty.  The town lived up to its reputation, the job itself was fascinating.  I’ve kept up with most of the literature since, and some of the guys who were there.  I don’t think you get over it.  There’s a definite sense of having been among the elect, all that Capt. Midnight secret decoder ring crap.  The dealer always gives you the first taste for free.

BLACK TRAFFIC and THE BONE HARVEST are the first two books in a story arc of five novels, if not six.  They’re not going to be chronological, and they don’t all have the same central series characters, but everybody gets at least a cameo: in other words, Andy Wye holds down the first and fourth books, Vlasov headlines the fifth, and so on.  Other cast members take their bows along the way.  Sort of a tribute album, the Cold War’s greatest hits.  And with THE BONE HARVEST in particular, I had a very definite aim in mind.  I wanted to show the nuts and bolts of how an intelligence or eavesdropping operation is actually set up, in a hostile environment.  More than that, I didn’t want to people my story with world-weary cynics, I wanted a team that was invested in the outcome, animated by resolve.  Dix Apodaca, the main guy in the book, is in fact an avatar, an alternate reality to my own – if I’d stayed in the service and gone career military, Dix is more or less how I would have turned out.  (I mean in terms of his pay grade and job description, not his heroics.)

What’s on deck would be more stories – a Mickey Counihan (STEP ON A CRACK) called “Stone Soup” is coming out in the November issue of HITCHCOCK.  I’m working on a sequel to EXIT WOUNDS called ABSOLUTE ZERO, about the cartels, and the Mexican gang presence in the American prison system, and then I’ll tackle the next chapter in the spy novel sequence, YANKEE ZULU, which takes place in Viet Nam during the Tet Offensive.  I’d also like to do a couple of more novellas, a sequel or sequels to VIPER, and I’ve got a story in mind about the Ardennes in ‘44.   So both some contemporary and some historicals.  Ideas are easy, execution is hard.

Raise a glass at Bouchercon in my absence. 

© 2016 David Edgerley Gates

More information about the work of David Edgerley Gates and links to his work is available here and his contributions at Sleuthsayers Blog here and sample his story Step on a Crack as a free download as a .pdf from this link [right click and “save as” to download].

And if this article has also piqued your interest in the Western Genre, click here for Piccadilly Publishing’s August Schedule of Publications.

More information about The Private Eye Writers of America is available here with details on attending the 2016 PWA Shamus Awards from this link  

Stranger than Fiction: Twisted Tales from real life in Georgian England

If I were to tell you that my novels feature, among other things, giants, dwarfs and witchcraft, you’d be forgiven for thinking I was either a children’s or a fantasy writer. Or what about the students who invented a diving bell to retrieve a coffin from the Thames? Or the surgeon who successfully grafted a cock's testicle on to a hen's belly?

The truth is all the storylines in my Dr. Thomas Silkstone series are based on real-life incidents in Georgian England.  They are so extraordinary that I didn’t have to invent them. One reader complained I’d gone too far when a fourteen-year-old aristocrat contracted syphilis when he lay with a prostitute at Eton College. That’s very tame compared with what else went on behind closed doors in Georgian society.

I’m a journalist and historian and during the course of my research into 18th century medical practices I’ve come across so many weird, wonderful and downright bizarre things that it’s hard to believe they are true or actually happened.

The reason I chose to set my murder mystery series during this time is precisely because it’s a period that is unique in history. It was the dawning of the Age of Enlightenment. Change was in the air, largely thanks to great philosophers such as Rousseau and Montesquieu. Religion was called to question and superstition was giving way to reason. New and exciting advances in science were being made that lead people to challenge the old order of things. Society was shifting away from the ‘Establishment’ and that makes a brilliant backdrop to any novel.

My fictional hero is an American surgeon and anatomist who comes to study in London. (There were many medical students who did shortly before the Revolutionary War of 1776.) Pioneering and compassionate, Dr. Thomas Silkstone is the voice of reason in a world that is struggling to come to terms with advances in science and philosophy. He becomes the father of modern forensics.

Nowhere is the contradiction of the age better embodied than in the tragic story of the last known witch killing in England in 1751, when a dispute between neighbours ended in murder. An elderly Hertfordshire couple was accused of communing with the devil and ducked in the local pond. After being subjected to horrific rituals by a mob, the ‘witch,’ Ruth Osborn, drowned. Her husband, John, died a few hours later.

Following the terrible event, twenty- two men were indicted and the ring leader, Thomas Colley was found guilty of murder for actions which, only a few years earlier, could have been justified. Indeed, to local villagers he was considered a martyr. The Witchcraft Act of 1735, however, reflected a general shift in mood in the country, away from superstition, although such beliefs clearly remained embedded in the fabric of society. The Act made it a crime for a person to claim that any human being had magical powers or was guilty of practising witchcraft. And yet, almost fifty years later, when parts of England were covered by a thick, poisonous fog and numerous weather phenomena plagued the countryside, many ordinary people thought the end of the world was nigh. The appearance of the Aurora Borealis, followed by a flaming comet in the sky did nothing to calm their fears. Little wonder that after a tumultuous thunderstorm in Witney the preacher John Wesley wrote: “many thought the Day of Judgment had come.”

Such is the fantastical nature of so many of these events to our 21st century sensibilities that I decided to include a glossary at the back of my novels to show that I wasn’t making things up. So, if you doubt that grave robbing was so rife that corpses were sold by the foot, or that a giant snake guarded the entrance to a diamond mine in India, then you can find out more. 

One of the most extraordinary tales I’ve come across features a woman from Surrey who gave birth to rabbits. She even convinced the highest physicians in the land that her ‘supernatural’ powers were for real and was only caught out when the man who supplied her with conies confessed. But that, as they say, is another story.

Tessa Harris is the author of the Dr. Thomas Silkstone Mysteries. The sixth book in the series, Secrets in the Stones, published by Constable, is out now, price £8.99.

More information about Tessa Harris can be found on her website.  You can also find her on Facebook and follow her on Twitter @harris_Tessa

The resurrection of Penny Wanawake

Susan Moody was born and brought up in Oxford. Her first crime novel, Penny Black, was originally published in 1984 and was the first in a series of seven books featuring amateur sleuth Penny Wanawake.  They have now been republished by Williams & Whiting. Susan Moody is a former Chair of the Crime Writer’s Association of Great Britain, a former World President of the International Association of Crime Writers and a member of the Detection Club.  She is currently the 2016 Writer in Residence for The Pen Factor.

I've just been rereading To Kill A Mocking Bird (by Harper Lee) and reflecting on the nine years I spent living in east Tennessee during the mid-60s, as the civil rights movement got under way.  They were stirring and dangerous times. Bombings, shootings, lynchings … activists down south in Tennessee, Alabama. Missouri etc were brave people indeed.

My husband and I were involved with the NAACP, the National Association for the

Advancement of Coloured People, founded by Medgar Evers, who worked tirelessly for voter registration rights, the desegregation of schools and colleges, and boycotts of companies practising discrimination against black people, before he was assassinated by the Klan.  We held meetings at our house, with the black attendees forced to sneak up from the woods, since they weren't supposed to be in our segregated white area.

  

We were watched.  One evening a sinister glow shone behind our venetian blinds and we discovered a cross burning on the lawn.  How had someone managed to plant it in the grass and set fire to it without us hearing anything?  Who was responsible? We knew the neighbours weren't sympathetic to the cause, but this was rather more than simple disagreement with our views.  This was in Oak Ridge, known as Atomic City, established in 1942 as a production site for the vast operation that developed the atomic bomb at the  Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

 

Another time, the Ku Klux Klan came into town.  The origin of the words Ku Klux apparently comes from the Greek word Kyklos, meaning circle, though it seemed highly unlikely that this redneck organisation of bigoted and intolerant homophobic, anti-Semitic, witch-hunting ignorami even knew what Greek was.  By the 1960s, the Klan, heavily against giving black people the vote, was concentrated on striking fear into the hearts of a superstitious people deliberately kept uneducated and disenfranchised.  The white ghost-like robes, the pointed hoods, the featureless head-coverings with only holes for eyes were indeed terrifying. 

I'd come from a liberal upbringing in Oxford, followed by two years in Paris.  Coming from Europe, I was shocked and appalled by the discrimination I witnessed there.  Not to mention the moonshine stills in the woods, the chain-gangs of convicts overseen by a white guy on a horse, with a rifle across his knees, the only restaurant in town a self-service place where black men were allowed to take your tray at the till and carry it to a table, as long as they were wearing white gloves.  And I shall never forget hearing a child of about eleven calling out  "Boy!  Boy!  I want more water." 

So by the time I got back to England, I felt I had to do something to equalize things.  I'm not implying that my Penny Wanawake series was a manifesto for civil rights but – thanks to a competition organized by the Sunday Times, looking for a new female protagonist in the field of crime – I created tall, rich, beautiful and socially concerned Penny.  I wanted a black woman who was not intimidated by white folks, who felt she had as much right as anyone else to walk down the mean streets, who was the equal of everyone else.

 That was quite a few years ago.  I'm absolutely thrilled that Williams & Whiting, a new and go-ahead publisher, has seen fit to re-issue all the Penny books.  The original reviews were ecstatic ('A protagonist who strides right into the gallery of amateur sleuths to occupy a position of distinction,' said the Financial Times.  'Debuts do not come more exotic or exuberant,' wrote The Times.  'Finger-lickin' good,' commented The Observer.)  

I very much hope that Penny will find a new audience among today's crime readers.

When good guys go bad: Why everyone loves a villain

Today's blog post is by Will Jordan. He is the author of the Ryan Drake series.

Everyone thinks they're the good guy.

Never have I heard a more timely and honest observation about human nature, and one that can be applied so readily to shaping and developing the characters in a story. Where did it come from? I'll tell you at the end of this blog.

First, let's be honest here; every story needs a bad guy. After all, what use is a hero without a villain to pit himself against? How can you create drama in a story without an obstacle or problem to challenge the protagonist? The more we look at how a story fits together, the more we come to understand that the villain is every bit as important as the hero.

Now let's be even more honest; secretly, don't we all root for the bad guy, just a little? Come on, you can admit it. Don't you find them just a bit more interesting, a bit more compelling and more fun than the hero? Don't you find yourself wondering what would happen if their plans actually succeeded? Don't you want to understand what makes them tick, why they do what they do?

Okay, maybe it's just me, then.

But whether you agree of not, the fact is that understanding what motivates your book's antagonist, what drives them, what they're striving towards and what they're willing to sacrifice to get there is a vital skill for any writer. If you can't do it, your book's in trouble right from the start.

So how do you write a good antagonist? Well, my acid test is a simple one. Can I make a convincing argument that my antagonist is in fact a good guy? Does his end goal, at least in his mind, justify all the things he does to get there? Can I imagine what he might do with the rest of his life if he prevails?

Those are certainly questions I try to answer with Ghost Target, my most recent novel in the Ryan Drake series. More than ever before, I set out to shed light on Marcus Cain, the shadowy and menacing figure who has loomed over the entire series. While other antagonists have come and gone in the course of each book, he’s always remained, and now at last he’s coming to the fore.

This has been my chance to show who he really is as a man, beneath the layers of deceit and cunning. Because for me the bad guy needs to have just as much depth and personality as the hero. They need to have strengths and weaknesses, quirks and flaws, and most of all they need to believe they’re the good guy. After all, who wants to read about a character that's just evil for the sake of being evil, or whose excuse for committing terrible acts is as thin and manufactured as the paper it's printed on?

The protagonist and antagonist are both opposing forces that combine to create the drama of a story. If one side is weak and poorly developed, the story suffers for it.

Which brings me back to my quote at the beginning. Everyone thinks they're the good guy. They all believe, somehow, that they're in the right and everyone else is wrong to stand in their way. For me, that is what truly separates a hero from a villain - the inability to see their actions for what they are, to accept the consequences of what they've done, and to admit when they’re wrong.

It's a lesson I've learned and continue to apply to my own writing.

So where did that quote actually come from?

A few years ago, a CIA field officer debriefing a captured al-Qaeda fighter, asked him why he did what he did – why he’d kidnap, torture and execute innocent civilians, help blow up crowded markets and sacrifice untold lives. His answer was as simple as it was striking - American movies.

Independence Day. Star Wars. Even The Hunger Games. Whatever their setting and specific detail, they all depict a small, plucky band of resistance fighters taking on a massive, superiorly armed invader, and winning out through bravery and sacrifice. As far as he and his comrades were concerned, they were those brave fighters, and America was the evil empire to be resisted by any means necessary. That was all it took to justify everything they had done, to make it right in their minds. It was simply a matter of perspective.

No matter where you go, everyone thinks they're the good guy.  

  

Ghost Target by Will Jordan is out now published by Canelo Books, price £3.99 in eBook.

You can follow him on Twitter - @willjordan83 and find more information about Will Jordan and his books on his website.