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 & Ben Bridges 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.
No comments:
Post a Comment