Through his efforts McDonald connects people, netting readers for writers, new favorites for readers and a network of fans for all comers. There are quite a few such people out there on the web, offering information, reviews, interviews and other ephemera that have created a sort of alternate universe where crime fiction is king.

McDonald has done as much as anyone to further those efforts, if not more, with his recent book, Art in the Blood. The book collects 20 interviews that McDonald has done over the past few years with some of the leading lights of crime fiction. It includes long Q&As with Ken Bruen, George Pelecanos, Michael Connelly, Ian Rankin and Dennis Lehane, to name only a few.

Great, you might say. I can read about those guys anywhere. Where does that “connector” stuff come in? Well, I’m living proof. I picked up the book to read about the above authors, but was drawn in by McDonald’s erudite questions and easy rapport with them and found myself wanting to read the whole thing. In doing so, I was introduced to the work of Steve Hamilton, Tim Dorsey, Charlie Stella and others. And while you can read interviews with many of these authors in numerous locations, including this site, few can rival the depth and breadth of McDonald’s work.

McDonald also writes fiction, having contributed to Dublin Noir and Best New Noir, as well as online outlets like Hard Luck Stories and the Mississippi Review (when you’re done here, you should go check out his story “Sheriff Andy Goes to Hell” in that site’s Postmodern Pulp issue). Seeing his name is like an imprimatur of cool, helping to continue the expansion of my personal crime fiction network.

He consented to answer a few questions by e-mail for today’s Monday Interview, where we discussed his non-fiction and fiction work, including the great news that a sequel to Art in the Blood is in the works.

TIRBD: How did you choose who to include in Art in the Blood? Were there writers you wanted to include but couldn’t this time out?

CMcD: I went for the broad perspective of the field: mystery writers, crime writers, males and females…American, Brits and Celts. The aim was also to include writers at all spectrums of success: veterans, up-and-comers, mid-listers and mega-sellers.

There was a significant lag between the time the manuscript was turned over to Wildside/PointBlank and its publication. In the interim, I actually conducted interviews with quite a few personal favorites. I’ve just completed a second collection of interviews that’s now being shopped. Rogue Males, as its title implies, focuses exclusively on male crime writers…the mavericks and stylists. It’s almost a pantheon of personal favorites: James Sallis, Daniel Woodrell, more with James Ellroy and Ken Bruen… James Crumley, Andrew Vachss and Pete Dexter, among others.

You clearly did your homework before these interviews. How did that affect the questions you asked, and how did those, in turn, affect the kind of information these authors revealed?

I went into the interviews very familiar with the writers’ works. I also combed through every previous interview each writer had given that I could get my hands on. That exercise probably generated the most interesting questions — follow-ups to answers I wished that the earlier interviewers had posed or pressed harder on… lines of inquiry I sensed could have been taken further.

The unhappy reality is that these writers go out on the road and are faced with all kinds of interviewers. They draw radio jocks, journalists who may or may not specialize in author profiles and, in a few rare cases, they come across an interviewer who knows their novels and really wants to discuss them on a serious level. It’s striking and sad to me how many writers are stunned to be interviewed by someone who has actually read their books. And I imagine it must be very depressing to give several dozen interviews that start with, “Tell me what your novel is about,” or in which the interviewer is parroting back the prepared Q&As or suggested questions sent out by publicists.

As a crime writer yourself, did that background have an impact on the questions you asked or the way you interpreted the responses?

I went in to these discussions as a student of the genre and the craft. It was a key focus of the interviews to really get at the business of writing at all levels. I wanted to explore work habits and the dubious stuff required of writers now: touring, promotional strategies… running Web sites or offering blogs. All the things required of a contemporary writer after the final edit is accepted. Writing a book is soulful; promoting one is anything but. With the exception of James Ellroy, I haven’t the sense that many, if any, authors relish touring, or even like it, and even Ellroy nearly destroyed himself aggressively touring to support his most recent novel.

What affect has talking to so many writers had on your own writing?

Demystification. I’ve also concluded that the most successful authors – not necessarily the best-sellers, but the ones who sustain the most stable careers and who maintain the best arc – are the ones who approach it with steady determination. They come at it with wicked self-discipline and they’ve taken the time and trouble to evolve a style and a recognizable “voice.” In most cases, I’ve also been fortunate to interview writers who really care about writing good books and who push themselves in new ways each time they sit down to start another novel. The best ones don’t content themselves with rewriting the same book over and over and counting on their readership to accept that. You can’t help but be inspired by that… to sense that’s the thing to do.

What is it about crime fiction that appeals to you? Is it really, as Bruen, Lehane, Pelecanos and others have said, the best way currently to address social issues in fiction?

Tony Hillerman is credited with saying that contemporary fiction is about not much happening to people you can’t care about. Good crime fiction is really what used to be called good fiction. It has great dialogue, convincing characterization and a compelling story – a plot. Good crime fiction offers everything that what currently passes for so-called “literary fiction” lacks. James Crumley and Daniel Woodrell both came out of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and they’ve both chosen to write crime novels.

Crime fiction is indeed perhaps the most potent fictional format to explore “social issues.” On the other hand, I think increasing numbers of crime writers are unfortunately too focused on that aim. My sense as a reader and reviewer is that increasing numbers of crime and mystery writers are straining beyond nuanced social commentary and instead aggressively freighting their books with political dogma. There seems to me to be more preaching and vitriol in more sectors of crime fiction now. Overt partisan politics are exerting themselves and in ham-handed fashion. It may make those authors feel good, but it doesn’t entertain or even edify. Left or right, I don’t like to be lectured to in a novel. I also think those books are going to date, and furiously.

Looking at your book as a whole, what do you think it says about the state of modern crime fiction? Would a collection of interviews with a similar stratum of writers from 10, 20 or even 30 years ago have yielded a snapshot with a different overall feel?

Going back 30 years, even 20 years ago, I think you’d come away with a sense of writers who viewed themselves as just that – “writers” as opposed to “authors” or “crime novelists.” Max Allan Collins has worked in just about every medium you can name… novels, novelizations, comic books, comic strips and film. I asked him about how he reconciled all that, and he said, “I just feel like I’m a full-time professional writer. I’m not a teacher, lawyer or doctor who writes. I’m a writer who writes.” I think that’s what you’d get if you went at the generation of crime writers just ahead of most of those in Art in the Blood. You would find a crop of writers who didn’t view crime writing foremost as a craft or a calling, but rather as a job that they wanted to do well and make enough money to support themselves and their families.

So far as the current market, there’s a lot of fragmentation in the field now, and we seem to be in the midst of a generational shift. We’ve lost some big names in the past year or so, and several of them had careers that spanned decades… scads of novels and short stories. You look around now and see the consolidation of markets and publishing houses and that doesn’t bode well. You also see the close, computer monitoring of sales figures and the resulting decimation of mid-list writers. You also see fairly established authors who are forced to adopt pennames to try and kick-start their careers or to reboot their sales figures. When you look at all of that, you have to wonder if such a career within genre as an “Evan Hunter” or Mickey Spillane enjoyed is even possible going forward.

Labels: crime fiction, Monday Interview