It should be no surprise that Craig McDonald's debut novel is both a ripping good read and a sort of shadow history of the pulp era of crime fiction. McDonald has proven himself a talented writer with good taste and a skilled researcher who brings a level of detail to his work that sets it apart.

I first came to know McDonald's work through the book Art in the Blood, a collection of interviews with crime fiction writers. I checked it out to learn more about a few favorites, and was so taken by the quality of those interviews that I quickly read the entire book, adding significantly to my favorite writer list in the process. My only criticism is that my free time is now even more limited because of all the catching up I needed to do after finishing the book.

When I learned during my first Monday Interview with McDonald that he had a novel coming, I was intrigued. When I learned it would deal with the history of pulps, Orson Welles and Pancho Villa's head, I could hardly wait to get my hands on it. McDonald doesn't disappoint. The book is ostensibly the first-person recounting of a wild ride by 1950s crime novelist Hector Lassiter. Hector and a young writer sent to Mexico to profile the novelist, Bud Fiske, meet up with Villa's skull just a few pages in, and the duo's journey -- as well as that of the head -- is the stuff of a great pulp story. Add appearances by Welles, Marlene Dietrich and others, and the story just compels you to keep turning pages.

McDonald's interviews stand head-and-shoulders above most such exercises (those of yours truly included) because he really does his homework. It shows in the insightful questions that lead to true discussions that take the subjects into areas where it's clear they've rarely ventured. He brings that same sense of detail to his fiction. Hector Lassiter might not be real, and the events described didn't happen in just the way McDonald supposes, but it feels as if we're following a real author recounting historically accurate stories.

The good news is that McDonald already has at least two more Lassiter novels in the works, meaning this well-drawn character will continue to lead us through history in a way that is enlightening and compelling at the same time.

McDonald took time away from his writing to sit on the other side of the interview table (electronically, anyway), offering a few "As" to my "Qs".

TIRBD: Have you heard from anyone associated with some of the famous people whose actions and words are fictionalized here, like Marlene Dietrich or Orson Welles or the Bush clan?

CMcD: So far, so good – that is to say, no word at all. Welles has taken it on the chin in at least one “true-crime” book recently – actually being fingered as a Black Dahlia murder suspect. Orson will feature prominently in the next Lassiter novel and that Dahlia allegation will actually be a plot thread… Welles and Hector will connect again on the set of “Lady from Shanghai,” 10 years before their meeting in Head Games. As to the Bush family, that clan has a pretty full plate of late. There are several Bush family members buried not far from my hometown, and Prescott Bush, father of Bush 41, and grandfather of Bush 43, is from around my neck of the woods. My web site has scored some hits from Yale-country lately… that’s about as close as it’s come.

I came away from this wanting to read some of Hector Lassiter's work. Ideally, you'd crank out a couple Lassiter books for me. In the absence of that, what actual authors most closely approximate his subjects and style?

Funny you remark on that. I’ve seriously toyed with the notion of writing an old-style, straight-up pulp-era noir and putting it out under Hector’s byline. There’s a post-modern, mimetic strain running under the surface of all the Lassiter pieces, so I could see doing such a book if a publisher was interested. That said, Lassiter is a composite. Mike Shayne’s creator, as a teen, actually rode with Pershing after Pancho Villa, ala Hector. Lassiter is also loosely modeled on the neglected crime writer Jonathan Latimer, who lived in Key West, knew Hemingway, and wrote some darkly funny, very strange and propulsively readable crime novels and later moved into screenwriting

I figure Hector’s own prose would be a kind of melding of Hemingway, Cornell Woolrich and Mark Twain’s styles. And Head Games is purportedly a memoir, so I guess Hector’s own first-person POV novels would read a little like Head Games. There are some snippets of Hector’s own prose in the next novel, and even more in the one after that in which he’s depicted in his apprenticeship as a young man… we see him grope his way to his writer’s voice in that novel, which is set in Paris in the 1920s.

What kind of research did you do for Head Games and assuming you didn't do all of it before the story was fully plotted and written, what impact, if any, did some of your discoveries have on the story as it unfolded?

I got hooked on Pancho Villa and the Mexican revolution as an undergrad and read a ton of stuff then, which saved me any heavy research regarding much of the novel. That said, about halfway through the novel’s composition, I learned that Emil Holmdahl, who was indeed arrested for stealing Villa’s head, was the subject of a full-length biography. I also learned another book had just been published with a long piece on those in Texas who wanted to recover the stolen skull. I stopped writing to obtain both books and read them before pushing on. I found the historical Emil and my Emil were pretty close in character, but I lifted some biographical details to throw into the mix. Somewhere about the same time, I learned about the growing conspiracy theories regarding the Bush family and Villa’s missing head. After learning that, the conclusion for Head Games was pretty much mandated.

I also suspended writing the novel for about six weeks to prepare for two big interviews with Ken Bruen and James Sallis that I was going to conduct in Arizona where Sallis lives and Bruen was scheduled to tour. I was reading a ton of Bruen and Sallis before, during and after the first draft of Head Games, and Sallis’s “bug books” had a profound influence on Head Games and my notion for further Lassiter novels. There are even some significant winks to some classic Sallis/Lew G. lines in my novel.

Now that you have a novel out, does that give greater context to the things you've talked about with other authors in your own interviews? Are there things that you know from those interviews that prepared you for the process of publication?

I did have one critical notion drawn from the interviews: I had a definite sense about how I wanted the book to look and to be positioned and touted and so was very vigilant in the design process. I really believe this: consumers do judge a book by its cover, so I pushed for a certain look and feel for this book’s packaging. An indifferent or pedestrian cover can sink a book from the gate. A novel might survive some writing fumbles, but it won’t survive a cover that sucks or just lays there. Sad, but I believe to my bones that to be true. The people at Bleak House really stepped up and I think created a book that’s just a beautiful artifact in terms of exterior/interior design. The hardcover, particularly, is a great looking book.

I also figured it was critical to have the right kind of web site since it’s really where a ton of book-buyers first form their opinion of an author. I knew what I didn’t want standing as my primary web presence, and that was an author blog. I looked at the writers I most admire, Sallis, Dexter, Woodrell, Holden, Ellroy and the like: not a blogger among them. No author blog has ever induced me to read or review a book, but plenty of blogging authors have turned me off from ever looking at their stuff. So I went to Madeira James of xuni.com and she came up with a slick looking site that works for me as an author, and for Hector, too (one of the things I picked up in interviews from a couple of authors is, you damn well better buy your character’s domain name if you intend a series, so type in Hector Lassiter.com and you go to my site).

As a fan and student of crime fiction and noir, did you have trouble keeping things in your own voice rather than mimic those of your heroes and mentors?

“Debut novel” is such a misleading term. There is the book first written and the one that is first published. I’m pretty prolific and my agent was pushing several books at once that could have been my “debut novel.” Each of the books was pretty different from the others and each would tend to “announce” an author differently. Head Games just happened to be the one acquired first. My own reading taste is for the works of stylists and I’ve tried to evolve my own style. The novel has drawn comparisons to the writings of Ross Thomas, James Ellroy, James Crumley, Mickey Spillane, Max Allan Collins, Loren Estleman, James Carlos Blake and even Jack Kerouac… very, very dissimilar voices. As I said, I was rereading a lot of Ken Bruen at the time, and that’s the one name that hasn’t come up in a single review. I personally think Bruen is probably the most dangerous of writers other than Ellroy to read when one is writing because the Bruen and Ellroy voices and cadences just pervade… Reviewing and interviewing for several years while writing my own stuff, I think I’ve just learned to shut it out somehow and not let the styles of other writers infiltrate my own.

I understand Head Games is going to come out as a graphic novel. How did that come about and how involved are you in the project?

That was all from the effort of my agent, Svetlana Pironko, who was convinced the novel was a graphic novel waiting to happen. She pushed to find the perfect publisher and she did just that – an Eisner award-winning imprint. Before the deal was sealed, the publisher wanted to make certain that my novel “wanted to go” in the direction of a graphic novel and asked me to adapt the first two chapters into a “script.” I have no idea what a graphic novel script looks like and so groped my way through to my own notion of such a document. Then the proposition became this: “You write the entire script and we’ll find an artist.” So I’m involved about as deeply I can be…the graphic novel will be written by me. I’m a ways into it and the experience is strange, but compelling.

What's next (including, I hope, an update on the status of Rogue Males)? More Lassiter, perhaps?

Spring 2008 will see the release of Rogue Males: Conversations & Confrontations About the Writing Life. It effectively marks the end of my interviewing of other authors and Bleak House is considering some special ways to maybe package the book. Like Art in the Blood, my first interview collection, it’s largely an array of Q&A-style interviews with a number of male stylists. It’s scrappier and more raw than Art in the Blood and has a much different overall vibe. I just turned the manuscript into Bleak House yesterday after adding some new material, including a new interview with Elmore Leonard conducted the day after his 82nd birthday. The heart and soul of Rogue Males, however, is a long, narrative piece on Jim Sallis and Ken Bruen called “The Desert Dialogues.” It’s really my final word on writing and writers as an interviewer.

After that, the second Lassiter should follow. That novel pits Lassiter against a cabal of killer surrealists. It’s another piece of historical fiction, darkly comic, and centered around a very unusual love story. Like Head Games, it’s spread over several decades: 1935 Key West on the run-up to a killer Labor Day weekend hurricane; Civil War-era Spain in 1937, Hollywood in 1947 and Cuba in 1959. The cast includes John Dos Passos, Orson Welles, Rita Hayworth and John Huston, but the novel, at base, is the arc of the friendship between Hector and Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway casts a long shadow over Head Games, but never really appears in the flesh. In the next one, Hem’s a major character.

Hear McDonald read the first chapter of Head Games here.

Labels: crime fiction, Monday Interview