Edgar®-nominee Craig McDonald is an award-winning journalist, editor and fiction writer. His short fiction has appeared in
literary magazines, anthologies and several online crime fiction sites.
His debut novel, Head Games, was published by Bleak House Books in September 2007. Head Games was selected as a 2008 Edgar®-nominee for Best First Novel by an American Author. Head Games was also a finalist for the Anthony, Gumshoe and Crimespree Magazine awards for best first novel.
His nonfiction books include Art in the Blood, a collection of interviews with 20 major crime authors which appeared in 2006, and Rogue Males: Conversations and Confrontations About the Writing Life, a second collection of interviews to be published by Bleak House Books.
McDonald was also a contributor to the NYT's nonfiction bestseller, Secrets of the Code. He recently won national awards for his profiles of crime novelists James Crumley, Daniel Woodrell and James Sallis.
PIC: Christ, man, you pack a hell of a lot into TOROS & TORSOS and manage to cover more than 25 years. T&T is a historical crime novel that somehow manages to tie-in a serial killer, Hemingway, the Spanish Civil War, the Surrealist artistic movement, John Dos Passos, the Black Dahlia murder, Orson Welles, Rita Hayworth, The Lady from Shanghai, Vincent Price and a whole hell of a lot more. Why did you decide to take on so much?
CM: For a few years, I'd been running across all these strange facts and eerie congruities involving Surrealism and crime and the same names kept coming up in these oddball contexts. I was actually leery of doing anything with a serial killer per se. I've pretty much read well-past my fill of serial killer novels, licensed P.I. novels and police procedurals. But I figured if I was going to write this novel, as I felt driven to do, I was going to write the hell out of the concept and mount an epic, decades-long death dance between Lassiter and this cabal of maybe-murderous art enthusiasts and all these elements might make the serial killer angle fresh and different. With the Lassiter series, going nearly over-the-top is always an option and maybe even a kind of goal. Hector's built to shoulder big stories.
PIC: How did you manage to make these seemingly disparate elements come together in an organic and pulse-pounding fashion? What was the process like for you?
CM: It was really all there, waiting for somebody to draw the connecting line. I wrote straight through the thing after spending a month re-steeping myself in all this stuff on Surrealism. I construct novels around elements or events that really engage my imagination and I plot to my passions. The challenge was keeping up with the speed with which it came together in my head. I started writing T&T on October 1 of 2006 and had the first draft in hand by Christmas morning of that year. It didn't change much in the editing, just stray paragraphs coming out, really. Nothing of magnitude was put in.
PIC: That's an amazing feat, considering how lengthy and sturdy the novel is.
CM: The over-arching challenge I set for myself with all of the Lassiter novels was to write them like Hector, as a pulp writer, would tackle these stories, which is to say, very fast and viscerally. Hopefully that lends them a propulsive, fever-dream quality critical for novels so studded with historical detail.
PIC: Why the switch from the first person narrative voice of HEAD GAMES to the third-person of T&T?
CM: The Lassiter series consists of seven novels. All seven are written. I have a master plan that binds the seven books into a larger, single work, at least in my own head. And the books will re-contextualize each other as the saga unfolds. To that end, I have buried things going on in the books that are directly bound to narrative voice and novels-to-come down the road. In HEAD GAMES, I had Hector doing some pretty rough stuff, right up front, and I needed to get the reader on his side from the get-go and the best way to do that was to adopt that kind of chummy, intimate angle of attack in terms of Hector telling his story in his own voice. That said, the guy's an ace storyteller, so when Hector speaks to you in first-person, he's probably least to be trusted. As a novelist, he's going to slight biography for effect…fact for fiction. Hec's very much an unreliable narrator in HEAD GAMES…so unreliable that he's so far gotten away with some things in that book that don't bear close inspection if a reader knows where to look. How unreliable Hector is in relating HEAD GAMES begins to become clear in books number three and four. Much of the "why" becomes clear, too. In TOROS & TORSOS, because of plot twists and so forth, I couldn't have Hector telling the tale without portraying himself as either an idiot or a very different kind of dissembling narrator. Short form answer: plot mandates voice.
PIC: Did you know from the onset that you'd end T&T with Hemingway's suicide?
CM: Yes, I knew going in just how I was going to close the book. It's strange: with the Lassiter novels (and only those), I tend to write the first three-quarters, then I write the end, and then I marry the pieces up somewhere in the backstretch. So the epilogue for the novel was written in present form before I tackled sending Hector into 1959 Cuba in TOROS' closing section. Also, apart from everything else going on in T&T, a major structural span of the novel (and series) is the long, storied friendship of Hector and Hemingway, and I needed to drive that depiction right to Hem's death (and beyond). A later novel, CITY OF LIGHTS, very much a companion piece and of-a-piece with T&T, explores their early days in Paris, as struggling unknowns. The series will give you their whole relationship, in time.
PIC: What kind of research did you do for the published novels? And how did that research differ from one novel to the next?
CM: Same approach for both: I went in knowing a great deal about what I was going to use, up front, and then just found some odd tidbits along the way that became plot points. Writing HEAD GAMES, I knew all the Mexican Revolution stuff already, and had a solid sense of Pancho Villa's biography. Villa and the Revolution were longstanding preoccupations. I had long known about the theft of his head. The only fresh digging I did there was some Skull & Bones research and reading up on Emil Holmdahl, the real-life guy who was arrested for stealing Villa's skull. For TOROS, I did a little extra reading on the Keys' Hurricane of 1935, and, to greater extent, a fairly deep read from Dos Passos' perspective on his and Hemingway's split over the disappearance of Dos Passos' Spanish translator.
PIC: With so much of Lassiter's life already presented, it must have become more and more difficult to write each successive book in the series.
CM: If I was to do an eighth novel, yeah, it would be an utter bitch to navigate his timeline. But I wrote the seven very fast, back-to-back, then revised them hard over a couple of years as a unit, so it all marries up very faithfully and tightly. What's become trickier is editing number three with a new editor whose reading of crime fiction and of history is humbling in its depth and breadth and who tends to suggest compelling, historically inflected ideas or spins to incorporate. I have to demur in some cases either because I'm protecting the other books in the series which haven't yet been locked up for publication, or because I'm having to make sure things shore up with what's been established in HEAD GAMES and T&T. Each published novel makes it harder to tinker with the already-written ones to come. Characters also bleed over from book to book. From the start, Alison Janssen, my editor at Bleak House for HG and T&T, was rightly hyper-vigilant about the world-building need for watertight continuity and Alison was checking me on stuff like Hector's book titles I mention and their presumed publication dates and so forth. To that end, I have a big timeline I put together that incorporates Hector's complete bibliography/biography. It's packed with lot of stuff I'll never use down to the model Chevy he owned in a particular year, but I know it and when it all happened.
PIC: Tell us a bit about the next one.
CM: Lassiter #3 is PRINT THE LEGEND…it picks up right off the end of T&T. It opens with Hem's last morning, loading his shotgun, then leaps to 1965. Hector, tabbed to be keynote speaker at a Hemingway conference in Sun Valley, comes to Idaho to poke around the circumstances of Hemingway's death and some sinister things tied to Hemingway's unpublished works. He quickly sees that mysterious things tied to Hem's past, and his own, are percolating up after many many decades. The next novel is, at its core, Hector Lassiter, at great personal peril, engaging the FBI during J. Edgar Hoover's last dark days.
PIC: What else are you working on?
CM: HEAD GAMES is forthcoming as a graphic novel from First Second. I wrote the script and the project is working its way through the art process. I have a couple of standalones I'm polishing now, each with a contemporary setting, well away from historical topics. Spring 2009 will bring a last piece of nonfiction, a collection of interviews from Bleak House Books called ROGUE MALES. That one is just going to galley. PRINT THE LEGEND will be published by Thomas Dunne in winter 2010, and GNASHVILLE, set in Music City in the waning days of 1958, should follow that autumn.
PIC: Thanks greatly, Craig!
http://www.craigmcdonaldbooks.com/
[Craig McDonald interviewed by Tom Piccirilli 11/26]
His debut novel, Head Games, was published by Bleak House Books in September 2007. Head Games was selected as a 2008 Edgar®-nominee for Best First Novel by an American Author. Head Games was also a finalist for the Anthony, Gumshoe and Crimespree Magazine awards for best first novel.
His nonfiction books include Art in the Blood, a collection of interviews with 20 major crime authors which appeared in 2006, and Rogue Males: Conversations and Confrontations About the Writing Life, a second collection of interviews to be published by Bleak House Books.
McDonald was also a contributor to the NYT's nonfiction bestseller, Secrets of the Code. He recently won national awards for his profiles of crime novelists James Crumley, Daniel Woodrell and James Sallis.
PIC: Christ, man, you pack a hell of a lot into TOROS & TORSOS and manage to cover more than 25 years. T&T is a historical crime novel that somehow manages to tie-in a serial killer, Hemingway, the Spanish Civil War, the Surrealist artistic movement, John Dos Passos, the Black Dahlia murder, Orson Welles, Rita Hayworth, The Lady from Shanghai, Vincent Price and a whole hell of a lot more. Why did you decide to take on so much?
CM: For a few years, I'd been running across all these strange facts and eerie congruities involving Surrealism and crime and the same names kept coming up in these oddball contexts. I was actually leery of doing anything with a serial killer per se. I've pretty much read well-past my fill of serial killer novels, licensed P.I. novels and police procedurals. But I figured if I was going to write this novel, as I felt driven to do, I was going to write the hell out of the concept and mount an epic, decades-long death dance between Lassiter and this cabal of maybe-murderous art enthusiasts and all these elements might make the serial killer angle fresh and different. With the Lassiter series, going nearly over-the-top is always an option and maybe even a kind of goal. Hector's built to shoulder big stories.
PIC: How did you manage to make these seemingly disparate elements come together in an organic and pulse-pounding fashion? What was the process like for you?
CM: It was really all there, waiting for somebody to draw the connecting line. I wrote straight through the thing after spending a month re-steeping myself in all this stuff on Surrealism. I construct novels around elements or events that really engage my imagination and I plot to my passions. The challenge was keeping up with the speed with which it came together in my head. I started writing T&T on October 1 of 2006 and had the first draft in hand by Christmas morning of that year. It didn't change much in the editing, just stray paragraphs coming out, really. Nothing of magnitude was put in.
PIC: That's an amazing feat, considering how lengthy and sturdy the novel is.
CM: The over-arching challenge I set for myself with all of the Lassiter novels was to write them like Hector, as a pulp writer, would tackle these stories, which is to say, very fast and viscerally. Hopefully that lends them a propulsive, fever-dream quality critical for novels so studded with historical detail.
PIC: Why the switch from the first person narrative voice of HEAD GAMES to the third-person of T&T?
CM: The Lassiter series consists of seven novels. All seven are written. I have a master plan that binds the seven books into a larger, single work, at least in my own head. And the books will re-contextualize each other as the saga unfolds. To that end, I have buried things going on in the books that are directly bound to narrative voice and novels-to-come down the road. In HEAD GAMES, I had Hector doing some pretty rough stuff, right up front, and I needed to get the reader on his side from the get-go and the best way to do that was to adopt that kind of chummy, intimate angle of attack in terms of Hector telling his story in his own voice. That said, the guy's an ace storyteller, so when Hector speaks to you in first-person, he's probably least to be trusted. As a novelist, he's going to slight biography for effect…fact for fiction. Hec's very much an unreliable narrator in HEAD GAMES…so unreliable that he's so far gotten away with some things in that book that don't bear close inspection if a reader knows where to look. How unreliable Hector is in relating HEAD GAMES begins to become clear in books number three and four. Much of the "why" becomes clear, too. In TOROS & TORSOS, because of plot twists and so forth, I couldn't have Hector telling the tale without portraying himself as either an idiot or a very different kind of dissembling narrator. Short form answer: plot mandates voice.
PIC: Did you know from the onset that you'd end T&T with Hemingway's suicide?
CM: Yes, I knew going in just how I was going to close the book. It's strange: with the Lassiter novels (and only those), I tend to write the first three-quarters, then I write the end, and then I marry the pieces up somewhere in the backstretch. So the epilogue for the novel was written in present form before I tackled sending Hector into 1959 Cuba in TOROS' closing section. Also, apart from everything else going on in T&T, a major structural span of the novel (and series) is the long, storied friendship of Hector and Hemingway, and I needed to drive that depiction right to Hem's death (and beyond). A later novel, CITY OF LIGHTS, very much a companion piece and of-a-piece with T&T, explores their early days in Paris, as struggling unknowns. The series will give you their whole relationship, in time.
PIC: What kind of research did you do for the published novels? And how did that research differ from one novel to the next?
CM: Same approach for both: I went in knowing a great deal about what I was going to use, up front, and then just found some odd tidbits along the way that became plot points. Writing HEAD GAMES, I knew all the Mexican Revolution stuff already, and had a solid sense of Pancho Villa's biography. Villa and the Revolution were longstanding preoccupations. I had long known about the theft of his head. The only fresh digging I did there was some Skull & Bones research and reading up on Emil Holmdahl, the real-life guy who was arrested for stealing Villa's skull. For TOROS, I did a little extra reading on the Keys' Hurricane of 1935, and, to greater extent, a fairly deep read from Dos Passos' perspective on his and Hemingway's split over the disappearance of Dos Passos' Spanish translator.
PIC: With so much of Lassiter's life already presented, it must have become more and more difficult to write each successive book in the series.
CM: If I was to do an eighth novel, yeah, it would be an utter bitch to navigate his timeline. But I wrote the seven very fast, back-to-back, then revised them hard over a couple of years as a unit, so it all marries up very faithfully and tightly. What's become trickier is editing number three with a new editor whose reading of crime fiction and of history is humbling in its depth and breadth and who tends to suggest compelling, historically inflected ideas or spins to incorporate. I have to demur in some cases either because I'm protecting the other books in the series which haven't yet been locked up for publication, or because I'm having to make sure things shore up with what's been established in HEAD GAMES and T&T. Each published novel makes it harder to tinker with the already-written ones to come. Characters also bleed over from book to book. From the start, Alison Janssen, my editor at Bleak House for HG and T&T, was rightly hyper-vigilant about the world-building need for watertight continuity and Alison was checking me on stuff like Hector's book titles I mention and their presumed publication dates and so forth. To that end, I have a big timeline I put together that incorporates Hector's complete bibliography/biography. It's packed with lot of stuff I'll never use down to the model Chevy he owned in a particular year, but I know it and when it all happened.
PIC: Tell us a bit about the next one.
CM: Lassiter #3 is PRINT THE LEGEND…it picks up right off the end of T&T. It opens with Hem's last morning, loading his shotgun, then leaps to 1965. Hector, tabbed to be keynote speaker at a Hemingway conference in Sun Valley, comes to Idaho to poke around the circumstances of Hemingway's death and some sinister things tied to Hemingway's unpublished works. He quickly sees that mysterious things tied to Hem's past, and his own, are percolating up after many many decades. The next novel is, at its core, Hector Lassiter, at great personal peril, engaging the FBI during J. Edgar Hoover's last dark days.
PIC: What else are you working on?
CM: HEAD GAMES is forthcoming as a graphic novel from First Second. I wrote the script and the project is working its way through the art process. I have a couple of standalones I'm polishing now, each with a contemporary setting, well away from historical topics. Spring 2009 will bring a last piece of nonfiction, a collection of interviews from Bleak House Books called ROGUE MALES. That one is just going to galley. PRINT THE LEGEND will be published by Thomas Dunne in winter 2010, and GNASHVILLE, set in Music City in the waning days of 1958, should follow that autumn.
PIC: Thanks greatly, Craig!
http://www.craigmcdonaldbooks.com/
[Craig McDonald interviewed by Tom Piccirilli 11/26]
