Exploring the Human Animal With Crime Fiction Novelist Nick Kolakowski

Nick Kolakowski

By Sean Tuohy

Author Nick Kolakowski loves crime fiction. From his work with ThugLit, Crime Syndicate Magazine, and his upcoming novel A Brutal Bunch of Heartbroken Saps (out May 12), it’s easy to tell that the author truly values the hardboiled crime-fiction genre and knows how to write it well.

Kolakowski sat down with me recently to talk about his love for the genre, the seed that created the storyline for his new novel, and “gonzo noir.”

Sean Tuohy: What authors did you worship growing up?

Nick Kolakowski: I always had an affinity for old-school noir authors, particularly Raymond Chandler and Jim Thompson. What I think a lot of crime-fiction aficionados tend to forget is that a lot of the pulp of bygone eras really wasn’t very good: it was all blowsy dames and big guns and writing so rough it made Mickey Spillane look like Shakespeare. But writers like Chandler and Thompson emerged from that overheated milieu like diamonds; even at their worst, they offered some hard truth and clean writing.

ST: What attracts you to crime fiction, both as a reader and a writer?

NK: I feel that crime fiction is a real exploration of the human animal. You want to explore relationships, pick up whatever literary tome is topping the best-seller lists at the moment. You want a peek at the beast that lives in us, crack open a crime novel. As a reader, it’s exciting to get in touch with that beast through the relatively safe confines of paper and ink. As a writer, it’s good to let that beast run for a bit; I always sleep better after I’ve churned out a lot of good pages. 

ST: What is the status of indie crime fiction now?

NK: I’d like to think that indie crime fiction is having a bit of a moment. A lot of indie presses are doing great work, and highlighting authors who might not have gotten a platform otherwise. Crime fiction remains one of the more popular genres overall, and I’m hopeful that what these indie authors are producing will help fuel its direction for the next several years.

Not a whole lot of authors are getting rich off any of this, but writing isn’t exactly a lucrative profession. There’s a reason why all the novelists I know, even the best-selling ones, keep their day jobs. We’re all in it for the love.  

ST: What is your writing process? Do you outline or vomit a first draft?

NK: I keep notebooks. Over the years, those notebooks accumulate fragments: sometimes a line of two I’ve overheard on the subway, but sometimes several pages of story. Usually my novels and short stories start with a kernel of an idea, and I start writing as fast as I can; and as I start building up a serious word count, I begin throwing in those notebook fragments that seem to work best with the scene at the moment. It’s a haphazard way of producing a first draft, and it usually means I’m stuck in rewrite hell for a little while afterward as I try to smooth everything out, but it does result in finished manuscripts.

I simply can’t do outlines. I’ve tried. But outlining has always felt very paint-by-numbers to me; once I have the outline in hand, I’m less enthused about actually writing. But I know a lot of other writers who can’t work without everything outlined in detail beforehand.

ST: Where did the idea for A Brutal Bunch of Heartbroken Saps come from?

NK: A long time ago, I was in rural Oklahoma for a magazine story I was writing. It was early February, and the land was gray and stark. Near the Arkansas border, I saw a Biblical pillar of black smoke rising in the distance; as I drove closer, I saw a huge fire burning through a distant forest. This would be a really crappy place for my car to die, I thought. It would suck to be trapped here.

So that real-life scene rattled around in my head for years. Eventually I began depositing other figures in that landscape—Bill, the elegant hustler, based off a couple of actual people I know; an Elvis-loving assassin; crooked cops—to see how they interacted with each other. The result was funny and bleak enough, I thought, to commit to full-time writing. 

ST: You referred to A Brutal Bunch of Heartbroken Saps as “gonzo noir.” Can you dive into that term?

NK: I love crime fiction, but a lot of it is too serious. That seems like an odd thing to say about a genre concerned with heavy topics like murder and misery, but more than a few novels tend to veer into excessive navel-gazing about the human condition. As if injecting an excessive amount of ponderousness will make the authors feel better about devoting so many pages to chases and gunfire. 

But real-life mayhem and misery, as awful as it can be, also comes with a certain degree of hilarity. You can’t believe this dude with a knife in his eye is still prattling on about football! A reality television star might dictate whether we end up in a thermonuclear war! And so on. With gonzo noir, I’m trying to blend as much black humor as appropriate into the plot; otherwise it all becomes too leaden.

ST: Your main character, street-smart hustler Bill, is on the run from an assassin and finds himself in the deadly hands of some crazed town folks. Why do writers, especially in the crime fiction genre, like to torture their characters so much?

NK: Raymond Chandler once said something like: “If your plot is flagging, have a man come in with a gun.” I think a lot of current crime-fiction writers have a variation on that: “If your plot is flagging, have something horrible happen to your main character. Extra credit if it’s potentially disfiguring.” It’s an effective way to move the story forward, if done right, and how your protagonist reacts to adversity can reveal a lot about their character through action.

Done the wrong way, though, it becomes boring really quickly. Take the last few seasons of the TV show “24.” Keifer Sutherland played a great hardboiled character, but subjecting him to the upteenth gunshot wound, torture session, or literally heart-stopping accident got repetitive. When writing, it always pays to recognize the cliché, and figure out how to subvert it as effectively as possible—the audience will appreciate it.

In A Brutal Bunch of Heartbroken Saps, Bill has done a lifetime of bad stuff. He’s ripped people off, stolen a lot of money, and left more than a few broken hearts. I felt he really needed to really pay for his sins if I wanted his eventual redemption to have any weight. Plus I wanted to see how much comedy I could milk out of a severed finger (readers will see what I mean).     

ST: What’s next for you?

NK: I’ve been working on a longer novel (tentatively) titled Boise Longpig Hunting Club. It’s about a bounty hunter in Idaho who finds himself pursued by some very rich people who hunt people for sport. I’ve wanted to do a variation on “The Most Dangerous Game” for years, and the ideas finally came together in the right way. It’s an expansion of my short story, “A Nice Pair of Guns,” which appeared in ThugLit (a great, award-winning magazine; gone too soon.) 

ST: What advice do you give to young writers?

NK: A long time ago, the film director Terrence Malick came to my college campus. He was supposed to introduce a screening of his film “The Thin Red Line,” but he never set foot in the theater—unsurprising in retrospect, given his penchant for staying out of sight. However, he did make an appearance at a smaller gathering for students and faculty beforehand.

All of us film and writing geeks, we freaked out. Finally one of us cobbled together enough courage to actually walk up to him and ask for some advice on writing. He said—and you bet I still have this in a notebook—“You just have to write. Don’t look back, just get it all out at once.”

I think that’s the best advice I’ve ever heard. It’s easy to stay away from the writing desk by telling yourself that you’re not quite ready yet, that you’re not in the mood, that somehow the story isn’t quite fully baked in your mind. If you think like that, though, nothing is ever going to have to come out. Even if you have to physically lock yourself in a room, you need to sit down, place your hands on the keyboard, and force it out. The words will fight back, but you’re stronger.  

ST: Can you please tell us one random fact about yourself?

NK: I like cats and whiskey.

To learn more about Nick Kolakowski, visit his official website or follow him on Twitter @nkolakowski.

The Writer's Bone Interviews Archive

Investigating Crime at the End of the World With Author Ben H. Winters

Ben H. Winters (photo credit: Mallory Talty)

By Daniel Ford

Noir lovers will be familiar with the opening scene of author Ben H. Winters’ award-winning novel The Last Policeman. A body is found hanging in a McDonald’s bathroom and a hardboiled detective smells foul play. His colleagues tell him not to bother tracking down leads because the case looks like a suicide. Detective Hank Palace does it anyway. Seems like typical crime fiction, right?

Well, what I didn’t tell you is that Palace is living in a world that is about to be annihilated by a meteor hurtling toward Earth. He’s one of the last people on the planet still willing to do his job in the face of certain and inevitable doom.

Winters’ novel spawned well-reviewed two sequels that earned praise from the likes of author John Green and Publisher’s Weekly. He talked to me recently about his early influences, writing for different genres, and the inspiration behind The Last Policeman.

Daniel Ford: When did you decide you wanted to be a writer?

Ben H. Winters: I've known it, in one way or another, since I was a kid. It took me a long time to know what kind of writer I wanted to be, or was meant to be, I guess. I was a newspaper columnist, in college; I was standup and an improv comedian; I was a playwright and a lyricist. So a lot of writing, but fiction came late.

DF: Who were some of your early influences?

BW: When I was a kid I read a lot of fantasy and science fiction. I read Robert Asprin, I read Heinlein and Asimov. I remember the Wild Card books edited by George RR Martin. (Huh, whatever became of that guy?) I remember being transfixed by Farmer's To Your Scattered Bodies Go, at age 14 or 15. The first "literary" author I really got into was Kurt Vonnegut, and then in college I fell in love with Charles Dickens. 

DF: What is your writing process like? Do you listen to music? Outline?

BW: I always try to outline, and always end up abandoning the outline and then coming back to it and then starting a new one and then abandoning that one too, and it goes on like that until the novel is done. I've stopped being annoyed at myself for not being able to keep to an outline. It will always be impossible to keep to the outline; it will always be valuable to try. I listen to music constantly. I vary it depending on my mood, or the mood of the story. A lot of Dylan, a lot of Tom Waits, a lot of opera. Two days ago I discovered a songwriter named Langhorne Slim and his work is heavily influencing my writing at the moment.

DF: Your bio also says you’ve written extensively for the theater. Does your writing process change at all when you’re writing for other genres?

BW: The main difference in writing for the theater is that it is much more collaborative, earlier on, especially because I mostly wrote writing musicals, which involve not just your imagination, but that of the composer, the director, the choreographer, the actors, and so on. If you can't accommodate your ideas and let them be enlivened and improved by the other artists, you're screwed. Novel writing is by its nature a much more isolated process, which usually I love and sometimes casts me into pits of despair.

DF: Since you’ve also worked as a journalist, I have to ask what you think of the current state of journalism. Also, what’s the most entertaining story you ever worked on?

BW: Smarter people than me will have to opine on the state of journalism. I wrote a piece once where I went with a group called Anti-Racist Action to protest outside the suburban home of a local Neonate asshole. Who emerged from his house to protest the protest, and managed to single me out, correctly identify me, and tell me he "doesn't talk to Jews." That was a pretty exciting story.

DF: What inspired your Last Policeman trilogy?

BW: I have always wanted to write a detective story. Because I was pitching this book to Quirk Books, a publisher that skews toward books with big hooks and big concepts (i.e. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies), I knew I wasn't going to just do your basic police procedural or detective book. I thought a cop solving cases even though the world was going to end was a pretty sharp angle, and that's where I came up with the asteroid.

DF: How much of yourself ended up in Detective Hank Palace? Would you handle a looming apocalypse as well as he does?

BW: I wish I was more like him. I doubt very much that I would have the integrity to keep working, and hang on to my moral sense, as long as he does. The thing is, my job (writer, writing teacher) isn't like being a police officer: nobody relies on it for their immediate safety or well being. I hope I would handle the looming apocalypse by protecting my children as much as I could for as long as I could.

DF: How did you develop the rest of the characters and themes in The Last Policeman? What are some of the things you wanted to explore in this world on the brink of extinction?

BW: Once I had this basic plot idea (cop solving crimes though the world is ending), once I got going on it, the themes presented themselves, really. Oh, I said, this is a book about death. Oh, this is a book about how we order our lives, given the fact that life, for all of us, is bounded. I didn't set out to do a book about those things—I set out to do a cool mystery. I was lucky enough to conceive a plot that suggested those themes, and then I just rode where they took me.

DF: How long did it take you to write The Last Policeman, land an agent, and publish it? Did you know it was going to be a trilogy when you started?

BW: I was in the very fortunate position of having an existing relationship with Quirk Books—I had done a bunch of humorous nonfiction titles for them, and then three somewhat less serious novels: Sense & Sensibility & Sea Monsters, Android Karenina, and Bedbugs. So my editor there, Jason Rekulak, and I had this back and forth, looking for the next thing to do together. I pitched him this idea about the cop and the asteroid, and he said what remains one of my favorite things anyone has ever said to me: "it sounds like it should be a trilogy." So before I really got going on the first one, I knew there would be three, and that helped me get that first book right, knowing I had time in the next two to edge closer to the end of the world.

DF: What’s your advice to aspiring authors?

BW: The best writing instruction you will get is from reading great writing. Not necessarily in your genre—don't just read mysteries because that's what you write, and not even necessarily fiction. Read poetry; read lyrics; read nonfiction; read the newspaper; read everything.  That's how you learn what makes a good sentence, and what makes a good story.

DF: Can you please name one random fact about yourself?

BW: I was not born with the "H." in my name (Ben H. Winters). My middle name is actually Allen. When I got married, my wife took my last name and I took the initial of her maiden name into mine.

To learn more about Ben H. Winters, visit his official website or like his Facebook page.

The Writer's Bone Interviews Archive

Tumbleweed Tendencies: A Conversation With Author Brian Panowich About His Debut Novel Bull Mountain

Brian Panowich (Photo credit: David Kernaghan)

By Daniel Ford

I became friendly with author Brian Panowich after I crashed a Twitter conversation between him, David Joy, and Michael Farris Smith about music, bourbon, and writing. That exchange led to the creation of Writer’s Bone’s “The Writer’s Guide to Music” and an advanced reader copy of Panowich’s debut novel Bull Mountain (which comes out July 7, and will be reviewed in this week’s “Bruce, Bourbon, and Books”).  

Panowich was also nice enough to talk to me about being a comic book kid, how he developed his writing style, and the inspiration for Bull Mountain.

Daniel Ford: When did you decide you wanted to be a writer?

Brian Panowich: I think I knew when I was a little kid that I wanted to write. I lived in my head a lot and read books more than I did anything else. I was terrible at sports and I was pretty geeky. But as I got older, my endless string of other interests distracted me from writing and dragged me all over the place. I definitely wasn’t the guy that stayed focused his whole life on one goal and is now living his dream. Once I got my tumbleweed tendencies under control, I returned to writing as a plausible medium for me to create something. So although the seeds were planted when I was a boy, it took nearly thirty years for me to actually nurture them.

DF: Who were some of your early influences?

BP: I was a comic book kid. I still am, to be honest. Frank Miller, George Perez, Chris Claremont, they were the guys that taught me how to tell a story. As I moved forward, Edgar Rice Burroughs became a huge influence via my father’s bookshelf, and of course I went through a Stephen King phase, but then I found Elmore Leonard and Cormac McCarthy and nothing was really the same after that.

DF: What is your writing process like? Do you listen to music? Outline?

BP: I devour music like food. It’s as big a part of my everyday life as breathing, but I need total silence when I write. I can’t even tolerate a television in the background, so writing at home with my wife and four kids is pretty tough. I wrote the entirety of Bull Mountain locked up in a spare room at the fire station where I work. I’m lucky to have the kind of job that afforded me that extra time alone at night to write, or else it would have taken me a lot longer to do it. I applaud the folks that work a nine-to-five job, come home to a family, and still find the time to write.

Nowadays I use the few hours I have to myself while the kids are at school to write and I try to do it everyday, even if it’s just to jot down a few lines. I have to write something everyday or I feel unbalanced, like I wasted daylight. I don’t anyways want to, but once I start I usually end up engrossed with whatever I sit down to accomplish. And I do outline—to a degree. With Bull Mountain, I wrote a sentence or two summarizing each chapter that fit on the front of one sheet of paper. That was my road map. I veered from the map quite a bit, and that’s the point I think, to let the story tell itself, but that road map was there to steer me back on track if it got out of hand.

DF: How did the idea for Bull Mountain originate?

BP: I always liked the idea of everyone thinking they are the heroes of their own story. The bad guy never thinks he’s the bad guy, so I wanted to write something to that end, but didn’t know exactly what about. I like to ride mountain bikes. I’m not very good at it, but I ride a lot and that’s where I do a lot of my plotting and scheming. I was out one day riding and listening to The Band’s “Up on Cripple Creek,” and the first line hit me like a hammer. “When I get off of this mountain.” I know that’s not a lot of lyric, but that line struck me for some reason and within the next few miles, I had the general plot of Bull Mountain fleshed out. I wrote two short stories that night from two opposing points of view, one from my protagonist and one from my antagonist, with the idea in mind of not really knowing which was which. Those two stories got me my agent and became this book.

DF: The crime genre has certain built-in tropes that can deter some writers from taking the plunge. How did you ensure that your tale was original?

BP: I think it helped that the crime aspect of the novel was secondary. I wanted this book to speak more about the family dynamic of these people than the actual crimes they commit. I wanted to build a saga around that idea on par with something like The Godfather, and I didn’t spend a lot of time researching if the angles of the mystery had been used before. In fact I was positive they had been. With the billions of stories that exist in the world, written or spoken, it’s hard to believe any idea can be completely original, but it was still a story I wanted to tell with my own unique perspective, and I think that comes through. I also thought I was on to something by setting it in a part of the country I feel goes unnoticed. There’s a rich history in the North Georgia Mountains that I’m proud to be a part of now.

DF: How much of yourself—and the people you have daily interactions with—did you put into your main characters? How do you develop your characters in general?

BP: I think it’s impossible not to inject yourself into the people you write all the way across the board. Your good guy is the way you’d want to be at your best, and your bad guy is still a product of what you yourself define as bad, but at some point they stop being you and take on lives of their own. Clayton Burroughs started out very similar to me, but as the story became more about him, he became his own person. My villains are the same way. They might start off as bad as I think I could be, but before long I’m shocked at what they can do on their own. The bit players are largely based on people I’ve met over the years. I file away mannerisms and turns of phrase and blend them together to form new composites accordingly, but if a character progresses, I don’t see the person I based them on anymore. Kate Burroughs, Clayton’s wife, is a great example of that. Her character grew and grew as the story developed and before I knew it, she was dictating to me how she would act. I love it when that happens.

DF: What are some of the themes you tackle in Bull Mountain?

BP: Family. Dysfunction. Loyalty. Take those three and crank it up to eleven.

DF: When you finished your first draft, did you know you had something good, or did you have to go through multiple rounds of edits to realize you had something you felt comfortable taking to readers?

BP: I knew I had a pretty good starting point, but it was a good five or six drafts later before I was comfortable sending it to my agent. Even then, I think comfortable is the wrong word. It was more like, at some point I just needed to stand back and let go. That was tough for me to do. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to look at a manuscript and say it’s done. I could revise and revise and revise forever and always find more things I could do to improve it. I think some authors get stuck in that and end up standing in their own way. That sucks, but I can understand how it happens.

DF: How do you balance writing and marketing your work (i.e. book tours, engaging with readers on social media, etc.)?

BP: I’m blessed in that department for two reasons.

1. I love running my mouth. I was born with the gift to gab and in most cases, when not mixed with copious amounts of bourbon, it works out for me in social settings. I enjoy connecting with people and talking about art, music, books, whatever. Social media is fun. It can be a little tedious and makes me feel a bit pretentious sometimes, but over all I enjoy it. I’m finding out that that makes me a touch different than a lot of other authors out there who are generally more secluded that I am.

2. I’m also working with a top-notch team at Putnam who knows exactly what they’re doing. That’s great because it allows me to focus on the fun part—the writing. Knowing I have the best marketing and PR people on the planet in my corner makes that balance incredibly easy.

DF: Now that you have your first novel under your belt, what’s next?

BP: I just turned in a second book in the McFalls County Series that features a lot of the same characters from Bull Mountain. That should be published by Putnam next year. I’m also in the process now of plotting out a third one. I love the idea of writing about different characters, and different eras even, that all share the commonality of place. The fictitious McFalls County is the only guaranteed recurring character. Bull Mountain acts as a springboard into that.

I also just finished a comic book script for a Hawkeye story I want to pitch to Marvel…(Hey Marvel, are you listening?)

DF: What advice would you give aspiring authors?

BP: Mainly, be wary of other author’s advice, especially those that make their money solely by giving it. There really are no rules. I’m not saying don’t ask questions of the writers you admire (I did) or that all “how-to” books are snake oil. Studying your profession and using the bits and pieces that make sense to you are essential, but any book, seminar, or pay-to-play contest that promises the moon can be downright predatory. Only three things are going to help you produce art for a living. Producing art, letting people see it, and doing both of those things with fearless tenacity. And none of that will cost you a dime.

DF: Can you please name one random fact about yourself?

BP: I rub my feet together like a cricket when I sleep. It makes my wife crazy.

To learn more about Brian Panowich, check out his official website, like his Facebook page, or follow him on Twitter @BPanowich.

FULL ARCHIVE

Writing Fedora: 10 Questions With Historical Crime Writer Kelli Stanley

Kelli Stanley

By Daniel Ford

You’ve got to respect a writer who pursues her craft while wearing a smart fedora.

Kelli Stanley’s biography on her official website could double as Writer’s Bone’s mission statement:

“Kelli earned a Master’s Degree in Classics, loves jazz, old movies, battered fedoras, Art Deco and speakeasies.”

It gets better. Stanley is best known for her Miranda Corbie series of historical noir novels and short stories set in 1940 San Francisco. City of Dragons won the Macavity Award for Best Historical Novel, and was nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, a Shamus Award, a Bruce Alexander Award, and an RT Book Reviews Award. She also writes a “Roman Noir” series that takes place in ancient history.

Stanley took a break from the past, pushed back her fedora, and answered a few of my questions about her novels and writing process.

Daniel Ford: When did you decide you wanted to be a writer?

Kelli Stanley: I’m not sure if I ever did, actually—writing was just something I did. Poetry, mainly, though I wrote my first play (a noir, of course) when I was 8 years old. I loved writing term papers, speeches, letters, anything.

At the same time, because writing was so much a part of me, I never considered pursing an actual career in it…so my academic history is checkered with experimentation. I was a drama major for a couple of years, flirted with film and English, and finally settled on art history and classics, with a Master’s Degree in the latter.

It was during my collegiate career as a classic major that I was first exposed to Steven Saylor’s mystery series set in Late Republic Rome, and I thought to myself “Gee…I wonder if I could do that?”

Translation was one of the aspects of classics that I enjoyed the most (and something for which I won awards), but I didn’t want to concentrate solely on translation. And the closer the “terminus” of Ph.D. approached, the more squeamish I became.

I eventually realized that the breadth of study in classics is one of the key elements that drove me to its pursuit, and that a doctorate would kill the very thing I love, i.e. force me to specialize. I’d already written Nox Dormienda in my senior year (while also working on my thesis), so I threw caution to the winds and decided to pursue publication—which is different than deciding to be a writer, and a whole lot more complicated.

Alea iacta est, and I crossed the Rubicon in 2007 when I got word that my book would be published the following year.

DF: What is your writing process like? Do you listen to music? Outline?

KS: I outline in order to interweave the usually-two-but-potentially-more subplots of the novel and to maintain a suspenseful pace punctuated by dramatic beats—a must with writing crime fiction, especially anything with thriller overtones. For me, an outline is like a road map from which you are free to deviate when you find a side road that begs for exploration.

I only listen to music that Miranda might hear or encounter, and I do that for research and inspiration—not while I’m actually crafting sentences. Writing is its own music, and writing a novel is like a composing a symphony—and music gets in the way of music.

DF: You’re best known for your Miranda Corbie series of historical noir novels and short stories set in 1940 San Francisco—which include City of Ghosts, City of Secrets, and City of Dragons. What drew you to noir and who were some of your early influences? What made you decide 1940s San Francisco as a setting?

KS: I’ve always been drawn to the period of American history from the 1920s through the end of the WWII. I’ve also always adored film noir. As a little girl, I could do a mean Jimmy Cagney impression! I must have been born with a noir gene. Not many people in my third grade class could figure out why I was writing a play about gangsters, spies, and an unfaithful, treacherous girlfriend.

My actual taste of literary noir didn’t come until I was an adult, however. I grew up reading Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie as a child (and Dame Agatha is far darker than many people think).

Raymond Chandler was my first real writing teacher. I devoured everything he wrote, and realized style, as he once said (and I paraphrase) is all a writer really has to call her own, so you need to develop it, hone it, and protect it. Hammett followed—to him, I owe the importance of existential, tough-as-nails realism, the moral force of class warfare, and the beauty of bare-bones story-telling.

I think of Chandler and Hammett as (in a bizarre way) the Catullus and Horace of hardboiled literature. The latter two were contemporary Roman poets who were both brilliant in contradictory and complementary ways, as were Hammett and Chandler. Other influences include Cornell Woolrich, Vera Caspary, Daphne du Maurier, and (particularly in opposition to his misogyny) James M. Cain…along with a host of other writers, including those who wrote for Hollywood.

I’ve been at least as influenced outside the genre as inside—because, frankly, I don’t really believe in genres. Because I grew up reading constantly—mostly poetry and literature—I’ve been influenced by a range of authors and poets from Thomas Hardy to Steinbeck to Poe to James to Shakespeare to Dickens to Saroyan to Fitzgerald to Austen to Hemingway to Nathanel West to Shirley Jackson to Whitman to Sophocles to O’Neil to Ray Bradbury to Tennessee Williams to…you get the idea. I guess the linking component is great writing, particularly with a strong lyrical aspect or skeletal framework.

As for San Francisco…well, I live here. It’s a fabled city with a fabled past, and a distinct type of noir atmosphere that is older than Los Angeles’—stemming from her Gold Rush days of desperation, sweat, and broken dreams. It’s a city with a corrupt police force at the time (Los Angeles did not have the lock on that, sadly), and with Hammett as the inspirational literary pipeline. It also embodies the dichotomy of outrageous beauty coexisting on top of ugly social conditions and nostalgic, romantic views of the past vs. historical truths…a main theme I explore with the books.

DF: How long did it take you to complete your first novel? Has your writing process changed in anyway since that initial endeavor?

KS: I was working on my thesis at the time, so actually writing it took about a year and a half. My process has become more solidified, if no less terrifying. Ask virtually any published author and they’ll tell you the same thing: you wonder whether or not you can write with every book you face. It’s the horror of the vacuum, that blank page fear, and the sad fact that most of us are terribly insecure.

DF: Do you have an in-depth research process?

KS: I research constantly. I don’t have anything I’d dignify by calling it a process. There are a few things I do with every book, however: go to the main library and research newspapers from the dates I’ve selected for the narrative; research Life Magazine from the same dates; consult my many, many of-the-period reference books; study photos and videos and any pertinent documentary footage; search out and secure story-related ephemera to add to my ever-growing collection. That collection, by the way, includes all kinds of souvenirs from the World’s Fair on Treasure Island, train schedules, journals, railroad china, and all sorts of other inspirational and forgotten bits of daily life that I use to flesh out the books and make them seem three-dimensional.

I’m something of a fanatic about research, and was very honored that City of Dragons won the Macavity Award for best historical mystery.

DF: You also write a series set in first century Roman Britain—which include the novels The Curse-Maker and Nox Dormienda. How did the idea for this series come about and what are some of the defining attributes of “Roman Noir?” KS: Well, as I mentioned earlier, I was staring at “the end,” aka matriculation. So, in a sense, “Roman Noir” was, itself, born from a noirish desperation to find something to do with my degree and my life that wasn’t just the typical “get a doctorate, go teach” path.

KS: As for what it is…firstly, it’s a playful pun on the French literary term for noir or hardboiled. Secondly, it’s my idea of translating the sometimes strange but always human ancient world into a more modern and relatable feel and style. Noir and hardboiled conventions suit Rome and suit the culture…so, in this case, instead of Latin poetry, I’m translating history.

That said, as a classical scholar, my research is extremely accurate. When I speculate, I do so with the evidence and credentials to make an argument or write a journal article. That’s one reason I was so honored and delighted to win the Bruce Alexander Award for Nox Dormienda, my debut novel.

Some people get confused by the approach. They apparently believe that Romans should be written according to the upper class British or Transatlantic accents with which they are nearly always portrayed in film and television. I mean, c’mon—Romans weren’t all wordy, nerdy, rhetorically grandiose characters. Not that my language in the books is anachronistic—far from it. The metaphors and similes so associated with hardboiled are based on actual history and actual Roman culture.

DF: True or false: You write while wearing your fedora.

KS: True. I wear my “writing fedora,” which is a beat-up vintage Champ felt. The reason is that it’s a visual cue for my partner to know I’m “in the zone,” i.e. don’t talk to me unless it’s really important.

I own many fedoras—from red to orange, from summer straw to winter felt, vintage and modern—but other than my old Champ, I don’t wear them around the house.

DF: What does the future hold for Kelli Stanley?

KS: Right now, I’m working on the next Miranda Corbie novel, City of Sharks, which is the last one on this particular contract. I hope to be able to write more Miranda and to hopefully pen not just another Roman book, but a few other things rattling around in my head: a stand alone thriller, a YA, and assorted other projects.

DF: What advice do you give to up-and-coming writers?

KS: Research the business, because it’s in a constant state of flux. Choose your agent carefully, and don’t settle for publication at all costs—sometimes it’s better to wait to be published really well.

Think before you self-publish. Publication, whether it’s traditional or done through Amazon, is a business. Ask yourself if you really want to put in the time and energy necessary to undertake that venture. Finish the book before you even think about contacting an agent, editor, or other professional. And, most importantly, keep at it.

DF: Can you please name one random fact about yourself?

KS: My first record album as a kid was “Free to Be…You and Me”, based on the Marlo Thomas television show. It’s still a great album with a great message for children, and I highly recommend it!

To learn more about Kelli Stanley, check out her official website, like her Facebook page, or follow her on Twitter @kelli_stanley.

The Writer's Bone Interviews Archive

Noir Hop Artist Zilla Rocca On How He Crafted His Distinct Sound

Zilla Rocca

Photo by Edwin Hay

By Sean Tuohy

Musician Zilla Rocca put together two styles of urban story to spawn his own subgenre he calls “noir hop.”

His latest album, “No Vacation For Murder,” came out a few months ago and showcases the artist’s ability to create tragic tales set to head bobbing beats. His self-made tone is brooding and filled with an uncontrollable creative energy that kicks to break loose.

Rocca sat down with me to discuss his creative process, his views on the music world, and what the future holds for him.

Sean Tuohy: Where did your love of noir and hip hop come from?

Zilla Rocca: I fell in love with hip hop as a kid. I used to watch MTV all day as an only child, going back to when I was really young, when Young MC "Bust a Move" and Tone Loc "Wild Thing" and MC Hammer were on television all day. As I got older and was able to buy my own tapes like Naughty By Nature, Dr. Dre, Wu-Tang and such, I had officially caught the bug and I haven't looked back. I liked the sound of people rhyming, the way people used to dance, and the outfits they wore. It was like nothing going on where I lived in South Philly, which was predominantly working class Irish and Italian people listening to Top 40 or the oldies, like Sinatra.

I was always a big reader too, so I used to read young detective books like Encyclopedia Brown. I always connected with characters that were smart, that were curious, and that weren't afraid to pursue something, so later on when I realized what noir was, it made perfect sense to become a diehard fan of it. Now I read Hard Case Crime books, Elmore Leonard, Frederic Brown, David Goodis, and others. I'm fascinated by crime and how or why people commit it.

ST: When did you decide that you could smash the two worlds of noir and hip hop together?

ZR: Back in 2009, I made an album called "The Slow Twilight" as the collective 5 O'Clock Shadowboxers with Seattle producer Blurry Drones, which was heavily influenced by the noir flick "Blast of Silence." The album is about alienation and anger that never quite bubbles all the way to the surface. I realized then that I made something completely original and that I needed to take ownership of this new style, which I coined "noir hop". And ever since then, it's been my calling card with any project I release, from the artwork to the song titles to the stories on the records. It was the best decision I've ever made musically because it gave me a distinct identity.

ST: What draws you to the world of classic noir?

ZR:  I love classic noir because there's no time for bullshit. People have a clear purpose, whether their intentions are noble or heinous. The writing is quick and brutal. The world of classic noir is seductive and dangerous. The slang is thick, the men are tough, the women are devilish. There's a clear connection between the themes of classic noir and classic hip hop, namely that it's a reaction to a particular city and a particular set of morals. I've lived in almost every part of Philadelphia my whole life, and I've been around people who decided to join the Mafia and people who decided to become cops, people who became dealers and people who became junkies. So that aspect of the literature influenced my writing with hip hop, because hip hop is all about you representing what you know and where you're from.

ST: Which hip hop artist influenced you the most? Which noir writer influenced you the most?

ZR: I'd say Aesop Rock has influenced me the most musically because he showed me a long time ago that you can do whatever you want. For a long time, there were unwritten rules in rap about how you look, what your content should be, who you could emulate, etc. Aesop Rock completely destroyed every rule in the book and has made the most original music for over a decade in rap while always moving forward. His writing is unmatched. His slang is very coded. His production is swampy yet digestible. And his voice is like a death dealer. He gave me confidence to try things that the status quo would frown upon.

There's different noir writers who have influenced different songs and projects. "The Slow Twilight" is very Raymond Chandler influenced. I have songs that haven't been released yet that owe a huge debt to Ed Brubaker and Megan Abbot. My new album "No Vacation For Murder" is probably most influenced by David Goodis because he was a Philly guy who wrote about men near my age in my town making very bad decisions.

Zilla Rocca (Photo by Edwin Hay)

ST: You have built your own sub genre called "noir hop." What does it feel like to be the first of your kind?

ZR: I've noticed that my style and terminology has crept into the subconscious of my peers, which is corny in one way but flattering in another. It means that people have paid attention to my work, but could never fully maximize what I do because they're taking surface level pieces of my stuff—black and white videos, fedoras, whiskey, cigarette smoke, etc. People weren't doing that as much in indie rap before I made that my flag to wave five years ago. I've had other people point these things out to me so I know they too respect the architect.

ST: What is your writing process like? Do you have the lyrics first or the beat?

ZR: I read all of the time and watch a lot of television, so I'll catch a certain phrase and write it down in my notepad app on my iPhone. Or I'll overhear someone say something really slick in a conversation and write that down too. So when it's time to write a song, I skim through my notes for a phrase to spark the concept or hook. I like to write things that are vivid and use phrases no one else has ever uttered in rap, so my notes are like my cheat sheets to accomplish that. I never write without a beat because the beat determines everything: the mood, the flow, the story, the spacing of the words. And the notes I keep help me add some flourishes along the way once I figure out what to do. When I first started out 17 years ago, I used to write lyrics first and match them with a beat. I'll do that once in a while if I wrote a song and it got scrapped so I don't waste any lyrics. But 90 percent of the time, the music creates the words.

ST: You came out with "No Vacation For Murder" not too long ago. Can you give us the background on this album? How long did you work on it?

ZR: The album actually dropped a couple months ago after years of work. It took about two years to write the album and four years total to complete. It was inspired by real life betrayal by people that were the closest to me. I had to take time off from making the record because it was too heavy, so I put out a bunch of other projects that weren't as cumbersome to fill the time.

There's parts on the album that play out like revenge fantasies, and other parts on the album where I take full responsibility for even having those relationships in the first place. I did a lot of growing up from the time I wrote the first song to the time the album was getting mixed and mastered. So the trick was to figure out how to determine the narrative as an album, since I started off feeling like I wanted to exact revenge at all costs on people who had broken my heart, compared to feeling at peace and letting go of all those emotions years later. I can say proudly now that it's my best work, and that unfortunate set of circumstances were the best things to ever happen to me.

ST: Your single "Shoot the Piano Player" is a stunning one-act noir play set to an awesome beat. Where did this song come from? Why did you make this one of the first singles off the new album?

ZR: My producer Blurry Drones, who is the driving force behind The Shadowboxers’ aesthetic, sent me that beat a long time ago. I wasn't really impressed with it. And then one day my friend Has-Lo stumbled across it and thought he and I should tell a quick crime story to it in the vein of Raekwon and Ghostface Killah, two of our biggest influences, for a different project. We did the song pretty quickly, and after hearing it, I told Has-Lo that I had to have it for the album.

My director Pat Murray, who has done several of my past videos, came up with the entire concept. I love working with Pat because he's a visionary—none of the work we've done together looks like anyone else's videos in rap. He understands the mood I want when I do videos, and I give him 100 percent creative control, something most artists don't afford him when they hire him.

ST: The music video for "Shoot the Piano Player" is stylish and original. How did you decide to set the tone for the video?

ZR: Again, that's all Pat. He had previously used that location called the Physick House, a historical landmark in Philly, for a commercial shoot. It was very elegant and built in the 19th century. Lucky for us, we shot it on a Saturday afternoon when it was raining like crazy, so it gave us an added sense of doom. And Pat had the idea very early on to do all long shots for each take, so everything you see in the video had to be filmed non-stop with no edits. If anything was off, we had to start from the beginning and do it for the duration for the song. In short, Pat Murray is untouchable.

Zilla Rocca (Photo by Edwin Hay)

ST: What does the future hold for Zilla Rocca?

ZR: Who knows? I learned recently just to let things happen instead of trying to control everything. Since I've done that, I've been lucky enough to have favorable situations come together. It's better to attract good things rather than chase them.

ST: Can you tell us one random fact about yourself?

ZR: No matter what city I go to, someone will pull over, or stop me in the street, and ask me for directions. It's happened in Philly, Chicago, London, Phoenix, New York City, Los Angeles, and more. I guess I always look like I know where I'm going.

To learn more about Zilla Rocca, like his Facebook page, or follow him on Twitter @ZillaRocca.

The Writer's Bone Interviews Archive