Author and renaissance man Scott Adlerberg has a new novel titled Graveyard Love out and it's really good. Now, I can tell you a hundred times how great it is and slap you around with a paperback copy and it won't incite you to read it, so I invited Scott over to have a chat about his eventful publishing history, what makes him tick, his passion for cinema and lots of other things. Because if you think the guy is cool, you're more likely to order his novel than if I beat you on the head with it.
So, without further ado, my favorite New Yorker since Walt Frazier, Mr. Scott Adlerberg!
Ben: So, I've (sort of) done my homework before this sit down and listened to the podcast you recorded with your editor J. David Osborne. One thing that caught my attention is that your said Jungle Horses and Graveyard Love were both written some time ago. Is that right? You also mentioned that Graveyard Love was much more of a straightforward crime novel than Jungle Horses, which has a rather important fantasy component. Which one of the two actually came first? Was the inclusion of fantasy an attempt to challenge yourself? What was the attraction of mixing both genres?
Scott: Jungle Horses was written some time ago. It had a whole history with a publisher who wound up going to jail for mail fraud and other things - a story I've told elsewhere. It never actually saw the light of day in print, and I put it away for several years. I dusted it off and sent it to David when Broken River Books was up and running, thinking, hoping, it might be a good fit there, and it turned out it was. But actually, Jungle Horses was written after my first novel, Spiders and Flies. That's a somewhat nightmarish kidnapping story set in New York and Martinique. It has a number of characters, and for basically everyone in the story, things end badly. With Jungle Horses, I wanted to write something that might have some darkness in it, but that would end well for the main characters, and most importantly, there would be no deaths. See if I could write a story that was dark enough and held the reader, but where nobody dies. That was the main challenge.
The mixing of genres wasn't something I thought about much. I usually write very slowly and very little seems to come easily, but Jungle Horses was one thing that did flow smoothly as I worked on it, start to finish. I just had the story, in the form it's in now. First half more or less realistic in London, second half more fantastical in the Caribbean. Racetrack horses in the first part, wild jungle horses in the second part. I didn't even really have crime genre fiction on my mind that much. The first half was more like trying to evoke just a smidgen of the feel of a certain era of Brit writers I love - Graham Greene, for example - and the second half was a stab at writing a weird island story, because I love those stories. The Island of Dr. Moreau, obviously, and a couple of short novels by the great Argentinian writer Adolfo Bioy Casares, The Invention of Morel and A Plan for Escape. Weird, fantastical island tales. That's a favorite genre of mine unto itself. Like Lost, which I thought was great, until the final season of course.
The mixing of genres wasn't something I thought about much. I usually write very slowly and very little seems to come easily, but Jungle Horses was one thing that did flow smoothly as I worked on it, start to finish. I just had the story, in the form it's in now. First half more or less realistic in London, second half more fantastical in the Caribbean. Racetrack horses in the first part, wild jungle horses in the second part. I didn't even really have crime genre fiction on my mind that much. The first half was more like trying to evoke just a smidgen of the feel of a certain era of Brit writers I love - Graham Greene, for example - and the second half was a stab at writing a weird island story, because I love those stories. The Island of Dr. Moreau, obviously, and a couple of short novels by the great Argentinian writer Adolfo Bioy Casares, The Invention of Morel and A Plan for Escape. Weird, fantastical island tales. That's a favorite genre of mine unto itself. Like Lost, which I thought was great, until the final season of course.
Graveyard Love I started about four years after I originally finished Jungle Horses. It's more of a straightforward first person narrator crime novel now, but when I first wrote it, it was very different. It was longer, and in its first section, was more of an "underground man" type of story. I showed the completed book to a writer friend of mine who's also a great reader, very insightful and someone I trust, and he suggested I cut at least a third of it and drastically restructure it. He was right, I knew that, but I didn't know quite how to do it. Problem was I didn't know what kind of book I wanted it to be. A straight crime novel or a Dosteovsky like "underground man" novel or whatever. And for whatever idiotic reason it took a long time for me to figure that out. I put Graveyard Love aside for several years and barely looked at it, not sure whether to abandon it, but unwilling to give up on it...until finally I just decided to write it as a lean, forward-driving crime story that I guess you could say falls into the psycho noir tradition. Why it took so long to hit upon the obvious, who knows? In writing anyway, I seem to always take the longest possible route between two points. But once I got back into it fully, which was a couple years ago, the writing went quickly enough and I finished it at the tail end of 2014.
Ben: Funny you mention H.G Wells, he's the first name I thought of when I read Jungle Horses. Not only the themes reminded me of him, but the style too. Back in those days, narration was more distant from character, omniscient. I felt like I was watching Arthur from above when reading the book. Almost like playing The Sims! Tell me, how was it like to have a manuscript orphaned by an editor? I mean, I understand the emotional involvement it takes to write a novel and I know for certain that it's a good book. Did it affected your confidence in the book at all having to through the submission process again or did you just wait for the right opportunity to show up? You said that in writing you always seem to take the longest route between two points, what was the process like for you as a writer, to bring back Jungle Horses to life?
Scott: Well, the same publisher who did the first edition of Spiders and Flies (there was an edition in 2001 with the publisher who went to jail and I got the novel republished years later with a legit indie press called Harvard Square Editions) was going to next do Jungle Horses. After all the problems getting Spiders out, it was almost a relief tht she wouldn't be doing Jungle Horses. But it goes without saying that the whole experience with her was exasperating and demoralizing. I did put Jungle Horses away and then for years I just didn't know what to do with it. Both because it's a genre mix and because it's a novella. This was before the current indie publisher boom which has brought so many adventurous publishers who'll take on offbeat stuff and before the current novella boom. Jungle Horses then seemed completely unmarketable. And I never had an agent anyway so....it sat. I liked it well enough, and I'd gotten good feedback from the 1 or 2 friends I'd shown it to - that many readers, no more - but that was about it.
Over the years, I'd glance at it occasionally, change a line or two, polish this or that, and wonder whether I should send it anywhere. Every time I'd say, damn, it's a pity because it reads well and probably would appeal to some people, and then I'd put it away again. We're talking over 10 years of this. Sometime in 2014, on the spur of the moment, I took it out again and decided why not get some new feedback on it. Maybe it is worth submitting somewhere. I sent it to the same friend who years earlier had given me the ruthless advice about cutting Graveyard Love and he loved it. No major suggestions for changes and he was like, "You should definitely send this out!" I was surprised he liked it so much. You sit with a story for so long, you may like it but you may also get blase about it because it's done and holds no surprises for you and you forget that someone coming to it for the first time may very well find it fresh and exciting. That's what happened here. So that reaction pumped me up. But where to send it? Bear in mind that at this point, still over all those years, a total of maybe 4 people had ever read the story. J. David Osborne at Broken River announced around that time that he wanted to start a line of Broken River e-books to go with the books he was putting out as both digital and hard copy books, and I thought Jungle Horses would be something he'd go for. I'd been following Broken River from its inception and contributed to the original Kickstarter campaign for it and so forth. Loved the stuff BR was putting out. So I sent it to David, who I was friendly with a bit as a fan of BR, and he also loved it and decided to make it the first of the Broken River digital book only series. The series never came to fruition but Jungle Horses wound up being published as both an e-book and a regular book. And by far most of the responses I've gotten to the book have been terrific. That's been gratifying, can't deny that. So...you just never know. A long long road for the book but in the end a pleasing result.
Over the years, I'd glance at it occasionally, change a line or two, polish this or that, and wonder whether I should send it anywhere. Every time I'd say, damn, it's a pity because it reads well and probably would appeal to some people, and then I'd put it away again. We're talking over 10 years of this. Sometime in 2014, on the spur of the moment, I took it out again and decided why not get some new feedback on it. Maybe it is worth submitting somewhere. I sent it to the same friend who years earlier had given me the ruthless advice about cutting Graveyard Love and he loved it. No major suggestions for changes and he was like, "You should definitely send this out!" I was surprised he liked it so much. You sit with a story for so long, you may like it but you may also get blase about it because it's done and holds no surprises for you and you forget that someone coming to it for the first time may very well find it fresh and exciting. That's what happened here. So that reaction pumped me up. But where to send it? Bear in mind that at this point, still over all those years, a total of maybe 4 people had ever read the story. J. David Osborne at Broken River announced around that time that he wanted to start a line of Broken River e-books to go with the books he was putting out as both digital and hard copy books, and I thought Jungle Horses would be something he'd go for. I'd been following Broken River from its inception and contributed to the original Kickstarter campaign for it and so forth. Loved the stuff BR was putting out. So I sent it to David, who I was friendly with a bit as a fan of BR, and he also loved it and decided to make it the first of the Broken River digital book only series. The series never came to fruition but Jungle Horses wound up being published as both an e-book and a regular book. And by far most of the responses I've gotten to the book have been terrific. That's been gratifying, can't deny that. So...you just never know. A long long road for the book but in the end a pleasing result.
Ben: You said something about Jungle Horses that caught my attention: you said you deliberately tried to write a crime story in which nobody died. Why is that so? Was it a sheer narrative stunt or is there an ideological basis to that challenge? Because it it hard. I mean, what do you think is as the heart of crime fiction if not people pushed at the edge of existence? I mean, most cozy mysteries I've read have at least one body in them. That said, I did not notice Jungle Horses had no casualties though, so it was well executed!
Scott: Ha, yes. Glad it didn't stick out to you, because there's no reason it should IF the story's working. And no, there's absolutely nothing ideological about it. As I was saying, the previous book, Spiders and Flies, had a bad ending for every major character in it. Death or despair for pretty much all, and the ones who died did so pretty roughly - a newlywed whose throat is slit on her wedding night, a guy axed to death in front of his lover, someone eaten alive by dogs, and so on. There's a decent body count in that book, and with Jungle Horses I wanted to change things up. Do something with a different tone. Plus, it can be fun to set yourself a challenge or limitation when you write a story. Makes you work through a problem, stretch yourself. In part, this was a way of doing that. Keep it dark, menacing, tense, but not kill anyone. Can I hold the reader's interest doing that? As you say, crime fiction often is people pushed to the edge of existence but that doesn't necessarily have to mean death. The threat of death, fear of death certainly, and usually people do die in crime fiction, but there's no rule saying there has to be dying. Still, if the story as it progressed had absolutely called for a character dying, I would have gone with that and killed the person off. You have to follow where the story best leads. But this story sort of came to me fully formed, with the whole conception there, and I didn't see any compelling narrative need as I wrote it to kill anyone off. That doesn't mean that everyone gets off happily, just that everyone goes on living at the end.
Ben: I like that exercise of challenging the form of crime fiction, which is extremely conservative. The content often is progressive and boundary challenging as it often addresses social issues such as human slavery and the sex trade, but it's often classically told because of the weight of the narrative. How do you think crime fiction can evolve from what it is now? I thought your stablemate (and collaborator to this blog) Gabino Iglesias' Zero Saints was extremely interesting in that regards as it involved the protagonist's beliefs in the fabric of the story itself. I've never read anything quite like it before. Is redefining the boundaries of crime fiction a preoccupation of yours? If so, what do you think needs changing?
Scott: When it comes to the question of crime fiction in general...I have no literary agenda and I don't spend time trying to redefine the boundaries of crime fiction or any fiction far as that goes. The main thing is I want to tell a gripping, intriguing story. Plot is extremely important to me so I do try to come up with stories that have compelling plots. Not just a series of good scenes or stories where character is king. Yes, obviously, you need interesting and complex characters but I don't think in all my years writing, I've ever started a story by building around a character. There has to be a situation, a fully developed plot, that in and of itself is strong. That's the goal anyway. Now, how that plot unfolds, that's the thing. You can approach that any number of ways, and I try to be inventive. I mean, as a reader, I enjoy a wide gamut of crime fiction from old-fashioned whodunits to contemporary neo-noir to something really fresh like Zero Saints, but when writing, I do try to do something not precisely like anything I've read before.
No one's completely original. That goes without saying. But if you're going to write in a genre like crime - and I'd feel the same way writing sci-fi or horror or any other genre - why bother doing it if you're not going to try something that doesn't fit just so into a neat mold? You want to keep the reader off balance and you don't want to fulfill too many of their expectations. At the same time, can you devise a plot that pulls the reader in and makes things suspenseful so the reader feels they have to keep reading. Remember, I'm only taking about what I like to write. As a reader, I enjoy a solid PI novel or a procedural done well or something that promises a certain reading experience and you get exactly that, very well done. I don't demand super inventiveness from every book I read. But when I do read something like Jon Bassoff's Corrosion or Stephen Graham Jones' The Least of My Scars or, going back a ways, Paul Auster's New York Trilogy or The Dead Mountaineer's Inn by the Strugatsky Brothers (and we could go on and on here), I get that little extra charge of excitement. The goal then in writing: to try as hard as possible to write stuff that gives that little extra charge of excitement to readers who have and treasure that "give me something I'm not quite expecting" mindset.
No one's completely original. That goes without saying. But if you're going to write in a genre like crime - and I'd feel the same way writing sci-fi or horror or any other genre - why bother doing it if you're not going to try something that doesn't fit just so into a neat mold? You want to keep the reader off balance and you don't want to fulfill too many of their expectations. At the same time, can you devise a plot that pulls the reader in and makes things suspenseful so the reader feels they have to keep reading. Remember, I'm only taking about what I like to write. As a reader, I enjoy a solid PI novel or a procedural done well or something that promises a certain reading experience and you get exactly that, very well done. I don't demand super inventiveness from every book I read. But when I do read something like Jon Bassoff's Corrosion or Stephen Graham Jones' The Least of My Scars or, going back a ways, Paul Auster's New York Trilogy or The Dead Mountaineer's Inn by the Strugatsky Brothers (and we could go on and on here), I get that little extra charge of excitement. The goal then in writing: to try as hard as possible to write stuff that gives that little extra charge of excitement to readers who have and treasure that "give me something I'm not quite expecting" mindset.
The evolution of crime fiction? I don't know if there's really an answer to that because there's so many different types of crime fiction. You have realist oriented crime fiction that puts social problems front and center; you have crime fiction centered on psychology and motive; you have modern versions of classic style whodunnits; you have police procedurals; you have pure escapist type mysteries, cozies and the like; now domestic thrillers are all the rage; and so on. Seems like more places than ever around the world are producing crime fiction, and that's something that has evolved over time and continues to evolve, that universality. More people of every color and background writing crime fiction. It seems to me also that never before has so much crime fiction been so well-written as now. Only a total ass at this point would call crime fiction something for sheer escapism or of a lower quality than any other type of fiction. So maybe that will be part of the evolution. More and more of the best writers, from a variety of backgrounds, when young, taking up crime fiction to investigate the world around them. There'll be the ones who are less formally adventurous and the ones who can experiment with crime fiction like some literary writers (for lack of a better term) experiment. And then like with everything you'll have readers who just stick with what they know they like and readers looking for writers who take chances.
Ben: This is interesting to me what you just said, that you want to tell gripping, intriguing stories first and foremost. I think this is a very healthy way to perceive writing, but it's also one part of a conundrum about fiction that I can't resolve. Let me try you: I think fiction always gets published either because it's great or because it's going to sell. Great fiction happens organically, there's no real way to manufacture it. Do you think it's possible to merge these two variables into one? In other words: how would you make storytelling excellence into a commodity without completely overhauling society?
Scott: You're asking something like 'would it be possible to turn the off-beat and go their own way indie type crime writers into James Patterson-like stars'? Would it be possible to do that without reinventing society? Sure, if the Ludovico Technique is applied to the indie writer like it was applied to Alex, in A Clockwork Orange, maybe there'd be a way to create in the indie writer an aversion to literary risk-taking and imaginativeness. Somehow create a therapy that makes the indie writer sick every time he or she verges on something off-beat or halfway original, you know, like what happens to Alex whenever he feels the urge to sex or violence. But the technique doesn't destroy the indie's writer's craftsmanship and skill with language so that the writer can now easily turn out conventional James Patterson-like thrillers without breaking a sweat...but I guess that's the overhauling you're talking about.
So, then, my answer is no. Definitely not possible. If I'm getting the gist of your question and answering what you actually asked. I think part of the evidence of that is how so many indie writers, myself included, don't seem to be able to write slick commercial things even if they try. I mean, if you could do it, why not do it, just once? Write a big fat conventional type thriller fast just for the money. I'd do it if I could. I could quit my 9-5 job on the earnings of my slick thriller and then write the stuff I truly want to write, meaning the stuff I'm writing now. Except I wouldn't have to"work" for a living. Or write one slick thriller every couple of years to support yourself and your own stuff all other times. You're telling me that a lot of indie writers, if they could, wouldn't do that? It would actually bring more freedom to do the writing that means something to you. But I'm 99 per cent certain I can't write that kind of book and from all indications, a lot of the indie writers out there don't seem to be able to do it either.
So, then, my answer is no. Definitely not possible. If I'm getting the gist of your question and answering what you actually asked. I think part of the evidence of that is how so many indie writers, myself included, don't seem to be able to write slick commercial things even if they try. I mean, if you could do it, why not do it, just once? Write a big fat conventional type thriller fast just for the money. I'd do it if I could. I could quit my 9-5 job on the earnings of my slick thriller and then write the stuff I truly want to write, meaning the stuff I'm writing now. Except I wouldn't have to"work" for a living. Or write one slick thriller every couple of years to support yourself and your own stuff all other times. You're telling me that a lot of indie writers, if they could, wouldn't do that? It would actually bring more freedom to do the writing that means something to you. But I'm 99 per cent certain I can't write that kind of book and from all indications, a lot of the indie writers out there don't seem to be able to do it either.
Ben: I've heard you discuss cinema on the Broken River Podcast, the other day. I know you're also part of a film club if I understood well. What do you think of the evolution of cinema and television as parallel storytelling mediums in the 21st century. It's very chic to say that television is the new cinema and that it is where you find the real narrative artists nowadays because television has found a new lease on life through quality storytelling, but would you agree that it would be putting blinders on to dismiss cinema? If so, what do you think movies have that television will never possess?
Scott: It's absolutely ridiculous to say anything remotely like "it's time to dismiss cinema." If I hear something like that from someone, to be honest, I don't even know what the hell they mean. Between movies shot on film and movies shot digitally, there are more movies made now than ever before. There isn't nearly enough time to keep up with all the movies being made. I'm talking about films being made all over the world. The number of sizable film festivals there are in the world - has there ever in film history been so many? Don't think so. I think what people are getting at when they talk about how TV is the "new cinema" and that TV is where you find so many talented filmmakers and writers now working is TV in relation to big budget Hollywood cinema. They're talking about one very specific type of commercial film making among all the various types of film making going on in the world. So this whole discussion is kind of Hollywoodcentric. But regardless. It's the argument bemoaning the blockbuster mentality, how every other film made, it seems, is based on comic books or is a sequel to a blockbuster or is a remake of an earlier film. The so-called dearth of "intelligent adult cinema" coming from Hollywood. I'm not entirely convinced even of this argument, but yes, it's hard not to be frustrated at times by the limited options Hollywood seems to give us, and directors themselves - people like Soderbergh, Lynch, Cronenberg - have talked about how difficult, nearly impossible, it is for them to get projects off the ground. Ok. In that gap, cable and sometimes network TV has stepped in offering much more creative freedom and a chance for people to make superlative stuff. A great thing.
I've never seen this new outburst of great TV, though, as something akin to cinema but more like a throwback, if anything, to the time when writers wrote triple decker novels that were serialized and the whole family would get caught up in a saga. Obviously, as many people have said, that's where TV can do what movies don't - tell these tales of novelistic depth and complexity over an extended time. The Wire really was like something you could see Balzac or Zola scripting if they were around now, writing for HBO. And also, as the common wisdom has it, TV is truly a writer's medium. The writer has clout, even control. One writer or a group of writers with a focused vision can drive an entire series and no matter how many seasons it's on, it's coherent and (for the most part) consistent. The Wire, Mad Men, The Sopranos, Deadwood, etc. But even these great shows, and the other great shows that have been on in recent years - what is the one thing about them that does not stick out? You think about the writing, the characters, the social insight, but usually not the visceral visual experience like you do with movies. That's not to say the best TV isn't well shot or visually impressive. Mad Men, for one, was gorgeous. True Detective, for all it problems otherwise, looked great. The best shows are not visually mundane. But you don't generally talk to your friends about the visual power of these shows like you would, say, with a Scorsese film or Sicario or The Revenant or Hou Hsiao-Hsien's The Assassin. Can TV do something like Mad Max: Fury Road or Interstellar? Potentially, but TV hasn't done that yet. For me, if and until something new comes along, movies will be the predominant visual medium, visual being the key word. So in my mind, it's not a competition between the two, or a matter of one superseding the other. They complement each other, and thank goodness, there are possibilities now in TV that never were there before. It's another place to work for the writers and directors having trouble with the restrictions in Hollywood, more good stuff for us as viewers to choose from. I just hope I can retire from working at a young enough age that I can catch up with all the TV series and movies I feel I'm falling behind on. I need years, at this point, to catch up.
I've never seen this new outburst of great TV, though, as something akin to cinema but more like a throwback, if anything, to the time when writers wrote triple decker novels that were serialized and the whole family would get caught up in a saga. Obviously, as many people have said, that's where TV can do what movies don't - tell these tales of novelistic depth and complexity over an extended time. The Wire really was like something you could see Balzac or Zola scripting if they were around now, writing for HBO. And also, as the common wisdom has it, TV is truly a writer's medium. The writer has clout, even control. One writer or a group of writers with a focused vision can drive an entire series and no matter how many seasons it's on, it's coherent and (for the most part) consistent. The Wire, Mad Men, The Sopranos, Deadwood, etc. But even these great shows, and the other great shows that have been on in recent years - what is the one thing about them that does not stick out? You think about the writing, the characters, the social insight, but usually not the visceral visual experience like you do with movies. That's not to say the best TV isn't well shot or visually impressive. Mad Men, for one, was gorgeous. True Detective, for all it problems otherwise, looked great. The best shows are not visually mundane. But you don't generally talk to your friends about the visual power of these shows like you would, say, with a Scorsese film or Sicario or The Revenant or Hou Hsiao-Hsien's The Assassin. Can TV do something like Mad Max: Fury Road or Interstellar? Potentially, but TV hasn't done that yet. For me, if and until something new comes along, movies will be the predominant visual medium, visual being the key word. So in my mind, it's not a competition between the two, or a matter of one superseding the other. They complement each other, and thank goodness, there are possibilities now in TV that never were there before. It's another place to work for the writers and directors having trouble with the restrictions in Hollywood, more good stuff for us as viewers to choose from. I just hope I can retire from working at a young enough age that I can catch up with all the TV series and movies I feel I'm falling behind on. I need years, at this point, to catch up.
Ben: So what are your projects for 2016 and 2017? Should we expect anything from the collaboration with Broken River Books? Also, if you have anyone to thank and anything to plug, now is the time!!
Scott: Well, I'm about halfway through a new novel now. Something a little different than the previous three books. It's called Jack Waters. It's set around 1900 and concerns a guy in New Orleans who makes his living playing poker. He had a well-to-do white father and a mother who was a Creole of color. So he's mixed racially, but somewhat southern in his sensibility. One day over a poker debt, he loses his temper and kills a man. He flees the US and settles on a Caribbean island where he winds up in a poker game with the country's president. When the president refuses to pay him poker debts he owes, Jack Waters vows revenge and winds up joining the government rebels on the island. It's the only way he can strike back at the president. So he's a gringo of color from the American South who gets involved in a foreign country's political revolution for a completely non-political reason. He's a murderer so there's a crime story aspect involved but it's also something of a revenge story and an adventure story and maybe a bit of an ironic political tale. I'm having a lot of fun writing it. I did show a section of what I have to J. David Osborne and he liked what he saw, so if all goes well with the book, it will be for Broken River, absolutely. I've had a great experience with Broken River and since you gave me the opportunity to thank whoever, I'll thank David. Jungle Horses and Graveyard Love are two books I figured might never see the light of day but through David and Broken River they have so....
Plugs? Well, just one, and I may as well be blunt about it since you're giving me the chance to do that. Graveyard Love has just been released and I'm excited about that and hoping obviously that people read it. It's straight crime, told from the criminal's point of view, and a fast, twisty read I think.
