The F**k Dialogues

“There are 400,000 words in the English language, and there are seven you can’t say on television. What a ratio that is! 399,993 to 7. They must really be baaaad. They must be OUTRAGEOUS to be separated from a group that large. “All of you words over here, you seven….baaaad words.” That’s what they told us, right? …You know the seven, don’t ya? That you can’t say on TV? Shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker and tits.”

- George Carlin, who celebrated his on Saturday by getting more ’stuff.’

To make all of this babbling concrete and real and wonderful, I present to you the cover for EXPLETIVE DELETED and it’s subsequently thrilling frontlist page on the publishers (Bleak House Books) site.

I may have been quiet, but I have been working diligently to make this book a reality and this is the HTML that proves it.

More interviews (including the charming Anthony Neil Smith and the luscious H.P. Tinker) shall follow soon along with continuing news about the editing process, the launch party and information about the sequel.

Yes, this nasty book shall have a companion.

So keep tuning in, kids. I have more tricks up my sleeve!

Once upon a time, in a far away suburb, lived a little woman with a big attitude. She spent her time reading voraciously most books that came her way, stooping to reading the backs of soup cans and spray cleaners in moments of desperation.

In school, she read all books assigned, searched dutifully for hidden meanings and allegories. She wrote essays and papers and reviews. But is wasn’t enough. Something was missing.

“All my library for a nasty book!” she was heard to exclaim as the neighbors reached for the phone and hit the speed dial that would connect them with the police.

It was OK. The little woman and the police were friends from way back.

But still she was not content.

The little woman didn’t care if a book had vampires or guns or tea pots or dragons. She just wanted to read more and more and more good books. And she wanted them to make her shiver.

She hadn’t shivered in a long time.

“Why don’t I make my own book of shivery, nasty stories?” she thought one day in a rare moment of clarity.

And that is what she set about doing.

Below, you will see her ongoing struggle on behalf of all people who like books that leave a mark when the reader is done with them.

She will tell of writers from near and far who write tales and tomes of evil men and cranky women, of innocent people fate throws into the wind and of cities and towns just like yours that harbor shadow people that smile as their gleaming knives swing down in the sun.

One day in November of 2007, there will be that shivery, nasty book and it will be called Expletive Deleted.

I’ve finally caught up with him.

And I’ve got the scoop.

Two scoops, really. And no raisin bran is involved!

After sliding a handful of new questions his way, and mix them cleverly and somewhat seamlessly with a CrimeSpree interview I took gleeful joy in, you can now found out what the hell is going on with him.

Who?

David Bowker.

Do a Google search for him and you’ll turn up books and little else. Except for reviews (”Bowker’s writing is poignant, moving and funny, bristling with a new breed”; “A perfectly paced rollercoaster ride. If you care about world peace, don’t read this book”), you’ll see confusion and consternation.

“I love his books but he has no web presence.”

“Just who is this David Bowker?”

After reading every book of his I could get my greedy hands on and becoming mightily addicted to his literate, affectionate sociopath of a hitman, I was compelled to find out. Like a smoker with only the stubbed out butts left in the ashtrays compelled.

Here’s a tiny history to give you a mindset.

A former editor of Bowker’s chose to market one of his novels as non-fiction. An odd choice, to be sure. When the novel was published, unwitting booksellers shelved it in biography and shelved it remained. Bowker, apparently not one to live in anger, got the book angst out of his system in a healthy and effective manner. He wrote it out. Woe to those who irritate Bowker (er, Billy Dye) for they shall find they are faced (in print) with Rawhead.

For a woman who has been reading up to eight books a week plus short stories on the side, my being so insanely attached to one character is frankly out of character. Unless you’ve read THE DEATH YOU DESERVE and I LOVE MY SMITH & WESSON, you won’t understand. If you have, then he’s your favorite character, too (unless your fond of a softer, gentler, kinder lead. If you are, you shouldn’t be here.). Rawhead is as his name implies and more; an erudite, sociopathic hitman with a heart of gold.

Do you recall when you first heard the word fuck?

I was about eight and an older kid told me he thought my sister was worth a fuck. Except I thought he said ‘worth a fok.’ When I told my very strait-laced sister, she was outraged. So I knew right away that fokking was very important.

What is your favorite use of the word fuck?

Courtney Love once said that she and Kurt Cobain had been ‘fuck poor’, as in penniless. I like that a lot.

The inception of Billy Dye and Rawhead was bourne of ‘– a vivid recurring dream’, I’ve heard. But is it one steeped in Celtic mythologies (Raw-head a.k.a. Bloody-Bones) or an amalgamation of dream and reality?

Yes, an amalgamation of dream and reality. I heard an ugly rumour that an old schoolfriend had done a few hits for a Manchester gang. At school, he was a very tough kid who happened to be my friend –and he took it upon himself to be my protector. I don’t know whether he really grew up to be an assassin, but it captured my imagination, And Billy Dye, a writer who ruins all his best chances by shooting off his mouth, there’s an element of truth in that. I’m forever being told that I’ve said really offensive things to people, yet rarely have any memory of saying them –which is slightly worrying. Because it implies that even when I think I’m on my best behavior, shit always escapes from my mouth.

In HOW TO BE BAD, your latest book, ‘hero’ Mark Madden is caught in a shitstorm. From having a bad day to suddenly having a bad life, with only a small stone thrown in his pond as impetus. Do you feel we’re all one small stone away from lawlessness?

Well, yes. You only have to drive a car to be aware how little empathy human beings have for other human beings. Have you ever been tempted to speed up to avoid someone overtaking, just to see if they crash into an oncoming vehicle? I’ve done it a few times, but always pulled back at the last moment with the realization that I’m behaving insanely. But I’ll bet thousands of deaths have been caused by people who lack my restraint. I don’t know about you, but the only thing that stops me from killing and maiming people I don’’t like is the desire to stay out of prison. If I get a bad review, I always want to kill the reviewer, or at least kick them on the ground until they’’re bleeding and begging for mercy. The only thing that prevents me is the suspicion that such behavior might be damaging to my career. That’s what HOW TO BE BAD is about –what would happen if we threw caution to the winds and actually went ahead and killed the people we hate. I thought it would be interesting to write a completely immoral book, in which there are no sympathetic characters and no redemption and the author’s message is ‘fuck off’. I feel I’ve succeeded.

Now, a seemingly irreverent question but one closely addressed in HOW TO BE BAD. Is happiness a state of mind? Or, as the Beatles contend, is it a warm gun?

I think only stupid people are truly happy. Even if your own life is going well, someone you care about will always be dying or suffering or failing in some way. To be happy in spite of that, you’d have to be a moron. So my ideal state is not happiness, but being healthy and full of energy. Having said that, I think I’ll be pretty happy when I’m dead. I once had an out-of-the-body experience that was more blissful and fulfilling than any drug. While it lasted, I wasn’t just free from my body; I was free from all ego, ambition, anger, regret or resentment. I have this theory that the dead are not just happier than the living, –they’re more alive.

How good does sex have to be to compel a man towards such atrocious bad judgment?

Sex doesn’t have to be any good at all to make men do ridiculous things. Just being wanted by an attractive woman, even if the sex is useless, is still enough to inspire men to acts of sheer folly. Some women are so erotic they set your teeth on edge; just the sound of their voices is enough to give a man a hard-on. So it doesn’t really matter if they give you orgasms because standing next to them is like one long, slow orgasm.

Caro is based on a girl I knew at school who was exactly like this. She had a habit of fucking people at parties when she was stoned and then forgetting all about them. So the next day, you’d turn up to her house with a bunch of flowers and she wouldn’t even recognize you, let alone know that she was carrying your child. But I would have done practically anything for this girl. I got back in touch with her recently and it was obvious she didn’t remember me or our sordid escapades. But when she read what I’d written about her, she thought I’’d captured her character perfectly. She was actually flattered. Can you believe that?

Is Caro Sewell inherently evil?

I wouldn’t say so, because the people she wants dead are all pretty awful. The only person Caro actually kills herself is based on a real person I knew in England, a woman who adopted her young nephew because his parents had died. This kid was disturbed and kept starting little fires on the carpet. So to teach him a lesson, his aunt shoved his hand into a fire, branding him. Some social workers came round and warned her that she mustn’’t burn the kid’s other hand –and that was the end of the matter. I’d argue that anyone who can do that to a child is inherently evil and that it’s perfectly reasonable to beat them to death with a shovel. But we’’re not even supposed to think these things, let alone say them.

‘Your Own Personal Jesus’ can certainly be taken in a different context in HOW TO BE BAD. When Jesus returns, what is the likelihood of him being an angry Irish mobster?

I just rang my bookie to ask precisely this question. He gave me odds of ten thousand to one.

The influence of graphic novels on your writing is readily apparent to those that read such things (i.e. me). If there isn’t one on your part, I’d be flabbergasted. The books read as if moving from one carefully drawn vignette to another, all of them larger than life.

I think the comparison to graphic novels is very astute. As a kid, the first things I really loved reading were American comic books. I loved Batman, Spiderman and Superboy and used to imitate them slavishly. I loved to draw, so the first stories I wrote were all in comic strip form. That’s a very good discipline to learn, because these comic guys don’t fuck about, every image and line of dialogue serves a purpose and there’s no time for any real subtlety, page one, here’’s the super hero, page four, look he’s discovering his powers, page five, look here he is foiling some muggers in an alley, now let’s see what he can do against a REAL villain.

And to a very real extent, I still plan novels in that story-board style. I like a story to zip along, I don’t like the characters to sit around talking for too long. Comics are full of energy whereas it seems to me that most novels, even crime novels, contain very little energy. They’re so obviously written by someone who’s trying to keep writing until they’ve got eighty thousand words. I think a lot of Stephen King’s books are like that, he seems to believe that a book isn’t real unless it’s too heavy to carry about.

I’m always terrified of boring the reader. I actually trained at art school to be a comic book artist, thinking it’d be easy, but illustrating my own stories was just too frustrating for me because I found I could never draw as fast as I could think up stories and dialogue. I would absolutely love to work with a great illustrator and turn the Rawhead books into graphic novels.

I’ve seen you described as a sci-fi writer. Are you an intentional genre jumper, a co-genre writer, or a teller of the tales that the muse facilitates at the time?

I’’ve seen me described as a sci-fi writer, but that isn’t true. It’s just that I’ve written a couple of supernatural thrillers (THE DEATH PRAYER and THE BUTCHER OF GLASTONBURY) which a few sci-fi mags chose to review. I do tend to combine genres, but it’s never a calculated thing. I’ve always been a fan of classic ghost stories by the best English and American writers, and I always think of the supernatural as my specialist area. When I came up with Rawhead, I’d just discovered Elmore Leonard, and I thought it would be fun to try and write a gangster novel in that cool style and see if anyone noticed.

But absolutely no one did.

And something went wrong, because before long all these old, dark houses were appearing. And it was becoming fairly obvious that my hitman was either a ghost or some kind of highly intelligent demon. So I jumped genres without really meaning to. I used to think I could write any kind of novel but I’ve now realised that if people don’t die horribly, I’m not really interested.

Onward and sideways!

What is the difference between being British and being English? Billy Dye makes rather a point of saying he’s English as opposed to….

Like Billy, I only feel British if I feel my identity is under threat. Most of the time, I have an ongoing love-affair with America and think of British people as lazy, complacent arseholes. I only think of myself as British if I hear someone from another nation pouring scorn on Britain. Then I automatically think: ‘We’re only a tiny little island but we gave the world Shakespeare and the Beatles, so frankly, who the fuck are you?’

But to truly know the difference between being British and American, I’d have to be both. All I will say is that the Americans I deal with all seem to work harder and think faster than their UK counterparts. Take you, for example –four days after asking if I’d do an interview, you come back with questions. An English journalist would have taken four months or forgotten all about it. (I know this for a fact, as I used to be an English journalist.) I’ve been in love with America since I was five years old and copied a picture of the Statue of Liberty out of a book. I must have drawn that ugly fucking statue a hundred times. I’m finally putting my love of the US of A into my work. – My next book is set in America, with American characters. The idea scares the hell out of me, but I’’m going to try.

You have writing roots in journalism, a not unheard of factoid in the backgrounds of many writers. I want a serious expounding on the subject (the man was a regular columnist in New Woman after all!).

I wrote a monthly column for ‘New Woman‘ for two years, and don’t know why I got away with it for so long. Each month, I wrote about some aspect of maleness, like having a penis or suffering from temporary impotence, etc. It was a strange job, and the closest I’ve ever come to being a low-grade celebrity. Women readers sent me strange pictures and invited me round to their houses. (I didn’t go.) Then one month, the editor suggested I write about what men really say about women. So I did. I quoted a friend who said of his wife: ‘She takes it up the ass, and what more could you ask for in a woman?’ The editor was horrified and said that her readers would lose all hope if they thought men really thought of women in such base terms. I refused to delete the sentence, convinced that the Editor valued me too highly to sack me. But no, she sacked me.

In an almost seamless seamy segue. What, pray tell, is buttwax?

I was afraid you were going to ask me that. Butt-wax is anal mucus. The natural lubricant in people’’s bottoms. Sorry.

This valuable grossitude was supplied for you by your son. After his birth, you went through an episode of male post natal depression which became FROM STOCKPORT WITH LOVE. Lie down on my couch and tell me about it.

Jane, my own personal spirit of darkness, always refers to my own period of depression as ‘the dark years’. A fair description, as I spent about two snarling years filled with bile and resentment because I’d become a father. We’d moved from a huge flat in London to a tiny cottage in the country, so my gloom was partly brought on by the shock of suddenly being stuck in a confined space with two people for twenty-four hours a day, one of whom kept shitting everywhere. But the feeling of being trapped wasn’t just physical - I think I was also miserable because I knew that fatherhood was one responsibility that I couldn’t walk away from.

I’ve since spoken to several fathers who recognize these symptoms all too well - one said ‘the only trouble with kids is that they’re there all the bastard time.’ I’m convinced many, many men feel their lives are completely fucked when their children are born - and in a way, they’re right. What they don’t know is that one day they won’t want thdysfunctionalback anymore, and simply being separated from their kids will create a vast, aching void in their dysfunctional hearts.

I think the reasons men don’t talk about post natal depression are a.) they don’t want to feel anything that women feel in case this makes them gay and b.) men always like to be in control, so see their inability to enjoy fatherhood as a personal failure (a bit like a guy admitting he can’t change a tyre) and c.) they’ve never heard of male post natal depression, so how can it exist? I could write a book about the subject, if I was boring enough!

Why do your books show no respect for ordinary decent people?

When did ordinary decent people ever show any respect for me?

What are your influences?

Modigliani, Marlon Brando, M.R. James, J.M. Barrie, Ian Fleming, Jim Morrison, Kurt Vonnegut, Walt Disney.

What have you got coming up in the next year (which, for most people, means when do we hear from Rawhead again)?

Rawhead will return, but at the moment, I’m working on a novel which is my attempt at a true horror classic. I have to meet tight deadlines with all my scripts, so I’m taking my time with the new book.

How is the approach different for a screenplay?

Completely different. I tend to make books up as I go along, never quite knowing where the story is going. You can’t do that in a screenplay, you’d be sunk. So your entire storyline has to be plotted in advance, before you even think about the dialogue.

Who was your first crush?

A girl called Gabrielle Town, who I mention in a few books. I was fourteen and she was twelve. I thought she was amazing, wouldn’t have dared to chat her up, but then she asked me out. Only to dump me after a week. This went on through my teenage years. Every year, she’d fall in love with me all over again and I’d allow myself to be strung along, hoping that this time it’d last longer than a week. But it never did. I loved that girl so much that I named my son, Gabriel, after her.

What is the disc in your CD player right now?

I never play whole CDs, I prefer individual songs. The song I keep listening to at the moment is ‘Motorcycle Emptiness‘ by the Manic Street Preachers.

Here is a snippet from Mr. Bowker’s story, Johnny Seven:

Maya’s mom and dad were out at the store with her kid sister, so we all went inside to listen to music. Except Maya didn’t have any music, all she had was her mom’s fuckin’ Neil Diamond CDs. Me and KC were supposed to listen to this shit and act like we enjoyed it, just for the privilege of sitting in the same room as two girls. Except I didn’t pretend, I said right away that in my opinion, Neil Diamond didn’t deserve to live.

Delphine Lecompte is prodigious writer with a rabid cult following.

Her book, KITTENS IN THE BOILER, is like falling through the rabbit hole and landing in a seedy bar with Bukowski and Henry Miller serving the drinks tall and strong. The six stories she wrote for
20 Stories of Drifters, Drunkards & Dreamers will fuck with you.

Her prose, steeped in the blackest shadows of the darkest alleyways, brings into sharp focus a life led on and off streets most people are afraid to walk down. These stories are about survival by any means necessary with no happy endings at the end of the rainbow.

She is an editor’s nightmare. Her work is all confrontational fragments strung together with commas and brutal intent like e. e. cummings slipping into the land of bad fairies with the needle still stuck in his arm.

Picture Patti Smith, eyes closed under harsh stage lights, swaying as she rants and reels to Lenny Kaye’s guitar; all raw pain and pleasure brought to a climax with a scream of rage and release.

That is Delphine Lecompte. Uncompromising, unafraid and unrestrained.

She is a genius without peer or convention or rules.

Do you recall when you first heard the word fuck?

‘i’d fuck her’, a ruddy middle-aged bricklayer to his ruddy middle-aged colleague, as i was strutting by, i was nine

How did you develop your writing style?

i still need to develop it

Is it rage the fuels your writing or a need for release?

a little bit of rage and a whole lot of vermouth-induced paranoia

Is the world a hopeless place?

yes, but thankfully there are lots of hopeful songs, and - dare i say it - a fairly reliable man who makes great pancakes and never tires of trying to satisfy my insatiable and unreasonable sexual desires

Who do you read?

graham greene and ed mcbain

What is it about Liam Gallhager that you love?

his sunglasses, his swagger, the sweet song he wrote about his stepson (!!),his uncompromising bitchiness, his irresistible flippancy, the way he rolls his eyes when noels talks too much, his childlike bluster (it makes me want to take him in my arms and comb his hair)

What is the disc in you CD player right now?

martha wainwright*

Here is a snippet from Delphine Lecompte’s story, three tepid shots:

“why did your dad cripple you?”, “he was drunk, he mistook me for a rabid poodle and snapped my legs, when i yelped: ‘daddy, stop it, you’re mistaking me for a rabid poodle again!’ he somewhat sobered up and drove me to a sinister north french hospital..”

*Martha has provided the soundtrack to this anthology

If you haven’t heard of Charlie Huston I don’t know how you made it to this website. Well, actually, I do. I have the stats, I’ve seen the Google searches and I don’t want to talk about it.

What I’m trying to say in my convoluted and asinine way is that Huston is on the verge. Riding the edge. He’s gonna be huge.

Actually he’s a rather tall, kinda lanky guy already.

But I’m writing metaphorically.

You know how you can tell someone is going to be a big name? When interviewers and reviewers start coming up with clever catch phrases to describe the exact sub-sub-genre the soon to be big name writes and then try to outdo each other with grandiose allusions. Read the reviews. You’ll see us all trying to out-cool each other.

Charlie Huston has inadvertently spawned the term “compassionate noir,” a contradiction in terms that readily applies to the Henry Thompson series. Pure every-man-meets-cluster-fuck-hand-delivered-by-the-Russian-Mob-and-a-bag-of-money.

I’ll give you a warning that anyone else that has devoured Huston’s book would readily agree with: do not pick up Caught Stealing or Six Bad Things unless you can safely miss a nights sleep.

I dare anyone to try reading these books in spurts instead of one page turning, eye-straining block of voracious reading.

Already Dead was almost too eminently readable. It isn’t fair to the other writers. They’ve got to make a living, too, Huston!

Tired of the simpering, soul-searching blood suckers of the last two decades? Joe Pitt is so hard-boiled he’s fucking cracked.

Tired of reading my babbling?

On to the interview.

What is your favorite use of the word fuck?

The biological.

Do you recall the first time you heard the word fuck?

I’m on the record as saying it was my mom telling me, “Watch your fucking language.”

Is it ever appropriate for a comic book character to use the word fuck?

As long as you spell it *&%$.

When I read ALREADY DEAD, I convinced myself that you created a vampire lead just for the opportunity of beating the shit out of a protagonist even more profoundly than you did to Henry Thompson. How close am I to the truth?

Actually, it was almost the opposite. I wasn’t concerned with writing a character who could be repeatedly beaten within an inch of his life; I was interested in writing a character that could beat other’s within an inch of their lives and be really good at it while having no moral qualms. Henry worries about people too much. It makes delivering an ass smacking a real logistical nightmare.

Your name is spread out all over the Internet like thousands of cyber billboards across a million mile highway. Do you have a fan club, can I be the treasurer and when am I going to see you in Teen Beat?

I am my own fan club. When I collect some dues from myself you can tend them like a weak fire in rain storm. I’ll be in Teen Beat when they give me a teen to actually beat on.

Do they still publish Teen Beat?

More importantly, do they still publish Over 50?

Your books feature a fair amount of violence with some of the most realistic outcomes I’ve read since Martyn Waites. Have you ever written a scene and then immediately thought you d crossed the line?

There are several scenes that have given me qualms for various reasons. Most of the discomfort has to do with hurting characters I’m fond of. However, the rape scene in Already Dead made me very uncomfortable. I didn’t want it to read as exploitive. Not there simply to make the bad guys badder. I wanted it to be horrifying, not utilitarian or, worse, titillating. Still not sure how that worked out.

When are eager readers going to get their hands on the next Henry Thompson book?

When they settle down and can all be quiet, they’ll get the book. That should be somewhere around September.

Who do like more, Jon (Central Crime Zone) or me?

Easy, girls, you’re both pretty.

What is the disc in your cd player right now?

Nothing in the CD player. However, “Tattoo You” is on the turntable, and Elvis Costello with Burt Bacharach “In the Darkest Place” was my last play on my iPOD.

And here’s a snippet from Charlie Huston’s story, Like a Lady:

“Thought you quit.”

“Fuck, man, seein’ something like that don’t make a man need a smoke, he ain’t human. Fuck do you care I kill myself a little more.”

“Uh-huh. Well. Seven-fuckin’-fifty a pack, each one of those mothers is costing me about forty cents. So I’m wishing you’d quit, die, or take it up full time again and stop bumming my fuckin’ Newports.”

My introduction to Kevin Wignall was brokered by a guest appearance on Sarah Weinman’s blog, Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind. I found him to be erudite and witty, polite but incisive and, dare I say, urbane. An image of him formed in my mind; that of a country gentleman with a vast library and a wine cellar the size of my house.

But that image would be doing him a great disservice.

For the Dogs, Mr. Wignall’s latest book, makes that very clear.

A master of the “compressed” style of writing, as a reader I found not a wasted word. It isn’t uncommon for me to skip a sentence or a paragraph here or there when reading a book. I want to get to the good parts; the action, the meat of the matter.

Mr. Wignall’s books are all meat of the finest cut.

His on-line book, Like Plastic, enthralled me from the first post and I’m actually sad the tale is almost completely told.

When you forget that you’re reading and your mental existence becomes the book or short story you’re reading, you know the writer has succeeded. I can still picture scenes from For the Dogs. This after untold hundreds of books, magazine and graphic novels have passed through my hands and were sifted through my brain.

Although contemporary, Mr. Wignall’s writing displays a clear love of the classics. It isn’t by accident that Stephen Lucas, the lead in For the Dogs, reads the Nibelungenlied as the impressionable Ella Hatto reads Jane Austen’s Persuasion. Their roles are defined and exchanged with a deft hand.

I’ve also come to admire, no - adore, Mr. Wignall’s repeated ability to stand by his principles in the face of oppostion. Re-write kill ‘em with kindness to read wear them down with niceness and you’ll see why I would be loathe to argue with the man.

We owe Mr. Wignall’s writing of thrillers to film and if there is any justice in this world, that is the medium in which his stories will play out.

What is your favorite use of the word fuck?

As in ‘I don’t give a…’ and also when it’s used in tmesis, for example, absofuckinglutely.

Do you recall when you first heard the word fuck?

No.

Do you sit down to write every day?

You’re asking this of the person who took three years to finish his latest book? When I’m actually working on a book I feel wretched if I don’t write every day, but inbetween times, I can go months without writing a thing, not even notes. It all stays in my head until I absolutely have to write it.

A reader of “literary fiction” for most of your life, you write (and write very well) crime fiction. How did this happen?

Well, I would say that I write literary fiction in which some people carry out violent acts and others suffer that violence - it’s only really in the last thirty years that violence and pace automatically sees you labelled as a crime or thriller writer. Whatever measure you use to define “literary” - subject matter, themes, characterization, language - there are plenty of people in the crime field who match and even surpass those published as literary authors. The only shame of it is that a lot of general readers miss out because of the narrow-mindedness of the literary world. For the sake of this interview, I feel I should also add, fuck ‘em!

What do you think establishes voice in a body of written work?

This’ll have a lot of people choking on their chips, but I think you either have it or you don’t. When you’re young, you have to let the other voices die down (the voices of the writers you admire, the voice of what you think a writer should sound like) but the simple fact is, if your own voice doesn’t emerge from this process, it never will. Everything else might be down to technique or experience, but I think voice is the raw talent and it can never be learned. I recently found a scrap of something I wrote when I was around twenty - and for all the things I still had to learn about writing back then, it’s unmistakably my writing, my voice. I think that’s true for everyone.

So, what was it like driving a tank?

How did you find out about that? It was fun, naturally, and remarkably simple. The noise is fabulous and it’s a great feeling seeing almost any terrain in front of you and knowing you can charge straight through it. Imagine all that when you’re seven or eight years old - I can still remember it like it was yesterday.

Where can readers read you next?

Good question. Bit of a romp in the current (March/April) edition of EQMM. A story in “Dublin Noir“, due out in March. As for the new book, hard to say at this point, but unlikely before the summer of 2007.

What are your influences?

I’ve always maintained that you’re influenced by everything you’ve ever read, good or bad. There are certain writers I relate to more than others - Stephen Crane, Graham Greene, Paul Bowles - but is that just subconscious vanity because they use a similarly lean style? It’s also well known that I like Jane Austen, and at some level, I think of all my books as love stories. No, really, I do.

What is the disc in your cd player right now?

At the moment, nothing, because it’s 1am and the stillness is what I like. Earlier, it was The Arctic Monkeys, The Foo Fighters and Nico.

Spellcheck does not like tmesis.

Spellcheck is good for typos, but really, you don’t have to push far to find the limits of its vocabulary. You’ll have to trust me on tmesis.

And I do. Implicitly.

A snippet from Kevin Wignall’s story, The Preacher:

“Are you on drugs? I mean, are you high right now?”

Hector laughed and said, “I’m serious, man. You know it’s like… well, let’s call it the C word, you know, to describe a woman’s er…”

“I know which word you mean.”

“I would hope so,” said Hector with a knowing smile that made Sidney want to slap his face. If the punk hadn’t been driving he’d have done just that. “It’s a bad word, the worst word, but it describes one of the greatest things ever. Haven’t you ever wondered, why that is?”

“No, Hector, I haven’t, just like your parents probably never wondered why you didn’t get into Harvard.”

Please forgive me a bit of babble and allegory. I am about to embark on a rather protracted bit of wordage to introduce you to our next writer.

In the poem Au Lecteur, that prefaces Les Fleurs du Mal, Baudelaire declares his readers to be as inured of sins and lies as he himself is:

… If rape or arson, poison, or the knife
Has wove no pleasing patterns in the stuff
Of this drab canvas we accept as life—
It is because we are not bold enough!

Six of the poems in Les Fleurs du Mal were suppressed and his publisher eventually went bankrupt. He was a poet in search of an audience for what was considered scandalous, vulgar work. Work that was in essence a beautifully blunt and perilous look into the darkest corners of human behavior.

Baudelaire had a bad end after living a life of excess, finding sanctuary for his embattled soul in opium and drink.

Ken Bruen is Baudelaire but with a steel spine and the courage of his convictions. He is not bound by convention or a need to please anyone but himself, as is readily evident in is writing. It is the darkest kind; a prose that peels back the layers so carefully cultivated by society to cover our ugly, festering human greed. It is all laid bare, and examined at length in Bruen’s bibliography.

If you like a book that gives you a hard shot to the gut then laughs as you gasp for breath, Bruen’s your kind of writer.

What is your favorite use of the word fuck?

AS IN…………AH FOOK, ACCOMPANIED WITH DEEP IRISH SIGH.

Do you recall when you heard the word fuck for the first time?

I WAS SEVEN AND A TINKER CALLED A GUARD A FOOKHEAD….I ASKED MY DAD, WHO GAVE ME A HIDING, SO THE TERM FOOKHEAD BECAME SYNONYMOUS WITH HIDINGS.

Do you think it’s possible for me to come up with a question that hasn’t been answered in one of the numerous interviews of you?

YES, AND HERE IT IS…….WHO ARE YOUR FAVOURITE WOMEN MYSTERY WRITERS? AND THE ANSWER IS……. MJ ROSE, LYNN HIGHTOWER, CORNELIA REED, CATHI UNSWORTH, SANDRA SCOOPOTONE (THAT’S HOW WE SAY HER NAME IN IRELAND), PJ PARRISH, VICKI HENDRICKS, PJ TRACY, BARBARA SERANELLA, ZOE SHARP………. AND HERE’S A WEE SCOOP FOR YOU; A FEMALE MYSTERY WRITER DISSED ME BIG TIME SO WE PUT HER FACE ON THE COVER OF TAMING THE ALIEN, WILDLY DISTORTED OF COURSE. WANNA GUESS WHO THE WOMAN IS?

Writing = primal scream therapy. You scream loud and long. Does anything else exorcise the demons as well?

I SAIL……ALONE, ON THE WEST COAST OF IRELAND, MUCH TO THE HORROR OF MY FAMILY AND FRIENDS. BUT EACH TIME, IT’S OUT ON THAT EDGE AGAIN, WHERE I SEEM TO HAVE SPENT ME LIFE, PRECARIOUS THE POSE. AND I ALWAYS THINK, EVERY SINGLE TIME………..FOOK THIS.

How do you conquer the dreaded blank page?

THINK OF THE BANK MANAGER.

There was a rumor going around, don’t know where it could have started, that you are a vampire. I believe the compelling and completely circumstantial evidence involved a lack of Ken sightings in the daylight hours and your aversion to garlic. What do you have to say to the conspiracy theorists?

DAYLIGHT IS OVER RATED. I PLAY BEST AT NIGHT AND IF BEING A VAMP MEANT I GOT TO HANG WITH BUFFY, HAVE HER ON ME CASE, WELL, BRING IT ON. BEFORE DARK, THE CLASSIC K. BIGELOW MOVIE, WITH ROCK N ROLL VAMPS WHO DON’T GIVE A TOSS. I COULD DEFINITELY HANG WITH THAT CREW.

What are you like pre-coffee (and please tell me you don’t sugar it up)?

SUGAR……. ARE YOU FOOKIN DEMENTED? AND PRE-COFFEE, I’M LIKE A WASHED OUT BANSHEE. I DON’T DO MORNINGS REAL WELL AND PRE-CAFFEINE, I’M LIKE A BASTARD. AFTER, I’M AN ALERT BASTARD.

Who are the musicians/writers you’ve carried with you through your life?

TOM WAITS, SPRINGSTEEN, COSTELLO, STRUMMER, MERLE HAGGARD, BOWIE.

Is there anyone you’d go fan boy about if you meet him/her?

I ALREADY DID……….M.J. ROSE……BUT I’D GIVE A ROSARY BEAD TO MEET PATRICIA CORNWELL….SEE THAT ARSENAL, PARANOIA UP CLOSE AND PERSONAL.

What is the disc in your cd player?

GORILLAZ, SENT TO ME BY A CERTAIN RUTH AND JON, FOLLOWED BY DEEP PURPLE, GIVEN TO ME BY THE LION IN (JIM) WINTER.

A snippet from Ken Bruen’s story, Spit:

Saoirse’s hair was auburn, fell in ringlets to her shoulders. Thing is, she wasn’t all that pretty.
But something.
Electricity in the eyes, attitude, a semi smile that danced around her mouth.
Her eyes were green.
I swear to fuck.
Green as shamrock. The key word there is sham.
What did I know? I was thirteen for Chrissakes. I do know she smiled at me.

Open Full

Radiant

Neon writ.
Cursed, blessed me, forever.
Then she turned away.
I was signed, sealed and delivered.

Going on record to say you’ve deliberately set out to write a main character who wasn’t “The Greatest Detective Ever” isn’t the normal tack most writers would take in an interview or a career. But in John Rickards’s series lead P.I. Alex Rourke, that’s exactly what he’s done.

Rourke isn’t a grand crusader for justice or a smart-talking tough guy. Nor is he a troubled here beset by problems with alcohol and/or bad relationship choices. Nor is he in need of anger management classes. He’s the people that you meet, when you’re walking down the street. He’s the people that you meet each day.

Now Rickards’s bad guy from Winter’s End, Nick, is another story. He is a well constructed, well-thought psychological thug. He gets you where you think and delivers a mindfuck that may well have a greater impact on his victims than a kick in the kidneys. Not to say Nick isn’t capable of leaving a few bodies around for effect.

And The Touch of Ghosts finds Nick left behind as the new and improved antagonists.

Rickards short stories, so quickly and easily written he just tosses them on his blog for any and all to read, display a mind that can write in a plethora of genres, points of view and narrative voices. His stories are often peppered with humor that range from droll to pie in the face. And subjects that run from horror to faux dandy witticism.

Behind it all is a restless mind on a quest for fulfillment that will no doubt carry Rickards very far.

What is your favorite use of the word fuck?

Mid-sermon.

That’s a lie. It’s not like I’ve ever been to church, nor wanted to. But still, it’d be nice.

Do you recall when you heard the word fuck for the first time?

No - I was far too young at the time. I know the first time I actually got into trouble for using it was at school when I was about seven or eight, telling another kid to fuck off, and I seem to remember that by then I had the tone and inflection pretty much down pat, so I guess I’d grown up with it.

How is the chattering skull?

My skullbones are fine and strong. They have much caffeine. They tell me many things. My skullbones do not lie.

Clackclackclackclack.

So, do you still harbor negative feelings about my review of your first book (hee hee hee)?

I’ll get you next time, Jordan! NEXT TIME! You’ll not escape my ninjas!

Ahem. I mean, no. Of course not. There is nothing to worry about. There is no need to lock your door before going to sleep, and nor is there any reason to check your brake lines before starting your truck. Everything is fine. Fine. FINE.

Your short fiction crosses all genres. What is the likelihood of a full length non-crime fiction book?

No idea, but it might be nice. Depends what my fevered brain came up with, but if it was cool enough…

But first I’d want to see HARDBOILED JESUS become a TV series.

What in Odin’s name are you doing eating white chocolate?

It isn’t even real chocolate!

What the hell?

Dark chocolate tastes like freeze-dried shit. White chocolate is the sugary, vanilla-laden food of the gods.

It helps not to think of it as chocolate. Instead, think of it as the thin, adolescent semen of the Milkybar Kid compressed and dried into solid form, with every cube of chocolate a fresh stream of lukewarm ejaculate preserved for your eating pleasure.

Watcha readin’(she wrote after calming done considerably)?

Just this morning the first of Denise Mina’s run on HELLBLAZER showed up in the post, along with the most recent in Warren Ellis’s excellent ‘mystery archaeology’ series PLANETARY. Both good. The last actual prose book I finished was Duane’s SECRET DEAD MEN, which was very cool.

What is the disc in your cd player right now?

Rammstein - ‘Rosenrot‘.

A snippet from John Rickards’s story, Twenty Dollar Future:

“The blow came out of nowhere. The man slammed the butt of his Kalashnikov into Abdi’s chin. Pain seared through his head and he could taste blood and dust as he dropped to the floor. The kicks the man followed up with hammered into his ribcage, but he could hardly feel them. His head swam with agony and he could do nothing more than lie there until the man picked him up and threw him across the street.”

Much praise has been heaped upon one Olen Steinhauer. I imagine him plodding about, stooped yet grinning like a well fed cat, under the weight of it all.

Reading some of this glistening praise as Mr. Steinhauer makes his sure-footed way across his career reveals snatches of accolades that convinced me he was my kind of writer. Seeing ‘noir’, ‘menace’, ‘bloody-mindedness’, ‘uncompromising’ and ‘complexity’ in his reviewed resume would make any reader hungry for a dark tale seek him out.

Reading The Bridge of Sighs, I was in love with his writing from the first page.

The Romanian world of Emil Brod is a grim one, tinged with mordant humor that yanks the reader in by the whiskers. As Brod sits at his desk, the eyes of the other militia men upon him, the reader can smell the sweat, hear the typewriter in the corner and taste the bad coffee. And you can feel the intense dislike that radiates from his ‘fellow’ militia men.

Mr. Steinhauer is referred to as a writer. I think of him more as a painter whose medium is words.

His short stories are no less vividly drawn but jump to a present as dark and as feral as the one left behind in the late 1940’s.

I consumed The Confession and last year’s 36 Yalta Boulevard like a starving woman at an endless banquet.

I would add a word to his collection of praise: fearless.

What is your favorite use of the word fuck?

Fuckface. It evokes such a lovely image.

Do you recall when you heard the word fuck for the first time?

I was nineteen, living in Zagreb, and a male prostitute was trying to find a way to get some cash off of me. I might have heard the word before then, but the next morning I woke in a bathtub missing a kidney as well as most memories of my youth. I later uncovered some papers containing my adolescent poetry, and one verse was entitled “My Fucking Grades”. I imagine, though, that I’d misspelled “flunking”.

How cool is your Mom?

Way fucking cool. Ask anyone. She was a 70s feminist, and this means she takes no shit off of no one.

What has compelled you to live all over the planet?

Boredom. And a fear of becoming tied to community. Does that make sense? Not entirely. Because then you have to go back. Why fear of community? Because community equals responsibility beyond your own skin, beyond the person you fuck most regularly. Then: Why fear of societal responsibility? Because I don’t necessarily trust my abilities in that regard. Why not? Because, as an introvert, I keep people at a certain distance. Why do you do that? Because…wait a minute. This is none of your fucking business!

What led you to writing historical fiction?

When looking at the present, it’s hard sometimes to figure out what’s important, what’s going to last–with the past it’s self-evident. That’s one of the reasons I started with historical stuff, and since it was pre-9/11 it was a reasonable excuse. By the time 9/11 hit and the whole fucking mess was becoming more obvious, I’d already begun writing about the Cold War. I’m working on the last book in the series now, and after that it’s gonna all be
contemporary.

What’s the book on your nightstand?

Book(s): A Corpse in the Koryo (pre-pub manuscript) by James Church; Lunar Park by Bret Easton Ellis; Stealing Me (unpublished) by Grace Greene; The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie. Sorry, no “fuck” titles there yet.

What is the disc in your cd player right now?

CD player? Fuck, that’s so 90s. My iPod has everything of worth on it, particularly Belle & Sebastian, Nick Cave, Sinatra, the White Stripes, the New Pornographers, Brigitte Bardot & Serge Gainsbourg, Johnny Cash, some Len Deighton audiobooks, and Sigue Sigue Sputnik. Whoops, I just erased that last one*.

Rarely, actually never, have I been so chastened by a writer. I rather enjoyed it.

Here is a snippet from Mr. Steinhauer’s story, Hungarian Lessons:

I’ve always felt you can tell a lot about a place by the way they design and keep their bathrooms, and the Marriott, by this estimation, was all about style and power. It made one—well, it made me feel as if there wasn’t anything in this world I couldn’t have, or do, if I really set my mind to it. Then I opened a stall door—silent, well oiled hinges—and found the Finance Minister sitting on the toilet, pants around his ankles, and Agota bowed between his legs, sucking his cock.

*Not such a smarty pants now, is he?**

**Yeah, and I’m such a smarty pants, I had to fix this post twice!

There are times it’s good to be me.

You may hear me bitch and moan about reviewing on a rather consistent basis. Behind that is the knowledge that every now and again, books that I wouldn’t have the insight or knowledge to pick up on my own fall into my hands.

Manuel Ramos’ Mooney’s Road to Hell was one of those books that balance out all the infuriating ones. And Scott Wolven’s collection of 13 short stories, Controlled Burn, made just as powerful an impression on me.

In my mind, after I read it, I thought, “Every person who has written that short stories are a dying art are proven dead wrong by this book.”

If I were to hear from Scott that he just sits down and writes these stories without re-writes and bam! they’re that good, like Mozart and his one-off compositional masterpieces, I’d be sorely tempted never to write again.

That’s why I’ll never ask Scott that question.

I’ll post here what I wrote after finishing Controlled Burn:

“These are the most raw, brutal, lyrical and hard stories I’ve read in an age.

I meant to read a story a night and ended up consuming the entire book at once. There is a part of every human being capable of creating only grief and ruin, leaving chaos in their wake. Wolven writes of these people.

The stories are intertwined over years, location or happenstance who’s protagonists cross over into oblivion of their own making. It is an oblivion we’ve all at least set a toe into, scuttling away, scared by what we saw and felt. The men in these stories embraced it, breathing it into every cell.”

If you haven’t read Scott and are afeared of laying down your hard-earned money for his collection, read his stories Eight Ball or Barracuda and join his fan club.

Wolven’s work has appeared in the Mississippi Review and three (2002, 2003, 2004, 2005) Best American Mysteries collections. He is a master and a must read for any connoisseur of the short story. How’s that for some unadulterated gushing?

What is your favorite use of the word fuck?

As the first letter in the graffiti acronym FTW – fuck the world.

Do you recall the first time you heard the word fuck?

I don’t recall the first time I heard the word fuck, but I do use it now.

In a preponderance of your stories, and there are many, your characters are fucked. But most keep fighting even as the current is pulling them under. It’s almost fatalism with a silver lining. Do you view the world with the grim stoicism of your characters?

It’s a very difficult question to answer – I’m always trying to tell a good story and if characters and situations are hard, I’ll try to tell a good story about that. It’s always about telling a good story as best as I can.

Some of the most jaded, read-that-wrote-about-it reviewers read ‘Controlled Burn’ and hailed your work as, to quote Kevin Burton Smith, “…the arrival of an important new voice, not just in crime fiction, but possibly in American literature itself.” Do you nod your head in agreement or open your eyes wide in surprise?

When somebody reads a story of mine, or Controlled Burn, and writes great stuff, I feel very lucky as a writer. Kevin Burton Smith – yourself – you read a tremendous amount of fiction and I have great respect for that and feel lucky I’ve written something that stands out for you. It’s pretty amazing.

Influences (more lazy one word questions)?

Work influences a lot of what I write (Scott is, as of this writing, in Louisiana helping to re-build). Music of all kinds.

What are you reading?

The Lineman’s and Cableman’s Handbook, Section 36, Distribution Transformer Installation.

What is the disc in your CD player?

Buddy Guy.

Scott is one of the few people I know who might be able to out-nice Sean Doolittle. And that’s saying a lot.

Here is a snippet from Scott’s story St Gabriel,

Nobody asks a man why he drinks. Mixed in there with the private darkness of reasons, nobody wants to know the answer from the man who is already drunk. I was drinking to get a woman to come back to me, which is the worst reason of all. The cost of pain. When you see someone so bright, such a bright fire, a diamond, it stays with you and their image is on the inside of your eyelids when you close your eyes. I can still see her, she lights up the night of life. Who wouldn’t want her back? Her smile alone could cure you of whatever disease had got hold of you. Oceans of booze couldn’t put out that fire.

Nathan Singer is one of the fiercest writers you may ever read.

Singer is a multi-dimensional artist channeling the rage of the streets, the passion of a bruised heart still willing to love and the pain of every child who’’s experienced the hand that was not held back in anger.

From the heavy metal stage with his band Absinthium, to the his solo stage presence doing spoken-word to writer for a stage occupied by others and directing them about the stage to the books lucky readers clench in their hands late at night, their brains too buzzed on words to sleep, Nathan Singer is a modern day knight errant on an eternal quest to make the world look in on itself, dark wounds and shining hope revealed. You can read a rant in CrimeSpree’s issue #9.

Benjamin LeRoy insisted I read Nathan’’s first book, A Prayer for Dawn. Normally when someone is that insistent, I ignore their advice just to fuck with them. But Ben has a sincerity to his insistence that can convince even a jaded Jordan to pay attention. I am so glad I did.

The two books you have out, A Prayer for Dawn and Chasing the Wolf, are brilliant and completely different from each other and everything else ever printed in the history of the English language. How did you develop this writing style?

Well, as for as the jagged, jumpy quality, that’’s just the way my brain works. Also, I’’ve done a fair amount of my writing actually in front of live audiences, so it lends a certain amped up immediacy to the work I guess. As far as my use of multiple narrators, I like the personality you can infuse in first-person limited narrators that third person loses. Conversely I like the ‘‘all-access’’ capability of third person omni, so this seemed the best of all worlds to me. I just naturally want to hear from more than one character in a story.

Your spoken word is reminiscent of Henry Rollins before I knew that he cleaned his hotel rooms up for housekeeping. Is the ‘you’’ on stage the same guy who sits down to write or is this a Nathan channeling the rage and injustice of the world?

Yes, that’’s the same guy. Also, I don’t sit down to ‘write’’ novels in a traditional sense. It’s a pretty active thing for me and, as I said, sometimes I actually ‘write’ live, so yeah. Same process. I actually became a spoken word performer without ever actually having seen any other spoken word artists. I was playing in metal bands and our shows were basically bloody experiments in sonic terrorism disguised as live musical entertainment. Mixing thrash with free jazz and 60s style psychedelia and anything else we could think of, it was wild and unpredictable and after a while I started mixing spoken word elements and more performance to the singing and screaming I was doing. Once my main band broke up, I wondered if I could bring that same level of danger and intensity to the stage with just me my words and a mic; no guitars or drums to support me and punish the crowd. It really took off almost immediately and it’’s been a steady climb upward since then (with plenty of fights and bedlam along the way).

What is your favorite use of the word fuck?

As a command.

Do you recall when you first heard the word fuck?

It must have been in utero.

What would the world be like without fuck?

Sparsely populated.

When is fuck not the right word?

“Which one of you wants to cut up this turkey carcass?” The word fuck has no business anywhere in that sentence. Perhaps a variation like the noun ‘fucks’ or the adjective ‘fuckin’, but no fuck itself.

What is the disc in your CD player right now?

Acid Bath - Paegan Terrorism Tactics.

Thanks so much, Nathan. I like you.

No problem, Jen. I like you too. Wanna go dancing sometime?

A snippet from Nathan Singers story, The Killer Whispers and Prays:

Twilight is my cloak and salvation. And the killer whispers and prays. I am still. Centered. My head is gravel, my teeth are arrowheads, my eyes are sand-packed tight, pounded clear and sharp into brittle liquid windows into your forever nothing. I am where chaos goes to die, dragged kicking and wailing, baffled and grief-struck into its own annihilation. I suffer neither the fools nor the wise.

I don’’t suffer at all.

Ray Banks won this reader’s jaded heart with the first line in Donkey Work, featuring the perennial smartass, Cal Innes:

“According to Simon and Garfunkel, the words of the prophets are written on the subway walls. According to the subway walls, Gaz drank piss on Ordsall common.”

A simple, effective first line tear down of a sixties icon that left me smiling like a kid running from a door about to open on a flaming bag of shit.

Ray Banks writes it angry, fast and real. But in the midst of chaos and violence are lines of sheer poetry and insight. He’s another born writer who has honed his craft constantly writing, putting his work out for the world to see, then sitting back down to begin again.

One of the joys of a writer with a list of on-line stories is watching a character and a writer evolve together. From a good writer, Ray has begun to evolve into a great writer. His stories evoke vivid, gritty images of human beings at their worst with the occasional relief of a beam of light to set the dark off all the better.

Ray’s non-Innes book, The Big Blind, is as sweet and dark as a hot cup of Turkish coffee.

What is the cutest author in the UK up to for the next year?

“I think Al Guthrie’s writing another couple of books as well as his agenting gig thing. Why you askin’ about him? Why aren’t you asking about the two books I have coming out? Pfft.”*

What is your favorite use of the word fuck?

“”Don’t show me your paintings, don’t talk to me about books, you’re an asshole, go fuck yourself…” Ed Hamell in the “song”, “Go Fuck Yourself”.

Or

“The cops are looking all over for ya, you’re hotter than a freshly fucked fox in a forest fire.” Another Day in Paradise, Eddie Little.”

Do you recall when you first heard the word fuck?

“Probably when I was born: “For fuck’s sake, get this bastard out of me and get me some fuckin’ drugs!” Something like that. And it stuck. It was my first word. My second word was “Thatcher”. Right on. Fight the power.”

How do you feel about women using the word fuck?

“Hungry. And sometimes I get a cramp in my leg. Depends on the volume and the intent.”

What’s it all about, Banksie?

“The Benjamins, Jay-Jay. And meat millinery. Y’ain’t nobody these days without a quality spam cap.”

Whatcha readin’?

“Like Mr. Basso Profundo, I got two on the go right now. Knocking on the last chapter of By A Spider’s Thread by that cut-throat Lippman, and for light reading I got me Dog Soldiers by Robert Stone (”They’re mean and stupid and greedy, they’ll fuck you for laughs, they want you dead.”)”

What is the disc in you CD player right now?

“The Baby Huey Story: Living Legend - Baby Huey and the Babysitters.”

A snippet from Ray’s story, Money Shot:

“When I clicked the barrel against her rotting teeth, her eyes took on the sheen of the newly-weeping.”

*Ray’s books are Saturday’s Child (the first Cal Innes book) which is coming out in May… and the sequel Donkey Punch which is scheduled for September.

Otis Twelve has a vast and varied history. This is his own take on it:

Otis lives in a very small town where nothing bad or evil ever happens, and where 70% cacao content dark chocolate candy falls from the trees. Although rumors of his involvement in several “distasteful” incidents last year in Chicago continue to circulate, Twelve maintains an almost Zen-like serenity in the face of these slanders and neither confirms nor denies their veracity. Currently in mourning after the death of his blind diabetic dog, he continues to peck away at his Mac G5 keyboard hard at work on his latest book, a critical examination of bunk beds - symbol or archetype? - in modern Crime fiction. Though once a “man of the cloth,” he now prefers to work in the nude as he has few visitors save the occassional Jehovah’s Witness. Otis spends his spare time building up his supply of freeze-dried food.

You may have heard of him and/or his work before if you:

a.) listened to the radio in the seventies. Remember the song Dead Puppies? He wrote it and recorded it. A little Dr. Demento nostalgia for you – Otis was Space Commander Wack, Dingo and the Mean Farmer.

b.) happened to notice that in 2005 he won the B@@kplace “people’s vote” for On the Albino Farm, the first in his “Tools” series.

c.) happened to notice that in 2004 he was short-listed for the Crime Writers Association Debut Dagger Award his second book, Sometime a Prozac Nation.

d.) didn’t overlook that in 2004, he landed himself $10,000 by winning an essay competition called The Power Of Purpose Awards for piece called The Goodness of Trees.

It’s almost annoying, isn’t it? The accolades. The praise. The vast and varied past.

He and the yoga-challenged Sean Doolittle live and write in the Great Plains. They both say nothing happens there. I suspect something does. But neither of them wants me to know about it.

I know this because I had the joy of reading a story Otis sent in to CrimeSpree (run in the Sept/Oct issue) called Dead Puppies. Failed rockstar, bored, looking for a kick and finding it in the Obits he writes. Before the people die.

When I met him this last fall, I grew to adore him. He is a gentle, sweet man with one of the sharpest wits I’ve ever encountered (and that’s saying something) and a baritone voice that could out sweet honey.

What is you favorite use of the word fuck?

Overheard yesterday at the grain elevator: “Fuck the
soybeans!”

Do you recall when you first heard the word fuck?

In third grade when Lazlo Zelinsky asked me the riddle, “What starts with ‘F’ and ends with ‘U - C - K’?” I answered “Firetruck.” I was wrong.

What is the disc in your CD player right now?

Sufjan Stevens - Illinoise

Book?

“Memoirs of Hadrian” by Marguerite Vourcenar & “Rain Dogs” by Sean Doolittle (Always do two books at once)

Inlfuences?*

G. Chaucer, E.A.Poe, M.Wollstonecraft-Shelly P.K.Dick, A.Watts, D.Lessing, A.Huxley, R. Madelin, A.Moore with D.Gibbons, and I.G.Parker.

A snippet from Otis Twelve’s story, Fluff:

“Take that cock out of your mouth, Sarah, and talk to me.”

*getting a little lazy with the questions, aren’t I?

I’ve been a satisfied reader of Michael O’Mahony’s for over a year now. I first ran across him when I was doing an internet search on how to write erotica. I found a piece he wrote for his blog called: Secrets of Erotica…Revealed!

Fucking hilarious! Instead of my usual method of skating through text to glean what wisdom there is as fast as possible, I actually read the whole thing, word for word. And laughed my ass off the entire time. I’ve reproduced it below and you should be glad I did. Mr. Mahony has had two sites since then and it’s no longer available except here, the web’s home of written fuck.*

Mr. Mahony is a closet writer. He’s tried to quit. But peer harassment and an addiction to the written word have got him hooked. Hooked bad. And thank God for it.

In every story of Michael Mahony’s that I’ve read over the past year, not a one has disappointed. He’s got a natural pacing and characterization prowess that has me green with envy. Emerald green. With a little apple green and forest green thrown in for effect.

Anyway, to read one of his stories is to know the man is a born writer. And he’s not just an erotica writing machine. The man can write anything he wants.

So, Michael, where’s the book? Huh? Where’s the fuckin’ book?

What is your favorite use of the word ‘fuck’?

“Shut that cunt’s mouth or I’ll come over there and fuckstart her head.” - written by Christopher McQuarrie and delivered by Ryan Phillipe in The Way Of The Gun. Dialogue like that just doesn’t come along very often.

Do you recall when you first heard the word ‘fuck’?

Probably at school, but I honestly can’t remember ever having had a fuckless life.

What would the world be like without fuck?

There’s an essay in that question, but the simplest answer is that you’d be putting together an anthology called Fiddlesticks Noir, and I sure as fuck wouldn’t be contributing.

Who rubs you the right way?

That is a hellish pseudo-question with approximately twelve million potential answers. At the time of writing, I’ve been thinking about it for forty minutes. You are a scorpion woman. That said, I am currently rubbed the right way (for a brain-frying variety of different reasons) by my wife, Bill Hicks, Hunter Thompson, Clive Barker, Chuck Palahniuk, Alkaline Trio, The Eels, Tanya Donelly, David Fincher, George Romero, Bruce Campbell, and that guy in The Warriors who sits in his car banging beer bottles together and going, “Waaaaaaarrioooors, come out to plaaaa-aaaay.”

What is the disc in your CD player right now?

Uh Huh Her - PJ Harvey

What do ya think of that?

Is this an official question?

A snippet from Mr. Mahony’s story, Every Ounce of Soul:

“Don’t,” she said.

“What?”

“Fall for me.”

I smiled at that. I kissed her shoulder as I began to move in her again, one arm draped over her hip, hand covering her crotch, fingers finding her. She tensed immediately, held my eyes as her breath steepened until each exhalation was a soft moan.

“Alex,” she said. She reached back and grabbed at my waist, nails digging into my skin. “Alex.” She bit her lip and her eyelids fluttered, her body still but trembling all over for a long, silent moment before the breath rushed out of her in a shaky sigh and she relaxed. kissed her neck and the side of her face. I brought my mouth to her ear.

“Don’t,” I whispered.

“What?”

“Flatter yourself.”

She turned and kissed me.

*Don’t know about you but I am becoming completely desensitized to that word. Fuck, fuck, fuck. It really isn’t that shocking after you write so many times.

“The difference between pornography and erotica is lighting.”

Yes, in this one-time-only post, I, Michael O’Mahony, bestselling author of such self-help books as But It Looks Nothing Like A Fucking Flower!: How to Write Descriptive Prose About the Female Genitalia, and Why Everyone Laughs When You Call It Admiral Winky, have gathered my considerable knowledge of writing dirty stories into one, easy-to-read package so that you, my readers, can go away and write the kind of erotica that will ruin underwear all over the world.

Before we start, please feel free to browse my recent forays into filth and depravity; A Conspiracy of One, Collect Call to an Unknown Lover, Tomorrow, Five Minutes Alone, Rain, and Fitz And Me.

All done with those? Still want to be a master/mistress of the erotic arts? Marvellous. If words be the food of love, read on…

Be Able To Write In The First Place

If you can’t string simple words together in a coherent fashion, you will never be an erotic writer. Brutal but true. While erotica is a much-maligned genre that is rarely taken seriously by the mainstream, it still requires a certain degree of talent to become respected and read in the field, even if your hardcore audience does consist of men in dirty raincoats who buy books with glossy covers that depict impossibly beautiful women pouting seductively whilst writhing amongst silk bedsheets.

Understand Your Genre And Your Audience

There are many different varieties of erotica, and not all of them are literary. On the internet for example, The Alt.Sex.Stories Text Repository (Adult Site) contains a veritable blizzard of strange, horrible, and poorly written tales in categories ranging from Non-Consensual Gay Sex to Mind Control (I wish I was kidding). ASSTR is basically a portal to the largest collection of erotic stories on the internet. I haven’t read them all. I doubt I’ve read 1% of them. But I have seen enough and know enough to be sure that of these thousands and thousands of dirty stories, about twelve are actually any good. The reason I want you to go there is not so that you’ll have a fine old time reading some awesome fiction, but to give you an understanding of just how huge and varied this genre is. If somebody somewhere has fantasised about it, you’re bound to find a story that features it.

Chosen a Category?

Spiffy.

Now Let’s Get To The Actual Writing.

Now you’ve chosen a Category (and those that chose vampires, vacuum cleaners, a video game character, or Mind Control can find the exit in the top right hand corner), you need to think about how you’re going to write your story and what it’s going to be about. In my own work, there is a huge difference between Fitz and Me (a lengthy tale with three-dimensional characters that actually attempts to tell a story and tap into the reader’s emotions as well as their pants), and Rain (in which two anonymous characters engage in clumsy, passionate sex against a backdrop of rain in an empty, nameless city). The contrast, to me, is obvious. Whereas the latter story’s erotic content is its centrepiece and meaning, the former uses erotic elements as a means to an end, in this case the telling of a doomed love story. These are two different approaches that attempt to make the reader feel similar emotions (though the overwhelming e-mail response to Rain suggested that it invoked a feeling of nostalgia and lost love).

So…decide what your story will be about, how long or short (approximately) it will be, and what it is you want to give your readers. If your answer to that last question was “an orgasm”, then that’s absolutely fine. I now plan to show you how to do this with style.

How To Write Sex

There is no right way to bring the glare of your descriptive prose to bear on sexual interaction of any kind. But there are many, many wrong ways. In my experience, and assuming the writer has talent in the first place, there is a tendency to go in one of two directions.

“Pamela screamed in ecstasy as I splattered her smiling face and jiggling tits with my thick, creamy man-custard.”

This kind of thing is most commonly found in works written by males that spend too much time reading the letters page of Reader’s Wives and surfing internet porn sites. Crazy as it seems, I have read work exactly like this. Erotica can be funny, but nobody wants the audience to laugh when they’re not supposed to.

“Camilla gasped and clapped her hands to her heaving bosom as Robert unveiled his throbbing manhood and then reached to rend her blouse asunder.”

You are a woman. You read too much Mills And Boon. Your writing would lose a battle of erotic content to a cheese sandwich. Danielle Steele sucks, and if your work reads like a sub-par attempt to copy her, then you may as well give up now.

While those two examples are still fresh in your minds, I’d like to deal, for a moment, with language. ‘Man-custard’, unless you’re writing in character and such a colourful turn of phrase comes (no pun intended) naturally, is not an acceptable euphemism for semen. Admittedly, ’semen’ is not exactly an erotic word in the first place, but surely you can do better than that. I pretty much always use ‘come’. Yes, that’s ‘c’,'o’,'m’,'e’. There is no such word as ‘cum’. If you attempt to use it in your erotic fiction, I will have you killed.

Acceptable Euphemisms for Penis:

Cock, Dick, Prick…or any descriptive variations on the theme…it’s not too difficult to write descriptive prose about the penis and its activities. There certainly isn’t a need for any of the following: Bacon Bazooka, Bald Avenger, Beef Missile, Bitch Stick, Captain Howdy, Charlie Russell The One-Eyed Muscle, Dr. Cyclops, Fun Truncheon, Gash Mallet, Godzilla, Jive Sausage, Little Jesus, Meat Thermometer, Mini-Me, Mr. Giggles, Muff Mole, Optimus Prime, Piss Whistle, Pump-Action Yoghurt Rifle, Purple Avenger, Slit-Eyed Demon, Soul Pole, Spurt Reynolds, Twelve-Inch Train Of Pain…or any variation thereof.

Acceptable Euphimisms for Vagina:

This one’s tougher. The only really useful one is ‘cunt’, and some folk are deeply offended by that particular word. I rather like it myself. ‘Pussy’ is also widely used, but I’ve always thought it sounded a bit lame. Then again, it’s possible it has simply been ruined for me by too many years of hardcore pornography. Either way, a good writer can see the image in his or her head and write about it without ever resorting to using any of these: Bearded Clam, Beef Jacket, Birth Cannon, Bitchcake, Camp Coochie, Cock Holster, Finger Warmer, Flesh Wallet, Four-Lipped Man-Eater, Front Butt, Fuck Hole, Garage Of Love, Gleaming Mound Of Venus, Growler, Gutted Hamster, Hairy Chequebook, Meat Curtains, Momma’s Silk Purse, Ninja Slipper, Old Toothless, Panty Rabbit, Pink Palace, Snake Charmer, Wizard’s Sleeve, Wookie….etc. etc.

Rely on your natural talent for writing good, sound prose, no matter how obscure the similes you may find yourself drawing on. Good erotic fiction understands the rules so that it can break them.

You are Now Ready to Write Erotica

That’s it…the end of this short but educational trip into the realm of the erotic. Go forth, my students. Go forth and write of warm skin, glistening flesh, and throbbing shafts. Fill the world with love and spectacular prose, not man-custard and beef missiles. Your readers will thank you, and so will I.