Filed under: Interview
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?
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
Filed under: Interview
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.”
Filed under: Interview
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.”
