Moments In Crime

Signing Off

Well, this is it for me.  My thanks to the people at St. Martin’s for giving me a vehicle to pontificate for a while.  I enjoyed it.  More than I thought I would, in fact. 

Goodbye Sister Disco will be released Tuesday, March 18^th.  The reviews so far have been generally good, getting a star (an A or A+ in the book world) from Library Journal and Booklist.  And I think I'm okay with this.  I try to tell myself that a book that pleases everyone may be like a person that pleases everyone - not much fun to be around.  Adios,

James Patrick Hunt

Bad Seeds

I watched, in a way, the second half of The Good Son on television last night.  When I say “in a way”, I mean that I was switching back and forth between the movie and a basketball game on another channel.  But I think I got the gist of it and caught most of the good parts. 

The movie was released about fifteen years ago.  In it, Macauley Culkin played Henry Evans, a twelve year old sociopathic killer intent on murdering his family.  It’s a remake, of sorts, of The Bad Seed, a genuinely creepy, disturbing film about an evil, homicidal little girl named Rhoda Penmark. 

I enjoyed both films.  They are horror films, making no pretense to great art.  Perhaps they are cheesy and manipulative.  But they’re good cheese and that’s worthy of respect too.  And in their way, they’re controversial.  As far as I could tell (I only watched the second half), no attempt was made to “explain” Culkin’s Henry Evans.  His parents seemed loving and decent.  His surroundings were comfortable and affluent.  There was no hint that he had ever been abused or mistreated.  No explanation at all as to what would “turn” him evil.  He just “was.”

This underscores an issue that many crime writers deal with: are human monsters born or made?  It’s a complicated question and how you answer it is obviously going to depend on your world view as well as your experiences.  At a mystery writer’s conference, I was asked to be on a panel to discuss the subject of “good guys and bad guys.”  Writer Mark Billingham chaired the panel and did a marvelous job.  At that time, I had only published a couple of Maitland novels and was probably the least known writer on the panel.  I had not drawn an antagonist on the level of Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Lecter. 

Still, we discussed Hannibal Lecter probably more than we did our own creations and it was fun.  It was my opinion that Hannibal was more interesting and more frightening before Harris “explained” him.  I referred to the scene in the book Silence of the Lambs when Starling meets Lecter for the first time.  Starling suggests that something must have happened to Lecter.  Lecter replies, “Nothing happened to me, Officer Starling.  I happened.  You can’t reduce me to a set of influences.  You’ve given up good and evil for behaviorism, Officer Starling.  You’ve got everybody in moral dignity pants – nothing is ever anybody’s fault.  Look at me, Officer Starling.  Can you stand to say I’m evil?  Am I evil, Officer Starling?”

I always loved that scene.  I thought it established Hannibal’s character early and told (or warned) the reader, this is a man who likes being evil.  He’s proud of it.  A genuine monster that enjoys inflicting pain and terror. 

When they made the film, they dropped this line.  This was unfortunate and I suspect it was done because Hollywood has long been uncomfortable with what they consider “simplistic” notions of good and evil.  Harris later did “explain” Hannibal.  Horrifying childhood, loss of a sister, tortured adolescence, etc. Whether this was a true reflection of Harris’s worldview or a need for material for another Hannibal book, I do not know.  I do know that I was disappointed by it. 

It’s hard to win with audiences with this sort of thing.  If you say monsters just “happen”, you offend liberals eager to blame environment and perhaps society.  But you also offend conservative Christians who want to believe that the worst of us can be saved through salvation and the grace of God. In both cases, you’re questioning their tenets of faith. And most people want to believe there’s a cause and effect. Life is somehow more comforting when it can all be explained.  It’s less frightening if we believe the monster had a reason to do what he did. 

There’s a great scene in Dirty Harry when Clint Eastwood tells the mayor of San Francisco the Scorpio serial killer is going to kill again.  The mayor asks, “Now why would he do that?”

Dirty Harry responds, “Because he likes it.”

Sometimes, maybe most of the time, there isn’t a reason far beyond that.  They like it.  Psychologist Anna C. Salter wrote a book on the subject, Predators: Pedophiles, Rapists and other Sex Offenders. I read it for research purposes and got a lot out of it.  But I don’t recommend it for general audiences.  It’s gruesome, depressing stuff.  She says that while these human predators make up a very small portion of the population, they have always been with us, from Alcibiades to Ted Bundy.  That they are generally born, not made.  And they cannot be cured. 

As a subject, they’re very much a part of the entertainment industry.  And I’m as guilty as anyone in using them for books.  Still, I hope we in the thrill and chill business can keep them in perspective.  The Good Son and The Bad Seed creepy child movies are disturbing, but mostly good entertainment.  But making a hero out of serial killer or romanticizing one – ala Hannibal Rising or Dexter – is probably taking it too far.       

The New Centurion

There’s a scene in Goodbye Sister Disco where Lieutenant Hastings remembers how another police officer exposed himself to departmental ridicule by appearing in a local magazine’s “Single in the City” issue.   The cop poses for a photo and advises readers what would constitute his ideal first date, what he’s attracted to, his celebrity dream date, etc.  This leads to the cop being lampooned in locker rooms, with doctored flyers suggesting his celebrity dream date would be Nicholas Cage, and that his ideal first date would include shopping for boots at the Galleria. 

It’s a comic relief scene, put in perhaps to give the reader a break from tension, but probably more because it’s my book and I wanted it there.  I got the idea from a local magazine profiling “Tulsa’s most successful singles.”  Unfortunately, the satires are not far from the reality.  One woman profiled said she was attracted by “Personality!” and that her ideal first date would include a hot-air balloon ride, which I don’t believe was a code for some other sort of activity.

As I said, the idea itself came from a local source.  But the style and execution was stolen straight from Joseph Wambaugh.  For I believe my writing is as much influenced by him as it is Elmore Leonard or anyone else.  Someone at a book function once told me that the beginning of The Betrayers (the first George Hastings novel) reminded him of Wambaugh’s The Onion Field.  Would that it were true.   I don’t think, in that case, I was consciously trying to take a page from The Onion Field, but maybe something was buried deep.  I’ve read that book two or three times and I think it’s as good as In Cold Blood. 

Wambaugh, as most readers are already aware, is a gifted novelist who happened to be a Los Angeles police officer.   His first novel was The New Centurions. Published in 1970, it told the story of police in a way that had not really done before.   It traced the lives of three young police officers from their graduation from the police academy in 1960 to their involvement in the Watts Riot of 1965.  And these cops were not lethal weapon superheroes, but human beings dealing with human issues:  fear of being a physical coward, racism, identity issues, marriage, tight finances, fidelity, and so forth.  (That’s another thing I stole from him: “and so forth.”  Wambaugh did that a lot and I do too.)  Here were cops who cried and bled, struggled and suffered. 

And such humanity.  Here is a scene between the inherently decent and unhappily married Gus Plebesly and his female partner Lucy, who he’s fallen in love with:

“You’ve got blood on your dress,” said Gus, nodding to the smear on her shoulder and immediately he was sorry he said it because he should be trying to cheer her up.

                “I don’t care,” she said, not bothering to look at it, and something had been building up in him.  At that moment he almost blurted something.  If those steady eyes had been on him instead of the table he probably would have blurted it but he didn’t, and was glad he didn’t, because she probably would have looked at him sadly and said, “But that’s not what I meant at all.” 

That’s drama, not a thriller.  And it is as good as it gets.   Here is a portrayal of police officers as vulnerable and real, flesh and blood.  Likewise, I cannot read the final page of The Onion Field without crying.   

The Choirboys and The Glitter Dome are both great, as are all of his books.  But one of my personal favorites will always be The Black Marble, which I’ve read four or five times.  Try this: write a love story between two cops, both middle-aged, neither one of them “beautiful people”, one of them a broken-down, alcoholic Russian-American, the other a twice-divorced female detective who’s plenty smart and tough and have them not save the city from a terrorist attack or pursue a serial killer or even solve a murder, but have them work a dog-napping case and get the reader not only to care very much about the outcome, but absorbed in it. 

Who else could do that?  Who could take those distinctly non-high concept elements and make a great novel out of it?  Who would have the courage to try?

Written by a Good Man

In recent years, I’ve grown fond of the expression: “He’s not someone you want to know very well.”  All too often, it’s easier to like or admire someone when you don’t know them.  This is as true for writers as it is anyone else.  About twenty years ago, I saw a very famous, hugely successful writer signing books at a bookstore and he seemed inordinately ungracious.  People standing in long lines only to learn that he would only sign hardback books, etc.  Possibly he was having a bad day, as bad as a writer can have when hundreds of people show up at his book signing.  But I saw him a year or so later in a lengthy television interview, and after watching it for fifteen minutes, knew my initial of him impression was correct. 

Well, what difference does it make?  We don’t read books to make friends.  And they say you should never meet your heroes as the likelihood of being disappointed is high. Still, sometimes you like to think they’re good people.  And often they are.   One of the best prefaces I ever read in a novel was about Rafael Sabatini (one of my favorites.)  The book was Sabatini's Captain Blood.  I forgot who wrote the tribute, but it said, “Here is a story about a good man written by a good man.”

George MacDonald Fraser was a good man who wrote about a scoundrel.  Fraser died about two months ago.  For those of you who aren’t familiar with him, he wrote the Flashman novels.   He also wrote many screenplays, including The Three Musketeers (the seventies one with Michael York and Raquel Welch, not that abomination with Charlie Sheen and Kiefer Sutherland), Octopussy, and Force Ten from Navarone.  He also wrote two marvelous non-fiction books, Quartered Safe out Here and The Hollywood History of the World.   I don’t think I’ve read a better memoir of the Second World War than Quartered Safe out Here.  He had been a nineteen year old British soldier fighting in Burma.  He writes about war and soldiering honestly and gives his views of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings from the perspective of one who would have had to invade Japan on the ground (and likely died in the process) if the bombs had not been dropped.  The book also shows us that Fraser bore little resemblance to the rascal Flashman.      

Born in 1925, Fraser was a product of the British Empire and unashamed of it.  In the late sixties, he took the character of the bully Flashman from Tom Brown’s Schooldays and made him the hero of a set of novels.   Flashman didn’t grow or soften.   He remained an unregenerate bully, liar, womanizer, and above all, a coward.  Told in first person, Flashman is honest about all these character traits.  Fraser put him at several historic events: Custer’s last stand, at the Charge of the Light Brigade in the Crimean War, with John Brown at Harper’s Ferry, in the first Afghan War, and so on.  The Flashman books are a great way to learn history, a subject Fraser took very seriously.  Fun to read and funny.  The mark of a true fan of the novels is that they’re sorry Fraser didn’t live long enough to write about Flashman’s experiences in the Civil War.  (Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant both appeared in a couple of the novels and more than once Fraser hinted that Flashman had fought for both the North and the South.)  I read Flashman and the Redskins three times and I once met a history professor who told me that it and Thomas Berger’s Little Big Man were the most authentic portrayals of the American West he’d ever read.    

I also recommend his autobiography, The Light’s on at Signpost.  This was released in Britain about five years ago.  I don’t think it was ever published in the States.  I bought mine off amazon and paid quite a bit for it.  It was worth every penny. I’ve underlined several passages in this book too and I have no intention of ever loaning it out.  It’s not quite what you’d call correct.  But it ain’t right wing either.  He takes aim at the liberals and he calls Bill Clinton a poltroon, but he delivers some well aimed shots at Bush too.  Not just for invading Iraq but for Afghanistan too.  He made some dire predictions, most of which turned out to be true.  He was, as he said, a pacifist in the way a soldier who’s seen combat is often a pacifist.    

Here are only a handful of Fraser’s passages I underlined, these being addressed to the business of writing:

-          “With a novel, you’re on your own, writing for yourself, with no one to satisfy except the reader at the end of the day.”

-          “ . . .  when I read of writers who actually read their stuff aloud to friends as they go along, I’m baffled, for my toes curl under at the thought.  I’ve never written a synopsis for a book … I want what I write to be a surprise (to me, for one . . . )“

-          “I know what I want to say; it may be tripe, but it’s my tripe, no one else’s.”

-          “The silliest thing I ever heard about writing was Cyril Connolly’s dictum in The Unquiet Grave that the writer’s only function is to produce a masterpiece, suggesting that when he knows he is not, he should put it aside.  At that rate no one would ever finish anything, for I doubt if anyone consciously produced a masterpiece yet.   I am sure that when Shakespeare wrote ‘Go, bid the soldiers shoot’ he was entirely unaware that he had just completed the greatest play ever written – it may well have been his sixteenth shot at a snappy ending, and being a professional he probably thought: ‘Well, thank God that’s finished.  Denmark, forget it!  It’ll do, with any luck.’  And then wondered, as I do now: Right, what’s next?”

       

George MacDonald Fraser, 1925 - 2008.  A good man and a great writer. 

 

David Mamet Comes Out

David Mamet published a piece in The Village Voice yesterday titled “Why I Am No Longer a ‘Brain-Dead Liberal.'” He describes his transition from a liberal to a libertarian/conservative. Very interesting reading.

I’ve always been a fan of Mamet’s. In particular, I recommend his “Three Uses of the Knife” to anyone interested in writing fiction. I also liked his book “True and False: Heresy and Common Sense for the Actor.”

Some choice excerpts of the essay include the following:

- “I began to question what I actually thought and found that I do not think that people are basically good at heart; indeed, that view of human nature has both prompted and informed my writing for the last 40 years. I think that people, in circumstances of stress, can behave like swine, and that this, indeed, is not only a fit subject, but the only subject, of drama.”

- “For the Constitution, rather than suggesting that all behave in a godlike manner, recognizes that, to the contrary, people are swine and will take any opportunity to subvert any agreement in order to pursue what they consider to be their proper interests.”

- “I found not only that I didn’t trust the current government (that, to me, was no surprise), but that an impartial review revealed that the faults of this president – whom I, a good liberal, considered a monster – were little different from those of a president I revered. Bush got us into Iraq; JFK into Vietnam. Bush stole the election in Florida; Kennedy stole his in Chicago. Bush outed a CIA agent; Kennedy left hundreds of them to die in the surf at the Bay of Pigs. Bush lied about his military service; Kennedy accepted a Pulitzer Prize for a book written by Ted Sorenson. Bush was in bed with the Saudis; Kennedy with the Mafia. Oh.”

If that doesn’t offend liberal sensibilities enough, Mamet then calls Thomas Sowell our “greatest contemporary philosopher.” He ends by saying, correctly, “The right is mooing about faith, the left is mooing about change, and many are incensed about the fools on the other side – but at the end of the day, they are the same folks we meet at the water cooler. Happy election season.”

Buckley and the End of an Era

“I leave it at this, that it is outrageous to live in a society whose laws tolerate sending young people to life in prison because they grew, or distributed, a dozen ounces of marijuana.  I would hope that the good offices of your profession would mobilize at least to protest such excesses of wartime zeal, the legal equivalent of a My Lai massacre.”

Another dispatch from those liberals over at The Wire?  No, that was William F. Buckley Jr., addressing the New York Bar Association in 1995.  He would later put a copy of that speech in the February 1996 issue of his magazine The National Review.  The cover said in big bold letters The War on Drugs is Lost and the contents therein made a powerful case that that statement was true.  They knew it back then.  Sadly, that was twelve years ago and nothing much regarding that issue has changed. 

William F. Buckley Jr. died a couple of weeks ago.  And I think he would not be surprised at both Democrats and Republican’s failure to change the draconian drug laws.  A true conservative recognizes the limitations and realities of human nature, even as we reject nihilism and hope for something better.   

I was an admirer of Buckley’s since college.  I attended a Jesuit university and the majority of the students there shared the Jesuits’ world view, which was rather left of center.  Perhaps because of this, I took some pleasure in being one of the campus’s few outspoken Reaganauts.  I thought Reagan was a great president (still do), read all of Buckley’s columns, all of George Will’s and I subscribed to National Review.  Things were different then.  Being a conservative meant you were distrustful of big government, that you were anti-Communist, and that you were wary of utopian ideals.

Now it seems to mean something else.  The Republican Party is no longer the party of Goldwater and Reagan.  It’s now the party of George W. Bush, bogus tough guys, neocons, supporters of bigger and ever more intrusive government, and Christians who don’t seem to have much of a problem with torture.  Those presently running the G.O.P. are forever invoking Reagan’s name to drum up excitement.  But this is a case of wanting to be associated with a winner rather than sharing the same philosophy.  I for one have a lot of difficulty believing Reagan would have jiggered with intelligence to justify invading Iraq.  And no one will convince me he would have invaded Iraq either.  He was too smart to have gotten himself into that sort of mess.   The dirty truth is, Reagan would be rejected by his party today for exercising too much discretion and restraint.   

Unfortunately, this is more or less what happened to Buckley.  Buckley supported the War in Iraq in the beginning.  He had apparently been privately assured (I would say deceived) by Dick Cheney that there were indeed weapons of mass destruction there.  However, Buckley later regretted supporting it and said so.  On a National Review sponsored cruise last year, Buckley asked neoconservative Norman Podhoretz, “Aren’t you embarrassed by the absence of these weapons?”  Podhoretz replied that, no, he was not embarrassed.  That of course the weapons had been shipped to Syria and that, further, he was “heartbroken” by this “rise of defeatism on the right.”   As noted by reporter Johann Hari, the audience cheered Podhoretz and stiffed Buckley.  Later, Hari overhead people dismissing Buckley as a “coward” and a senile old man.  This on a cruise sponsored by the magazine he founded. 

I cannot say if he was depressed by this turn of events.  He was a gentleman, but he did not seem to me the sort of man who cared much what people thought of him.  It depresses me though.  It’s not his party anymore and he probably died knowing it.  The Republican Party is today dominated by people like Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, Hugh Hewitt, and Sean Hannity.  The overwhelming majority of them have never been soldiers and have never seen combat.  Moreover, damn few of them seem willing to enlist.  Yet they don’t hesitate for a moment to support and defend unnecessary war, or support the expansion of it into Iran, and they condone abuse of prisoners of war in clear violation of not only international law, but regulations plainly listed in the U.S. Army Field Manual.  A Bush policy that’s almost certainly done more damage to this nation’s image than the invasion of Iraq itself.  In a different time, these were the sort of people we called opportunists and, yes, cowards. 

Lastly, they don’t seem to have a trace of Buckley’s wit or grace.  They just seem like creeps, drawn more to bullying, power, and fame than to conversation or ideals.  Even if you shared their views, you probably wouldn’t want them in your home or at your dinner table. 

In a 1964 essay entitled We Want our Politicians to be Hypocrites, Buckley wrote, “We are so concerned to flatter the majority that we lose sight of how often it is necessary, in order to preserve freedom for the minority, let alone for the individual, to face that majority down.”  Let us hope for more men like him, facing the majority and defending freedom. 

Being Steve McQueen

When I was in college, my roommate and I affected the term “the Steve McQueen excuse me.”  This was a reference to a scene in Bullitt when Robert Vaughan’s jackass district attorney tried to bully McQueen’s Frank Bullitt into signing a statement.  McQueen simply says, “Excuse me,” and walks off, dismissing him.  One of the best brush offs I’ve ever seen on screen.  The Steve McQueen excuse me could be remarkably effective when dealing with jerks and fools.  Quiet, controlled, offhand, and cool.  So we thought.   

But it was in vain, really.  For who could be as cool as Steve McQueen? 

I’d like to think I’ve grown up since then.  But I probably haven’t.  And I suspect that I am not the only crime writer who is influenced by McQueen and his films.  I think I read somewhere that Michael Connelly admitted that his Harry Bosch had some Frank Bullitt in him. And George Pelecanos recently went all out, buying a new Bullitt Mustang with green paint, blacked-out grill and all the trimmings.  There may be another writer out there wearing dark turtle neck sweaters and brown sport coats.   

That’s how it often is for men of a certain age.  I don’t own a ’68 Ford Mustang myself.  They’re great to look at, but I test-drove one once and thought it handled like a tractor.  (Besides, my preference is for second-hand German cars.)  But there is a picture on my office wall of the Bullitt Mustang hurtling over a San Francisco hill.  And I own a VHS of Bullitt which I watch probably three or four times a year.   Others have tried and some have come close, but no one has yet filmed a car chase more exciting than the one in Bullitt.  My understanding is that the car chase was chiefly McQueen’s idea. 

If the film was written around the car chase, it doesn’t seem to show.  That is, the rest of the movie works as well.  In particular, the airport scenes at the climax of the film are very good.  The film's score, the pacing, the dialogue, the acting . . . it all holds up still.  It is and was a thriller for grown-ups. 

When I created the character George Hastings, I suppose I had a little bit of Frank Bullitt on the brain.  I wanted Hastings to be a lieutenant, as Bullitt was.  And I wanted him to also have to deal with the administrative politics that are present at any police department.  Beyond that, there’s probably not much similarity.  While Bullitt works well on the screen – particularly when you have McQueen playing him – it may not work too well on the page.  He’s too cool, really.  Can readers really identify with a fortyish great looking guy who gets to bed twenty-two year old girls who look like Jacqueline Bissett?  Movie stars may get to do that, but I assure you not many cops do.  Give Bullitt a busted marriage and the problems of raising a daughter alone, both financial and emotional, and he’s not really Bullitt anymore.  But if you saddle a George Hastings with those issues, a reader will see him, hopefully, as sympathetic and a little more human. 

It’s not much fun aging. Still, I feel a genuine pity for people under thirty-five because they didn’t get exposed to Hollywood’s age of cool movie guys.  They were born too late to catch it.  Most of them are unable to get excited about seeing McQueen on the screen.  We got Robert Mitchum, John Wayne, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Brando and Paul Newman and Bogart, Strother Martin and Lee Marvin.  They got The Matrix.  I know, I know.  Let them do what they want.  Maybe it’s like telling people of my generation that we never gave Ronald Colman his proper due.  But I’ll take McQueen destroying a police car with a shotgun in The Getaway over Fast and Furious any day of the week.     

I’ll close by referencing two often overlooked McQueen films that probably best demonstrate his range.  The first is Hell is for Heroes.  This was released in 1962, the year before The Great Escape made him a big star.  It’s a World War II picture directed by Don Siegel.  McQueen plays a burned out soldier who’s probably a borderline psychopath.  It’s the sort of film I wish I could have written.  Great dialogue, great action, well drawn characters played by pros who knew what they were doing.  It's such well written drama, the entire thing could have been performed on a stage.  Co-stars include James Coburn and, in his first film, Bob Newhart.  Watch it and you’ll know that McQueen was more than just a screen presence.  The man could act.  And this was his best performance. 

Junior Bonner is less intense but no less revealing of his gifts as an actor.  It was released in 1972, the same year as The Getaway.  Sam Peckinpah directed this one too.   McQueen plays an aging rodeo cowboy returning to his hometown in hopes of winning the big prize.  His father, Ace Bonner, is played by Robert Preston.  The scenes with them are very effective and it’s always neat to watch two top notch actors work the screen together, each raising the other’s game.  Joe Don Baker, the great seventies character actor, plays McQueen’s far more successful younger brother.  At one point, he says to McQueen, “I’m working on my first million and you’re still working on eight seconds.” My understanding is, the movie wasn’t very successful.  This is unfortunate because it was beautiful and tender without being mawkish, which isn’t is easy as you might think.  But it probably wasn’t quite what people expected from McQueen and certainly not from Peckinpah.  It’s not an action film.  There’s no violence.  And the drama is subtle and intelligent.  McQueen took a fair amount of risk playing an affable loser and the whole thing has a sad, sweet tone to it.  Both actor and director deserve credit for bringing it to us.     

A Brief History of George Hastings

I’ve always been drawn to the police procedurals.  There’s something clean about the form, maybe even something comforting.  Starting in college, I read most of the Per Wahloo-Maj Sjowall Martin Beck mysteries which, as most of you probably know, were set in Sweden.  I didn’t care for the writers’ Marxist worldviews and the characters themselves seemed pretentious and a little difficult to like.  But they were good stories.  And the pacing and the structure were nearly perfect.  The Laughing Policemen, probably their most successful one, was made into an American film with Walter Mathau and Bruce Dern.  The film was, in style and sensibility, very American.  And it was great, arguably better than the book.  (Note: I represented police unions for about seven years and Bruce Dern’s portrayal of a detective was one of the most authentic I’ve seen.)

Anyway, while I was practicing law, I wrote books as a hobby.   Before ego took over, I never imagined any of them would be published.  The first three books I wrote featured a lawyer named Paul Kessler.  He was, like me, a Tulsa lawyer.  But he was taller, richer, and slept with a lot more women.  The first two books were pretty clunky and amateurish.  The third – Before They Make You Run – was eventually published.  I liked Kessler, but the legal thriller/crime solver form didn’t really satisfy me.  In my work, I had tried plenty of cases, almost all of them civil.  Perhaps for that reason, courtroom thrillers didn’t much appeal to me.  (Generally, they still don’t.  Apart from The Verdict and Anatomy of a Murder, most trial stories bore me.  And The Verdict is really more about a man’s redemption than it is a trial.) 

So I knew I wanted to write something different.  A cop story with a cop central character.  However, this required me to take off the training wheels.   While the life of a trial lawyer was something I knew, I had never been a detective.  Still, I wanted to write a police procedural.  So I created George Hastings, a detective lieutenant in Saint Louis. 

The first book with him was called Speedboats for Breakfast.  It was basically a re-working of An American Tragedy.  I got the idea after reading a letter that Raymond Chandler sent to his friend saying how much he hated the movie A Place in the Sun, the film version of the book starring Montgomery Clift and a very young, very cute Elizabeth Taylor.  Chandler said the stark contrasts of the rich and poor in the movie were so overdone and clichéd they just as well have called it “Speedboats for Breakfast.”

So that’s where I stole my title as well as the idea.  I took the Clyde Griffiths character, made him considerably darker, placed him in the 1980’s, and had him murder the low class girl that threatened to ruin his future and entry into the good life.  But, I let him get away with it.  Until twenty years later, Hastings started to investigate him. 

After I finished it, I put that book in a drawer and then wrote Maitland, which became the first book I got published.  Speedboats may suffer from the same clunk and amateurish issues that the early Kesslers did and if that’s the case, maybe it should remain in the drawer.  But I’m still glad I wrote it.  (I rarely regret writing any book, so long as it was my idea.)  Because it was that book that gave me the confidence to write a character who was not a lawyer, who was not so close to home.  After Maitland, I wrote Maitland Under Siege.  And then I came back to Hastings and wrote The Betrayers, which was published last year.   Goodbye Sister Disco is the next in the series.  So I’m grateful to George Hastings.  He helped me move up and out. 

Blogging This Week: James Patrick Hunt

 

 A graduate of St. Louis University and Marquette University Law School, James Patrick Hunt practiced law for thirteen years, and for seven of those years, he represented police unions. He is the author of four previous novels, two of which are in his Maitland crime series. Born in Surrey, England, he now lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Photo Credit: Chris Claussen                                                                                                                                 

        Lieutenant George Hastings, a cool-headed, quick-thinking police detective, leapt to the forefront of the St. Louis Police Department when two beat cops were gunned down, and he led the joint FBI/police task force that caught the killer.
        Now he is back at work with the FBI on a new case: Cordelia Penmark, the daughter of a wealthy businessman, has been kidnapped and her boyfriend callously executed outside of a posh holiday party for his law firm.
        The murder was clearly a message—the kidnappers are willing to take this as far as they have to—and the target and the ransom demand indicate that the crime is politically motivated. But the investigators are stumped. Wary because of bruised egos on his team and bad blood among members of the young woman’s family, and suspicious of the kidnappers’ intentions, Hastings knows that there’s more than simple politics in play as the kidnappers pull him and the girl’s father into a deadly game of cat and mouse.
        Slick, sharp, and authentic, Goodbye Sister Disco, the sequel to the acclaimed novel The Betrayers, establishes James Patrick Hunt as one of crime fiction’s rising stars.