Q & A with James Winter

James Winter has finally brought out his Nick Kepler novel Northcoast Shakedown out as an ebook. A nice time for an interview...
Q: How did you come up with the character?
When I started sketching the story that became Northcoast Shakedown, I worked for a large insurance company. A freelance claims investigator seemed like a good fit for the story, and Nick sort of evolved from there. I wrote a few shorts to get a feel for him: He’s a part time musician. He used to work for the company that gives him office space (a tip of the hat to Sue Grafton). He gets along fairly well with cops, but not with organized crime. All that came about as I worked on Northcoast Shakedown.

Q: What's next for you and Kepler?
When Northcoast Shakedown was originally published, I already had the second book in the can, so I plan to release Second Hand Goods in the new year.

Q: How do you promote your work?
Twitter. Other blogs. Beg. Whine. Plead. Mainly I count on word of mouth. I think when I get enough work out there, I’ll start offering books for free.

Q: What's your idea about the psychotic sidekick in PI novels like Hawk and Joe Pike?
It was interesting when Parker did it because no one had done it before, and for his first couple of appearances, you never knew whose side Hawk was on. Pike is an interesting character in and of himself. But beyond that, I’ve read too many PI novels where the psycho sidekick was there because someone told the author they had to have one. Beyond Hawk and Pike, Bubba Rugowski’s the only one that’s ever worked for me. I deliberately avoided using one in my work.

Q: In the last century we've seen new waves of PI writers, first influenced by Hammett, then Chandler, Macdonald, Parker, later Lehane. Who do you think will influence the coming generation?
Probably Michael Koryta, who can really craft a good story, and Sean Chercover, who didn’t really reinvent the PI novel. He just wrote a damned good one. We need more from Sean.

Q: Dennis Palumbo came up with the following question: what is it about those "mean streets" that make your character insist on going down them, regardless of what awaits?
The mean streets are actually something we don’t see very often in our day to day lives, unless you’re a cop or a criminal or someone on the fringes of society. We do our daily commutes, go to work, go to school, go home, go to the bar or to church or to the movies, and life functions, on a very basic level, by a certain set of rules. The “mean streets” are where those rules breakdown. It’s not that our daily life is a fallacy, but it’s what’s beyond it that’s where the conflict lies. And the guy going down those mean streets for some reason always has a need to put things right. His or her idea of right doesn’t necessarily conform to what we normally think it should be.

Hurt Machine (Moe Prager) by Reed Farrel Coleman

With this novel Reed shows us again why he’s the crime writer’s writer.
Moe Prager has been diagnosed with stomach cancer, but that doesn’t hold him back from investigating the stabbing of his ex-wife’s sister.
There’s a lot of people out in NY that hated her, because she neglected her duties as a paramedic and let a man die in a restaurant. Uncovering her secrets Moe infiltrates into the macho world of the New York fire department. And it must be said, Moe might be getting old, he might be getting sicker and sicker but he can still be a pretty tough guy.
What makes this such a great PI novel is the fact it never strays from what makes the genre great but also adds more. The mystery is very satisfying but we also can read the story as social commentary, as a more literary view of a man fighting age and disease. Excellent work.

White Knight Syndrome - now on Kindle!

It came out in paperback a few years ago, but is NOW available as an ebook for the low price of 2,99 bucks.

Noah Milano is a Los Angeles security specialist with more than a few family problems. Because, in his case, his family is the family. He's the estranged son of a mobster, which creates a big deal of tension and more than a few problems. Fiercely independent, and determined to sever all ties with his past, Noah has to adjust from being a spoiled mobster son to being an independent operator with little money.
When he's hired to bodyguard a beautiful and rich teenage girl he's drawn into a web of family secrets, homicide and the dangers of falling in love.It's not easy to be a White Knight in a world filled with betrayal and mob violence but Noah Milano is going to try anyway... Even if he has to die doing it...

Get it here.

Favorite Sons of 2011

As I do every year I want to share with you my favorite PI-stuff of the year.

BEST PI NOVEL: 13 Million Dollar Pop by David Levien
BEST DEBUT: Pocket-47 by Jude Hardin
BEST NEW PI: Conway Sax (in Purgatory Chasm) by Steve Ulfelder
BEST ACTION SCENES: Kiss Her Goodbye by Mickey Spillane & Max Allan Collins

Honorable mentions go to Timothy Hallinan whose first novel featuring Junior Bender, Crashed, was my favorite book I read this year. It came out in 2010, so it didn't really belong on this list.

Guest Post: Out of the ordinary crime fiction

Sometimes a writer needs to look outside their comfort zone to find constructive inspiration for a story. When writers draw inspiration solely from within the confines of their own genre, writers run the risk of sounding repetitive, like their rehashing parts of someone else’s story. Hardboiled crime writers can lose their individual voice in the echo chamber of their genre just like any other fiction writer. It could be the case that a genre writer looking for inspiration could find it within unconventional stories that challenge traditional devices of the genre. Below are three books that manipulate traditional hardboiled crime fiction in ways that could reinvigorate writers and readers to the subject.

P.D. James’s Death Comes to Pemberley
A crime writer for over twenty years, British-born P.D. James is no stranger to the genre. What sets her newest novel Death Comes to Pemberley apart from its peers is the subject matter and the narrative style. James sets her story in the same Victorian setting as Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, and by the same setting I mean the same characters, the continuation of the same storyline that ended with Austen’s novel. But don’t be scared away by the premise! James uses her skill as a crime writer to investigate the dark, gothic underbelly that belies the relatively sunny atmosphere of the British socialites in Pride and Prejudice. The novel playfully inverts the decorousness of its Victorian subject matter: bloodied corpses are discovered, shady characters sully the main characters’ decorous conventions, friends betrayed, and mysteries beget mysteries. It’s an entertaining and refreshing reinvention of the Victorian mystery fused with the best elements of contemporary crime fiction.

Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice
Thomas Pynchon might be called a lot of things in his illustrious career as a fiction writer, but “crime writer” is not usually among them. His huge and dazzlingly complex novels have garnered him decades of critical acclaim while the author himself remains shrouded in anonymity, a mystery novel unto himself. His relatively breezy 2009 crime novel Inherent Vice playfully engages the elements of hardboiled fiction in the drug-haze of early 1970’s Los Angeles. The story follows the main character, Private Investigator “Doc” Sportello, through a series of bizarre investigations begun with a small job taken on behalf of his ex-girlfriend. Follow Doc through a hilariously drug-induced fog of paranoia and half-baked mystery that plays out like a well-crafted Coen brothers movie.

Jennifer Egan’s Look at Me
Most recently awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2010, Jennifer Egan is a writer’s writer. Her prose is as florid as it is thought provoking and complex. Her 2001 novel Look at Me focuses her critical eye on the theme of identity, how people perceive of themselves and others. The story interweaves several narratives, but the main story concerns a spiritually lost private eye and a has-been fashion model trying to hunt down a mysterious figure known to them only as Z. As the story progresses and Egan reveals more background about every character, you start to gain a deeper understanding of the stereotypical private eye, their job, their lives, and the interconnectedness of the lives around them. It’s a compelling read well worth your time.

Byline: Jane Smith is a freelance writer and blogger. She writes about criminal background check for Backgroundcheck.org. Questions and comments can be sent to: janesmth161 @ gmail.com