Interview with William Todd, Author of A Christmas Coda (2016)

It’s not often that a Christmas book crosses our desk as smart, as moving and as ornate as A Christmas Coda, by William Todd.  We were lucky enough to read and review his new book last week, and even luckier when Mr. Todd graciously consented to an interview.

A Christmas Coda is a sequel to Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, and is a worthy addition to the Scrooge mythos.  It has excited a great deal of interest among Dickens scholars and Carol enthusiasts alike, and is well on its way to becoming a holiday classic in its own right.

Here Todd responds to our questions….

Can you tell us a little about yourself and your career?

I was born in 1960 in Detroit, Michigan, and spent the first couple decades of my life doing non-writing stuff.  So let's start at age 23, when I moved to Los Angeles to begin my first job (of any type, ever) as an aerospace engineer.

Like a lot of new hires, my first couple weeks on the job were basically "free roam," where not much is really expected of you except learning how to use the copy machine.  That's how I found myself one day sitting in my office with a bunch of other new hires, shooting the breeze, until someone raised one of those "Book of 1000 Questions" type of questions, which was:

"If wages were no object, and you could do ANYTHING you wanted to do with the rest of your work life, what would it be?"

To my surprise, I started hearing such answers as "I'd play the saxophone" or "I'd race boats" (which I didn't even know was a career option!).  But an even bigger surprise was that not one of the new hires in my office, aerospace engineering majors all, said, "I'd build the best spaceship ever" or even "I'd become the head of NASA...”

...including me - which was by far the BIGGEST surprise of all.

You see, I'd grown up loving the world of entertainment - books, plays, and especially movies and TV.  But I'd also grown up in Michigan, about as far away from the centers for these activities as you could get, geographically and psychologically.  Entertainment as a career path was never even remotely on my realistic radar.  I was good at school.  I was good at math and science.  An engineering career was a guaranteed job back then.  Why aerospace?

I loved Star Trek.  That should have been a clue.

Instead, I did what I was expected to do.  I got my degree (or two), got my guaranteed job, moved out to the Promised Land...

...and for the first time, stared down the barrel of 50 years doing this.  And, as embarrassed as I am to admit it, waiting my turn to answer the "Book of 1000 Questions" question, not having ever REALLY considered what I'd REALLY like to do with those 50 coming years.

And as it turned out, somewhat to my surprise (and somewhat not), the answer wasn't "to become the best damn engineer I could."

So what DID I want?

And that's how, within a month of graduating from college with two aerospace engineering degrees, and within a week of moving my life out to Los Angeles...

...I started writing scripts.  After work.  Every night.

And didn't stop until I finally sold one, four years later.

Yep, my self-administered "university education" on How To Become A Writer was four straight years of just doing it.

Which, of course, turned out to be only the beginning...

What was it about A Christmas Carol that told you that it needed a sequel?

A Christmas Carol has always been my favorite Christmas story.  Especially Act Three, where the reborn Scrooge awakens on Christmas morning.  I love this part so much that I often watch just this sequence from several of its many movie adaptations, all in a row, for the simple shared joy of it.

But there have always been lingering questions.  And for years, like the spirits that haunted Scrooge, these would occasionally visit me:

- How did Scrooge help Tiny Tim to walk again?

- Could there be any chance for Scrooge to redeem lost love?

- How could Scrooge ever repay a debt of the magnitude he owed Jacob Marley?

Inevitably, these led to speculative musings (most often in the shower, a writer's greatest think tank!) and the eventual forming of answers, image by image and scene by scene.

It took years.  Literally.  But there finally came a time when the enterprise as a whole elbowed its way to the fore and said, "It's time."

And so I began what would be, for me, the most difficult thing I ever wrote in my entire life.

Are there any real-world events that make a sequel to A Christmas Carol particularly pressing at this time?

Yes.  And no.

And forgive me, because my intention is not to waffle, but to hope that A Christmas Coda, like A Christmas Carol before it, is more universal in nature, rather than tied to any specific place, time, or event.  Certainly, there are things in the real world today that beg a re-acquaintance with "goodwill toward men," just as there were very real issues in Victorian times that coincided with the motions of Dickens pen.  But these are universal, ongoing, human issues, not fixed in time, as the longevity of Dickens tale instructs.

The economic realities of Scrooge’s world are pretty bleak; have we come far enough?  Have we lived up to the ideals of The Carol?

We can never - and will never - "come far enough"...

...but that doesn't mean we should stop trying.  I'll broaden the point philosophically to say, there will always be evil in the world, just as our goal should always be to completely eliminate it - even though we know that to be impossible.

We'll never completely "live up to the ideals of The Carol" because that would involve an end point, a state of flawlessness in an inherently flawed universe.  But this is not a matter of despair, because fighting the good fight is what our lives are all about:  It gives us meaning.

[And before anybody beats me to it, yes, I'm the guy who wrote the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie!]

So much of A Christmas Carol and A Christmas Coda are about redemption, and then making good on that redemption.  Why does redemption resonate with you?

I think it relates to the above:  Trying your best to be as good as you can be, inevitably failing to achieve any ideal standard, but finding that it's never too late to do better.

I’m delighted that Jacob Marley is such a large presence in A Christmas Coda, even though he doesn’t appear onstage.  What is the heart of the Marley Paradox, for you?

I'm not sure what the "Marley Paradox" even is!  But I'll give it a shot:

The thing that always bugged me the most about A Christmas Carol was the idea that Jacob Marley, the guy who moved (presumably) heaven itself to save a friend, was himself never saved, but instead, forever condemned to chains, and in his own wailing words, "doomed to wander through the world—oh, woe is me!—and witness what [I] cannot share, but might have shared on earth, and turned to happiness!"

That's not fair!  That's not right!  Scrooge got a second chance...

...why not Marley???

And thus the seed of a sequel was sown...

What is it about A Christmas Carol that has made it such a classic?  Is it the story?  The character of Scrooge?  Or something else?

If only the S.A.T. had been this easy--

e.)  All of the above!

And, yes, more.

But mostly, I believe, is its message of Redemption:

It's never too late - for anyone - to change for the better.

Take THAT, Relentless Focus On The Negative In Modern Culture!

I can imagine that someone who wrote A Christmas Coda is a fan of the holiday.  What are your thoughts and feelings on Christmas?

I've always loved Christmas.  It's been my favorite holiday ever since childhood, when I actually experienced the magic of a Midwestern winter morning transformed by the kindness of parents into a warmly glowing treasure hunt initiated by siblings in knit pajamas well before the rise of the sun, tearing open package after package of colorfully wrapped gifts, piled 'neath a twinkling tree... made of aluminum.

I thought it the most beautiful thing in the world.  I used to lie under it at night reading Archie Christmas comic books, staring up at the ornaments, slowly changing hue from the rotating color wheel with its ratcheting metal plate and blindingly hot floodlight bulb that could only exist in a fairy-tale era before OSHA.

The gifts are the very least of it for me now.

I love it for the music, and the food, and, yes, the fact that people at least try to experience it as "a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time".

In other words, I love it for a lot of the same reasons Charles Dickens did.

How do you envision Scrooge?  Is there an actor or interpretation you had in mind while writing your novel?

I sometimes envision a specific person (such as an actor, but not always) as a physical model when writing a script, and it was (perhaps too) easy to let Alastair Sim slip into the role of Scrooge, given that the 1951 film version of A Christmas Carol has become all but canon amongst movie adaptations.

Certainly, in the opening sequence of A Christmas Coda, Mr. Sim was much in mind, right down to the whooping of his post-salvation laugh, since his interaction with Mrs. Dilber was purposely reminiscent of the scene in the 1951 movie (which does not exist in Dickens' novella) where she threatens to "scream for the beadle".

Soon thereafter, however, I abandoned all physical reference to Scrooge, even the original John Leech illustrations, in favor of the original character Dickens described, and thus available to be cast to the particular taste of any reader, in their own mind's eye.

Do you have a favorite adaptation of A Christmas Carol?

Actually, no.  Not even what seems to be the consensus pick for "Best Adaptation," which, as mentioned above, is the 1951 Renown Pictures version starring Alastair Sim.

As alluded to farther above, I tend to judge A Christmas Carol adaptations by their third acts, and each has its strengths and weaknesses.

A particular strength of the 1951 version is the scene in which Scrooge goes to his nephew Fred's house on Christmas Day to finally accept his annual dinner invitation.

[An aside:  In an example of just how much people love that 1951 movie version of A Christmas Carol, and for anyone who might particularly appreciate a story of heroic research, there is the tale of "Fred's Maid".  She appears in a scant 42-second scene in which she answers the door to Scrooge, and silently encourages him to enter the party.  This actress didn't have a single word of dialogue, and is nowhere credited in the film, but she became such a beloved character to many over the years that she eventually sparked an internet hunt for her identity.  Only recently has the mystery been solved!  If anyone cares to, you may read about it here:  http://dickensblog.typepad.com/dickensblog/2013/05/meet-the-maid-an-interview-with-theresa-derrington-cozens-hardy.html]

There, he encounters Fred and his wife, a woman he had heretofore refused to acknowledge (previously thinking it a bad match - financially) and, in one of the most emotional scenes in the entire movie, asks forgiveness.  And all to the strains of "Barbara Allen" - quite the concentration of weepy emotion in and of itself!

Similarly, the 1984 movie adaptation starring George C. Scott finds its deepest emotional resonance in that very same scene, Scrooge literally capping it with, "God forgive me the time I've wasted."

I love these scenes.  Perhaps best of all.  And the most fascinating thing about them is this:

These moments DO NOT EXIST in Dickens' original "A Christmas Carol".

Instead, he wraps up the entire Fred visit in barely half a page:

In the afternoon he turned his steps towards his nephew’s house.  He passed the door a dozen times, before he had the courage to go up and knock. But he made a dash, and did it:

“Is your master at home, my dear?” said Scrooge to the girl. Nice girl! Very.

“Yes, sir.”

“Where is he, my love?” said Scrooge.

“He’s in the dining-room, sir, along with mistress. I’ll show you up-stairs, if you please.”

“Thank’ee. He knows me,” said Scrooge, with his hand already on the dining-room lock. “I’ll go in here, my dear.”

He turned it gently, and sidled his face in, round the door. They were looking at the table (which was spread out in great array); for these young housekeepers are always nervous on such points, and like to see that everything is right.

“Fred!” said Scrooge.

Dear heart alive, how his niece by marriage started! Scrooge had forgotten, for the moment, about her sitting in the corner with the footstool, or he wouldn’t have done it, on any account.

“Why bless my soul!” cried Fred, “who’s that?”

“It’s I. Your uncle Scrooge. I have come to dinner. Will you let

me in, Fred?”

Let him in! It is a mercy he didn’t shake his arm off. He was at home in five minutes. Nothing could be heartier. His niece looked just the same. So did Topper when he came. So did the plump sister when she came. So did every one when they came. Wonderful party, wonderful games, wonderful unanimity, won-der-ful happiness!

And now, a Sacrilege:

I actually like the movie versions of the Fred scene better than Dickens' original.  To me, they resonate with far more emotion.

But before you gather pitchfork and torch and set GPS coordinates for my home address, pause a moment, as I once did, to consider that perhaps some good can come out of this realization...

...because for me, it was a sign that I, too, might dare extrapolate the work of The Inimitable.

Or that you, perhaps, could actually enjoy it.

My fond hope, of course, is that you will.

For my dearest hope is that A Christmas Coda, like The Carol before it, will become a small part of YOUR love of the Christmas season - blessed to Dickensian fullness--

With Tidings of Comfort and Joy,

William Todd

Down Mean Streets With Lawrence Block Part V

Today we conclude our week-long interview with Grand Master Lawrence Block.

JA: Are your comfortable making public appearances?

LB: I have been. Yeah, I enjoy it. I like travel. Even book tour-type travel. It's exhausting, but it's supposed to be. If it's not, it means you're not doing it right!

JA: Is it more and more part of a writer's life to take control of the selling of one's self?

LB: I don't know if you can control it. You take a part in it. But it seems to be, it seems to be. The book tours are a fairly recent phenomena in American book publishing. Fifteen years ago, hardly anyone toured and the tours were all media oriented and confined to writers of non-fiction or extremely topical fiction that would get on various local shows. Frequently there were no bookstore appearances. The idea of bookstore driven tours with signings, or sending out fiction and first book writers in many instances lately, I don't know how productive that is. I know it can be enormously frustrating for the writer who shows up at a bookstore where no one has heard of him and the store has anywhere between zero and one copy of his book. I think there may be rather more touring going on now than makes sense. But I enjoy it. Doing too much of it this year, because I toured for A Long Line of Dead Men in November, and for Burglars Can't Be Choosers in February. And I'm going out again in June for The Burglar Who Thought He Was Bogart.

JA: Where are you going?

LB: Mostly the mid-West.

JA: Are your biggest sales in the mid-West? New York? The West Coast?

LB: New York. But, all over.

JA: Would you say publishing has changed radically from your early days?

LB: I'm sure it has, but I can't say how. I don't know that I had much sense of what was going on when I started out, so it's hard to tell how it's changed. There are fewer houses, but they're larger. Editors have less decision making power. Houses are run rather more by sales departments and less by editorial departments than they used to be. I don't know that any of these changes are good or bad.

JA: Surely the superstore has played a role?

LB: That's quite recent. It certainly is playing an enormous role. I don't know if it's affecting writers, but it's affecting independent book-sellers. It's unfortunate the way the smaller stores are getting caught in the crunch that way. On the other hand, it's hard to go into a brand new Barnes and Noble and say, "This is bad for American publishing," or "This is bad for American writers and readers."

JA: I think one of the problems with the superstores is that maybe new writers are on the shelves for three weeks, if they're lucky, and then they're remaindered or sent back. I think with smaller stores they would have longer shelf lives. But I don't know what the facts are.

LB: I don't know either. But they have a hard time getting into smaller stores, too. If a superstore carries a 120,000 titles, the smaller stores would carry a fraction of that. So I don't know if that's true. It has always been tough to be a first-book author. But it's always been tough to be an unpublished writer trying to get published. It's always been tough to aspire to a career in any of the arts -- and I think it's supposed to be tough. We say that it's more difficult now to break in, but I don't know if that's true. It's never been easy. And it seems to me that I remember hearing 30 years ago that it was tougher than it used to be! It's like Greenwich Village, for God's sake. When I first came here in the mid-1950s, people were saying, "It's nice here, but you should've seen it 10 years ago!"

JA: Mystery fandom has become so vocal and so active. The emergence of Murder Ink and Scene of the Crime and Foul Play bookstores can be directly attributed to fans, along with countless newsletters and mystery book bulletin boards on Internet and America On Line. Of course all of this has affected the market, but do you think it has affected the production of the work? For the writer?

LB: Has fandom affected me? I don't know. I'm not sure. I think the proliferation of all of this has been quite recent. For example, there was one conference for years, The Bouchercon, and only recently has there been an explosion of local ones. I think they're probably good for the biz, good for writers and all.

I think, though, there's a real danger for the writer in paying too much attention to all of that. Someone suggested that I subscribe to Dorothy L. on line, so I did. I subscribed to it for two days, and then unsubscribed. Not that there was anything wrong with it, but what did I need it for? I didn't want all that coming into my computer every day, and I realized it would be a real mistake to read it all. And this is not to deny the validity of anything that is said on it, I just think the writer should not be monitoring what is being said about him or anybody else too closely. One way to put it is that the worse disservice I could do to my readers is to try to give them what they want.

The hour grows late and the shadows lengthen. We finish our coffee and head for the street.

Kindly, he walks me to the Christopher Street subway station at Sheridan Square. Around me, the city night life shifts into gear. I ask one more question.

"The New York of Matt Scudder is such a dangerous place, the streets are mean. Do you feel safe here?"

He looks at the neighborhood streets. "Sure I feel safe. New York's no different. The world's a dangerous place."

And he smiled.

Down Mean Streets With Lawrence Block Part IV

More of our 1995 interview with Lawrence Block…..

JA: And your future books?

LB: There is an upcoming Burglar book in June.

JA: Really!?

LB: The Burglar Who Thought He Was Bogart. That's the next book that will be coming out.

JA: Can you give us a quick preview?

LB: Sure. It will remind people in certain ways of The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca, I suspect. In the course of it Bernie, because of a relationship he's involved in, goes to the movies every night during a Humphrey Bogart festival. So he sees two Bogart films every night, and this inevitably begins to bleed into his psyche as the case goes on.

JA: Sounds great. One of your most significant villains was James Leo Motley. From what sick part of your brain did he come from?

LB: (Laughs.) I don't know. He was just sort of there! He was such a good villain, I was sorry to kill him. When I finished that book, I thought that it was not sound economics. I should've gotten more than one book out of James Leo Motley. But as I said before, the bad guys are as much aspects of myself as the heroes. (His grin sneaks up on him.) I don't rush to proclaim this!

JA: Maybe there's a Motley prequel somewhere.

LB: Never know.

JA: I think it's fascinating that Scudder in essence executed Motley at the end. That's another adventure that changed Scudder as a man, and because of that Motley is more interesting a villain than someone like, say, Hannibal Lecter.

LB: Pretty compelling character, though, Hannibal Lecter. I don't know that I always manage it, but I like to try to get in touch with the humanity of the bad guy. For me one of the more interesting things about A Walk Among The Tombstones, for example, was that the villain was a real nasty guy. And there was one window of opportunity where Scudder was talking to him at the end, and the sense of the person came through. I thought that was interesting. There's a non-series book of mine called Random Walk, I don't know if you know it, that has a serial killer. It's a multiple viewpoint book, and about a third of it is from his viewpoint. I don't know if anything you do at a keyboard takes a tremendous amount of courage -- it's not like facing man-eating tigers in Borneo -- but the one thing my work does demand is the courage to confront parts of one's self that one would prefer not to look at. And that happens sometimes in the villain, and sometime in the hero.

JA: Have you come away disappointed with what you learned of yourself through other characters? Or happy?

LB: No, not sorry. But generally one is reluctant to look into the dark corners of one's self. But what you learn eventually is that they are there anyway, whether you look or not.

JA: Any thoughts on a writer's life? Would you tell your son to be a plumber?

LB: I've told my kids to do whatever they want. But I think that it's a wonderful life. I'm enormously grateful for it. That doesn't mean that every moment of it is unmitigated joy, but that's okay.

JA: Didn't you own a gallery somewhere at some point?

LB:  Oh yeah, for one year in 1970-71. In New Hope, PA. I opened it so I would have something to do.

JA: Were you writing at the time?

LB: I was writing and living in the country. Writing would only take up so much of my time. I would go into the city to an apartment I kept there and hole up and write. But I needed something to do for the rest of the time, where there would be people to talk to. So I opened a gallery. Didn't last terribly long, but it was interesting to do. But as soon as the lease was up, I was out of there.

JA: What sort of work did you exhibit and sell?

LB: Whatever artist would turn up, I'd take their work. Some good stuff.

JA: Did you get a book out of it?

LB: No.

JA: Not yet.

LB: I learned certain things, not the least of which is I'll never do it again. But I was thinking about all of that recently when I was thinking of the amount of non-writing work that I was doing these days. The amount of correspondence, interviews, book tours, speeches, all the stuff, and I was contrasting that to twenty years ago when the only work-related thing I did was write. That, and every once in awhile carry the manuscript to my agent. And that was why, for example, that I had the time to do something like open a gallery. But now... no time! I'm not objecting. I like what I'm doing. And I could certainly cut down on some of it if I wanted to, like eliminate some of the travel and correspondence, but it's manageable.

Tomorrow we conclude our interview!

Down Mean Streets With Lawrence Block Part III

Welcome to the next installment of our Lawrence Block interview.

JA: You seem to be a quintessential New York writer. What is it about this city?

LB: It's home to me in a very important way, I guess. That's been as true even for the times I haven't been living here. I grew-up in Buffalo, but I visited New York off-and-on starting with my college years. I love it. I find it terribly energizing.

Lynne and I got our "Golden Years" out of the way early. We moved to Florida in the mid 1980s and discovered that it was manifestly not for us. So now we feel that we've had a retirement to look back on! But, down in Florida, I figured that now that I'll be here for the rest of time, I'll start writing novels set down here. And then I thought, gee, I don't know if I can do that, because I don't know what human lives are like down here. Intuitively. I do know that in New York. I somehow always have, and I can't say that about other places.

New York's not only my home, but will always be my spiritual home. That makes it nice to be living here and writing about it. A lot of people have said that the city is almost a character in the Scudder books. And I suspect that's true. I've written books set elsewhere, of course, and will undoubtedly continue to, most probably short stories than novels. But you can never tell what the future holds. But I think I'm advised to keep most of my stuff in New York, because that's what I handle better.

JA: Your series reflects very different New Yorks. The city in the Scudder books is another world from Bernie's.

LB: Same streets, but very different. Every once in a while I get the question, could Bernie and Scudder ever be in the same book? My answer is always -- they're don't live in the same universe! They're both in New York, but they're very different.

JA: You mentioned short stories a moment ago. Like a Lamb to the Slaughter is a wonderful collection. What are the different demands of the short story? Do you have a preference?

LB: Hmm. I don't know what the difference in the form is. I know that any number of novelists don't write short stories, or can't write them. I've always found myself comfortable with the shorter length, as well.

Short stories are enormously satisfying. They come a good deal closer to instant gratification -- about as close as writing comes. You sit down with one idea, pretty much hold the whole thing in your mind at once, and that day or the next you get up and you're done. It would be nice to write books that way, but one can't.

JA: Unless you're Edgar Wallace!

LB: Right. They're also satisfying because there are any number of things for myself that I can do in a short story that I wouldn't be inclined to do in a novel. Settings I wouldn't use, or write from the point of view of characters that I wouldn't be interested in sustaining for a whole novel. All sorts of things like that.

Someone asked if there would be an Ehrengraf novel, and the answer has to be no. He couldn't sustain a novel, but he's perfect for short stories. Lots of things like that. They're fun that way.

JA: The Ehrengraf stories are tremendously satisfying. What was his genesis?

LB: Ehrengraf came about as the result of an adventure in creative plagiarism. Not the obvious plagiarism, that he is a lineal descendent of Randolph Mason,  Melville Davisson Post's character. I can see where one could come to that conclusion, but I never read those stories so I couldn't plagiarize Post exercising all the will in the world.

There was an element of a Fletcher Flora story in an issue of Manhunt sometime in the 1950s where a friend saves her friend from a murder conviction by committing another similar murder while the guy was in prison. I thought there had to be something I could do with that that wasn't actionable plagiarism. Then I thought of a defense attorney who did that, and the character just evolved. Fred Dannay at Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine was very taken with Ehrengraf because he immediately thought it was a homage to Melville Davisson Post, and made it clear that he would be pleased to see more stories about Ehrengraf. I found that more ideas accrued, but there were a limited number of variations one could work on this theme. And I didn't want to write the same story over and over, and I think there is a total of eight Ehrengraf stories. It's very frustrating, because publishers said if I got a book-length collection of them, they'd publish it. But there was no way that was going to happen. Happily, Jim Seels in California did that small press, limited printing of the eight stories collected.

JA: Are they still available?

LB: I think he has some left. It's a hefty price. I think he gets $125 for it. It's a very limited edition and beautifully produced. His phone number is (714) 455-1319.

JA: You were talking about the genesis of Ehrengraf. Now for the question that all writers dread: where do you get your ideas?

LB: I keep up with the newspapers, and read things that pass in front of my eyes. I don't specifically seek anything out. An idea only works if it somehow resonates with a writer at a particular time. There are ideas that cross my mind that I shrug off, and years later they have something for me that they didn't the first time.

JA: Can you think of one?

LB: (Laughs.) No.

JA: Favorite mystery writers? Preferably dead, so you won’t get anyone mad at you.

LB: So many. I did a piece for American Heritage years ago that I think mentioned 16, and...

JA: I have trouble answering questions like that, myself. People ask your three favorite movies on Monday, and on Thursday you come up with three different.

LB: Right!

JA: But there are no mainstays that come to mind?

LB: No. I read less now than I used to. I hesitate to...

JA: I'll let you off the hook. What about authors you recommend to other writers. I know you have a great affection for P.G. Wodehouse and Somerset Maugham.

LB: And John O'Hara, whom I continually reread. I can't think of anyone in particular that all beginning writers should be advised to read. I think beginning writers should read what works for them. I have any number of writer friends who recommend Faulkner, and he has clearly been an important influence on fiction. But you know what? Faulkner never really worked for me. This is not Faulkner's fault; I don't know that it's my fault. But there are books that may have little to recommend them, but when I read them they were alive to me in a certain way that made them more significant.

More tomorrow!

Down Mean Streets With Lawrence Block Part II

Today, we continue our marathon interview with writer Lawrence Block, first conducted in April 1995.

JA:  With Scudder, or Bernie or Tanner, to what degree are any of your characters autobiographical?

LB:  Well, every character is, including all the villains! They are all who one would be if one were that character. And certainly the ones that I've chosen to write more than one book about are probably aspects of self to a greater degree than others.

JA:  Are you more Bernie, or more Matt? Or more Evan, for that matter?

LB:  I don't know. If I had a clue to who I was, I wouldn't have to sit around and write about other people. It's probably just a cost-effective form of therapy, don't you think, as it is for most writers.

JA:  One of the things that make your books so successful is the rich supporting characters. Mick Ballou, or Jan, or Carolyn -- they are so vividly drawn. Do you find them taking over a book mid-way, and you have to keep them in line?

LB:  No, not as such. But there are occasionally executive decisions that I find I must make. For example, in A Walk Among The Tombstones, I sent Ballou to Ireland because I didn't want to find myself writing buddy books where he was a major force each time. There is a danger in any on-going series, I think, when there are sufficient supporting players accumulated over the years that you find yourself burdened with them. Like a repertory company where everybody has to shuffle on-stage and do his particular bit. It's the great temptation, I see it a lot in other people's work, and try to guard against it in my own. It becomes a shortcut; you can do that instead of having real stuff happen. It's much easier to fall into that in the Burglar books, which are light anyway and no one would necessarily object. You can have all tail and no dog very easily, and you find there's no room for story.

JA:  Do you think that's what happened with The Burglar That Painted Like Mondrian?

LB:  I liked that best of the books until then. There's nothing in or about that book that explains why there wasn't another one for eleven years. It just happened that way. I certainly wasn't aware of that problem in the book.

JA:  Was it easy to take Bernie up again?

LB:  Well, it took a while to do, as you know.

JA:  I know, but once you got started, was it hard to bring him back?

LB:  No. Bernie was right there. Bernie was there, how he sounded was right there. That part was easy. What was difficult was just the plot. The plot was difficult.

JA:  The Burglar Who Traded Ted Williams has one of the best openings in the series.

LB:  Thanks. I was afraid while I was doing it that it wouldn't have an ending! But it all fell together to my delight and surprise.

JA:  There is the standard cliché about starting to read something and not being able to put it down, but here it's true. No one can read the opening chapter and not go immediately to the second. Staying with Bernie, what about the movie version with Whoopee Goldberg?

LB:  Well, I haven't a whole lot to say. The casting was the most curious thing about the movie, and Whoopee was certainly one of the best things in it. She gave a pretty good performance.  A thankless task! I thought the movie was close to working. If only it had a lighter hand to give the script a polish, and if they shot that director and hired another one, it might've been much better. It wasn't bad.

JA:  What was your involvement with the film, if any?

LB:  None. None at all. I saw it in a theater when it opened.

JA:  And probably said to yourself, "Did I write that?"

LB:  Actually, they were rather more faithful to the plot than they needed to be.

JA:  It seems inexplicable to me, when there is a built in audience, to buy the title, buy the plot, but not use the character.

LB:  Well, that wasn't the original intention. The original script was for a male lead. At one point Whoopee was going to play Carolyn, and Bruce Willis was one of several people booted around to play Bernie. This was when Moonlighting was on, and he had a somewhat softer screen persona before Die Hard. He would've been fine; it was a good casting choice. But either he turned it down, or they couldn't come to term with him, or whatever it was, and then, as I understand it, either Whoopee suggested herself for the role or someone else did. They had a three picture deal with her, and they needed something to stick her into between Jumpin Jack Flash and whatever the hell the other picture was. They gave the script a sex change operation and shot it.

As I said, it comes close to working even with all that's wrong with it. Ultimately it doesn't. People laughed a great deal while watching it, and on the way out said: "That wasn't much good, was it?"  If you listened in the theater, it sounded as if everyone was having a good time. They just then told their friends not to go.

JA:  Staying with film for a second, you wrote the screenplay for one of the most interesting horror films of the 80s: Funhouse.

LB:  No I didn't. It says Larry Block. I don't know who that is. I've never written as Larry Block and I don't know who that is.

JA:  I have a few reference books that say, "respected mystery novelist Lawrence Block!" And the magazine Cinefantastique also said it was you.

LB:  I'm glad to know it's interesting. I've never even seen it. There's an actor who uses the name Larry Block, and he may write as well. It may be his work; it may be somebody else's. There's another film, Captain America I think, with the credit line Lawrence Block, and that's not me either.

JA:  Do you have screenplays to your credit?

LB:  I'm not sure credit it the word we're looking for! No, I haven't done any screenplays. But there are a couple of things that make it look as if I have.

JA:  Sorry about the mix-up.

LB:  No, it's a very understandable one. When Funhouse came out, I was getting calls from people and I didn't know what the hell they were talking about! I hadn't seen an ad for it at this point.

JA:  Rent it. It's a good film -- take credit.

LB:  (Laughs.)

JA:  For me, some of your most interesting work has been your books for writers: Telling Lies For Fun and Profit, or Spider Me a Web. Could you talk a bit about your efforts to teach people how to write, and to what extend people can be taught?

LB:  Well, I don't know if I was trying to teach people how to write. I was trying to write a column on the subject of fiction writing. I did that, remarkably enough, for fourteen years. A long time. I don't think I was specifically trying to tell people what to do as much as discussing problems I dealt with, or didn't deal with. I thought, early on, that it wouldn't be long before I ran out of things to write about, and then I discovered, empirically, that I could just take it for granted that once a month I would think of something to write. I never had trouble getting the column written, it was never late.

And, of course, it led to the two books you've mentioned, which were collections of columns. And also, I've done a book on writing the novel. It was a great experience for me. It was instructive in that it focused me in a particular way. Just as you read a differently when you're a writer, somehow you read a little differently when you're writing a column about writing. It was helpful, I think I learned a lot doing it.

JA:  And you've done seminars as well.

LB:  Yeah. My wife Lynne and I put on a seminar for a couple of years in the mid-1980s. It was like a traveling road show. We called the thing "Write For Your Life!" but a better title might've been "The Inner Game of Writing," or "Working on the Writer Within." Something like that. It had very little to do with what ended up on the page, and as a result, we never knew if the people who took it had written or were writing, or how good they were at it. It was immaterial. And it was a wonderfully successful seminar. I keep running into people who said they had taken it and they published this or had done that. But it was enormously demanding: it was a full day, an eight-hour one day seminar. It was draining to do it, because I had to be "on" all the time doing it. I understand there are people who make a profit doing that,  I don't know how. I know the hotels made money, and the airlines made money, and the direct mail house made money, but it took all our time, and we were making about 50 cents an hour! But it was fun to do, though.

JA: I can tell you from experience that your books have been a great help.

LB: Thank you.

JA: I just finished my second novel, and I think the best, and the most, help that I had was found in Telling Lies for Fun and Profit.

LB: Great! I'm delighted to hear that!

More tomorrow!

Down Mean Streets With Lawrence Block Part I

Here is a special treat for Jade Sphinx readers.  Those who follow this blog know of my addiction to quality detective fiction.  Well, many years ago (1995!) I had an opportunity to interview one of America’s greatest mystery novelists, Lawrence Block.  The interview was scheduled to run in a magazine now defunct; and it has been languishing in my files ever since.

So, here is the interview in its entirety, spread out over the course of this week.  Enjoy!

The creator of tough guy Matt Scudder has a great smile.

Author Lawrence Block talks with measured deliberation: he's a man who chooses his words with care. The eyes behind his wire-rimmed glasses are affable and benevolent. His close-cropped hair and iron gray mustache are more mindful of a career military man than a journeyman writer. A battered green felt hat rests at his side, the kind of hat that inspires wild speculations of dark nights and rumpled trench coats.

But it is his smile that is most striking. It slowly creeps up on him, and he smiles with his whole face. His grin is disarming. Smiling, Larry Block looks like the classroom dreamer, the kid we all knew in school who easily made up stories.

And make up stories he does! Lawrence Block is one of the most popular and well-respected novelists working in the mystery field today. He has created three series characters that have had particular resonance with mystery readers for more than twenty years: private eye Matt Scudder, burglar Bernie Rhodenbarr, and secret agent Evan Tanner.

Mr. Block is also responsible for several books on the craft of fiction, which, along with his seminars, have helped aspiring writers nationwide.

He has won virtually every award a mystery writer can receive: three Edgar Allan Poe Awards from the Mystery Writers of America, four Shamus Awards, a Nero Wolfe Award, and two Maltese Falcon Award. He has also been awarded the highest honor a mystery writer can receive: the Mystery Writers of America Grand Master Award.

The writer lives in Greenwich Village, and we caught up with him in a local coffee shop.

JA:  Well, let's start with your latest, and work our way back. Tell us about your latest book.

LB:  Well, the latest book, of course, is the re-issue of Burglars Can't Be Choosers, which is just out. The latest Scudder came out in November, A Long Line of Dead Men, from Morrow. And, I don't know what to tell you about it, exactly...

JA:  Were you pleased with it?

LB:  I was quite pleased with the way it came out. The central element of the book:  the idea of a survivors club of that sort, is an idea that got planted in my consciousness 30 or more years ago. I was reading something about a club of that sort somewhere; I don't remember where I read it...

JA:  Could it have been Stevenson's The Wrong Box?

LB:  No, this was an article. It wasn't anything fictional. And it took a long time before I thought of using it in a book. And when I did get the idea of using it as the central element of a book, my first thought was to use it in a multiple-viewpoint sort of book and not a Scudder novel at all. But the more I thought about it, the more it seemed to resonate with Scudder. So I went with it.

JA:  And the upcoming Scudder?

LB:  Can't talk about the upcoming book.

JA:  Not even a title?

LB:  Sorry. Promised.

JA:  Going back to the beginning. When did you decide to become a writer? Was it what you always wanted?

LB:  Well, I don't think it was always what I wanted. I think there was a time when I was four and I wanted to be a fireman.

 It was sometime during 11th grade in high school that I realized that it was what I wanted to be. It wasn't that long after that I was doing it professionally.

JA:  And your first published book was?

LB:  Well, the first published book was anonymous. The first book under my own name was in 1961, Mona.

JA:  Can you telling us what some of your early, pseudonymous work was?

LB:  Not in any detail. I will be writing about that in a memoir that I'm going to be publishing in the next couple of years. I'm doing some work on it now, an autobiography of my writing life. So, when I bring that out I'll talk at length about the pseudonymous stuff, which I've always declined to discuss. But I was writing various paperback novels, but not for terribly long before using my own name.

JA:  You worked for a time at a literary agency.

LB:  That's right.

JA:  Reading the slush pile. Was that very instructive?

LB:  It was wonderful! It was enormously valuable. I was reading no end of inexpert manuscripts every day. And you learn much more reading bad work than good work. Studying expert writing is not valueless, but it's not terribly instructive. You look at it, and know it's good, but it doesn't show much. But when you're reading something not that good, and you can see why, it's enormously instructive. You learn much more from it.

JA: Did you start writing mysteries because it was the genre you most appreciated?

LB:  I don't really know. That's not terribly easy to answer. The first short story that I sold was not written to be a crime story initially, but it sold to a crime fiction magazine, Manhunt. Over the years, it seemed to me, that the work that I found satisfying and seemed to have some aptitude for, was in the crime fiction field. So, it was gradual. There was never a decision made that "I will be a mystery writer," or even that I am a mystery writer.

JA:  Do you think of yourself as a novelist, or a "mystery writer?" Do you pigeon-hole yourself when you sit behind a typewriter?

LB:  No, not necessarily. I just work.

JA:  The character Scudder progresses throughout the series. The Scudder in A Long Line of Dead Men is a different man from the Scudder in A Stab in the Dark.

LB:  Oh yeah.

JA:  Both are equally satisfying, but you're approach is more a slice of life than the average detective story. Not that I'm taking a swipe at detective fiction, but--

LB:  I know what you mean. I don't know if that has been a progression as much as the series keeps changing. As anyone who knows me will tell you, I have a very low boredom threshold. I think I tend not to repeat myself too much. Not because I have any moral objection to doing so, but because I can't write something that I find tedious. I think I stopped writing books about Tanner because it seemed to me that I was repeating myself. I don't think readers objected too much on those grounds, though.

JA:  I miss Tanner.

LB:  A lot of people had said that.

JA:  I missed Bernie Rhodenbarr, too. Glad he's back. Getting back to Scudder for a second, if I can. A great many readers of detective fiction like the comfort of coming back to a place that doesn't change. I think Somerset Maugham said that you know no more about Sherlock Holmes after sixty stories than you do after one. But Scudder has evolved a great deal: starting out as an alcoholic, and then his going to Alcoholics Anonymous, meeting and finally marrying Elaine. Has all of this alienated readers who want the mixture as before?

LB:  I don't know. Traditionally, books in a series have not varied much and the character has been the same in the beginning as the end. And I had no intention of Scudder's changing in the course of the series. But, it just seemed to me that the books were operating at a level of reality in which he had to be affected by what he experienced. And he couldn't come out of the books unchanged. And this just sort of  happened, I write more intuitively than intellectually. I go a lot by how it feels, and it began happening that way.

A Stab in the Dark was the first significant change. The first three are pretty much of a piece, but not entirely for even there is some kind of a shift. But by the time A Stab in the Dark was finished, Eight Million Ways to Die was inevitable. And he's continued to evolve. He has also aged. I've never been specific about his age, but with A Long Line of Dead Men it would've been wrong not to be specific. The book was so much about other people's age that it would've been coy for him not to be specific. It would've been inconsistent. So I figured, all right, let's go on the record and give him a specific age.

 So he has grown and changed and evolved.

JA:  It think that gives the character the great vibrancy that he has. Much as I admire them, if you've read one Nero Wolfe book, you've read them all.

LB:  Yeah, which I never objected to in the Nero Wolfe books, and I happily went on to read them all. I don't think I could've written twelve books about Scudder if he hadn't changed. I would've gotten tired of him.

JA: What event in Scudder's life drew the strongest reader response?

LB: Probably when he cheated on Elaine. I really heard about that, got lots of mail.

JA: Why'd you have him do it?

LB: Don't know. Maybe I think that's the way men really are.

More tomorrow!

Classic Cartoons Preserved

Of the indigenous American arts forms, few are more satisfying, as delightful, and as ultimately ineffable as animated cartoons.  Often mistakenly dismissed as entertainment for children, many animated cartoons rank among the great American film classics.  Surely What’s Opera, Doc? (1957) where Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd crucify Wagner’s Ring Cycle, is the work of a certain type of genius, as are the Popeye cartoons produced by Max Fleischer in the 1930s and the great Felix the Cat cartoons of the silent era.

Sadly, the very thought that so much of this material was disposable led to poor (or no) preservation, and often restoration of many fragile films is an effort requiring prohibitive amounts of time and money.  Add to that, there are gaps in the animation record that film historians have been trying to fill for decades.  Interested readers would do well to check Of Mice and Magic by Leonard Maltin (1980) and Before Mickey by Donald Crafton (1982).

One of the most prolific animation studios during the silent era was Bray Studios.  Founded in 1914 by J. R. Bray, Bray Studios was the first successful production company solely dedicated to animated films.  Such celebrated animators as Max and Dave Fleischer, Walter Lantz, Milt Gross and Pat Sullivan were all part of the Bray stable at one time or other.  Bray produced many series cartoons that would help shape and define the medium, including the Fleischer Out of the Inkwell cartoons, Krazy Kat and Happy Hooligan.

The Golden Age of Bray’s animation output was the era from World War I to the end of the 1920s, but animation continued, in a limited way, until as late as 1963.  The complete history of the company has become lost to scholars and archivists, and many of the classic films missing.

Happily, young animated film historian Thomas Stathes has started work that will find and restore some of these films, as well as create a complete history of Bray and its output.  That is all here at his new Web site, The Bray Animation Project, found at:  http://brayanimation.weebly.com.  We caught up with Mr. Stathes recently and he shared some of his story with us.

You are such a young man – what spurred your interest in lost and vintage animation?

I've never been able to figure out the exact origins of my interests. Like most children, I was very interested in cartoons but was attracted very early on to the few black and white cartoons I could see at the time, in the early 1990s. I suppose a childhood fascination with history and past forms of graphic design attracted me to the earlier films, but I cannot explain the fascination in any more detail than that, as it's also part mystery to me. As I grew slightly older, I started reading into the history of animated cartoons and began to realize that so few actual examples could be seen, this prompted me to begin searching for the films. 

There are a lot of great animated classics out there.  Why have you focused so clearly on what is missing?

Everyone loves and patronizes the classics. The lost and obscure films are so much more interesting to me for the very reason that finding them is like a treasure hunt. What's more, our rich animation history should be preserved, so aside from my personal joy gleaned from searching for and finding these films, I feel the need to rescue them when so few others have made the same kind of concerted effort.

What first attracted you to the Bray output?

As we've established, J.R. Bray's studio was the first successful model for an outfit that produced primarily animated cartoons. This fact alone makes the studio's films extremely historically and culturally relevant in terms of film studies. Unfortunately, however, some historians and many casual fans who have seen the few circulating Bray cartoons over the past 40 years have been stuck on the fact that some of the films were not always aesthetically pleasing or overly fluid in terms of animation. As I entered my teenage years and became more of a film print collector, it became clear to me that the Bray cartoons were a sort of 'underdog' in the silent animation category and needed to be further located and studied. I believe the general outlook on Bray cartoons in previous years had caused some disinterest in organizing a large hunt for the films, or at least before the launch of this project. On the Web site, I openly state that the project seeks not to critique the films artistically, but to collect and preserve them for their historical significance.

Tell us about the Web site?

The Web site features several useful tools. First and foremost, surfers can enjoy plenty of text and imagery as educational tools. Of direct interest to archivists and collectors is the animated cartoon filmography, which is presented as one full list and also broken down into series, artists, or characters on their respective pages. The filmography is color-coded based on film survival; for example, titles in red are not known to exist while titles in gray are known to be in other collections and titles in green are the films I have personally found to date. In addition, there is a discussion board for all interested parties to peruse.

How many cartoons are now on the site and how many will you be adding over time?

Currently, there are approximately a dozen cartoons which can be viewed on the site, as linked to YouTube. Over the next few months, I look forward to uploading several more. It would be great to have at least one cartoon viewable on each series or character page; if such an example exists.

What are your future plans, both for the Bray Animation Project and in general?

I expect to gradually add more to the project Web site such as text and images, as well as cartoons. More importantly, though, is that the website will hopefully attract collectors and archivists who can verify films surviving in other collections. From that point, I hope more of the films can be acquired or copied so that the project collection can become more and more complete. Within one week of launching the Web site, I've already received leads for three or four films that I originally had marked as red, or "lost", so I am especially hopeful that the site will bring together 'outlier' knowledge and films related to the Bray Studios. In a general sense, I will always continue to collect all silent-era animated films, and may create websites for other studios in the future.

Readers interested in both early animation and Bray should visit The Bray Animation Project.