My latest pulp-noir thriller, The Long-Ago Dead, is officially published today, and I hope you’ll give it a shot.
The Long-Ago Dead is a departure in style for me. Whereas my most recent crime novels Loser Baby and Tessa Goes Down adhered to a sorta loose, smart-ass, third-person, multiple-narrator form of storytelling, The Long-Ago Dead is much stricter in its voice. It focuses solely on action and dialog, forbidding the reader from entering the main character’s mindscape. I came to this narrative style in an interesting way.
Last year, I traveled to California to visit my wonderful sister (and my niece and nephew), and during the trip I attended an event featuring my author pals Eric Beetner and Duane Swierczynski (both of them very fine dudes). This was at one of my all-time favorite bookstores, Book Carnival, in Orange. During his talk about his new novel California Bear, Duane spoke of one of his all-time favorite crime novels, Jean-Patrick Manchette’s The Prone Gunman, and how it shook his foundations as a prose stylist. Needless to say, once I returned to Colorado, I found a copy of The Prone Gunman and devoured it. Manchette’s is one of the most perfect voices in all of crime fiction, conveying in its clipped, distanced third-person narration a cold, laconic world-weariness—utterly ideal for noir. So, in the end, I would say the novel had the same effect on me that it had on Duane. In fact, you can consider The Long-Ago Dead a straight homage to The Prone Gunman. Thanks Duane!
I also have to acknowledge the influence of two other classic noir writers and one famous French film. The first of those writers is, of course, Dashiell Hammett, who employed a similar voice in his tales: devoid of literary flourish. Sam Spade of The Maltese Falcon is the epitome of this style. You can also see it in Richard Stark’s “Parker” novels. Check out the first in the series, The Hunter, and then go from there. Finally, the film that most brilliantly embodies this kind of voice is Le Samourai by Jean-Pierre Melville, starring the effortlessly cool Alain Delon. While following the movements of Sydney Fleet in The Long-Ago Dead, you might as well picture Delon in all his cold, brutal, methodical glory.
Purchase The Long-Ago Dead today!
