Author Larry Beinhart - The Deal Goes Down and a lot more besides - answers a few questions on his reading and writing habits ...
Is
the writing full time, part time, a sideline?
Full
time whenever I think I can make it pay.
Is
there a day job?
Writing
is the day job.
Can
you offer us a potted biography of yourself?
Is
that a marijuana reference?
If
so, I have to say, weed's not my thing. When I was young, in order to beg off,
I'd declaim that I was saving my body for hard drugs. Of course, that wasn't
true either.
Does
it mean boiled down and stuffed in a mason jar?
Grew
up in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. Went to SUNY Binghamton where I found out that
white people were a majority group. Then SUNY Stony Brook. Co-wrote a
screenplay, No Place to Hide, a super
low budget indie. I thought the worst thing about it was the script so I
stopped writing. Became a grip, gaffer, and film production manager.
Hitch-hiked to Miami. Started a commercial film company. Left it to my partner.
Back to New York. Worked mostly for a political consultant doing TV &
radio. Got unemployment insurance, which I took to be a New York state grant to
the arts. Wrote a book. Won an Edgar.
*I’m about to read The Deal Goes Down. Can you pitch it to a potential reader in 50 words or less?
"Beinhart brilliantly drags Chandler to the tangled
woods of the Catskill Mountains, resulting in a first rate - and first -
noir-murder-Buddhist-comic-Woodstock-thriller. Fantastic fun."
24
words. From Shalom Auslander. He has a cameo in the book.
Do
you have a typical writing schedule?
It
depends on circumstances. Contracted, employed, deadline, seasonal sports
(tennis usually means play in the AM, write PM, winter I have to ski 2 or 3
full days a week), family issues.
Before
I had a family, it was out for breakfast, come back, imagine home was an
office, write 5 pages, go do something else.
Actually,
I think this last book was sort of written that way. Except I wrote most of it
by hand, with a pen in a notebook, at the local coffee shop. Never did either
of those before.
When
you have an idea and you sit down to construct your story – do you know what
the end result is roughly going to look like?
I
think it's best to do so. Else you could get stuck in Eureka, Kansas when you
want to surf in Malibu. That doesn't mean it can't change. It often does, but
it's best to plan your trip so that it gets you - after great difficulties - to
that great destination.
A
blend. It varies every book.
Narrative
is, in essence, about going somewhere to achieve something.
That
has to be there in the overarching structure. It has to be there in every
segment. Get to a goal, get to a goal.
It
is possible to do that totally mechanically. Many books done that way are very
successful. The Da Vinci Code is a
perfect example.
I
think that has to mean that even if you have a master plan to get your
characters from Boston to London through Mexico City and Istanbul and have
three killings along the way, each based on a favourite film scene, except that
each fails this time, you're going to have to work out a lot of things to make
it happen credibly. (Provided you care about credibly). As you do that, it
creates new limitations and new possibilities, new things that you must do and
certain things you can no longer do.
This
book, The Deal Goes Down, is closest
I've gotten. Once I started the main characters up, their desires and needs
drove the action forward.
Never
thought of it. At least not in those terms.
I
wouldn't do a plot whose resolution rests on the revelation that someone was molested
as a child. But that's a "not that again" reaction.
Some
books are very quick and smooth. The first one, No One Rides For Free, was. The third, Foreign Exchange, was, if you don't count skiing in St. Anton for 5
weeks or so, then traveling through Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia with my
wife, baby daughter, & Isuzu Trooper for another month or so. Wag the Dog/American Hero, took a huge
amount of research. Salvation Boulevard had
to be put away for over a year, then totally rewritten.
This
one came quick and easy.
I
believe the book brings back an old series character of yours – Tony Casella –
after a 30 year absence. I’m intrigued about the long gap with the character.
Is
Tony 30 years older than when he appeared in Foreign Exchange? Has he been in
cold storage for all this time? (Lawrence Block literally did that with his
Tanner character.)
He's
30+ years older.
He's
done various things during those years. Various things have been done to him.
By time, fate, life. He reveals some of them, as relevant, in the course of the
book. If there's another book after this, I expect it will show that he's left
out some important bits and been less than honest about others.
More
important, the world is 30 years older.
In terms of ethos and spirit, more than technology.
I've
come to realize - I never set out to do it consciously - that the four books
are a history of the effects of economic policy on American society.
Don't
worry, you can read them all, and never notice.
In
this fourth one, that victory has eaten itself. Money has risen so high that
all values are measured by money. Money, therefore,
is the only value left.
Did
the end result mirror your expectations at the start of the process, or is it a
very different book to what you imagined?
It's
more fun than I expected.
When
I started out, given the age of the character, of the people around him, and around
myself, I thought it would be a lot more about death.
Was
there one spark or germ of imagination which started the story off in your
mind?
Many
years ago, I did three books with my wife. She was an actor and a detective.
The heroine in the books was a lot like her. The ex-cops in the books were a
lot like the real ones she worked with. They books were, comparatively, light,
witty, fun. And in their own way, realistic.
The
series got so orphaned that the third was never published even though we were
paid for it.
I
recently pulled it out of the drawer. I sent to an ex-agent who I was still
friendly with. Her reaction was that it was no longer the current saleable
style (in mysteries not spouses). She said The
Girl On The Train was the contemporary in thing. I got it. I read it. The
heroine was miserable, alcoholic, endlessly complaining, in a dreary
self-medicated world. Oh, it was a man who had done her wrong, wrong, wrong,
and made her that way.
Imagine
the pain of being trapped on a train with her.
The
title of the first chapter The Deal Goes
Down is Woman on a Train.
It
immediately takes off in very different directions.
Without
spoilers, is Tony’s story finally done or can you conceive him coming back for
a fifth outing?
I
was explaining Tony's motivations to someone.
It
came out as a true story about Lazlo, a border collie I once owned. He was very smart. As dogs go. If he got out of the
house, you couldn’t drive on my street. Fortunately, it's just a one lane dirt
road. My neighbor came to me. He said, “You gotta do something. I have teeth
marks on my bumper.”
Not
the rear. Lazlo did not chase cars. On the front. Lazlo herded vehicles. If he got out on the real road, he’d stop two cars
going in opposite directions. He’d stop UPS trucks.
Lazlo needed a job. I didn’t have one for
him. I finally had to give him away. He ended up demonstrating doggie exercise
machines on TV, happy and successful.
That’s
Tony. Languishing and lost.
Then
someone comes to him and offers him a job. It’s an insane, amoral, crazy job.
But it calls for his skills. Forty pounds going up against 3,500 pounds (a
Subaru Forester) and 5 tons (a UPS truck) at the same time.
It's
like someone left the door open. He can't help it. He's out!
Wag the Dog
(originally American Hero) is my most
ostentatious.
Wag the Dog reads like a thriller.
It's loaded with literary tricks. Real characters march through the pages
beside the fictional ones. Including a cameo for Barry Levinson who ended up
making it into a movie. George HW Bush who made the war that inspired the book,
is a featured player. It has 100 and something footnotes. All the footnotes
about real people are real. All those about fictitious characters are false. In
the final chapters the main character - in a very dramatic plot situation - is
telling me the story. He's not just telling it, he has transformed it. Because
by then he's transformed himself from a shlub PI into a Hollywood player and
everything you've heard - which is the whole book - is him pitching the story.
When books are published as literary
fiction, reviewers, if not readers, are very conscious of literary tricks and
describe them analytically.
No reviews have ever commented on
all the tricks in Wag the Dog. I like
to think that's because they actually worked in service to the story. Which was
about turning fiction into reality and reality presented in fictional terms.
I
believe American Hero and Salvation Boulevard have both had big screen treatments
- the former as Wag the Dog with Dustin Hoffman, Robert De Niro as well as
other big names in a stellar cast.
Did
you have any involvement in the films? Were you happy with how they turned out?
In
both cases they bought my house because they liked the view.
Wag
the Dog was a brilliant film. I'm proud to be associated with it.
The
question I'm usually asked is, "Was the film like the book?"
My
usual answer is, "It was exactly like the book. All they changed was the
plot and the characters." Actually, they changed the war, too, from
presenting a real war in dramatic terms to dramatically creating the illusion
of a war.
However,
strange as it seems, the experience of the movie and the book are very much the
same. They caught the spirit of creating a war for domestic political reasons
that Americans could love on TV.
Salvation Boulevard was a good film. I
saw it three times, at Sundance, in Woodstock, and on the Jersey Shore. I liked
it each time. Audiences seemed to love it. Yet it disappeared faster than any film
I've ever seen.
I
got to know the director-writer and his co-writer. I told them that they
treated my book like a castle made of Legos. They knocked it over, then made
their own house out of the pieces. Every once and a while I'd notice a piece
being used the way I used it.
Don't
get me wrong. That's not a complaint. If I were to make complaints they would be
that their version needed another $5 million or so and that a faithful-to-the-book
version could only have been done as a TV miniseries.
I
just self-published one of them.
Zombie Pharm. You can get an e-version
of it on line. It's dramatic - as zombie stories must be - and wickedly
satirical. A friend of mine who is a Joyce scholar told me she never reads
zombie things. I told her it was to zombie stories what A Modest Proposal by Johnathan Swift was to agricultural essays.
The
pleasure of building things. Making them work.
What
are the last five books you’ve read?
Dashiell Hammett's five novels.
Red
Harvest, The Dain Curse, The Glass Key, The Maltese Falcon, The Thin Man
Who
do you read and enjoy?
I read more non-fiction than fiction these days.
Celestine
Prophecy. I could be wrong about this, but it seems like
it must have been really quick and easy to write and it made $1.5 million back
in the 90's.
Favourite
activity when not working or writing?
Skiing.
TV has gotten better than film. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, the first
season of The Boys, Tokyo Vice, The Man in the High Castle
Not
Too many to list.
-----------------------------------
RANDOM TRIVIA FUN QUESTIONS
Sicilian.
Any
vegetables from Italy are better than anywhere else. But they're even better in
Sicily.
When
and where did you last have a fist fight? School, church, a sleazy
neighbourhood bar?
On
the street. Broadway and 45th. A long time ago.
There
have been some physical altercations since, but I wouldn't call them fist
fights. Nor are any of them particularly memorable.
Why
would I be?
No.
GB
short
for George Bernard Shaw. He was a beagle.
I
only remember the good ones.
The
rational ones seem sufficient.
Any
place with mountains and snow.
Monday.
A legendary, Edgar-Award winning writer returns, and so does his legendary detective, with a gripping thriller about marital discord, contract killing, off-piste skiing and the deep state...
Really interesting interview, so thanks, both. I like the idea of at least having a rough idea of how a story's going to end before starting it; I do the same thing, and it helps me to keep my focus. Having scheduled writing time (even if it varies sometimes) is really helpful, too. Thanks for sharing, and much success!
ReplyDeleteGlad you enjoyed the interview, Margot. It's interesting to see the different and sometimes similar approached authors take to their craft.
DeleteCol – Thanks for posting this interview. Interesting and humorous.
ReplyDeleteElgin, I'm glad you enjoyed it.
Delete