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This page updated: 01-Oct-2007 8:39 PM

 

The Mankiller of Poojegai and other stories

Stories ranging from Stone Age Germany to 19th century Italy to currrent day Africa.

Crippen & Landru, August 2007

Read an online story or excerpts from recent books, buy a signed book, check out the Trailer Trash tour and the photo album, visit with Darlene and find out more about the International Lunch Whore.

Walter Satterthwait - Interview

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Thanks very much to Chris Aldrich and Lynn Kaczmarek, who produce "Mystery News", where this interview was first published, for their permission to reprint it here. "Mystery News" is a terrific periodical, and I don't say that simply because Lynn and Chris have been very kind to me. If you'd like subscription information, you can e-mail them at: caldrich@blackravenpress.com or lkasmarek@blackravenpress.com.

 

A few years ago I picked up Walter Satterthwait's WILDE WEST and was intrigued by the idea: Oscar Wilde, on a tour of America, discovers that someone among his entourage is brutally murdering prostitutes. The book also has buffalo hunters, prostitutes, and Doc Holliday. What's not to like? So I read it and was hugely impressed by the book's wit and humor and by the author's storytelling skills and writing ability. I was so impressed, in fact, that I went out and bought all the other Satterthwait books I could locate. These included an early adventure/suspense novel, THE AEGEAN AFFAIR, another historical mystery, MISS LIZZIE, and WALL OF GLASS, A FLOWER IN THE DESERT, and AT EASE WITH THE DEAD, the first three books in a contemporary private-eye series featuring Joshua Croft. Other Crofts (THE HANGED MAN, ACCUSTOMED TO THE DARK) found their way onto my shelves as soon as they were published, as did a collection of short stories entitled THE GOLD OF MAYANI. Not to mention MASQUERADE (his latest novel) and ESCAPADE, two thoroughly entertaining historical mysteries featuring Pinkertons Phil Beaumont and Jane Turner. I recommend any and all of these books without hesitation. I'd probably also recommend Walter's other novel, COCAINE BLUES if I could only find a copy of it.

The only thing wrong with Walter's work, from my point of view, is that he writes so well that after reading one of his books, I have to fight off the urge to take an ax to my word processor. (Don't get your hopes up; it hasn't happened yet.) So naturally I was delighted when Lynn Kaczmarek asked if I'd do an e-mail interview with Walter for MYSTERY NEWS. I was going to be doing a "live" interview with Walter at ClueFest (where Walter is one of the Guests of Honor) in July, so I thought this would be a great chance for us to get our act together. You can be the judge of how well we succeeded. (And if you want to know even more about Walter, find a copy of the revealing SLEIGHT OF HAND: CONVERSATIONS WITH WALTER SATTERTHWAIT, published by the University of New Mexico Press.)

 

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BC: I'm always curious about how writers get their starts. So tell me, how did you begin your writing career?

WS: In 1976, I was living in New York, working as a bartender and getting a much better quality of rejection slips for the literary short stories I was sending out. But, even hand-written, and encouraging, they were still rejection slips. A friend of mine knew someone at Dell, and the friend suggested that I slap together a proposal -- a couple of chapters and an outline -- for an adventure novel. If her friend at Dell bought it, my friend would take 10%, just like a real agent. So I did. I wrote the first 2 chapters of COCAINE BLUES, and an outline, and Dell bought it as a paperback original, and I wrote it, and then they bought the proposal for a second book, THE AEGEAN AFFAIR.

I was pretty pleased with myself. I figured I had fooled all those New York publishing people into believing that I was actually a writer. Then I got a real agent, and I didn't sell anything for about 7 years. I wanted to write a book about Africa, and the new agent told me that no one was buying books about Africa. Then Wilbur Smith started selling books about Africa, and I dumped my agent and got a newer one. The newer agent told me that no one was buying books about Africa, because Wilbur Smith had sewed up the market.

So I dumped that agent and decided that, since I couldn't sell anything anyway, I might as well write exactly what I wanted to write, and I wrote a short story about Africa, and sold to Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine. It was, I think, the first good piece of writing I'd done. I wrote a few more African stories, then got even a newer agent, slapped together a proposal for a book featuring my African detective, and the agent sold that for an incredibly small amount of money to St. Martin's Press. I went off to Greece to write the book, discovered that I'd been too long away from Africa to write about it well, and renegotiated the St. Martin's contract and wrote the first of the Joshua Croft books, WALL OF GLASS. The rest is history.

BC: What about your writing habits? Do you plan a book with an outline, or do you just wing it?

WS: Do I outline? Usually, yes. The process itself, forcing myself to think about the linear plot, sometimes helps clarify the book. But once I've started the actual writing, I don't usually refer back to the outline unless I've gotten stuck. And, more often than not, I find myself adding scenes and characters, or changing the scenes and characters as they exist in the outline. An outline is like a road map -- it shows me one way to get to the destination. But I can make side trips if I want to, and I can take an alternate route if it looks more interesting.

In ESCAPADE, for example, for which I wrote a fairly detailed outline, I didn't realize until very nearly the end of the book that I would be turning one particular character into the mysterious magician, Chin Soo.

And I like "kicker" endings, endings that provide, maybe even in the very last line, one final, unexpected twist. Often I don't know what this will be until I get to it.

BC: And how, Oh Wise One, do you work on a daily basis?

Well, Grasshopper, I get up, pour myself three fingers of Scotch, beat my three children to get my circulation started, shoot a little smack, and light up a big joint. Then I just sit down and let the magic happen.

Well, no, not actually. I work five days a week, giving myself weekends off, just like a normal person has. (Although these tend to vanish toward the end, when I'm running up against a deadline.) On a workday morning, I have my coffee while I read and respond to the e-mail. Then I exercise. Then I have breakfast. Then, after stalling for as long as possible, I sit down and work for a couple of hours. Then I go for a four mile walk. Then I eat lunch. Then I work for a couple more hours. Then I have dinner. It's a pretty exciting life.

BC: I'll say! And I know that in addition to being a writer of mysteries, you're also a long-time reader of mysteries. When did you get started in your reading in the field, and what kinds of books did you read?

WS: I started reading mysteries pretty early on, when I was something like 12. For most of my high school years I was reading hard-boiled people like Mickey Spillane, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Ross Macdonald, John D. MacDonald. Probably I was fondest of Chandler and Hammett, and to this day I can't figure out which of them is "better." I was also reading a lot of espionage stuff, which was popular throughout the 60s and 70s -- Ian Fleming, Len Deighton, John Le Carre. It wasn't until I got to college that I started reading the British cosies. A friend gave me a copy of an Edmund Crispin book. I liked it, for its wit and playfulness, and pretty quickly I read through all his books, and then went on to the other Brits.

BC: You've written an excellent series of private-eye novels featuring Joshua Croft, and incidentally done some of the best descriptive writing about Santa Fe that we're likely to find. But I hear that there won't be any more books in that series. Why?

WS: Why no more Joshua Croft books? Because my publisher seems to have more interest in promoting the historicals, like ESCAPADE and MASQUERADE. I like doing the Croft books -- I'm very fond of the wise-cracking P.I. novel. And I think that the Croft books are pretty good representatives of the form. But it's difficult to put a year of your life into a book when you know that it's going to end up on the remainder table at Borders. Things can change, however. Maybe, sometime down the road, I'll do another Croft.

BC: Your historical mystery novels are uniformly excellent. Besides Oscar Wilde, you've used Lizzie Borden, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Houdini, Hemingway, and Gertrude Stein, among others, as characters in them. How do you decide which historical figures you're going to write about?

WS: It beats the hell out of me. Gregory Mcdonald, the guy who wrote the Fletch books, says somewhere that he gets a lot of ideas for books, but that he ends up using the ideas that just won't go away. While I was writing WALL OF GLASS, the first Croft book, I got an idea for a short story featuring Lizzie Borden and a young boy. The idea wouldn't go away, and slowly it turned into an idea for a novel featuring Lizzie Borden and a young girl. I saw the book as a one-shot, a kind of mutant book that would only temporarily interrupt the flow of the Croft series. I had no intention, when I wrote MISS LIZZIE, of making it the first in a series of historical mysteries.

But having solved -- to my own satisfaction, anyway -- the Lizzie Borden case, it occurred to me, while I was writing AT EASE WITH THE DEAD, the next Croft book, that it might be fun to solve the Jack the Ripper killings. I remembered reading, in one of the books about the case, that one of the suspects was a guy who had been, briefly, a friend of Wilde's. So why not have Wilde act as the detective?

But the year in which the book would be released was the centenary of the Ripper killings, and my editor felt that the book might get lost among a lot of others that rehashed the killings. So I dropped Jack himself and brought the killings over to the U.S., along with Oscar Wilde. I think that WILDE WEST is a better book than the original idea would've been, mostly because of the cross-cultural stuff with Wilde and the cowboys and buffalo hunters.

By the time I was writing A FLOWER IN THE DESERT, the third Croft book, I'd established a pattern: a Croft, then an historical. The idea that wouldn't go away this time was using an hard-boiled American P.I. within what was essentially a British locked-room mystery. I liked the notion of trying to combine two separate genres, the hard-boiled and the cozy, both of which I enjoyed. And if you're going to have a locked-room mystery, who better to solve it than Harry Houdini? And if you're using Harry Houdini, who better to pair him with than his real-life friend, Arthur Conan Doyle?

But unfortunately I couldn't afford, at the time, a trip to England to research the book. So I broke the pattern and wrote another Croft book instead, THE HANGED MAN, which is, in effect, also a mystery featuring a (more or less) hard-boiled American P.I. within a (sort of) locked room mystery. When I finished it, I was able to get to England and learn what I needed to know to write ESCAPADE.

I liked Phil Beaumont and Jane Turner, the two narrators in ESCAPADE, and I wanted to use them again. So, while I was writing the last Croft book, ACCUSTOMED TO THE DARK, the idea that wouldn't go away was to plunk the two them down in 1923 Paris and having them hobnob with the likes of Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein. And the idea became MASQUERADE.

BC: Do you ever feel that writing two different types of books has hurt your career?

Yeah, sometimes I do. As my agent once said, there are a lot of readers out there who like to have exactly the same buttons pushed, and in exactly the same sequence. But, judging by the comments on DorothyL, I think that even more discriminating readers sometimes get annoyed with a writer for shifting from one series to another. If the readers like the series characters, look forward to their next appearance, then sometimes, when a writer attempts to do something else, they perceive this (consciously or unconsciously) as a repudiation of the characters; and, indirectly, of the readers themselves.

Maybe if I'd written all five Croft novels consecutively, rather than interrupting them with the historical mysteries, the Croft series would have picked up more momentum.

But, as my version of Lizzie Borden puts it, there are no ifs in the world. I have no way now of knowing how the books would have sold if I'd done things differently. And, if I had to do it all over again, I'd probably do exactly the same thing. I found it refreshing to go from one of the Croft books into the basically uncharted waters of an historical; and I found it refreshing, after finishing an historical, to return to the familiar waters of the Croft books. This may be, however, why I don't own a five bedroom mansion in Topanga Canyon.

BC: Next question, entirely unrelated to any other questions: Do you think the movies are influencing writers these days? I mean actually changing the way books are written (I guess I'm talking about style here as much as anything, but go where you want to with it). What about your own books?

WS: I'd have to say that, on balance, after much careful thought, that I haven't got a clue. But, pushed into a corner, I'd guess that they probably have. The Really Big Bucks are in movies, not books, and it may be that writers have begun to structure their books in ways that make the books more amenable to adaptation. Possibly some of them are doing this consciously, and possibly some of them are doing it simply because movies -- big budget, action-packed movies -- have become so dominant a part of the culture that they've stamped their structure into the National Psyche.

This may be irrelevant to your question, but I suspect that movies have affected books in another way -- by their effect on the readership. It seems to me that there can be, these days, a large market for a badly written book because many of its readers aren't reading it so much as watching it. Sloppy and confusing prose doesn't much bother these people because all they're interested in, really, is the progression from scene to scene, the delivery of one slick thrill after another.

But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe badly written books can do well simply because they do manage, despite their defects, to tell a story. Stories are both primal and primary -- they're more important, historically and emotionally, than prose.

As for my own books, I don't think that I write them with the movies in mind. I've written a screenplay or two, and I have to say that I don't very much enjoy the form, and I'm not very good at it. I find the three act structure of a screenplay to be a bit confining. I like the open structure of a novel. I like detail and depth; and, in a screenplay, those are more the responsibility of the director than of the writer. And I like words, like using them not only in dialogue, but in description and narration, neither of which is crucial in a screenplay. There've been some movie people interested in one or two of my books, and their interest has always surprised me. But not so much, of course, that I wasn't very happy to take the money.

BC: I don't blame you. Now let's get to the good stuff. Since you write private-eye novels, I know you'll have an opinion. Who are the great writers of private-eye novels? (No need to mention me here. You can stick to dead guys if you want to.) And what makes 'em great?

WS: I think I'll stick with the dead guys. It's safer.

My list of greats is probably the same as most people's. Hammett, Chandler, and Ross Macdonald. There are other dead guys, like John D. MacDonald, Phillip Atlee, and the late Ross Thomas, whom I admire and who've influenced me; but you're asking about P.I. novels, so I won't mention them.

Why are Hammett, Chandler, and Macdonald great? For me, it's because each took the form, as it existed at the time he was writing, and raised it a notch higher. All of them can be very funny, funny in that straight-faced, laconic, wise-cracking way that's a part of the American hardboiled novel, and of American writing in general. One of the funniest passages I ever read was the scene in Hammett's short story "Corkscrew" -- maybe the first cross-genre piece, blending the mystery with the western -- in which the Continental Op tries to ride a vicious horse.

But, despite the humor, all of them brought a level of seriousness to their work. I think that this reveals itself not only in their attention to detail, and to language, but in the way they shaped their writing around their own deeply-felt concerns. Hammett had been a true-life P.I., a Pinkerton, and he stripped his stories of the silliness and absurdity that, for me, mars the work of his contemporaries. The British-educated Chandler consciously tried to elevate the form to something like Art. (I think that those wonderful similes of his are a kind of deliberate transliteration, into contemporary American prose, of the classical British style.) And MacDonald, obsessed as he was with the dysfunctional family, and with the ecology, brought both these subjects to our attention long before they become the common currency of journalists and pundits.

These guys did have flaws, of course. And today, there's a flock of terrific P.I. writers out there, men and women, who pay attention to detail and to language, and who write out of deeply-felt concerns. But all of them, I think, are stepping into footprints chiseled in the stone.

BC: As you know, most people desperately long to be members of some clandestine cabalistic society with a secret handshake, obscure rituals, and complicated passwords. You've attained that dream. So tell us, how did you become an International Lunch Whore?

WS: Manned flight. Heart transplants. Lunar Landings. These are all achievements that were one time thought to be impossible. They became possible because someone, somewhere, had a dream, and he, or she, worked to make it a reality.

I don't know who first said, "There's no such thing as a free lunch." I'd thought for years that it was Calvin Coolidge. It sounds like the sort of thing that Calvin Coolidge would say, on one of those rare occasions that Calvin said anything. And Calvin, of course, never ate lunch, or much of anything else, so probably he could be pretty cavalier about the subject. But I spent hours yesterday searching the Internet -- well, minutes, anyway -- and I couldn't find a single reference to Calvin having said it.

(I did find, though, a nice quote about Calvin, from Dorothy Parker. When she was told that he'd died, she said, "How could they tell?")

Anyway, according to the best source I could find, the phrase was used by the science fiction writer Robert Heinlein, in his book STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND, and by the economist Milton Friedman, but no one seems to know where it originated. I suppose that the origin doesn't matter. The important thing -- for me, anyway -- was that when I first heard it, as a child, it made a deep impression on me. I pondered it.

"There's no such thing as a free lunch." Did that mean that there was such a thing as a free breakfast? A free dinner? Canapes, maybe?

And the phrase seemed kind of defensive to me. It suggested that whoever said it, he was saying it in opposition to the idea that there was, in fact, such a thing as a free lunch. And if such an idea existed, who held it? Was there a secret society somewhere, some sort of Freemasonry, dedicated to the notion of the free lunch? If so, who were they? And, more important, where did they eat?

Over the years, I kept my eyes open. Long before I became a writer I worked as a bartender. Now, bartenders don't usually get free lunches. But, as every bar owner knows, they get free drinks, and if you get enough of those, you don't really worry too much about lunch. Or dinner. Or Calvin Coolidge.

Even so, in my heart of hearts, I had come to believe that somewhere out there, a free lunch was waiting.

I sold my first book in 1977. A lot of people think that when a writer sells a book, suddenly he's making enough money to buy a condo in Miami. This isn't exactly true. The mean annual income for free-lance writers is something like $6,000. And that's including people like Steven King and John Grisham, people who are making enough money to buy a condo in Miami. Most writers have day jobs -- teacher, lion tamer, or, in my case, bartender. For a number of years, I kept working, while I wrote on the side.

But I made an interesting discovery. I discovered that when I met with my agent, or with my editor, usually we'd meet over lunch, and usually they'd pay for it. Well, both of them knew how much money I made as a writer, and neither one of them wanted to eat at McDonald's, so they'd take me someplace nice, and they'd pay.

And suddenly I realized. There WAS such a thing as a free lunch, but only writers could get it. The people who believed in the concept of the free lunch, that Freemasonry I mentioned, they were writers. And the guy who said that there was no such thing, he was obviously somebody who hated writers. Probably a publisher.

In the nineties, I got lucky. I picked up some foreign sales. British, Italian, French, German. I was able to work full time as a writer. And I was able to travel. In 1994 I was living in England, researching a book called ESCAPADE. Once a week I'd have lunch in London with a couple of writer friends, Sarah Caudwell and Mike Ripley. Neither one of them would ever let me pay for the meal. Despite my belief in free lunches, and in their wonderfulness, this was a bit embarrassing.

One day, while I was in the post office, I noticed a machine that made business cards. On a whim, I printed up 50 cards. They gave my name and a joke title: International Lunch Whore. Beneath the title, the card read: Entertaining, Discreet, Inexpensive. Next time I had lunch with Mike and Sarah, I gave them each a card. Before I gave it to them, though, I crossed out "Inexpensive."

I started handing out the cards on a regular basis. And the more I used them, the more of them I handed out, the more it seemed to me that an International Lunch Whore wasn't really a bad thing to be. It gave people a chance to demonstrate their generosity. It increased the cost of the meal, and therefore the waiter's tip. (And the bartender's. I still had, and have, a certain fondness for bartenders.) It permitted publishers, in some small way, to make up for the terrible wages they paid writers. From a certain perspective, you might even call it...noble.

I threw myself big-time into International Lunch Whoredom. I had to go to Greece, where I had rented a house. Instead of flying, I took a train to Paris, where I had a free lunch with my French publishers. From Paris I went to Milan, where I had a free lunch with my Italian publishers. I figured out later that when I added up the transportation and hotel costs, those two free lunches cost me $1,275. But when it comes to free lunches, I decided, money is no object.

I've had a lot of free lunches since then. In Munich, in Berlin, in Frankfurt and Amsterdam and Athens. In a month or two I'll be seeing my agent and my editor in New York. At this very moment, both of them are clearing up their credit card charges, so they'll be ready for me.

I think that an International Lunch Whore is a fine thing to be. I'm very proud that I've proved -- to my own satisfaction, anyway -- that there is such a thing as a free lunch. It's not manned flight. It's not a heart transplant, or a lunar landing. But, in its own way, it's a small step for man, and a great step for me.

Naturally it's not a job for everyone. Sometimes it's not pretty. As a Lunch Whore, I'm more or less compelled to accept lunch invitations from virtually anyone. Publishers. Politicians. Arab terrorists. Rotarians.

But I think that the benefits exceed the disadvantages. I may remain broke as I scramble from one free lunch to the next. But I've had some very nice meals.

And that's how it happened. Oh, and by the way. Thanks for the lunch.

BC: But I didn't buy your lunch.

WS: Well, no, but you are going to buy me lunch when we meet at ClueFest, aren't you.

BC: Uh, well, . . . sure.

WS: See what I mean?

BC: Yes. Thanks for a great interview.