Short, Sharp Interview: Malachi Stone

PDB: Can you pitch your latest publication in 25 words or less?

AMERICAN BANSHEE. Phony exorcist preying on local yokels in the Missouri Ozarks encounters an authentic “haint”: a banshee. Will she drag him down to hell?

PDB: Which books, films or television shows have floated your boat recently?

One of my cardinal virtues, one I truly strive for, is originality. If I have the slightest suspicion that a phrase I’ve written down may not be completely original (which usually begins with a nagging feeling that if I’m too much in love with a particular bit of dialogue or description, it must be borrowed unwittingly from another author) I Google it. If my suspicions prove correct I strike it out and start over. Fortunately for me I’m usually incorrect. The most recent time I harbored a suspicion that I had unwittingly lifted a particular phrase, I Googled it and then discovered that I had used it before in the same novel. I was stealing from myself.

I am pathologically afraid of committing unconscious plagiarism. Therefore I try to avoid reading books that have anything to do with what I might attempt to write in the future. For this reason I read very little crime fiction these days. I made an exception for Matthew J. McBride’s Frank Sinatra in a Blender, an impudent, in-your face book that bends the genre in outrageous ways. I’ve met Matt McBride at Noir at the Bar in St. Louis. He’s a disarmingly nice young man whose outré writing style reminds me of a guy making balloon animals out of inflated condoms and then handing them out in restaurants. And I mean that as a compliment.

I’ve read works written by Daniel B. O’Shea, Steve Weddle and others. Their books deserve to be published by one of the majors and one day will be. I’ve read Joelle Charbonneau, whose name, I predict, soon will be a better known brand than, say, Janet Evanovich or Sue Grafton. Scott Phillips is the gold standard. His Ice Harvest, The Walkaway, Cottonwood, Rut, and The Adjustment have left me hungering for more. Jedidiah Ayres is an unsurpassed editor whose knowledge of the crime noir genre is encyclopedic in depth and scope, and whose own fiction deserves a reading by anyone who enjoys dark, edgy prose. Check out D*CKED: Dark Fiction Inspired by Dick Cheney and Crimefactory and you’ll see what I mean.

I don’t mean for this to sound like an Academy Award acceptance speech, but I also recommend Frank Bill, John Hornor Jacobs, Seth Harwood, Chuck Wendig, Laura and Pinckney Benedict, Keith Rawson, Hilary Davidson, Barna Donovan, Jeff Shelby, Owen Laukkanen (if you can get past that Canadian accent) and Anthony Neil Smith.

Let’s face it: every writer is essentially an amateur. There is no government licensing of writers, thank God. A professional writer is one who gets paid for what otherwise would be nothing more than hobby. For me it’s still a hobby, albeit one I take very seriously. These days you can’t tell a writer apart from any other hobbyist. It’s like walking down the street in an unfamiliar suburban neighborhood. The guy who lives in the third house on the left may have a huge set of trains in his basement. Next house over, the homeowner may have installed a fully-equipped torture dungeon with soundproofed walls. Everybody should have a hobby. It’s not mine to judge.

Movies that float my boat are the old Hollywood B-pictures, the ones Raymond Chandler derisively characterized as “gun-in-the-kidney,” where all the men wear hats, everybody smokes their brains out and a quick punch in the nose is the sure rejoinder to every well-tuned wisecrack. For a considerable period of time I watched a steady diet of those turkeys, studying the dialogue for my novel Heartbalm, where the heroine suffers from a posttraumatic mental condition that causes her to revert to hard-boiled dialogue from 40’s crime movies whenever she’s placed under stress. By the way, anybody interested may read Heartbalm in its entirety on my blog. I’ve also posted podcasts of the first ten chapters. I would have produced more but for the fact that my dear wife, having overheard one particularly offensive recording session, made me quit.

As to television, other than the old movies I’ve already mentioned, I’m particularly fond of programs like Dateline where Keith Morrison, Josh Mankiewicz (my alter ego Nastydamus’s Twitter nemesis) and others provide in-depth coverage of tabloid-worthy interspousal homicides. Keith Morrison’s creepy voice-overs make Peter Lorre sound like Mister Rogers; Josh Mankiewicz’s distrustful squint evokes Charles Laughton as Captain Bligh.

Speaking of homicide, how can I not bring up Nancy Grace, the Grande Dame of all tee vee prosecutrixies, whose hour-long idiot call-in shows every weeknight feature three minutes of (slanted) fact presentation followed by endless hand-wringing angst and enough outrage to fire up a torchlit lynch parade from the television station direct to the jail house.

PDB: Is it possible for a writer to be an objective reader?

Yes, if he has the moral strength to rein in his envy and his pride. My blog reviews of novels written by Nancy Grace and Glenn Beck were probably unfairly harsh. I attribute that fact to my politics, my lack of personal financial success as a writer thus far, and my respect for the United States Constitution as proof against demagoguery. However, most of the people who’ve read those reviews told me they were funny. Plus, I’m no Michiko Kakutani, so a bad review or two from me isn’t likely to damp down sales.

On second thought, I wasn’t being unfairly harsh.

PDB: Do you have any interest in writing for films, theatre or television?

Grease me up and bend me over, Dude. While everybody from Frederica Maas to Raymond Chandler to John Gregory Dunne has castigated Hollywood for its mistreatment of writers, I’ll match any one of them ouch for ouch, and grovel for the chance to lunge for that brass ring out there in La La Land. In other words, yes.

PDB: How much research goes into each book?

All of my novels have dealt with some aspect of law practice. I have actively practiced law for three decades now, so I tend to write from a technical baseline of what I already know. Everything else—the characters, the dialogue, the plot—is strictly imaginary. In American Banshee I sought out a challenge: to write a traditional ghost story with enough original elements that it would stand out from the genre and at the same time to write an exorcism story that aligned with what is known about real-life exorcisms. Therefore I studied these books in particular, all three of which I highly recommend: Hostage to the Devil by Dr. Malachi Martin; An Exorcist Tells His Story by Fr. Gabriele Amorth, and People of the Lie by Dr. M. Scott Peck. The challenge, as always to the modern novelist, was how to write something even more hair-raising than those eminent authors’ authentic accounts. In American Banshee I hope I have succeeded.

PDB: How useful or important ARE social media for you as a writer?

I never would have explored social media if not for the recommendation of my literary agent Stacia J. N. Decker of the Donald Maass Literary Agency. Social media have provided me with a number of useful contacts but, more importantly, I have encountered many fascinating people I never would have known but for Facebook and Twitter. The down side, of course, is that the social media suck out time from one’s day like a black hole.

PDB: What’s on the cards in 2012?

Finishing Nightmare Number Nine, my tenth novel. It’s a sequel to Dead Man’s Act that features protagonist Bosco Hoël undergoing sleep studies to find out why he keeps dreaming about murders with himself as the killer. Bosco and his amputee wife run a three-legged race with insidious forces seeking to destroy him. Those interested can find the entire manuscript of Dead Man’s Act as well as the partial ms of Nightmare Number Nine posted on my blog http://malachistone.wordpress.com/ for review, critique and comment. Editors please note: they’re for sale.

Thanks again for the opportunity to be interviewed on your excellent blog.

(FIND OUT MORE ABOUT MALACHI STONE HERE)