Douglas Winter was born in 1950 and grew up in the steel town of Granite City, Illinois. His mother encouraged him to read and write, even if it meant buying him subscriptions to Famous Monsters of Filmland. He attended Harvard Law School, from where he graduated in 1975. His first job was with Judge William H. Webster, later director of the FBI and CIA. By the 1980s, Winter was a partner in one of the nation's leading law firms, where he specialised in air disaster cases.
His criticism, reviews and interviews have appeared in countless US magazines and newspapers. Among his published books are the definitive biography of Stephen King, The Art of Darkness, and the anthologies Prime Evil and Revelations. His short stories have been published with increasing regularity and have won several awards.
Winter lives in Oakton, Virginia, a suburb of Washington DC, with his wife, Lynne, and their three dogs. Although he's now retired as a partner of the law firm, he continues to work on a limited basis. On his days off he can be found at home hunched over a computer, writing to the accompaniment of eclectic rock music and his ever-growing collection of obscure film soundtracks.
Run feels like it was written in one go - exactly how long did it take you to write?
I wish it had been that easy! Run was written over several years, in the aftermath of an air disaster case that consumed my life for almost a decade. I honestly don't know how much time I spent on the book - sometimes months would pass when I couldn't write a word. And the style is deceptive. Because the story is narrated conversationally, it was difficult at times to sustain an authentic voice, straight off the street; to lure readers into the criminal mindset, urge them along on the doomed 'run' that is the focus of the novel's first half. Certainly it was a book where less words meant more work.
How did you get back into character each time?
Because I didn't have the luxury of being able to write every day, it was often difficult. But it was important to honour the first person narration, to filter every element of the novel through Burdon Lane's perspective. So I guess part of the process was learning to look at the world through his narrowed and jaundiced eyes. What helped the most was to learn the rhythm of his voice, and his idiosyncrasies of speech - for example, the way he uses proper names as adjectives, like 'this Dickie Mullen guy'. Another great help was to write in a run-on style, which produced lengthy rants that I would later edit dramatically - but which carried me over into his voice.
The subject matter is harrowing - did you find yourself drawn too deep into it?
I wrote Run in an effort to make sense of tragic violence - things like school shootings - which the media prefer to describe as 'senseless'. That's one reason for the novel's intimate style. I didn't want to distance readers. I wanted to put them right inside the story. Originally, the ending was darker and more violent; but when I finished the book, it was obvious that, in your words, I was 'in too deep', and that the novel worked more convincingly than I had hoped. Which meant, in turn, that my original vision of the ending was moot, and the finale became even better than the one I'd intended.
How important is it to you to put forward a viewpoint that may be morally repugnant?
It was essential. I wanted to tell the story from the inside out - to take readers into the criminal underworld, and into the culture of bigotry and violence that haunts America. You can't do that honestly or convincingly without offering attitudes and words that are impolite and, indeed, repugnant. And we've seen far too many novels and films that gloss over the demons, that wrestle with symbols - swastikas, for example - without ever getting to the pathology that gives the symbols their power. My narrator, Burdon Lane, tells you from the outset that he's not the good guy; but readers soon realise that Burdon's world is one of bad guys and worse guys; that an either/or mentality - good or bad, black or white, criminal or cop - is not only superficial but dangerous. And that there is no redemption without damnation.
Was it difficult getting it published?
No. While I knew that publishers who liked bland, safe, so-called 'commercial' prose might balk at the style and the subject, other publishers wanted Run, and intensely so, because it took risks and tried to be different. The response was very gratifying. I knew the risks when I started the book, but I wanted to write a novel that was mine, a novel sufficiently unique that, whether you closed it after page one or the final page, you knew it was written by Douglas Winter. At the same time, I knew I was working within a great tradition, and I hoped that publishers would see Run as an extension of that tradition. I wanted, among other things, to take noir sensibilities and wrench them out of the forties and fifties and into the next century, and, at the same time, to ratchet up the prose, to make this book true to its title - something that moved with a speed that would leave readers breathless.
You cite cinema as an influence on some of the shoot-outs, but doesn't this glamorise the violence?
Cinema does glamorise violence; but glamour is the essence of cinema, at least in Hollywood, which has managed to glamorise everything from the Holocaust to HIV. The cinematic influence on Run was contrary: I wanted to depict the gunplay and its aftermath in a realistic and decidedly non-glamorous style, although I admit there are moments where I try to evoke the strange, seductive beauty of guns. But otherwise, especially in the two major shoot-outs, the gunplay is dense and chaotic, with the fog and confusion of combat - an inversion of the choreographed and romanticised 'bullet ballet' seen in the films of Sam Peckinpah and John Woo.
Was it a 'healthy' diversion from the incisiveness and logic of your law job?
Yes, it was a wonderful diversion from legal writing, which requires orderly, grammatical structures and polite language, even at the worst of moments. One of my favourite reviews told readers not to fret because I was a lawyer: that Run wasn't a 'lawyer novel' but read like it had been written inside a prison cell!
What other sort of feedback have you had?
Well, when I finished Run, my wife and I agreed that we would only care about whether the book was published. Anything else - whether it sold for $5,000 or $5 million, whether it was panned or praised - would be meaningless, because the point was to see my first novel, written on my own terms, in print. But the response has been terrific. From publishers in New York, and then around the world, to reviewers and readers. Being published by Knopf is the dream of any writer in the States, and being published by Canongate in the UK is another delight, since I'm a great fan of their Payback series and now their new crime series.
Tell me a bit about your Prime Evil anthology.
Prime Evil was meant to offer readers a collection of original stories by the best (and bestselling) writers of horror and suspense fiction at the close of the 1980s, and to champion my argument that horror is not a genre but an emotion. The anthology was based on good writing, and featured writers whose voices are genuine and idiosyncratic. It included fine work from 'name' writers like Stephen King, Peter Straub and Clive Barker, but it also helped bring lesser-known talents like Thomas Ligotti and Jack Cady to the public eye. And it's stayed in print for more than twelve years now, which is very gratifying.
Influences - who are your literary heroes?
It's difficult to offer anything approaching a definitive answer. Joseph Conrad, and particularly Heart of Darkness, is immensely important - it is, for me, the finest horror novel ever written. In the realm of crime fiction, I have a definite fondness for Raymond Chandler and the more desolate writers of noir: David Goodis and Jim Thompson, certainly; the early novels of George V. Higgins; the darker works of Elmore Leonard. Among more contemporary crime and thriller writers, Michael Connelly and George P. Pellecanos and, of course, Thomas Harris; I think Red Dragon is a masterpiece. Peter Straub and Stephen King. Clive Barker (for his ambition), Robert F. Stone, if only for Dog Soldiers. James Herbert and David Morrell, whose early novels, in particular, taught me so much about momentum. And then - to underscore my eclecticism - some less obvious names: Alain Robbe-Grillet, J. G. Ballard, the fantasist E. R. Eddison, and the bitter black comedies of Harry Crews and Thomas McGuane.
What's your ultimate goal in Run - to entertain, or to challenge?
To me, these goals aren't mutually exclusive. I write to entertain, but I don't like 'mindless' entertainment. I want to challenge readers, to give them something that works on multiple levels - to have, in a sense, stories inside of stories. To entertain and, hopefully, edify. Films and television seem increasingly superficial - for the most part, what you see is what you get. But in fiction you can work so effectively on multiple levels, giving readers things to thrill them, like murder and mayhem, at the same time that you're giving them things to think about. Myth and meaning.
Do you enjoy publicity work?
Well, I guess in a perfect world, Run would speak for itself. But with competition from everything from video games to the internet, you really need to distinguish your work and find ways to communicate your ideas to an audience. And a first novel presents a unique difficulty in the marketplace, since no one - bookstores, reviewers or readers - knows who you are, or why your book ought to be read rather than one by, say, the tried and true folks who have published ten novels. So publicity work seems inevitable; it can be stressful, but it's also a lot of fun. Writers work for a long time in the shadows, then emerge every year or two, or ten, with a new book. The isolation is nice, but I like interacting with others, particularly on subjects that are dear to me. That is an added benefit of doing interviews or speaking about the book.
Your role on the Book Critics Circle must mean you see an awful lot of books - what's the state of fiction in the US like at the moment?
I think it's very good. The nineties were a difficult time for publishing in America, with so many houses consolidated or dissolved through mergers and the advent of competition from electronic media and the Internet. There was something of a shake out, and a healthy benefit was that books published more for their type than for their merit lost favour. In the aftermath, there seems to be renewed interest in original voices, and the way in which books are written. There is still too much emphasis on publishing 'safe' books - novels that seem to replicate other successful books - but there is also great interest in evolution, in championing books that push at, or indeed reject, the expected.
Novels offer an experience unlike that produced by any other media - that delightful long-term collaboration between the author and the individual reader's imagination. We may witness changes in the format of that collaboration - from paper to electronic screen, for example - but I have no doubt that fiction is thriving, and will outlive us all.
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