Ed Gorman

Interviewed by Peter Dillon-Parkin

From the first paragraph of the first novel I read by Ed Gorman I knew that this was a writer I was going to like. My misspent youth consisted largely of my tracking down any and all examples of American crime fiction, in the secondhand bookstores and junk shops of Birmingham. Old issues of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, Gold Medal novels, Penguin editions of Erle Stanley Gardner and Raymond Chandler. My most successful purchase stays in the memory to this day - a hardback edition of The Collected Novels of Dashiell Hammett, at a Catholic Jumble Sale I'd wandered into, for a penny.

Occasionally I'd come across one of the EQMM quarterlies - hardback size, with papercovers. And inside, Rex Stout, Cornell Woolrich, Fredric Brown...

It's the latter two, and another childhood favourite (well, it was an odd childhood) Robert Bloch, that Ed's novels reminded me of when I read them. Dark Suspense. Noir. A world where bad things happen to good people. And to bad people too, for that matter.

If the protagonists of Patricia Highsmith's novels are skating on the thin ice of civilisation, then those of Woolrich, Brown, Bloch and Gorman have often dropped all the way through.

Dark suspense. Noir. It's hard to pin down. It's not horror, because the evil is very definitely of the human kind. But it's hard to get mystery fans to embrace it because, well, it's a little strong, a bit hard to take.

And very hard to put down.

If the work of Jonathan Kellerman and Patricia Cornwell is essentially therapeutic in nature - society threatened by 'outsider', outsider defeated, status quo restored, dark suspense goes one step further. Often (as in the work of Jim Thompson) we see the world from the outsider's viewpoint. If Cornwell and Kellerman chronicle society from the winners' point of view, Gorman asks you to sometimes look at the losers' end of the deal. And dares you to put the book down. And you can't...

I talked to Ed Gorman for a long time...

You write a lot about disaffected teenagers. Are you writing about yourself?
In the days when we lived on farms and small towns, I never got into trouble. But in the small cities where we lived, I gravitated toward the outcasts, and that inevitably meant the criminals. I became a master thief. I could shoplift damned near anything. Got so brazen in fact that we used to put bets down on how long it would take one of us to get into a store, steal the item we wanted, and then get out without getting caught. But my criminal career ended the summer I was seventeen. One of my best friends stuck up a gas station and cut the gas station attendant in half with a shotgun. Then a few months later, the police accused me of stealing a great deal of money. I was advised by a lawyer to plead guilty - he thought I was guilty - and try either for probation or a very short stint in reform school. Fortunately, the cops figured out what had really happened so I was set free. I was really scared by both events. I gave up my life of minor crime and went back to high school. I'd been expelled for fighting from Catholic school so I went to public school, which I hated. I actually liked the nuns very much. Back in the days when I still wrote poetry, I wrote; "I've been so many/god damned people/in my life/there's going to be/one hell of a crowd/in my coffin." True.

What got you interested in crime fiction?
I grew up reading everybody and everything. I remember my seventh grade nun looking at the books I'd hidden in my desk and saying, "Mickey Spillane and F Scott Fitzgerald, that's quite a pair, Mr Gorman." I spent a long time writing literary fiction, but the sort of material I like contemporary literary writers loathe. I published in some very, very small 'small' magazines and then gave it up and started writing stories under pen-names for various men's magazines. There was a kind of natural evolution, I guess, turning then to the crime story.

What was your 'big break?'
Selling my first novel. Since then I've enjoyed a series of small big breaks but never the big big break. My first novel was called Rough Cut. A reviewer called it a "hate letter to the advertising business," which is what it was. I'd tried writing a novel many times but always gave up. I decided to write one, no matter what, for my fortieth birthday. I got up every morning at five and wrote till eight, then I went to work at the ad agency I owned. I wrote it in three months. I sold it to the first publisher I sent it to. Unfortunately, I wasted the year previous sending it to agents. One said "This reads like Dick Francis and I hate Dick Francis." Another said "This is too literary for genre fiction" (leading me to wonder what the hell this guy knew of literary fiction - Rough Cut is pure pulp.) My favourite was, "Your narrator is more psychotic than your villain." Rough Cut is very much by the numbers. The "rage" as one reviewer called it is its only distinctive characteristic.

Has publishing changed since you sold you first novel?
It seems to me that publishing was more civilised when I began fifteen years ago. Calls were returned, and reasonably promptly, and editors made a point of being cordial. These days, with so many mid-listers looking for slots, some editors have become rude and angry. If they ever bother to return your calls. But I think we have to cut them some slack. They're under a lot of pressure. Huge conglomerates have taken over American publishing and by and large publishing has become very much like the soap business these days - they're looking for one-size-fits-all. The blandness and idiocy of many bestsellers tells you about the people at the top of publishing these days. And these people like nothing better than pitching editors out 38th storey windows when times get tough.

Why do you write?
I've always believed that people write - or paint or dance or act or play the violin - because of some lack they sense in themselves. It's compensation of some kind. I've always felt afraid and lonely and writing gives me the opportunity to deal with those feelings. But other times I've felt good and happy and this is reflected in the humour and optimism in my stories. As a number of critics have noted, there's a lot of humour in my novels. For all my 'dark' reputation, I think my writing is optimistic. I write about ordinary people like myself and I try very hard to give their lives dignity and meaning. I don't like most nihilistic fiction. It seems juvenile to me. Life is a bitch, true, but after you say that, then what? That's when you have to set about trying to make something of your life, even if it is meaningless in the cosmic sense. I remember reading Celine in college. I found him to be a show-off and a pain in the ass. I'm speaking for myself, of course. I don't reckon any of my opinions are universal.

You've produced a fair number of books.
Thirty-one in sixteen years, though a number of those were 45,000 word house-name westerns (something I have in common with John Harvey). There's a professor doing a sort of literary profile of me and he made the point that even though I've written horror and SF and westerns as well as crime fiction, all my stories are really crime stories, and that they all seem to have two overriding influences, Gold Medal novels and Ernest Hemingway. I suspect that's true. All three of my SF novels, for instance, are caper books, believe it or not; and my horror novels are cliff-hanger suspense tales. But I've given everything else up to concentrate on suspense novels and nothing else. That's really the only genre I feel totally at home in.
I enjoy writing very much. I stick to a strict routine, five pages a day virtually no matter what, sick days, holidays, it doesn't matter. I probably write 360 days a year. And always hit that page count. However - I also throw a lot away. I've probably thrown six or seven nearly-complete novels away over the past fifteen years. I'm not a great re-writer. I'd just as soon pitch the damned thing and start over fresh. Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays I feel like a genius when I'm writing; Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays, I'm convinced my career is over, that I've been found out for the pretender I really am.

Who are your favourite writers?
I always leave somebody out. Koontz and King and John D MacDonald and Ross McDonald and Maugham and Woolrich and Fredric Brown and Kerouac and Himes and Ira Levin and Dreiser and Steinbeck. (Charles) Beaumont and Bradbury and Westlake and McBain and Wileford and Zola and Richard Matheson and (Graham) Greene and (Elmore) Leonard and (Robert) Bloch and Pronzini and Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Rendell and Margaret Millar and Jim Thompson and Simenon and (Charles) Bukowski and Peter Rabe. To mention just a few. I spent my teen years gorging on Gold Medals and the Beats and The Angry Young Men. In fact, I'll recommend a book here. I recently picked up a British Angry Young Man novel from the fifties, Room At The Top by John Braine, which became a very good film. It's a wonderfully done sad-droll-comic novel, a comedy of manners but with a great dark soul. If you read it I think you'll agree with me - this is the literary novel Raymond Chandler never got around to writing. I tried another couple of Braines but didn't care for them. But this is a first-rate story and novel.

Your work seems to take the archetypes of The American Dream' and subvert them.
I think most people carry a share of disappointment and regret around with them, no matter how wealthy or celebrated they become. There's a bit of Jay Gatsby in most of us, I think. At least that's what I hear in the voices of most people I listen to carefully.

I think this is a realistic perception of the human condition. I also hear fear in a lot of people - fear of death, fear for their children, fear of poverty, fear of being left alone. But I like to write about people who fight on anyway, who try to do the right thing, who try to overcome a bad turn of chance or fate or some mistake they made in the past. Fitzgerald said that Hemingway spoke with the authority of success while he, Fitzgerald, spoke with the authority of failure. I've always remembered that.