In the 'Man out of prison' Noir Trilogy by Dave Zeltserman, the reader is presented with three dangerous men released from prison and the three distinct noir journeys which follow. That's the premise for my 'man out of prison' noir trilogy which Serpent's Tail is publishing. The first of these, Small Crimes, was published in 2008 and ended up being named by both NPR (National Public Radio) and The Washington Post as one of the top crime novels of the year.
In Small Crimes, my anti-hero, Joe Denton, is a disgraced
ex-cop who is being paroled after eight years for violently
disfiguring the County DA who was building a police corruption case
against Joe. When Joe was on the force, he was a bent cop, a
degenerate gambler, and a coke user. Now that he's out and back in his
fictional hometown of Bradley, Vermont, Joe finds nobody much wants
him around anymore, not his parents, his ex-colleagues, or his
ex-wife. Joe wants redemption for his past crimes, but the problem is
there are too many old ghosts and too much anger for that happen. The
damage that Joe and his release ultimately causes the town is
staggering.
The inspiration for Small Crimes came from two newspaper article I
read. The first was about a cop who committed a similar crime as
Joe's, and like Joe, was able to serve out an amazingly short sentence
in a County Jail. This cop also started collecting his pension shortly
after being released! The second article was about a corrupt Sheriff's
office in Denver in the 60s where they were robbing stores blind, even
going as far as carrying safes out of stores to open later. Merging
both these stories together, I started playing what-if games and built
a scenario in my mind of how a cop could be treated as lightly as Joe
for such a heinous crime within an utterly corrupt small town
atmosphere. And so Small Crimes was born.
The second book in my series, Pariah, was published in 2009, and is
written on two levels—one level being a fierce crime story, the other
a darkly satirical look at the New York publishing industry and all
their follies. Like a lot of people in Boston, I was fascinated for
years by the Whitey Bulger/Billy Bulger story, and read everything I
could on it. Here you have the most feared mobster in Boston, with his
brother being the State Senate President. Stories would come out about
how Whitey would lean on other pols to keep his brother in power, and
Billy would squash state police investigations into Whitey, going as
far as ruining the careers of state police who would try to bring
Whitey in.
After Whitey goes on the lam it then comes out that he was an
informant for the FBI, that he corrupted several FBI agents, including
his childhood friend, John Connolly. Connolly would tip him off if
anyone went to the FBI to give up Whitey, and Whitey would use the FBI
to get rid of his competition, and he'd also give up his own people to
help Connolly and these other corrupt FBI agents advance their
careers.
I knew there was a great crime novel in all of this, and I was mulling
over what angle to go at, when several things happened—first was a
Harvard student who had a reported 500K 2-book deal with Little Brown
being vilified when it came out that she plagiarized other chick lit
books in writing hers. The other thing was a bunch of tell-all books
hitting the shelves early March 2006, by South Boston mobsters (Brutal
by Kevin Weeks, Rat Bastard by John "red" Shea). I now saw my angle,
as well as getting excited about the idea of a "man just out of
prison" trilogy, with Small Crimes being the first, Pariah the second.
I wanted Pariah to start the same as Small Crimes—a man just getting
out of prison, but have this man (Kyle Nevin) be the polar opposite of
Joe Denton. While Joe, for all his weakness and self-delusion, is
still someone who wants to go through life without causing anymore
damage, Kyle is a force of nature and utterly ruthless and
remorseless, someone who leaves death and destruction wherever he
goes. I wrote Pariah early in 2006, and finished the book months
before the OJ Simpson "If I did it" book story came out—which was all
a bizarre coincidence—I thought the behavior of my fictional
publisher in Pariah was beyond the pall and would be too extreme for
any actual publisher, but I was proven wrong. In writing this book I
wanted to work in as much history of Whitey and the South Boston mob
as I could, and I also wanted to write what could be considered a
great crime novel—even with the satirical elements, I wanted to write
this straight up, and not for laughs.
Killer, which is being published in January 2010, rounds out this
trilogy. Killer was inspired very loosely on the idea that Boston mob
hitman, John Martorano, could murder 20 people, then end up striking a
deal for a 12 year prison sentence in exchange for becoming a
government witness agains Whitey Bulger and the South Boston Mob. With
Martorano, he is now out of prison and back in Boston where he's
living among the shadows of his victims.
My anit-hero in Killer is Leonard March. Like the real-life Martorano,
March was also a hitman for the mob, in his case performing 18 hits.
When he's picked up on a racketeering charge, he strikes a deal for 14
years in exchange for testifying against the mob and immunity for all
his past crimes. It's only when the deal is struck that the
authorities learn about his murders.
Just as Joe Denon and Kyle Nevin have there quests on leaving prison,
so does March. His is a search for self-discovery. The chapters of
Killer alternate between past and present, with the past chapters
showing Leonard as a cold-blooded killer, while in the present
chapters he's an older man trying to understand himself. Since his
release from prison he's working as a janitor and living in a low-rent
dirty apartment. Any former glory is gone, as well as any fear he
might have once have struck in the hearts of the Boston underworld. He
has been reduced to a toothless wolf left howling futilely at the
moon. March wants to believe that his past job was just a job, that
things could have been different for him. That he could have been a
good husband and father. In many ways, Killer is a meditation on the
mind of a killer, and in the end when Leonard's past collides with his
present the mystery of how these two sides of March can be reconciled
is at last answered.
Dave Zeltserman is published by Serpent's Tail
