INTERVIEWS --->> list of interviews
Introducing Bill Crider…
Steven: You've written fifty novels and seen them through the publication process. There is a debate among your fans as to whether you're making Janet Evanovich money or Dan Brown money, but I'd rather know what the career has taught you both as a writer and as a businessman/salesman.
I'm the world's worst salesman and self-promoter, which may help explain why I'm not making Dan Brown money. Come to think of it, I'm not making Janet Evanovich money, either.
I suspect there are two directions a writer can go: make a lot of money from one book, or make a little money from a lot of books. Unfortunately for me, I'm stuck on the second pathway. Not that it's been all that unfortunate. I sent a couple of kids to college for years and years and years, without having to take out a bank loan.
I'm on a panel at Bouchercon related to this topic, and all the other panelists are more or less beginning their careers as novelists. I guess I'm the Voice of Experience. All I can say is that things have changed drastically since I published my first book. (Yes, I know this doesn't answer your question, but, hey, it's as close as I can get to an answer.)
You have about a half dozen series: what do you do to keep the characters differentiated in your own mind or do you just make Sally Good sound like Truman Smith? Also, is there a favorite either with yourself or among your fans?
I like all my characters, but readers have voted for Sheriff Dan Rhodes, who's the only one with a series that's still active (the current book is A MAMMOTH MURDER from St. Martin's; MURDER AMONG THE O.W.L.S. is coming in January).
Poor sales, I assume, would explain why there aren't any Truman Smith, Sally Good, Stanley Waters, or Carl Burns books coming along in the future. I had a great time writing all those series, and I was particularly hoping that Truman Smith would continue, but it just wasn't in the cards.
It's easy for me to keep all the characters differentiated because to me they're all like real people that I know and talk to. To me they don't seem anything alike, though some small-minded critics might argue otherwise.
Your blog draws attention to your profound knowledge of classic hardboiled and noir as well as your other reading. Is this an archaeology of your influences as a novelist? Or how else did you learn how to write?
I've been reading and collecting old paperbacks since before most of your blog readers were born, probably. I love writers like Jim Thompson, Harry Whittington, Gil Brewer, Day Keene, John D. MacDonald, Charles Williams, and on and on and on. The books I write, though, are nothing like theirs, more's the pity. I think it's great that places like Hard Case Crime and Stark House are making their books available again.
As for influences, even though my books are entirely different, all those guys influenced me by making me want to write. You'd certainly have to include Hammett, Chandler, and Macdonald in the influential group, along with Mickey Spillane. And spy novels. Man, I read those by the metric ton. Helen MacInnes, Ian Fleming, Len Deighton, blah, blah, blah. Then there's science fiction, which I read by the truckload. I still read it. When it comes to influences, there are literally thousands, and they go beyond the hardboiled field (I read a lot of Agatha Christie, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, John Dickson Carr). If I learned to write (and those small-minded critics I mentioned above might argue with that assumption, too), it was probably by osmosis.
I recently read a western by you -- "Galveston Gunman." This is proof that you're not just one of those "Mystery writing pretty boys." What else would we find in your bibliography that might surprise us? Besides the fact that you've co-authored books with Willard Scott. And what was that about anyway? Did he just say things like "I think a story with fog in it would be good" and let you go from there?
Williard Scott provided most of the background for the main character in the two books we collaborated on. In fact, Stanley Waters is very much like Willard Scott. I'm not sure where the "fog" and "mist" titles came from, but the weather lore snippets in the book weren't my idea, so I guess he came up with it. I suspect he was the one who wanted the setting to be in a town much like the one he lives in. I contributed the plot and the writing, but the whole setting and the rest came from him.
I did a number of westerns, so finding one of those wouldn't surprise anybody. Several of them have mystery plots, so they're actually "historical mysteries." Maybe people would be surprised that as "Jack MacLane" I wrote four or five horror novels for Zebra Books. There are a couple of those that are pretty good. BLOOD DREAMS and GOOD NIGHT MOOM come to mind.
And then there are the two unpublished novels I did for an on-line seller of adult marital aids. Probably best that they never saw the light of day (and I'm not making this up).
You're at every convention I've ever even heard of (thus fueling the theory that you've got more money than Evanovich though perhaps not quite as much as Brown since jetsetting is expensive). Why? What do you get out of them, which are the best ones?
I started going to conventions around 1979, when Judy and I went to the World Fantasy Convention in Ft. Worth, Texas. It was a great experience, and we met people like Stephen King, Manly Wade Wellman, Evangeline Walton, Don Wollheim, Lin Carter, Fritz Leiber, Harlan Ellison, and so on. I was overwhelmed. We couldn't believe we'd been missing out on something so great, so we decided we'd go to a few more. We went to our first Bouchercon in 1980, in Washington D. C. Very few people attended. There were three or four panels a day. That was it. But we loved it. We've been going ever since.
I don't think we go to as many cons as a lot of people do, and we go mainly for fun and to see friends. Maybe because I started going before I ever sold a book, I've never gone to a convention to promote myself. If I'm not on a panel, I don't care. I'm not there for business. I'm there for pleasure. The Bouchercon is still my favorite, though it's considerably different from that first one I went to. I like smaller cons, too, and I really regret the demise of ConMisterio, which I thought was great.
You have dealt with students for a good long while now. It is currently popular for professors to confess that they learn as much from their students as their students learn from them. So fess up: what have you learned from your students or at least from the teaching of writing and the critical care that goes into grading papers and such.
I'm not sure I ever learned a thing from my students. Maybe I just wasn't tuned in. From all the grading, I guess I learned how important it is to pay attention to the little things, to get the commas in the right place, to use the right word instead of the nearly right one (or the entirely wrong one). But to tell the truth I looked at my life at school and my life as a writer as two separate things and kept one apart from the other pretty much all the time.
The bonus question: Describe your writing routine - outlines vs freewriting, heavy metal music in the background or pumped into your brain via earphones, write out the entire novel before revising or revise along the way.
I rarely outline unless it's required by the publisher. For me, the shorter the outline, the better. I listen to music sometimes, less now than in earlier years. When I listen, it's always oldies, and by oldies I don't mean '80s music. I mean music that you young whippersnappers never heard before, stuff from the '40s and '50s and maybe the '60s. I listen to the Houston Astros on the radio, too.
I write in the evenings, a habit I developed before I retired from teaching and one I can't seem to break.
My revisions are made as I go along, and when I get to the end, I'm pretty much finished. Then Judy reads the manuscript to tell me all the things I did wrong, and I try to fix those. After that I ship it off to the publisher.
The master level question: If you were forced to give advice to mystery writers just starting out, what would you tell them? Besides "Turn back while you still can!!!"
I have nothing profound to offer. I'd tell them to read. To go to conventions for the fun of it. To have a good time. To write for the sheer fun of it. To read some more. After that, what else is there?
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