Interview with Steve Hockensmith

Many of your stories, especially the Amlingmeyer brothers stories, but even a story like "The MacGuffin Theft Case," seem to derive half their power from the fact that a fictional audience is being created and considered at the same time that the story is being told. I mean, the stories I've read include a letter to Sherlock Holmes, a letter to the editors of Harpers Weekly, and a narration told by a neighborhood know it all. Even your novel Holmes on the Range imagines a "dear reader". What are you trying to do by highlighting the fictional/fictionalized audience like this?

You're right that a lot of my stuff tends to have a frame of one kind or other. Good catch! You don't happen to have an MFA, do you?

What am I trying to do? I wish I knew. There's no artistic rationale for it, as near as I can figure.

A few years back, when I was struggling to find my footing as a writer (i.e., when what I was writing really sucked), a friend of mine noticed the same thing. She thought I was using frames and story-within-a-story structures as a kind of post-modern copout: I was ambivalent about trying to be A Writer, she said, so I was subconsciously looking for ways to undercut and critique myself. By giving a story a specific context -- making it a drunken monologue by a trucker in an Indiana bar, let's say -- I was distancing myself from the storytelling while winking at the reader in a way that deliberately undermined any artistic pretensions I might have.

Was she right? I don't know. *I* don't have an MFA, nor have I undergone therapy. So I prefer to think I'm just having fun.

I really enjoy first-person narration -- I use it fairly frequently. But I always end up asking myself a question a lot of other folks don't seem to consider (or find worth considering): Who's the narrator talking *to*? I mean, isn't that kind of a weird thing about traditional first-person narration? All these people gabbing away at no one in particular? Why is Philip Marlowe telling us this story? Are we his psychoanalyst? His secretary? His mom? His dog? By providing an answer, not only does that give me more to work with as the writer (by shading what the narrator would say and how he would say it, given his audience), but it also gives the reader a role to play. You're not just a generic observer. You're a waitress in a Hoosier trucker bar or a detective hearing a confession or maybe even Philip Marlowe's dog. And that (hopefully) makes the story even more entertaining.

Of course, another possible answer is that I'm simply overthinking everything. Fortunately, my stories don't seem to suffer as a result. At least, not that anyone's ever told me, other than my friend. But I think she was biased against anything that smacked of self-conscious, "meta" fiddle-faddle. She'd just quit her MFA program at the time....

It seems like when you decided to write mystery stories, you also decided to chuck the number one rule of mystery short fiction -- drop the body as soon after the title as you can. Even in an almost minimalist story like "Erie's Last Day," we don't get to know the crime until we first get to know Erie. They're wonderful stories nevertheless, but is there a reason for the delay?

I'm not sure I'd call it a delay. Just look at "Erie's Last Day," for instance. The title tells you exactly what the story's about: this Erie dude's *day*. Solving a crime happened to be a part of that day, but it's not the crux of the story -- it merely makes it more exciting. I'd say that's true of all my Erie stories for Alfred Hitchcock. They're not about crime. They're about a depressed retired guy who happens to be pretty good at solving crimes. That's a lot more interesting to me than who put the poison in the vicar's scone.

I probably don't feel the need to front-load my stories as a writer because I don't need (or even want) them front-loaded as a reader. You can pile a hundred dead bodies on page one and that's not going to make me want to read more. But you *can* write about a forgotten marshmallow going stale behind the refrigerator, and you just might hook me. It all depends on the writing. As the infallible Sarah Weinman said in an interview with you a while back, plot's cool and all, but voice is where it's at, baby.

Of course, I'm paraphrasing. I don't think she said "baby." And maybe she didn't use the phrase "where it's at." And she might not have been talking about plot...or voice. But suffice it to say, she said something pithy that in some way validated whatever point I've been trying to make. Just take my word on it.

Now if you can write about someone trying to poison the vicar with a marshmallow -- and you can do it from the marshmallow's perspective as it's about to be dropped into the vicar's steaming-hot cup of cocoa -- then you'll *really* have me hooked.

Well, first off -- thanks! Praise is a wonderful way to begin any question.

There was indeed an enormous amount of painstaking research that went into Holmes on the Range. But in the end, I don't think it was all the hours I spent poring over books or doing Google searches like "remedies cattle maggots" that made the difference. What puts the setting across, in my opinion, is what you mentioned: the dialogue. And I include the narration in that, since, after all, the book's in first person. It should (and, from what I've been told, does) seem like a cowboy is telling you this story himself. And if I pull that off -- if the narration sounds right -- then the whole thing *feels* right, and readers just go with it.

Unless they happen to be serious scholars of cowboy lore. I'm expecting the angry e-mails from those folks to start streaming in any day now. I did my best, but I have no doubt that I made mistakes. Fortunately, 99.9 percent of my audience won't notice them.

As for why the Old West...well, I think it's a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup kinda thing.

Guy #1: "Hey, you got your Sherlock Holmes in my Western!"

Guy #2: "You got your Western in my Sherlock Holmes!"

Both: "Mmmmmm."

The Victorian era in England coincided perfectly with the "Wild West" era in America, yet no one ever seems to link them. They're polar opposites -- one repressed and (on the surface) "civilized," the other rowdy and grungy. You couldn't ask for a better juxtaposition. And I love both eras. So throw 'em together, and you've got the two great tastes that taste great together. And who better to represent their respective eras than Sherlock Holmes and an illiterate cowboy?

Another great opening! And I love the questions, too! Where'd you pick up your interviewing technique? The Washington press corps?

But enough smart-assery...thank you again! It's doubly wonderful to hear praise about one's short fiction, because it's always such a surprise. At the last Bouchercon, a very kind gentleman told me he thought my Erie stories were the best P.I. short fiction series around today -- which is sort of like being told you're the most popular polka band in Toledo. It's a wonderful honor and all, but how many people are paying attention?

I plan to keep writing stories about Larry Erie as long as Linda Landrigan at AHMM keeps buying them. In fact, I've been meaning to write a new one for months, but the novel I'm working on keeps refusing to FREAKING END ALREADY!!! I've thought about building a novel around Erie, but I always come up with plenty of reasons not to. I don't have time, for one thing -- I'm backlogged on novel ideas well into the next decade, if not the next century. And I'm not sure Larry's the kind of character who could support an entire book on his own. Unlike Big Red Amlingmeyer, he's no barrel of laughs. As I'm writing him now, he's basically just killing time until a heart attack gets him in his La-Z-Boy. I get the feeling that if I wrote a novel about the poor guy, he'd have to be dead by the end of it.

As for The Collected Works of Yours Truly...only time (and my Amazon.com ranking) will tell. I recently got a nibble from a small press, which was nice, but it'll be a while before I think seriously about a collection. Once upon a time, I tried to get my agent interested in packaging my Christmas stories -- I've had a bunch in EQMM -- but she had a let's-wait-and-see attitude. If the Big Red/Old Red books take off, then who knows? Maybe I'll actually get to collect those works of mine. And if I tank as a novelist...well, there's always PublishAmerica.

Not.

Oh, lordy, yes. Not only is child molestation not funny, I usually don't like seeing it used as a plot device at all. I'm one of those stodgy types who thinks making a horrific crime a subplot on Diff'rent Strokes isn't daring and laudable -- it's cheap and creepy. I recently tried reading a thriller by An Author Who Shall Remain Nameless, and the graphic child rape scene just stopped me cold. I closed the book and never reopened it. If you're going to go down that road, you've got to be taking it somewhere -- to a *point*, for instance. If you don't have one, you're just turning people's misery into entertainment.

Ditto animal abuse. And 9/11. And I'm always amazed by the number of people who find prison rape to be the very height of hilarity.

Murder, on the other hand...now that's pure comedy gold!

I have to admit the only Cheever I've read is "The Swimmer," which I hunted down after watching the bizarro movie version starring Burt Lancaster's chest. I am an uptight middle-class WASP, however, which may account for any similarities in our writing styles.

Actually, I've done a lot of thinking about my influences lately, in preparation for this exact question, but I haven't come to any satisfying conclusions. There's no obvious progression, no Unified Field Theory for my writing. I read Kurt Vonnegut obsessively when I was in high school, but I don't think I sound much like Vonnegut now. My favorite novel is Catch-22, but my stuff's much more plot-driven than anything Joseph Heller ever did. I write mysteries, but I didn't start reading them until I was in my mid-twenties, and by then my voice as a writer was more-or-less fully formed. I subscribed to Asimov's when I was growing up, not AHMM or EQMM, yet I couldn't write an Asimov's-style story to save my life. It's strange.

It's probably safe to say I'm a mystery writer who doesn't have many influences within the mystery genre, simply because I wasn't reading it when I was young and impressionable. Which is perhaps why my stories strike you as unconventional. I simply don't know any better!

Buying a tuxedo would be the quickest way to ensure I *won't* be nominated for anything next year. The universe simply wouldn't tolerate that kind of hubris from a guy like me. I did recently acquire a penguin suit, though -- a classy designer number that originally belonged to Sharon Stone's ex-husband. (Don't ask.) It was free...and it fits! The hand of fate? I can only hope so.

Any speech I would make would be a simple litany of thank yous. I'm not sure "Best First Novel" or what-have-you would entitle me to attempt anything profound. And like with the tux, making assumptions about your own success merely speeds the inevitable cosmic smack-down. So no pre-written speeches for me, if I'm lucky enough to be graced with a nomination. Which is another reason why, if I actually win anything, I'll probably hyperventilate and pass out before I reach the podium anyway.