El Gavilan (45 page)

Music comes up a lot in your books. You were friends with Warren Zevon … you mention Lucinda Williams in the new book. Who do you listen to now?
Oh, I pretty much listen to everybody. I go all the way from Shostakovich to Steve Earle. Warren was a wonderful guy. I told him he was probably the smartest songwriter in America and he told me, “The words are just something I hang the music on.”

Have you been pressured to put up a Web site?
I have. I’ve been using a computer for a long time, but the maintenance of a Web site is not something I want to take on. I don’t know if it works or makes a difference. I have enough trouble cleaning out my e-mail. I don’t know that
my
fans are interested in sitting down in front of a computer, either. I’ve often thought most of my fans were in jail, or should be … on the lam or in the slam.

Do you still do film work at this point at all?
[Laughing]
Not as much as I used to, unfortunately.

Well, the money is certainly there. I tend to dwell on the books screenwriting may have cost us from Faulkner, from Fitzgerald and some others. But you do have to make money …
I had to pay for a fairly expensive divorce, yes. And you know, I like movies. But like every other idiot writer in the world, when I went to Hollywood I thought, “It’s easy to do because it’s a lot of white space.” But you have to learn a new form. I’ve never not gotten paid for a script, although I have as many good Hollywood horror stories as anybody else.

You’ve done quite a range of work: from
Judge Dredd
to Ellroy’s
The Big Nowhere.
Yeah, that one was a chore.

Bet it was … that’s such a sprawling piece of work. How do you approach something like that by another crime writer?
Well, I just sort of did something else. The producer that owned the option, Tim Hunter, and I had a drink with him the day he picked up the option. I said, “I feel sorry for the poor screenwriter that has to deal with this.” A year later, it was me. That was a real chore. The guys who figured
L.A. Confidential
out, I thought were geniuses. I spent a lot of that time working with Robert Towne on
Dancing Bear
and couldn’t do anything else at the time. Wrote a couple of books during that time and couldn’t get any screenwork.

And I live in Montana and nobody quite knows where it is.

Flyover country.
Worse
than that. Some woman from ABC News in the recent past wanted to talk to me about something. I was going to do a soundbyte. I said sure. She said, “How will I find you? Where would I land?” I said, “Well, you could land at the jet airport here in Missoula, Montana.” And then maybe she wasn’t so interested as she thought she was. Another friend of mine, when he joined The Writer’s Guild, they put him in The Writer’s Guild East because they thought it was Missouri.

I was guilty of that, too, when I first came to Montana to teach Freshman Comp. When I got out of graduate school, I had all the schools in the west listed to start sending vitas out—except Montana, where I got to by pure wonderful chance. I’ve never been able to quite successfully leave.

There were a lot of writers living there at one time.
There still is. I knew a guy from Dallas who sold his advertising firm—one of the few people I ever knew who sold a novel over the transom. He moved to Missoula because he didn’t think there would be any writers here. But he knew Dorothy Johnson lived here, so he went over and had tea with Dorothy one afternoon. Then he finds out that two novels doesn’t buy you anything in Missoula. You can find a cocktail party full of fifteen people who have published four or five novels. So finally he moved away somewhere. back to Texas maybe.

It is easier to live someplace where people understand the problems with writing. I’m mostly not much of a literary guy. It’s like when two writers get together, they don’t talk much about literature. They talk about contracts … the complicated parts. I’ve always said that in these writing programs they should teach a course in the business aspect.

I could see that—in terms of the contracts and taxes and investment and budgeting. You get these big checks, then you go fallow for a period until the next check for the next book.
[Laughing] Budgeting?
Excuse me? Yes, but there are lots of things you don’t know until it happens to you. I often think that working in Hollywood helped me to understand how to deal with publishers. The business is so
strange
now. I sold my first book in 1967. It still occasionally is like a gentleman’s business, but that’s almost all gone.

Vietnam—you’re very associated with that topic and the war runs as a thread through your books. The Vietnam generation is getting up there; it doesn’t loom as a shaping event or a prism through which to view the world for those forty or so and under … is that a good or a bad thing?
Well, it’s another piece of traumatic history we would have been better off not to know … not to have ever happened. Must have been summer before last, there was this organization of guys who did what I did in the Army, except they did it in Vietnam. These guys asked me to join them because of
One to Count Cadence.
I went down to their convention in Colorado Springs. I never knew any of these guys before. They were a little bit younger than me and they were some great guys. They were obviously connected in that way and they still are. I haven’t been back to another convention, but I’m in touch with them all by e-mail. It’s clear that war had a terrific effect on their lives and it doesn’t go away. I figured out some years ago that almost all of my old friends are either writers or Vietnam vets. Just one of those sort of accidental things.

Oddly enough, I did all the research for that first book [
Cadence]
and I sort of changed my mind about the war in the middle of it, which was a good thing. I never have been to Vietnam—been to Southeast Asia—but I was concerned I would do something wrong …
really
stupid … like have the sun go down in the east. The vets who read it in manuscript said the only thing I got wrong is there is not a tree in Vietnam that two guys can carry, ‘cause they’re so heavy from being wet.

But it’s like Eliot said: “Bad writers imitate, good writers steal.” Although he then said that he may have stolen that from a French poet. You build on the people who did the work before.

Speaking of Europe, you take C.W. to Scotland in the new novel.
The Final Country
ends with Milo thinking about maybe moving to Paris, France. Scotland and Paris are a long way from Montana, or El Paso. We’re not going to hear of you moving to Europe, are we?
The Scottish part comes from Richard Hugo. When he was living on Skye I went to see him. Then my wife and I went back, shit, seventeen years later. There is something about Scotland—the landscape and the skies—that just felt good and still feels good. It’s a very odd place. The first time I went, I was by myself and wearing cowboy boots and a leather jacket and nobody would talk to me. But I couldn’t understand them, sometimes, anyway. Over the years, I’ve become quite fond of France. But I can’t live someplace without cable TV and American football.

Do you have a personal favorite among your own books?
That’s like choosing among your children
[laughing]. The Last Good Kiss
was pretty easy once I got it figured out. It’s like one of those books where you do a lot of work and then it drops out of you very nicely.
The Wrong Case
—that was my first attempt and most of which I owe to [Raymond] Chandler. I owe Chandler to Richard Hugo. He came here the year before I did. When he found out I had never read any Chandler, he was like [feigning a smack to the head]
whack
… “What kind of smart-ass graduate student were
you?”

That first summer I was in Mexico working on
Cadence,
the Chandler books had come out and were in the grocery store with those wonderful Tom Adams art deco covers. So I read ‘em all at once. I thought, after failing at the Texas novel for six years or something, “Maybe I’ll write a detective novel”—little knowing that it would be taken more seriously and do better than the first book. It’s been an up and down thing.
The Last Good Kiss
only sold forty-four hundred copies in hardback. But it’s never been out of print.

It’s not a sprint, it’s a marathon?
I don’t know what it is, anymore. I just know I can’t stop doing it.

You’ve criticized the depiction of the Old West and of American Indians in a number of films. Have you seen
Deadwood?
Any thoughts on that?
I have seen it. Great technical work. Someone in the
New York Times,
I think, said that I have a fine ear for filthy speech. But I think David Milch doesn’t quite understand that profanity is about rhythm—it wears me out, just watching it. It is a very interesting show and I think probably as realistic as anything ever done about the West has a chance to be. It has that real grit to it. I tend to watch it every week and I usually watch it twice: the second time is when it starts to make sense again.

Is there anything you’d particularly like to get out about
The Right Madness?
Well, it was a great feeling to finish … a great feeling to finish
again.
Not only all that time I lost in the middle there, but a funny thing about the drugs they gave me—I lost all my compound words: steamboat, motorboat, machine gun. If it was a compound word, I didn’t have it any more. I’ve pretty much gotten those back. The other thing I lost was touch-typing. I simply couldn’t touch-type anymore. Maybe because of my arthritis, maybe because of my brain. I was always the “touch-type with one hand and hunt-and-peck with the other” sort.

Anything else in the works right now?
Oh, I’ve
always
got something in the works.

Do you have a strong sense of where you’re headed for the next one? Maybe that’s the better way to phrase the question.
No, because I don’t have a hundred pages. It takes me about a hundred pages to be sure that I’m going to finish a book. I have a notorious inability to write before another book comes out. You’d think I’d be used to this. I was telling somebody Saturday, “Jesus, you’d think I’d know about this by now.” But it always makes me antsy and nervous.

I was going to ask you if it is still a thrill for you when a new book comes out, but it sounds like a big anxiety.
The thrill comes when you pick up a finished manuscript. All the rest is kind of fluff. But, you know, if you’re going to make a living at it, the fluff is what counts. But,
God …
I’d just as soon not have to do it again. But I don’t have any choices anymore. I guess I never did have any choices.

Read more of Rogue Males

Tyrus Books, a division of F+W Media, publishes crime and dark literary fiction—offering books from exciting new voices and established, well-loved authors. Centering on deeply provocative and universal human experiences, Tyrus Books is a leader in its genre.

tyrusbooks.com