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A Conversation with Walter Mosley

July 17, 2017 by Mark Rubinstein Leave a Comment

Walter Mosley was born in California. When he was 12 years old, his family moved from South Central to a more affluent West LA neighborhood. Although racial conflicts flared throughout Los Angeles at the time, his family was non-political. He later became more politicized and outspoken about racial inequality in the U.S., which continues to inform much of his fiction.

He earned a political science degree at Johnson State College, then abandoned a doctorate program in political theory and began working in computer programming. While working for Mobil Oil, and after being inspired by Alice Walker’s novel, The Color Purple, he took a writing course at New York’s City College.

He began writing at 34 and has continued ever since, having penned fifty books in different fiction genres including mystery and Afrofuturist science fiction. He has also written non-fiction and plays.

In 1990, Devil in a Blue Dress was published, and featured the iconic character, Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins. The book received a Shamus Award and was adapted into a 1995 movie starring Denzel Washington, Jennifer Beals, Tom Sizesmore, Maurey Chaykin and Don Cheadle.

His works have been translated into 21 languages. He’s won many awards and has served on the board of directors of the National Book Awards.

You once said your writing imagination was due to ‘an emptiness in my childhood that I filled up with fantasies.’ Will you tell us more about that?

I was an only child. My mother was an only child and my father was an orphan. So, there was a lack of interaction between and among us. I was alone a lot. That being the case, I had to fill up time, so I made up stories. And I think that has stayed with me all these years.

Were your parents profound influences on you in relation to reading and storytelling?

My parents were extremely sophisticated. I was reading comic books and my father said to my mother, ‘He’s not reading. What’re we gonna do?’ My mother said, ‘The house is filled with books. You and I are always reading, so if there’s any possibility of him turning out to be a reader, he will be.’

That was the most they ever said about it. And it’s true: books were everywhere. I was looking at them, thinking about them, and I learned to revere them in certain ways.

I wasn’t told to read one book or another. My parents left it up to me to discover reading.

You once described your father as a deep thinker and storyteller, a ‘black Socrates.’ Will you elaborate a bit?

If you were poor and white, you might have claimed Socrates as an inspiration.

If you were poor and Chinese, maybe you would have said Confucius.

But if you were poor and black, there was nobody from your race you could claim.

Maybe you’d look up to someone, but that person wasn’t from your race or ethnicity.

 

My paternal grandfather was the only black man in New Iberia, Louisiana who could read. Everyone brought him their contracts, letters or whatever else required a written response.

My father, like his father and like Socrates, was first and foremost an educator. To me, my Dad was a ‘black Socrates.’

What inspired you to begin writing fiction?

I was in a Political Theory program at UMass Amherst. One day, I was sitting in class and listening to a revered professor of political theory—a man who studied Thucydides, the Greek historian, physician and general—and though I was really interested in the subject, I was incredibly bored by his lecture.

It was at that moment I realized I’d never be happy or truly successful as a teacher.

So I walked away from pursuing my doctorate, and went back to working in computer programming. Some years later, while still working in programming, I started to write.

You were thirty-four years old, and attended a writing course. I understand you were inspired by Alice Walker’s “The Color Purple.” What about the book inspired you?

I don’t know that I was inspired by The Color Purple, but when I read the book, I thought, ‘I could write like this.’ Not that I thought I was as good a writer as she was, but I knew I could use dialect and the black experience and make it into fiction.

I hadn’t had that realization before, even though I had read Richard Wright and other black writers.

I also read that a mentor at City College encouraged you by saying, ‘You’re Black, Jewish, with a poor upbringing: there are riches therein.’ How did that affect you?

That was Edna O’Brien. I think she’s the greatest living writer of English prose. She was teaching at City College.

Yes, she said that to me, but I already knew it. However, what Edna did do—which was much more important—one day, while reading something I had written, she said, ‘Walter, you should write a novel.’

I went, ‘Wow!’ This was Edna O’Brien, a brilliant person, who was also unbelievably beautiful. I would look at her and fall in love. And six weeks later, I’d written a novel—because Edna had told me to do it.

I don’t think she understood the impact she had on me.

Six weeks, first draft?

Yes, Gone Fishin’ was my first work of fiction.

Easy Rawlins is your most famous character. At the end of the 2007 novel “Blonde Faith,” you had him die. Or so it seemed. Will you talk about that?

I’d gotten to the end of the book. Easy was broken hearted and drunk, driving a car barefooted on the Pacific Coast Highway. He would pass cars and finally, he passed one. A truck was coming from the opposite direction and he was forced onto the shoulder. Then, the shoulder ended.

Now, I was simply writing this…I wasn’t really thinking. I was just writing. I wasn’t sure if I should have him go down the embankment. Then, I thought, ‘That’s what you wrote, you must have had a reason to write it, so leave it that way.’

And I did. I left it that he drove off the side of the mountain.

Now, it’s a first-person narrative, so obviously, he can’t be dead because in a first-person narrative, he’s telling the story to the reader. So, it’s impossible for him to be dead. But everybody else thought he was dead. That was fine with me because I didn’t know if I could write about Easy Rawlings anymore.

What made you feel you didn’t know if you could write anymore about Easy?

I couldn’t think of anything new, or anything different. Some years later, I realized the reason for that was I had been writing about my father and his world, but at that moment in time, I was entering my world. When I began writing from my own point of view, I could inform Easy from that perspective, and that’s when I wrote Little Green.

Yes, after “Blonde Faith,” you turned to writing novels about a New York-based private eye, Leonid McGill. But in 2013, you brought Easy Rawlins back in the novel “Little Green.” So, you rethought his disappearance?

Yes. I never thought of him as being dead.  As I said, in the first person, he knew he’d gone off the cliff.

So where was he for six years?  [Laughter]

He was nowhere.

I wasn’t writing about him for six years because I didn’t think I could. But then I realized,  I’d write about him  from my own vantage point.

I told myself, ‘Okay, let’s do it.’

So, I resumed writing about Easy Rawlins  in Little Green, which begins a few days after the accident in which he survived going down the embankment.

There have been debates in academic literary circles about whether your work should be considered ‘Jewish’ literature, or if you should be viewed as a ‘black’ author. What are your thoughts about being thus classified, and how do you view your work?

Well, let’s talk about generations.

My mother’s generation would say, ‘He’s a Jewish writer. He’s one of us.’

Their children would say, ‘Oh, Walter’s writing stories.’

Historically, the thing about being Jewish has been assimilation. You like to think of yourself as being part of the dominant culture. For example, you identify as being German because you were a heroic soldier in World War I. You think of yourself as a good German until the day you realize the dominant culture doesn’t want you anymore.

In America, you identify as being white. You think you’re assimilated until the day you’re not wanted because you’re a Jew.

A lot of people would say, ‘He’s not a Jewish writer.’ I mean, Philip Roth wrote a novel about a black university professor having sex with one of his students, and yet he was still Philip Roth, a Jewish writer.

Bernard Malamud wrote about Roy Hobbs in The Natural, but Roy Hobbs wasn’t Jewish.

So, the idea of excluding me from being a Jewish writer and just seeing me as a black writer, is an act of racism.

So obviously, you consider yourself simply a writer.

My mother’s Jewish, that means I’m Jewish. And so, I’m Jewish, and I’m a writer…so I’m a Jewish writer.

I’m also a black writer in America.

And beyond all that, I’m a writer. Period. The fact that people argue about it is wonderful. I enjoy that. [Laughter].

It’s nice to be argued about, isn’t it?

Absolutely. [More laughter].

You once said your first love is the genre of science fiction. What about it do you love so much?

It’s hard to say. It’s like being asked what you love about your children. Or, what do you love about the ocean? But science fiction is wonderful because it opens your imagination to all kinds of possibilities. Children’s stories are really science fiction or alternative fiction of some sort. I mean, think about Jack and the Beanstalk or Alice in Wonderland or Winnie the Pooh. They all involve an alternative reality.

Also, if you’re black in America, science fiction is one way to overcome your own history. If you write, ‘In 1832, there was a black president,’ that’s science fiction. It didn’t happen; but by writing that, you’ve created an alternative history which is science fiction.

I didn’t think about that element at the time I began reading science fiction, I just enjoyed the genre.

You’ve written stage plays in addition to novels. You’ve also written screenplays. How did you learn these crafts, and how do you approach them as compared to writing novels?

I could spend a long time talking about that. I’m not sure I studied the craft that much. To me, art is an unconscious activity. People’s desire to make it conscious baffles me. I don’t know much about the craft or how to consciously write these things. I’ve been teaching screenplay writing at Sundance for twenty years. Every time I teach, I expect they won’t ask me back. And then they call and ask me to come back to teach some more. If that’s what they want, okay, I’ll do it. [Laughter]. Each genre of writing has its own avenues and its own limitations. I like playing with that. It’s true about non-fiction, too. It’s really true about all art, and especially true about poetry.  I don’t think much about the craft or the means by which I write. I just write. It flows.

Speaking of poetry, David Mamet says rap music is the operative poetry of our time.

Mamet’s a brilliant guy and I really like him. Yes, rap music certainly has poetic elements in its use of language and cadence. So do pop songs. So does really good oration. It’s all over the place.

Is it true that you’ve written virtually every day since 1986?

Yeah.

You never take a day off?

Maybe if I have a plane trip, or if I’m sick. Before I came down here to meet you, I was writing.

What’s a typical writing day like for you?

I get up and I write for three hours. That’s it.

You’ve been outspoken about racism in the publishing industry. What do you think can be done about it?

The publishing industry has become more and more corporate. Everything it publishes—from children’s books to pornography—is catering to different types of readers: native Americans, so-called Hispanics, so-called black and white, and Asian people.

I think it would behoove publishers to have people from all these groups as editors—not necessarily editing just the books from their race or culture. To have a native American edit a book for, let’s say, Scandinavians, would be very interesting. I think the writers and the readers would learn something.

Art is unconscious, and so is racism. There are those people who are afraid of others whom they don’t understand. And there are people who think they are right because other people think like them. And there are people who think they’re smarter than those in another group.

One of the things I love about the Easy Rawlins character is that he sees racial issues even in their most subtle forms.

He has to deal with racism all the time. When the waitress at the diner is afraid to take his order, he has to deal with it. So, it becomes a very practical matter.

In his own mind, Easy always describes people he meets as having various shades and tones of skin color. He’s very aware of racial differences.

Yes, it’s done in very practical ways. He’ll think so-and-so has very good-looking skin. It’s white, or pink, or olive-colored, or black, or bronze, or shiny.

The idea of defining race by color is idiotic.

I don’t believe in the existence of a ‘white’ race. I mean, there are people we call white, but the differences between and among then can be startling: one person is tall and beefy, has pink skin and red hair and blue eyes, while another you’re calling white is short and thin, has ivory-toned skin, black hair, and dark brown eyes, with totally different features, and speaks a different language. What makes them the same?

I think the thing that makes them the ‘same’ was colonization. So-called white people came here and felt they had to kill the so-called red man, and enslave the so-called black men and women. So, the people who did the killing and enslaving decided they needed to have a color, too; and they became ‘white.’ If you call something white, it should be white, like the whites of your eyes, right? [Laughter]

Who are the authors you enjoy reading most these days?

They’re probably the same authors as years ago. I re-read books a lot. I reread Marquez all the time. Even though I don’t like his politics, I re-read Eliot. I read a lot of science fiction. I’m almost positive that other writers don’t influence me. I write about the world I experience.

If you could read any single novel again as though reading it for the first time, which one would it be and why?

It has to be The Stranger by Camus. It’s an extraordinary book that speaks so much to the modern world. It speaks to the issue of humanity which is dealing with our instincts and our passions.

What if anything keeps you awake at night?

Nothing. [Lots of laughter]. I think it’s because I’m old enough that I could have been dead for a long time by now. And, I live in America, and have my arms and legs. I’m in pretty good health. And as far as I’m concerned, I’ve had enough success. If there’s anything I could get upset about it pales in comparison to the troubles of people living in Mosul. It’s extraordinary to think about how lucky I am to have the life I have. Something really bad has to happen for me not to sleep.

So you don’t let ‘first world problems’ eat away at you?

I don’t let my ‘first world problems’ eat at me. I mean, 2.8 million people in America are in prison. Two million of those fall within the definition of people of color. Those people have trouble in the first world. If I was about to go to trial tomorrow for something that might send me to prison, I wouldn’t sleep tonight. [More laughter].

If you could host a dinner with any five people from history or contemporary times, living or dead, real or fictional, from any walk of life, who would they be?

I know a lot of people, some of whom are quite famous or very wealthy, and they’re much sought after.  But some of these people bore me, even though they’re smart and have accomplished great things.  I’m just not interested in what they have to say.

Would I want to have dinner with Abraham Lincoln?  If I said ‘yes’, maybe I’d regret it: he might be boring.

I know lots of people who’ve never done anything noteworthy, and I love spending time with them. I learn from them and enjoy their company.

So, I’ll pass on hosting your dinner party, and stick with inviting my friends.

What’s coming next from Walter Mosley?

I’ve written a book—not an Easy Rawlins novel—called Down the River Unto the Sea which is coming out in about nine months. I’ve written another book I’ve worked on for years about a deconstructionist historian. It’ll be published a few months after Down the River Unto the Sea; and I’ve written a children’s book for nine or ten-year olds called The Adventures of Renny a Little Brown Mouse.

Congratulations on such a diverse and successful career. It’s been a pleasure talking with you.

 

 

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Filed Under: About Books, creativity, crime, Huffington Post Column, Interviews Tagged With: Art, being black, creativity, Edna O'Brien, identity, Jews, novels, poetry, race, success

A Good Story is Disturbing

June 6, 2017 by Mark Rubinstein Leave a Comment

As David Mamet once said to me, “If Hamlet comes home from school, and his dad asks him how school was, and Hamlet says, ‘It was fine, Dad,’ it’s boring.”

Whether you’re writing a literary novel, a psychological, medical, legal or spy thriller, or even a cozy mystery, for a novel to be engaging, it must center on human conflict and disturbance.

Without chaos, there’s very little story to tell.

If you think you’ve got a story worth telling, before you start to write, reflect upon what you’ve enjoyed when reading fiction, and also remember those books you just couldn’t plow through. Where did those writers go wrong?

The scintillating stories you favored most likely brimmed with conflict. An engaging novel is disturbing. It presents chaos and upheaval—either within the characters’ minds or in their lives. These clashing interactions and relationships between people are at its core.

As readers, we crave disturbance and uncertainty. We live vicariously through the anguish, turmoil, and trouble the characters must endure in an attempt to reorder the chaos propelling the story.

This dynamic holds true no matter the genre.

And, it’s as old as storytelling itself: consider The Iliad and The Odyssey.

Within their pages we find incest, murder, kidnapping, wars, and nearly every other conceivable horror that can beset human beings.

When writing my own novels, I keep conflict center stage. And, with surgical precision, I use my expertise as a forensic psychiatrist to bolster that chaos.

For example, in The Lovers’ Tango, Bill Shaw, the protagonist, is not only on trial, accused of murdering his wife, but the reader is kept off-balance experiencing all that led up to the courtroom, and ultimately that which follows the jury’s verdict.

Despite my years working as a forensic psychiatrist testifying in many trials, I avoided making the courtroom scenes an exposition of arcane language and legal concepts. Instead, I kept the focus on conflict, and did so through dialogue, the engine driving this and many other novels. I employed my knowledge of the courtroom and psychiatry in the service of heightening the tension, but didn’t allow my professional fund of knowledge to drown out the chaos and turmoil.

As for using any writer’s knowledge in a specific field or endeavor, be it medical, legal, military, financial or otherwise, a balance must be struck so the expertise doesn’t burden the all-important role of pacing. It’s fine to employ that which you know well, but it must play only a supporting role to the tension and conflict driving the novel.

Presumed Innocent by Scott Turow perfectly illustrates this maxim. Turow skillfully imbued his novel with legal expertise, but the tension in the story derived from the chaos of the characters’ lives. His legal knowledge added color, authenticity and depth.

Jonathan Kellerman’s latest novel, Heartbreak Hotel, achieves this same goal, integrating his knowledge of psychology into a riveting tale about the death of an old, mysterious woman.

We read novels to experience vicariously something far different from our daily lives. We want to be titillated, frightened, angered, overjoyed, heartbroken or moved in some kinetic way as we turn the pages.

If we want to immerse ourselves in a field of study, there are many non-fiction books available to provide such information.

When you’re ready to write, keep in mind those novels which kept you turning the pages as opposed to those you put down after a chapter or two.

“Write what you know” isn’t always the best advice.

Write to tell a story that captures the imagination and makes a human connection with the reader.

And one final but essential piece of advice: remember, dialogue isn’t just what characters say to each other, it’s what they do to each other with words.

Make your dialogue count. It should be thrusting the tension and hence the storyline forward.

Most of all, aim to make the reader regret when the book is coming to its end.

No matter what your primary field of study had been, when you write a novel, your basic aim is to tell a good story.

Don’t get lost in the weeds of expertise.

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Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: chaos, fear, incest, Murder, novels, tension, uncertainty, vicarious anxiety

Gizmodo Interviews Me About “Bedlam’s Door” and Mental Illness

September 3, 2016 by Mark Rubinstein Leave a Comment

Real Stories About Real People Show Complexity of Mental Illness

A Hungarian-born man is found ranting in the street that he is “king of the Puerto Ricans.” A perfectly healthy woman feels compelled to undergo over a dozen operations. A man in a straightjacket somehow manages to commit suicide while inside a locked psychiatricAmazon pic ward.

These are just a few of the compelling stories in Mark Rubinstein’s new book, Bedlam’s Door: True Tales of Madness and Hope. (You can read an exclusive excerpt here.) Rubinstein is a former practicing psychiatrist turned novelist who has drawn on his years of clinical experience to follow in the nonfiction footsteps of Oliver Sacks, shedding light on the complexities of the human mind with real stories about real people. Gizmodo sat down with him to learn more.

Gizmodo: What drove you to write this nonfiction book, after years of clinical practice and novel-writing?

Mark Rubinstein: It all came down to my wanting to tell the general public a little bit more about mental illness. When someone has a physical illness, people feel some kind of empathy, but they still respond to an obviously disturbed person with fear. It’s not just your heart, lung, or liver that’s sick—it is you. That is very threatening to people. And people don’t really understand the mental health dilemma, and the issues that mental health practitioners face.

Q: You brought a novelist’s sensibility to these stories, with composite characters and reconstructed dialogue. How much is fiction and how much is nonfiction?

Rubinstein: It is kind of a combination of fiction superimposed on a nonfictional layer of things that really happened. These were all real people and real cases—sometimes a composite of more than one person to protect their privacy. Oliver Sacks was accused of unwittingly giving away the identities of some of the people he wrote about in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.

I never wanted to be accused of anything like that, so I changed everything: times, places, people, venues, even races. I didn’t even use a real hospital. Of course, I couldn’t remember all the dialogue from 30 years ago, but I created dialogue consistent with the story line. But these were all real stories and real people from people I had treated. There isn’t a story in there that isn’t true.

But the overarching theme running through most of the stories is that even with the most bizarre cases, if time is taken to listen to these people and understand their stories and background, perhaps we can offer them help. It’s all about storytelling. That’s what novelists do, and in a sense that’s what patients do when they come to see a psychiatrist: they tell a story.

Q: I was struck by your statement that even people who suffer from the same diagnosed condition can have very different stories.

Rubinstein: [Mental illness] can affect almost anybody, given certain circumstances. Some of the most successful people on the planet have a touch of hypomania. I know physicians and attorneys who don’t have full-blown manic episodes but they are filled with boundless energy. They are restless. They feel bored and unhappy unless they are facing a challenge. And they are highly successful. Take that to a more severe degree, however, and it can be completely disabling. And 100 different people can have 100 different pathways to the same diagnosable psychiatric disorder.

You contrast two very different examples of PTSD in the book, for instance.

Rubinstein: In one case, a police officer was shot while sitting in his patrol car outside a store near Tompkins Square Park in New York City. A bullet smashed through the windshield and hit him in the armpit, ruining his brachial plexus—a complicated series of nerves that serves the entire arm. He almost bled to death in the ride to the hospital, and he was crippled for the rest of his life. The depression, the PTSD, the pain he felt in his right arm—the pins and needles and tingling—was directly related to the psychic impact of that half-second of impact.

Then there is the man I call Nathan, found ranting on Delancy Street that he was the king of the Puerto Ricans. He was a carpenter, born in Hungary, and that skill saved his life at Auschwitz. He watched people disappear into the gas chambers—his family, his entire village. He was the sole survivor. But his PTSD didn’t develop until 40 years later, when he was in America and fell off the ladder while working on a roof, breaking some vertebrae in his back. He could no longer work and began having horrifying nightmares. It’s called delayed onset PTSD. So these two men came by totally different pathways to the same condition.

Q: In both your preface and conclusion, you talk about how mental illness has always been stigmatized throughout history. Is it really any different today?

Rubinstein: Well, today we don’t torture people. As recently as the 1950s, they were lobotomizing psychotic patients. They removed a good portion of the white matter of the frontal lobes of the cortex, and turned those people into—for lack of a better term—the walking dead. They became blunted and unresponsive to most emotional stimuli. It was done to try to improve their lot in life, but it shows how primitive things used to be.

When I was in resident psychiatry, the cops would drag a guy in and tell me, “This guy belongs in the loony bin, doc.” Even if the person was just drunk, they wanted to dump these people off in the psychiatric emergency room rather than take them to the precinct. They didn’t want to be bothered with an agitated, fulminating individual who was obviously disturbed.

What’s really changed is there is a much more scientific and compassionate approach. The popular conception of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) still exists from a famous scene in the 1974 movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest—Jack Nicholson with the bulging eyes and convulsions and coming out of it like a vegetable.

But they now use unipolar leads, and very low, slow pulse electricity. They administer muscle relaxants, so there is no convulsion. There is hardly any retrograde amnesia and what little there is resolves with a matter of days. It doesn’t take 12 to 18 sessions anymore, it only takes between four and six.

Q: You end on a somewhat surprising note of optimism, given that these are such very sad stories. I am curious about why you see hope for the future.

Rubinstein: No matter what kind of progress we make, there will always be people slipping through the cracks. There will always be people who either don’t want to be helped, or can’t be helped for some reason. But transcranial magnetic stimulation is a noninvasive new treatment that, so far at least, according to preliminary findings, has tremendously good effects—with no side effects or ingestion of chemicals.

Then there is the promise of gene therapy. At some point in the not too distant future, neuroscience will advance to the point where blood can be taken from a newborn child, and based on that baby’s genome, scientists will be able to predict what mental dysfunctions or illnesses that individual will have a predisposition for. Imagine if you could do that for people with a high risk of schizophrenia or severe bipolar disorder, based on the genome analysis of a two-day-old baby? It would put every psychiatrist out of business.

So in the long run, if the human race survives as a species, I think the prognosis medically [for mental illness] is very good. I am not sure that I am optimistic about the survivability of the human species, but I am optimistic in that limited way.

 

 

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Filed Under: About Books, book launch, doctor, health, Interviews Tagged With: gene therapy, lobotomy, mania, medical advances, mental illness, non-fiction, novels, Oliver Sacks, schizophrenia, storytelling, the future, trans-cranial magnetic stimulation

‘Interior Darkness,’ A Conversation with Peter Straub

February 16, 2016 by Mark Rubinstein Leave a Comment

Peter Straub-photoPeter Straub needs no lengthy introduction. As a novelist and poet, he has received many literary honors including the Bram Stoker Award, the World Fantasy Award, and the International Horror Guild Award. In 1965, he earned a B.A with honors in English from the University of Wisconsin at Madison; and one year later, an MA from Columbia University. In 1969, he moved to Dublin, Ireland to work on a Ph.D and began writing professionally. Peter collaborated with Stephen King on two novels, The Talisman and Black House.

Interior Darkness, a collection of 16 short stories written over the course of years, demonstrates Peter Straub’s uncanny ability to blur literary genres and pen short stories ranging widely in length, style and tenor, providing a highly entertaining and unusual volume.

Read more on the Huffington Post >>

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Filed Under: About Books, creativity, Huffington Post Column, Interviews, On Writing Tagged With: horror, novels, personal trauma, short-stories, Stephen King

Where the Bodies Were Buried: Whitey Bulger and the World That Made Him: A Talk With T.J. English

September 21, 2015 by Mark Rubinstein Leave a Comment

whitey bolgerT.J. English is a noted journalist, screenwriter, and author of the New York Times bestsellers Havana Nocturne and Paddy Whacked, as well as The Westies, a national bestseller. His true-crime book, Born to Kill, was nominated for an Edgar Award. His screenwriting credits include episodes for the television crime dramas NYPD Blue and Homicide. He has written about the New England Irish mob, and covered the July 2013 trial of Whitey Bulger, Boston’s most notorious native son and iconic Irish American gangster.

Where the Bodies Were Buried details the career of James “Whitey” Bulger, who in his day, was one of the most vicious and feared killers in America. Ironically, while he was the de facto Irish mob boss of New England, Bulger was also a Top Echelon (TE) informant for the FBI. He covertly fed local prosecutors information about rival mob figures, using the agency to eliminate them and reinforce his own power. He was protected by people in the Department of Justice who also told him where to find people he planned to murder.

Read more on the Huffington Post >>

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Filed Under: About Books, creativity, Huffington Post Column, Interviews, Mark Rubinstein Tagged With: authors, books, Huffington Post, novels, writing

‘Protocol Zero,’ A Conversation With James Abel

August 12, 2015 by Mark Rubinstein Leave a Comment

2015-08-12-1439374068-5514893-JamesAbelPhotoBillSchmoker-thumb

James Abel is a pseudonym for Bob Reiss, the bestselling author of more than 20 books. He is a former Chicago Tribune reporter and previously was a correspondent for Outside Magazine. His works have been published in many national publications and have been included in the collections of “the best of the Washington Post.” Bob’s new series of science-based thriller novels launched with the publication of White Plague, a novel about a US submarine trapped in the Arctic.

Protocol Zero, the second in this series, concerns U.S. Marine bioterror expert Col. Joe Rush. In the remote town of Barrow, Alaska, Rush is investigating the death of a researcher and his family. Rush suspects foul play, and stumbles upon a deadly virus slated for use in biological warfare. It’s a race against the clock to find out who’s behind this potential plague, as Rush tries to untangle the mystery behind the mounting deaths, while the army quarantines the town. Why are his superiors in Washington threatening to end the investigation; and who is behind the clandestine plans connected to the deadly virus? With his life in danger, and so much at stake, Rush presses to find answers and to stay alive.

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Filed Under: About Books, creativity, Huffington Post Column, Interviews, Mark Rubinstein Tagged With: authors, books, Huffington Post, novels, writing

“Black Scorpion” A Conversation with Jon Land

April 7, 2015 by Mark Rubinstein Leave a Comment

CJon Land c, Todd StephensJon Land is the prolific author of more than thirty-five books. His thriller novels include the Caitlin Strong series about a fifth-generation Texas Ranger, and the Ben Kamal and Danielle Barnea books about a Palestinian detective and an Israeli chief inspector of police. He has also penned the Blaine McCracken series, standalone novels, and non-fiction. Jon was a screenwriter for the 2005 film Dirty Deeds. He is very active in the International Thriller Writers Organization.

His latest thriller, Black Scorpion: The Tyrant Reborn is the second book featuring the character, Michael Tiranno, a myth-worthy hero created by Fabrizio Boccardi with whom Jon collaborates in this series. Michael (known as the Tyrant) must deal with a newly-surfaced enemy based in Eastern Europe—a powerful organization, Black Scorpion, involved in human trafficking and other crimes on a global scale. The leader, Vladimir Dracu, has set his sights on America as his next target. Black Scorpion has also taken hostage Michael’s lover, Scarlett Swan. Michael has limited time to save Scarlett, Las Vegas, and the entire United States.

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Filed Under: About Books, creativity, Huffington Post Column, Interviews Tagged With: David Morrell, Harlan Coben, Hercules, heroes, Lisa Gardner, myths, novels, Stephen King, storytelling

The Carrier: A Talk With Sophie Hannah

January 15, 2015 by Mark Rubinstein Leave a Comment

 

2015-01-13-SophieHannahRoderickField-thumbSophie Hannah, a British poet and novelist, is an internationally bestselling author of psychological crime fiction. Her novels have been published in 27 countries and have featured the detective couple, Simon Waterhouse and Charlie Zailer. In 2013, it was announced that Hannah would pen an Agatha Christie novel featuring Hercule Poirot, the first new novel in 38 years to feature the world famous detective. The decision to write the novel was endorsed by Christie’s estate and publisher.

The Carrier, Hannah’s just released novel, begins when Gaby Struthers’s plane is delayed overnight. She is forced to share a hotel room with a young woman, Lauren Cookson. Lauren tearfully reveals to Gaby she is responsible for an innocent man being sent to prison for murder. Gaby soon suspects Lauren’s presence on her flight isn’t coincidental because the murder victim is Francine Berry, the wife of the only man Gaby ever truly loved. The mystery begins, and Simon Waterhouse knows there is far more to this case than first meets the eye.

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Filed Under: About Books, creativity, Huffington Post Column, Interviews, Mark Rubinstein Tagged With: authors, books, Huffington Post, novels, writing

The Golem of Hollywood: A Talk with Jonathan & Jesse Kellerman

October 7, 2014 by Mark Rubinstein Leave a Comment

2014-10-04-JonathanandJesseKellermancJoanAllen-thumbJonathan Kellerman has written 43 books. Thirty seven of them have been novels; all have been bestsellers.  Twenty nine of the novels have featured Alex Delaware, a child psychologist who is a consultant to the LAPD.

Jesse Kellerman, Jonathan’s son, has written five novels. Two of them have been international bestsellers. He is also an award-winning playwright. Jonathan and Jesse have co-authored The Golem of Hollywood, a crime novel with elements of myth and the supernatural.

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Filed Under: About Books, book launch, creativity, crime, Huffington Post Column, Interviews, On Writing Tagged With: collaboration, Novelist, novels, playwright, writing

Murder 101: A Talk with Faye Kellerman

September 24, 2014 by Mark Rubinstein Leave a Comment

2014-09-23-FayeKellermancredittoKarenMiller-thumbFaye Kellerman is the bestselling author of twenty-six novels, twenty-two of which feature the husband and wife team of Peter Decker and Rina Lazarus. Faye and her husband, Jonathan Kellerman, are the only married couple ever to appear on the New York Times bestseller list simultaneously for two different novels.

 Murder101 is the twenty-second Decker-Lazarus novel. Peter is now retired from the LAPD. He and Rina have moved to a small town in upstate New York, to be closer to their four adult children and foster son. Peter works for the Greenbury Police Department, which usually involves little more than dealing with college-town problems. A possible break-in at the local cemetery where a mausoleum’s Tiffany panels have been stolen and replaced by forgeries, leads to drastic consequences, including two brutal murders. As a former LAPD detective, Decker is called on to investigate a case that has far-reaching implications.

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Filed Under: About Books, creativity, crime, Interviews, On Writing, thriller Tagged With: collaboration, novels, research, writing

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