If you don't know James Reasoner, you're in for a treat, if you do know him and his work, well, it's still mighty enlightening.
A lifelong Texan, James
Reasoner has been a professional writer for more than forty years. In that
time, he has authored more than four hundred novels and short stories in
numerous genres. Writing under his own name and various pseudonyms, his novels
have garnered praise from Publishers Weekly, Booklist, and the Los Angeles
Times, as well as appearing on the New York Times, USA Today, and Publishers
Weekly bestseller lists. He lives in a small town in Texas with his wife,
award-winning fellow author Livia J. Washburn, five dogs, and thousands of old
books and pulp magazines. His blog can be found at http://jamesreasoner.blogspot.com.
Mr. Reasoner, I’ll be honest with you I initially didn’t
know which direction to take this interview, as on one hand I want to get into
your prolific work as a Western writer, and on the other I wanted to pick your
brain about some thoughtful observations you offered about other Western
writers a few years back. But fortunately, you have been gracious with your
time and allow us to do both.
Today we’ll talk you, another day we’ll talk about your
tastes.
First things first, how many Western novels do you have
under your belt? I know of your work under your own name, but I believe you
have also written under the Hank Mitchum byline for the Stagecoach
series, as William Grant for the Faraday series, and Justin Ladd for the
Abilene series. Have I missed a few?
I was Matthew S. Hart on the Cody’s
Law series, Jim Austin on the Fury series, Terrence Duncan on the Powell’s
Army series, and Mike Jameson on the Tales From Deadwood books.
Also, I wrote 47 Longarm novels as Tabor Evans, 22 Trailsman novels as Jon
Sharpe, and one each in the Slocum, Lone Star, Sons of Texas, and McMasters
series as Jake Logan, Wesley Ellis, Tom Early, and Lee Morgan, respectively.
I’ve also written dozens of Westerns under various names that I’m contractually
obligated not to divulge. I don’t have an exact count, but I know I’ve written
upwards of 200 Westerns.
Allow me to say that often prolific authors move from author
to writer, that is from starting out wanting to say something then moving to
assembly-line story-telling. But in your case, I never detect that boredom with
the process. Every title of yours I pick up there always seems to be an
engagement with the material. Do I have this right, that you still love what
you do, or is this pure skilled craftsmanship? Either way it works for this
reader.
There’s some craftsmanship
involved, but if I ever get to the point that I don’t love what I do, that’ll
be the time to pack it in. I always write to entertain myself first, and if I’m
having a good time, I figure the readers will, too. I hope I’ll always be
learning new ways to do things, new techniques to try, new bits of history and
Western lore to work into the books. A week or so ago I got a note from a
reader correcting some terminology I used in one of the books. I’ll tuck that
away in my brain and make use of it in the future.
You have referred to your work as heavily influenced by the
pulp fiction of the 30’s and 40’s and the paperback authors of the 50’s and
60’s. I definitely get that feel. What is it about these authors that attracts
you, that makes you want to emulate them?
It goes back to what I said above
about writing to entertain myself. Those authors knew how to tell colorful,
fast-moving stories with lots of action. That’s what I like to read, so that’s
what I like to write, too. When I was in high school, I always made sure I had
a study hall period every year, not so I could work on assignments and such,
but so that I’d have some time during the day to read paperbacks and library
books. College was much the same. I spent as much time reading paperbacks as I
did studying. (Probably quite a bit more time, actually.) But I realize now
that I was just preparing myself for my career, although I didn’t know it at
the time.
Your love of the pulp era comes through in your fresh takes
on pulp-fiction reviews that you feature on your own excellent blog. Leaving
Western writers to another day, what pulp-fiction writers still give you pause
for thought and reading enjoyment? People you would direct us to so we could
see what the best of the pulp-era was all about according to James Reasoner.
Most of these writers also wrote
Westerns, but they’re best known for other things. Robert E. Howard is my
all-time favorite writer. I feel a real kinship with him and he’s been a real
influence on my work, not so much his style or subject matter as the way he
carved out a career for himself when he grew up in a small town in Texas and
wasn’t really around any other writers until much later in his life, the same
as me. I’m also a big fan of H. Bedford-Jones, who wrote a lot of pure
adventure fiction and historical swashbucklers, along with mysteries, spy
stories, and a little horror. Edgar Rice Burroughs, of course, was one of my
favorites growing up, and I read dozens of his books sitting on my parents’
front porch, which was my usual reading spot then. Over in mystery fiction, you
can’t go wrong with Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. This is very much
just scratching the surface.
Something that I love about your work is the terse “Let’s
get this thing started” feel to all of your novels. You open scenes with
lived-in characters, and often there is an implied question of “What’s this all
about.” I compare it to a non-Western author, Ross MacDonald, who opened
practically all of his Lew archer novels with the same propulsive skill. Do you
take great pains to get these openings just so, or are we just seeing a good
craftsman doing what comes naturally?
A lot of it is that pulp
influence. Many of those stories started in the middle of the action and kept
it up until the end. Over the years I’ve realized that I like to burn powder as
close to the first page and the last page of a manuscript as I can. Get in,
tell the story, get out. That doesn’t mean I have the characters in the middle
of a gunfight at the beginning of every story, but I definitely like to create
some tension right away. Somebody’s moving, somebody’s talking, something is
either happening or is about to. That keeps me hitting the keys and I hope
keeps the reader turning the pages.
I want to throw a passage at you from the first page of your
excellent Dust Devils. One of your contemporary Westerns. I love the
tone and feel we get from this brief passage. It calls to my mind the recent work
by Taylor Sheridan in the film Hell or High Water. Gritty, nourish, and
point of view all nicely packed.
“The pickup came out of the haze, passed a sign that said
LUBBOCK-76. In the passenger seat, Toby McCoy watched for the turn-off and
pretty much ignored the country music coming from the radio and the driver’s
attempts at conversation. The driver wanted to talk about the chances of his
hometown football team once school started in a few weeks. Toby made polite
noises from time to time. After all, the guy was giving him a ride and he
didn’t seem the least bit gay.”
Gold. I lived in Texas years back and in five sentences we
know where we are and a little something about Toby’s circumstances and point
of view.
Again, skilled craftsman or do you put a great deal of sweat
into what feels easy?
I wouldn’t say sweat, because I’ve
never been one to spend a lot of time agonizing over what I write. I do two or
three revise-and-polish passes over everything, sometimes more if it doesn’t
ring true. But I rely a lot on my instincts, and if something sounds good to
me, I’m satisfied. Dust Devils is something of a special case, because it began
life as a screenplay. I’d written about a third of it in that format when I
decided it ought to be a novel instead, so I backed up, novelized that partial
script, and carried on from there. Another of my novels, the frontier
historical Cossack Three Ponies, was a completed script that I novelized.
You have written a great deal of series work, that is,
contributing to stable-creations. Do you find this challenging in working to
the strictures of a character you did not necessarily create?
No, I’ve never minded that. I got
started early in that part of the business. I’d only been writing a couple of
years and had only done short stories when Sam Merwin Jr., the editor of MIKE
SHAYNE MYSTERY MAGAZINE, who had bought several stories from me, asked me to
write one of the Mike Shayne novellas that ran in the magazine every month.
Now, I’d been reading the Mike Shayne novels for years and was a big fan, so I
was very excited to have the opportunity to write about that character and to
be published under the name Brett Halliday. Sam sent me the Shayne bible and
told me not to worry too much about the details, to just get the story down and
he could fix anything that needed to be fixed, but as it turned out, he changed
one or two words in the story and that was all. I had a lot of fun with it,
discovered that I was good at writing characters I didn’t create and didn’t
mind writing under a house-name, and that’s been a big part of my career ever
since.
Do you find your own creations more rewarding to work on, or
are you equally sparked by working within the confines of a series?
This carries on from the previous
question. I have enough of an ego that yeah, it is a little more rewarding in
that respect to write something that I’ve come up with, that will be published
under my name. There was a time in my career that I’d had one novel published
under my name and dozens under pseudonyms and house-names, and people would ask
if that bothered me. My standard answer was no, not at all, because my name was
on the checks. That’s me being a little glib, of course, but there’s some truth
to it, as well. Writing is a business for me, and I’m very proud that I’ve been
able to do it full-time for so many years. But sure, it’s great to have books
out there with my name on them. I don’t know how many there are now, 60 or 70,
I’d say, and that’s very satisfying. However, from a day to day, creative
standpoint, I approach everything pretty much the same no matter what it is.
When I sit down at the computer, I just want to get the day’s pages done to the
best of my ability, and I’ve always been able to take those series characters
and make them my own while I’m working on them. My Longarm, for example, was a
little different from all the other versions of Longarm written by the other
authors on the series, talked a little different, thought a little different.
Just not enough so that the readers would ever notice. I think that’s a natural
thing, that every author will a slightly different slant on the character and
the stories.
Since you are so prolific, if you were asked to introduce
new readers to your work, what handful of novels would you point to to say “Here,
read these; these tell you who I am”?
My favorite of all my novels is
probably Under Outlaw Flags, which is part Western, part World War I novel. I
think I did the best job of capturing the particular voice I was after in that
one. Dust Devils and Tractor Girl are my best crime novels. Outlaw Ranger is
the best traditional Western I’ve done. All these are under my name. The best
house-name books I’ve done are Longarm and the Bloody Relic and Longarm and the
Voodoo Queen.
How much research do you put into your novels. Do you
immerse yourself in the history, visit locations, or simply put what’s in the
head on the page?
I haven’t had the luxury of
visiting many of the places about which I’ve written, so I’ve spent a lot of
time pouring over research books or searching on the Internet, in the years
since we’ve had that capability. When I was writing my Civil War books, I
usually had a number of volumes stacked next to the computer and would refer to
them often as I was writing. By this time, a lot of the stuff is in my head,
but I still look up things on-line fairly often as I’m writing. I try to be
careful about how I work the history into what I’m writing, so that the story
continues to flow and doesn’t come crashing to a halt for a lecture. Flow and
pace are very important to me in my writing. My dad gave me the best compliment
I’ve ever gotten when he finished one of my novels and said, “You know, there
really wasn’t a good place to stop reading in that book.”
What’s next from the pen/keyboard of James Reasoner?
I have house-name work lined up
for the next two and a half years, and I expect to continue it for the
foreseeable future after that. My wife Livia and I are writing a new novel in
our Western series Wind River, which will be published under our names probably
in 2019. I have another Texas-set crime novel outlined and would like to find
the time to write it, but we’ll have to wait and see.
I want to thank you again for your time and consideration.
It’s been an honor talking with you and I look forward to picking your brain
about other Western authors in the future!
Thanks for asking me!
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