The Hard-Boiled Book Tour: The First 30 Days

one. word. at. a. time.

Almost 30 days into the release of “The Hard-Boiled Detective 1.” A good time to update the scorecard. Success? Failure? Progress? Depends on the size of those rose-colored glasses.

The paperback came out on August 28. The ebook came out on September 11. I’ve been featured in four online interviews with another due tomorrow. I’m scheduled for a big-deal radio interview on October 5. I’ve held two book readings, got another tonight, and appeared at two reading series. You could say I’ve been busy.

For all that, about a month in and I’ve sold nearly 30 books. Does that number mean anything to you? Sounds small, looking at it bare and all. But I’m impressed. That’s no egotistical claim, and I’ll tell you why.

There’s no damn reason my book should sell at all. Who ever heard of me or my humble volume? Sure, I’ve got my social media friends and followers approaching 100 folks. Toss in another 100 from my series subscription list, allow for overlap, and that’s one humble group. Now put that up against Amazon where there’s 300,000 mystery and suspense titles listed. That’s one heck of a field to compete in. All together, the site offers more than 8 million titles. Put any kind of dent in that and you’re getting somewhere.

So I’ve moved 30 books in the first month, in my own, little way. Through Facebook and Twitter and blogs. No paid advertising. No media coverage. No published reviews. No viral campaigns or celebrity scandals to draw on.

I began writing the stories in this collection in August 2012. It’s been plenty of work getting from there to here. I’ve covered my shoestring costs of publishing. And I’ve got enough yarns, ready to polish and proof, for another 2–3 volumes. I’ve just gotten started. Sure.

 

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By this time next month, give or take a couple days, I’ll have my first book. I don’t mean some tome by Sendak or Seuss, no A.A. Milne. I mean my very own. That stack of my papyrus marked through by my personal keyboard scratchings. That either-riding cowboy full of sure’s and swells and uh-huh’s. That pile of piles with that curious tag on the front and spine, “By Ben Solomon.”

I know. You’re all tingly. Like seeing you name in lights, isn’t it? But that’s where they all started. Every last one of them had their very first. Fitzgerald. Hemingway. Groucho. Sure, once upon a time each on of them a literary virgin. Carefully protecting it. Trying not to give it away. Makes you wonder if their moms and dads ever gave them the talk on the facts of publishing.

Of course that was long before independent publishing. Not that such a thing ever stopped Homer or Tommy Paine. But those were different eras, different cultures, different markets. Nowadays, any monkey can independently publish any damn thing he likes. That’s any monkey with a credit card. Even a rhesus like yours truly.

So I’m joining the fray, diving in, holding my nose. I’ve got my 73,000 words running 212 pages. I’ve got my cover, I’ve got my spine. I’ve even got some awful nice blurbs from some very gracious folk.

Of course there’s a catch. There’s always a catch. There’s no avoiding it, no getting around it or making up for it by doing more stomach crunches or downing more coffee or buying Grecian Formula: if a book is listed on the internet, and there’s no one there to buy it, how do we know it’s any good?

That’s where I am today, and that’s where I’ll be a month from now. I’ve got to wonder where I’ll be in another two months, or three…or fifteen. Sure.

The Hard-Boiled Detective Interview

Reposted from http://pauldbrazill.wordpress.com/2013/08/18/guest-blog-the-hard-boiled-detective-interview-by-ben-solomon/

Have you ever planned a murder? I ply the art three times a month for my series, “The Hard-Boiled Detective.” I have to admit that this is an odd slant on the publishing racket: retro, private eye fiction on a subscription basis. After seven months and 21 adventures, word is finally, slowly, starting to break. Then in steps Paul D. Brazill, esquire, graciously suggesting I pen a guest blog.

You don’t double-hitch at that kind of generosity. I immediately propped a vanity mirror next to the laptop and conducted the following interview with myself. Sure.

“The Hard-Boiled Detective” is some kind of series?
Sure. Doesn’t everybody have a series these days? Tag it, “old-school, detective fiction.” Three short stories come out every month.  Subscribers download tales in the format of their choice: epub, mobi or PDF.

Three? You’re really going to crank out three pieces every month?
That’s what everybody asks. I’ve been doing it since the site launched last February. Three yarns a month come rain or come shine. I guess I’m just crazy that way.

So who is “The Hard-Boiled Detective?” What’s his name, etc?
I won’t tell you his name. One’s as good as another.
Or the city that serves as his beat. You’ll figure it out, all right.
His time? It’s any period you like. Call it 1929, 1939, 1959.

A man of mystery?
Nix. Nothing like that. I wanted to create a throwback, see?

Narrative forms are always evolving. Like the flattening of the narrative arc in the cinema under the influence of new wave directors. (That played real esoteric-like, didn’t it?). How books and television immerse adventure stories in more and more soap opera subplot. I longed to get away from that and return to a simpler form.

So I modeled the series partly on the idea of classic television. I chose to avoid contemporary times, opting instead to create an undefined period piece. “The Hard-Boiled Detective” is basic, a romanticized valentine to the genre.

Isn’t that sweet?
I hope it doesn’t come across too sweet. That would gum up the format. I merely allow the hero’s actions and observations to do his talking. I’ve never developed his personal life. There’s no melodrama on that level.

So there is a format?
Sure there is. And it’s kind of funny. The last thing I want is to bog down the form in any heavy sense of realism, but something odd struck me when I began writing. You start out with the movies, then read Hammett and Chandler, add in Spillane, and then those countless detective shows on television—victims are everywhere. They’re dropping like flies. By the hundreds. Probably by the thousands. So it struck me: all these gumshoes must spend half of their professional lives at the local station house giving accounts to the bulls. That lightbulb established the format: each story of “The Hard-Boiled Detective” is told by our gumshoe hero as a statement to the police. Naturally, he likes spinning a colorful yarn.

So the characters and stories never develop, one to the next?
Not per se. I do attempt to reward regular readers, but each plot stands on its own—you can start with story number 11 without reading 1–10. Jump around as much as you want, even. It’s really as simple as old TV comedies. Every episode is self-contained. The idea’s to craft the P.I. and his tales as timeless. As timeless as a code of honor. As timeless as man’s corruption and sin.

You sure reference television a lot.
I don’t mean to. My first influences were Hollywood, all the way. Cagney and the Brothers Warner. Bogart. Raft. The entire Warner gangster cycle. Feels like I was weaned on ’em. And comic books and cartoon strips. Of course my generation claims ABC, CBS and NBC as surrogate parents. And then there’s books.

Detective-wise, Hammett came first for me. But it was Spillane that moved me towards this series. Spillane provided a double-edged sword. On the one hand, he inspired me to hit the keyboard; on the other hand, his later works made me long for the earlier tales before modern times and political correctness mucked up the proceedings. Call it a knee-jerk reaction, sure, but that was my take.

Of course, no set of masters is complete without mentioning Chandler. Aces. Simply aces. There’s no simile like a Chandlerism. It makes me think of that “Unfaithfully Yours” line by Preston Sturges: “You handle Handel like nobody handles Handel.” Sure.

So who do you go for, Hammett or Chandler?
Really? You’re going to throw that one at me? Okay. It’s means nothing, but for me? I prefer Chandler. I’ll also take Keaton over Chaplin, Astaire over Kelly, and paper over plastic. Satisfied?

So when will we see “The Hard-Boiled Detective” on the little screen?
Probably around the same time I get my first book deal and “The Ed Sullivan Show” comes back to prime time. Sure.

But I’ve got some thoughts on that, just the same. A fella can dream, can’t he? See, I’ve got two ideas for the TV series. And they’re plenty radical.

First of all, we make it a half hour. Can you picture that? A 30-minute detective show? It’s just not done, but man, would it clip along! Leave ’em wanting more—there’s a motto for you.

Uh huh.
The second idea—this one is a pip. We’ve got an unnamed sleuth working the mean streets of an unnamed burg, right? In a sense, he’s unidentified, right? So we cast a different actor to play him in every episode.

So the detective is actually a guest star every week?
You got it.

Uh huh.
What the hell? After all, it’s my fantasy. It’s the stuff that guest blogs are made of.

The Raymond Chandler Interview

The city where I work and live is rich in tradition. Politics, in many ways its own hog butcher to the world, overlaps most of this heritage. If there’s one thing we’re good at, and we’ve been doing it a long time, that’s getting out the vote. Preston Sturges celebrated this in his original screenplay, “The Great McGinty:”

Some people is too lazy to vote, that’s all. They don’t like this kind of weather. Some of them is sick in bed and can’t vote. Maybe a couple of them croaked recently. That’s ain’t no reason why Mayor Tillinghast should get cheated out of their support.

It’s in this spirit of overcoming trivialities that I present the following interview with Raymond Chandler. Just because he hasn’t penned a word since the 1950’s is no reason he should dummy up now.

In case you don’t know it, Chandler’s the bird what wrote “The Big Sleep,” “Farewell My Lovely” and “The Long Goodbye,” among others. By all accounts, Chandler and Dashiell Hammett make up the one-two punch that matured pulp, detective fiction. They gave it class with a capital K, and their polish and sophistication turned the hard-boiled genre into the stuff of literature. I hear some of their work is even assigned in high schools and universities across the nation. Not too shabby for a couple authors whose early works wore a Black Mask.

Raymond Thornton Chandler was born in Chicago in 1888, and it’s about time he retuned for a visit. In world-class and world-weary style, no one paid us no never mind as we swapped questions and answers during a walking tour of the Near North Side.

SOLOMON: Mr. Chandler, I thank you for granting this interview. I’m sure readers everywhere are plenty grateful, not to mention awful surprised.

CHANDLER: Dead men are heavier than broken hearts.

SOLOMON: I understand you didn’t go for it at first. I mean the first time my editor called you.

CHANDLER: I hung up. It was a step in the right direction, but it didn’t go far enough. I ought to have locked the door and hid under the desk.

SOLOMON: You two didn’t get along.

CHANDLER: He was a guy who talked with commas, like a heavy novel. Over the phone anyway.

SOLOMON: What did you tell him?

CHANDLER: You talk too damn much and too damn much of it is about you.

SOLOMON: He tends to do that.

CHANDLER: He sounded like a man who had slept well and didn’t owe too much money.

SOLOMON: Well I’m awful glad you eventually came around.

CHANDLER: Sooner or later I may figure out why you like being a kept poodle.

SOLOMON: I’d sure never admit to anything like that being true. And even if it was, I sure as hell wouldn’t like it.

CHANDLER: You know Chandler. Always griping about something.

SOLOMON: You are the first in the decadence of your art.

CHANDLER: The more you reason the less you create.

SOLOMON: It’s easy to stiffen up while sitting at the keys. That’s for sure.

CHANDLER: The faster I write the better my output. If I’m going slow, I’m in trouble. It means I’m pushing the words instead of being pulled by them.

SOLOMON: So how do you accomplish that? How do you pull it off?

CHANDLER: Throw up into your typewriter every morning. Clean up every noon.

SOLOMON: Isn’t that a little easier said than done? Don’t you run up against obstacles? Don’t you even create your own obstacles?

CHANDLER: Everything a writer learns about the art or craft of fiction takes just a little away from his need or desire to write at all. In the end he knows all the tricks and has nothing to say.

SOLOMON: I know what you’re getting at. But when you say it out loud it sounds kind of astounding. Almost appalling.

CHANDLER: There is something about the literary life that repels me, all this desperate building of castles on cobwebs, the long-drawn acrimonious struggle to make something important which we all know will be gone forever in a few years, the miasma of failure which is to me almost as offensive as the cheap gaudiness of popular success.

SOLOMON: Yet your work is still celebrated. “The Big Sleep,” f’rinstance, is held in the highest regard. That book goes back to 1939, for crissake.

CHANDLER: There are no “classics” of crime and detection. Not one. Within its frame of reference, which is the only way it should be judged, a classic is a piece of writing which exhausts the possibilities of its form and can never be surpassed.

SOLOMON: So you’re saying you never achieved that. Hammett, neither? Not anybody since?

CHANDLER: No story or novel of mystery has done that yet. Few have come close. Which is one of the principal reasons why otherwise reasonable people continue to assault the citadel.

SOLOMON: The public always loved the form, anyway. And still does.

CHANDLER: An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence.

SOLOMON: I take it you don’t go in for a lot of the contemporary, detective fiction.

CHANDLER: The flood of print has turned reading into a process of gulping rather than savoring.

SOLOMON: Is there such a thing as being too critical? Perhaps a touch too severe?

CHANDLER: A classical education saves you from being fooled by pretentiousness, which is what most current fiction is too full of.

SOLOMON: So who do you recommend?

CHANDLER: Hammett was the ace performer.

SOLOMON: You can’t go wrong with Dashiell.

CHANDLER: He is said to have lacked heart; yet the story he himself thought the most of—

SOLOMON: “The Glass Key.”

CHANDLER: —is the record of a man’s devotion to a friend. He was spare, frugal, hard-boiled, but he did over and over again what only the best writers can ever do at all. He wrote scenes that seemed never to have been written before.

SOLOMON: That’s one heck of a compliment.

CHANDLER: The challenge is to write about real things magically.

SOLOMON: Who sounds pretentious, now?

CHANDLER: Without magic, there is no art. Without art, there is no idealism. Without idealism, there is no integrity. Without integrity, there is nothing but production.

SOLOMON: So how do you keep your integrity intact? It’s a tough haul, word by word, line by line, page by page—

CHANDLER: Don’t ever write anything you don’t like yourself and if you do like it, don’t take anyone’s advice about changing it. They just don’t know.

SOLOMON: Fair enough. Sure.

CHANDLER: I am a writer, and there comes a time when that which I write has to belong to me, has to be written alone and in silence, with no one looking over my shoulder, no one telling me a better way to write it.

SOLOMON: You are your first and last audience, if I get you right.

CHANDLER: It doesn’t have to be great writing, it doesn’t even have to be terribly good. It just has to be mine.

SOLOMON: It always sounds too damn easy when you talk it through. So easy to say it’s all about the writing.

CHANDLER: The actual writing is what you live for. The rest is something you have to get through in order to arrive at the point.”

SOLOMON: But it don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.

CHANDLER: Everything written with vitality expresses that vitality: there are no dull subjects, only dull minds.

SOLOMON: If I’ve got it right, you kinda write as you will, artistically speaking, I mean. The notion of creating art isn’t part of what you consciously do.

CHANDLER: There are no vital and significant forms of art; there is only art, and precious little of that.

SOLOMON: Ain’t that the truth?

CHANDLER: There is no bad whiskey. There are only some whiskeys that aren’t as good as others.

SOLOMON: Now I believe you’re quoting yourself…I wanted to take you for a bite, to one of those venerable establishments you might remember. But you know things can never be the same. The Blackhawk, Barney’s Market Club—both gone. Even the Berghoff ain’t what it used to be. Sure.

CHANDLER: I used to like this town. A long time ago…

SOLOMON: Maybe I should just rustle us up a couple of dames.

CHANDLER: I do a great deal of research—particularly in the apartments of tall blondes.

SOLOMON: Then maybe I should just leave you to it and say goodbye.

CHANDLER: To say goodbye is to die a little.

END

Real Life Detective Story

The funny thing is, see, I’ve been writing detective stories. That project is another yarn in itself, but my point is that I’ve been walking around for awhile now with hard-boiled notions racing through my head.

So imagine walking out to my car, on my way to a coffee date, when a bright, blue object in the street catches my eye. Sure enough it’s a wallet. It’s a bloated wallet. It’s a wallet thick with masses of credit cards and receipts and coupons and club cards and business cards. I’d say the damn thing was thicker than a corned beef sandwich at Manny’s.

So now I’m stuck. I can’t leave the thing in the street and I can’t turn it into anybody–believe me, I’ve got all the respect in the world for the boys in blue, but I was always told to avoid coppers just like you avoid hospitals and the military. So I was stuck.

I took the exploding billfold with me to the cafe. I started rifling through its contents as I explained the situation to my coffee-mate. Sure, I could’ve contacted one of the bank card companies, but that’s just opening up another can of worms. All I wanted to find was a phone number, one lousy phone number.

Needless to say, buried in the depths of the purse’s crevices and pockets, among all those slips of cards and papers and scraps, I came up blanksville. Zippo. No phone, no way, no how. But my deductive powers were sharpening, a circumstance I attribute to those P.I. tales I’ve been penning.

See, I found this business card. Some kind of nutrition center. And it was located less than two miles from where I sat at that very moment. And it was on the way home. Ain’t that swell? All I had to do was pop in, ask the receptionist to give their client list a look-see, place a call, and pass on my number. Easy, right? In a pig’s eye. I found the joint easy enough, a big office in this ritzy complex just off of Clark and Diversey. And the dump is closed, locked up tighter than an embezzler’s safety deposit box.

When I got home I surfed all the usual suspects looking for a lead and came up with zilch. I was resigned to calling one of the credit card companies. But, I decided to check through the volumes of flotsam contained in the billfold one last time. 

And that’s when I found it. A credit card recept that had been run through one of those old machines that uses a carbon. The thing had been folded, spindled and otherwise mutilated, but it also had handwritten notes on it. One of the handwritten notes was, hold on to your fedora, a telephone number.

So I dialed per the receipt, got the tootsie on the line, and was she ever bowled over with relief. Somehow she had dropped the two-ton wallet in the street without noticing. Go figure.

So she swung by my place that night to retrive the pocketbook, and she kept falling all over herself with thanks. She was on the run, getting ready for a trip out of town, but had one last thing to tell me before she skidaddled: “You’re my guardian angel,” she said.

That’s me all over, all right. Sam and Phil and me. We’re all guardian angels. Sometimes my line of work calls for it.