Grant
Tracey takes the stage for a a book release reading at the Final Thursday
Reading Series on September 27 at the Hearst Center for the Arts (open mic @
7:15; Grant Tracey @ 8:00). Tracey will be launching A Fourth Face, his
second book in the Hayden Fuller series of detective novels published by Twelve
Winters Press. Tracey is also Fiction Editor at the North American Review and a
Professor of English in the Department of Languages & Literatures at the University of Northern Iowa.
One
thing that really comes through in A Fourth Face is your love of the language of the hard-boiled
detective genre. Can you talk about what drew you to the genre and what writers
of detective fiction inspired you?
GRANT TRACEY: In
high school I read Dashiell Hammett, inspired by his politics and Jason
Robards's portrayal of him in Julia. I liked his clipped style (it
was Hemingway-esque almost before Hemingway) and the Continental Op detective. Red
Harvest was a fast-paced violent novel, and I found myself really drawn
into it. It was the first book I read and then had to immediately re-read. It
just had an energy to it. A dark vibe. And I've always liked film noir and
Hammett wrote crime noir. I was drawn to the cynicism, I guess. But it was when
I read Raymond Chandler (The Big Sleep and Farewell My Lovely)
that the genre really came alive for me. He had a lush, romantic sensibility
mixed with a sardonic toughness. I liked the mood, the subtexts. Later, I read
Mickey Spillane and I was blown away. My teachers all dismissed him as a
fascist, but I liked the unapologetic way he wrote, the passion in every
sentence. He was like a prose comic book writer. And I love comic books. Today,
one of my favorite crime writers is Jim Thompson. Nobody wrote like him. He's
jazz punk.
What
about your writing breaks with some of the contentions or standard styles of
the genre?
GT: I
guess the thing that distinguishes my writing from many of the other writers
listed here is that I invest in half-scenes, summary mode, and free-indirect
discourse. PD James was an awesome story teller. She tells stories.
Doesn't show them as much. I have scene work, but I like slipping into dialogue
that isn't direct but summarized or free and indirect because it creates
uncertainty and the landscape of a mystery novel should be full of uncertainty.
So I freely move among these modes. Did the detective just say that or think
that? Oh, someone's responding, so he must have said that, but did he really
say that or is the author giving us an approximation? I like that. It's kind of
my jam.
I know about your love of hockey, and you’ve written about the sport in some of your literary works like Parallel Lines and the Hockey Universe, so I get why Hayden Fuller is a former hockey player, but I was intrigued about why this series is set in mid-1960s Toronto, which you are too young to have had be a formative part of your life.
GT: Hayden is a guy who lives on the cusp. He's a retro, a throwback, a buzzcut guy in an era that's changing (the permissive society). Hayden is a liberal. He believes in social justice, helping folks attain the dream and making sure everyone is given a fair shake. And as a Jew, he has experienced anti-semitism and injustice, so issued of fairness or unfairness are very real to him. He believes in people. But, when it comes to sex, he's a square. That's why I set the stories when I did. He's a 1950s cat in a 1960s world, and he's navigating his place between the two.
Though
Hayden Fuller is clearly a tough guy who can take care of himself, it also becomes
clear in the book that he’s a character who has been wounded, psychologically.
How are those two things related?
GT: I
think the detective novels I like are pyrrhic.The detective dies a little bit
in solving the case. It's certainly the case in all of Chandler. Spillane's
hero, Mike Hammer, I think unbeknownst to the author, suffers from PTSD; what
he experienced in the South Pacific during WWII. So yeah, I was drawn to that
aspect of the genre and wanted to take it a step further with the reveal in this
book.
There
have been times when detective fiction, as a genre, has been criticized for its
gender politics. There are aspects of A Fourth Face that felt like they consciously pushed back
against misogyny, while at the same time recognizing the fact of violence
against women, and I was wondering how much of that just happened in the
writing and how much was intentional.
GT: I
was very aware of it and am trying in my writing to complicate this issue.
After the first novel, the character of Stana came across for some as a femme
fatale. But that was never my intention. She made a bad choice. She's not a
spider-woman. So, in the next two books, I'm working to ask some readers to
re-evaluate her. Summarizing a character around a single truth is too easy.
Stana is many truths, and I wanted to show how complicated friendships and
romance can be. Hayden is still drawn to her and they might just be good for
each other. Also, the end of A Fourth Face (no spoilers here) attempts
to reconfigure or deconstruct the usual bondage scene, such as where a naked or
nearly naked Velda is rescued by Spillane’s Mike Hammer. Ed McBain's Doll
and what Steve Carella goes through in that mid-sixties classic 87th Precinct
novel was a bit of an inspiration for me.
I’d
like to be able to ask a good question about the ending of A Fourth Face without
giving anything away, but I don’t think I can say much more than “wow, that was
an ending!” So, in general, when you’re writing in a genre like this that
involves complicated plotting, how much do you need to know about where the
narrative is going to end up, and how much do you discover along the way?
GT: I
have a blue print plot (who did what and why) before I start writing, but it
changes dramatically once I get rolling. Two-thirds of the way through this
novel, I saw the ending, but I didn't know who all would be in the scene. And
when I got to the ending (involving water), I went through the wall to another
level that totally surprised me. Sorry to be vague, but I don't want to give
things away. Something did happen when I wrote that final scene that just
grabbed me and shocked me. But really, as I write these books, I'm just trying
to survive the scene I'm in and allow that to take me to the next scene. Often
I discover what scene is happening next by following the impulses of the
current scene I'm writing.
-- Interview conducted by Jim O’Loughlin
