The Monday Night Zoom Boys

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: The crazed promo person in my brain is insisting I call this Guy-Day Friday! But that’s so silly. So I won’t do it.

But what a wonderful guest we have today: The truly brilliant Charles Salzberg not only brings us the power of his positive thinking, but a positively wonderful event that emerged and bloomed from the pandemic – – yes, a good thing!

Here’s how, with a little help from his friends, Charles found a silver lining in the pandemic. And the friends did too. And as the pandemic wanes (we hope)-- these fab “five guys“ are only beginning their adventures.

(And he has a new book! Keep reading. Because there's a giveaway! )

How the Pandemic Saved My Life (Kind of…)
by Charles Salzberg

When the pandemic hit two years ago and we were ordered to shelter at home, most people became anxious, wondering how they could, in this new world order, shelter in place, day after day, night after night.

Not me.

As a writer, staying home not only wasn’t a problem, it was a gift from the gods. And so, when friends asked, “how are you doing?” My guilt-ridden answer was, “fine.” But in truth, it was way better than fine. It was giving me permission to do something I’d been rehearsing for all my life.

When I was in my 20s, knowing I wanted to be a writer but struggling to decide how I was going to make a living, I scored a job at New York magazine, working in the mailroom. I loved magazines and despite not knowing what editors actually did all day, I thought I could put the only marketable skill I had to good use by becoming a magazine editor. And this, I was told, was a good to start from. But after a week or so of stamping, sorting and delivering mail, I didn’t see my future sitting in an office all day. And so, after a mere three months, I did something that in hindsight was not only downright foolish, but irresponsible. Without having any idea how I would pay the rent, and put food on the table, I quit, and declared myself, without having sold a word, a “freelance writer.”

Fortunately, the dumb luck of the stupid kicked in. Almost immediately after quitting, I sold two articles. One to New York magazine, the other to The Daily News Sunday Magazine. It wasn’t much, totaling a little more than $1,000, but it was enough to make me think I could make it living the life of a freelance writer which, as the winter weather became worse and worse, became more and more appealing. I’d never have to wear a tie and jacket. I wouldn’t have to go out in bad weather unless I wanted to. I could rise whenever I wanted. I could sleep whenever I wanted. No longer would I suffer the “Sunday night blues,” anticipating I’d have to go to work the next day. No nine to five for me, baby. That was for suckers. Instead, I could work whenever I wanted, morning, afternoon, or night.

Then, because of the pandemic, I was ordered to stay home. Was I bored? Absolutely not. Almost forty years of practice gave me a pretty good head start on the rest of you.

There was plenty to keep me busy. Netflix, HBO-Max, Prime, Hulu, Apple-TV, and a host of other streaming services. I discovered true crime podcasts. I read at least a couple books a week. I took long walks with friends. I even Zoomed my weekly lunches with my good friend, Ross Klavan. Instead of having to travel to where I taught writing classes, I Zoomed my classes from my dining room table, revealing other perks: I didn’t have to wear pants. Or shoes. The travel time to work was cut from 20 minutes to as long as it took me to get from my living room to my dining area. And when class was over, no problem. I was already home.

Let’s face it, I was living la bella vita.

As if that wasn’t good enough, there was one other unanticipated bonus that came from those many months of social isolation. Every Monday night I Zoomed (a noun became a verb) with four other crime writers: Reed Farrel Coleman (center of photo), Tom Straw, Matt Goldman (left) and Michael Wiley. And even though we were spread out across the country—I’m in New York City, Reed in the outer reaches of Long Island, Mike in Florida, Tom in Connecticut, and Matt in Minneapolis. But for an hour and a half every Monday night, we were in the same room.

Every Monday night, a few minutes before 7 p.m., I’d set up shop in front of my dining table and for the next hour and a half, I had the time of my life. After all, these guys weren’t just crime writers. They’d all lived very interesting lives. Tom and Matt are also very successful sitcom writers. Matt worked on Seinfeld, The New Adventures of Old Christine and a bunch of other hit shows; Tom worked on Night Court, the Craig Ferguson Show, Grace Under Fire, and Nurse Jackie, and others. Reed has held a number of interesting jobs, while my background as a magazine journalist and nonfiction book writer, dovetailed very nicely with this diverse group.

The conversation ranged all over the map. What we were reading. What we were writing. What we were watching. Anecdotes from our past lives. Whatever happened to be in the news, other than the pandemic and politics. After all, we were there to have fun, to make human connections in troubled times, not deal with the news which seemed to get worse and worse.

And fun we had. In fact, we got along so well that we promised ourselves that when we’d all been vaccinated, we’d take a trip together.

So, last May, after we’d all had our second dose of the vaccine, the Monday Night Zoom Boys rented a villa down in Hilton Head and four of us (Tom preferred to stay home because he didn’t want to put his elderly mother-in-law in jeopardy) spent five days (and nights) together. We got along swimmingly and that ranks as one of the best vacations I’ve ever had.

 

(Here's Tom, gallantly at home.)

Last summer, as the pandemic waned, and the vaccine freed us from captivity, we all mourned the inevitable passing of our Monday night ritual. But wait. Not so fast. Instead of totally abandoning our Monday night meetups, we decided instead to cut back to every other Monday night. And so, our Zoom calls continue to this day.

It’s a close bond that wouldn’t have been possible before Covid hit. In fact, our close relationship has only grown, as evidenced by the fact that four of us are attending Left Coast Crime, where we’ll be able to hang out together in person. And in September, there’ll be Bouchercon in Minneapolis, Matt’s home turf.

So, now that we seem to be approaching a return to “normal” pre-pandemic life, I can’t help but be grateful to a deadly virus for bringing us together.

HANK: Isn’t this great?

And oh, see below for more of Charles' brand new book, CANARY IN THE COAL MINE. Doesn’t it sound amazing? I’m giving a copy to one lucky commenter!

Funnily, my fellow Career Authors bloggers (Dana Isaacson Dana Isaacson, Jessica Strawser, Paula Munier, Brian Andrews and I) meet every Monday morning at 10, on zoom, with coffee and Monday brains, and we’ve been doing it from the very beginning. It is such a joy and reassurance. And ooh, we are doing something together in real life, too – – the first ever in person MIT Endicott House Career Authors Weekend Writers retreat! (Click here for more info. Space is limited.)

How about you, Reds and Readers? Dare I ask…did you discover anything good in the pandemic? (I can tell you, also, I swore I would put the books on my bookshelves in alphabetical order. But nope. Didn’t happen.)

And remember, comment to be entered to win!  (This week's winners will all be announced Saturday!)

CANARY IN THE COAL MINE

Pete Fortunato, a New York City PI who suffers from anger management issues and insomnia, wakes up one day with a bad taste in his mouth, which is usually a sign of trouble. When he arrives at his "office," a desk in back of a friend's real estate office, he's hired by a beautiful woman to find her husband, "dead or alive." He successfully completes his job in a couple days--he finds her husband shot dead in the apartment of her young, stud boyfriend--only to find that his client's check bounces. This is only the beginning of a nightmare that gets him half-way across the country in an attempt to find money which can save his life.

Charles Salzberg is a former magazine journalist and nonfiction book writer (From Set Shot to Slam Dunk, an Oral History of the NBA and Soupy Sez: My Zany Life and Times). He’s twice nominated for the Shamus Award for Swann’s Last Song, the first in the series, and Second Story Man (also winner of the Beverly Hills Book Award). Devil in the Hole was named one of the Best Crime Novels of 2013 by Suspense magazine. 

He lives in New York City and teaches writing for New York Writers Workshop, where he is a Founding Member.

The Way of the (Detective) World

HANK:  I love Charles Salzberg, and he knows it, and I love his books. But what I didn’t know, until he sent me this blog, was what he had written a non-fiction book with another of my idols, Soupy Sales. I burst out laughing simply thinking about Soupy, and I bet Charles has all the scoop.  But I guess that’s a different blog.

How’d you decide to write crime fiction? I asked him. And, like everything Charles writes, that turned out to be a great story.

How I Became a Crime Writer and Stayed That Way

           --Charles Salzberg

It was an accident. Not the kind of accident where anyone gets hurt. The kind of accident where something happens that’s totally unplanned and unpredictable. It was an accident that changed my life. For the better, as it turned out.

Let’s start at the beginning. Not the beginning like when God created the heavens and the earth. The beginning as in when I had to decide how I was going to make my way in the world.

 First, the decision.

That was the easy part. I was going to be a writer. I was never without a book and as a shy kid, someone who didn’t make friends easily, an unhappy kid who wanted to live in a happier world, books and movies were the perfect refuge.

The only thing better than reading a book, I thought, was creating one.

I even knew what kind of writer I wanted to be. Like Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, Vladimir Nabokov, Dostoevsky, John Updike. The serious literary ones, who wrote interesting characters who led interesting, complicated, often tortured lives.

But making that happen wasn’t so easy.

After tackling my first novel at the age of 12—it was a roman a clef based on sleep-away summer camp (half a dozen single-spaced pages which I still have)—I became an English major in college.

But life got in the way.  I had to make a detour into law school. Then another detour into teaching in a special school for delinquent kids.

One thing led to another and soon, to put food on the table, I began writing nonfiction books. Some of them my own, many of them collaborations, some of them even ghostwritten by me. And all the time I kept working on and finishing novels. But although they were praised for style and the characters, no one wanted to publish them. Why? Because they weren’t commercial. Or, as one professor and novelist not so gently informed me, “You write that psychological crap, like Dostoevsky, Nabokov and Bellow. Don’t you know what a story is?”

I took the first part as high praise. I took umbrage to the second, Of course, I knew what a story was.  But to me plot wasn’t all that important. Maybe that was the reason I wasn’t having any luck getting published. Maybe I ought to concentrate on plot instead of style and character.

So damnit, I’d show them. I’d write a novel and plot the hell out of it. I’d write a detective novel, because I couldn’t think of any genre in which plot was more essential.

And so I immersed myself. I read everything I could: Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Rex Stout, John D. MacDonald, James M. Cain, Mickey Spillaine, Agatha Christie, Charles Willeford, Jim Thompson, Ross MacDonald. I came away in awe and with a newfound respect. There were talented writers in that group, and though their work was carefully plotted, they hadn’t given up style and character.

I was heartened and a little nervous. Would I be able to pull it off?

Then I found there was not so much a formula involved in writing detective fiction, but certain assumptions in the genre.  That the world usually begins as an orderly place. And then a crime is committed and the world is no longer orderly. It’s shaken to its core and becomes downright chaotic. Along comes the detective whose job it is to make the proper connections by following the clues and solving the crime, which ultimately puts that world back into place.

I began by creating a prototypical American detective. Henry Swann is a loner, living on the margins. He carries a heavy burden—his wife was killed in a freak accident and he gave up his son to his in-laws. He’s a skip tracer, even lower than a private eye. And he is low on the moral scale, willing to do just about anything for money. One day a beautiful, wealthy woman (this is the way most classic detective novels begin) appears in his office in a rundown part of town and hires him to find her missing husband. Within a day, he finds her husband has been murdered. So she then hires him to find out who killed him and why.

But here’s where I veered away from the usual detective plot. I created a corpse who had different identities, and Swann has to figure out who this man really was as opposed to who killed him. And Swann does not solve the crime himself. In fact, I turned the detective model on its ear by creating a world that didn’t make sense, where the clues didn’t add up to solving the mystery.

What I didn’t bargain for was that no one would publish the book that way. “People who read detective novels want the detective to solve the crime,” I was told, “and if they don’t they will be disappointed.”  The novel sat in a drawer for twenty more years, before I pulled it out, updated it, and showed it to an editor. He loved it, but said he’d only publish it if I changed the ending. By that point, you might say I’d outgrown my principles and said, “sure.” Thus was Swann’s Last Song born.

As I began to work in the genre I realized crime novels aren’t just about murder. They’re about life and only sometimes death. I was really writing about human nature. And then I realized--all good writing necessitates an element of mystery. If I can’t make you want to turn that page to find out what’s going to happen next, then I’m not a successful writer.

I also made a conscious decision that murder wasn’t going to be the focal point. Instead, I would write about all the other crimes that happen. How many of us are touched by murder? Very few, I’d guess. But crimes of the heart? Theft? Fraud? Lying? Cheating? Aren’t these crimes?

 A whole world opened up to me as a result. I wasn’t a crime writer. I was a writer who happened to write about crime. And if you think about it this is true of all the great crime writers out there. They’re not writing about crime. They’re writing about us. The best of us. The worst of us. Every one of us.

HANK:  Loved this book! So Reds, do you remember the book that hooked you on crime fiction? Either as a child, or a teenager, or an adult?

  

CHARLES SALZBERG is the author of the Shamus Award-nominated Swann’s Last Song, Swann Dives In, Swann’s Lake of Despair (re-release Nov. 2016), Devil in the Hole (re-release Nov. 2016), Triple Shot (Aug. 2016), and Swann’s Way Out (Feb. 2017). His novels have been recognized by Suspense Magazine, the Silver Falchion Awards, the Beverly Hills Book Award and the Indie Excellence Award. He has written over 25 nonfiction books, including From Set Shot to Slam Dunk, an oral history of the NBA, and Soupy Sez: My Life and Zany Times, with Soupy Sales. He has been a visiting professor of magazine at the S.I. Newhouse School of Communications at Syracuse University, and he teaches writing at the Writer’s Voice and the New York Writers Workshop, where he is a founding member.

Website - http://www.charlessalzberg.com/
Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/CharlesSalzbergAuthor/
Twitter - https://twitter.com/CharlesSalzberg
GoodReads - https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/7563.Charles_Salzberg
Amazon - http://www.amazon.com/Charles-Salzberg/e/B001IXO1TE

I Need A Hero...with a special Longmire Giveaway!

 JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: Today's the day our friend Craig Johnson's latest Walt Longmire mystery, ANY OTHER NAME, hits the stores. Since the A&E series LONGMIRE is coming back for a second season, I assume there are a lot of people out there who've been introduced the Walt Longmire, but I (puts her hipster glasses on) have been crushing on Walt Longmire since Craig's first book, THE COLD DISH, came out ten years ago.

Walt Longmire is an example of the kind of hero I can't resist: fifty-something, laconic, tough-but-sensitive, knows his way around a gun but gets thrown by the women in his life. (People who read me may recognize certain similarities to my own male protagonist.) There are a lot of sigh-worthy heros in crime fiction, but what is it that makes them so? 

I got into an interesting discussion at Murder in Muskego a few years back on this point. I said it was competence - the sense that the hero could Do What Needed To Be Done with a minimum of fuss and bother. Tess Gerritsen opined it was being an alpha male that made the hero irresistable - women want to read about the man all other men defer to. Libby Hellman (IIRC) argued for sensitivity - a man whose emotions the reader can experience.
All of these? Something else? To reach the pinnacle of "Women want him, men want to be him," what qualities does the crime fiction hero need, Reds?

HALLIE EPHRON: Doesn't Take Himself Too Seriously and Has a Sense of Humor... those are my two. And Longmire, boy howdy! Does he qualify on both counts, especially in the novels. Ah, Likes Women... he's that, too.
And NEWS BULLETIN, Craig Johnson is going to be Guest of Honor at this fall's New England Crime Bake -- a wonderful conference for mystery writers and readers (set not in Wyoming but near Boston) which sells out fast... and registration is about to open! He'll on a bunch of panels, get the GOH interview treatment, as well as be on a panel of plot conjurers and we'll get to see how he does it. Registration should be opening later this week.
 
SUSAN ELIA MACNEAL: I love the kind of hero Craig Johnson and Julia write, but I'm also up for the deeply flawed protagonist who might not fit those criteria. The male protagonist I'm currently obsessed with is Buck Schatz, introduced in Daniel Friedman's, DON'T EVER GET OLD and now in DON'T EVER LOOK BACK. Buck's 88, moves with the aid of a walker, and has increasing issues with dementia. He's a curmudgeon, but I absolutely adore him. 


 

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: And Breaking News number two: the fabulous Craig Johnson is offering--just for today's Jungle Red commenters--THREE COPIES of his new book ANY OTHER NAME! So--just tell us about your heroes..and you're entered!

Here's me with the fab Craig Johnson last time he came to Boston..he's hilarious and tells wonderful stories. (He has a very cool wife, too.)
And Susan, I, too, am in love with Buck Schatz--he's so terrific. And right now I am delighted with Henry Swann, the poetry-reading skip tracer in Charles Salzberg's about to be released SWANN'S LAKE OF DESPAIR. Those familiar with this blog will remember my love of Inspector Morse. So I guess the thread for me in all of my favorite heroes is that they're smart. And wry.

RHYS BOWEN: My kind of hero has to be someone I can identify with. He or she has to have an innate goodness and desire to make things right. I'm a fan of the unlikely hero--Frodo in the Lord of the Rings--a little, insignificant person thrust into a role far beyond him but taking it on anyway. And retaining the self deprecating humor and basic humanity throughout. I think Louise Penny's Gamache is that sort of person. I hope that my heroines have just a tinge of it. 


DEBORAH CROMBIE: All of the above! Competent. Not necessarily outwardly tough, although I adore Jim Butcher's Harry Dresden. Likes women, yes, AND respects them. Sense of humor, check. Not taking themselves too seriously, check. And I love a bit of the eccentric--I haven't read the Buck Schatz books, or Henry Swann (putting on never-ending list) but I love Christopher Fowler's Arthur Bryant and John May.


Oh, and Walt Longmire is okay, too:-)




How about you, dear reader? What attributes do you like to see in your fictional hero-and-heartthrob? Don't forget, we have three copies of Craig Johnson's ANY OTHER NAME to give away!