Peter Spiegelman sat down with Bobby McCue, general manager of the Mystery Bookstore, in February 2007 to discuss his latest John March mystery, RED CAT, and the Akashic collection WALL STREET NOIR, which Spiegelman edited.









Let’s talk a little about John March, private eye, the main character of your books. Most American PIs are “broke, busted, disgusted, but they can be trusted.” John March is unusual in that he comes from money. It’s interesting that British crime fiction has a tradition of wealthy detectives, but you almost never see rich American detectives. Why did you decide to make John March the son of an investment banking family, instead of being down on his luck?


That’s a really great question. March -- although he is wealthy – he’s not an ascot-wearing, pipe-smoking kind of guy. He does very much come from the hard-boiled tradition, but it just so happens that one of the things he’s walked away from, in his life, is the family business. I think the decision to give him that sort of background came in part from what I was interested in writing about, which was in part families and in part people with money, and the distorting effects that wealth can have. Part of the decision to make March wealthy came out of that.


I also wanted him to be very much an outsider, in all ways -- so the fact that he walked away from the family business made him an outsider from his family and his social milieu. The fact that he came from wealth makes him an outsider with a lot of the other people he comes in contact with: cops, robbers (laughs), other law enforcement types. So he is, in most circumstances, the odd man out.


When we recommend your books, we compare them to the works of Ross Macdonald –


Which is so great. I really appreciate that.


One of the similarities we see is that you’re terrifically perceptive about the way that people behave around money. Can you tell us a little about your previous job, before you started writing full-time?


Sure, absolutely. I spent 20 years on and around Wall Street, in banking and in banking software, and a lot of that time was spent on the trading floor – various trading floors. And I think, if you’re an aspiring novelist, it’s a great place to hang out. It’s a great place to be a fly on the wall, because you see big, often dysfunctional personalities (laughs) operating in situations of great stress, with a lot of money on the table, and it’s a great place to view human nature. Greed, I think, illuminates a lot of things.


So yeah, my background on and around Wall Street gave me access to a lot of that, and a lot of that finds its way into my books.


Were you the one that was yelling “Sell, sell, sell!” or “Buy, buy, buy”?


(Laughs). I was actually, fortunately – I was never actually a trader. I was developing the software that these guys used to buy, buy, buy and sell, sell, sell.


Both RED CAT and the last John March novel, DEATH’S LITTLE HELPERS, were very personal cases for March. I don’t think we’re giving too much away by saying his brother’s involved, in the current book. It seems that each book has become more personal for March, not less. Was this a plan that you had?




Not a plan, but I think that’s – you know, to me, one of the things I love best about private detective fiction is that to me, the private detective is always the most interesting character. And seeing the way – what was it Michael Connelly said – seeing what the case does to the detective, the way the case works on the detective. I absolutely agree with that, I think that’s in many ways the most interesting thing. And that almost necessitates the detective having some sort of personal stake in what’s going on -- either from the outset, as in RED CAT, where his brother is actually a client, or because he develops a personal relationship or finds some resonance with the case, or with the client, or some element of the case. He finds some resonance in his own life.


So I think the personal stake, however it’s arrived at, is always with me.


Now, to get back to RED CAT – RED CAT is a lot darker than your earlier novels, which, of course, I love. Among other things, it explores the borderline between pornography and performance art. What inspired this, and what was your research like?


Yes – I guess RED CAT is darker, I would have to admit (laughs). The spark that got me headed down this path and this element of the story in RED CAT – art, and pornography, and performance art – was the work of a woman named Andrea Frasier, who is a performance artist and a video artist and a conceptual artist. A few years ago, she had a work playing – a video work – playing in a gallery down in Chelsea, called “Untitled.” (Laughs.)


And the work consisted of – one of her patrons paid her $25,000 to appear in one of her works, and the nature of the work was the two of them having sex in a hotel room. And it was filmed in a particularly lurid, sort of hidden camera-peep show style, and you know, very unsettling – and that got me thinking a lot about artists who are so committed to their artistic vision that they are willing to go to extreme measures, including really objectifying themselves. That’s what got me headed down the path that led to RED CAT, ultimately.


Which plays a big role a big role, at the beginning and all through half the book. When you first thought of John March and started to write, did you think you’d be writing him as a series character?


I did, I did. You know, I – I think this is true of a lot of people, when you first start out, you love. You write what you love to read, you write what you were weaned on – and in terms of my crime fiction diet, while it’s pretty catholic and without rhyme or reason, from the earliest days, detective fiction has always been a part of it.


And so yeah, I think I always knew that I wanted to write PI fiction and a series character.


BLACK MAPS, your first novel, a winner of the Shamus Award. In addition to award-winning crime novels, you’re a gifted poet. Are those completely separate pursuits, or does one kind of feed the other?


I maintain that one feeds the other (laughs). There’s certainly a long tradition – there are lots of poets who have written crime fiction, or crime fiction writers who write poetry. And actually a couple of years ago at Bouchercon in Chicago, I was on a wonderful panel with Reed Coleman and Ken Bruen, who like myself started out their writing careers as poets. We were talking about the conjunction of poetry and crime fiction.


I think there is one. Poetry teaches you a lot of things – it taught me a lot of things that found their way into my crime writing. Certainly economy is one of them; choosing just the right word, or just the right image; restraint, the willingness to let the image do the work, let the language do the work. Trust in the reader, that they can connect the dots; don’t step on them, don’t overwrite everything.


And there’s, I think, a concern thematically with distilling things down to that critical moment, you know, that one image on which everything turns, whether it’s a poem or a story. There’s actually a lot that the two have in common.


Yeah. James Sallis comes to mind –


He is a wonderful poet and a wonderful crime writer, absolutely.


John March is part of the new, post-Internet generation of private detectives. How has technology changed the shape of traditional PI novels?


Yeah, March definitely is of the Internet age, and part of that is because of my own background.


I don’t know that it’s changed it [the PI genre] fundamentally. Clearly, there’s a little less shoe leather being spent, and a little more keyboard time being spent – although, you know, not exclusively. In talking to real PIs, they use the Internet extensively these days, but at the same time, it has its limits. Not everything has been rendered into digital form.


I think one interesting thing that I explored a little bit in my books has been the breakdown in any notion of privacy. The fact that things that people once assumed were private are just not at all, and the things that you can find out if you have a credit card are really scary.


Yeah, it’s just amazing the things you can wind up digging up.


It’s quite frightening. Notions of privacy are quite illusory these days.


Let’s go on to WALL STREET NOIR, which is coming up from Akashic Press. Short fiction, and you’re editing this?


Yes. It’s done and dusted, and it was a great project: 17 stories, by myself and 16 other writers, all set in the world of Wall Street, part of Akashic’s great “Noir” series. It was a labor of love – a lot harder than I thought it would be, but I’m happier with the end result than I ever thought could be possible.




Have you ever tried to write short stories before?


Oh yeah, I write short stories occasionally and I love doing it. Every time I write a short story I feel I come out the other side as a better writer. Like poetry, it’s a demanding form. You don’t have a lot of room to play with – you don’t have, you can’t just go off on some dilatory romp. So it’s demanding technically, and I really like that.


Yes, it’s demanding as far as truncating it at the end, too, just lopping it off –


And you really need to understand the essence of your story – what is it that this thing is about? -- so that you can get to it.


Yeah, I’ve contributed to several anthologies, and then had the chance to edit this one.


Anthologies are pretty hot these days, and there are some fun things that have been coming out.


There sure are. And fun things coming.


What’s next for John March?


Well – how fitting, since we are here in Westwood. My fourth novel takes John March out of New York and brings him to Los Angeles.


Oh, great.


So that’s all I’ll say about that…


What, is he going to be in films, is he going to be in Hollywood?


No, no (laughs). It’s finance – there’s a lot of money out here.


So he’s going to be investing in movies…


No, instead he’s going to take his money and burn it (laughs), because that’s much faster.


Has there been any interest, or do you perceive March becoming a film or television character?


I certainly would love to see that happen, and I think if I had my druthers I’d pick TV over film, because I think it’s a better form for this stuff than film. But it’s one of those ephemeral things, you know, you’ll get a phone call, and somebody has some vague level of interest, and then it all kind of vanishes in smoke.


Has anything been optioned at all?


Not yet.


Thanks again for talking with us, and congratulations on RED CAT, which is the February Crime Club selection for the store.


I’m so pleased.