West of Hollywood

Libby Cudmore

In this world, you have to ask for what you want.

In some cases, you have to pick a lock and break in.

When I heard that Brian Thornton was putting together a pair of crime-themed anthologies based on the music of Steely Dan, I knew I had to be part of it. It didn’t matter that the slate was already full.

Over the past several years I have positioned myself as the Queen of the Dandom, a mighty figure in the realm of Steely Dan Twitter, and as the author of the critically-acclaimed mixtape murder mystery, this was the project I had been waiting for.

I emailed Brian this:

Hi Brian, I just saw your article about your Steely Dan anthology and I think it is the GREATEST IDEA EVER IN THE HISTORY OF ALL IDEAS. I was wondering… room for one more? I am a huge huge HUGE Steely Dan fan (I've seen them six times; am wearing my "The Dan Who Knew Too Much" tour shirt as I write this) and I know I could write you an amazing story… plus I'm quick! Please and thank you!

Brian told me he liked my enthusiasm and my Dan credentials (since then, I have seen them another four times, bringing the grand total to 10 shows, plus The Nightflyers / Dukes of September) and although he initially told me he couldn’t make any promises.

I told him that if not this one, I’d love to collaborate on another. A few days later, he responded with this:

All that aside, I value passion, especially when it comes to music, and doubly so when it comes to GREAT music. I have no doubt that this collection will be the stronger for your participation. So congratulations, kid. You’re in! I’ll make it work.

I was ECSTATIC. If the first lesson is shoot your shot, the second is to always be gracious and forward-thinking. Being a jerk gets you nowhere.

Settling on a song was the difficult part. So many of the good ones were taken – including “The Second Arrangement” – but I wanted to go with something a little off-beat. I’ve found a lot of fans underrate Two Against Nature and Everything Must Go, so my initial thought was to write a stalker story around “Lunch With Gina.”

But the story wasn’t coming together, and with the deadline clock ticking down, I switched over to “West of Hollywood” from Two Against Nature. There’s a cold undercurrent of broken passion there that fascinated me, something wild that had since crumbled to dust. I based it around a pair of con artists and former lovers who reunite for one job in the Hollywood Hills.

As soon as I settled on the concept, the story came together in almost one draft. I like to think it was guided by the spirit of the late Walter Becker.

But never one to keep all the good stuff for myself, I was also able to recommend that Brian bring in my friend/fellow Steely Dan fanatic Matthew Quinn Martin in, and he wrote a devastatingly good story based on “Pretzel Logic.” Both stories will appear in the second volume, titled A Beast Without A Name, available from Down & Out Books on Oct. 28.

It never hurts to ask for what you want. Be prepared for a no, which makes celebrating that YES even better. I am forever grateful to Brian for making space for me in this anthology, and I’m really looking forward to sharing “West of Hollywood” with all of you when it comes out.

The Journalist Detective

Maybe I should have known something was waiting for me when I was inspired to wear a button-down shirt and suspenders into my office. I was having writer’s block on my novel and a bad feeling when I took a pass over to the state police website in search of a story. Kassirer’s car had been found abandoned in the parking lot next to the Troop-C police barracks in the West End of Oneonta, five days after he was last seen by his family as he left his father’s funeral in Irondequoit, three days after he’d been reported missing by his employer, a drug rehab center in Brattleboro, Vermont, four days after he’d texted them to let them know he would be in the next day.

A bad feeling, sure, but I had to know where it was going to lead. I went into full detective mode. I called the Irondquoit police, who told me that he had last been seen checking out of a Binghamton hotel on the morning of Oct. 23, and that the last cell phone ping came from Oneonta, not far from where his car was located, at just before 4:30 a.m.

Meaning he checked out of his hotel at 3:30 a.m. The mystery deepened.

*

Out of curiosity, I did a Google Maps search of the area where the cell phone ping had been picked up. I saw a small path that lead into the ravine, near where his car was found. My heart sank. That’s where they’ll find him, I thought. I tried to ignore the feeling. Friends and family pleaded on Facebook for him to come home. That night, Ian and I drove out to Binghamton to buy Halloween supplies. I wondered if he’d gone into the nearby river or wandered into the woods. He wouldn’t be the first one. I lamented his disappearance and hoped he was okay.

*

The next day, a loose-lipped policeman in Massachusetts told me that a friend had picked up a ping from his cell phone in Rochester later that evening, meaning he got nearly 200 miles away from where his car was found, back towards where he had been. The police had searched his apartment and all they found in his room was a pile of blankets where a bed should be. His roommate was out of town, but someone was feeding the cat.

We went to press that night with no sign of him. I went to bed that night hoping that he would turn up in a hospital or rehab center, a man who just needed to get away from it all for a few days. But I’ve been at this business long enough to know that it’s so rarely the case.

*

My boss jokes, darkly, about my uncanny ability to read between the lines of press releases, an understanding of crime and human behavior honed from an adulthood of reading and writing mysteries.  On Wednesday, as I was getting ready for the Halloween parade, I got a call from Aga that his body had been located in “heavy brush” down the hill behind where he had parked.

Just as I had suspected.

But how did he get there? And why? I’ve written here before that being a journalist has all the questions of a private detective, with none of the release that come with the solving of a case. I can make the calls, but in the end, I have to just wait for the phone to ring and write down what is said on the other end of the line.

The autopsy proved inconclusive, but that the death was not being ruled “suspicious.” That means they don’t think he was murdered and there were no indications of suicide. Toxicology reports and additional testing take time.

Maybe I’ll have an answer for you next month.

Or maybe another case.

Hit The Road

There are a couple obvious influences on my writing – Raymond Chandler, of course, and Warren Zevon, Steely Dan and The Shield. But my first brush with the detective genre was a video game – Sam & Max Hit The Road to be precise.

Purchased in a set of four LucasArts game at the height of my Star Wars fandom in eighth grade, Hit the Road follows Sam, a private eye who happens to be a dog in a rumpled suit, and his partner, Max, a “hyperkinetic rabbity-thing” as they track down a stolen bigfoot across the USA. The game is played as a point-and-click adventure, with text prompts and plenty of insane puzzles to solve.

With a comically neo-pulp aesthetic, Hit the Road also taught me the very early mechanics of how a detective story works – that one clue leads to another and nothing is coincidence. Sam has to say the exact right thing or else the puzzle doesn’t get solved. You have to think beyond the obvious, steal the rasp, attach the hand and the magnet to the golf ball retriever to get the mood ring. Makes total sense, right? But that’s how good detective story is put together – if anyone could solve it, then they wouldn’t need a PI. Sam and Max have the right kind of smarts to hunt down a missing bigfoot.

Yacht Rock Badasses

I used to joke that I was going to write a series of novels where Donald Fagen and Walter Becker would use their time off of touring with Steely Dan to solve mysteries. Can’t you just picture it? They’re a perfect detective pairing; they’re snarky and sardonic, with a clever patter and a long history of writing songs around lowlifes. It would have been amazing and the most on-brand Libby Series of all time, combining my well-honed talent for writing mysteries with my deep and passionate love for the Dandom.

Tragically, Becker’s death last September put an end to this and many of my other Steely dreams (like getting to hear them do “The Second Arrangement” in concert again) but it did get me thinking about the core of hardboiled noir that runs throughout a lot of Yacht Rock.

For those of you unfamiliar with the term, (coined by J.D. Ryznar in his eponymous and, frankly life-changing Channel 101 series) “Yacht Rock” generally refers to a style of smooth, often jazz-inflected music from the late 1970s and early 80s, bolstered by studio musicians (Jay Graydon, Steve Porcaro, Jeff Porcaro, etc) and, if you want to get hyper-specific, containing the word “fool.” Think Michael McDonald. Think Christopher Cross. The Doobie Brothers’ “What a Fool Believes” is Yacht Rock. Looking Glass’ “Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl)” is not. Do not try to fight me on this, I swear to God, I will mess you up.

On Making a Notebook

Many writers, myself included, suffer from a terrible affliction known as "Pretty Journal Panic." Well-meaning friends and family buy us beautiful journals as gifts, and, once unwrapped, they languish in a drawer, their pages too pretty to be scrawled with half-finished poems and false novel starts. It easier to make mistakes on yellow tablets or battered composition books, and some of us have even abandoned the notebook completely in favor of sleek keyboards and digital drafts.

But a notebook is a safe space. Opening up a new .DocX final betrays a certain finality, a final draft feel that can crush the early blossoms of creativity. There's an intimacy of pen to paper that cannot be matched by the tap tap of fingers on a keyboard. It's easier to make mistakes, to take risks on stories or poems that might never be finished, when the page doesn't look so formal. You can't doodle in the margins of an Open Office document.

 It wasn't until I started making my own notebooks that I discovered how intimate a process it could be. Creating something from raw materials has a certain magic to it -- taking a pile of paper and thread and building a sacred space.

INTERVIEW: Alex Segura on BLACKOUT, Outlines and Writing the PI

I don’t remember how I met Alex, but when we did meet, over Twitter, we clicked immediately. We both wrote PI novels and shared a love of the Talking Heads and the Replacements. So when he invited me to read at Noir at the Bar (a series I have desperately wanted to be part of for years) I felt like I had finally made it as a mystery writer.

As you do at readings, I bought everyone’s books, and read his Silent City first. I was instantly sucked into Pete Fernandez’s world, right alongside him as he worked to solve the case of a missing journalist and the shadowy figure who haunted his detective father’s own caseload.

Blackout, Segura’s latest book, finds Fernandez, a Miami native, now living an isolated life in New York, pulled back to Miami after a politician hires him to find his wayward son in a case that connects to one Fernandez botched years ago. “He sees it as this opportunity to fix his mistake,” said Segura. “There are a lot of parallels to his recovery and embracing life.”

Though Segura started out in comics, rising through the ranks at DC to become the Senior Vice President of Publicity and Marketing and the editor of Archie imprint Dark Circle Comics, (to which he contributed Archie Meets Kiss and Archie Meets the Ramones) he soon turned to crime fiction. “When your hobby becomes your day job, you need a new hobby,” he said. “I started reading the classics – Chandler, McDonald – but what I really liked were the more contemporary ones, like George Pelecanos, Lawrence Block and Dennis Lehane.”

He was drawn to the “textured, messed up,” protagonist over the Golden Age detectives. “I didn’t want to write the detective with the fedora and then the dame walks in,” he said. “I love the enterprising hero who doesn’t have the resources of the police or the FBI. He’s chosen to do things on his own.”

On Coffee

by Libby Cudmore

I turned the hot water on and got the coffee maker down off the shelf. I wet the rod and measured the stuff into the top and by that time the water was steaming. I filled the lower half of the dingus and set it on the flame, I set the upper part on top and gave it a twist so it would bind.
The coffee maker was almost ready to bubble. I turned the flame low and watched the water rise. It hung just a little at the bottom of the glass tube. I turned the flame up just enough to get it oer the hump and then turned it low again quickly. I stirred the coffee and covered it. I set my timer for three minutes. Very methodical guy, Marlowe. Nothing must interfere with his coffee technique. Not even a gun in the hand of a desperate character.

— Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye

Percolator, French press, drip or Keurig, from carts and convenience stores, artisanal shops and vending machines, coffee is the unsung hero of the crime novel. Black and bitter or hot and life-saving, it can sooth an anxious gunman, fix a hangover or keep you up long enough to solve that murder/heist/kidnapping that has plagued you for 200 pages. 

My own writing time starts with a coffee ritual. I wake up, usually around 6 a.m. (having set the alarm for 5:51 a.m., which gives me enough time to hit snooze once and snuggle with my husband and cat). I use a French press, a tip I picked up from the same college English professor who taught me about crime fiction (and who gave me the copy of The Long Goodbye that I re-read every year) and coarse-ground coffee, preferably from Fairway (I stock up at the store at 74^th and Broadway). I will make due with other coffee, if I have to. I vary on the flavor; currently I’m using the traditional Fairway blend.

I heat the water in the red teakettle my husband and I bought when we first moved in together. Not quite to boiling; I listen until it just starts to rumble a little. While the water is doing its thing, I prep the French press. Two scoops, with about a quarter of a scoop extra. I don’t know why I do this. Luck, maybe.  A couple flicks of cinnamon too, just to help me wake up. Brain food.

While the coffee is brewing, I make my playlist. Can’t write without the playlist.

I used to take mine with Carnation evaporated milk when I was going through a weird 1950s housewife phase. Then I took it with half and half, but lately, I’ve been drinking it black, with raw sugar. 

I feel like you can tell a lot about a person by what kind of coffee mug they use. Is it personalized? Did it come from a special event, a concert, a vacation destination? Or is it plain, nondescript, something that came in a set of four from WalMart. Maybe it was stolen from a stakeout at a fancy hotel. I only have a handful of coffee mugs, all of them from special events – the 2016 Steely Dan tour, my beloved Beverly’s in Oklahoma City, a bookstore in Austin, Texas, where my Dad proudly bought copies of The Big Rewind for his co-workers. Guess he figured I already had a copy and bought me a mug instead.

When it’s ready, it’s ready, and I can finally sit down to write.

But maybe your detective drinks tea instead. Or yerba mate. Or energy drinks that make his heart feel like it’s going to explode all over his laptop. Whatever it is, make a ritual of it. Let her live fully in that moment, that ritual. Let it be a piece of his day, ahead of the robberies and the dead bodies, tap into a grand genre tradition. 

How do you make and take your coffee?

Zip Gun Bop: Songs About Crime & Criminals

by Libby Cudmore

Let’s be real, I could write about crime songs all day, because there are a billion of them. But we’ll come back to this series every so often, because songs about the wrong side of the law are my favorite genre of music. This month’s theme? The criminals themselves, the best of the bad guys and all of their gruesome deeds. Consider this the start of your master heist mix tape.

1. “Kid Charlemagne” Steely Dan (The Royal Scam). Oh, like you didn’t see this coming. Steely Dan writes a LOT of songs about crime and criminal acts, ranging from drugs to murder to gambling to prostitution to child molestation. But “Kid Charlemagne” remains not only their greatest song, but possibly the greatest song in the history of all pop music (Fight me, I dare you.) This song, inspired by famed, ah, chemist Owsley Stanley, is a little tiny novel in itself, the tension building through Larry Carlton’s legendary guitar solo, from the talk of the town to hiding drugs from the cops. Is there gas in the car….?


2. “The Long Arm of The Law” Warren Zevon (Transverse City) Zevon, like Becker and Fagen, is no goody-two-shoes when it comes to songs about crime, and as a fan of Raymond Chandler and a friend of crime and thriller luminaries like Stephen King and Carl Hiassan, it should be no surprise that mercenaries and murders crept into his songs. But “The Long Arm of the Law,” like “Kid Charlemagne,” is a whole arching narrative, starting with a gun runner in South America and ending with him in chains. “Only the dead get off scot-free,” he laments, and he isn’t wrong.


3. “I Remember Larry” ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic (Bad Hair Day). I love this one because it’s so unexpected. The man who gave us “Eat It” and “Like a Surgeon” can also go to some dark places, rapidly escalating a series of pranks played on the narrator by his neighbor Larry, who makes prank phone calls, post embarrassing photos and dumps toxic waste on the singer’s lawn—where he got toxic waste is probably another song—to the final snap in the last verse. “If the cops ever find him who knows what they’ll say/but I’m sure if ol’ Lar were still with us today/he would have to agree with me/it was a pretty good gag!” Yankovic bleats cheerfully. April Fools can be deadly, folks.


4. “Sweet and Tender Hooligan” The Smiths. (Louder Than Bombs) Who doesn’t love a bad boy, especially one on a post-punk beat and a Morrissey wail? Maybe I’ll put this one on a mix for LesterNygaard.


5. “Only a Lad” Oingo Boingo (Only a Lad). Danny Elfman takes a decidedly less romantic look at teenage criminals, snarking on a soft society that lets arsonists, car thieves and murders walk free because of their white and suburban precociousness. This song is just as true today as it ever was, as young men repeatedly get away with rape, assault and other crimes because, hey, boys will be boys, right?


6. “Hospital Food” The Eels (Electro-Shock Blues). Dark and low and grimy like an alley after midnight, everything about this song, sound and lyrics and all, captures a hitman’s nightlife. I think of Vic Mackey when I hear this one, or Eric Powell’s The Goon and Franky.


7. “Gimme The Goods” Boz Scaggs. (Two Down, Then Left) Another pulp-novel narrative coming out of the yacht rock canon, Boz takes his all the way back to 1948, telling a doomed tale of drug runners, complete with one final and badly botched job, a bullet wound, a femme fatale and the wail of sirens coming down rain-slicked streets. I would watch whatever movie was made from this song.


8. “Opportunities” Pet Shop Boys (Please). “If you’ve got the inclination/I’ve got the crime” is the most perfect invitation to wicked deeds ever set to music. This is the soundtrack to assembling your team for a casino heist, a bank job or maybe a long con played out of a sleazy motel room.


9. “Stool Pigeon” Kid Creole and the Coconuts (Tropical Gangsters). Sure, he’s bringing in the bad guys, but this ex-con isn’t getting the hero’s ballad for turning in his old friends to the FBI. Singing the chorus through the crackling static of a policeman’s radio, Kid Creole seems to be warning him of the oldest adage in the book—snitches get stitches. So maybe he’s got a plane and a boat and a new face, but all that money can’t buy him the kind of friends he had in the joint.


10. “Zip Gun Bop” Royal Crown Revue (Mugzy’s Move) The neo-swing revival of the late 1990s drew much of its songwriting inspiration from pulp of the 1940s and no one drew more heavily on it than Royal Crown Revue, widely considered to be the founders of the movement. This gangster-addled number incorporates the slow scream of the police siren, rat-a-tat-tat of machine gun fire and plenty of other genre pastiche.

Nasty Boys

by Libby Cudmore

Nasty, nasty boys, let me see your body groove. — Janet Jackson, “Nasty”

Lester Nygaard

There has to be a word for that moment when you’re watching a TV series, and you’re more than a few episodes in, and you suddenly realize that you are terribly, violently attracted to the absolute worst character on the show. It’s never a slow build; one minute, you’re just toodling along, watching Fargo on the couch with your husband and the next, like a hammer to the skull, you find yourself thinking, “I am ride-or-die for Lester Nygaard.”

There has to be a word for it. And if there isn’t, we should scour world’s languages over to invent one. Because it’s legit. I remember how I felt in the moment I fell for Shane Vendrell, sometime around season two of The Shield, and my heart just started pounding, and I thought, “He is so fine that I am going to literally die from how fine he is.” Then I discovered he was the cast member with the last name Goggins and thought “Well, Mrs. Elizabeth Goggins doesn’t sound that weird….” But through all of it—through the casual racism and the grenade throwing, the violence and the threats, Shane was my One True Love, right to the end. I was there for all of it.

And I thought maybe it was a one-off thing. Nope. A whole series of trash boys followed. Jimmy McGill on Better Call Saul. Lester Nygaard on Fargo. Boyd Crowder on Justified, and on and on and on. There’s one in every series.

I am not really like this. My husband is a well-regarded figure in our community. He is honest and handsome, a sweet man who buys me Donald Fagen records for Christmas. I have never once wanted to date a “bad boy;” in high school and college I happily dated a series of nerds, guys who listened to Billy Joel or watched anime or went to ren faires. I have always been attracted to nice boys. I am a feminist. I demand respect, Ms. Cudmore if you’re nasty.

Shane Vendrell

But I confessed this terrible feeling to my other girlfriends and, as it turns out, they all had their own trash boys. Caleb on Bates Motel. Gus Halper as Erik Menendez. Jax on Sons of Anarchy. They’re the first entry on a game of F•ck/Marry/Kill, but they are down for a good time. And so what if they impregnated their sister or murdered their parents or take sleezy career shortcuts? We love them just the same.

To men, these characters often play as a sort of justification for all their weak impulses. Who hasn’t felt like they’re misunderstood in their work or by their spouse, believed they deserved more, that they had earned what they’d stolen? It’s an outlet, a fantasy that they could get away with being something other than the common human we are all guilty of being.

But to women, they are someone in need of love, of fixing, of understanding, then maybe they wouldn’t do such terrible things. There’s a certain power, at least to me, in loving these sorts of characters. We could keep their secrets. We could help bury the bodies. We are bold and trustworthy broads, and no man would ever think of double-crossing us. We can hold our own in a gunfight or a car chase.

It’s dangerous thinking, in real life, to imagine that you are responsible for fixing someone. But in film and fiction, it’s an addictive thrill. And a good writer knows this. A good writer knows how to make a man desirable and repulsive all at the same time, give him something the audience recognizes as a nearly-palpable need and then twist that into something selfish, the push and pull with the audience. It is almost erotic when done right.

Crime fiction thrives on nasty boys. But a good writer can make even the worst of them somehow charming, to keep the reader turning the page, breathless and, just maybe, slightly in love.

And while you’re working on that, I’ll be trying to create a new word for that stupid-twisted-love feeling. I’ve got another season of Fargo to get through.

On Crime Reporting

I was up early Jan. 1, 2017. I wanted to start the New Year off right, that is, writing. Also, I had trouble sleeping. I blamed the champagne.

As such, I was the first person in Upstate New York to see the press release from Doug Brenner, the Oneonta Police Lieutenant who was set to be named Interim Chief that Thursday, stating that Joshua Underwood had been arrested for bludgeoning his boyfriend, Mark Morrison, to death with a 25 pound weight after a fight just after the dawn of the New Year.

It was 8 a.m. “Doug,” I groaned when I called him for details. “You have got to be kidding me.”

“Tell me about it,” he said in a voice I would soon get very familiar with.

The Anthology: An Announcement

Over my previous three turns in the Sleuthsayers rotation I have discussed my experiences with anthologies. You can find those entries here (the story of how submitting to an anthology which never published kick-started my professional writing career), here (my first experience collecting and editing an anthology: a non-fiction gig that I did for hire), and here (my second, and much better, experience collecting and editing an anthology- crime fiction this time!).

This week's entry will be the final one in this series, and kicks off with an anthology-related announcement. Here it is:

Just last month I signed on with Eric Campbell of Florida's own Down & Out Books to collect and edit an anthology of crime fiction inspired by the music of Steely Dan!

I am over the moon about this project. More on it below.

First, here's a little bit about how it came about, and the role that Sleuthsayers played in it. As with so many good things, this anthology had its roots in tragedy. In other words, this all started with a death.

Back in September, guitarist, bassist, songwriter and arranger Walter Becker, died at his home in Maui, after a long illness. He was 68. Becker was one half of Steely Dan.

Walter Becker (left) on-stage with his Steely Dan partner, keyboardist and vocalist Donald Fagen

I wrote about his death here at Sleuthsayers (you can read this entry here).  I went on at some length about Becker's output with Steely Dan, and how the themes they explored in their music (and in their lyrics) were so frequently outright noirish. And I closed with this observation:

"I've often said that the music of Steely Dan would lend itself to a themed anthology of the type recently collected by Joe Clifford and centered around the music of Johnny Cash. I've even worked up my own short story based on 'Show Biz Kids,' from their Katy Lied album.

"I'm positive I'm not the only one so influenced by these masters of the bleak, jazz-tinged pop hook.

"What say you all? Anyone else written something Steely Dan-inspired?

"And lastly, adios, Walter. And vaya con dios."

I thought that would be the end of it.

And then my wife, who is my first reader and perennial wisest counsel, asked me, "Why don't you do it?" Turns out she soon had company.  Several friends asked the same thing after reading that piece.

So I took a while to think about it, all the while moving on with a couple of other things I've been working on. Included along these on-going projects was the expansion of a short story I sold to Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine a decade ago into a novella-length piece of crime fiction.

Turns out there is a bit of a Sleuthsayers connection to this one as well. Friend and fellow crime fictioneer S.W. Lauden, no stranger to fiction influenced by edgy music (he's a refugee from SoCal's punk/hardcore scene), who agreed to be interviewed about his Anthony nomination and resurgence of the novella (you can read his interview here) had graciously introduced me to his publisher, Eric Campbell (who also agreed to be interviewed regarding the resurgence of the novella, and whose interview can be read here).

When I mentioned my nearly-completed novella to Eric, he asked to see it, and then offered to publish it (so I guess this is a double announcement! More on the novella in a future blog post, I promise.). It was while we were talking about the novella that my idea for a Steely Dan-influenced crime fiction anthology came up. Eric expressed interest in that as well, so I went looking for contributors.

I confess I was nervous about this part of the process. After all, I have a lot of friends in the writing community, many of them music aficionados. But it's one thing to like a certain type of music and another to write something inspired by it.

I needn't have worried. The idea sold itself.

So let me wrap this entry by announcing our proposed line-up of heavy-hitters. This anthology, entitled The Hangman Isn't Hangin': Stories Inspired by the Music of Steely Dan, to be released in mid-2019, will feature the writing of David Corbett, Simon Wood, Cornelia Read, Bill Fitzhugh, Sean Chercover, Steve Brewer, Reed Farrel Coleman, Aaron Erickson, Stacy Robinson, R Narvaez, Sam Wiebe, Nick Feldman, Pearce Hansen, R.T. Lawton, Michael Jacobs, Peter Spiegelman, Jim Thomsen, and Yours Truly.

I could not be more pleased and proud to be associated with this project, to be working with this fantastic group of writers. It is going to be so much fun!

On Motivation

A good detective always keeps the “Why” close at hand. What’s the motive for the crime? Why kill, rob, torture or maim? Until the detective figures out why the crime was committed, he/she will never be able to solve the case.

But the writer also has a big “Why” to answer: Why their detective drawn to the case in the first place.

When I teach mystery writing workshops, it’s the issue I see the most often in beginners’ manuscripts. The writer has a detective, usually an amateur, who plunges into the case without any experience or knowledge of how crimes are actually solved, and from there, it’s a series of coincidences and luck that lead to a conclusion. But let’s be real—if any of us came across a dead body/broken bank vault/bloody, half-conscious victim, our first instinct would be to scream and call the police, not embark on a quest to put the perpetrator behind bars on our own.

How I Wrote THE BIG REWIND

Libby Cudmore, the Girl with the Impish Smile

Welcome Libby Cudmore. She’s the author of The Big Rewind (William Morrow, 2016) which received a Starred Review from Kirkus, as well as praise from Booklist, Publisher's Weekly and USA Today. Her work has been published in Beat to a Pulp, The Stoneslide Corrective, PANK, The Big Click and the anthologies Hanzai Japan, Welcome Home and Mixed Up. She is a frequent contributor to Vinyl Me Please, Paste, Albumism and the Barrelhouse blog, and hosts the weekly #RecordSaturday.

Meanwhile, she answers those forever questions… How do you get your ideas? How do you bring them to fruition?

You can live-tweet her @libbycudmore.

— Velma

---

by Libby Cudmore

I spent the first few years of my crime writing career trying to emulate others. With The Long Goodbye, Sin City and a soundtrack of early Tom Waits albums as my bibles, my early stories dripped with pulp pastiche like a half-scabbed wound.  I was successful to some degree—short stories published across the internet, some awards and notoriety, a few close calls with agents and editors, but with three novel manuscripts wasting away on my hard drive, I knew I had to try something different.

The Big Rewind didn’t come to me as a fully-formed plan. Rather, it came as an exercise in late-winter nostalgia, on the bus home from work, listening to songs that an unrequited college crush had given to me on a mix CD. I got thinking about the mix CD as a piece of ephemera, wondering what someone might think of the relationship between us if they were to find this document 200 years down the road. I began to write a scene where a young woman, named Jett Bennett, came across a tape meant for her downstairs neighbor, KitKat, and goes to return it. But because I am me, and because I have a background in crime fiction, there had to be a dead body, and that dead body turned out to be KitKat’s.

I then realized that I had stumbled upon the greatest idea I had ever had.

It was a great idea because I was able to write it from my heart. I was able to create a modern, likable protagonist with none of the worn clichés of the genre. And where there were conventions—the fact that she works for a private investigator as a temp—I was able to playfully twist those conventions to tell a story that felt true to me. Not to someone else. Yes, there are references to Raymond Chandler and The Shield, but I was able to look at the tools I had been given and use them to build something of my own design.

The book came together in about eight months, writing just a few hours a day, often doing my first drafts in a notebook on the bus and then typing those into the document at night. It was fun finding a voice for Jett, building her a world instead of trying to stuff her into someone else’s variation of New York or LA. Age had made me weary of violence, so I let myself have fun, keeping the book as lighthearted and generous as a murder mystery can be. And I was able to weave in my second love, that is, music. With references to Warren Zevon, The Vapors, Steely Dan and countless others, I shared my love of music with the reader, a narrative mix tape.

(FUN FACT: After the book was released, The Vapors, best known for their hit “Turning Japanese,” reunited. They have been playing gigs around the UK ever since. I’m not taking credit for this, buuuuut…)

And when I was finished, I cold-queried Jim McCarthy at Dystel, Goderich & Bourret Literary Management, and he agreed to take me on as a client. Another quick polish and it was off to William Morrow, where editor Chelsey Emmelheintz acquired the book for publication in Feb. 2016. It received a starred review from Kirkus, as well as praise from Publisher’s Weekly, Booklist and USA Today.

One of the hardest parts of writing is finding your own voice. It’s easy to play in someone else’s sandbox because they’ve already done the hard work. But it is important to dig deeper, to find a narrative that is meaningful to you as a writer and as a reader.