The New Black Mask (No 4)

Loren D. Estleman: An Interview

Loren Estleman is a relative newcomer among hard-boiled detective novelists. His first book was published less than a decade ago. He has a background in journalism, having written for three Michigan newspapers, and he lives near Detroit, the beleaguered city Amos Walker calls home.

While he is best known to New Black Mask readers for his novels featuring either Walker or the professional hit man Peter Macklin, Mr. Estleman has also distinguished himself as a writer of Westerns, winning the Western Writers of America Golden Spur Award for his novel Aces and Eights, based on the life of Wild Bill Hickok as it is revealed during the trial of his murderer.

Critic Robin Winks has remarked that he reads Loren Estleman “for the sheer joy of seeing the phrases fall into place.” A prose stylist who believes that some of the best writers in the English language take private eyes as their subjects, Mr. Estleman does not find it necessary to apologize for his material.

NBM: How long had you been writing before your first novel, The Oklahoma Punk, was published?

Estleman: Eight years.

NBM: So you started when you were sixteen?

Estleman: No, actually I was about fifteen.

NBM: And writing with a view toward being a professional writer?

Estleman: Oh, yeah.

NBM: Publishing?

Estleman: Yep.

NBM: Where?

Estleman: The first place I sent a short story, when I was fifteen, was Argosy magazine. So I had my mind on the pulp fiction market even then.

NBM: What was the attraction of the pulps?

Estleman: It seemed to be my kind of fiction. I had tried, and now and then I still try, to write one of these things that takes place entirely in someone’s head, and I found that it just wasn’t for me. I write stories about people who do things.

NBM: Action and adventure?

Estleman: Right.

NBM: The pulps are typically thought of as being a man’s reading material.

Estleman: Yeah, to begin with, although there was a time when there were fully as many women readers as men — at least of the Westerns. Around thirty years ago men, women, and children were gobbling up Westerns by the millions.

NBM: Do you have any sense now that you are writing for a male audience?

Estleman: I am constantly interested in finding out how I am going over with a female audience. It always surprises me, and maybe it shouldn’t, to learn that I have quite a large female following for the Amos Walker series. A lot of my colleagues have asked me how my Walker series does with women, because he’s kind of macho as opposed to the usual modern Alan Alda kind of hero. My answer is always the same: I seem to be going over quite well with women. What captures the female audience is Walker’s type of humor. He doesn’t take himself too seriously. I think that is an important ingredient in what I call the quintessential American hero, the complete revolutionary who does not take authority, others, or himself too seriously.

NBM: You have written a substantial amount of Western fiction. Why Westerns?

Estleman: I think I recognized early on that the Western is a purely American form, and it was a form that I could relate to more than, say, the European style of both living and writing. There are definite similarities between the detective form and the Western form. One of them is the revolutionary hero I talked about. The cowboy myth, if you will, the man alone, the man outside — that goes back to our own revolutionary beginning. Whether I’m writing about Amos Walker, who lives on the modern urban frontier, or a character named Page Murdock in one of my books set on the Western frontier, I’m basically writing about the same kind of person, though I am using somewhat different methods and describing different forms of civilization. Nevertheless, it’s the same person underneath it all. The idea of the lone revolutionary-type hero has produced a purely American form. Too often we overlook in our fiction Ned Buntline, Prentiss Ingraham, Owen Wister, Jack Schaeffer, Louis L’Amour, and some of the more sophisticated Western writers. You can draw a straight line from the Street & Smith Buffalo Bill stories and Ned Buntline stories right to Street & Smith’s pulps of the twenties and thirties and forties and then to today’s paperback novels. That type of story is beginning to make itself known in the hardcovers now.

NBM: There’s a classic affinity between the Western and mystery fiction.

Estleman: There are definite differences too. The mystery is more complex in the way it deals with nature and a bit more cerebral because of it. I don’t mean puzzles of the Agatha Christie type. Detectives depend on their minds a little bit more than their physical reactions.

NBM: The setting of detective fiction is certainly more complex.

Estleman: The settings are basically different, and yet somehow the same too. Both are set in a kind of a gray-area frontier where the only real law is the law that a man makes for himself.

NBM: If my count is right, your fourteenth book will be published in spring 1986.

Estleman: Actually my twenty-second. If you ask me about that, I will say that I remember writing every one of those twenty-two books, but I don’t remember writing twenty-two books.

NBM: You have series novels with at least three publishers. For Houghton Mifflin you do the Amos Walker mysteries; for Mysterious Press you do the Macklin series; and for Doubleday you do the Westerns. Have you ever written under a pseudonym?

Estleman: I never have. Never felt the urge to. I never really trusted it in the people that I read because I always felt that what they wrote under a pseudonym was something that they didn’t put their heart and soul into. I always thought that if I ever did write under a pseudonym, subconsciously I would not make it as good as if I were putting my own name on it. I’m much more comfortable with my own name, because knowing that my reputation is going to depend forever on that book, I’m going to make it as good as I can.

NBM: Is there one of your series characters that makes your heart beat a little faster, that you anticipate writing about with a little more excitement?

Estleman: Yes. When I’m writing a Western I’d rather be writing a mystery, and vice versa. It always works that way. That’s why we’re paid. But you’re always thinking ahead to the next project wishing you were doing something else, because when you get to the nuts and bolts, it’s not as romantic as it was when you first had the idea. They all make my heart beat faster, though, when the writing’s going well. I may be more comfortable in the Western form. I can’t really tell you why. Maybe it’s because it’s a little bit freer, and I can depend on those reactions a little bit more. And you can use a little bit more action and not feel as if you’re just greasing a story up. That’s how things were done out West; they were men of action. But I certainly wouldn’t give up the mystery for anything. Any time I begin to contemplate a new Walker book, it’s like seeing an old friend. As long as that continues, I’m going to continue to do it. If I ever find myself writing a Walker book just to write a Walker book, that would be the time to quit that series and go on to something else. It has to be enjoyable for me or it’s not going to be enjoyable for my readers.

NBM: Why do you write short stories? With your writing schedule they would seem to be a distraction and not worth your time.

Estleman: I enjoy them; they’re a challenge. They are certainly a change of pace when I have finished a long project like a novel. I enjoy writing short stories. And yet, probably when you talk about intensive work, a short story is exceedingly more difficult to write than a novel. It’s kind of like making love on an elevator; you have to know where you’re going from the beginning. You have to nail your character down in a couple of lines and move on from there — keep it in constant movement. It’s been said that those who can’t write poetry write short stories, and those who can’t write short stories write novels. I don’t know about the poetry part because it’s been twenty, twenty-five years since I’ve tried poetry. But I do know that short stories are a challenge.

NBM: Do you ever worry, as Hemingway might put it, that the juices might dry up?

Estleman: Not consciously, but certainly when I’m between books and more than a couple of weeks — well, let’s be honest — when more than about two days pass, I start to climb the walls. There’s always that little niggling doubt somewhere in the back of my mind that maybe I’ve lost it and can’t do it anymore, and I have to glue myself to the typewriter and get back in the harness and prove to myself that I can. That may be a valuable asset.

NBM: In nine years of book publishing you’ve established yourself in the first rank of writers in two genres, if you also count Westerns, both of which are becoming more and more respectable.

Estleman: Very good people have been working in the Western field, and I fear that the average reader hears so much about Louis L’Amour that he’ll pick up a L’Amour book and think that this is as good as it gets. L’Amour writes well, not as well as he used to, but he still writes well. But there are people who are doing classic American literature in that form who are not as well known.

NBM: Aside from talent, which is obvious, to what do you attribute the success you have enjoyed in a relatively short professional career? A lot of people, presumably even talented people, have books that they can’t get published.

Estleman: Sure. Those stories are all over the place. Both world and American literature would be immeasurably richer if a lot of books that never were published had gotten to the right people. I think that many fine, fine writers have been and are being overlooked. I know a few myself. I think the real danger that we face now is the mania for categorization. The average publisher is afraid to touch a book that doesn’t fall into an acceptable pigeonhole. They don’t know how to present and how to handle books otherwise. I think that’s going to be a problem for a while. I had a realistic approach from the beginning. I knew that the kind of writing I wanted to do would be the kind that could be popular. And, also, I thought that I could maintain my integrity, and I feel that I have by doing the best that I am able to do. At the same time I’m lucky enough that the kind of writing I’m most comfortable with is the kind that tends to be the most popular. Yet I’ve never really gone with the trends. If I see a trend developing, I almost immediately head in the opposite direction. That’s how it was with Amos Walker. When I started Amos Walker, there were no other major private detective figures out there except Bob Parker’s Spenser, and when I first started doing Westerns, they were at their nadir both critically and popularly. I guess there was a certain amount of luck there. After my first book, I landed an excellent agent who I still have and who can speed things up immeasurably because he knows to whom to send a book. I’ve had a series of very good editors along the way who have well understood what it is I’m trying to do and have known how much to take part and when to back off and defer to me. I may be more comfortable and more knowledgeable as a result of these circumstances, and that is a valuable asset. At the same time, I look around and I see extremely good, Nobel prize-quality writers who are just not being published.

NBM: You said that the writers whose works have had the most profound influence on your own writing are Edgar Allan Poe, Jack London, and Raymond Chandler. How big a factor is the writing of others in your work? Or to put it differently, how dependent are you as a writer on literary history?

Estleman: I think every writer is definitely dependent on those who have gone before us. Both on their mistakes and on the trail that they’ve blazed. I can’t pinpoint any one person who has been the greatest influence on me. They have all been influences to some degree. And that’s not a bad thing. It’s a good place to start as long as you can move on from there and advance the cause that these other writers started. I read a great deal, and I make it a practice not to read writers who do not themselves read. We read for the same reason a baseball player looks at a videotape of another player in action. Certainly a pitcher does it to sec how his opponent works and to see if he can better it. You also read to know what’s going on around you; and it’s good for the soul. Two things can make you sit down and write. One is reading a book that is really bad, thinking I could do much better; the second is reading a book that’s very good. It makes that old fear work up, and you think maybe I better get back in the harness here and establish myself.

NBM: Television seems hungry now for detective series, especially hard-boiled detective series. These shows haven’t been in vogue for about fifteen years. Why the interest all of a sudden?

Estleman: It would have to do with our continuing interest in crime. Crime is something that happens to people you’ve never heard of, except when it happens to your next-door neighbor, or to people in your family, or to you and me. As long as we are potential victims, the interest in crime fiction is going to continue — certainly in detective fiction in which the criminal gets caught, because it’s something you don’t see too much in everyday life. It’s definitely going to continue to grow as time goes by. The reason private detectives themselves are of interest now is this American revolutionary concept. At the moment, I think people are sick and tired of police, and they want to see something a little less structured than police procedure. They want to see basically ordinary men of an extraordinary makeup doing things the police can’t because of the Bill of Rights, the Supreme Court, and the inertia of modern American law enforcement.

NBM: So you don’t think that detective fiction or detective material is in danger of being oversold, as Donald Westlake has suggested?

Estleman: Probably not. I don’t think that it can be oversold. I think that there’s going to be a lot of bad detective fiction written; there always has. And along the way there’s going to be a lot of good fiction. But as far as being oversold, I don’t see that happening.

NBM: You’re now thirty-three years old. Do you anticipate with tranquility another thirty years of writing fiction?

Estleman: Oh, yes. That’s what I’ve been doing so far, and that’s what I’ve always wanted to do. I don’t see that changing. I can’t tap-dance or sing. So I think I’ll stick with the talent I have. I do hope that I’m going to continue to get better, and I hope never to sell out.