Dick Davidson Interviews Marshall J. Cook, Part 1

Interview conducted by Dick Davidson, OCWW and www.davidsonbooks.com.

1. Q: In your many years of teaching at University of Wisconsin, Madison, you have influenced many fledgling writers. Have you seen variations and trends over time suggesting differences in the kinds of people who write and their levels of proficiency?

A: More and more people are writing—and publishing—fiction now, which I of course think is wonderful. Proficiency is and always has been all over the place, but pretty much every student I interact with is scared and doesn’t think he/she is any good at it.

2. Q: The last figures I saw showed you as the author of 21 nonfiction books and 6 novels. I believe that your mystery series contains your most recent works. You were once quoted as saying, “I love writing. Fiction, nonfiction, grocery lists, doesn’t matter.” Do you currently consider yourself more of a novelist, and do you plan on more mystery novels in the future?

A: You’re missing the most recent, Walking Wounded: A Wartime Love Story, my seventh published novel. (And by the way, I never stop being amazed and thrilled every time a new book comes out.) I’m definitely focused on the novel now; it was always my first love. I’m hoping for a fifth book in the Monona Quinn Mystery Series, and I have a couple of other things rattling around inside.

3. Q: I have read that Murder Over Easy was based on the real-life murder of a diner owner. Do you recommend basing a mystery novel on an actual event, or do you think authors do better when they use their imaginations without being restrained by headlines? (One television series deliberately characterizes its plots as being “ripped from the headlines”.)

A: We do better when we aren’t restrained by anything in terms of material to write about. The first two novels in the Monona series were based on real events. Three and four are not. All four are total works of fiction, meaning I made the stuff up.

4. Q: You once recommended that a query letter sent to an agent or publisher should pitch a single novel except for the situation where you are writing a series. How would you handle the situation where you are pitching the second novel in a series to a different publisher than the one who issued the first volume?

A: Same process, but you of course mention the existence of the first book (which should help rather than hurt your chances with the second).

5. Q: What do you think about some of the new technical trends in publishing? Will economic trends, better editing, and quantities of titles guaranty eventual parity of POD books with traditionally published titles? Will the numbers game of E-book publishing make it very difficult for any one title to stand out?

A: I LOVE the new technology (and that from one who reveres the book as a holy object). POD and e-books have opened up publishing incredibly and made book publishing much more economical and less wasteful.

That said, it has made it tremendously difficult for any one title to receive any attention and find its readers. (The problem has shifted from getting published to getting noticed.) When I first started teaching, there were 65,000 books published that year in America (about a tenth of them fiction). The number is now 10 times that! (with the same ratio of fiction to non-fiction). Average sale of a POD self-published book is 147—but millions of people are selling them, so the so-called tail of the marketing dragon has become huge.

6. Q: As online book sales become increasingly important, do you think that publishers will do away with the free return policy for bookstores? If they do, what will bookstores of the future look like?

A: Great question.

I think in the not-too-distant future bookstores will have display copies only. When you buy a book, someone pushes a button, and a computer publishes a single copy of the book, your copy, at a regional distribution center. You get your book within a day or so, and there are no returned/remaindered books.

7. Q: What makes British mysteries so special? Is it history, environment, humor?

A: I think every country has lots of “special” mysteries and tons of not-so-special ones. To the extent that there’s a national outlook and a collective consciousness, the mysteries reflect this.

The Brits gave the world the cozy. America and the French gave it noir. Nobody does hard-boiled better than America.

8. Q: The new technologies of publishing make it relatively easy to create a new publishing firm. Would the emergence of many new small, specialized publishers be a good trend? How do you see publishing developing in the future?

A: We already touched on this a bit. Len Fulton (Dustbooks) has been tracking (and nurturing) small press publishers for four decades (God bless him). I join him in thinking that the little indies have been and remain the source of incredible vitality and experimentation in our literature. I love the fact that publishing is becoming cheap enough for many more to do it. This really parallels the advent of the computer in terms of making publishing more accessible.

9. Q: There are genre mysteries, and there are mainstream novels that have mystery aspects to them. Do you think most mystery readers are specialists, or do you see a wider market for mystery writing in one form or another?

A: I think we pigeonhole novels and novelists, primarily because it’s a lot easier to market them that way. But there are and always have been writers who defy categorization and transcend genre. From Raymond Chandler to Elmore Leonard and James Lee Burke, we have mystery/thriller/crime novelists writing great literature.

And tell me Ernest Gaines’ Long Day in November is ‘just’ a kids’ book and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird is “just” a young adult novel.

10. Q: Are the better mystery and mainstream novel authors formally taught techniques, self-taught through trial and error, or just born to the art?

A: I think folks are born with the inclination, desire, and even need to write stories. It may even be that the stories pick the writers instead of the other way around. And certainly, just as some folks are born with greater natural athletic ability, some are born with more natural facility with language than others. But I’d never try to discourage anyone anywhere from writing.

Some writers are products of creative writing classes and MFA programs. Many are not. Take Louis L’Amour, who jumped a freight and hoboed around the country at age 15 and taught himself by stopping at the public library everywhere he went. He became our foremost writer of westerns and a true expert on the west.

If I had to choose whether to close down the writing schools or the libraries, I would without hesitation choose the former.