A Rare Interview with Crime Author Joe Stein

‘Stein writes with real class and has created a devastatingly credible and hugely desirable character in Garron.’

Praise for Joe Stein’s previous book in the series, That Twisted Thing Called Truth, reviewed in The Truth About Books, and I couldn’t agree more.

To me, Garron is of particular interest as a ‘deep character’ with the complexity on which I’ve recently been leading workshops all over the UK and the Netherlands. Garron is an ex-boxer trying to make a new life with the skills he has – as a bodyguard – but the maelstrom of his earlier life has a way of dragging him back, conflicting with his conscience and his desire to make good, as far as he can work out what that means. More often, simply staying alive becomes the priority of the moment.

As the latest Garron crime thriller is about to be launched in London, I feel very fortunate to bring you an interview with the author, Joe Stein. And before we start, here is the eye-catching and intriguing cover.

 

 

Trish:

While part of a series, each of your books stands alone; do you start with a story idea for each book, or with what Garron is capable of getting into at any particular time?

Joe:
I’m interested in why people do things and I use this character to try to illustrate the way people behave in certain circumstances, their motivations and sometimes lack of them. So with each book I’ll have an idea of where I want the characters to end up. Then I try to think of how to get them there, what would be an interesting situation, or relationship, or set-piece even, for the reader to see these characters in. The plot builds around these, and my plots tend to be fairly simple, these are character based books, not intricate mysteries.

Trish:
The character-driven approach is certainly the attraction to me as a reader, but for a writer, what are the pros and cons of writing a series based around a single main character?

Joe:
My take on writing a series is that you have a greater opportunity to develop the characters and explore the changes that they go through. In any single given story, the main character is caught up in a set of events, or interacts with a specific set of people. In a pure ‘action’ book, readers may get caught up in the events, but as I mentioned, it has always been more important to me why a character does something, rather than just what that character does. The action may be vital, but it’s a means to an end. By writing a series about a particular character you get to go deeper into what makes him or her tick.

There are definitely negatives, though. Occasionally I think I would really like to write in a different style, but this character has to stay credible and grounded in his particular world and there are things that just wouldn’t fit with him and styles of writing that wouldn’t fit the stories. Quite often I find myself not being able to use certain descriptive language, because this guy simply wouldn’t talk in that way. I have to either forget it, or work a different character into the scene.

Trish:
Or perhaps write a different sort of story altogether? All your novels are set in the crime/thriller world. Would you consider writing in a different genre?

Joe:
Yes, I’d like to at some point, although I have to say that at the moment, I’m still enjoying writing about Garron and his world. But I do have a couple of ideas, which haven’t got past the sketching stage.

I used to write more short stories, where I pushed myself to write in different genres and I found that very useful – to be able to dip into another world for a while, but not be investing about eighteen months in it!

But I do think that the best crime / thriller books shouldn’t be just about crime, they should be examining human relationships and the way we act and interact with each other. Writing crime fiction allows you to examine how people behave under unusual stresses and in unusual situations and how they deal with those (or don’t).

Trish:
I agree, and how we cope with stresses varies, for better or worse, at different stages of our lives. Over the last few years of Garron’s complex life, do you see his character as having changed in significant ways?

Joe:
I think he has become more self-aware, even more self-reliant and he’s certainly had a few of his illusions broken.

For me, Garron has to be a ‘real’ person who is affected by what he does and by what goes on around him. This means that there is always more to learn about him and it’s essential to me to have him develop book to book, for the reader to discover more about him and how he reacts to events as he goes on.

There are so many devices a writer can use to highlight their lead characters’ thoughts and personalities. Introducing relationships, either personal or work-related is a standard and putting them into stressful situations shows their temperament or breaking point. Many lead characters in crime fiction have sidekicks to play off, through which you learn more about the lead (think Holmes and Watson, Morse and Lewis, etc.).

I wanted Garron to have to deal with his problems alone, to be completely isolated and that’s what I did in book one. But then to learn more about the character, I couldn’t just allow him to do the same thing again, so it was important that the circumstances changed for the second book and then again for the third and fourth, crucially not suddenly changing, but instead developing the underlying psychology of the character, who is a loner type person. How does he cope with what he does, how does he live with his actions, can he let others into his life, how do his actions affect those around him. Garron has learnt a lot about himself over the last few years, but often he absorbs this information without really thinking about it. Sometimes he gets things wrong. Maybe the first person reasoning he uses might be something the reader disagrees with, but that’s fine. He’s not a role model, he’s a guy with little education and one or two specific skills trying to make his way day to day. He wants to live his life in the right way, but his definition of right and the reader’s might not be the same. Over the past books, he’s come to terms with what he isn’t. I’m not sure he’s yet come to terms with what he is.

Trish:
Do you have an image of Garron’s longer term future, or does each book itself create the stages of his development?

Joe:
That’s a good question. I know some writers have a whole story ‘arc’ planned, but I’m not sure with Garron at which stage he will have had enough and I haven’t planned out Garron’s life for him beyond what I am writing at the moment. It is true that each book moves these characters into different places and I’m open to them changing direction when it seems right. But whilst I may not be planning too far ahead, one of the things I like about writing a series is laying down points, ideas and characters that I might pick up in a later book, although it can be a minefield if you don’t get your continuity right.

Trish:
One of the things that stand out for me in all your books is their credibility, and the realism of the action. How do you create that realism?

Joe:
That’s a key question for me. These are not gadget filled spy thrillers, or books where the lead is a six and a half foot tall martial arts expert who can make an improvised machine gun from two kitchen paper rolls and some sticky-backed plastic. Realism is different for different writers and genres. In a police procedural, you need to get that procedure part right. In some books, gory detail might be the realism that writer feels is needed to bring a scene to life. (Though I’m not a fan of gratuitous violent/sexual detail.) In a kitchen sink drama, the day to day details of people’s lives need to ring true.

The characters in my books have to behave the way they would in real life whether in the day to day scenes, or the action pieces. It certainly helps if you have some experience of what your characters are going through. Obviously given these are set in the crime genre, the stories and characters are a fictional exaggeration of things that I know about (and if they weren’t fictionalised, I’d still say that they were!) but those types, mindsets, even some of the lesser events (though not all) are based in reality. And that should give the books the credibility they need as a background to what the characters do and how they act.
And sometimes, making things real is not necessarily achieved by detailing every little point in a scene. I firmly believe that each reader automatically brings to a fiction book his/her own experiences, and therefore subliminally (good word that, not one I could use in a Garron book, unless spoken by a different character) colours the scenes and action and even some deliberate gaps in the descriptive writing, with their own background.

Trish:
Taking a wider view, so much in publishing seems to be in flux, what changes do you see in your own genre?

Joe:
The whole e-publishing boom has changed everything and even more so in the very popular genres, in that it has opened the market up to so many more writers. Even just the development of digital printing bringing down the cost of hard copy books has meant the main cost for publishers is now storing their books in bulk, not in printing them. Crime fiction has always been popular, and the fact that so many readers have become writers has both positive and negative factors. On the plus side, there are many more writers plying their trade and there are some very good books out there that may never have seen the light of day before. And the audience that you can reach is far greater. On the negative side, there are many, many books published which have little or no editing and proofreading, which seems to be having the effect, not only of producing poor standard books, even where the actual story-telling is good, but also in almost ‘dumbing down’ the expectations of the readers. Looking at some of the forums, people seem to be at a stage where when buying an e-book, they more or less expect there to be multiple typos and errors.

There is also a knock on effect for small presses – again both positive and negative. It is certainly less expensive to produce an e-book and market it, but at the same time independent publishers and small time writers are in competition with the big companies, who might put out a particular writer’s back catalogue on e-books at a low price. Given the choice between a well known best selling writer at £1.99 and a relatively unknown like myself at the same price, the readers are quite understandably going to go for the writer that they’ve heard about!

Trish:
And an issue that challenges most writers: with a family and a full-time job, how do you find time and presence of mind to write?

Joe:
With difficulty and usually on a Saturday night at one o’clock in the morning, when everyone else has gone to bed.

Trish:
And finally, I’m interested to know who were/are your literary heroes?

Joe:
Oh, the difficult question!
I think at different times in your life you respond to different books and it can be difficult to pin all of these down. But I would say that I always go back to Raymond Chandler’s Marlowe books, which brought crime stories out of the ‘pulps’ and made it acceptable for everyone to read them. These are books which have character, scope and depth.
And also in the PI genre, Hammett, Howard Browne, Arthur Lyons – I’m afraid I could go on and on, but I’ll stop with some of the non-crime, single books that I always re-read. The Master and Margarita by Bulgakov, Fat City, written by Leonard Gardner, Waterfront by Budd Schulberg, The Small Back Room, by Nigel Balchin and as a series, the Quiller spy books by Adam Hall. Very few in the ‘action spy’ genre give such a sense of the humanity of their lead character.

But ask me this one again next week and I might give you a different answer.

Trish:
Ah yes, I always find that question difficult, too, and I agree about the varying influence of different books at various points of our lives. Thank you, Joe, for taking up some of your limited writing time to answer my questions, and the best of luck with your new book, Through Another Night. I’ve become quite attached to the enigmatic Garron and look forward to this next phase of his life, and I love that dramatic cover.

Joe:
And thank you, Trish, for the questions. I don’t usually get the opportunity to think out loud about my writing, and these have been very interesting questions to answer.

Joe Stein’s new novel, Through Another Night is published by Ward Wood Publishing and will have its launch party on November 4th at the King Stores pub (where else would you expect to find Garron?) at 14 Widegate Street, London E1 7HP. This launch is special in another way too, also characteristic of Garron: everyone is welcome to come and meet Joe, just turn up at 6pm in the upstairs room above the bar. Sad I can’t be there myself.

If you can’t be there either, you can learn more about Joe and his books from his website:  http://www.joesteinauthor.co.uk/