Sheldon Russell is on "The Insane Train"

 

Author Sheldon Russell is a former Oklahoma public school English teacher and professor emeritus from the University of Central Oklahoma, who currently lives in Guthrie, Oklahoma, with his artist wife, Nancy. Russell has previously won the Oklahoma Book Award and the Langum Prize for Historical Literature but has also penned crime fiction titles, beginning with Empire, in 1993, and The Yard Dog: A Mystery in 2009, which introduced the one-armed railroad detective (or "yard dog"), Hook Runyon, set during World War II.

In Russell's follow-up novel, The Insane Train, the Baldwin Insane Asylum in Barstow, California, has recently burned to the gound, costing many inmates their lives. Hook Runyon is put in charge of security for a train that is to transport the survivors and the head of the asylum, Dr. Baldwin, to a new location in Oklahoma. Hook hires a motley crew of down-on-their luck army veterans to help, but things start to go awry when several inmates and attendants are found dead, and Dr.Baldwin seems increasingly disoriented and incapable of running operations. With the help of a nurse, Andrea, Hook begins investigating the suspicious deaths and uncovers a trail of revenge that has been a long time in the planning.

Russell stopped by IRTM for a Q&A, and you can also enter the giveaway for a free signed copy of Insane Train (via details at the bottom of this post), a book Publishers Weekly deemed one of the top mystery books of 2010.

IRTM: You apparently based Insane Train in part on a real-life event. Can you tell us a little more about that?

SR: Perhaps not so much an event as a series of events.  When I was a child, I had an uncle who returned from WWII with serious mental issues.  I went with my father to have him committed and that experience left an indelible mark on me.  Later, as a college student, I visited this same institution and saw the process from a different perspective.  Stark images, some too awful to describe here, have remained with me over many years. 

All of this, in addition to years of studying psychology, came together to inspire THE INSANE TRAIN.  After all, what better than having Hook Runyon in trouble on a train?  Contrary to what one might think, THE INSANE TRAIN is not a dark book.  All that’s human can be found in mental disorder, and humor often shines brightest from out of the darkness.

IRTM: You taught English and education, yet you've focused on historical fiction and nonfiction. How did you develop this passion and turn it into a literary career?

SR: Well, I have a minor in ancient history and studied the classics as an English major.  But I think my upbringing influenced my interest in history as much as my studies.  I grew up on a cattle ranch in the Gloss Mountains of Oklahoma.  It was an isolated existence, and I was surrounded by adults who were products of The Great Depression and WWII.  I listened to stories about those events my whole life.  In many ways the past became more real to me than the present.

I’ve always enjoyed museums, antiquity, old books, and  biography.  I love wandering around in the past and discovering things long forgotten.  Historical fiction indulged all of these passions.   

IRTM: Writing a historical novel can be tricky, having to conduct a lot of research to get details as accurate as possible. That must be even more difficult when dealing with mental illness practices of the day, in this case, the 1940s. Where did you look for inspiration and background information for the events depicted in Insane Train?

SR: While digging through the historical society achieves one day, I came upon an article about a fire that destroyed a private mental institution shortly after Oklahoma had become a state.  Many of the inmates, a term used for mental patients in those days, were buried in a mass grave.  At about the same time, the federal government turned over a fort to the state, and the decision was made to convert it to a mental institution.  They transferred the surviving patients to the fort by train.  This was, of course, a perfect situation for Hook Runyon, railroad yard dog.

I learned to research as a graduate student and refined those skills as a professor.  For me, it’s been one of the more enjoyable tasks of writing.  I first read widely about my subject and then narrow it to specifics.  I read books about the criminally insane early in my research for THE INSANE TRAIN. 

But one of the last things I went to was the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, a reference published by the American Psychological Association. While the reference bolstered my confidence as a writer and opened up my thinking, I worked hard at keeping it from showing through in my writing.  I try never to state facts about anything.  Readers of historical fiction don’t want to read about history.  They want to live it through the characters.   

IRTM: Where did the inspiration for Runyon and this series originate? He's certainly an unusual and fascinating protagonist even living in a caboose.

SR: As a youngster I was fascinated by the rail yards, the steam engines thundering in and out all through the night, the smell of heat and creosote, the men in their oil-soaked overalls.  None was more mysterious and interesting than yard dogs, railroad security agents, men known for their lack of fear and their quick execution of justice.  They dealt with desperate men and in the most dangerous of places.  Stories about the ferocity of yard dogs abounded, so my interest in them was inevitable. 

In my view, journeys make the best stories, and men with flaws make the best protagonists.  The railroad, the caboose, and Hook Runyon all fit the bill.

IRTM: The first novel in the series, Yard Dog, deals with a Nazi POW camp in Oklahoma. I having a feeling that many people probably aren't aware there was such a place in the 1940s. Do you feel the teacher in you coming out a bit in these novels by way of helping introduce readers to places and events they might not have learned about otherwise?

SR: THE YARD DOG is set in Camp Alva, Okla., a POW camp that was designed to hold the most dangerous Nazi prisoners near the end of WWII.  At it’s height it contained over 5,000 prisoners. 

There were many POW camps in the United States at that time, often located in isolated areas for security reasons.  I’m always surprised at how many people are unaware of this.  Even the locals, particularly the younger ones, have a limited knowledge of the prison and what happened within its walls. 

My priority in writing is to entertain, so I resist the urge to teach.  That said, I do believe that curiosity is an inherent human trait and that most of us enjoy learning something new, particularly when it’s painless.

IRTM: Author James R. Benn called your writing "mid-century American noir." Would you agree with that description, as related to the Runyon series?

SR: Yes, in large part.  Hook is certainly hard-bitten and cynical.  He drinks too much, and it’s not always clear on which side of the law he’s operating.  He’s been known to drop the hat pretty fast and has little compunction about doing whatever it takes to survive. 

On the other hand, he has intellectual curiosity.  He reads, collects rare books, and has an affinity for the underdog.  Hook likes his women smart and strong, loves his old dog, Mixer, and cuts a lot of slack for his sidekicks, who tend to be off center.  

IRTM: You list Conroy, Steinbeck and McMurtry as authors you admire. Do you feel they have influenced your writing, and are there any others in the crime fiction world who have made an impression?

SR:  I  learned from Conroy to worry more about quality and less about quantity.  From Steinbeck, I learned the power of place and from McMurtry, the structure of narrative well told.  I’m still learning from the world of crime writers, Robert B Parker’s incisive use of dialogue, John MacDonald’s seamless  transitions in his Travis McGee series, James Patterson’s cliff- hanging suspense. 

But most of all, I just read to fill the well because ideas spawn ideas, and ideas are a writer’s currency.

IRTM:  Your next Hook Runyon novel features a railway tunnel in the Arizona desert that was under guard during WWII. What's next for Runyon in this book and beyond?

SR: The neat thing about this series, from my point of view, is that I can couple up Hook’s caboose to Frenchy’s steamer and move him to the next trouble spot.  This kind of flexibility permits new situations, places, and people.  Not only does this keep the stories fresh and vigorous for my readers but for me as well. 

In the next book Hook comes face to face with a changing world, a world no longer obsessed with World War II.  Like after any traumatic experience, adjustments have to be made to new realities.  Hook is no exception.  

I’ve a couple ideas brewing for future books beyond that and plan to keep Hook in trouble for as long as there’s interest.

IRTM: Since you're an Okie — Woodie Guthrie or Garth Brooks?

SR: I’m going with Woodie here.  You gotta’ love a man who looked out for the underdog, had the courage to speak his mind and the nerve to live in immigrant camps while doing it.  It’s something Hook Runyon might do.   

Russell Sheldon is giving away a signed copy of his book, Insane Train, to one lucky tour visitor. Go to his book tour page, enter your name, e-mail address, and this PIN, 8399, for your chance to win. Entries from In Reference to Murder will be accepted until 12:00 Noon (PT) tomorrow. No purchase is required to enter or to win. The winner (first name only) will be announced on his book tour page next week.

A Trio of Worthy Debuts

 It's always a pleasure to discover new novelists who have written works that compare favorably to those of more-established authors. On a recent train trip to Vermont to see family, I had the luxury of time (it's an 11-hour ride), and happily read my way through the autumn countryside views and three debut novels.

Hilary Davidson has been known in crime fiction circles for a while due to her short stories, published in such venues as ThugLit, A Twist of Noir, Rose and Thorn, CrimeFactory and Spinetingler, with her story "Anniversary" selected for A Prisoner of Memory: And 24 of the Year's Finest Crime and Mystery Stories in 2008. She's also a travel writer and her debut novel The Damage Done features travel journalist Lily Moore, who returns to New York upon the news that her sister Claudia, a recovering heroin addict, has allegedly drowned in her bathtub on the anniversary of their mother's suicide—only to learn the corpse isn't that of her sister, but a lookalike stranger who's been posing as Claudia. Thus begins a frantic search for her missing sister and the murderer of the stranger (with the assistance of her best friend Jessie and two sympathetic cops) that may involve Claudia's former lover, wealthy Tariq Lawrence, and Lily's ex-fiancé, real-estate tycoon Martin Sklar. Davidson maintains the suspense at a high level but also manages terrific character development, vivid imagery, and an engaging mystery, to boot. Her next novel, The Next One to Fall, is due out October 2011 and will be one to look for.

Helen Grant worked in marketing for ten years to fund her love of travelling, eventually moving to Bad Müenstereifel in Germany. It was exploring the legends of that beautiful historic town that inspired her to write her first novel (after having a few supernatural short stories published), The Vanishing of Katharina Linden, which is set there and features local folk tales and legends. Publishers Weekly called Grant's debut "a charming horror novel," but that's a good description, dealing as it does with 10-year-old Pia Kolvenbach, whose grandmother accidentally sets herself on fire and burns to death. Becoming an outcast afterward, Pia's only friend is the most unpopular boy in her class, nicknamed StinkStefan. The duo begin visiting an elderly man who entertains them with folk tales that Pia and StinkStefan hope will help them solve the mystery of local girls who have gone missing, including Katharina Linden—a girl last seen alive by Pia. Although the mystery is an integral part of the novel, its real strength lies in the pitch-perfect setting and the coming-of-age lessons that teach Pia the adult world is even darker than ghost stories and all too real.

Avner Mandelman was born in Israel and served in the Israeli Air Force during the Six-Day War. He started out writing short stories (a recurring theme for these debuters!), and his story collection Talking to the Enemy was chosen by Kirkus as one of the 25 best books of 2005 and by the ALA as the first recipient of the Sophie Brody Medal for outstanding achievement in Jewish literature. His first novel is the thriller The Debba—a mythical Arab hyena that can turn into a man and lure Jewish children away from their families to teach them the language of the beasts. To the Arabs, he is a heroic national symbol; to the Jews, he is a terrorist; to the novel's protagonist David Starkman, the Debba is a controversial play written by his war-hero father that was only performed only once and caused a massive riot. David had renounced his Israeli citizenship and moved to Canada, but when he learns his estranged father has been gruesomely murdered and the Will stipulates David stage the play within 45 days, he returns to his homeland and gets drawn into a world where the sins of the fathers are painfully and dangerously revisited upon the sons. It's a biting and pensive debut work that also turns a microscope upon the unrelenting Arab-Israeli conflict.

It's NoirCon!

 

If you're in the Philadelphia area, there's still time to register for all or part of NoirCon 2010, held primarily at the Society Hill Playhouse, 507 South 8th Street.

There are panels and events through Sunday, including Friday's "Pornography in Noir Fiction," a panel with Reed F. Coleman, Jay Gertzman and Christa Faust; Philadelphia Noir celebrating the anthology with authors Meredith Anthony, Keith Gilman,  Dennis Tafoya, Jim Zervanos, Duane Swierczynski and Carlin Romano; an interview of George Pelecanos by Laura Lippman; "Noir Poetry" by Daniel Hoffman, Robert Polito and Ed Pettit; and "Writers on Noir" with Vicki Hendricks, Reed Farrel Coleman, William Heffernan, Seth Harwood with Cameron Ashley (Crime Factory).

Saturday and Sunday highlights include "Through a Rearview Darkly: A Revisionist History of Noir" by  Megan Abbott and Anthony Neil Smith; and a panel with authors in Damn Near Dead 2: Live Noir or Die Trying! (from Busted Flush Press), including Patti Abbott, Scott Cupp, Christa Faust, Scott Phillips, S.J. Rozan and Reed F. Coleman.

The keynote address will be given on Saturday by playwright Joan Schenkar, biographer of Patricia Highsmith (The Talented Miss Highsmith), who told the Philadelphia Inquirer (in answer to what makes a noir writer?), "The noir author is someone who is compelled to walk always on the dark side of the street, looking for answers that are not there to questions that are barely formulable, articulating the very interesting American obsession with murder and with what murder does for you."

Vicki Delany's "Negative Image"

Author Vicki Delany took early retirement from her job as a systems analyst in the high-pressure financial world to take a year off travelling across North Americ before finally settling down in bucolic Prince Edward County, Ontario, where "she rarely wears a watch." Her two mystery series take full advantage of the rural Canadian settings where she lives, including the historical Klondike Gold Rush mysteries and the Smith and Winters novels, set in a traditional British Columbia village.

Negative Image is the fourth Smith and Winters installment featuring the young Constable Molly Smith and her mentor, hard-edged Trafalgar City Police Sergeant John Winters, whose wife Eliza is a former supermodel. The story centers on famous photographer Rudolph Steiner who arrives in town to reconnect with the woman who left him twenty-five years ago (to marry another man), none other than Eliza Winters. When Steiner is found murdered in his luxury hotel room, suspicion falls on Eliza, and Sergeant Winters is forced into the most difficult decision of his life: loyalty to his job or to his wife. Meanwhile, Constable Molly Smith has her own troubles including a series of breakins has the peaceful town in an uproar, her overprotective Mountie boyfriend who is fighting with her colleagues and a vengeful stalker watching her every move.

Vicki's on a promotional tour for the novel and stopped by In Reference to Murder for a chat.

IRTM:  Negative Image is a book that explores the meaning of family, as well as the forces that bind or separate them. Without giving too much of the plot away, can you elaborate on that theme?

VD: Family dynamics are important in all my books. I like to explore various types of families and relationships and ask what works and what doesn’t. In Negative Image I ask the question: What would you do if you believe the person you trust most in the world has betrayed you? What would you do if you discover that the person you trust most in the world believes you capable of betrayal?

A visitor to Trafalgar is murdered and Sergeant John Winters begins to fear that Eliza, his wife of twenty-five years, isn’t the woman he thinks she is. Another long term marriage ends, and a new relationship is getting off to a very rocky start. Part of the reason I love writing, and reading, crime fiction is that a mystery novel is a perfect way of exploring the human psyche under pressure. Let’s see what a suspicion of murder does to a happily married couple or what happens to young love when the female partner works in a traditional male field.

IRTM: The Molly Smith books are set in the fictional town of Trafalgar, British Columbia, which is based on the real town of Nelson. Have you based any fictional characters on real-life personalities, and/or do people in Nelson ever ask if they've become fodder for your writing?

VD: With one exception, I don’t use real life people in my books.  Here’s a line from Winter of Secrets, the third book in the series:

Slightly ahead and to her right a bright red Toyota Echo, dotted with magnetic black circles that made the car look like a giant ladybug, backed out of a parking space. The ladybug hit a patch of ice and slid downhill, very slowly, coming to rest against the bumper of the police car. A tall, slim middle-aged woman climbed out, spiked purple hair, red coat, blue scarf, yellow mittens, and clanging jewelry.

That is a friend of mine, and such a well-known and well-loved person in town I thought it would be fun to include her. I let her read the paragraph first and got her permission to describe her. I have a good relationship with the Nelson City Police and they always say things like they should dress nicely today so they look good in my book. Generally speaking the people in my life are far too boring to provide much fodder for a crime novel.

IRTM: One of the challenges of setting a crime fiction series in a more rural setting is how to work in a series of plausible and unusual murders and/or other crimes in a succession of books (I grew up in a town with a small population—almost exactly the same as Nelson—where violent crime is somewhat rare, so I speak from experience). How do you set about finding plots and storylines that can arise organically from such a setting?

VD: That can be a problem for sure. Trafalgar, like Nelson, is a tourist town and also sees a lot of transients passing through. In Winter of Secrets it’s a group of university students on Christmas vacation who run into trouble, and in Negative Image it’s a photographer in town to do a feature on mountain tourism. I want these to be realistic police novels and not have the townsfolk dropping dead all over the place. On the other hand, the books are fiction. In Nelson, no one can quite remember when the last murder was.

IRTM:  You've indicated that generally speaking, Canadian books, even police procedurals, are concerned as much with personalities and relationships as with solving the crime. What other differences do you see between Canadian  crime fiction authors and those from the U.S. or other countries?

VD: Canadian crime writing tends, generally, to be neither as soft nor as hard as American mystery novels. There are not many, if any, real cozies published in Canada although there are Canadian cozy writers published in the U.S. On the other end of the spectrum, you don’t get many really hard-boiled or noir crime novels set in Canada. Louise Penny’s books are a good example: she created a lovely little village and populated it with interesting people who have very intricate relationships. Generalizing again, but you are more likely in Canadian books to have a resolution arrived at by the detective solving the crime following the clues and by observing the people, than a shoot out with the bad guy. My opinion only. Others may differ.

IRTM: You are currently writing two books a year, which is a pretty amazing schedule. Do you write more than one book at a time or finish one before starting another, and do you find it difficult to keep the two sets of plots and characters separate?

VD: I write one series at a time, but I sometimes have to interrupt one to return to the other when I get the edits back from the editor or the proof. I do find that I have to write one in its entirely before starting the next. I don’t have trouble with plots and characters but I do with tone. The Klondike books are intended to be comedies. The Molly Smiths are not, and I find it hard to keep things light after dealing with very serious issues, not so hard to go the other way. So what I do is find a couple of humorous books to read and that seems to help lighten my mood. 

IRTM:  One of your greatest pet peeves in mystery fiction is the author who is too much in love with his or her character. Not mentioning names, of course, what do you mean by that and how do you avoid this in your own work?

VD: A tough question. It’s something you almost can’t quite put your finger on, but somehow the character just seems to be too good and too perfect, and everyone (in the book) thinks they’re so special.  I guess the way to avoid it is to create a complex, conflicted character and have them make mistakes and not always be perfect.

IRTM: You also blogged recently about a desire to avoid crime fiction labels, i.e. "murder mysteries" vs. "cozies" vs. psychological suspense or adventure novels. Unfortunately, most agents and publishers these days almost demand that they be able to classify a manuscript in a specific category. What do you feel is lost in this rigid classification process for writers and readers?

VD: What I worry about is formula.  It’s a struggle for us as crime writers to get recognition from the literary ‘establishment’ (particularly in Canada) and the idea that a crime novel must follow a formula doesn’t help. So many good books overlap sub-genres that if you are classifying a book by its subgenre, readers of other sub-genres might not even find that book that they might well love. Also what happens if books get mis-classified or one person interprets a sub-genre as meaning something different than what other people interpret it as? Where this came about is that someone in an organization I belong to thought police procedural means extensive forensics (like CSI or Kath Reichs) and mis-categorized my books very badly.

IRTM: Your next book in the Constable Molly Smith book, the fifth, is titled Among the Departed and deals with a reopened police investigation into a man's disappearance, and how the lives of the missing man's wife and two children were destroyed by the case. How do you see Smith and your other characters evolving over time?

VD: As far as I know Molly Smith is unique in police procedurals as she is young and green and very naïve. She is on probation in the first two books. I did that because first of all I want to explore issues of growing up as a young woman today (I have three daughters in that age group). For example in Negative Image her boyfriend, who is also a cop, is so over-protective she worries about what would happen if they were in a situation together. I want to have lots of opportunity to have her grow as a woman and as a police officer. So I see Molly changing a lot over the course of the series. John Winters, not so much, he’s been a cop for almost thirty years and is pretty much set in his ways. Although I do hope that he and Lucky Smith, Molly’s hippie mother, learn from each other, and each have some of their prejudices reduced. Lucky, by the way, is in for some big changes.

Vicki's book Negative Image, published by Poison Pen Press, is due in stores this week, and you can also catch her postings on the crime fiction blog Type M for Murder.