Jake Hinkson lives just outside of Washington, DC. His short fiction has appeared in A Twist Of Noir, Crooked, and Powder Burn Flash. He also contributes to the Noir City Sentinel, the monthly publication of the Film Noir Foundation. He is currently at work on a book about film noir.
What issues or ideas about fiction have been foremost in your mind of late?
Lately, I been more and more interested in the way genre fiction carries along buried—and not so buried—human desires and fears. In particular, I’m interested in the way noir tempts us with visions of transgression and ruination. We want to sin, but some part of us also wants to pay for our sins.
Who is the best short story writer that people haven’t gotten hip to yet?
I don’t feel qualified to say, really. I check out various websites, but I really spend most of my time reading stuff that’s forty years old. Right now, I’m into women writers of pulp in the fifties and sixties. Having said that, the best writer of short stories I know of is the late Andre Dubus. He’s known to many people, but he’s not the household name he should be considering he was arguably the best short story writer we produced in this country in the last sixty years.
Where are you, right now, as you’re writing these answers?
I’m vacationing in San Francisco, the greatest city in the world. I’m in a hotel room on a laptop.
What’s your favorite story written by someone else?
I could never narrow it down to one. I love “Killings” by Dubus, “Glossolaia” by David Jauss, and “Going To Meet The Man” by James Baldwin. I love pretty much everything by Flannery O’Connor.
Who are your influences and what is your most unlikeliest influence?
All the people I’ve mentioned above are influences. Dubus packs more into a short story than most people can get into novel. He is a writer worthy of deep contemplation. Jauss’s stories tend to have a heartbreaking core of thwarted desire; they’re just beautiful in their sadness. Baldwin didn’t write a lot of short fiction, but “Sonny’s Blues” and “Going To Meet The Man” are perfect. His great virtue is a bottomless empathy. O’Connor is the great literary love of my life. Her stories are the weirdest, meanest, funniest, most violent, most brilliantly constructed pieces of short fiction imaginable. And finally, I’m a huge Jim Thompson fan—though in some ways he might be my most unlikely influence. I’m not really interested in stories about psychos—most of them are terribly boring, but Thompson’s different. He was interested in the tension between the placid surface—the surface that we try desperately to maintain—and the giant hole of nothingness underneath it. Nihilism is fashionable in noir, but Thompson’s the real deal. Even today, after all the attention that has been paid to him, I still think he’s underrated. A Hell Of A Woman and Savage Night are American noir at its best. Oddly enough, he and O’Connor are my biggest influences, the nihilist and the fundamentalist. If they’d had a one night stand in a cheap Ozark hotel, I would have been their offspring.
What do you like most about short fiction?
Intensity. In literature, the only thing more intense than a short story is a poem.
When did you start writing short fiction and what prompted you to do so?
I started writing short fiction in high school. I don’t know why I started. I guess I had some need to make up stories. Fiction writers are fundamentally weird in that way. If I hadn’t started writing stories, I suppose I would have begun telling lies about the people around me. If you look at it that way, writing fiction seems almost healthy.
Of your stories, which is your favorite; the one that showcases best your abilities?
The best thing I’ve written is an unpublished novel. It’s the best expression of that weird hybrid of O’Connor and Thompson and me. Of the short fiction I’ve done, I like A Little Harmless Fun a lot. It’s about a married man who is having an affair that turns horribly wrong one afternoon. I don’t think I have a favorite story, really, but that one more or less did what I wanted it to do.
Do you have any short story publications forthcoming?
I have a story due out on Beat To A Pulp called Maker’s And Coke. I think that should be out in late March or early April.
How do you plan to rectify your booklessness?
Self promotion comes naturally to some people. Since I am not one of those people, the hunt for an agent and a book deal falls under the heading of “necessary evil” in my life. I like to think that web forums are a good way to get your name out there, but I’m also resigned to slog through the snail mail submission process. Hope springs eternal.
