Conversations with the Bookless: Dan O’Shea

In this installment we talk to Dan O’Shea

Where are you, right now, as you’re writing these answers?

On my treadmill. I put a treadmill desk together about a year ago because my burgeoning girth was beginning to cause gravitational disruptions that were adversely affecting the space-time continuum. So I do a lot of my writing at 2.4 miles per hour now.

Who are your influences and what is your unlikeliest influence?

I get influenced by everything. Today’s one of those ass-ugly March days, the snow all melted off, brown grass and mud everywhere, bits of garbage marking the terminus of the melted plow drifts along the roadside like a shit moraine, rotting poultices of dead leaves plastered under the edges of the bushes, misty drizzle, low sky with all the gray charm of a wet garage floor. So that mood’s going to filter in to whatever I’m working on. So far as writers go, I think the earlier in your life you read something, the more formative it is. I read this series of kid’s books when I was maybe 10 or 11, had titles like Amazon Adventure and South Seas Adventure – they were about this guy who was an archeologist and he’d take his kids with him on trips and they’d always end up in some harrowing escapade. I still remember that feeling of not being able to wait until I was done with whatever I was doing so I could get back to the book and see what the hell was going to happen. Graham Greene, he’s stuck with me. So far as genre stuff, guys like Len Deighton and John Le Carre and Ross Thomas and James Lee Burke. And I also have to say my Dad. He wasn’t a writer or anything, but he loved to read, so I was raised in a house where you couldn’t turn around without tripping over a freakin’ book.

Why do you write?

I don’t know how to answer that. Part of it’s money. It’s how I earn a living — not that I’ve made squat on the fiction side of things, but I’ve been writing for businesses all my adult life. I joke that writing about shit like the tax code for thirty years has driven me to write about killing people. I guess really because it’s about the only useful skill I have.

What issues or ideas about fiction have been foremost in your mind of late?

I don’t think about any of that much. I understand the whole publishing industry paradigm is in flux right now, and I suppose I should study up on that more. If I were dependent on fiction writing to make a living, I’m sure I would. I kick myself sometimes for not getting off my ass and getting serious about fiction fifteen years ago when it would have been a lot easier to break in. I’m not big on writing advice or process stuff. The only way I ever get anything done is to just sit down and write. Thinking about how seems like thinking about breathing. You can think about it or you can do it, but it’s hard to do both at once.

When did you start writing and what prompted you to do so?

Fiction writing? I’ve always messed with it, the operative word being messed. My best friend growing up wrote stuff too, and we’d yak about it on the phone, telling each other how great we were while we got nothing done. Then he was killed in a car accident three years back. That shook me up in a lot of ways, but the big way was in manifesting the idea that we only have so much sand in the glass and I’d pissed away a lot of it. So I finally finished a damn novel and got an agent and actually got disciplined about putting time and effort in on a regular basis. Right around then, somebody gave me a book that was a big seller at the time, and it was the sort of stuff I liked to read and liked to write, and I read this thing and it was so fucking horrible – cardboard cut-out characters, tone-deaf dialog, a predictable plot recycled out of bad TV shows – and I thought, “Well hell, if this shit can get published, maybe I have a shot after all.”

What do you most value in the fiction you love?

For me, the characters and atmosphere are key. I don’t just want a good story, I want you to put me through the emotional wringer. And voice – when I’m reading somebody, I don’t want to have to look back at the cover to remember who the author is. If you’re in the middle of a James Lee Burke book, you know who wrote it.

How would you describe your style?

I don’t. And I don’t really want to think about it either. I don’t understand how it would help.

What’s your favorite story written by someone else?

Steve Weddle’s Oscar Martello stories are great. I’ve actually done audio versions of a couple of those for Steve, and have become the unofficial voice of Oscar. He’s an interesting character, and I think that Weddle’s a guy to watch. So far as novels that you haven’t read yet, John Hornor Jacobs’ Southern Gods is due out in August. It’s got this whole swampy Faulkner meets Flannery O’Connor meets Steven King vibe I really loved.

What is the value and purpose of short fiction in mystery/crime fiction for you personally and overall for the form and genre?

Up until a year or so ago, I’d never written any short fiction, and I didn’t really know that people did. I’m an old fart, so I wasn’t tied in to this whole on-line writing network. The first person I met that had anything at all to do with the crime fiction community was my agent, Stacia Decker, and she’s the one who told me to get out there on Twitter and Facebook and maybe start blogging and such. Until then, all I’d ever read were novels, so that’s all I wrote. And it’s still where I focus the bulk of my attention.

Who is the best short story writer that people haven’t gotten hip to yet?

Frank Bill is pretty damn good, but I think people are hip to him. Chuck Wendig’s got a cool collection out, Irregular Creatures. Keith Rawson, Kieran Shea, Chris Holm – this is like an Oscar speech, I know I’m going to forget someone I shouldn’t.

What do you like most about short fiction?

Same things I like in long fiction – I want atmosphere, character and voice. But it’s cool to have something you can just rip through in a sitting.

Of your stories, which are your favorite; the one that showcases best your abilities?

I guess “Thin Mints”, which was in the third issue of Crimefactory. And I did a flash fiction piece called “Shakleton’s Hootch” that I really like. That’s up on my blog.

Do you have any short story publications forthcoming?

I have a piece of Elizabethan noir entitled “The Bard Confesses in the Matter of the Despoilment of the Fishmonger’s Daughter” that is coming out in Needle.

Where can readers check out some of your work?

My blog is their best bet at this point.

What are you working on now?

I’m just finishing up getting my second novel, The Gravity of Mammon, ready to go out on submission. And I’ve started an Elizabethan era novel tentatively titled To This Little Measure. It’s my first attempt at a first-person novel, and the person is Shakespeare. Espionage, court intrigue, recusant mischief. Probably the dumbest thing I’ve tried to pull off yet.

How do you plan to rectify your booklessness?

I’ll just keep writing shit and hoping Stacia can sell it. I don’t know what else I can do about it.

Do you have a completed manuscript floating around? Care to tell us about it and maybe share a paragraph or two.

My first novel, Unto Caesar, is currently out on submission. It’s about a Chicago cop who has family connections to the city’s corrupt power structure. In the course of investigating a series of what appear to be religiously motivated sniper killings, he discovers connections to the city’s ruling family – and to his own father’s murder thirty years earlier. Here is an excerpt:

Lynch’s cell rang. He looked at the screen. Liz. Wasn’t sure he wanted to answer. Second ring, third. Just before it went to voice mail, he answered.

“Hey, John,” she started. Sounded happy. Sounded like she had a good day. Sounded like she lived on the other side of some kind of divide he would never be able to cross again.

“Hey, Liz.” Trying to keep it neutral.

“My God, John. What’s wrong?”

“What do you mean?”

“John, I can hear it. What happened?”

Lynch waiting a moment, wondering how much shit you have a right to dump into how many lives, and at what point you forfeit you claim on another’s grace.

“Tina DeGetano was raped and murdered last night. I should have had her covered. I didn’t.”

A pause. “Oh my God, John. Oh. I am so sorry. I’ll be right over.”

“I can’t, Liz. I just, I don’t want company tonight.”

She started to say something, but Lynch closed the phone.

You’ve got a full novel available on your site, The Gravity of
Mammon, what is it about and what has the reception been like?

Yeah, my online novel experiment. The deal there was I actually wrote the rough draft in public – pretty much one chapter every day until I was done. What worked about it was it forced me to keep writing. And I was happy with the rough draft – but it was a rough draft. The feedback has been great, and the revised version will be going out on submission soon. I’m trying to decide whether to do the same thing again with my current WIP. Something about the shame of not meeting a public commitment seems to force me to crank out work.

So far as what it’s about, well, stolen blood diamonds, ex-Foreign Legionnaires, pissed-off Hollywood stars with grudges, drug dealers, mafia guys, Chicago cops, terrorists, the usual.

Dan O’Shea is a thriller writer represented by Stacia Decker at the Donald Maass Literary Agency. His fiction has appeared in Crimefactory, and will be in an upcoming issue of Needle: A Magazine of Noir. You can find him on his blog GOING BALLISTIC, or just head out to the Chicago area and pick out a bar. He’ll turn up.

Brian Lindenmuth

Brian is the non-fiction editor of Spinetingler magazine and one of the fiction editors of Snubnose Press. In addition to Spinetingler his work has appeared in Crimespree magazine and at BSC Review, Galleycat and the Mulholland Books website. He also heads the Spinetingler Award committee.

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