SEAN CHERCOVER

By J.B. Thompson

BIG CITY, BAD BLOOD
by Sean Chercover
William Morrow
January 2007

When a simple bodyguard job threatens to expose society’s most powerful and corrupt, Ray Dudgeon's odds of survival make for a sucker's bet. The worlds of Hollywood moviemaking, Chicago organized crime, and Washington politics collide in this P.I. thriller.

Sean Chercover has been a private investigator in Chicago and New Orleans and has written scripts for television documentaries and children's shows. He's also worked as a film and video editor. These days, he splits his time between Chicago and Toronto. Sean is a member of Killer Year, the Class of 2007.

He also blogs with a group of Chicago writers at The Outfit.

Visit Sean’s website at www.chercover.com.

Big City, Bad Blood (William Morrow) is his first novel and will debut in January 2007.

J.B.: First of all, congratulations on the new baby (your first?). Has being a parent drastically changed your writing/life schedule?

SEAN: Thank you. Yes, this is our first baby. And yes, it has drastically changed my writing life, and my non-writing life as well. Basically, I haven’t slept in eight weeks. Which is challenging, both for writing and for driving … even for doing interviews and coming up with coherent sentences. But I’m not complaining – it’s a great experience, despite the sleep deprivation.

J.B.: Tell us a little about Big City, Bad Blood. How did Ray Dudgeon come to be? Do any of your real-life P.I. experiences show up in the book, or are they more of an influential undercurrent?

SEAN: Around the time I was getting started as a P.I., I knew someone who was deposed as a witness in a fraud trial against a low-level wiseguy in Chicago. The fraud in question was a “long con” version of the Fake Landlord Scam. It’s still a popular con in Chicago and has spread across North America. Anyway, I used the fake landlord scam as the set-up for Big City, Bad Blood. The characters are fictional, of course, but the internal architecture of the scam provided a launching pad for my plot.

Various smaller events and settings in the book come from my P.I. experience. Sometimes it’s just the smallest of details. It’s nice to be able to draw on experience, but this ain’t an autobiography, after all. It’s fiction. A pack of lies. The experiences are all ‘grist for the mill,’ as my grandmother used to say. Grist made more dramatic by time-compression and a good measure of making stuff up.

J.B.: In addition to being a private investigator, a television screenwriter and a film editor, you’ve also been a scuba diver, nightclub magician, car-jockey (what is a car-jockey, anyway?), waiter, truck driver, encyclopedia salesman ... among other things. How did all this transition into your becoming a novelist?

SEAN: In the service department of a car dealership, the car-jockey drives customers’ cars into the garage and onto the hoists for the mechanics, and then takes the cars off the hoists and back out into the lot. He also does routine maintenance, like oil changes, and takes cars to a nearby carwash. Oh, and in the winter, he shows up before sunrise and scrapes the snow off about a million cars and shovels the lot. It’s a glamorous job. I doubt being a car-jockey in any way led to being a writer, but it probably helps me to not complain about the difficulties faced by writers.

Having a wide variety of jobs and living in different places brings you in contact with a wide variety of people with very different perspectives on life. I think that can’t help but be beneficial to anyone who wants to write. Or maybe I’m rationalizing …

J.B.: You grew up in Toronto but spent summers with your grandmother and cousins in Georgia. Were you old enough to know what culture shock was? After also having lived in South Carolina, Chicago and New Orleans as an adult, how much has the regional/cultural flavor of these diverse places affected your personality and, in turn, your writing?

SEAN: Sure, even young kids are aware of cultural differences, but they get past them. Kids are kids, and they break through the surface crap pretty quickly. It’s the adults I worry about.

When you live in different cultures, your sense of us/them (or self/other) erodes, and I think that’s a good thing. You don’t assume that the dominant values of any particular place are objectively superior to dissident values. As a result, you think less in terms of good guy/bad guy. Although I occasionally like to read a morality play with characters that are either all good or all bad, I usually prefer to read (and write) about flawed people who are a mix of good and bad, healthy and unhealthy.

J.B.: Let’s talk about Killer Year. What does being a member of the Class of 2007 mean to you? How did you come to choose Ken Bruen as your mentor?

SEAN: Jesus, why the hell wouldn’t I pick Ken Bruen?! Have you read his books? He’s a jaw-droppingly magnificent writer. What amazes me is that he picked me back.

I really didn’t know much about Killer Year when I joined. I thought it was just going to be a way to hang out with folks in a similar situation and share the ‘debut author’ experience. It’s remarkable to see what a vibrant community the Killer Year founders have created, and it’s quite an honor to see KY adopted by the International Thriller Writers.

J.B.: Imagine yourself settled in the corner of a quiet pub, enjoying drinks with a few friends. Who’s there and what are you drinking?

SEAN: I’m probably hanging out with Gary and Chris and Tibor and Bryce, and we’re drinking pints. If the evening goes late enough, we’ll get into the bourbon.

J.B.: Are you a sports nut, a movie buff or a bookworm?

SEAN: “Sports nut” is a little extreme, but I love baseball and watch a lot of it. I’m a Bears fan and watch some NFL football too. A little college football, but not much. NCAA Final Four basketball, but I don’t pay much attention until the playoffs. As a kid, I was a hockey fan, but not for many years now.

I love movies, but again, “movie buff” is probably extreme. My friend Gary can name every movie that has ever won the Academy Award, in chronological order. He’s a movie buff.

At the end of the day, I’m a bookworm more than anything.

J.B.: Where is someplace you’ve never been but would love to go?

SEAN: I’d like to go to my Happy Place, but I haven’t found it.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

J.B. Thompson is the author of two novels of romantic suspense currently in publication http://www.jbtauthor.com. In addition to conducting author interviews, she writes book and movie reviews. J.B. blogs at “Let’s Do Lunch – The World According to J.B.”. She lives near Nashville, Tennessee with her husband and three teenagers.