Mystery Author Interviews

James Hime, author of Night of the Dance (St. Martin's; $6.99) and Scared Money (St. Martin's; $22.95) is interviewed by Deron Bissett, Ph.D.

Q: Your style in Night of the Dance used Third person present tense (omniscient point of view.) What were your reasons for using present tense?

Scott Turow wrote Presumed Innocent in present tense. I was a great admirer of that book, since, like Turow, I was trained as a lawyer and was practicing law at that time. So when I first started writing Night of the Dance, I started using it. Early on I wasn’t sure whether to keep it or convert to past tense. But within a month of having started the manuscript, I happened to see a documentary on television. A woman was talking about being sexually molested in a motel room. She told her story in the present tense. I was struck by how immediate it was. Because you could clearly see it was happening all over again in her mind and she was describing the scenes she was seeing in her head. I thought that if I could make it work, that would be a unique way to tell a story, as very few people use it. That’s why I stuck with it. The second and third books are also in the present tense.

A lot of authors start using the first person of course but I chose the third person because it provides a lot more latitude to tell the story. I’m not too keen on the style where the protagonist speaks in the first person and then the action switches to the third person later in the book. Some very good writers do this of course. Harlen Coben does it; James Lee Burke does it, and I believe Michael Connelly has done it. For me, I like to stay in the third person throughout.

Q: Are there other features of your writing that you have been ambivalent about? For example, you use italics as you talk about events that take place in the past, in memory.

In the second book, there are a number of flashbacks all of which are in italics, I used that font because I wanted the reader to understand they were going to another time and place, in this case, Hungary in the 50s, Western Europe during the Cold War. There was also a different, sort of shadowy character involved in that part of the story.
I borrowed this approach from Michael Connelly. He used it in dealing with a character that turned out to be a red herring. He would have snippets of subconscious thoughts by that character that reflected aspects of the character’s motives or state of mind. These misdirections were always in italics. I think Connelly has used it more recently in The Narrows, and earlier in Blood Work.

Q:The other character who I wanted to explore is Jeremiah Spur. Is there a reason you wanted to introduce him as an ex-Texas ranger, rather than a current Ranger? The efficiency with which he might use his office in his studies as an active Texas ranger have been diminished now that he is and “ex”; he has no access to some of the databases that he previously could use. He also has to identify himself as a former Texas Ranger whenever he speaks to someone.

A part of it was lack of confidence in my knowledge about how the police operate.
Let’s use Michael Connelly as a contrasting example. He was a crime reporter, but I am not and never have been. He was able to have access to the police departments in that capacity and could study their methods and procedures. By contrast I didn’t feel confident enough in my understanding of technical police procedures to have an active cop as a protagonist. And I made Jeremiah older and retired in part because I wanted a character that has seen a lot of life. In the first book, Jeremiah has gone unwillingly into this investigation, in part because he has so many other things going on in his life. This gave the book more texture than just through a police investigation.

Q: Your Texas Ranger character was identified from a real character that you actually worked with, State Representative Short.

Jeremiah is an amalgam of three people. One is E.L. Short, whom I worked for when he was a State Representative from West Texas. He was the original Marlboro Man-looking guy. The second was a former law partner of mine, Perry Barber, who passed away a few years ago. Much of Jeremiah’s personality comes from him. Barber also hailed from West Texas. Jeremiah has a little of me in him, as well.

Q: There is another character in the book, C. Livermore Thomas, who goes by “Judge” to his friends and colleagues. I’m interested in knowing how a name like that is associated with a personality like that, in the book.

A lot of African-Americans have powerful names. Clarence Thomas is one example. The middle name was something I played around with. The nickname, Clyde, came from Clyde Drexler, (the Houston all-star Basketball player)

Q: Clyde has an edge on his personality that you’ve tended to highlight in the new book.

The new book has him going a number of new directions. Thomas is somewhat the victim of his own personality quirks. He wrestles with several demons, some of which are of his own creation.

Q: In one incident in the book, he has an interview with a member of the newspaper. He fails to use discretion during his interview.

He falsely accuses a man of murder. I wanted to explore how a red herring with teeth would react, how a man who was affected by adverse publicity might fight back. Here is a guy who was suspected of murder by the police; then skewered by adverse publicity, and yet the guy is completely innocent. That’s where the indiscrete news interview fit into the story---It got a cop who was trying to do his job in trouble. It reflects part of Clyde’s learning experience in the book.

Q: In the interview you finished at Book People, you indicated some authors who you regarded.

I’m a big fan of Ian Rankin, who won the Edgar a year ago for Resurrection Men.

I also like Ken Bruen from the UK, who writes rough books about the prison system, and
Alan Furst, who writes Eastern European espionage books.

Q: One other thing I would like to allude to is the difference in how you present Dewey Sharpe in the second book, from the first book. Why diminish his role in the 2nd book?

He’s not as important or interesting a character to me. Dewey provided comic relief in the first book. Scared Money is less firmly set in small town Texas. This second book is a more serious book, with somewhat bigger themes.

My next book is set almost entirely in Mexico. The working title is, The Third of Death. It has a strong bullfighting theme. As you may know bullfights are split into three stages. The third act is called the “Tercio del Muerto” or the Third of Death.

Q: You used a Cormac McCarthy quote for your 2nd book.

The phrase “scared money” also appears in one of Burke’s Billy Bob Holland books. Burke is one of my stylistic idols. (I saw him interviewed in Las Vegas at last year’s Bouchercon Mystery Writers’ Conference.) But I’d have to say George Pelecanos knows how to write dialogue, particularly street talk, better than anyone.

Part of what I wanted to accomplish in using Texas dialect was to give the story authenticity. But I’ll be the first to admit, there are people who are put off by that, but that’s how it is rendered.

Q: The local color element is hard to do.

Again, it lends authenticity to the book. I remember in the first book, I had an early draft in which the character says, “I’m gon’ do that.” But I changed it to “I’m gonna” because I thought it was too over the top. After I turned the book in, I was watching Coach Mac Brown of Univ. of Texas being interviewed on the field during a football game and he said, “We’re gon’ to keep them from moving the ball on us” or words to that effect. That’s the way people talk in Texas, even if they’re being interviewed on national television. He’s originally from Tennessee, though, I think. I was thinking of how people talked in Arkansas, where I was born. The older people speak in that dialect. And it’s unique.

Q: You also have a tendency to capture the female dialect in your books. The lady who is the Judge's girlfriend drops out the picture, and so Clyde develops an attraction for a lady officer from the Department of Corrections.

Making characters sound unique is not easy. In the second book, Yolanda Banks is a woman in her early 30s who has grown up with a particular style of speaking, that of a hip, young, African-American woman. People don’t sound alike. Mass media can help you appreciate different dialects. Clyde is sometimes sophisticated, sometimes not.

Take Don Cheadle, in the film, Out of Sight, as an example. The smart mouthed guy. Very funny. Elmore Leonard is good at that.

Q: Regarding the Budapest connection in Scared Money. You use snippets in italics that describe past events in the book. Could you describe how the book evolved as you wrote it?

When I began the book, I had no clue that the Cold War would figure in it. It was somewhat spontaneous for me. I have spent a lot of time in Vienna, but have never actually been to Budapest. My character, Benjamin Farkas, was tailored after my friend, Tom Falus, who is in real estate in New York. Much of the Budapest link focuses on October 1956 in Budapest. Tom’s Father was a university professor there and escaped during the 1956 uprising, carrying Tom on his back. After he escaped from Hungary Tom’s father became a custodian in a hotel in Toronto. But Tom told me he was happier doing that job because he was free.

Q: What was the challenge from moving from doing tax law to entering the dot-com industry?

I have always thought that writing was my first love. Tax law does not lend itself to developing a particularly pleasing creative writing style. In the 80s, I tried two or three books but always gave up. They were not in the mystery genre. When I left the law business, my kids were grown so I had time to write. I took a class at Rice University on mystery writing taught by the writer Chris Rogers. I remember the first night, she said, “Look, you can try to write the great American literary novel and your chances of getting published are about the same as winning the lottery. But if you write a mystery, and it’s a good one, it will sell. There’s always a market for good crime fiction.” So I said, OK, I’ll try this. In 1999, I began writing Night of the Dance. I set it aside that fall to start an Internet company. 15 or 16 months later, I had failed in the dot-com industry, and declared bankruptcy. And the more I thought about it the more I realized that one of the reasons I was struggling with finishing the book was, I was a little afraid of failing. Wasting all that time, and not having anyone interested in reading the book other than my wife, you know. But when you’ve been written up as a business failure in the Wall Street Journal, you can stop worrying about becoming a failure since you already are one. I realized I just needed to give it the old college try. I worked all the summer of ’01 to finish the manuscript, then I got an agent that fall, but he couldn’t get it sold. We had a conversation in 02, in which he said there were four reasons the book was being rejected. The writing was too leisurely, the setup took too long, the killer was too predictable, and the ending was too abrupt. I thought about that, and called him back and said, “I can fix those things.”

I worked hard on it for four weeks. I cut 25,000 words out of the front of the book and added 25,000 words to the ending. I even changed the killer. Then I resubmitted it to him, and he submitted it to St. Martin’s Press, who accepted it two weeks later. They’ve been very good to me. They bought the 2nd book. I’m looking forward to working with them on the 3rd book.

Q: Would you like to let me in on the focus of your next book, The Third of Death?

It involves a plot to assassinate one of the candidates for President of Mexico and is set in the year 2000 against the background of the bullfighting culture. In 1994, the PRI candidate was assassinated under very suspicious circumstances. The man who was arrested for it was interviewed, with highly questionable set of results. It’s been a lot of fun writing this book. I’ve spent a fair amount of time in Mexico doing research and even managed to witness two bullfights. I also spoke with bullfighters.

Here's what TEXAS MONTHLY has to say about Scared Money:
"Houstonian James Hime has built a global stage for retired Texas Ranger Jeremiah Spur and deputy sheriff Clyde Thomas to strut on in his second novel, Scared Money. Spur (who also appeared with Thomas in Hime's debut, The Night of the Dance) has been enticed by the feds into giving them a helping hand with a missing-persons case involving a CIA hit man turned Dallas businessman-and $10 million. Thomas, meanwhile, has his hands full with a police brutality suit, a slander suit, and a series of drug-related deaths in tiny Brenham. Hime sets 'em up and knocks 'em down with élan in this edgy thriller-sophisticated enough to sprawl from the cafes of Vienna to the alleys of Brenham without skipping a beat."