I don’t think Alex Segura and I have ever been in the same place at the same time. Otherwise surely we would have been placed on a panel together, a lazy diversity panel at the very least. Our series share tons of similarities, both at the surface and deep in the construction. His PI is a Cuban-American dude in Miami; mine is a Korean-American woman in Los Angeles. We trade in noir, and grapple with both the weight and the silliness of that tradition.
Pete Fernandez is my kind of hardboiled hero: a tough, worldly, painfully human guide to the dark side of the Sunshine State. In Blackout, he takes on Florida politics and creepy cultists, as well as grieving parents, pissed off exes, and his own legion demons. I quizzed Alex over email about his new book and his approach to writing crime.
Steph Cha: This is your fourth Pete Fernandez book, and the guy has really been through a lot. I appreciate that you acknowledge all that damage, and that he doesn’t just shake off all the death and trauma for his new adventure. How do you think Pete’s changed since you first conceived him?
Alex Segura: Thanks for noticing that. My favorite series are the ones that build, that show the characters not only evolving but also scarring up a bit. I think there will come a time for Pete where he’ll look back and say “Yeah, I’m done.” I don’t know when that will be, but I do feel he’s smart enough to pull the pin. At least I hope he does.
When I first created Pete, he was driven more by his demons—he drank heavily, he bemoaned how the world had treated him in regards to his romantic relationships, career and luck. He was a bit emo and broken. Over time, he’s picked himself up and worked hard to gain some focus. He’s found that investigation and helping other people helps him, mentally and spiritually. So, while he’s not completely at peace with himself, he has gotten a bit of a handle on his darkness, and he tries to use his wits and skills to do some good. That said, he’s still impulsive, stubborn and prone to falling for the wrong people. But what I try to emphasize in the series is that no one changes overnight, especially when we’re talking about an alcoholic or addict. As readers of the series have seen, Pete has taken a step back for every few steps he takes in the right direction.
Cha: Did you have his character development plotted out across books at all? Did he change in any ways that surprised you?
Segura: I didn’t really know I was writing a series until I was close to the end of the first novel, Silent City. It was a missing person case, and Pete found her, so I had the chance to write him and Kathy Bentley together. Their dynamic was so much fun for me to play with that I didn’t want it to end, and I really liked the idea of him having a partner who was not only his equal, but in many ways his superior—smarter, a more decorated journalist and calculating in a way Pete could never be. They balance each other out well. I also liked that I could write a male/female friendship that wasn’t hinging on some kind of “Will they or won’t they?” plot, even if they did eventually stumble into bed together. That gave me the chance to write the real fallout of sleeping with your close friends. But yeah, I didn’t think it would be a series until then, and even at that point, I didn’t have an over-arching idea for Pete. I just knew that I wanted each book to be essential to his life, not just the case of the month, and that I wanted the story to be not only about whatever mystery he was facing, but also about him—and his journey from being this kind of messed-up guy to a less messed-up person who builds a life for himself. We meet Pete alone, passed out in his tiny apartment, isolated, drunk and depressed. By Blackout, even though he has alienated himself from his home and friends, he still has a network, and he’s working on moving forward. To answer your question—I had a rough idea of what I wanted his journey to be, and I knew that I wanted him to face varied threats, which eventually came to be a serial killer, drug gangs and now a cult. But from a character perspective, I wanted him to evolve and change in meaningful ways with each book. If the Pete at the end of the book is the same as the Pete I introduce at the beginning, then I’d feel like I’d failed myself and the reader.
In terms of surprises, Pete’s knack for violence is something that sprung up on his own, and something I had to spend time thinking about after the last two books. There’s some simmering rage in him, and when I spent some time thinking about it, I realized it was mainly because he wasn’t truly recovered. He was doing the paint-by-numbers sobriety, and while that can prevent you from picking up a drink, it doesn’t mean you’re living a healthy life. We see it a bit in Dangerous Ends and certainly near the end of Blackout, where he goes to extremes to get information out of someone. It’s something that I’ll address in the next book, if not directly, then at least in how he behaves moving forward, with an understanding of why that’s changed.
Cha: He has a very fraught relationship with Miami, for multiple reasons, most of them involving danger of death in various forms. You’re a Miami native who left for New York. Is your hometown love as complicated as Pete’s?
Segura: It is, minus the violence and bounty on my head. I love Miami, spent most of my formative years there and have family and close friends I see often, but I did feel a yearning to leave and explore the world outside of Florida. I’ve come to appreciate it more now, twelve years after leaving, though. But I do realize that part of that filter is based on nostalgia and getting older. I think it’s natural, especially in our twenties to want to rebel and try something else, so I wanted to go away. I hadn’t traveled much as a kid, so I wanted to at least try and experience something else, and I’d had this love affair with the idea of New York as far back as I could remember. So, when the opportunity presented itself, I dove in, not really thinking about how complicated a move like that would be. It’s interesting, because while going back home is always engaging and fun, it can be weighed down by the past, by relationships and memories and “what if?”-style scenarios my anxious brain creates. But overall, I love the city. I think about what it’d be like to live there again often.
For Pete, Miami is as big a part of the series as he is. Even when I’ve done stories that feature Pete elsewhere, or, like in Blackout, when I have him start somewhere else—the pull of Miami is clear. It’s either Miami or “Not Miami” for Pete, and I try to infuse the books with that sense of setting as strongly as I can, because those were the books that resonated with me, that made me want to try and write my own crime novels. Miami is such a perfect setting for this kind of story because, on the surface, you wouldn’t think of it as one. You’d think New York, LA or Chicago—big, established cities with dark corners and steam coming up through the sewer grates, you know? But Miami is perfect because of the contrast—the dark deeds happening in the small shadows cast by beautiful palms, cutting through the sunlit streets. It’s paradise, but paradise is also dangerous. That’s the fun of it.
Cha: I do love my warm weather noir. Blackout features some stormy weather. Does Miami’s hurricane weather have the same literary status as LA’s Santa Ana winds? I feel like it should.
“I know the general consensus is that Florida is always insane, but there’s a special frequency of crazy that happens as a storm approaches…It’s a manic, kinetic time that feels loaded with danger.”Segura: Writing those hurricane scenes in Blackout was a little surreal, I have to admit. Right around the same time, there was a storm barreling down on Florida and I just felt this strange, dark sense of foreboding as I put Pete, Kathy and the others through a fictional storm. One minute I’m writing about a looming storm hitting Miami, the next I’m on the phone with my mom, trying to convince her to fly up to New York. I know the general consensus is that Florida is always insane, but there’s a special frequency of crazy that happens as a storm approaches – people raid grocery stores, board up their houses and hunker down. It’s a manic, kinetic time that feels loaded with danger. I really liked the idea of using that as a boost to the story I was trying to tell, adding a dose of adrenaline to the last act of a novel that already felt really packed with action and darkness.
It almost did feel like a rite of passage, too, because I’ve read many novels that use hurricanes as a plot point, so I did try to balance it and not overdo it. I wanted the storm lurking in the background and then appearing at the right time to amplify what was already going on, but I didn’t want the storm to be the plot or conflict, if that makes sense.
Cha: How do you approach writing Miami, and I guess place in general? I enjoyed that trip to the Keys.
Segura: One of the biggest gripes I had with depictions of Miami, not just in books, but in television and movies, was this idea that it was a strip of beach loaded with nightclubs and rowdy Cubans and…that was it. From what I experienced, it was much more than a daiquiri on the beach and flickering neon. It was a sprawling, complicated city with a diverse community and a dark, complicated past that not everyone was proud of. Miami’s so many different things at different times—old South, an extension of Cuba and a gateway to Latin America, you name it—that I wanted to reflect a bit of that in these stories, and show a bit of what lies outside the beaches and downtown. It lets me write different kinds of crime stories without leaving Miami. You can have the almost country noir vibe of the Keys scenes from Blackout paired with the high-octane, thriller-ish elements of the Miami political subplots. Whenever I think about writing something else, set somewhere else, I can’t find a good enough reason why I would. Miami’s got it all.
Cha: How do you like writing in the third person? I’m writing in third for the first time in my fourth book, and it’s been a trip. Have you tried first? I feel like it’s more conventional for PI, though close third seems to work just as well.
Segura: I like third because I get a little wiggle room. Most of the books are told from Pete’s POV, but I allow myself the chance to detour a bit. In Blackout, I did a brief chapter from Kathy’s perspective. In past novels, I’ve shifted the focus to the villains or to Pete’s grandfather or father in flashbacks. And while it’s third, it’s not omniscient, so you know you’re only getting the info this character knows, if that. It keeps the reader—and the writer, too, if I’m being honest with myself—on their toes, and I like that.
I almost wrote Blackout in first person, because it starts out, when we reach the present day, with a very traditional-feeling PI story—the client comes to visit the detective to find a missing person. But the more I toyed with it and zoomed out, and the more complicated the story of Patty Morales and the cult became, I knew I needed to keep it with third, because there was too much going on, and I wanted the readers to have a sense of that.
Cha: Writing hardboiled detective fiction means you’re always ass-deep in conventions. Whether you’re adopting, defying, or ignoring them, they kind of follow you around. How do you manage the tropes of the genre? Any you particularly love or despise?
Segura: I try to honor them all, invert the ones I hate and tweak the ones I love. I’m personally tired of the hard drinkin’ PI who has seven or eight mixed drinks before a stakeout and still manages to solve the case while getting laid a handful of times along the way. It just doesn’t ring true, especially when there’s little consequence. I feel like Pete’s entire arc is pushing against that. Silent City shows him as an active, intense alcoholic and it shows in his work. He makes mistakes. He gets beat up badly. He loses friends and fucks up because he’s not all there. I love Chandler and don’t really even count Marlowe in this, because those books are just a pleasure to read and less about plot, but there are dozens upon dozens of PI novels that don’t seem to care about showing the consequences of these things. If the book is good, I can overlook that part, but as a trope, it’s something that grates on me. Pete starts out as a raging drunk and we build from there, showing the hopefully realistic fallout from that. In terms of romance, I try to be realistic about it, because if Pete’s a hot mess, I don’t feel like a lot of women would want to sleep with him. It just feels more genuine to not have him be this wannabe James Bond.
Not to harp on it too much, but the sex symbol PI concept rarely lands for me as a reader, maybe because it just feels like so much male wish fulfillment. As a writer, I know I’m veering into fantasy when I have Pete succeed in romance too much. I find that having a stronger, complicated supporting cast works better, and if there are some romantic elements, I feel the need to showcase them more honestly—flaws and all. In the second book, Down the Darkest Street, Pete rekindles his romance with his now-married ex. I let that moment happen, but I also knew it would explode later and not end well. It’s just a matter of keeping that in mind and avoiding the instinct to just brush it under the bed and chalk it up to boys being boys.
“When I think of characters like Matt Scudder, Tess Monaghan or Patrick Kenzie, I can’t help but also think about their cities, because the stories are so tied to place. You have the weight and pull of history there.”The tropes I do love are “the city as character”—because I think having a unique setting makes for a much better, deeper novel. When I think of characters like Matt Scudder, Tess Monaghan or Patrick Kenzie, I can’t help but also think about their cities, because the stories are so tied to place. You have the weight and pull of history there, and you get to experience the story through the eyes of a native. I loved that sense of being transported to a new place, and not feeling like you were getting the TripAdvisor version.
It’s not really a trope, but rather a sub-genre of PI fiction, I think—but while I love reading “episodic” series that feature a protagonist that doesn’t really change much, like Lew Archer or Marlowe, I’m less interested in writing that. I think other writers could do it better. I’m drawn to stories about messed up people who are trying to get better or are getting worse, but are changing in some way from book to book. As important as the case is, I need it to spring from character and where they are at any given moment.
Cha: How deep did you get into cult research? I feel like that shit is scary and bottomless. Anything particularly interesting you couldn’t wedge into the book?
Segura: I dip my toe into research, but don’t get too immersed. The “research” I do for the Pete books usually tend to just overlap with whatever I’m personally obsessing over myself, which makes the writing more fun. In terms of cults, I read enough to get my brain whirring and to create my own versions of things. There’s a real Miami cult that I had very clear memories of—Yahweh Ben Yahweh. I remembered hearing about them as a kid. They were this group that was seen as almost fashionable—their leader even got the key to the city!—but fell apart once it was discovered that the guru was ordering people killed. Those broad strokes got me thinking about cults, and I read a few books to learn about how some of them worked—Jeff Guinn’s Jim Jones bio was particularly excellent—and then I was on my way. I loved the idea of a cult that was once popular but was now gone, or believed gone, but they were still boiling under the surface. Lots of cults deprogram their members and, in the process, get all their deepest, darkest secrets, too, and that struck me as an amazing tool for an organization, even after it stepped back from the limelight. That lead to a similar idea in Blackout, that there was this book with all these major, bombshell revelations somewhere that were tied to some of the biggest power players in the city.
Cults are bottomless, and I admit I didn’t read every book I flagged. There just wasn’t time. I read enough to get an idea of what I thought might work for the book, but I knew I could fall into that well indefinitely, and I had to move on.
Cha: You kill a lot of people in this book. Is this your highest body count? How do you approach action scenes? I always have the hardest time with them.
Segura: I think it’s gotta be my highest body count. The earlier books felt more insular and some of the deaths happened offscreen, but with Blackout, I put Pete in the thick of it from the beginning, which made for a more action-heavy book, but one that I don’t think skimps on the emotional beats. Action scenes are difficult, because they’re naturally complicated—you need to show a lot of stuff happening at once. I try my best to strive for clarity, to be clear in my language and keep in mind what I want the outcome to be—not just in terms of plot, but for the scene. What are the big emotional beats? What’s the last visual thing I want to leave the reader with? There’s one scene in Blackout that I’m particularly proud of because it happens early enough in the book that you think it’s just going to be exposition—we’re just going to get to know these characters better for a bit – but then revs up and becomes something completely different, something that hopefully surprises people. That feeling of an earned twist is the biggest rush for me as a writer, knowing that the pieces are there and the reader gets a kick out of it and doesn’t feel cheated by some kind of weird twist or plot device.
Cha: Are you working on another Pete Fernandez book? If not, what other crimes do you have in store for us?
Segura: I’m working on the fifth Pete book, Miami Midnight, which I can’t really talk about too much—since so much of it springs out of the last few chapters of Blackout. But it’ll definitely be the culmination of the first quintet of Pete novels and maybe even the series. We’ll see Pete at full power, in a way, and see how these first four books have changed him. The Pete we see in the next book will be very different, but hopefully just as interesting to readers.
