Twenty years ago, Scott Wolven published Controlled Burn and became the king of noir stories. Seven consecutive years of being selected for “Best American Mystery Stories” backed up that reputation. Now he’s back with Hundred Proof, packed with more than twenty interconnected stories set far from big cities, in remote places like Maine or Idaho, starring men on the run from justice, from themselves. Caged, even when they’re out of prison. Men who watch the last bridge that connected them to humanity burn, while holding a gas can in one hand and a beer, a gun, or a brass knuckles in the other, depending on what it takes to forget they’re alive, and to do whatever it takes to stay alive, without ever fully understanding why. As one of his characters says: “There are places inside me that’ll never get warm. Not here. Not in hell either.”
Ex-convicts, drug dealers, loggers, amateur detectives, hard men doing hard work. All of them accurately narrated in Wolven’s tough and gritty, even poetic, prose, which not only portrays violence but also humanizes it.
If you want someone to really know what noir is really about, hand them a copy of Hundred Proof.
This book shares the same mood of Controlled Burn, feels like a sequel. We got men who were in prison, fake ids, missing persons, some shady deals going on. What attracts you to this kind of stories?
Scott Wolven: Jim Thompson used to say ‘things are not what they seem’ and that always resonates with me. I just always look at a situation, and sometimes you had the sense that things are just not right in some way. Someone is someone who they are not claiming to be. Something is going on and it is shady, these criminal activities going on, not necessary huge criminal activities. But it’s the little every day, day to day stuff that kind of accumulates to me, so I’m just curious about that and I wanted to know about it. I see it going on with my own eyes so I want to depict it.
When I finish reading one of your books, what resonates most with me are the characters, who in some ways cut ties with society, even with themselves, and feel overwhelmed by everything. Your characters also feel like they’re still serving a sentence, even when they’re out.
They been doing the wrong thing for so long that it literally becomes their life. They are bouncing from one bad thing to the next. Sometimes people say ‘there must be hope, there must be something’. I’m sure there is, but that’s for another story. In this particular story, this is the way it’s going to go. So the hope is different. When people are at the end of their rope, they don’t always tie a knot, sometimes they just let go. You don’t know where they go, but they go to a bad place. And then they live there. But they made the bad place. They help to make it, whatever it may be. Then, exactly as you said, even if they are out of prison, they act that way anyway. It really doesn’t matter. It has affected them to an extent where their days are different than our days. That’s it.
In way, they can’t afford to hope. In ‘St. Gabriel’, the only love story in the book, the character is afraid of having hope or the possibility of things going different.
It would be a path that they have either only been down once and it failed, or that’s just simply not for them. So why would I go over that way? I sort of know how this way is going to go, I stick with this way. The worst I’m going to get is handcuffed and some time. I can do that. I’m familiar with that type of thing.
Love is the unfamiliar territory for them. Those stories are violent but not in the way we usually think of violence, it’s not over the top or like a Tarantino film. Your stories portray an intimate and honest violence. It’s related to what you said at the beginning, that they are not huge criminal activities. This is not the last job story. They have to do another and another. Nothing is guaranteed for them.
I think many times, there is violence somehow embedded in the life, when three hundred dollars becomes a lot of money you’ll do bad things to keep it and to make sure you have it. It becomes desperate in a particular way, without being like a Tarantino or a Ninja-Sword-this-that. It’s not like that. It’s a just a very simple day to day. These people have problems. Just getting from point A to point B is sometimes a problem. I think there is a lot of that in everyday life. Call it slow-boil suicide.
Related to that, sometimes for your characters violence is a way of communicate, another way to killing time. They don’t have any second thought about hurting someone.
For me it’s always about sort of like people they talk tough but then you will say to yourself ‘When was the last time that they were actually in a fight?’ Probably like grade school, like thirty years ago, maybe. The people in my stories, they were in a fight two days ago. Prior to that, they were in a hundred fights. They don’t win them all. They lost most of them, but they know what is like to be hit, to hit somebody. Not just to talk about it, but to actually do it. They’d take a swing at you. It’s reality and it’s frightening, but it’s reality. There are people in the world that you just don’t want to tangle with. Not that they may even beat you, you may beat them. But they are in fights all the time. If something goes wrong, they’ll do it. They don’t even have to think about it anymore. It’s just a different group of people.
It’s a good definition to describe your characters. It’s seems like they are programmed to act no matter what they have to do. You have this story, ‘John the Revelator ’, when someone dies next to protagonist, and he is already putting finding a spot to dump the body.
And that’s like, basically, what we set to do this morning. ‘I can’t deviate from that, because then I’m going to get caught’. So if I have to put some cinder blocks on somebody´s hands, toss them in the river, I just do that and keep going. That’s part of the task of being involved with this level of criminality. And sometimes things don’t go well and they try to adjust the ship, and sometimes adjusting the ship means that somebody has to get hit, shot, whatever it may be.
Reading your stories, I feel like they pack so much, that you feel like reading a sort of bonsai-nouvelle, you have so much going on, on the surface and beneath.
I always try to make it seems as if even though the stories has ended with the words, than in your mind it can continue on. That the readers can see other things happening, because hopefully there is been enough there, enough packed in, and the characters are good enough, and the story is good enough that you sort of believe that at least these people are alive. And if you believe that they are alive, that you may believe that they are dead. Regarding the endings, I don’t like to wrap stuff up neatly if I can help it. I like it to expand out and just do its own thing, which is, to me, kind of like life. Let’s say you go for a year and you don’t talk to someone. Then all of a sudden you reconnect and they go ‘Oh, I got married, I have a child’. And you are like ‘Wow. All that happened in a year’. But to them it’s seems normal, it happened all one day at the time, but to you it’s coming to you in a single mail or a phone call. It’s a lot. And for people that bad stuff happened towards them or they are involved with, a lot can happen in a very short span of time. It can go from what we think is bad to a lot worse than that, very rapidly. And so, sometimes I like to see that happening, I like to see that the characters reflect on what just happened to them, what they are going through, and it causes other questions to come up. I like that in a short story. I like it if the reader is able to think about a question that is meaningful to them. It’s something that maybe they already have inside them or they got something out of the story, and wonder ‘what if that happened to me’ or ‘I never read something that it was so packed in like that’. Sometimes works better than others. I give it a shot.
There is a short story by Hans Koning called ‘Naval Aviation’. It’s about the dirty war in Argentina. It appeared in the New Yorker years ago, and when I read it, I thought that it was one of the best short stories that I’ve ever read. It is about Bocartes, who is a pilot and he is throwing people out of the plane. That’s what he is doing. But the way Koning wrote it, back and forth between these letters from Bocartes and these diary entries, and it’s the ‘I narrator’ talking, the flow is masterful. And without having all that much violence in it, it’s one of the most violent stories that I’ve ever read. I always admired that style, not to make it like big, like train exploding and bombs, and whatever. I just want to see it in real life, if I can.
Beyond all the physical violence, you go deeper, to all those all these other layers violence and brokenness that your characters are buried on. If someone would ask me ‘What is noir really about?’, I’d give them this book, because I feel like they would find an answer between all those layers.
I appreciate that a lot. When people talk about noir, sometimes it feel like 1940s, old school, old style, and I appreciate that, but to me, I want to see that stuff happening in real life, I want the characters to say things that are memorable and believable, but I want them to go through things, sort in way like a contemporary Jim Thompson. Not as crazy as Lou Ford in “The Killer Inside Me”, but something like that. Where that tension of what could happened would feel like ‘we’re already in a bad situation, and now it’s get worst’. And we all seen it or been of the periphery of it. You’re buying groceries, you come out into the parking lot, somebody is involve in a scuffle. You don’t really run over and get involved in that, you kind of get away from it, you hope other people take care of it, but for my characters, they are involved. And that’s actually their life, what’s going on with them. That’s what noir is about, the uneasy feeling that things are going to go bad.
When we try to tackle this question, what’s is really noir, I’m interest in this idea of desperation literature, when your moral code is challenged. In your short-story ‘Barracuda’, you got the protagonist lying to the doctor about some incident and he says “With truth and honesty and human concern. I wanted to act like someone who deserved to be called sir, but I couldn’t.”
He wants that normal life, but he can’t have that. And then it almost awkward this interaction. The doctor knows that he is lying. But it’s amazing that this doctor says “sir” to the character, and he wants that and he’d like that, to be call “sir”. But that’s not going to happen in his lifetime. They can see this other side of life, but there is no bridge to get there. They are not going over there.
Also, in ‘Barracuda’ you present Jimmy Work, one of your recurrent characters, who happens to be at the center of ‘Eight ball’.
Yeah, he and his brother are involved in bad stuff. In ‘Eight Ball’, Jimmy Work knows enough to push the guy face into the car when he slam on him, so basically nobody would hear him scream, because he is screaming into the closed up car. To slam a car door on somebody several times, that is tough. But they go after him because he owes them money, but not much money even. We all, probably wish we didn’t, but sometimes we think about vengeance, in some way. And just you like you said earlier, for these guys vengeance could be about five hundred dollars. That’s where they at. And you wouldn’t think of people doing that, but I think it happens all the time. Definitely, there is people in the world that you wouldn’t want to get involved in a way. It’s a mistake. But it’s already too late. You’re already involved with them, now you going to have the price. You are going to end up wishing that you didn’t know Jimmy Work.
For sure, every time we see him, we know things are going to get really bad. You see him and he is involved in dogfights, shooting kids. You don’t ‘shy away from going into the darkest part of the human being. And in the other hand, you have the “market” telling you ‘don’t go there’, but you go anyway.
There is a lot of truth in that. I’m trying not to watch the news anymore, but when I do you see that all the time. Children are killed all the time, and I think it’s a tragedy, it actually affects me. In some way, through my stories I try to do the opposite and say ‘when will it stop?’, but to me it never would. It always been happening, it’s something that you we just tend to look away from, and I think it’s a truth, an it’s a bad, unfortunate truth, you wouldn’t perhaps think that the truth would be a bad thing, but it’s there and it’s real. So I don’t want to see it just moved over into like crazy school shootings stuff, it happens every day in all kinds of circumstances, just because, perhaps, is only one child or two, doesn’t make it less meaningful or awful. It’s awful.
With the dogfights, I always think poor people have poor entertainment. If you have a pit bull and you trained to fight you could go a make five hundred dollars. That may be not a great decision. But when you go down the streets in Los Angeles, you see this dog training in leashes, everybody has a giant dog. They not all going home at night being nice pets. You know if they can train those, they are others that you never see. To me, there something about doing that, that attracts a certain type of person. You, somehow, lost a barrier of goodness, it’s has been erased by you or for you somehow, and you are just fine with it. And maybe that’s the frightening thing of it. There are places right now, that you and I can get into a plane and go somewhere, and two hours from now we can be watching a dogfight. That’s kind of crazy, but it’s true.
Your stories are set far from big cities—Moscow, Idaho, New York State. Outside the cities’ protective embrace, this reinforces the impression that the characters are in “the land of you are on you own” which makes their relationship with the world more intense. I understand that some of them are places you have lived, but I’d like to talk a little about the setting of the stories.
There is this great line in Sherlock Holmes’s story “The Copper Beeches”. Holmes and Watson are on a train and they’re going to a place far away from London to investigate a crime. Holmes sees this single house, and he says something about to be out here so far away from the Bobby whistle, away from the gaslights from London, he goes to say it’s frightening to him. When you have something happening in Manhattan, for example, they have all kind of special squads, the SWAT team, the sniper team. They will come down on you like a hammer. When something happens in Moscow, Idaho, there is no one there. You are on your own. You have better be good at what you do. When something happens in Elko, Nevada, it’s just you. Yes, there is a sheriff, and there are police officers. But not a lot of them, and not like special weapons or things like that. It’s just regular people, doing their job. Maybe they have been on the job for ten or twenty years. They may or may not be good at their job. Maybe they are wonderful, maybe they are terrible. You don’t know. But it’s not like being in the city. When you have, let’s say, God forbid, a medical problem in Los Angeles, there is a special hospital for it in Los Angeles. They could cure anything. Fifteen minutes later you are on the operation table and someone specialized is looking at you. When it happens in upstate New York, you start going to the funeral home to buy you a casket. No one is there to help you. They have never seen that before. You are going to die. So geography always makes a big difference. And you get farther away from the cities, you get more areas where people can have dogfights, and I know that these urban centers have a lot of drugs in them, but there are a lot of drugs in crimes in the rural areas, just because there is no one there to stop it. And you have solitude there to do your criminal thing, no one is going to come check up on you. If you have a hundred acres and you are out of in the middle of nowhere, you just do whatever bad thing you’re doing. The other thing I always felt it’s other authors wrote about urban environment so much better than I did, that was their thing. Let them do that. I do this. I enjoy reading their books, reading about urban environment through their fiction, but let them do that, I do this.
In both Controlled Burn and Hundred Proof, most of your main characters make a living as lumberjack or doing some business related to woods. You seem to know a lot about this kind of business.
Years ago when I couldn’t get a job, I got a job working in a lumberyard, so I know a little bit about it, and I’ve logged and done stuff, but also I knew other people that did it, and it’s a very hard business. It’s very hard, especially at the lower level, and it’s extremely dangerous. You’ve really got to know what you’re doing. Your equipment can fail. Like people say ‘it’s an easy way to make a hard living’. There’s a bunch of professions like that. Here in Maine, there’s loggers and lobstermen. You’re not really making much money. If somehow you claw your way all the way to the top, no pun intended, but like that’s not the guy on the ground just trying to get started. He’s got one truck, he got two saws. It’s tough and you are definitely not making enough money to help yourself, God forbid, if you get hurt. And everybody gets hurt at some point.
You have these interconnect stories that gives your characters and their lives more room to breathe. We’ve talked about Jimmy Works, but you have this sort of main characters, John Thorn and his partner Greg, his uncle too. How do you approach working within this universe?
I’ll come out with one of those stories every once in a while, that they’re interconnected. It’s either the same characters or similar characters, same geography. And with John and Greg, they have a difficult relationship sometimes, and so it has taken more than one story to get them to where they’re going. And at some point in the future there’ll be more stories about them. But I wanted to see what would happen, I guess, with some different crimes for them, some different things that they were investigating. When I start writing the stories, it makes me curious about where’s this going to go. Like, I always have an idea, but I always feel like I want to write another one just to see where they’re going to go. Are they going to stick together in this private investigating thing? Are they going to get sick of each other? Is there going to be an incident? Is one of them going to die? It’s always very interesting to me. So I hope it’s interesting to readers.
You really have to pay attention to see if this character is the same as the last one or a different person. The whole fake identity thing makes you feel even more unsure, which brings greater importance to the choice in which the stories appear. How did you work on this aspect?
I try to think about it. You could read them in any order you want, but I sort of intended them to be read in that order. So certain things are revealed, you bump into certain realities and sometimes it comes as a surprise. I always try to think about people reading the whole book. I want them to be entertained from one story to the next. But hopefully if you read the whole book, especially with those interconnected stories, you bump into different things and it takes you back to the other story and you’ll go ‘all right, what’s happening now? Is this the same guy? What’s going on?’ And so you kind of key back into that. I always liked that feeling as a reader, so I hope I can give some of it to a reader.
I want to go back, just a little bit. When you started published your stories, twenty years ago, there was some “market” for them, with the emergence and rise of e-magazines, like Plot with Guns, CrimeSpree, Thuglit Nowadays you don’t have this type of opportunities, but you continue working on short stories.
I had never read Plots with Guns, somehow I read it on the internet and I thought maybe I’ll submit a story there. And I sat down and wrote one, and I sent it to Anthony Neil Smith, who is a terrific writer in his own right. And he took it, you know, and they published it. I kind of couldn’t believe it. And then I probably did that like five more times. Then I started to be in anthologies. I got picked up for “Best American Mystery Stories”, and then that happened seven years in a row. And then James Elroy picked me for “Best American Noir of the Century”. So there used to be a place on the internet for stories like this. And the I think those things became difficult to run. They take up a lot of time. There was no money in it. And I think, people just went on and had their own careers. They kind of stopped doing that, which I certainly understand. For me that was a big part of me, publishing stories and getting picked up and put in the Best American Mystery series, which was really kind of huge for me. The first time I did it I was like ‘Oh, wow. You know, I got lucky’. And the second time I did it, I thought I got lucky. And the third time in a row when I did it, I thought maybe I could actually do this. And then when, you know, James Elroy picked me up for the “Best American Noir of the Century”, I just couldn’t believe it. When I got the book and saw that Jim Thompson was in it and I was like ‘Oh my God, I’m in the same book as Jim Thompson’. Like I’m in the same book as Chester Himes. That was kind of crazy for me. I was just like, that was something else.
You’ve probably written about fifty stories already. What’s your process like?
Usually, I’ll have a pretty good idea of what I wanted to do and where I wanted to go, and then I always hand write my story. And as I’m typing it, I’ll add things and make corrections and I’ll print it, and then I’ll have a typed printed version. From that point forward, I might make some handwritten changes, but I’ll usually keep typing it until it lands where I want it to land. So usually when I first go through, it’s really like loose. Like it’s taking place here, it’s going to have this in it. It’ll do this. Then I make it fuller in a handwritten draft. And then the typing.
You mentioned Jim Thompson, Chester Himes, can we talk about your influences?
I definitely read everything that Jim Thompson wrote. Some of his stuff comes out better than others, but I thought that for what he was doing… You know, they used to call him the dime-store Dostoyevsky, because he always had like a little bit of philosophy in there. Things just wouldn’t go right, and that was always very interesting to me. He just wrote about a lot of times about people just having bad lives that got worse. There are very few uplifting moments in a Jim Thompson novel. I also like the speed with which those stories move along. You’re not going to get bored. You’re always into it. He really didn’t write overly long stuff. And then I guess, when I was coming up, like there used to be these paperbacks from Alistair McLean, the Scottish author, and he used to have this little sticker in the corner that said ‘Alistair McClain, master storyteller’. I like that for some reason. I didn’t even know what it meant, but I wanted to be a master storyteller, I wanted to do that. As soon as they came out, like I read all of Henning Mankell’s books. I still read all of Jussi Adler-Olsen. I’m just kind of fascinated with his stuff. Two years ago I read Hideo Yokoyama’s “Prefecture D” and I thought that was really good. It’s, it goes along with that with “64”. It’s a big novel. It’s a lot to digest, but “Prefecture D” is much shorter and a little more, I think, to the point. It was very interesting to me. I like the classics, I always loved Sherlock Holmes. the relationship between he and Watson who’s doing what. Watson kind of chronicling everything. And I’ve read thousands of books between now and then. I’m very lucky to be married to a genius writer – Shanna McNair – and her debut novel “Soul Retrieval” really inspires me – it’s brave, amazing writing. Most recently, the half-hour crime series “On Call” from Elliot Wolf and Tim Walsh was ground-breaking and so intense to watch. Really outstanding. Any of the “Power” series from showrunner Gary Lennon – he’s got the story-telling magic. There’s some of Cormac McCarthy that I really liked. I really like “No Country for Old Men”. There’s other things that Cormac McCarthy wrote, but It’s just not my style. I’m not really that into it, That doesn’t mean it’s bad, that just means it’s me. I just read Michael Mann’s “Heat 2”. I liked it. It’s like sort of the quintessential Michael Mann. I hope he makes a film out of it. I think it would be amazing. I’ve always found “Heat” to be a tremendous inspiration, Michael Mann just knows the way everything works, and then he kind of runs it through the imagination of the Michael Mann machine. And that works. It’s magic, its visual magic. He’s simply always revealing things from one sentence to the next. He has stuff going on, and it’s just kinda wild to watch his stuff. Not all of his stuff has been as successful on the screen as others, but I still think that he’s a special kind of genius.
Yeah. For me, “Heat” is a masterpiece. He know what he’s talking about. So, Scott, to close it up. You came back with this book these short stories, are you working on something new?
I’m working on a crime novel titled “Conquistadors” and it will come out from High Frequency Press, probably late next spring. And I’m working on some stuff for Hollywood.
