Ghosts and Shadows ~ 2016
Mr. Hiller,
Thank you for
taking your time for me ~
Who are your influences?
I was
genuinely blessed to have met Kurt Vonnegut and Will and Ariel Durant at a book
fair in Los Angeles when I was just out of high school and they were
considerably more encouraging about my goal of being a writer than my parents.
I have read everything by Elmore Leonard, Robert B. Parker, and especially
James Lee Burke I have been able to lay my hands on and absorbed a lot of tips
on pacing and developing characters, but Terry Pratchett’s novels showed me how
to layer contemporary issues within my stories. I am not a fan of fantasy
fiction, but Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams brilliantly write about
important things while sending their readers on hilarious romps.
When did you begin writing?
A friend recently gave me a novella I wrote
at the age of fifteen, so I could say I started at least that long ago. I have
started a number of novels over the years since then, and got into the
restaurant business under the very mistaken impression I would be able to
support myself and have time to write. Instead I did what most waiters and
bartenders do, I spent my time spending my money. I went into management and
that was pretty much the end of having time to do anything else. I did, though,
come away with a million stories and characters to write about. It wasn’t until
I took a job as a chef on a work-boat and had time to fill between meals that I
really focused on writing again. My work schedule alternates working one month
at a time with having an entire month off, during which time I can afford to do
nothing but write.
How do you come up with your stories,
characters, character names, POV, etc.?
One
of my favorite TV detective shows is Foyle’s War. Each of Detective Foyle’s
cases are complicated by England’s involvement in the Second World War. I am
writing a series in which my detective is hobbled by his hometown’s painfully
slow and uneven recovery from Hurricane Katrina. The first book in my detective
series involves the murder of someone the police are glad to see dead, the
second book finds a criminal motive buried within perfectly legal land transactions,
and the current novel looks at how to find justice when the government has
deemed certain crimes to be legal. The next book in the series mixes the hunt
for a serial killer with the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon tragedy. As for
how I find my characters, I used to drive between New Orleans and Kansas City
to see my daughter and passed an exit sign in the bootheel of Missouri for the
towns of Cooter and Holland and thought Cooter Holland was a funny name for a
character. I used to keep myself awake on the long drive trying to imagine
stories I could write around a man with that unique name. I also met a number
of former Special Forces and Intelligence operatives through a woman I dated
for a while and was struck by the fact that, unlike an average soldier, they
seemed only able to discuss any adjustment issues or their past service with one
another because of the classified nature of their past work. My detective’s
sister is named Tulip because it says something about their father’s sense of
humor. Most of the other character names are either variations of the names
people whose real-life anecdotes I spice my novels with or ones I pulled at
random from the New Orleans phone book. I find a last name I like and then
match it with a randomly selected first name.
If you could actually meet one of your
characters, who would it be? Why?
Well a great many of the minor support or characters-in-passing are
actually people I have known from the decades I spent working in restaurants
and nightclubs in New Orleans, but the central fictional character I suppose
would be the most interesting to actually spend time with would be Chef Tony
Venzo. There are so many layers to who he is, and has been in the past, plus
I’d love to steal a few of his recipes.
Do you work from an outline?
I do, but the finished books only share the
crime committed, a few new characters, and a title with the original outline. I
have learned to trust my characters to develop the story after I point them in
a general direction. Each of the new characters is something of a sign post
that keeps the story moving in the direction I intended, but I’ve very seldom found
that the story my detective and core characters develop is less engrossing than
the one I thought I wanted to tell. I’m also not afraid to throw away entire
chapters if their story wanders too far afield, and once tossed nearly six chapters
and two week’s work when I realized this was the case. Any time I have writer’s
block I usually find that it is because I am too far from the outline and can
no longer see where I am going.
Tell me about your favorite scene in your
novel(s).
I always enjoy the Detective dealing with his mother. He is trained to
handle warlords and generals, and his sister is a top civil attorney with
notorious courtroom skills, but Camille Devereaux Holland wears both of her
children out with her Old-Money-Southern attitudes and the cryptic advice she
passes along from the online psychic she began consulting after Hurricane
Katrina. The first time we meet Detective Holland’s mother you can tell he has
a hard time telling if she is in the early stages of dementia or the late
stages of being difficult to live with.
Can you tell us a little about your
writing philosophy?
My philosophy is to Write What You Want to
Read. It is hard to sell anyone on a story about social issues, but making them
a subplot or contextual element creates a more engaging story and that is what
each of the books in my series does. For one thing, my characters are fictional
but the world they inhabit is very real. I recreate the events, even the actual
weather on a given day, in New Orleans at the time of each story. I find a
topic that affected the city at the time (and may still), such as gentrification
in poor neighborhoods, and write a mystery that finds a way to incorporate that
subject into the plot. It’s vital that your characters have opinions about the
world you have created around them, even a purely fictional world. Readers have
opinions and take sides, so the fictional characters they read about need to as
well. Mysteries are occupy a unique niche in literature because of the
traditional requirement that the reader has to have the same clues as the
person solving the crime. You can spring surprises in romances or horror
novels, but you’ll never find a last-second clue that solves the whole thing in
any book by Agatha Christie. So, by placing my readers in Detective Holland’s
shoes, I can help my readers see not just the solution to the crime but the
very real world he and they share.
Have you ever tried writing in any other
genres?
I did try writing an Angry Young Man novel when I was fresh out of high
school and then a Contemplative Man novel examining the lives of my friends and
myself at about age forty. Thankfully I understood what I was doing and stopped
before embarrassing myself any further, and am grateful these were both in the
days before such easy self-publishing. I’ve always preferred true-crime and
mystery novels and TV shows, and was drawn to New Orleans in the first place by
a TV mystery series called Longstreet, so it was probably inevitable that I
would wind up writing them.
Do you have any interesting writing-related
anecdotes to share?
It’s not so much
a writing-related anecdote as a publishing one. I was shopping my first book to
agents and was consistently met with rejection and some well-meaning advice
about readers not being interested in stories about veterans who aren’t some
sort of hero, that there is Katrina-fatigue in the book market, and that most
mystery readers want very straightforward plots and simple to grasp characters.
The reviews of my books seem to contradict each of these arguments and every
book I sell vindicates my decision to distrust advice from literary agents.
Do you listen to music as you write?
I’m too easily distracted. Music has
inspired individual scenes and influenced me when I was looking for plots. I do
often have a song mentally playing in the back of my head when I write, as if
it were background music within the scene I am writing. I hummed Elton John’s
song ‘I’ve Seen That Movie, Too” when I wrote the last meeting between the
Detective and a movie actress at the end of the first book, and it was all I
could do not to steal that chorus. Hearing music in my head while I write is
easy to do because so many of the scenes in my books are set on the streets of
the French Quarter or in music clubs anyway, and I always try to write favorite
local musicians into a scene when I can.
✒ ✒ ✒
On the behalf of my reader's, I thank you Max for taking your time with us.
Connect with H. Max Hiller
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