An Interview with Ray Nayler
David Soyka: There’s a case to be made that writers need to experience life in order to write about it (could Melville have written Moby Dick without ever having shipped aboard a whaler?), but in the territory you work—crime and noir fiction—is it necessary to have ever been a P.I. or known a thug or two?
Ray Nayler: Well–that one is tough. For some people, I think it is nearly impossible to write about something they have no experience in first hand. For others, research will suffice. I think what serves the writer best is a combination of both. I’ve known a P.I., I’ve talked to a lot of criminals, though not in the name of research. I was in and out of trouble quite a bit as a kid and saw too much of the policing side of the industry. I’ve been in a few scrapes, here and there, and known some people that might qualify as “thugs,” although I wouldn’t really call them that. I also do my research when I can–read and read about true crime and false, and read widely of any fiction or non-fiction that I can get my hands on. The process is more complex than most people might think–the process of gathering information, I mean. You take it from your own life, from the lives of those close to you, from people that you meet on the street, from stories you read in the paper, and from traveling, which may be where I learn more than just about anywhere else. I also think it’s important not to gloss over academics. Theory and critique have, at times been just as valuable to me as personal experience, although I think that without the personal experience, the University would have, in my case, been almost completely useless. Being poor as a kid helped me to understand class. Living in different places, getting shuffled around, seeing quite a few Laundromats and flea markets, racism and street life, and suburban boredom for a while as well. Everything helps.
David Soyka: Lance Bailey, the protagonist of American Graveyards, is the archetypical noir hero—the private detective with his own ragged moral code, trying to settle accounts and make things right, but in the process discovering some greater truth that render his own actions as perhaps pointless, even if still admirable. How do you go about bringing something fresh to what has become a clichéd form?
Ray Nayler: Part of it is a good working knowledge of the genre. You can’t improvise if you don’t have any idea of the basic structure, the rules and the established tropes of the writers before you. For me, a big part of being able to “bring something new” to the genre came from theory. I was lucky enough to study a lot of detective fiction as an academic after having read it as a fan., so I could look at it from both angles. That has helped me quite a bit. And I also believe it helps to be critical of the genre–not to just be a fan, and not to let other people’s definitions of the genre overwhelm you.
David Soyka: Typically, your stories end with the main character having followed through on the original “mission”—which may not necessarily be a good one—awaiting the consequences of their actions. Why do you resist that urge to tag a “moral” onto your endings or otherwise spell out their fates?
Ray Nayler: That’s the realist in me, I guess. I’m just not comfortable with capital “M” Morals. I think I’ve just seen a bit too much of that type of thing in fiction. It doesn’t strike me as uplifting; it strikes me as false, as a cop out, as cheesy. I don’t think that the end of the story needs to spell out whether or not the main character’s actions are correct, in a Moral sense. I think ambiguity and openness in an ending are more effective. I trust my readers to make their own judgments, or not to judge at all. Maybe I would prefer it if they withheld judgment. There’s no need to police the moral lives of fictional characters, after all. I think the point of fiction is that it does not judge. It illustrates. It tells the story, and doesn’t tell you what to think of the story.
