Fantastic Metropolis

Ray Nayler was born in Quebec and educated in California, where he studied American Literature and Film Noir at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His short fiction has been published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Heist, Blue Murder, The Edge (USA), and The Berkeley Fiction Review, among others. His short story “Cutting Wood, Carrying Water” appeared in Crimewave 4: Mood Indigo. TTA Press has just reissued his first novel, American Graveyards, in which Lance Bailey, PI, on his last case and his last legs, track downs the murderer of his true love. But before Bailey can exact his final revenge, he must unravel a web of conspiracy and murder in the Mojave Desert. Haunted by an enigmatic nightmare of being a deep sea diver losing his air supply, the well-past-his-prime Lance finds himself struggling to keep up with a world that is growing more and more fragmented and deadly with each passing moment. His one saving grace is the secretary who has been loyal to him all these years, whose very life depends on Bailey’s ability to come through against the odds one last time.

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David Soyka: There was a time in the 1920s and 1930s when a writer could actually make more money writing short stories than novels. Today, the opposite seems true. While rumors of the death of the short form may be greatly exaggerated, what with the plethora of university-associated journals and nascent web and electronic “publications,” these aren’t well paying—and often don’t pay at all—while also being very much a niche marketplace. As someone who first made his mark as a short story writer, to what extent does the prospect of a wider readership, not to mention additional income, play in your decision to write in a longer form?

Ray Nayler: I think that what played more into my decision to write longer was being able to form and execute more complex ideas. For a short story, I would start with a pretty simple situation, place it in a scene, and go from there. When you’re writing for the short story market, at least for the market that I have been targeting, you’re looking for around 3,000 words. What that trains you to do is to cut everything extraneous out of your idea and focus. You have to characterize and move action at a very good clip, or you won’t have room to progress the story along sufficiently. You learn techniques to deal with this: you learn how to quickly define a character through actions and gestures. You learn to start the story in the middle, to drop your reader into the action quickly, and you learn when to get out. But the form, while amazing, can be limiting. I found that, more and more, I was coming up with ideas that needed more space. Ideas that were more complex than I could work out in a short story. So I had to write a novel. I just needed more room for things to play out. At the same time, I think that the short story form is flourishing these days–not necessarily as a paying form, but definitely as a form in general. I think that the level of short story writing is, in general, very high. Crime stories and Mystery stories have a market and do quite well. More than a paying, viable economic market, what they provide is a proving ground for young writers and an opportunity to get their names out there. Economics isn’t everything, and the short story form is a very rewarding artistically, if not financially.

David Soyka: The cliché is that the short story writer is a sprinter, and the novelist a long distance runner. True enough, on the surface, since you’re obviously spending a lot more time with characters and plot line in a novel. But are the skills really necessarily different?

Ray Nayler: I don’t think that the skills it takes are very different at all. I think of a novel as a tightly controlled tale, rather than a dumping ground for excess character study and the like. A novel, to me, should have enough of an idea behind it to carry it through without any need for padding. As a writer, I don’t like subplots much, or side characters. I like plots. I like strong main characters that are well developed, and well-developed supporting characters. I like for everything to fit together pretty neatly. Short story writing taught me to do that. I learned to discard. To trim away the fat, so to speak. I want things lean and concise. At the same time, I’m not the kind of writer who covers a large amount of time in a few words. What I write is scenes, rather than description of the passage of time. I like dialogue and action, and that’s the way that I structure my work–around the scene. That takes up a certain amount of space. A short story for me is usually one to three scenes. A novel might be fifty or so. You can get a lot more depth into fifty scenes. You have more time for subtlety.

David Soyka: American Graveyards is actually more novella in length than novel. Given the popularity of “fat books”—both in terms of single volumes of 500 pages or more as well as multi-volume sets—do you think that is a drawback from a commercial standpoint? Or is commercial success even a consideration for you?

Ray Nayler: I think it might be a drawback for this particular book, from a commercial standpoint. It’s certainly the trend these days to write longer novels. But at the same time, I think there is a market out there for almost everything. I trust the reader to recognize a good book when they read one, no matter the length. Not everyone out there is looking for the same thing, thank goodness. Also, I feel that I would have been doing myself a great disservice by writing American Graveyards at any other length. The length fit exactly what I wanted to do. My next book, Empty Horse, is almost twice as long as American Graveyards. It’s entirely different, and its length fits it well, I think. I really believe in not padding anything. Padding isn’t fair to the reader, either. It breaks the focus of a novel, it distracts, and it is disingenuous. Maybe it will be a slight commercial drawback, but I’m not writing for commercial gain. I would like to make a living doing what I love. I just hope that there are people out there who respect that and support it. I believe there are.

David Soyka: American Graveyards is your first published novel, but not the first you’ve written. Is your first effort something you intend to ever publish?

Ray Nayler: I’m not really sure. I go back and forth with that first book. It was a detective novel as well, and I feel that it was an exercise in learning how to write a book, more than a complete novel. As I went along through the book, I felt like I was getting better at writing. So I feel that the beginning is much weaker, and that as the book goes along it gets stronger. That isn’t such a great thing for a manuscript. I would have to do a lot of rewriting, I believe, in order to save that book. I’m not sure it’s worth it. It seems better just to move forward, to write other books and build on the experience I gained with the first one. Writing the first novel definitely allowed me to write American Graveyards well. By the time I started American Graveyards, I had a much better idea of what I wanted to do and how to get there.

David Soyka: It seems more the rule than the exception for writers to go through the process of creating a novel—sometimes more than one—as a way to learn how to do it, then discard it to move on to something else. But while on the one hand that’s a valuable “learning experience,” to use the term, it must be frustrating to invest all that time and effort into a project without a pay-off—both literally in the sense of making money for your work and developing a readership. Which leads to the whole question of how anyone can hope to earn a living as a fiction writer. Do you?

Ray Nayler: Writing that first novel was not at all a frustrating experience for me. It was a huge challenge. It took over a year to get the first draft done, and longer than that to revise it, but while I was doing it I was very happy to have a focal point in my life. The magic of a novel is that it protects the writer from some of life’s bumps and bangs. You always have the novel to come back to, you always feel like you have a purpose. The length of the process, I believe, is one of its joys. And at the time, I wasn’t thinking too much about making a living as a fiction writer. I was still an undergrad. I just wanted to see if I could do it. I had written so many short stories, and had a few out there. I wanted to see if I could write novels too–or if I would always be a short story author. In the end, I was very happy with the result. My friends, whom I used as test subjects, loved the book. I just felt that it had a few major flaws. It isn’t until recently that I entertained an idea of making money in this market–that is, I hadn’t made any before, and it isn’t until recently that the money has started to trickle in. I still read parts of that first book, and it reads well to me, most of the time. The problem is that I can’t really put my finger on how to “fix” whatever it is I don’t like about it. And so I move on to other things. There’s a definite limit to how much an author can dwell on past writings. And there’s a definite limit to how much an author can worry about the money side of the business. I try not to worry too much about that. I just try to write, and not get rusty sitting around worrying about when I’ll be able to quit my job and write full time. I’m still not sure that writing full time would be healthy, or possible.

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.

David Soyka: The detective novel at times seems to be recognized as a legitimate literary form—witness, for example, the critical attention to Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless in Brooklyn—but, at the same time, it’s often relegated as a genre that is somehow intended primarily as entertainment. Given the obvious literary aspirations of your work, do you feel that being labeled as a writer of a particular genre in any way hindering? Or, is it in some ways liberating?

Ray Nayler: I think that the detective novel has actually been recognized as a valid literary form for some time, although not always here. The French, for example, point to the American detective novel as high art, and found Jim Thompson and Raymond Chandler, among others, to be fine practitioners of the existential novel, before its time. Camus was a fan of Thompson and other crime writers. Almost everyone respects Poe as a major innovator, and he is the father of the genre. Many of our finest “mainstream” novels have been crime or mystery novels in thin disguise. I think that the genre has always done well. On the other hand, the genre will always suffer somewhat from the stigma of being purely “entertainment.” That is partially the fault of the many sloppy writers in the genre, a tradition that goes back as far as the tradition of fine writing done in the name of Detective and Crime fiction. There is quite a bit of garbage out there, and there always has been. But then there is quite a bit of garbage in the literary novel field, and in any artistic endeavor. The Detective genre isn’t immune from bad writing, but neither is any other market. I think that the problem lies more in the public perception of Detective fiction, boiled down to its simplest elements of tough investigators, femme fatales and gunplay. That’s unfortunate, but it isn’t the fault of the genre. It is the fault of consumerism. People using Bogart to sell coffee or butter. People not paying attention.

David Soyka: Here comes the obligatory interview question, “What writers influenced you?”

Ray Nayler: It’s odd to say, but I think that William Styron influenced me the most at first. I read Set This House On Fire and I wanted to write like that. Jim Thompson and Cornell Woolrich were influences on me for sure. And there is no avoiding Chandler. Bret Easton Ellis is, at times, inspiring. But if you asked me what book I carried around the longest, and what book affected me the most early on, I would say it was a collection of poems by Wilfred Owen. I still envy his power over the word.

David Soyka: What’s on your bedside reading table these days?

Ray Nayler: At just this moment, I’m reading The Man With the Golden Arm by Nelson Algren. Under that is Manifestoes of Surrealism, by André Breton. I just finished Chuck Palahniuk’s Choke about a week ago. I enjoyed that book. He’s a brilliant writer. I also picked up a collection of Sherlock Holmes stories, and am looking forward to reading and rereading some of those. Then there’s always the Freud Reader. You can never get enough Freud. That stays on the nightstand.

David Soyka: Something tells me you must listen to guys like Tom Waits. What is it about losers and the underbelly of the American dream that makes it such an attractive venue for artists to mine?

Ray Nayler: I was having a conversation with a friend of mine a couple of weeks ago about class–working class, middle class, and upper class. These days it can be confusing trying to figure out your own class. You can be poor but have things. You can be middle class but feel poor. We were searching for indicators of class. What we came up with was Laundromats. The more times you’ve been to a Laundromat as a child, the poorer you were. Flea markets can be another indicator. And if you ever had to buy your school clothes at the thrift store (not the vintage clothing store, and not so you could look cool) that marks you as poor. So I’ll put it this way: I saw a lot of Laundromats as a kid, and I wore a lot of terry shirts and corduroy pants that were long out of style. Tom Waits is great, but being poor and eating church yams is not that great. I don’t really care for artists “slumming it” by mining that kind of thing. Or for artists making fun of the working poor, making them into caricatures. I had my time in suburbia too, and that’s in my fiction. But at the core of it, my family was poor. That doesn’t make my fiction more or less authentic, but it might give an answer as to where it comes from. As for the American Dream–maybe if I write well enough I can have a bit, by and by. In the meantime, I chalk up all the dirty dishes and boxes to deliver and conveyor belts to experience. More things to write about. Or am I not supposed to tell anyone I haven’t quit my day job yet?

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This interview originally appeared in the now-defunct Blue Murder.