An interview with Terrill Lee Lankford by Allan Guthrie

TERRILL LEE LANKFORD is the author of three very different novels: Angry Moon, Shooters and Earthquake Weather. Running the gamut from horror to Hollywood, the frenzied energy of Lankford’s earlier books have given way to the more assured, reflective and, dare I say, subtle voice of his latest book (a conclusion backed up not only by the barrage of excellent reviews, but also in Earthquake Weather’s nomination for Best Mystery of 2004 by the Southern California Booksellers Association). In his first print interview in seven years, Lee tells Noir Originals about his writing, his movies and his thoughts on the book trade. You want candid? You’ve come to the right place.

Allan Guthrie: What inspired you to write Earthquake Weather?

Terrill Lee Lankford: Living in Los Angeles and working in the film business, writing something like this becomes a bit inevitable. The stories you accrue have to go somewhere. I thought a book would be a good place to put it all. And the only way anyone would believe any of the stuff that happens here is to fictionalize it. I started the book in 1990, but put it aside a number of times to work on other things. The earthquake in 1994 obviously added a new dimension to the story.

Once I decided to use the quake as a starting place—and a justification of the madhouse going madder—the biggest problem I faced was trying to jam as much of what I had experienced over the years into a somewhat cohesive story. I never really got where I wanted to go with it. I found that trying to capture the Hollywood experience is a journey down a truly bottomless pit. I finally had to give up and accept the fact that I was going to have to be content with telling A story—or a group of stories—but not THE story of Hollywood life. It's so different for everyone who experiences it. The winners and the losers have very different stories to tell, but they can swap places overnight.

Allan Guthrie: It comes across as being full of inside knowledge. Were any of the characters based on real people? Any of the scenarios based on real-life experiences?

Terrill Lee Lankford: Almost every character is based on one or more people I have met during my
twenty-plus years in L.A. Most of the characters are an amalgam of two or three different people, often people who toil in similar jobs in real life as their characters do in the book. But then I add a coat of imagination to give the characters their own fictional lives.

Many of the events in the book are based on things that happened to me or friends of mine or events that were in the air over the last twenty years. The most insane stuff in the book is real. If you feel yourself getting bored at any point, it's probably during something I made up.

AG: Why was there such a long delay between Shooters and Earthquake Weather?

TLL: That's a big question. And the answer is complicated. Angry Moon was published eight months after Shooters, so the gap is really between Angry Moon and Earthquake Weather, although Angry Moon was the first novel I wrote and the first novel I sold. Due to quirks at the publishing house it was released as my second novel. And both those books had been smoldering for many years after my contracts were signed. Shooters took two and a half years between signing and publication. Angry Moon was four years! The powers that be at that publishing house really put a hurt on my career. (I don't think it was out of malice, but incompetence can be just as damaging.) By the time I realized I had to get away from them I was pretty burned out on the process. A big part of me didn't want to ever go through that bullshit again. I was seriously considering never submitting another book, just so I could avoid the publication gauntlet. I'm certain that those feelings contributed to my taking so long to finish the next book. Subconsciously I was trying to avoid all the battles and the inevitable pain of defeat.

But as to the delay between books, aside from the many distractions life has to offer, Earthquake Weather also took a very long time to write. It was originally a much bigger book and I just about had it sold in 2001. I had an editor at William Morrow who said he was going to buy it five days before 9/11 happened. He was let go from Morrow about a month later when they cut 20% of their workforce, blaming 9/11. The book deal went out the door with him. (He went off and became an agent and he currently represents me.)

I submitted the book to two more editors and it was rejected. Once politely. Once violently. I suffered a crisis of faith in the material and I took another look at the book. I decided the book was too large and rambling. I had too many characters and too many plots and subplots running alongside and underneath each other. I also realized that many of these subplots could be split apart and that the book might work better as two simpler books rather than one complex one. I experimented with the manuscript and Earthquake Weather was the result. It was sent out to ten editors. Four of them were interested, but they could not convince the sales or marketing forces at their publishing houses to take the plunge (it's frightening how much power these people currently wield compared to most editors). It was outright rejected by five of the editors. But the tenth, Joe Blades at Ballantine, not only wanted it, but had the power to push the sale through. So the journey took somewhere between seven and fourteen years, depending on how you look at it. Some people take that long to write a book even when things are running smoothly for them, so I don't feel that bad about it. But in the crime fiction business, if you don't publish every twelve months people start thinking there's something wrong with you. I find that very strange.

AG: Earthquake Weather seems to me to be quieter, less dark and more intricate than the previous two. Do you see any thematic or stylistic progressions in your novels?

TLL: The first two books were the product of a young man who was trying to learn how to write books (as opposed to screenplays) and who had a lot of energy and was in the process of doing a bit of rampaging on planet Earth. Earthquake Weather is the end result of having lived that life. The darkness may be more obvious in the first two books, but I think the themes and meanings running under the surface of Earthquake Weather are just as dark as those previous books, maybe more so. There's probably just a bit more honey laced with the medicine this time. I guess it's going to be considered my "cozy."

As far as progression goes, hopefully I'm getting better as a writer or what would be the point in continuing? I can't even read my earlier work. Or look at my movies. (And no one else should have to either.)

AG: "Angry Moon" was superb fun. Are you tempted to write another horror novel?

TLL: It's very doubtful. I don't think I could afford a failure of that magnitude at this stage of life. I have children now, so I have to limit my experimentations with finances. Angry Moon was a book written in ignorance of the fact that most readers don't like their genres mixed. Horror novels are also a very tough sale nowadays. But I did get a call last night from a director friend of mine who just read the book and is interested in trying to get it off the ground as a movie. We'll see.

AG: Shooters is very different. Dark, but very real. What stays with me is the sex scene. Was it a hard book to write (sex scenes are notoriously difficult to get right) and what's your favourite scene (if it doesn't give away the plot)?

TLL: Again, I wrote that book in complete ignorance of the fact that you really shouldn't do things like write twenty-page sex scenes. The book was about sex. And about pornography. And drugs. And booze. And excess. And guilt. Bearing all that in mind, I felt the scene was important to developing Nick, the main character, and to understanding Candice, whose absence in the book would fuel the rest of the story. At the time, I didn't feel the sex scene was hard to write. The key to writing these scenes is doing the proper research. (And at that time I had a lot of willing research assistants.) I tried to bring that to the book in the most simple and honest way I possibly could. Just like it was any other scene I would be writing. I'm not sure why something that is so basic to human life has to be swept under the rug or romanticized out of reality when we bring it to our art forms, but I have to admit that I'm more cautious about this subject now.

Shooters was the easiest book to write out of the four I have completed. It was written out of need and expediency. That's not to say it was a painless experience. I bled on that book. But I bleed on them all. There was just less blood than usual.

My favorite scene? I haven't looked at that book in so many years that I'm not very familiar with it anymore. Sorry.

AG: You mentioned you can't read your earlier work. Why is that?

TLL: I see all the mistakes. The things I never got into the manuscripts or the things I should have cut out. There's nothing I can do about it now, so it's just frustrating. And you grow throughout the years so the things you worked on long ago can seem quite embarrassing. My agents would like me to sell the reprint rights to the first two books, but I just can't bring myself to do it.

AG: If the rights have reverted back to you, can I ask what's now stopping you from making any changes you want?

TLL: Time. And the realization that if I got started fixing those books I wouldn't stop. If I'm going to put that kind of work into something, it should be something new. But maybe I'll tackle those old books one day when I've run out of new ideas.

AG: And a quick word on movies, if you can bear it! How many have you worked on? The best and the worst?

TLL: I lost count a long time ago. I know I've worked on, in one capacity or another, more than thirty-five features that have been made and released and a bunch more that haven't. My favorite of the feature films is probably a movie called SOUTH OF RENO from 1988. It's very flawed, but I like it. My favorite project in general would have to be BLUE NEON NIGHT. I think it's the best thing I ever worked on, but it's not a feature. I also like a documentary I wrote and directed for a TV show called SAVING THE ENDANGERED SPECIES. My episode was about blood sports, with a focus on dog fighting. It was a real myth-buster, but I don't know how widely it has been distributed.

The worst of the bunch? It would be hard to say. There's a lot of competition. Probably a piece of crap called STEALTH FIGHTER that I did a quick rewrite on so the producer and director could get it cast. It was originally so bad that even actors who do just about anything that pays cash money were turning it down. I did a week on it and I wanted to do a lot more to the script. I told the producer and director what needed to be done to make it halfway decent, but the moment the actors started saying "yes" instead of "no" the company stopped paying me to work. They had gotten what they wanted. The producer told me it was good enough. Well, it wasn't. It's a terrible movie. But the company made a ton of dough on it, so what do I know? They're all happy. This is why I work in the film business exclusively under a pseudonym now. I can't afford to let them put my name on my own work. It would kill my career.

AG: Tell us more about your favourite project. How did Michael Connelly's "The Narrows" DVD, "Blue Neon Night" come about?

TLL: Mike's publisher, Little, Brown, wanted to do some kind of promotional giveaway to go along with his book, THE NARROWS. His publicist suggested doing a short film. Mike had created a music CD that was given away with a limited number of his book, LOST LIGHT, the year before and this seemed like a natural progression. But it's a lot more complicated to make a movie than a compilation CD. And more expensive. Mike asked me if I could pull it off and, like a dummy, I said yes. We thought we were going to make a fifteen-twenty minute piece, but once we started it just got out of hand. Then, about a week after we began, Little, Brown asked us if we could do a ten minute piece about THE NARROWS that would be used to promote the new book to the bookstores in lieu of them sending out galleys. Once again, we said okay. Then they said they needed it in about ten days. And that first deadline almost killed us. But we learned a lot about the new technologies we were using while making the short piece. It was invaluable to the bigger project, which eventually grew to an hour in length, plus deleted scenes. It's a tour through Los Angeles using passages from all fourteen of Connelly's books. William Petersen reads the passages and we shot footage to visualize Mike's words. We intercut those scenes with brief interviews with Mike as he talks about the city and how it has inspired his work.

AG: You had a very tight deadline. Did you manage to have some fun under all that stress?

TLL: We had a lot of fun. Yes, there WAS a lot of stress at times. But there usually is when you make a movie. It was great to do something about the city and about someone who is very important to the world of crime fiction. And getting to direct William Petersen was a dream come true. He's such a great actor. We had quite a bit more time on the larger piece, but that second deadline still crunched us. Publishing houses like to allow plenty of time for product to sit in warehouses before it gets shipped so they know it's really there. I could have used some of that extra time. Of course, if it was up to me I would have worked on it until the book was out in paperback. These things always have to be taken away from me eventually or I'd never finish anything.

AG: You also mentioned a fourth novel. Can you tell us a bit about it?

TLL: It's called Blonde Lightning. It's a sequel to Earthquake Weather. It starts five days after Earthquake Weather ends. It's the rest of the story. It's due to be released in July, 2005.

AG: Bearing in mind your own early experiences with the publishing industry (as you've already outlined), what advice would you give to unpublished novelists?

TLL Write hard, write fast, revise constantly. Don't look back. Don't talk about your work until it's done. Don't believe anything anyone says you SHOULD be doing with your work if your heart tells you otherwise. (Let them write their own damn books.) Really look at the marketplace and try to understand who your potential publisher is and what effect they may have on your long-term career before you sign on the dotted line. And don't start at the bottom and work up when you submit your work. This sounds like a no-brainer, but a lot of people do this (my EX-agent was one of them). Don't assume the battle has been won just because some publisher has given you a deal. Don't call yourself PRE-published before you have a deal (or even a finished book). It's embarrassing. You are UN-published. Not PRE-published. (It's taking a lot for granted to suggest otherwise). Don't give up any ancillary rights (including, and especially, foreign rights and movie rights) on your first deal unless they are willing to pay through the nose for them (which they almost never do). Write because you love it or feel you absolutely HAVE to do it, not for what you think the rewards will be. More than any business I've ever seen, this one offers no guarantees.

AG: Given the self-confessed agonies that writing provokes in you, what is that makes you do it?

TLL: It's a long story and I don't want to bore you with it, but I kind of fell into it twenty-plus years ago and never got out. I've quit a half-dozen times (or more), sometimes for as long as two years, but I always come back to it. I'm trying to learn not to resist the pull and just go with it, but circumstances occasionally convince me to chuck it all in and try other things. Still, it's hard to knock a job that pays you to sit around and be creative. It beats being a bill collector.

AG: What's given your writing the single biggest boost?

TLL: I'm not sure it's gotten much of a "boost" at any time. I just seem to be coasting along under the radar. The reviews of Earthquake Weather have been the best overall that I've had on a book—in that there have been very few negative reviews. So that helps. I'm not a big believer in the old "any publicity is good publicity" philosophy. Mud sticks a lot longer than perfume. My previous books were much more polarizing than Earthquake Weather. People (and critics) seemed to either love them or hate them. There wasn't a lot of middle ground. The new book doesn't seem to be pissing people off very much. I guess I'm getting soft. Probably a good sign for my sons' college funds.

AG: What do you do if you get stuck?

TLL: WD40.

Just kidding. I don't really have that problem. My problem is usually the opposite. I often can't find the time to put down on paper all the ideas I want to explore. And once I get my ass in the chair, I can't stop rewriting. Getting stuck is for people with too much time on their hands.

AG: Who are your main literary influences?

TLL: There are so many. Everything I read and see goes into the brain soup. I forget most of it, of course, but it's hard to deny the influence of a lot of writers who were popular between 1920 and 1940: Fitzgerald, Hemingway, West, Maugham, Hammett, Chandler, you know, the usual suspects. And the next generation: Thompson, Highsmith, Willeford and their ilk. More recent influences would include everyone from Robert Stone to Joe Lansdale to Mike Connelly. This is not an attempt to place blame for anything I've done on any of these great writers. I don't consciously try to emulate any of them. But their material is in my head, so I can't help but be influenced.

AG: What's your ultimate literary ambition?

TLL: I'd like to write a few good books that have something to say about the times I've lived through and the people I've met and the things I've witnessed during my time on this planet. And I'd like to put my sons through college in the process. Lofty ambitions, eh? A view of the beach out of my office window wouldn't be bad either.

AG: How did you enjoy running a bookstore?

TLL: It was more like a tavern, but one where I couldn't charge for the booze. I didn't sell a lot of books there. But we had a lot of drinking parties, so it was fun—at times. Just not very profitible. I never put the kind of effort into it that a bookstore demands. I also had trouble making people pay for things. It's not in my nature to squeeze every nickle out of every opportunity and you need to have that skill if you're going to make a low profit margin business run successfully. Also, you have to show up every day and keep regular hours. That's a lot harder than it sounds. For me, at least.

AG: If there was one thing you could change in the way the book trade operates, what would it be?

TLL: You don't ask difficult questions, do you? There are so many places for improvement, I don't know where to start. And I shouldn't complain since I've been resurrected by a good publisher. But I have a lot of friends in the business and when they are in pain, so am I. So I have opinions on the subject that should not be taken as a reflection on my own current situation.

I suppose one thing I'd like to see is an adjustment of the attitude writers get from some publishers that since the publishers have been in the business for a long time, the writer should just let them make all the decisions pertaining to the writer's book after the writer turns it in. That could use some thought. No business that runs on a profit margin of 2-4% should be that arrogant. It's our work that they turn into their product and ultimately we have far more to lose than they do, if they do a bad job with the cover, the marketing, the promotion, the distribution. All the things they like us to keep our noses out of. (There's a big reason for this, of course, and that is that people who make a weekly wage like to keep their jobs. They don't need upstarts making them look bad.)

I hear about a lot of good writers losing their contracts because their books didn't sell enough to make the publisher happy, but I don't hear much about the firings of the art department that put the bad cover on that book or the sales department that deemed it a loser upon seeing the lousy cover and didn't put much effort into the sales pitches, or the publicity department that did nothing to promote said book because they were too busy pushing Janet Evanovich or whichever big dog they had on their hands who really didn't need such a big push anyway, but who got the push because their advance was a thousand times that of the little book that no one wanted. No one except the critics who embraced the book and the few readers who were canny enough to find the one copy buried spine out on the back shelves of their local chain store or were handed the book by the wise owner of the little independent bookstore who had looked past the crappy cover and found some good words to read.

More decision-making power should be shifted back to the editors and taken away from sales and marketing. The wrong people are making the final decision on what books are being published. And the end result is bad for the business (and the public).

I'd also like to see less mediocre or downright crappy books out there and more good books published well. The library mills should be run out of business. They clutter the landscape with questionable product and their motives are less-than-honorable. And good writers often sign up with them out of ignorance of the publisher's true ambition, which is to spend very little and make a small profit on a lot of books instead of taking risks and promoting each of their authors' works properly. This move can haunt a writer's career for life.

Mmmmm.... Unsigned reviews are also a crime. Huge advances for celebrity books that will go nowhere should be abolished. Less starfucking in this business would be a good thing. The book business has been trying very hard to be the movie business over the last decade. They have been adopting a lot of the bad practices of the movie business, but very few of their good practices. That should change, but it won't. Buying space in the chains should be outlawed. (Come to think of it, so should Dan Brown. Just kidding, Dan. Go get 'em!) I'd like to see the monopoly laws brought back into fashion. All corporations should be busted back up into the million pieces they started as so we would have more than four people to submit our work to who weren't connected to each other in some way....

Sorry about that. You said ONE thing, right? I wouldn't mind getting a gift basket sometime during the holidays. And maybe a nice card.

AG: Angry Moon was described as an update of Conrad's Heart Of Darkness and Shooters as Nathanael West's Day Of The Locust. To what extent was this the result of deliberate intent on your part?

TLL: Those were very kind words from some very kind reviewers. Conrad and West are giants, so I'm sure they had an influence on those works somewhere in the process, but there was nothing specific of theirs that I was trying to link to in those books. Angry Moon is certainly also influenced by the thousands of horror movies I watched when I was a kid. Shooters is all about L.A. in the eighties and the greed and selfishness that pervaded here and throughout the country (which continues to this day). The wildfires that are going on throughout the book probably got reviewers thinking about the climax of Day Of The Locust, but Earthquake Weather is a much closer descendent to Locust than Shooters. It's about the grunts who work in the film business. The little guys. Shooters was about a fashion photographer who has hidden his past identity of a porn cinematographer who had gotten into some very bad trouble. The film business is barely mentioned in that book. The legitimate film business, that is.

AG: What's the least enjoyable aspect of being a writer?

TLL: Dealing with illogical policies at either publishing houses or production companies. It can be very frustrating. Especially when you feel left out of the loop and silly things happen that you could have easily corrected if you had been consulted. Getting screwed is no fun either, but it happens often, especially in the film business. They've always got new tricks up their sleeves. Deadlines also suck. Big time. I'm going to do my best to avoid them in the future.

AG: And the most enjoyable?

TLL: I just turned my new book in—abandoned it, really, due to deadline issues—and I'm going to be sort of unemployed for a few minutes. The feeling of freedom I'm experiencing after two years of being behind schedule on anywhere from one to three projects at any given moment is really exhilarating. There are so many things I want to do now. The problem is choosing something and then tying your life to it for however long it takes to complete. Freedom is a very attractive aspect of writing. (Even being a slave to a deadline is more liberating than punching a timeclock.) But that kind of freedom is very scary too. I blew through three deadlines on this new book already and it took a lot of pressure from my editor to convince me it was time to let it go. It's not always good to be your own boss. Sometimes you have to wonder where the money for the light bill is going to come from. But, hey, those bill collectors have to make a living too, don't they? We're here to help.

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