Rob Kantner

interviewed by James R Winter

Once upon a time, Ben Perkins prowled the mean streets of the Motor City with a decidedly different take on life than Amos Walker. For Perkins, sleuthing wasn't a mission, it was a means to an end, a way to finance his need for the finer things. He liked his cork-tipped cigars and his ultralight. And while he liked his women, he didn't go through nearly as many as some of his colleagues, even settling into a relationship with a pretty lawyer he originally dumped in the series debut, The Back Door Man. From the early eighties to the mid-nineties, Rob Kantner used Perkins to give us a working man's view of life in Detroit for both good and bad. Then, in 1994, the books stopped as Kantner focused on other matters, namely building a business. Rob and Ben are both back with a new collection due out soon from PointBlank Press. I caught up with him to talk about writing, life in the Rust Belt, and Ben Perkins.

JW: We last saw you on bookstore shelves in 1994. Was your retirement from writing novels voluntary or due to market forces?

RK: Some of both. In 1993 I completed my last book on the third contract, and there seemed little interest in continuing. I was for the second time in need of a literary agent. And just then one of those life choices came along. My three children were in their mid-teens and nearing college age. I had always wondered how, as a sole bread-winner parent on a not-impressive income, I was going to be able to get them through college without generating a mountain of crippling debt. By 1994 my business consulting career was advancing to the point where I thought that I could start my own firm. To make that fly I had to be 100% committed to it—including a brutal regimen of travel—that would for all practical purposes preclude "non-essentials" like fiction book contracts. But the trade-off, as I hoped, was that I became able to fund my kids' college educations. I will always feel good about that.

JW: What prompted you to get back into short story writing a few years back?

RK: The itch, man, the itch. The '94 hiatus didn't dampen the itch for the work. I did not have a contract (and do not now, either), but for me the work, and the contracts, had nothing to do with each other. Besides, I happened to pick up and devour Nightmare Town, the Dashiell Hammett short story anthology, and that was the last straw! So in '98 or '99 I wrote "Something Simple" just out of the desire for it, and only after finishing it and realizing that it actually worked, did I think to contact Cathleen Jordan at Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine—and she snapped it up. Bless her heart and R.I.P.

JW: I hear that. Did AHMM reopen the floodgates? Or would you have kept going anyway?

RK: Oh, I'd have kept going anyway. I can't not do this. (Even during the "hiatus," which was a hiatus from publishing, not from writing, I wrote The Long Way Home, a 250,000-word suspense novel, plus the nonfiction books, plus some fiction shorts that I haven't bothered to shop anywhere.) There's always something simmering away. I may put off doing something with it, or place it at less than top priority, but it's always there. For example, right now I have a short one percolating about a hunting blind that's apparently been sabotaged—a follow-on, with the some progatonist, to Crooked Lake, which AHMM just bought.

JW: You still travel a lot. Do you write on the road?

RK: Yes. I write in the room, I write on airplanes (at least on the longer hops). I do not have the luxury of unlimited stretches of time in any particular day. The important thing is to do some every day even if it's only 15-20 minutes. If I stay away for more than a day, it takes a corresponding amount of time to get fully wired back in. Fortunately, the writing regimen of my "real" jobs has taught me how to budget and economize time. But the writing every day, that's something I've had to learn the hard way.

JW: I see on your site that you're doing an ebook. Any books slated for print in the works?

RK: No.

JW: Whose idea was the collection for PointBlank? And what's PointBlank like to work with?

RK: They've been great. They've taken a very light-handed and easy-going approach to the material throughout the process, and even the copy-editing cycle was fun. I'm enjoying it.

As for whose idea it was, the impetus for Trouble Is What I Do was fans wanting to get hold of some of the old stuff. I finally decided to do something on my own, and I started pulling old issues together. Ended up with 17 of the published Perkins stories, and for icing I added a brand new never-before-published one called "Sex and Violins"—and did some little "afterwords" for each. Happened to mention it to my friend Joe Konrath (author of the wonderful Jacqueline Daniels thrillers)—he wrote a killer intro, very generously talked it around—and Al Guthrie at Point Blank came back expressing interest. And so we're off to the races.

JW: Any discussions about PB or some other house, say Hard Case, reissuing the old books as well?

RK: I've had inquiries but nothing has come of them so far.

JW: Let's talk about Ben Perkins. He's every bit as blue collar as his crosstown counterpart, Amos Walker. Yet the two are as different as night and day. Some compare him to Jim Rockford. Was that a conscious decision? Or did he sort of evolve into surviving by his wits?

RK: I was a Rockford Files fan, that's for sure. There's some similarities—Ben has a good old boy congeniality. But old Ben's got a dark side to him that Rockford does not have—and a lot of generalized anger also. This is more evident in the earlier stories than in the later ones. Certainly there's been some evolution there (i.e. having a daughter, who purely owns him) and most of that was, I must admit, intuitive rather than planned. I think Ben's gotten less hard-boiled and, hopefully, more sympathetic, without losing the essential edge. He has not lost his appetite for violence. As for "surviving by his wits," that's part of the detective game also, I think. Somebody once called Ben's manipulative tendencies "typical middle child" behavior—which is interesting because he IS in fact a middle child—which I am not!

JW: Would you say Perkins is a more ambiguous character than Amos Walker? How do you think the two compare?

RK: I think Walker is more fully realized as a heroic figure than Ben. Ben has flaws and suffers lapses; he can be appetite-driven, and his innate anger can blind him at times. Rather than being a fully realized hero, he is more of an everyday man who is capable of heroism and willing to act on it, even at great personal cost.

JW: What's the appeal, you think, of the industrial Midwest as a hardboiled setting? Wessel had Harding in Chicago. Koryta's taken over for Les Roberts in Cleveland. Now Jeffrey Marks wants to revive Cincinnati as a hardboiled setting. What is it about these cities, particularly Detroit, that make them great alternatives to New York and LA?

RK: Well, Detroit has an image and it's not always presented in an appetizing way. My stuff has a very strong sense of place, and in particular I enjoy portraying metro Detroit in a way that flies in the face of people who don't want their inexperienced opinions disturbed by the facts. The thing about Detroit that people elsewhere either don't know, or dismiss, is the incredible survivor-sense that the town and its people have. Their ups have been way way up, their downs have been awful, and they've experienced everything in between, sometimes all in a single decade. For all of its troubles, Detroit has a lot of compassion and companionship among its many peoples. Having lived elsewhere, and spent time on both coasts, I have to say that I don't think either has those traits to anything like the same degree.

That said, I think writers who want to get or stay published had best set their stories either in NY or LA. Most media people (including editors, publishers, agents, others with the power of the green light) are based in one or the other. They are the first to read prospective projects; they are, first of all, readers—and readers always like to read about the places where they live. So a project set either in NY or LA is going to make a better first impression.

JW: Rob Kantner, thank you very much.

RK: You're welcome. My pleasure.

###

Copyright © 2005 Noir Originals

JAMES R. WINTER made his bones in 2001 with the Plots With Guns story “A Walk in the Rain.” Since that time, he has penned stories that have appeared in Judas, Nefarious, Shred of Evidence, Hardluck Stories, Futures Mysterious, and Thrilling Detective. Northcoast Shakedown debuted in January, 2005. He lives in Cincinnati with his wife Diane.
Contact James