Scott Phillips

interview by James Lincoln Warren, April 14, 2003

James Lincoln Warren: Welcome, Scott, to the Noir Originals interview. Just to set the record straight, I should point out that very few of my questions are original—I went online and mined several interviews from the Mystery Readers Journal website, Mystery Readers International, at www.mysteryreaders.org, to find interesting questions. Most of them were put to each other by Jan Burke, Harlan Coben, Michael Connelly, Laurie R. King, Val McDermid, T. Jefferson Parker, Ian Rankin, Peter Robinson, and Dana Stabenow. If our readers are unfamiliar with the Mystery Readers Journal, let me strongly recommend that they pay an extended visit to their site.

Let’s go ahead and get started.

Can you tell us anything about what are you working on right now?

Scott Phillips: I’m working on a Western, actually, if you want to call it that. It’s set in the 1870s and 80s, and it works around the true story of the "Bloody Benders," which was going to be the title, actually, except that in Britain, people would have thought that it was the authorized biography of Peter O’Toole. The Benders were a family that lived on the prairie, and from 1870 to 1873 they operated in a very sparsely populated section of Kansas. They operated an inn, and it was the sort of inn where people checked in, but they didn’t check out. When they were finally found out after three years, there were fifteen or so bodies in the orchard, and possibly, probably I would say, many more scattered around the property. The heads had been crushed and the throats slit and the bodies bled into the dirt in the cellar. The bodies were naked in the orchard. Nobody knows exactly why. Robbery was a motive, but whether there was something else as well, nobody knows. So I used that as a basis.

JLW: So this isn’t exactly John Ford material, then.

SP: I think it is. I mean, I don’t know. I think it’s the kind of story that has cropped up in every civilization where they’ve come to the point where they thought of, hey, you could put people up for the night. Anyplace there was an inn, within a few years, somebody thought, hey, you could just kill people and take their money, and nobody’d ever know. Because people were not arriving at their destinations, but there were long distances and it was the empty prairie and there was a tendency to think, well, they changed their minds, they got sick and died, they found a better offer somewhere else, who knows? There were a lot of missing people, back then, about a hundred, mostly men, but several women and at least one child that we know of, in that tiny little section of Kansas with a population of maybe ten thousand.

JLW: What comes first to you when you’re working on a novel: plot, character, or setting? Where does that come from?

SP: Well, plot is almost incidental, really. Character and setting are the heart of it for me, and plot comes out of that. The first two books were set in Wichita and in The Ice Harvest, the character of Charlie [Charlie Arglist, the novel’s central character –JLW] came first, and then came the idea of putting him in Wichita. They sort of grew together. I never specified that the town was Wichita, but it got to be Wichita after a while, and in the second book I knew it had to be Wichita because the character Gunther [Gunther Fahnstiel, The Walkaway’s title character –JLW] had come from the previous book. In the new book, the setting came first, because I knew I wanted to write a story about that section of Kansas at that time, and it’s really the story of a boom town as much as these murders. The murders are almost incidental, but they’re what gets the plot going. They serve as a sort of springboard. The central character, I decided, would be the grandfather of another character in the second book, which ties the books together in a way that I like. Cottonwood is a fictional town that appears in the second book, and I’ve placed it between two real towns, Cherryvale and Independence, and I’ve sort of stolen their histories and lent them to the pretend town, and the character comes out of that, and the plot sort of congeals around those things.

JLW: Give me an idea of your writing routine. Are you a morning or an evening person? How many hours do you spend at the keyboard? Do you write every day? Are you consistent in your work habits? Do you count words or pages? Do you play music or do you prefer silence?

SP: I always listen to music, although oftentimes if I’m on a roll, I’ll find that the music stopped a while back and I didn’t even notice, I’m just writing so fast. I always listen to music—mostly classical and jazz, although I will occasionally break the rule and listen to pop music. I’ve been listening to the new Yo La Tengo record, which for some reason I’ve found very conducive to working. I do count words. I try to get a thousand words a day at least, but if you’re cutting, you can’t really count how many words you cut—if I’m drafting I tend to count words. I do work every day, or I try to. I will take a day off and take my wife and daughter somewhere, but writing is my job, so I can’t get too far behind, so something like going out with my family is a good impetus to go into work every day. Before I was making a living at it, I still tried to work every day. And I would say, probably two to four hours at the keyboard, depending on what kind of work I’m doing, if it’s revision or just plain drafting. Oftentimes I’ll sit and think, I’ll sit and read, or look at pictures, and listen to music, and that, in a strange way, is also working. Somebody had a great quote, and I can’t remember who it was, but it was, "What no writer’s wife will ever understand is that when he’s sitting there looking out the window, he’s working." At night when I read, I very often will solve a problem that I didn’t even realize I was thinking about, and I’ll sit down and take notes, and I’ll stick it in my wallet, and the next day I pull it out and key it in. So, in that sense I work a lot more than the two to four hours. Generally I work in the afternoon, just because I like to exercise in the morning and I find that I’m more productive if I can exercise. If I get up and take my kid to school, exercise, eat a little something, by then it’s getting pretty close to noon.

JLW: How do you "build" a novel? What do its earliest stages look like – outline, bullets, straight narrative, utter chaos, what?

SP: Definitely utter chaos. I used to try to come up with opening scenes, and that’s the way all three of my books got started. The Ice Harvest started with a scene that I’d written several times. I walked into a bar one late afternoon and saw a guy set his hair on fire, and I loved that story so much that I wanted to use it. I saved it for years, and I finally wrote it down, thinking it would be a detective story. I started writing the detective story, and had the detective walk into the bar when the guy sets his hair on fire, and it just didn’t work at all. It was going to be a hard-boiled, first-person private eye thing, and I just couldn’t do it. I loved that story and I loved what I’d written, and it seemed to be to be very—it was funny, and it evoked very well what had actually happened that afternoon, so I thought, well, I’ll write it again from the third person. Once I took it into the third person, it all came together in a way that I could build on, and I found that I was able to take that character, that third-person character who’d seen the guy set his hair on fire, take him almost anywhere. With the second book, I knew I wanted to open with my character having escaped from a nursing home. So I had him just walking up Douglas Avenue in Wichita, looking at familiar and unfamiliar sights and remembering things from that street, thereby establishing his loss of memory and some of his character, and again, I found that that was a very useful way to jump off and get to the heart of the story. With the third book, I knew a little more in terms of plot, because I had this real crime to hang it on. But I still opened with a guy waking up at five in the morning in a little town on the prairie, dissatisfied with his lot in life—so, I generally start with a scene. Not always a very dramatic scene, but something that establishes whose eyes we’re looking through.

JLW: How much time do you devote to research as compared to actually writing?

SP: In the first book, there was zero research, or almost zero—the research had been done years before, of course, in the form of going to strip clubs [laughs], and maybe once in a while looking up whether a certain street ran in a certain direction in Wichita. For the second book, I did a little more research, because part of it was set in the fifties, and I wanted to find out how much a used car cost in 1952, and I discovered that I found things that were really useful, things that were serendipitous—like Elisha, the junkie, works as a shirt-press operator, and I was able to establish that a shirt-press operator in Wichita, Kansas, in 1952 made eighty-four cents an hour. Actually, that was a female shirt-press operator, but nobody has to know that. I enjoyed that so much, I enjoyed that aspect of it so much, that I really enjoyed the feeling that I was getting things right, and having done that, I decided that I was ready to try something a little more ambitious. So with this book, I did a lot of research, and bought a lot of books. I think I bought six or seven books on railroads. Maybe ten pages take place on a train, but I feel like I got those ten pages right. I really enjoyed doing the research, and the research did lead to some good things being in the book that were just serendipitous discoveries, really accidents. There’s some wonderful stuff I found out about the Chinese community in Denver, which ended up getting cut, but which I really enjoyed writing anyway. I really think I would like to write another book with a historical setting, because I enjoyed that tremendously.

JLW: What’s the most difficult part of writing a novel for you? What comes easiest?

SP: The most difficult thing, I guess, is plotting—I think plotting is what I’m least adept at, partially because I tend to plot things the way I see real life being plotted, which is to say, pretty much at random. When you discover you have something you need to reconcile, then it gets tricky. What I find easiest is dialogue, character—character development, to me, is ultimately the most rewarding.

JLW: Do you know what the ending is going to be like before you begin writing a book?

SP: No. Usually I have no clue. What I try to do, is by the time I’m about a third of the way through, I try to have an idea of what the ending could be, always with the idea that I’m free to wiggle out of it and think of something better. With The Ice Harvest, I really had no idea of what I was going to do. Was I going to let him get away with all that money? Was I going to have him run away with the woman? Was I going to let her kill him and take the money? There were a million possibilities. Then I came up with an idea, a little before the middle of the book—I thought, well, here’s something I could do. Here would be a weird little ending that was not among the likely contenders when you’re thinking of how this plot will end—and that one ended up being my ace in the hole.

JLW: And that’s the ending you used.

SP: And that’s the ending I used.

JLW: Which we won’t share with our readers.

SP: Which we won’t share with our readers, but which people really liked, although I never really thought I was going use it until I got to the end of the book. I thought, well, I’ll give this a try, and I thought, well, I kind of like this. The second book ends in a pretty organic way, and there weren’t any big surprises, and with this third book, I really was at a loss for how to end it until I came very close to finishing it. I had several different possibilities, one of which had the hero ending up on the gallows, which is what I was leaning toward at one point, and then I had an idea for a really melodramatic ending that I thought would work, and I actually ended the book that way. That’s the way my editors have read it, but in the interim I have decided I’m not going to do that. I’m going to change it again, and go for a much more muted ending that I think is much more true to the book. I always try to have an idea for an ending so that if I just don’t think of anything else, I can use it. I think that’s just a psychological tool. It just helps me get through the process.

JLW: How much time do you spend working over the actual language of what you write, as opposed to doing the story-building? How important is technique to you?

SP: Well, it depends. There are times when I’m drafting, and it’s on the level of, "The guy walked into the room and he crossed it and he got to the window and then he looked out the window and he saw this thing downstairs." Just so I can hammer out the very basic skeleton of what the action is. Then, typically the next day, I will go back and polish it until it’s an interesting description of somebody crossing a room and looking out a window, or it’s cut entirely. And then sometimes I’m writing, and I get florid and descriptive and poetic while I’m doing the drafting. Some things don’t take any rewriting at all and some take a lot. This book is stylistically a lot more elaborate than the first two were. The first two were pretty straightforward, and this one’s told in an approximation of a nineteenth century voice, a little more eloquently.

JLW: Your books show a rather pronounced and wicked sense of humor. Do you write humor for its own sake, or do you use it as a vehicle?

SP: I like to read things that are funny, I guess. Jim Burke [James Lee Burke, multiple Edgar-winner and author of the Dave Robicheaux series—JLW] told me many years ago in a writing class—I’d written something funny, and he pointed out to me that humor is a great tool, but if that’s all there is, people may find it lacking. I don’t know if that’s necessarily true for everybody. I certainly do like writers who are funny and just funny—P.G. Wodehouse and Perelman [S. J. Perelman, 1904-1979, renowned American humorist—JLW] and those guys. I think that’s a very high calling, but in my case, it’s a means to an end. Humor is part of it, and it’s there to keep the reader amused, and I like funny writing—but it’s always there as part of a mix, part of a bigger thing. It’s always grim humor.

JLW: Do your background and upbringing influence your themes and characters? How?

SP: Well, being a Midwestern boy, I guess. I was just reading a thing Otto Friedrich [Newspaper editor, essayist, and cultural historian who chronicled 1940’s Hollywood and the 1920’s Weimar Republic. He died in 1995—JLW] wrote about all these "Balzac-y" writers, by which he meant people who are always ripping the lid off of small towns, and I felt a little bad, because I thought, gee, I probably fit into that mold. I think having been raised in a pretty upright community probably affected my love of the ribald and the dark, and that probably leads to a lot of what I write.

JLW: Have you been a writer since childhood?

SP: Yes.

JLW: When did you first realize you wanted to be a professional writer?

SP: I kind of always knew it, I think. I had a few teachers who were not great, but every single English teacher I ever had was terrific. Everybody always encouraged me and everybody always praised my writing. It wasn’t the only thing I ever wanted to do, but it was always something I thought I might do at some point. Now, I always wrote, and I was interested in being a filmmaker for a while, but even that involved writing because I was writing unproduceable scripts, but the idea that I would sell things really came as a surprise to me even when it happened.

JLW: You mentioned Jim Burke. Obviously, you have taken writing courses. Who were your teachers, and did you find them useful?

SP: Well, I’ve never had a bad English teacher, as I mentioned. James Lee Burke was the only teacher I ever had in a course that was labeled "Creative Writing," and he was very helpful in that he was a good example. He was sort of between successes at the time. He had had his successes in the 60’s, and he had not yet started writing his Robicheaux books. He was making a living teaching college, and he was the most—I guess the word for it is evangelical. He was evangelical about the subject of fiction writing. He really made it sound like a great thing to do. That said, I wasn’t really meant for the "Creative Writing" workshop thing. I never really did that. I have lots of friends who’ve done that, and I think that works really well for a lot of people, but it would not for me.

JLW: How much does your writing life affect your personal life? Do you keep the personal and the literary separate, or do they impinge on one another?

SP: I’m always getting in trouble with buying books. No, they don’t impinge—it’s like having a job. My wife is very happy that I’m doing it, and I’m very happy that I’m doing it. It impinges on my private and personal life less than a lot of other jobs would.

JLW: Who do you write for? How do you see your audience?

SP: I write for myself and an imaginary reader, who’s usually one of my friends [laughs]. For my first book, I had two friends—real people, they’re not imaginary—but I had an imaginary reader comprising two friends of mine, and if I could imagine either one of them saying, "Bullshit!", I would automatically cut something out. If I found myself softening or weakening or pandering, those imaginary voices would call out, "Bullshit!" And it would go.

JLW: What have you read recently that you’ve admired? Are there certain books you return to again and again, and if so, what draws you back to them?

SP: The Great Gatsby I return to again and again, just because it’s such a great short book. I mean, there’s so much in it that you find something new every time. That’s not terrifically original, saying that, but . . . [shrugs and smiles]. I recently read The Distance by Eddie Muller [Eddie Muller, a leading authority on film noir, has written several books on that subject and has also recently written two crime novels set in the boxing world of San Francisco in the 1940’s. The Distance is the first of the two novels.—JLW] which I really enjoyed. Right now I’m reading I, Claudius by Robert Graves, which is a fantastic book. That’s all that springs to mind.

JLW: Do you see yourself working within a tradition or genre, or do you combine elements from more than one? Is it important to you to break new ground?

SP: That’s a really interesting question, because I don’t ever think of myself as working strictly in the genre. With The Ice Harvest I was more or less drawing on Jim Thompson, obviously—that kind of writer. In The Walkaway, there are sections where I’ve acknowledged consciously imitating Charles Willeford. I think it’s pretty obvious [laughs]. But I don’t think of the books as being part of a particular genre. I just think of them as being their own books, and if people want to place them within a genre, that’s fine with me. The book I’m working on now, or this book I’m just finishing, is Western/Romance/True Crime/Historical, whatever you want to call it, everything but science fiction. Horror—it’s horror.

JLW: We both once heard Terrill Lankford, a mutual friend of ours and a terrific novelist in his own right, define the difference between hard-boiled and noir as, "hard-boiled is about tough guys who win, and noir is about tough guys who lose."

SP: Yeah [laughs].

JLW: What are your thoughts on that? You’ve been described as a "noir" writer. Do you think that’s an accurate description?

SP: I don’t know. Eddie Muller once told me he didn’t think The Ice Harvest was noir—he didn’t mean it as a criticism, I don’t think, but he didn’t count it within the genre. I think Terrill’s definition is about as good as any. I guess I read more noir books than hard-boiled.

JLW: Is there something especially attractive about writing crime fiction? What do you think is at the heart of a good crime novel?

SP: Same as any other novel. Do the words propel my eyes on the page? I like crime novels, I like some crime novels. To me, crime is just something that I tend to hang the story on. It’s entirely possible that I might write a book without a crime in it more serious than jay-walking, but I think it would appeal to the same readers. I think people tend to get a little trapped by genre, or the idea of genre. I like books that are pure genre, but I also like books that crack the genre open a little bit. I don’t like parody crime fiction, but I do like books like Motherless Brooklyn [by Jonathan Lethem, Doubleday, 1999, winner of the 1999 National Book Critics Circle Award—JLW] which is this close [holds thumb and finger about a quarter inch apart] to being a pastiche of a crime novel, but it’s really a good, well-constructed novel by any standard.

JLW: A lot of contemporary crime fiction seems to be regional. The Ice Harvest and The Walkaway feature many of the same characters, but one of the most powerful common threads between them is a strong sense of place, to wit, Wichita, Kansas. How important is that to you? Was it primarily a commercial or an artistic choice?

SP: Artistic, because I didn’t think there would be any commercial value to it, although I was surprised to learn that people, particularly overseas, found it very interesting to have a crime novel, particularly a sleazy crime novel, set in a place like Wichita. I was surprised, because people, people in England, in fact, found it kind of exotic, which is hilarious to me, because it seems like the most dull place in the world. I wasn’t originally going to call it Wichita. I was going to leave the town nameless, and Dennis McMillan [an independent publisher of collectible hardcover crime fiction—JLW], who is from Wichita, and who published the limited editions of both books, said, "No, it should be Wichita. You should tell people it’s Wichita." He quoted George Pelecanos to the effect that it’s bullshit to leave a town nameless, that you should tell people where they are. To me, as a writer, it’s very important to have that sense of place, because that’s where a lot of the story comes from. People are formed by where they’re born and raised and where they end up. The character comes from place. For The Ice Harvest to have taken place in Boston would have made it a completely different book. Or think of George Pelecanos, or of [Michael] Connelly, who really has a very profound link to Los Angeles. I’m sure he could write a book about anywhere, if he wanted to, but that portrait of L.A. is a very important thing. My next book, I think, is going to be set in Ventura, California. It’s going to be another Kansas boy, and there are going be links to the other books, but it’s going to be set in Ventura, which is a place I once lived and have a pretty good sense of. It’s a place I’ve always wanted to write about.

JLW: What are your writing roots? Do you model your work after any particular authors? You mentioned Willeford and Thompson already.

SP: [nodding] Willeford and Thompson . . . oh, man, there’s a big collection of people, in crime fiction alone. [James] Crumley, I think, to me, is the most obvious example of someone I’ve cribbed from. The list is pretty wide. Nabokov, Fitzgerald, on the literary end—I mean, I’m reading Robert Graves, and I’m thinking, "Man, I can use this!" [laughs]

JLW: Was The Ice Harvest your first attempt at a novel?

SP: No, I wrote a novel in 1989 that was completely unpublishable, and thank God for that, because I would hate for anybody to see it now.

JLW: Were you pleased at the way The Ice Harvest turned out, and did you expect you’d be able to sell it?

SP: Yes and no. I was pleased the way it turned out, and I was absolutely shocked that I was able to sell it. I thought there might be a small press edition, that I might sell a thousand copies, if I was lucky.

JLW: How was it different from your earlier effort?

SP: It was more organic, I mean, it came out of a desire to tell a story. I think part of my problem in the past was that I always tried to come up with a big plot, and the books were somewhat unwieldy and not much fun to write or read. I discovered that I could take a character and a setting, and set the character walking in a direction, and get a book that way. Also, this may sound crushingly obvious, but I finally decided to write a book that I would want to read, [laughs] to write the kind of book I enjoyed reading, which it seemed to me no one was writing any more. I was reading a lot of old—all the books that Barry Gifford put out when he was editing Black Lizard [an American publishing house that in the late 80’s reprinted classic pulp paperbacks from the 40’s and 50’s; it was acquired by Doubleday in the early 90’s—JLW]: all those Jim Thompsons, and Harry Whittingtons, and Willefords, and things like that.

JLW: Do you ever feel constrained by the expectations of your publisher and readers, or do you pretty much write whatever you want?

SP: I pretty much write whatever I want, once my publisher has said, "Yeah, I’ll buy something like that." I mean, if I called my publisher and said I want to write a sci-fi porn novel about lesbian slug people on the planet Mongo [laughs], and they said, no, absolutely not, I might put that one on the back burner. They’ve been pretty good so far about letting me do whatever I want. They didn’t complain at all when I told them I was writing a Western; they were pretty enthusiastic.

JLW: If you started all over, what would you change?

SP: My fiction? Or from birth?

JLW: It’s an open question. As a writer, though.

SP: I don’t know. My first temptation is to say, kind of glibly, that I wouldn’t write any more fucking screenplays, I wouldn’t have written all those screenplays, but I think I learned a fair amount of craft from writing those: my sense of plot, and particularly whatever sense I have of making a plot unobtrusive, came from there. There’s not a lot I would change. I got a late start as a writer. My first book was published when I was thirty-seven or thirty-eight, which is not that old for a writer, but a lot of people start in their twenties. Frankly, when I was in my twenties, I was writing crap.

JLW: Give me one piece of advice you wish someone had given you when you were first starting out.

SP: Write a book you would want to read. Same goes for any kind of writer: screenwriter, poet, playwright.

JLW: Thank you, Scott.

SP: Thank you, Jim.

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Copyright © 2003 James Lincoln Warren

SCOTT PHILLIPS is the author of The Ice Harvest (nominated for virtually every major award in crime fiction, including the Edgar, Anthony, Hammett, and Macallan Gold Dagger awards) and its successor, The Walkaway (which the Chicago Tribune picked as one of the ten best crime novels of 2002). He has worked as a French translator and English teacher in Paris, France (where he once took part in an epic pub crawl in company with noir titan James Crumley), as a commercial bookseller for a national chain, and as a feature film screenwriter. Although he’s a valued member of the Los Angeles crime fiction scene, he and his family will soon be relocating to St. Louis, Missouri.

JAMES LINCOLN WARREN’s first published work appeared in 1974, in the pulp fantasy magazine Fantastic Stories. His character Alan Treviscoe, an 18th century insurance investigator for Lloyd’s of London, regularly appears in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. He received his B.A. in the Humanities from the University of Texas San Antonio in 1979. He lives in Los Angeles and is a member of the Board of Directors for the Southern California Chapter of Mystery Writers of America. He is currently working on a Treviscoe novel.