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This interview originally appeared online at THE BIG ADIOS.

Tom Piccirilli lives in Colorado, where, besides writing, he spends an inordinate amount of time watching trash cult films and reading Gold Medal classic noir and hardboiled novels. He's a fan of Asian cinema, especially horror movies, bullet ballet, pinky violence, and samurai flicks. He also likes walking his dogs around the neighborhood. Are you starting to get the hint that he doesn't have a particularly active social life? Well, to heck with you, buddy, yours isn't much better. Give him any static and he'll smack you in the mush, dig? Tom also enjoys making new friends. He is the author of twenty novels including The Coldest Mile, The Cold Spot, The Midnight Road, The Dead Letters, Headstone City, and A Choir of Ill Children, all published by Bantam/Random House. He's won the Bram Stoker and the International Thriller Writers Awards, and he's been nominated for the Edgar, the World Fantasy Award, and Le Grand Prix de L'Imaginaire. Learn more at: www.thecoldspot.blogspot.com

DW: THE COLDEST MILE is a continuation of your Edgar Award-nominated THE COLD SPOT. We follow the further adventures of getaway driver Chase as he pulls scores to gather funds in order to track down his stone cold killer grandfather Jonah. Did you always intend this to be a series?

PIC: I'm still not sure it is a series, or whether it'll be a trilogy or whether it'll stop where it is, on something of a cliffhanger. The Cold books represent one facet of my work as I jump into the crime field, but there's a lot of other areas I'd like to explore as well. Suspense, thriller, other hardboiled or noirish avenues. I would like to get back to the series to finish a third book tentatively titled THE COLD AND THE DEAD. Hopefully within the next year or two. And who knows, maybe it'll keep going from there.

PIC: As I started to slide over the hill it seemed that I became a lot more interested in dealing with more authentic and realistic matters rather than fantastical ones. My mid-life crisis was kicking my ass telling me, Man, if you want to talk about some of this shit you're going through with any degree of honesty, you've got to do something different with it. These fears, worries, regrets, hopes, whatever. I could be a little more honest in my exploration of them but still keep them in the dramatic context that I'd always known. So a small jump from horror to crime seemed in order.

PIC: I think noir fiction can be as frightening and cold and illuminating as horror fiction can be. You're still dealing with the same forces of good versus evil. Crime probably allows for more of a gray area between the two though. You can sympathize with the outlaws more, at least the "good" outlaws. Horror demands certain extremes. By definition you need something horrific going on. So the distance between the good and bad is greater. You get the selfless priest versus the devil. In crime fiction the gap is often narrowed. The cops are human, the villains are understandable. Even in noir novels where the protagonist commits awful acts for his femme fatale honey, you know he's doing it for a human reason. He's trapped by the inevitability of his vice and his lust. He was fated to go on a downward slide from the onset. In horror, someone is fated to stand up. In noir, someone is fated to go down.

DW: I didn't think it was possible, but THE COLDEST MILE might even be a more high-octane read than THE COLD SPOT. There's absolutely no "down time." The book starts off with blood and speed and just keeps ripping along.

PIC: The Cold books are heavily influenced by Gold Medal classic authors like Goodis, Williams, Thompson, Whittington, Rabe, Fischer, Brewer, and Westlake (Stark). I wanted to distill just about everything I loved about those guys' work and pour it into my own. And if it's one thing they knew about, it was how to keep a story moving at full-speed. There's some "down time" in TCS after Chase goes straight and gets married. I wanted to show the difference between civilian life and the bent life. But in TCM I could just haul ass and let the engine scream.

DW: It's hardboiled, but with real heart and soul. Did you feel it was important to have more thoughtful elements in the books to help balance the story out?

PIC: I think that's just a part of who I am and what my worldview is. Action is terrific but you need a greater context. The book has to actually be about something. I've got things I want to examine and scrutinize. Things that genuinely matter to me. The hardboiled elements just underscore and dramatize all the other stuff. The Cold books are as much about family, loss, love, and heartache as they are about guns and scores and wheelmen. Sometimes the action scenes and the emotional ones are the same thing. That's what I think I like best about the crime genre. You never know when someone is going to shake hands or pull a S&W .38. Or betray a friend or save a life. The whole human condition from best to worst can crop up at any second.

DW: With the economy in the dire straits that it is, publishing has been very hard hit as well. What can the industry do to turn itself around?

PIC: Treat every book as a potential bestseller. Give them all your very best where encouragement, publicity, are concerned, because you never know just what will catch fire with a little push. Publishers need to quit looking for the next big thing and simply treat all books as if they have the potential to be mega-sellers. Because they do. On any bestseller list there's at least a handful of books that appear to be uncommercial in the extreme. Julia Leigh's DISQUIET is a kind of surreal literary novella, and it's up there. Roberto Bolano's 2666 is a five-book monolith by a dead Chilean writer, and it's up there. No one knows what might be a major hit, what might take off. You just never know what the public might pick up on, so allow even the most uncommercial work to have a chance, because it might just pay off. Spread the love around the midlist. Give them a taste of publicity, encouragement, and advances they can live on,. Stick with them and help to build up their careers. Keep them healthy and working at top form and maybe we can build a bigger readership instead of losing our reading culture.

PIC: SHADOW SEASON is due out in October. It's the story of a blind ex-cop turned teacher at an isolated girls' school. Amid some scandalous events concerning a student, he tries to struggle by with his handicap and a lot of unresolved issues dealing with his girlfriend, his dead wife, and his former partner. Currently I'm working on THE UNDERNEATH, a crime-suspense crossover about a family of thieves who have to deal with a possible serial killer.

This is a good time for Tom Piccirilli. The International Thriller Writers gave him the award for The Midnight Road and now his novel The Cold Spot had been nominated for an Edgar (best paperback). Tom is well on his way to well-deserved major stardom.

1 Tell us about your current novel.
THE COLDEST MILE hits bookstores in four weeks. It's the follow-up to THE COLD SPOT and continues on with the dubious adventures of my getaway driver Chase and his stone cold killer grandfather Jonah. In this one, Chase gets on the wrong side of the mob while hunting his grandfather for their inevitable showdown. When they do meet face to face, the situation is much different than Chase expects. Hopefully I've managed to amp up the noir atmosphere even more than it was in TCS.

2. Can you give us a sense of what you're working on now?

A novel called THE UNDERNEATH, which is a sort of crime novel-suspense hybrid, about a young thief from a family of thieves who returns home after several years away to meet with his brother who's on death row. The brother murdered a number of folks in a meth-fueled rage, and though he admits to the charges, he swears that he didn't kill one person attributed to him. So off goes the brother on a strange investigation that takes though an underworld he's familiar with and straight world he's not, where every brick he turns over brings another secret to the light of day, including several involving his own family.

3. What is the greatest pleasure of a writing career?
The satisfaction of having created something that is wholly my own and yet somehow manages to be a part of the overwhelming grandness of literature. Most of us get into this racket because literature itself has had such a profound effect on us. It's given us a kind of love, entertainment, excitement, joy, enlightenment, fulfillment that only books can give us. And becoming a writer is joining with that, becoming a part of it, and passing it on to other readers. I don't know, it's the kind of thing that bibliophiles will understand, and anyone who doesn't read simply won't.

4. The greatest DIS-pleasure?
No real security. No health insurance, no 401k, no pension. Living check to check, hand to mouth, and always the possibility that your best work is behind you. And if you're a lazy , then the sedentary life just cranks up the potential for weight gain and heart trouble and all those similar health concerns. But as soon as I finish this double cheeseburger I intend to lose 120 lbs, train intensively for 18 months, and enter the Iron Man competition.

5. If you have one piece of advice for the publishing world, what is it?

Treat every book as a potential bestseller. Give them all your very best where encouragement, publicity, are concerned, because you never know just what will catch fire with a little push. On any bestseller list there's at least a handful of books that appear to be uncommercial in the extreme. Julia Leigh's DISQUIET is a kind of surreal literary novella, and it's up there. Roberto Bolano's 2666 is a five-book monolith by a dead Chilean writer, and it's up there. You just never know what the public might pick up on, so allow even the most uncommercial work to have a chance, because it might just pay off.

6. Are there two or three forgotten mystery writers you'd like to see inprint again?
Hard Case Crime has done a wonderful job of bringing back some of my faves, but at a last looksee the likes of Fredric Brown, Bruno Fischer, and Peter Rabe were still mostly out of print. Or at least not as widely available as they should be. I'd love to see those guys back on the shelves, right up front with the bestsellers. Any fan of noir/hardboiled fiction will go apeshit for them.

7. Tell us about selling your first novel. Most writers never forget that
moment.
It was a trip. Even though I have a total love-hate relationship with my first novel (because it blows, don't read it, don't hunt for it, don't torment me with it at conventions) it was the one that carried me into the game. I made every mistake I could with it, both in the writing and in the submitting, but somehow it got picked up by Pocket Books. Jesus, I sent three chapters in over the transom when all I had were the three damn chapters. How stupid. But I was a kid, and the fates shined down on me.

8. What do you consider the highlight of your career thus far?
I just got an Edgar nod this week. That's pretty close to the top. Other highlights usually involve my literary heroes. Exchanging letters and email with great folks like Dean Koontz, Donald Westlake, Chuck Palahniuk, James Rollins, Stewart O'Nan, Ken Bruen, and Richard Matheson. It's a validation of the work and, as I mentioned, since we're all here because we're fans, it just tickles me to no end. The friends and fans you make are really what count most.

9. How about the low point?
Oh Christ. If I start thinking about them all I'll spiral into a fit of depression and it'll take me a month to climb out of the ditch. But losing contracts, getting dumped by publishers, having books I slaved over get dumped by publishers without any distribution or fanfare or reviews, years going by without seeing my books on the shelves, getting ripped off on royalties. It's so easy to feel like a complete failure in this game, no matter how many accolades or sales you may have racked up. There's always a boot on your back. It's hard to fight and it's hard to ignore, but if you don't make some kind of peace with it, it'll drive you right into the ground.

10. Which book or short story would you recommend to readers unfamiliar with your work?
I'd say folks can either start with THE MIDNIGHT ROAD or THE COLD SPOT. They're two of my most recent titles and pretty much show where my head, heart, and art are at the moment.

Tom Piccirilli is best known as an award-winning horror writer. Recently, though, his writing has taken a new direction, and he’s now making serious in-roads into crime fiction. Whether he’s writing horror or crime, you can rest assured that he delivers the kind of story that’ll knock not just your socks off but the rest of your underwear too. Allan Guthrie had the pleasure of talking to the man who writes some of the best prose around today.

Tom Piccirilli: I suppose I started for the same reason that all young guys start writing. For the hot chicks.

TP: Yes, but they didn’t start coming around for twenty years, until after I was married.

TP: Twenty novels now. Plus three short story collections, three poetry collections, and a mess of chapbooks.

TP: The older one gets the clearer the themes and topics that make up the writing become. You discover the sound of your voice. You find the deeper substance of your work. It’s not merely saying something, but having something to say. Not merely telling stories, but the stories that teach the writer something about himself. What his priorities are, what his values are, what his beliefs might be. The more you write, the more you learn about yourself. And the more experiences you have, the more you find to write about.

AG: With the recent release of The Fever Kill and the impending publication of The Cold Spot, would it be safe to say your focus seems to have drifted away from horror and into the crime field?

TP: As I hurl shrieking into middle age, I feel a greater affinity for crime fiction. I seem to be more concerned with writing more realistic, authentic material. I feel comfortable with the crime field because in essence when you purify and distill horror you wind up with crime. Crime against man, crime against God, or crime against nature. Whether your monster is a werewolf or a serial killer or a bank robber, it boils down to somebody fucking up someone else’s day.

AG: I believe some knucklehead Scottish crime writer once said he thought noir was horror without the supernatural. You think he was talking out of his arse?

TP: I don’t think you necessarily need the supernatural to make a story horror. It’s all about emphasis. If you emphasize the horrific and the terrifying, you’re probably writing horror. If you emphasize the tragic, the despairing, and do it within the setting and atmosphere of a crime story, you’re probably writing noir.

AG: The Fever Kill was one of my books of the year in ‘07. It’s paced like a contemporary Gold Medal novel. In tone it reminds me of Jim Thompson and Peter Rabe, guys who wrote books about a skewed reality, not the banal one we face every day. The writing itself is more like Charles Williams or Malcolm Braly. Tell us a little bit about the book.

TP: Although I’d been inching more and more towards the crime genre, I wanted to throw myself in whole-heartedly and do something right off the bat that would pay homage to all the classic GM writers who meant so much to me. For years I’d been a big fan of Thompson, Goodis, Rabe, Williams, Brewer, Fischer, MacDonald, Brown, and on and on. So I very much wanted to write a novel with a classical set-up (cop returns to corrupt small hometown where his disgraced father died in order to discover what truly happened during a botched kidnapping) but bring my own sensibilities to it. Throw in lots of dark humor, scenes that hinged on the nearly surreal (there’s an exchange between my protagonist and a talking teddy bear), the burden of personal history, the search for identity, some vicious action. Hopefully folks who love classic stuff and folks who dig neo-noir will both find plenty here to enjoy.

AG: The Fever Kill is published very handsomely by Creeping Hemlock Press, a new press to me. Can you tell us a little bit about how that deal came about?

TP: RJ & Julia Sevin, the husband & wife publisher-editor team at CHP, had previously invited me to an anthology they were putting together called Corpse Blossoms, which was a huge and fine antho of horror-suspense. We clicked together during that foray and they decided to make their next project the release of my offbeat crime novella "Frayed." We worked closely together and worked well together and it seemed natural that we’d continue with our relationship. So when they asked if I had anything else they might pursue, I turned over The Fever Kill to them. It was a good decision on my part because they’re both brilliant designers who picked up on the pulp feel of the book and decided to run with it in their layout and look of the novel.

AG: You’ve published a number of books with Bantam (The Midnight Road, The Dead Letters, Headstone City), with more to come. But you’ve published with a number of smaller presses too. What’s your take on the role of small presses?

TP: I’m happy as hell that they exist. They’re often a market for what might be considered the less commercial or the hard to pigeonhole works, and it’s a chance for an author to work much more closely and have a greater hand in the look and feel of his own final product. Because the publishers are smaller and naturally have a larger stake of finances, time, and effort involved, they tend to really push product hard. Sometimes the most major reviews and notice come from works that first see print in the independent presses.

AG: Ha! You’re not escaping that lightly, though. I’m sure the Big M is a motivator for a lot of writers, but what about the way you write: do you have a routine; do you aim for a set word count; do you write for a set number of hours?

TP: I try to write a thousand words a day or so, but if I don’t make it I usually don’t beat myself up about it. Some days you feel the excitement of facing the empty page, some days you don’t. The thing is, you can’t go without it for too long. It’s so easy to become complacent and lazy. I burn out easily, so I try to juggle the writing amid other things. I read for a while, then write. I watch movies, then write for a bit. I’ll walk the dogs around the park, then write. It keeps me in the mind-set, and it keeps me from learning to hate the page.

TP: I don’t think I’ve ever written more than 2k words in a day. It’s just not the way I’m built. I can’t go further than that without the quality being affected. So long as I get 1k or more, I consider it a solid writing day.

AG: Are you a rewriter or are you one of these bastards who gets the words right first time?

TP: Are there bastards who get the words right the first time? If so, then I hate those fuckers. But I think most of us are forced to revise to some extent. But I’d rather write as cleanly as possible the first time around to avoid having to do serious revisions later on. I know a lot of writers who want to write as much as they can as fast as they can the first time out, and leave all the rewriting until after they’ve finished. But I think it’s much harder that way, and it’s much easier to become discouraged. You get to the end of your novel and think, Finally, I’m done. And then you go back to revise and realize all the shit that still needs to be fixed. Characters who’ve dropped out of the book, plotlines that come to nothing, weak prose. I’d rather get it down as right as I can the first time, even if it slows my pace down considerably.

AG: We’re all led to believe that a successful novel must have a sympathetic protagonist. What do you say?

TP: If by sympathetic you mean someone you feel a great emotional bond with, then I say that’s not always a necessity. If by sympathetic you mean someone we root for because we’re caught up in their story and we want them to win out, despite them possibly being villains or assholes or both, then yes. Richard Stark’s Parker novels have a protagonist that no one could ever like in real life. He‘s a cruel professional thief and a heartless killer. But in the context of the stories themselves, we become so caught up in Parker’s big scores and his dark world of crime. We want him to kick everybody’s ass, and we don’t feel all that sorry for the innocents who might be hurt along the way. Because we fall into his mindset. That’s the power of a writer like Stark (Donald Westlake). He makes us love the unlovable. Hell, everyone knows the villain is the most interesting character in most tales, and it’s through that interest that we become connected. It’s what we’ve invested in them.

TP: It’s the first in a new crime series which follows a young thief and getaway driver named Chase, raised by his brutal career criminal grandfather, Jonah, who have a falling out after the old man kills one of his own crew. They part company and Chase eventually goes straight, marries a cop, and for years lives a contented, average life. But when tragedy strikes (I mean, this is noir, you just KNEW that tragedy was going to strike, didn’t you?) Chase has to seek out Jonah once again in an effort to find and get revenge on a group of diamond heisters.

Along with that main thrust of the action there’s plenty of room to move among a couple of sub-plots involving Chase and Jonah’s turbulent and conflicted relationship. The bad blood between them and Chase’s search for identity are natural extensions of the iconic main storyline.

The follow-up novel The Coldest Mile should follow nine or ten months further on down the line.

AG: Back to something you said earlier when you mentioned themes becoming clearer as you get older. Have you noticed any recurring themes? If so, do have an understanding of your exploration of these subjects, or do they just come to you from that part of your subconscious that you don’t want to analyze too much?

TP: The themes are probably as obvious to me as they are to anybody else who reads my stuff. The nature of identity--what makes us who we are, our pasts, our pains, our hopes, our genetics, our social surroundings, all of that or something more? The conflicts involved in familial relationships-the love/hate relationships we might have with our parents or siblings or even our children, the nature of that dysfunction, the bad blood, the forgiveness and understanding. Certain elements just work their way in. The missing but important father figure, the dying mother figure, the ghostly lost love. I don’t really explore them on a conscious level, it’s just the sort of thing that happens in the midst of my work. In fact, sometimes I have to consciously force myself not to tackle certain themes and say, "Okay, in this story, no more goddamn dead fathers, no hospitalized mothers."

AG: One of the first books of yours I read was Fuckin’ Lie Down Already, kindly loaned to me by a big fan of yours, Duane Swierczynski. I did try to buy my own copy, but it seems the book is impossible to get hold of. You ever think we’ll see a reissue? What’s the deal there?

TP: It was originally put out by a small press that did a handful of gorgeous limited editions and promptly disappeared from the scene. I contacted the publisher not long ago asking if he had any copies I could buy off him. He told me he had boxes in a closet somewhere and he’d send them to me. Not only didn’t he, but he immediately fell off the planet again. But the novella will see reprint in an upcoming collection of mine due out from Cemetery Dance Publications called Futile Efforts. It’ll have something like twenty-five stories collected over the last however many years, each piece with an introduction by a different author in the horror/crime field. Jack O’Connell (whose next novel The Resurrectionist is a brilliant mixture of crime, horror, and fantasy elements) did the intro to FLDA.

TP: I sold my first novel Dark Father the summer I graduated college. And thank Christ I did because I still don’t know what the hell I would do with an English degree.

AG: Any words of advice for young writers trying to break into the crime or horror fields?

TP: Listen to your mothers and go into accounting. Listen to your fathers and join the plumbers’ union. Be a construction worker. Become a teacher. If you’re too reckless, foolhardy, and demented to listen, then there might be a chance for you in this insane biz. Make sure that you love the field, that you read and study and are passionate about and truly love the literature. Don’t go in thinking, "This book sucks, I can do better!" Go in with a joy for the novels and the stories, and with the real heart of a fan. Writing is a slow, frustrating, painful process in the moment, and the only thing that will keep you nailed to the empty page is your single-minded focus on wanting to accomplish something significant.

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