the elliott issue: interview with charlie huston

What did you enjoy reading when you were younger?
When I was a kid and a teenager, I was definitely a fantasy and science fiction kid. This cousin I had, when I
was really little, used to tell me the story of The Lord of the Rings. Every time I visited him, he would tell me a
little bit more of the story. He didn't read it to me--he'd just act it out and tell me who the characters were.
He'd sort of quiz me on it each time. I think that's where the fantasy thing started: with him.

And then I started reading The Hobbit and John Christopher had this trilogy (The Crimson Wave). And then, at
some point, I started reading Ray Bradbury and that got me into the science fiction. I still love a good fantasy
story or good science fiction, but I find it's a little bit harder to dig out the really good stuff.

The name of your website is "pulp noir." What is it?
Well, I don't necessarily think of "pulp noir" as a genre classification. I think it's just a nice-sounding name for
a website. (Laughs) I consider myself more of a pulp writer at the moment than a true noir writer. I think a lot
of the noir aspects are leeching out of my books as I go along. It's still really present in the Joe Pitt books. Noir
is largely considered an atmospheric quality and the quality of the world within which a story exists.

A good noir story doesn't necessarily have to be a mystery. It will always have darkness of the soul, a morally
ambiguous world, a world where everybody has a secret and has a price. It's hard when you try to transfer that
into books. [Noir] is classically a film definition. Noir refers to a visual style as much as a context. It's "dark
film." The traditions evolved out of these B-movie crime stories where they didn't have very much money to
produce them. So they tended to have a lot of shadows. The good directors ended up coming up with a visual
style that tried to capitalize on the lack of money, the lack of equipment, the lack of lighting. It became a
signature of [noir].

Noir in literature tended to be defined more as an echo of that: the crime story, the hard-boiled story. I think
my crime novels are starting to curve away from that. The Shotgun Rule , the last crime novel of mine to come
out, was certainly the least noir of all my books, by far. It takes place in a bright, hot summer in a California
suburb and it's about teenage delinquents. So, in terms of that classic, foggy, night, urban wasteland, it's not
that at all. But it does have the classic aspects which I've been talking about: everybody has a secret,
everybody has a price, moral ambiguity.

The pulp aspect, for my writing, I've come to believe that pulp has less to do with trenchcoats and laser guns
and swords and and loincloths. You know, these kind of trappings of classic pulp novels and pulp stories and
pulp magazines. In the last couple of years, I've been on a schedule where I'm writing two genre novels a year
(one in crime, one in horror) and also doing a comic book [Moon Knight ]. I'm working in classically pulpy
territory here.

The aspect that I've come to think is related to pulp more than anything else is the speed with which you are
required to work. The reason traditional pulp is looked down on, and so often is looked down on, is that it's
classically paycheck writing. You're working on short deadlines, you're working for x number of cents a word.
In order to make a living, you've gotta work fast, you've gotta hit your deadlines, and you have to produce a
certain amount of quantity to pay the bills.

When I read classic pulp, I can I look at it and go, well, the writer really dropped the ball here with this plot
point, this character is inconsistent, or the prose really faltered. This is an otherwise original genre writer
indulging a lot of cliches, but what I've come to realize is that a lot of those things are classic symptoms of writing with velocity and writing on deadline. It encourages you to embrace cliches.

The pulp aspect really has a lot to do the economics of writing the genre on a certain timetable. You might
want to take a week to revise a sentence. You might want to, after finishing a first draft, put it in a drawer and
come back to it three months later with new eyes and really rework it. But writing true pulp on a true pulp
schedule doesn't really allow that. There are times, looking back at my own work, when it's not necessarily
that I didn't want try to do my best. There were just times where I made a decision about a character, a plot
point, or a phrase that I used. And I got to a point later in the story where I realized the choices I made earlier
got me in trouble, but I don't have time to go back. I don't have time to rewind fifty, six pages and rewrite
fifty, six pages to take care of the ripples from the one big change.

That has a lot to do with what I think really defines pulp. It's a warts-and-all classification. That's part of
what's beautiful, part of what's exciting about pulp. You have to write with a great deal of velocity and, with
pulp, I think that shows up on the page: the intensity with which the writer is working shows up on the page
when it's really clicking.

That's not to say that I'm not looking forward to maybe getting more time with some of my books. With the
fourth Joe Pitt book, I finished the first draft months ago. My wife had a baby, so I had to take some time off.
Normally, I would've gotten right back into work on it as soon as my editor returned the draft with his notes.
This time, I took an extra six weeks before I got back into it. So it's interesting to have fresher eyes than I
usually have when I return to draft, to be able see some things that I might not otherwise have seen, to make
the book stronger.

Violence is almost another character in your books. Is writing violence hard to do, or does it come
naturally to you?
No, it's very hard for me to do. I mean, there are different aspects of it that are difficult. Chief among them is
that I'm not a violent person. Quite the opposite. I don't believe in this stuff. I mean, I'm exposing myself here
... in terms of exposing myself to a lot of people saying "What the fuck?", I'm not a fan of exploitive violence.
A lot of it is in the eye of beholder, because the violence in my books tends to be extremely graphic and there's
a lot of it. I think that it's very easy to read it and to see it as exploitive, and I've certainly heard people argue
that point. I would absolutely sit there and go there, "Yeah, I'm open to that." I'm exposed to that criticism.

The only grounds on which I can fight that criticism is that it doesn't seem exploitive to me. The reason is that
I always come at it from the viewpoint of wanting it to hurt. Whether that means wanting to hurt the
characters physically or whether I want it to hurt the people committing the act of violence, there is some sort
of price being paid. I try not to have the violence be off the cuff. I try to have anything where someone is hurt
or someone is killed impacting characters, or impacting the plot. Or, ideally, all of the above, so that the pieces of the plot are being moved around by the violence.

It's hard to go there. Some things are harder than others. I'm very emotionally attached to all of my characters.
It's very rare when I don't have a certain feeling for my characters. I don't like hurting them. (Laughs) There
are characters I thought I was gonna kill. There were characters I thought were going to die in The Shotgun Rule
but, at the end, I couldn't bring myself to kill. There were characters in the Hank Thompson trilogy that I
thought were going to die. I mean, I killed half the cast, but there were a few odds and ends that I couldn't
bring myself to kill.

From a technical viewpoint, trying to stage some of these scenes so that, again, the sequences have velocity on
the page ... so that they're choreographed in such a way so the reader can visualize them fairly easily. With
some of them, scenes of mayhem can take a long time to put together. There's a large fight sequence toward
the end of The Shotgun Rule with seven or eight characters involved and each character is fighting a different
character. I had to rewrite that scene several times. I was never completely satisfied with it.

You mention velocity. Since you are writing at such a brisk pace, are you ever surprised by where
your writing takes you?
Yeah, I am. I think that most writers would agree the greatest pleasure in the act of writing is those moments
when the story flies away from you. You have to chase it. I don't think I've ever met a writer who didn't
describe the experience of taking dictation from the characters, the scene wrote itself, or this story had to get
out and I just put it on paper. So there are definitely times when it just comes out--sometimes that's during the
grind and sometimes that's in the middle of the night. You wake up and go, "Ahhhh! Pen and paper! Now!"
(Laughs)

Sometimes it's those hours when you just sit in front of the computer and bang your head. I put words on the
paper for the sake of getting stuff done because the minute you seize up, you're fucked. Even if I don't
necessarily like what I'm putting on the page, I'm always trying to add. I can always scrap it the next day.
Those are the ones that are exciting: when I think what I'm writing royally sucks. The most pleasant times are
when I come back to it the next day (my work day always starts with me reading what I wrote the previous day) and I re-read what I thought was terrible, and it's actually good stuff.

Next