![]() Then a year later I wrote Gene Kelly a fan letter and he wrote me back - he signed his name with a little four-leaf clover growing out of the y. He was older, wearing a beret and walking down the street with his two beautiful young nurses. I mean, I met Groucho when I was 9 or 10. What have been some of your takeaways from all this proximity to celebrities? And in what ways did that inform themes in The Last Songbird?ĭW: When you grow up in Hollywood, the crazy intersection of celebrity and reality is always right there in front of you. Your bio also made mention you’ve performed spoken word alongside some big names and penned some lyrics for others. I saw you were the “as-told-to” for Dee Dee Ramone’s Lobotomy, which I used in my research, making this conversation a full circle moment for me. ![]() KD: I’m a high-school teacher by day, so I did my homework. And this quality helps him come to understand that guilt is complex and communal. Or, as he himself puts it, “I’m about as hardboiled as scrambled eggs.” He’s the last person on earth you’d expect could solve a crime-except that his heart gets snagged on things, he feels for the people around him. And even more than that, he’s what you call a luftmenschen in Yiddish, his head is in the clouds, swimming in song lyrics. Fair enough.īut I couldn’t get cooking until I discovered a detective who is somehow more porous, more vulnerable and confused than all that-Zantz is a shlepper, a loser, near bankrupt, and a wimp. Were there any you wanted to be sure to include, omit, or outright subvert?ĭW: Many detectives, including some that are dear to me, pride themselves on their power of deductive reasoning and sharp use of scientific method and when they nail the bad guy, order is restored. KD: The crime genre is full of various tropes. I kept worrying about the plot when the real answer was in the character of the detective himself. ![]() Of course, my first attempts to write a full-length mystery at 14, 15, were just terrible! All about a cliché k ind of private eye with the fan on his desk blowing cigarette smoke out the window into the hot summer day. ![]() “She wasn’t what you’d call living, really-but she was still awake.” The language of punk lyrics - the direct and fleet-footed truth–owes as much to the detective paperback as it does to rock and roll. My first fanzine was called Rag in Chains, first poetry chapbook was Happy Go Deadly. That’s one of the things I love about your novel - it joins the electricity from these natural twins. …but you know, also, I came of age in punk, and punk was always noir! Always a branch off the tree of urban mystery. I was a SPERDVAC member in grade school, collecting old radio shows, obsessed with Vincent Price as The Saint, the Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald paperbacks, Columbo, the Rockford Files, Darren McGavin’s The Outsider-all those detectives reminded me in some way of my dad who I adored. But all along, I carried around the secret dream of writing a detective mystery like a lucky penny. Do you consider yourself one of these “more” than the others? Or do they all overlap and inform each other?ĭW: I guess I followed my confusions wherever they led! Sometimes a rant, sometimes a poem or a memory. Music journalist, songwriter, spoken word artist, ghostwriter, short story writer, and now a novelist.
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