This Q&A came about when reader Beth Zurkowski—pen name Bxerk Sketch—from Beloit could not come to my book talk at the Palmyra library. “There are questions I wanted to ask,” she said. “Have you ever considered doing an online chat?”
I responded, “That’s a heck of an idea.”
I said I’d host a chat on my James Early Posse Facebook page on Friday evening, March 4, and Saturday, March 5, 2011.
My final promo posting kicking off the event said this: “It’s chat night tonight here on The Posse, your opportunity to ask all the questions you have about the sheriff and Early’s Fall, or about writing or about me. I’ll answer them all starting at 7 p.m. . . . that’s way-south Wisconsin time.”
Q. Jerry, I have always wondered if Early was based on someone you know in the real world or knew—always sorta got the impression he was like perhaps your dad or a favorite uncle? Any answer for that one? I often make composite characters from several people I know. Is Early a composite?
—Rob Walker, West Virginia
A. Is Early a composite? No. All the sheriffs I knew when I worked police beats for newspapers in Colorado, West Virginia, and Virginia, they were pretty big guys—physically intimidating. Bad guys knew they could whip them in a fight, so they never took them on.
Early is a small man, about five-feet-two. But he always hires deputies who are either big or, like Hutch Tolliver, tall. Nobody messes with Early when Hutch is with him.
Now I know we had some crooked sheriffs in West Virginia, I just didn’t know any. Those whom I knew were honest. They wanted to do what was right, and that sometimes got them in trouble. I put those traits in Early.
When Early appeared in my first Kansas short story, “The Dead Pool,” he appeared whole . . . five-foot-two, a ragged mustache, leathery tanned face, a battered cattleman’s hat. He’d rather be riding a horse, but after the war sheriffs drove Jeeps or pickups.
Q. I’ve always wondered how you came to write about the Manhattan, Kansas area, especially in the period shortly after WWII. Great book, by the way.
—Mike Hayes, Arizona
A. Track back to 2003. A group of mystery writers in Manhattan decided there needed to be a conference for mystery writers who set their stories in small towns . . . and that they would organize it. In 2004, they held the first Great Manhattan Mystery Conclave. To draw in new writers, they announced there would be a short story contest and the best stories would be published.
I was hooked.
I was looking to break in, to be published, so I wrote two stories – the rules said the mysteries had to be set in or around Manhattan – the first, “Dead Pool,” set in the great flood in Manhattan in 1952, and the second, “Big Dam Foolishness,” set a couple years later when the Corps of Engineers was about to build the Big Blue River dam to prevent future floods.
Both stories featured James Early. In the first, he’s accompanied by the county coroner, Doc Grafton, in the second by Deputy Hutch Tolliver.
Both stories won slots in the GMMC anthology, Manhattan Mysteries, published the next year.
I had a character people enjoyed. For why I set Early’s Fall in those years following World War II, I’ll get to that in a later answer.
Q. I like this book a lot. I was wondering why you chose to use Granny for a male name and Clark for a female name?
—Bxerk Sketch, Wisconsin
A. That’s Granny Weichselbaum.
When I realized the murdered woman was a Jew, I needed a Jewish community for her. A lot of the clothing stores in Kansas towns—and other small businesses, too—at this time were run by Jews. So I put one of those stores in Leonardville and the proprietor became Granny.
I just liked the name.
The first time my writers group read that chapter, they said they thought Granny was a woman. “You’ve got to change that name.” I thought about that for a while, then said, “Granny is Weichselbaum’s nickname. His real first name is Granville, and what old cowboy is going to call anyone Granville?”
When I needed a name for the sheriff of Trego County, Adam Clark came to mind. It’s simple. It’s direct.
Sheriffs could serve only so long in office, then they had to sit out an election. Usually the sheriff’s chief deputy—in Wisconsin we call him/her the under sheriff—ran for the office and won it. He’d make the old sheriff his chief deputy . . . and you can see how this rotation could go on until one of them retired.
I wanted Clark’s chief deputy to be his wife. There had been a few of those in Kansas. If he’s Adam, she had to be Eve, her proper name Evelyn.
When Early goes out to Trego County to talk to the father of the murderer, he goes to the man’s ranch in the company of Evelyn, the chief deputy, because Sheriff Clark has other things he has to do that day.
In the narrative sections of my novel, and in the speech tags, I always use the characters’ last names. So when Evelyn says something to Early, her speech tag is Clark said. It’s her last name.
Comment from Bxerk: I sure felt like I was back there during those times.
Reply: I’m glad you did. That means I did my job as a writer. I made the places and that era real for you.
Q. Was this case something you created, or was it something historical?
—Sean Patrick Little, Wisconsin
A. The murder of the school teacher is a real case. When I read the initial news stories about the crime, I realized how unbelievably violent the murder was. Shocking. And I wanted shock in my crime.
All knew the husband did it, but the police couldn’t marshal the evidence to make the arrest . . . until the man confessed to his father, and the father wrote to the police saying his son had murdered his wife.
I took that story and fictionalized it . . . changed the names, changed the locale, changed the era.
Q. I know the period and the setting of the story are intrinsic to your background—could you go into some detail on that?
—Sean Patrick Little, Wisconsin
A. This answer also is for Mike Hayes.
I set the story in 1949 because I wanted all the main characters to be survivors of the Second World War.
Early, Hutch, Trooper Plemmons, County Attorney Weiland, they’d fought through North Africa, Italy, France, or the South Pacific and come home in various states of disrepair. Early, particularly, is tormented by his memories of the men in his platoon who were killed in the war. Weiland lost an arm.
How men deal with these things has long fascinated me. When I was a newspaper reporter and editor in West Virginia, I worked on stories with Vietnam vets who had been damaged by Agent Orange. Their lives were a ruin, their frustration and anger at lack of compassion, understanding, and treatment from the VA was palpable. The military had not accepted the harm done by Agent Orange to soldiers as a legitimate claim.
I bring all that World War II stuff more forward in the James Early short story, “My Name is Truman, T-H-O-M-P-S-O-N.” You’ll find that story here on my website, in the short story archive. It’s in this story that you can see how that war really reshaped the lives and values of Early and his friends.
Sean also asked about the setting.
My Uncle Clarence and Aunt Charlene lived in Mission, Kansas. I visited them several times when I was a teenager, but Clarence and Charlene always looked east to Kansas City, never west to the Flint Hills—until their son, Charles, went to college at K-State in Manhattan.
It was not until I was hired by Kansas Farm Bureau a decade later that I drove west. From Kansas City to Topeka, in the Kaw Valley, it’s farmland, much like southern Wisconsin. Only after I got west of Topeka and drove up into the Flint Hills—cattle country, lots of grass and few trees—that I got the feel of the wide open spaces we associate with the West.
I liked it.
I still like that drive. You go miles without seeing a ranch road or buildings. I was at home . . . and then when I got to Dodge City and Boot Hill, somewhat later, and the re-creation of Old Front Street complete with the Long Branch Saloon from “Gunsmoke” . . . I was a kid again, reliving in my memory the shootouts with my friends, all of us armed with Roy Rogers cap guns. There was no way I could not set a story in that state.
Q. Some of the most poignant parts of the book focused on Thelma’s depression. Is there a background to that?
—Sean Patrick Little, Wisconsin
A. Oh, is there ever.
My first wife, Sallie, was a manic depressive.
The shopping spree, the fantasy of the governor calling and asking Thelma to work for him, the race over the roads of Riley County, all these things happened, except they happened in Kentucky where Sallie and I lived during the last years of her life. For me, it was a 40-mile chase over winding two-lane roads before I could get ahead of Sallie and cut her off, ending the chase with no one harmed.
But we writers up the ante for our characters, and I knew Thelma could not survive.
My short story writing prof back at the University of Tennessee—Wilma Dykeman—told all of us, “Find something in your life that deeply affected you and write about it. Incorporate it in your fiction and all of the emotions will come through. Your story will have the ring of truth.”
She was right. When I read that chapter, I still cry.
Q. How long does it take you to write a novel, like this one?
—Bxerk Sketch, Wisconsin
A. A year. Another six months to polish it. Another two years before publication.
During that time, my writers group critiqued all the chapters. So the manuscript was fully tuned up and clean before the editor at Five Star went to work on it.
I’m a fast writer. I can write a 300- to 320-page manuscript—85,000 words—in a month, but family commitments, mowing the lawn in the summer and shoveling snow in the winter interrupt. And, like you, I have to sleep now and then.
Q. I really appreciate the funny situations James Early finds himself in. Does humor come naturally to you?
—Bxerk Sketch, Wisconsin
A. Humor is a survival technique. When life gets really bad, we crack a joke. If we were to dwell on the awful things that happen to us, we’d go crazy. Does humor come naturally for me? Yes.
I like situation comedy.
Robbery, murder, death . . . these things can make a crime story so dark and depressing that I’ll put the book back on the shelf rather than read to the end. So I insert situation comedy to give a break for the readers, to break the tension that’s been building, to let them—and me—laugh before we get back to the hard work of catching the killer.
You’ve noticed the humor between characters in Early’s Fall tends toward the wry and dry, not roll-on-the-floor funny nor over the top slapstick. I have friends who write raucous humor into their crime stories. It works for them and their readers love it.
That’s just not my style.
Q. Your James Early novel, Early’s Fall, was a terrific suspense/mystery. Do you outline your plots in advance, or write and let the story unfold as it comes to you?
—Mike Black, Illinois
A. Outlining doesn’t work for me. I’ve tried it, but I don’t have the discipline to stay with a detailed outline. My characters come to life. They take over and move in directions I never anticipated. And I’ve grown to like that. I’ve grown to trust them.
An illustration. In book 2, Early discovers the body of a murdered child, and he becomes tremendously angry. To him, it was a senseless death. The members of my writers group said Early has to react. He has to release that anger. He has to put his fist through the wall, so I rewrote the scene that way.
But it didn’t work. And everyone who read it realized it didn’t work, that it was hollow, that it was untrue. Early does not put his fist through walls. He’s not that kind of man.
I took the wall busting out.
For me, I know where my book starts and where it must end. When I roll my chair up to the keyboard to write, I start on page 1 of chapter 1 and write straight through. Not all at one sitting. I’m a fast writer, but not that fast.
I do make notes for scenes that occur to me when I’m away from my keyboard . . . and I file them. I usually forget to call those notes up, so I have lots of orphan scenes that may work themselves into short stories or other books.
Q. What’s next for Sheriff Early? I remember you mentioning he’s going to hire a controversial deputy. What can you tell us about this?
—Mike Black, Illinois
A. I cannot tell you why, but it didn’t seem right for long tall Hutch Tolliver to appear in book 2, so I have him away at the state police training academy. That’s an ultra modern concept for 1950. The state police did not train local officers. But I figured that if an opportunity presented itself for Hutch to go to school—to become better at his job—Early would do the right thing and send him.
So Early needs a new chief deputy. The safe thing would be to hire another white guy. I instead have him hire an Indian, John Silver Fox. Silver Fox is a former Army MP who served in occupied Japan, so he has all the credentials for the job, plus he’s a dead shot.
In Kansas 1950, you did not hire Indians for police work. You didn’t hire them for much of anything. This was the west. We have reservations within an easy drive of Riley County. The bias against Indians was real.
Early hires Silver Fox because to him it’s the right thing to do, but it creates all kinds of problems for Early at the courthouse. How he deals with those problems is a part of Early’s Winter.
Q. You obviously envision the James Early saga as a series. How many books do you plan on writing in this series and are you planning any non-Early novels?
—Mike Black, Illinois
A. Early’s Fall was a one-off, a stand-alone. But when people wiser than me said mystery readers want series, I set out to write book 2, Early’s Winter.
So you can see, I’m following the seasons. There will be an Early’s Spring and an Early’s Summer. The story ideas are in place.
There may be a fifth book. I’ve long wanted to write a war novel. Book 5 could be that. The Korean war would be hot. Hutch Tolliver would have been a member of the Army Reserve and would have been called up.
I have him lost behind the lines. Early will go to Korea to find his friend because the Army command won’t release a unit to search for Tolliver.
I am shaping up two manuscripts for a series set in eastern Tennessee in 1967 that features a female defense attorney fresh out of law school. I wrote the books as an exercise, as a challenge. I can write a strong male lead. I’m a guy. It’s easy. But few guys can write a strong female lead. So that was my challenge, to see if I could do it.
I will bring those “Thou Shalt Not Murder” novels out this year as e-books. I’m joining the book biz revolution.
I’m also well into the writing of the first of a contemporary mystery set in my home state of Wisconsin. It features a female defense attorney—again—who lost an arm and a leg in the first Gulf war. The first book is currently titled For Want of a Hand.
Q. How does your background as a reporter influence your writing style?
—Mike Black, Illinois
A. It gave me an ear for dialogue. As a reporter, I was paid to go around and listen to people talk and then write what they said. I captured speech patterns and accents and ways of saying things, facial gestures, body movements, all of that in the news feature stories I wrote.
So I let dialogue do a lot of the storytelling in my books.
We reporters were not permitted to have writer’s block.
Get the story done by 2 o’clock or don’t come back tomorrow. You will be fired.
So when I sit down to write, I write.
I also write fast.
One day, John Blankenship and I had a writing contest. John had the desk next to mine at Beckley Newspapers. Who can write the greater number of stories by quitting time? We had both banked a week’s worth of interviews, so at 8 o’clock we went at it.
At the end of the day, I forwarded 17 stories to the editor and John 15.
They weren’t all long stories. Some were 5-, 8-, and 10-inchers.
To get more stories into the paper at that time, the editor put a maximum limit on the stories we could turn in—15 column inches.
If we ran longer, she took out her scissors and cut off our stories at 15 inches, often in mid-paragraph, sometimes in mid-sentence.
So all of us at Beckley learned to write tight.
I write tight now, even when I have 300 pages in which to tell my story.
Final Note: Millie Mader, a member of my writers group, didn’t want to ask a question. She wanted to make a comment about Early’s Fall. Here it is:
“The gripping tale was so realistic, and I knew that you must have had lots of stored memories of the Kansas west after World War Two. The book kept me up very late three nights in a row. I was intrigued with Sonny from start to finish. He brought to mind Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The ending proved his innate decency and his clever escape. How Early discovered the missing papers [in the final chapter] was out of sight. His determination and uncommonly sharp mind tied the whole crime together in a bizarre but believable conclusion. I can’t wait for someone to publish Early’s Winter.”
© Jerry Peterson.
