In the short bursts of commuting that makes up my nerdy bridge-and-tunneler existence, it takes a rather special book to rise above the tinnitus of 3,000-odd music tracks, thirty or more iPhone games, or however many PSP games I have in my bag.
And, so, you'd imagine my surprise on ignoring all of the above, nine or ten TV shows, a pile of unopened Xbox 360 games and most of my social life to read through the first four books in the quintet of Charlie Huston's Joe Pitt casebook series.
They take place in a modern-day New York that exists with a Vampyric (note the spelling) war bubbling under the surface - a separate community of the 'infected' (it's a 'vyrus,' passed via the blood), split into clans. Between the clans, a rock and a hard place is hard-boiled badass detective/man-for-hire Joe Pitt, who begins the first book, Already Dead, (which is currently free on many eBook formats) on the trail of a shambler - better known to normal people as a zombie.
All of these supernatural elements, however, are merely props in Huston's pulp noir piece. While there's blood-letting (and drinking), his focus is not on the Vampyres and their coteries, but on the mysteries and conspiracies that Pitt finds himself embroiled in.
I recently had the pleasure of chatting with Huston about his work.
What made you bring vampires into a detective novel?
It was just one of those things. You're sitting around and thinking about your ideas, and suddenly it's a vampire detective - it isn't rocket science.
Were things like True Blood, Twilight, etc. part of the decision?
No. I don't need anybody's reaction to lead me. I mean I've never read [any of the Twilight] books. I'm not a very aware consumer of pop culture. Even though I write vampire books, it took a really long time for Twilight to penetrate my awareness. I can remember a long time ago having people write me emails and ask me what I thought of Twilight and I said, "What the f**k are you talking about? I have no idea."
Twilight bubbled up in my consciousness about the same time as Charlene Harris and the Sookie Stackhouse stuff, along with the True Blood show and the Twilight movie came about. It doesn't appeal to me at all. Ultimately, I don't like vampires that don't kill and eat [laughs]. You either find a way to take these creatures, and if you are going to use them as your protagonists, and take them on their own terms and find a way to deal with them on their own terms and still make them a character that somebody can get behind. Otherwise, you're just cheating. Well...okay, maybe that's unfair. You're writing something else.
How did the character of Joe Pitt, the protagonist of the books, come about?
Joe was kind of reaction to Hank Thompson, one of my other characters. I'd finished writing the first Hank Thompson book, Caught Stealing, and Hank is definitively not a tough guy. When Hank gets the upper hand on people, it's usually scenarios where he kind of gets the upper hand by accident. He steps on the end of the board and the board pops up and hits somebody else in the head. It was hard to keep him alive during the course of the book and when I starting Caught Stealing I'd originally thought Hank was going to be more of a tough guy, and it just didn't work out that way.
So, I really wanted to write about someone hard-boiled - someone who is a legitimate badass who I didn't have to constantly be rationalizing how he could survive things. I think I just, at some point really wanted to write a tough guy character. I don't even remember where the Vampire thing came in.
You obviously take a lot of inspiration from New York - the series is set there, after all - how long were you here, and how much did you travel?
I lived in NYC for 11 years - I think I wrote up to Half the Blood of Brooklyn before I went to Los Angeles. I then had to return to write Every Last Drop - so much of the book is set in the Bronx, and I hadn't spent much time there. So, I spent a few days in The Bronx.
The locations in Already Dead were very much just my everyday backdrop. The apartment that Joe lived in is actually an apartment that some friends of mine lived in. They had a ground floor and a separate room underneath some big set room, and that's how I kind of setup the architecture of Joe's apartment in Already Dead - the one where he's got a secret below-ground room. All the bars he hangs out are bars that I was hanging out at or had worked at one time or another.
There was even a time when I was spending up my every waking hour at the pizza place. That's the opening of the book, the pizza place where he gets a slice. That's where I'd stop on my way home from work - whenever I got off from bartending, that's where I'd stop off for a slice before I went home.
Has there ever been any talk of adapting the Joe Pitt books into film, TV, comics, anything like that?
There's a screenplay out there that I've read, actually - it's quite good. It was very faithful, but adapted the story in a more Hollywood way - for example, it took the relationship with Evie at the center, which was appropriate.
Who would you have cast as Joe, if you had the choice?
You know, I only have one answer for that, and he's not available - a young Robert Mitchum. That kind of imposing, swaggering, physical presence. He was so unflappable.
So, what's next for you?
Well, the next book is already done, and it's called Sleepless. It was a huge push for me because it's crime in a speculative setting. It's set in 2010, in Los Angeles - the premise is that there's a plague of sleeplessness that's infected 10% of the population. It's a multiple viewpoint narrative. As a result, it's a little denser in terms of the prose. It's not as lean as the stuff I've been writing, and it's definitely much more somber in tone.
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