Dan O'Shea is a very intimidating man. He's also one hell of a writer. I'm very glad to have him closing out the MY DARK PAGES series with the eloquent and dramatic recalling of how he lost his literary virtue. Dan has a short story collection coming out with the great Snubnose Press. He's also shopping a few novels. He's represented by killer agent of crime writers Stacia Decker. If you'd like to know more about Dan, head to his little corner of the internet.
Oh and Dan is not really closing the series. I have a surprise guest next week!
I was raised in a house where you couldn’t turn around without tripping over a book – my Dad was an inveterate reader. Early in their marriage, my parents moved into an apartment in DC, close to Georgetown where my Dad was finishing his residency and my Mom was a nurse. I guess the kitchen floor was pretty disgusting, and my Mom was pregnant, so Dad set out to scrub it. Mom told him to put some newspaper down along the edge of the carpeting in the next room so it wouldn’t get stained. She comes back half an hour later and Dad is still scrubbing the same spot, reading the paper. Left a white circle on the floor that’s probably still there.
While they were in Georgetown, my mom also used to babysit for William Peter Blatty. When The Exorcist came out, my parents took us older kids to see it. I was 14. I was living in the bedroom in the converted attic – and the attic was where all the bad shit with Captain Howdy starts. Climax of the movie, that Karras priest gets tossed out the window, cartwheels down this long cement stairway, breaks his neck. I’m pissing myself thinking I’m going home and some Assyrian demon’s gonna make me its bitch and my parents are sitting next to me going “Oh, honey, you remember those stairs? We used to walk down those every day on the way to work.” I still have mental scars. But that’s another story.
Most of my Dad’s books were non-fiction, history mostly. Though he did like Agatha Christie. So I tried one of those when I was in high school. Hated it. I’m just not a cozy guy, it turns out. Also, I was a bit of a literary snob. I’d had a few teachers tell me I could write, and since that was pretty much the first time I’d had a teacher tell me I could do anything other than fuck around, it went to my head. I was gonna be the next Hemingway or Fitzgerald. Fuck that, the next Shakespeare. I was gonna carve my face into the Mount Rushmore of the western literary canon.
So I read Hemingway and Fitzgerald. I read dead Englishman – Hardy, Dickens, whomever. And I’d yack your ear off over how great they were, and how Americans were cultural zombies who’d had their intellectual life force sucked out through their eyeballs by the television. Went to see Animal House with some friends, and I bit my tongue so I wouldn’t laugh out loud, didn’t want to soil my cred. God, I was an asshole.
The truth? All that stuff I was reading was OK, but it was like health food. Every so often, you want dessert. You want booze. You want a fucking steak.
In 1979 or so, Graham Greene came out with The Human Factor – an espionage novel. Hey, Greene was an Important Writer (and, if you haven’t yet read The Heart of the Matter, do so immediately). So if he wanted to slum and write, GASP, genre fiction, then I could slum and read it.
And here was the tasty morsel I’d been craving. It was still a compelling and human story with rich characters and important messages, but it was also, I dunno, fun?
Slippery slope from there. My Dad had started in on Le Carre, and I plowed my way through that oeuvre. I mean at least Le Carre was still, what? Serious? Or English at least. I mean they made a PBS series out of his stuff, so it had to be OK, right?
And then I read a Ross Thomas novel. Don’t remember which one I read first, because I read all of them in short order. It’s not like being at the movies and biting your tongue – it’s just you and the book. There’s no one to pretend to, no one you can convince you aren’t enjoying it. (And yeah, I’m kinda old, and Thomas has been dead for a while so some of you punks probably haven’t read him. Try Ah! Treachery! and tell me it’s not a good time.)
I also figured out something else. I wasn’t going to write “serious” fiction. Maybe I didn’t have the talent for it or the patience for it or the psychological insights for it. And serious fiction, lots of times those books don’t have much in the way of story, plot, narrative arc. They’re about feelings and angst and ennui, not about things happening. Turns out I don’t know how to put a novel together that doesn’t have a skeleton of plot inside it. And also this – you think reading Hardy gets a little dry sometimes? Try writing Hardy. If you don’t enjoy what you’re writing, then it’s just work. Fuck that. Life’s full of work. Who needs more work?
So, for years, I didn’t write much of anything I wasn’t getting paid to write – and I was getting paid to write about the tax code.
Then, finally, I guess I grew up enough to get over my own pretensions and self-judgmental bullshit and decided to write what I felt like writing. OK, I’m still enough of a high-brow asshole that I turned Shakespeare into an Elizabethan private dick, but I’m just as happy with a meth-head stealing from Girl Scouts.
I’m just another genre slut out on the crime fiction stroll, flashing my hairy thighs at you and hoping to catch your eye. And I’m finally OK with that.