Historical Mystery
Date Published: 03-01-2022
Publisher: New Arc Books / Level Best Books
It's 1954. The place is Prosperity, North Carolina, a small farming community in Bliss County. Three teenagers, the 1953 championship-winning offensive backfield for Prosperity High, are unwilling participants in a horrific event that results in a young man’s death.
One of the friends harbors a tragic secret that could have prevented the crime. Divulging it would ruin his life, so he stays quiet, fully aware he will carry a stain of guilt for the rest of his life.
The three buddies go their separate ways for almost a decade, before another tragedy brings them back to Prosperity in 1968. Now in their thirties, it is a time of civil and racial unrest in America.
They discover the man who committed murder back in ’54 is now the mayor, and rules the town with an autocratic iron fist. He’s backed by his own private force of sheriff's deputies and forcibly intimidates and silences any malcontents.
Worse, now he's set his sights on Congress.
A Kind and Savage Place spans half a century from 1942 to 1989 and examines the dramatic racial and societal turmoil of that period through the microcosmic lens of a flyspeck North Carolina agricultural community.
1. What is the hardest part of writing
your books?
As I’ve stated in many interviews, I’m a hardcore pantser, meaning I never
really know when I start out where a story is going. I do have a vague idea of
the plot trajectory, but it’s usually in the form of a concept rather than an
actual plot with fully fleshed-out character arcs and motivations and whatnot.
I usually start with a conversation between two people--one has a problem, and
the other might provide the solution. I allow the story to evolve organically
from there.
This process
works marvelously for my genre crime fiction, even if it frequently results in
dead-end plotlines that are later excised. I’m working on a novel set in 1920s
Paris at the moment, and there are two characters I absolutely loved writing
who will never show up in the finished book because their story never really
goes anywhere. Learning to ‘kill your darlings’ is a tough lesson for writers.
For weightier
historical pieces, I do write a brief synopsis summarizing what major points I
want to make over the course of the work, and that is sometimes the most
tedious part of the writing process. It does help keep me on track, though,
with complicated plotlines that intersect at key points in the work.
Overall,
though, I really hate writing first drafts. I’m an expert woodworker, and I
liken the writing of a novel to building a nice piece of furniture. Before you
make it pretty, you have to bang the boards together. Writing the first draft
is banging boards together, and I’m always impatient to get on with it so I can
begin the real artistic process of massaging a wet hot mess of a first draft
into something people would really like to read.
2: What songs are most played on your Ipod?
Well, I don’t
own one. I have a Sansa Clip lying around somewhere, but I don’t really like
the feel of earbuds so I seldom listen to it except when I plug it into my
stereo system. I was a genuine hippie in the old days, and lot of my ‘personal
listening device’ is taken up by artists from the Laurel Canyon days—CSNY,
Joni, Poco, Buffalo Springfield, yada yada yada. I’m also a pretty big
Deadhead, so Jerry and the boys show up a lot.
3:
Do you have critique partners or beta readers?
On occasion.
For my private eye genre pieces, I hand the second draft over to my wife—a
professional writer and editor. She is appropriately ruthless in critiquing my
work, and has made many of my books a great deal better.
For longer,
more intensive works, such as my upcoming historical mystery Vicar
Brekonridge, I do recruit beta readers to examine the work after I’m ready
to circulate it—usually on the fourth or fifth draft. Some of them have worked
with me on more than one book, but most only help once, and I deeply appreciate
their contributions.
4: What book
are you reading now?
I’m about to
finish one of Joe Lansdale’s Hap and Leonard novels, Bad Chili. It’s an
older work from about 1997, but I’m always up for some Hap and Leonard action.
When I finish it, I’ll pick up James Lee Burke’s Robicheaux, because my
self-esteem is entirely too robust right now, and reading Burke always humbles
me.
5: How did you start your writing career?
In the worst
possible way, and the repercussions have followed me my entire career.
In late 1999,
I was beating my head against a wall trying to find a publisher for the first
novel in my New Orleans-based Pat Gallegher series, Joker Poker. I’d
burned out two agents and had a stack of rejection letters that would choke a
hippo. I was driving home and heard a report on NPR about a new publishing
process called Print On Demand, and how a startup called iUniverse was
utilizing it to bring out-of-print works by people like Lawrence Block. More
importantly, they were publishing new works.
At about the
same time, Mystery Writers of America entered into a partnership with iUniverse
to allow MWA members to publish with them free under a new imprint calls
Mystery and Suspense Press.
Desperate to
get Joker Poker into print, I signed up. Joker Poker was released
under the MASP imprint in 2000 to relatively good reviews.
I attended
the Harriet Austin Writers Conference in Athens, GA the following spring, and
met Steven Brown, a writer from Greenville, SC, who owned his own publishing
company, Chick Springs Press. We staffed the MWA table at the conference
together and talked at length about the prospect of self-publishing. Shortly
after, realizing that iUniverse hadn’t done a thing for me that I couldn’t do
for myself (and being the ultimate DIYer) I tossed caution to the winds and
formed my own publishing company, Barbadoes Hall Communications. I contracted
with Ingram Lightning Source to produce and distribute the books and hired a
cover designer from Vermont to do my artwork. For my mystery novels, I
developed an imprint called Back Alley Books, and my first offering on that new
imprint was the second Pat Gallegher novel, Voodoo That You Do.
I submitted
it to the Private Eye Writers of America Shamus Awards. A few weeks later, I
receive an email from the Dennis Lynds, one of the great pulp writers from the
fifties and sixties. He liked the book quite a lot, and wanted to recommend it
as a finalist, but it appeared to him that it was self-published. PWA had a
rule that self-published works weren’t eligible for the Shamus Award, in an
attempt to avoid submissions from vanity presses. I explained that I owned my
own company, and contracted for publication and cover design, etcetera, and he
agreed that this might be a unique situation. He appealed to the contest chair,
S.J. Rozan, who gave Voodoo the thumbs-down.
The next
year, though, S.J. and PWA president Bob Randisi instituted the ‘Rick Helms Rule’,
which stated that books from the various POD vanities like iUniverse, Xlibris,
PublishAmerica and the like would not be eligible, but self-published books
like mine would be. They even recruited me to help curate which self-publishers
were eligible and which weren’t.
My next
submission, another Pat Gallegher novel called Juicy Watusi, did become
the first-ever self-published novel to become a Shamus Award finalist in 2003.
I figured my career was ready to skyrocket. I couldn’t have been more wrong.
My fourth
self-published Gallegher novel, Wet Debt, was a Shamus finalist in 2004,
as was my second Eamon Gold novel Cordite Wine in 2006. I think I still
hold the record for the number of self-published Shamus Finalists at four—the
most recent, Brittle Karma (Eamon Gold) won the award in 2021, after it
was published through a new Barbadoes Hall imprint called Black Arch Books.
I wasn’t
traditionally published until my Judd Wheeler series debuted in 2010 from Five
Star. Except for my Eamon Gold novels (Brittle Karma; Doctor Hate), all
of my works since 2010 have been traditionally published.
As a result
of years of self-publishing and small press releases, my BookScan numbers are
not the stuff that sets New York editors’ hearts aquiver. Starting out the way I
did probably cost me a shot at being published by one of the Big Four and a
Half, but I’d be lying if I said it hasn’t been a lot of fun.
6:
Tell us about your next release.
A Kind and
Savage Place (New Arc
Books, March 2022) is a broad departure from my genre crime fiction. It’s a
prequel to my Judd Wheeler Series that was originally published by Five Star
beginning in 2010 (Six Mile Creek; Thunder Moon; and Older
Than Goodbye). That series is built around the police chief in a small
North Carolina farming community that is slowly giving way to suburban sprawl
from the large metropolis to the north.
About four
years ago, shortly after Older Than Goodbye was published, I began work
on the fourth book in the series. It opened with a prologue that took place in
1954, involving Judd’s father and two other friends who had comprised the
offensive backfield in the local high school’s 1953 championship-winning team.
The prologue stretched to almost ten thousand words, and I realized it was a
book all by itself. I expanded the first twenty-two pages into almost a
hundred, and the first act was complete. The fourth Judd Wheeler novel was
intended to be titled A Kind and Savage Place, so I just kept that
title.
It's 1954.
The place is Prosperity, North Carolina, a small farming community in mostly
rural Bliss County. Three teenagers, the 1953 championship-winning offensive
backfield for Prosperity High, and lifelong friends, are unwilling participants
in a horrific event that results in a young man’s death.
One of the friends harbors a tragic secret that could have prevented the crime.
Divulging it would ruin his life, so he stays quiet, fully aware he will carry
a stain of guilt for the rest of his life.
The three buddies go their separate ways for almost a decade, before another
tragedy brings them back to Prosperity in 1968. Now in their thirties, it is a
time of civil and racial unrest in America.
They discover the man who committed murder back in ’54 is now the mayor and
rules the town with an autocratic iron fist. He’s backed by his own private
force of sheriff's deputies and forcibly intimidates and silences any
malcontents.
Worse, now he's set his sights on Congress.
A Kind and Savage Place spans half a century from 1942 to 1989 and
examines the dramatic racial and societal turmoil of that period through the
microcosmic lens of a flyspeck North Carolina agricultural community.
I’m
completely stoked about this new novel, mostly because it reflects my own
experiences growing up in the center of the civil rights movement in the late
1950s and the 1960s (and which, many would argue, continues to this day). I
grew up in Charlotte, Charleston, and Atlanta. I saw “whites only” water
fountains and bathrooms. My family ate at Lester Maddox’s Pickrick restaurant
in Atlanta before he stood in the doorway with an ax handle and dared a person
of color to enter, and we were disgusted when the people of Georgia later
elected the bigot as governor just before we moved back to North Carolina. I
witnessed a Ku Klux Klan parade in a small Georgia town in the early 1960s, and
as a reporter I covered the Greensboro Klan/Nazi shootout in 1979. I witnessed
the struggle for civil rights in America firsthand, and wanted to channel my
experiences into a compelling story. I’m extremely proud of A Kind and
Savage Place as a ripping yarn and a reflection of the events in my
childhood that affected the course of my life.
A Kind and
Savage Place debuts
on March 1st from Level Best Books’ New Arc Books imprint.
Thanks for
hosting me today! It was a pleasure chatting with your readers!
About the Author
Richard Helms is a retired college professor and forensic psychologist. He has been nominated eight times for the SMFS Derringer Award, winning it twice; seven times for the Private Eye Writers of America Shamus Award, with a win in 2021; twice for the ITW Thriller Award, with one win; four times for the Killer Nashville Silver Falchion Award with one win: and once for the Mystery Readers International Macavity Award. He is a frequent contributor to Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, along with other periodicals and short story anthologies. His story “See Humble and Die” was included in Houghton-Mifflin-Harcourt’s Best American Mystery Stories 2020. A Kind and Savage Place is his twenty-second novel. Mr. Helms is a former member of the Board of Directors of Mystery Writers of America, and the former president of the Southeast Regional Chapter of MWA. When not writing, Mr. Helms enjoys travel, gourmet cooking, simracing, rooting for his beloved Carolina Tar Heels and Carolina Panthers, and playing with his grandsons. Richard Helms and his wife Elaine live in Charlotte, North Carolina.
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