Interview with Nathan Walpow
by Jon Jordan
Nathan's Web Site

JON:  To start with, how would you describe your series featuring Joe Portugal?

NATHAN:  They've been described as "urban cozies," a term which I don't love but which does have a certain descriptive value. Joe acts in TV commercials, which leaves his days free for stumbling over dead bodies. The first two books were so-called botanical mysteries, in which victims and suspects were members of plant clubs. One Last Hit, the new one, dispenses with most of the plant stuff, concentrating instead on rock and roll music. To tell the truth, the actual mystery is secondary to me. I'm much more interested in the characters and how they deal with what life's handing them.

JON:  What is the attraction of writing a series instead of stand alone books?

NATHAN:  It goes with what I touched on above. Characters and setting interest me more than plot. (A good thing, since I'm a lousy plotter.) I enjoy watching Joe dealing with being middle-aged in Los Angeles, and since he's about five years younger than I am I gain some insight into my own behavior. Also, I love when this character I've lived with for the last six years surprises me with stuff I didn't know. Like this time around I discovered he ran away from home at fifteen and spent several months in a home for wayward teens.

JON:  The title of one of your books, The Cactus Club Killings, gives a little clue about you. You raise cactus and actually are something of an expert. How did this come about?

NATHAN:  It started in the mid-70s, when my cats insisted on eating my houseplants and I needed something they wouldn't chew on. After I had half a dozen I was, you'll pardon the expression, hooked. By the time I started that book I had around four hundred plants. Putting them into the book was based on the write-what-you-know principle. My original publisher wanted the botanical stuff to continue, so I wrote Death of an Orchid Lover. I never intended to keep up the plant connection, except to have Joe visiting his greenhouse every once in a while, like Nero Wolfe with his orchids.

JON:  In what way is One Last Hit concentrating on Rock and Roll? I love the opening with Joe and Gina at an Aerosmith show.

NATHAN:  Joe was in a band called the Platypuses in 1968, when he was fifteen. Some of the members try to get the band back together again. But the lead guitarist disappeared around 1980 and it's up to Joe to find him. (Also, someone doesn't like the idea and goes around shooting at the members.) Joe listens to a lot of 60s music throughout the book, and visits a club where the music and everything else is from the 60s. (The bartenders look like Chad and Jeremy - or is it Peter and Gordon?) I discovered Joe's favorite group was the Who, and there are various connections to them strewn around.

The book's dedicated to John Entwistle (who died the day I mailed the first draft to the publisher) and all the chapter titles are songs by the Who or its members. By the way, I went to the Aerosmith concert in question, though I used artistic license on the opening act because I couldn't imagine Joe fantasizing about anyone in Cheap Trick.

JON:  And, if you were to put a soundtrack to it, what music would you include?

NATHAN:  There'd have to be a lot of the Who, and some Entwistle solo stuff. Jefferson Airplane - anything set in the 60s (and there's one chapter that's a flashback to then) has to have "White Rabbit" on the soundtrack. "Born To Be Wild," "96 Tears," some Procol Harum (one of my favorite groups). And some of Love, one of the criminally unknown groups of the 60s, who figure into the story. And I guess some Aerosmith.

JON:  Do you listen to music while you write?

NATHAN:  I don't. I've tried it (both rock and classical) and I find it absolutely distracting.

JON:  You mention discovering things about Joe as you write. So it would seem that Joe has really taken on his own personality and you are kind of channeling him. Do you find that where you think you are going with a book and where you actually end up usually end up being two different places?

NATHAN:  I generally don't know much about where a book is going when I start. I kind of know what the crime is and have a vague idea who did it and why. My first drafts tend to be 120,000 word outlines. Only when I get to the end can a piece together the good parts and figure out what's really going on. Which means a third or so of the draft disappears, but that's the price I pay for being unable to figure out a plot beforehand. On the other hand, it's a rush looking over the first draft and suddenly figuring out how apparently disparate elements can connect. (I think that's the first time I've ever used the word "disparate.")

JON:  What is it about Ugly Town books that attracted you to them?

NATHAN:  They're a wonderful publishing company. Two guys, Tom Fassbender and Jim Pascoe, who decided to start a small crime fiction press and did it right. The books are beautiful, the covers uniformly great; and the UglyGuys are totally supportive of their authors. They've already had Edgar and Shamus nominees for best first novel. Sometime in 2001, after I was part of the great Dell-mystery-author purge, they said if I wanted to write another Joe P. book they'd publish it. I'd been working on other stuff, but Joe wanted to make another appearance. I'm their second non-first-novelist; Gary Phillips was the first.

JON:  What other types of work have you done? I noticed on your website that you've won awards for your web work.

NATHAN:  Said website is at http://walpow.com, and all your readers should visit it as soon as they finish reading this interview. I make my living as a web designer, working for a smallish bank. I've been involved in computers in some capacity or other for thirty years. Throughout the 80s, concurrent with the computer work, I attempted an acting career; I did a lot of stage work and comedy improv, had one line in prime time, and got cut from a Moonlighting. My bachelors is in chemical engineering - I worked as an engineer for four years when I got out of college - and I have a masters in communications management, whatever that is.

JON:  You said that you have gained some insight to your own behavior writing Joe. How much of you is in Joe?

NATHAN:  In some ways Joe's very much like me; in some ways he's very different. I've noticed that Gina ended up with some of the traits I didn't give Joe. For instance, she's very computer literate (she designed the website for her interior design business, for instance), while Joe is a total technophobe. Gina also tends to reflect my cynical side. Joe has my basic laziness.

JON:  Or is Joe more of a way for you to live vicariously?

NATHAN:  Not consciously, but I have put him through some things I would like to experience. Trying to get into a band while middle-aged, for instance. I'd love to do that. And Joe's moderately successful as a TV commercial actor - he makes his living at it, though since he lives in a house his father owns his expenses are low - while I never got past a callback for a commercial.

JON:  You also write short stories. How is the writing for short stories different than for novels?

NATHAN:  You have to be much more economical. With novels, you try to wring out anything that's not crucial to story or character development, but you can indulge yourself sometimes, allow a little more description, for instance, or explore character in more detail. With a short story, every word counts. Description is squeezed to a minimum. So is dialogue. The thing I like about short stories is that all you need is one idea. A situation arises, the protagonist deals with it, bam. I wish I had time to work on more stories, but with a limited amount of writing time each day I have to concentrate on something that might let me quit my day job someday.

JON:  Is there anything you've always wanted to do or try that you haven't yet?

NATHAN:  There is that band thing, though I did play one gig at a McGovern rally in '72. And I've just gotten into amateur astronomy and can't wait to take my telescope to a dark sky site. With reference to writing, I want to write a mainstream novel and see it published. I worked on one for two years prior to writing The Cactus Club Killings, and never finished the first draft. It was basically several moderately-interesting characters in search of a story. Writing three Joe Portugal books has taught me enough, I think, to produce that great American novel. I have the germ of a story and will start work on it in a few months.

JON:  But do you plan to also keep writing mysteries?

NATHAN:  I plan to keep writing Joe Portugal books. I'll do another one after the mainstream thing. Anything else, I'm not sure about. By the way, I really don't view the Joe books as mysteries - not the new one, anyway. It fits somewhere under the great big umbrella of crime fiction, but there's not a whole lot of sleuthing going on.

JON:  What authors do you enjoy, either mystery or non-mystery?

NATHAN:  First off, I'll admit that I'm very ill-read. I haven't read any of the classics since they made me do it in high school. And I've never read Steinbeck, Hemingway, or any of those guys. And I couldn't finish The Great Gatsby. (Though I did read and enjoy The Day of the Locust.) There really isn't any non-crime author I could call a favorite. In the crime fiction field, starting with the oldies, I love Raymond Chandler and Fredric Brown. I'm a big Lawrence Block fan, especially the Scudder books. I'll read anything Lee Child and Dennis Lehane write. And I'm a huge fan of Cynthia Harrod-Eagles' Bill Slider series. I got to talk with her at Left Coast Crime; that was a real pleasure.

JON:  If you were allowed to go back in time and change one event that involved you, what would it be?

NATHAN:  This question is fraught with danger, because once you change anything, everything else becomes different. I wouldn't have met my wife Andrea, I might never have discovered writing, and on and on. That said, the crossroads I sometimes think about came right when I finished college in 1969. I was a chemical engineering major, and part of the job-hunting process was what we called a plant trip. The prospective employer paid for you to fly or take the train to their facility, and you found out about each other, and if they liked you they offered you a job. Except Rocketdyne in L.A. offered me a job without a plant trip, and wouldn't pay for one. I'd lived in New York City my whole life, and had never been further west than Dayton, Ohio (on one of my plant trips), and I was too chicken to take a chance on such an unknown. So I ended up working for General Electric in upstate New York. Over the years I've wondered what would have happened if I'd taken that job. Most likely I'd have been laid off during one of the aerospace cutbacks. But I'd have moved to the city I love ten years sooner than I actually did, and maybe I'd have gotten into acting or writing sooner and ended up being a big something-or-other. Or maybe I would have become a cokehead and died.

JON:  If you reach the point that you can right full time, would you keep regular hours for your writing?

NATHAN:  Semi-regular. I'd write in the morning (as I do know), but I would truly enjoy not having to deal with an alarm clock, so the start time would vary.

JON:  What do you find to be the toughest part of being a writer?

NATHAN:  Finding the discipline to get my ass in the chair. When I think about all the time I've wasted over the years, finding anything but my writing to do (damn that Internet) ...

JON:  What's the one thing you cook better than anything else?

NATHAN:  Kashe varnishkes. Kashe is a grainish thing also know as buckwheat groats. The other main ingredient is bowtie noodles. There's egg and there's onion and there are several fun steps which invariably result in kashe on the floor.

JON:  What's the one thing always in your refrigerator?

NATHAN:  Probably not always, but I'm overly fond of blueberries.