Читать книгу Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine #1 - Arthur Conan Doyle - Страница 7

SHMM SPEAKS WITH RON GOULART

Interview conducted by Carole Buggé

Ron Goulart is one of the most prolific genre authors with more than 180 published works, including approximately fifty science fantasy novels and twenty mystery novels, including his popular series starring Groucho Marx as detective. His Harry Challenge stories are special favorites of this magazine’s editor, who has commissioned several new stories in the series. Twice nominated for the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar award, Ron Goulart is an acknowledged expert on comic books and pulp magazines; his most recent book, just published, is Cheap Thrills, an Informal History of the Pulp Magazines. He and his wife Frances, who is also a writer, live in Ridgefield, Connecticut.

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SHMM: Where were you born?

Ron Goulart: In Berkeley, California. That was in January of 1933, just a couple of months before Roosevelt was inaugu­rated for the first of several terms as President. I grew up in a peaceful, pleasant neighborhood, even though it was on the wrong side of the tracks.

SHMM: What did your parents do?

RG: My father came to America from the Azore Islands when he was in his teens and worked in the same factory for the next fifty years. He was a dapper, handsome fellow in his youth and in Oakland, where he then resided, his friends called him the Sheik of Kirkham Street. My mother, who was born in this country, grew up in Oakland with a bunch of siblings and a one-armed father. She worked in a couple of factories, one of which manufactured light bulbs, until she married. In the early 1940’s, she started working as the head cook in the cafe­teria of the Berkeley grammar school that I attended. She stayed at that job until she died of cancer at the age of forty-five. I’m an only child, as is my wife. Makes for very sparsely attended family reunions.

SHMM: What in your background led to a writing career?

RG: Writing was only one of several careers I had my eye on as a kid. Our family consumed all the cheap popular arts forms — movies, radio, pulp magazines, library books and (for me, anyway) funny papers and comic books. I saw no reason why I couldn’t grow up to be a writer, a star of stage, screen and radio, a comedian and a cartoonist who drew a newspaper strip and a batch of comic books. From grade school through college I fooled with all of these callings. Wrote and drew for the high school newspaper, wrote and drew for the college humor magazine (at UC Berkeley), starred in the senior play at high school, belonged to a radio workshop that broadcast a dramatic show once a week on a local station, did a standup comedy act that wowed them at Cub Scout picnics and, later, at the Junior Prom.

SHMM: Were your ambitions nurtured by your upbringing and background, or did you have to overcome obstacles?

RG: Neither of my parents wanted me to end up in a factory. So they always encouraged my efforts to aim higher. My mother was convinced that I was destined for greatness and saw to it that by the time I was thirteen I had my own typewriter and drawing board. My father, more practical, suggested that I also think about an occupation to fall back on. That’s why I told the folks at UC that I wanted to become an English teacher.

SHMM: When did you get started writing?

RG: I was telling stories at school show-and-tell days from the first grade on and putting them on paper from about the second. I started submitting stories to professional magazines from the time I was about fifteen. I collected rejection slips from Planet Stories, Thrilling Wonder, Weird Tales and The New Yorker. When I was about sixteen or thereabouts I signed up for a one-night-a-week writing class that Anthony Boucher taught out of his house up on the right side of the tracks. I was certain that once he saw a sample of my work, I’d become a regular contributor to his Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. It didn’t work out that way and I was nineteen before I made my first sale to F&SF.

SHMM: Did you ever have to support yourself with “day jobs,” and if so, what were they and what were they like? Did any of them feed your writing?

RG: I’ve always, once I got out of college, supported myself by writing. However, for the first dozen or so years I wrote copy for ad agencies in addition to selling stories to F&SF, Amaz­ing, Hitchcock, etc. What I’d do was work for a couple of years at an agency, then quit and live on my savings while writing stories. The first year I tried this I wrote fifty stories, sent out about twenty-five and sold six. When my money ran out I’d go back into the ad game for a couple more years. I was a pretty good copywriter, and also fast, so I didn’t have much trouble getting a job. The San Francisco agency where I did two stretches hired me initially after reading some of what I’d written for the college humor magazine. That saved me from a life of teaching, as well as kept me from living off a generous pension now.

SHMM: Which of your books or stories do you like most, and why?

RG: I like most everything I’ve written over the years. Right now the Groucho Marx mystery novels I’m doing for St. Martin’s Press strike me as being pretty good — and funny. The latest one, Groucho Marx, King of the Jungle, is about a murder on the set of a Tarzan-like movie. It’ll be appearing in a book store near you this July. And I’ve always been fond of Harry Challenge in both novels and short stories.

SHMM: With regard to comic books, what have you done, and what your views of the genre’s significance? When did your in­terest in comics begin, and what are some of your likes and dislikes?

RG: I got hooked on funnies at a very early age. I was reading the Sunday comic sections before I could read, spreading them out on the kitchen floor and savoring the pictures. Comic books came along about the same time I did, and I started buying them (financed by my mother) from about the age of four. Graphic images of all sorts have always appealed to me, even the ones I turn out. In the middle 1970’s, Gil Kane and his family moved into the same Connecticut town where we were living. He was a great fan of science fiction and was fa­miliar with my work. Or so he said. He introduced me to Roy Thomas, who was the head editor at Marvel back then. I got about a dozen scripting jobs, mostly adaptations of H.P. Lovecraft, Robert Bloch and the like. In the late 1970’s, Kane and I collaborated on a syndicated comic strip called Star Hawks. In the 1990’s I wrote the first eighteen issues of William Shatner’s Tekworld for Marvel. I was never able to work on DC comic books and the late Julie Schwartz once told me I ought to stick to novel writing. I still buy comic books every week and like a wide range of stuff, from Bone to 100 Bullets.

SHMM: Which genre authors influenced your style and career?

RG: I wrote fan letters to a few of my favorite writers in my distant youth: Edgar Rice Burroughs, Sax Rohmer and Leslie Charteris among them. Burroughs and Rohmer obliged with autographs and a few kind words. Charteris actually wrote a couple of letters answering my questions. I read Charteris in those days not for his plots but for the adventure and the humor. The Saint was all over the place in the 1940’s. Movies, radio, comics and the affordable two-bit paperback. Charteris even had his own paperback outfit — Chartered Books for a time. The lesson from him was that a mystery could also be funny. It wasn’t until years later that I learned that some of his stuff was ghosted. By Henry Kutter (another of my fa­vorites), Cleve Cartmill, etc.

SHMM: Do you have advice or observations on the plotting process, which some writers regard as the toughest part of story writing?

RG: My approach to plotting? My basic theory is that a good short story is constructed like a good joke. Or maybe a good shaggy dog story. So you have to know the punchline before you can start telling it. Usually I try to know what the ending is going to be and sometimes I even write out the last lines first. That way, I know where I’m heading. I must admit that in recent years I sometimes start a story without that punchline clearly in mind. To get myself going on the plotting process, I often think up titles first. Those often trigger a plot. Although I have some titles that I jotted down years ago and am still trying to figure out a story to go with. One a long time on my list is The Case of the Extra Ventriloquist. Another method for me to get a plot going is to put the end at the beginning, but in a vague way that is hopefully intriguing. For example

— “As to why they found his body floating in the Pacific wearing those strange shoes.” Then you go back and explain why. Another source of inspiration is the old what if? ap­proach. Works for both fantasy and mystery.

SHMM: Where do you think the business is going? What’s wrong — or right — with it?

RG: No idea. I just hope it lasts as long as I do.

SHMM: This issue contains a new Harry Challenge story. How did you come up with Harry and his magician sidekick in the first place?

RG: Harry was inspired in part by my interest in Victorian fiction. Especially the sort of romantic thrillers produced by the likes of Anthony Hope with such novels as The Prisoner of Zenda. And there’s a bit of an homage to one of the favorite writers of my teens, the incomparable Sax Rohmer. It occurred to me some years ago that there was no reason why I couldn’t turn out stuff like that myself. I see the Harry Chal­lenge yarns as falling somewhere between pastiche and spoof. Harry first appeared a couple of decades ago in a paperback novel titled The Prisoner of Blackwood Castle. Most all of my novels, even the ones that aren’t officially mysteries, tend to have a mystery plot and so it seemed only logical to make Harry a detective in the tradition of both Nick Carter and Carnacki. The Great Lorenzo, his magician friend, was par­tially inspired by my interest in stage magic of a century ago, especially the gaudy posters. And I’ve been using plump, avuncular likeable windbags in my stories since grade school days. The other recurring character in the series is Jennie Barr, the daredevil reporter who frequently crosses Harry’s path. She’s part Nellie Bly, a real life daredevil reporter, and part a fictional reporter that Robert Barr wrote an adventure novel about and part my feisty writer wife.

SHMM: Are there any of your interests outside of your writing that you feel have influenced your writing?

RG: Comics have always been an influence. I’ve written quite a few stories, as well as a couple of novels, about cartoonists and the comics world. All the radio dramas and comedies I lis­tened to while young also had their effect and I think my habit of telling quite a bit of a story in dialogue I owe to my long ago listening habits. I’ve always been a fan of jazz and the blues and I’ve used lines from blues songs for story and book titles — such as Broke Down Engine. This is something I was more inclined to do in my younger days.