All Due Respect Issue 2 (16 page)

B
Y
C
HRIS
F
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H
OLM

It’d be awfully easy to say Owen Laukkanen is on a lucky run. After graduating college, he answered a Craigslist ad that led to him spending the next three years traveling the globe as a tournament reporter for a poker website. And when he turned his attention to writing fiction, his debut novel,
The Professionals
, garnered raves from the likes of Lee Child, John Sandford, and Jonathan Kellerman, as well as starred reviews from
Publishers Weekly
and
Library Journal
and a slew of award nominations.

But his follow-up,
Criminal Enterprise
, proved luck had nothing to do with it. As taut, gripping, and richly textured as
The Professionals
, it laughed in the face of the sophomore slump and cemented Laukkanen’s place among the finest thriller writers of the day. And luckily for all us crime-fic fans, his upcoming third novel,
Kill Fee
(out this March), is as much a joy to read as the first two.

Owen was kind enough to chat with me recently about crafting nuanced characters, his aversion to living a comfortable life, and his clandestine predilection for Cinnamon Toast Crunch.

Chris F. Holm:
Your protagonists, Kirk Stevens and Carla Windermere, are an unlikely pair. Stevens is a quiet, paunchy family man who works for the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA), and Windermere is a brash, beautiful, aggressive FBI agent ten years his junior. And yet there’s no denying they’ve got chemistry. What led you to put these two together? Were they always intended to be the stars of the show, or is that something that developed over time?

Owen Laukkanen:
It seems funny now, but I never intended for Stevens and Windermere to be the stars of anything. I wrote my first novel,
The Professionals
, figuring the bad guys were the protagonists, and created Stevens to be their antagonist on the law enforcement side. I realized pretty quickly that their case would require more than a state policeman’s expertise, so I brought Windermere into the mix, and their relationship really just developed from there.

I’m very much a “write from the seat of your pants” kind of guy, and it’s funny how arbitrary decisions panned out sometimes. I didn’t plan to write a series about a pair of Minnesota-based cops; I just needed someone to chase my college-age kidnappers, and they happened to be in Minnesota when the state police cottoned on. So it’s been pretty cool to be able to revisit them and expand on their initial premise.

CH:
I’ve read plenty of novels featuring FBI agents—heck, I’ve even written one—but
The Professionals
was my first exposure to the BCA. Tell us a little about the organization. What is it about the BCA that lends itself to a crime novel?

OL:
I had no real exposure to the BCA either, before I wrote
The Professionals
. I just figured a state policeman would take an interest in a kidnapping case, and quickly discovered the Bureau. Seat of my pants, like I said—and I may have thought twice about my decision, had I known just how incredibly well John Sandford had already covered the BCA terrain in his Lucas Davenport books. Had I known any better, I probably would have been too daunted to try and follow in his footsteps.

That said, the BCA is a fascinating operation, and in many ways is an ideal backdrop for a crime series. BCA agents can travel around the state, working cold cases and helping out smaller jurisdictions with major crime investigations, and they have a state-of-the art forensics lab for the CSI stuff. I’ve taken significant liberties with the scope of a BCA agent’s work—there’s probably no way Kirk Stevens leaves Minnesota in real life, but in my series he spends a lot of time chasing bad guys around the country with Windermere. I like writing thrillers that keep everyone on the move, cops and criminals alike, and part of the fun is figuring out plausible ways to keep Stevens involved when the cases go beyond the state line.

CH:
You live and write in Vancouver—and thanks to your prior gig as a poker journalist, you’ve traveled extensively, from the sketchy card rooms of Atlantic City to the swank casinos of Monaco and Macau. Why set your novels in Minnesota? Any chance we’ll see a globetrotting international thriller from you? A slug of seedy poker noir? A crime novel set in your hometown?

OL:
The simplest answer is that the books are set in Minnesota because that’s where the bad guys happened to be when I needed a law enforcement antagonist, and the bad guys were only in Minnesota because I arbitrarily started
The Professionals
in Chicago and, just as arbitrarily, sent them north after the first crime.

I really had no intention to set a series in Minnesota, and had I been planning better, I probably would have chosen somewhere like Detroit, which I know pretty well. Happily, I’ve been able to get back to the Twin Cities a number of times in the course of the series, and I like them so much that it almost feels like serendipity that my series wound up set there.

Stevens and Windermere travel a lot, which is fun for me, but there’s probably no chance they’ll wind up in Vancouver (my hometown), or in Europe, where I did a lot of travel for work, so I do toy with other projects from time to time. My first-ever crime novel was a hardboiled poker noir set in Las Vegas; it was never published, but it did help me attract my agent. And I have a first draft of a glamorous industrial espionage thriller set in Barcelona and Paris that I’ve been meaning to edit for, like, a year now, and an adventure novel set in the Pacific Northwest that I’d been wanting to write for a while and finally hammered out last fall. I’m kind of a profligate, as far as writing is concerned.

CH:
A number of your characters, from Minnesota cop Kirk Stevens to bank-robber Carter Tomlin, seem to dread the notion of a normal life. Given that your resume—poker journalist, commercial fisherman, critically acclaimed novelist—is more colorful than most, I can’t help but wonder: What is it about a quiet suburban existence that so creeps you out? If this writing thing hadn’t worked out, would you be knocking over banks to get your kicks?

OL:
Ha! I very well might be. Though I guess it’s not necessarily the quiet suburban life itself that scares me, but rather the notion of settling for an existence that I really don’t want, but that is comfortable and pleasant enough to anesthetize me from following my dreams. I think a quiet, normal existence is perfectly fine, but what scares me is that I’ll get so comfortable that I’ll wake up one day and fifty years will have passed and I’ll have nothing to show for them but vague regrets and a bunch of half-remembered dreams.

And I think my characters share my biases. Carter Tomlin is bored in his comfortable life, and given the opportunity to liven things up, he wakes up his latent adrenaline junkie slash inner asshole and goes on a spree. And I suspect there are more than a few people living in suburbia who might not want to rob banks and kill people, but who certainly yearn for something more exotic, just as there are people in suburbia who are absolutely in love with the security that life allows, and who gain all the fulfillment in the world from raising families and establishing a comfortable standard of living. I don’t begrudge anybody that; if anything, I feel guilty to be so fortunate as to want to spurn it. It’s just not for me, and I guess it shows.

CH:
One of the things I love about your writing is your sympathetic approach to your antagonists. You avoid mustache-twirling villains, instead creating nuanced characters with understandable motivations—and thanks to that, the reader winds up feeling almost complicit in their crimes. How important is it to you to relate to your antagonists on a personal level?

OL:
It’s extremely important. If I’m going to write about a villain for three- or four-hundred pages, I need to be able to empathize with him or her. I don’t want to write about people who were born bad, or whose motivations are one-dimensional attributes like greed or lust or simple malevolence. I don’t know people like that, and I don’t think I could make them interesting for very long.

What I do know are people who make poor decisions and have to live with them, and people who maybe rationalize a little bit of rule-breaking here and there, who keep sneaking across a line until that line means nothing, and they find a new line to cross. I think people get into crime incrementally, down the proverbial slippery slope, and what interests me is finding people who are at the top of that slope and watching them slide their way down. And I think if you start with a character who is at the top of that slope, the audience can relate to them, and it becomes this kind of horrifying, car-wreck situation where you’re really invested in the character’s survival.

CH:
You studied creative writing in college—and your program, like many of its kind, discouraged genre writing in favor of more literary endeavors. What impact did that have on what and how you write? Do you think the anti-genre bias exhibited by the majority of creative writing programs is justified?

OL:
I don’t think I’d be writing crime fiction if my university’s creative writing department hadn’t been explicitly anti-genre. The expectation at my school was that students were to focus on producing work of artistic merit, and straight genre work was unacceptable unless it really pushed the boundaries.

I’d had no prior interest in writing genre fiction, but I was a bit of a smartass who liked pushing boundaries, so I wrote about android girlfriends and caped superheroes and hardboiled detectives, and not only managed to avoid being expelled, but realized I really kind of liked the noir stuff, and so later when I set about trying to carve out a writing career for myself, I remembered how much fun the hardboiled stuff was to write and decided to try my hand at a crime novel.

As for whether the anti-genre bias is justified, I think the aim of the program was to encourage artistic exploration, where I’d maybe expected a more practical, “how to get paid to write novels” kind of education. I certainly think the program encouraged its young writers to challenge themselves instead of looking for an easy formula for fame and fortune, and I think that mindset has helped me write novels that—I hope—are a little more than just by-the-numbers thrillers.

CH:
I recently came across a quote of yours in which you said, in response to what you look for in a crime novel, “I like to be wowed by technique.” So let’s talk technique. Your books are often praised as page-turners, and it’s easy to see why. Your language is lean and economical, your chapters brief and hooky. But I think the label sells your writing short, because your language also manages to be incredibly evocative, and those short chapters read like self-contained short stories that somehow work together with clockwork precision. What’s your process like? How cognizant are you while you’re writing of how you’d like the book to sound, to read? Is page-turning prose borne of writing, or of editing?

OL:
I’m always trying to keep the language spare. I had a professor in university who would take his red pen to my short stories and hack and slash them until they were pared to their most essential parts, and as traumatic as I always found the experience, it really stuck with me, and I’m a ruthless editor of my work. I find the hack and slash cathartic.

In my mind, the way to keep a reader turning pages is to avoid burdening them with the unnecessary bits. Give them the basic facts, and let their minds fill in the blanks. We all have a picture in our minds of what a sandwich shop looks like, for instance; unless it’s absolutely necessary for the plot, I’m not going to tell you about the soup of the day.

And I think short chapters, paradoxically, keep readers reading longer, especially if you can end each one with a cliffhanger. I know I fall into the trap of always promising myself just one more chapter before I turn out the light at night, and then all of a sudden it’s three in the morning and half the book is gone. That’s the kind of problem I’m hoping to cause for my readers.

That said, if I could write the kind of poetic stuff that Michael Chabon writes without it coming off as gooey and purple and embarrassing, I would do it. I love technique, and I love beautiful writing, but I just don’t think I have the chops to pull it off myself.

CH:
The Professionals
, quite rightly, made major waves when it was released—garnering uniformly excellent reviews as well as a number of award nominations, including the Anthony, the Barry, and the International Thriller Writers’ Thriller Award. What effect did that have on crafting your subsequent books? Did you feel pressure to live up to so auspicious a debut?

OL:
I felt tremendous pressure. The award nominations came later, after the book had been out for a while, but certainly the reviews and the blurbs hammered home that I was playing in the big leagues now, and I’d better be able to prove I belonged.

I felt like I was learning to write all over again when I wrote
Criminal Enterprise
, the second book. I’d been given a two-book deal, and I’d never written something that I’d already been paid for, so I was really conscious of the expectations and the pressure, and I kind of froze up, like a terrified minor-leaguer taking his first big league at-bat. I stressed about the book all the way from the first draft to the day it hit stores, convinced that somebody was going to realize it was crap and point me out as a phony.

It’s still something I worry about, though with
Kill Fee
, I’ve learned to try and separate my internal sense of a book from any external reviews or reaction. I like
Kill Fee
a lot, and it’s the book I set out to write when I started the first draft. I’d like to get to a point where that’s satisfaction enough for me, and I’m not pinning my sense of writerly self-worth on external accolades or achievements, but I’m not quite there yet.