How My Two Huge Dogs Became Characters in The Dread Line: Guest post by Bruce DeSilva

Bruce DeSilva grew up in a parochial Massachusetts mill town where metaphors and alliteration were always in short supply. Nevertheless, his crime fiction has won the Edgar and Macavity Awards; been listed as a finalist for the Shamus, Anthony, and Barry Awards; and been published in ten foreign languages. His short stories have appeared in Akashic Press's noir anthologies, and his book reviews for The Associated Press appear in hundreds of publications. Previously, he was a journalist for 40 years, writing and editing stories that won nearly every journalism prize including the Pulitzer. His new novel is The Dread Line.

Bruce DeSilva:
How My Two Huge Dogs Became Characters in The Dread Line


I never intended to make Brady, my big lovable Bernese Mountain dog, and Rondo, my huge goofy mutt, characters in one of my hard-boiled crime novels; but when I write, they are always with me, often sitting on my feet, their big heads in my lap.

So I suppose it was inevitable—but it was also a happy accident.

The fact is that when I write, I rarely intend to do anything. I never outline. I don’t think about my plot in advance. I just set my characters in motion and discover the story as I go.

Each time I start a new book, the first thing I do is to write a paragraph that establishes its mood. Later, it may end up on the first page of the novel, or somewhere in the middle of the book, or even nowhere at all. But until I get the mood right, I can’t press on. For me, everything flows from there.

When I began The Dread Line, the fifth novel in my series featuring Liam Mulligan, the first thing I wrote was this:

 “He was a serial killer, but I didn’t hold that against him. It was just his nature. The way he killed irked me some. His victims were all missing their heads. But what I couldn’t abide was his habit of using my porch as a dump site.”

 I had no idea who the killer was. Worse, I didn’t want to write another serial killer book. I’d already published one (Providence Rag) based on a real case I once covered as a journalist, and reliving those terrible days had been painful for me. I had vowed never to write about a serial killer again. But I loved the feel of that paragraph—the way it set the noir mood of the novel I wanted to write.

As I pondered what to do, I looked down at Rondo, the most territorial of my 130-pound behemoths, and thought about him patrolling my big back yard, driving off every intruder from foraging deer to our neighborhood’s most efficient killer, a friend’s predatory cat.

And then I knew. The serial killer in that first paragraph—which I kept as the opening of the novel—was a feral tomcat who always deposited its daily kill on Mulligan’s back porch.

To deter the killer Mulligan dubbed “Cat the Ripper,” he would need a dog. A big one. So he rescued a young Bernese Mountain dog named Brady at a local animal shelter and set him loose I the yard.

I figured that would do the trick, but the dog and the cat didn’t see it that way. When the two animals first encountered each other early one morning, Brady tried to make friends, got scratched on the face for his trouble, and immediately became terrified of the intruder.

Meanwhile, Mulligan had bigger things to worry about—the things that emerged as the main plot and sub-plots of the novel. He became obsessed with a baffling jewelry robbery. He was enraged that someone in town was kidnapping and torturing family pets. And all of this—including his vendetta with Cat the Ripper—kept distracting him from a big case that needed all of his attention.

The New England Patriots, still reeling from a double murder charge against one of their star players (true story) hired Mulligan (not a true story) to conduct a background check on a college star they were thinking of drafting. To all appearances, the player was a choirboy, so at first the case seemed routine. But as soon as he started asking questions, he got push-back. The player had a secret, and somebody was willing to kill to prevent it from being revealed.

The detective work kept Mulligan away from home for long hours, and one day he returned to find that Brady had shredded his couch, tossing stuffing all over the place. (The real Brady had never done anything like that, but the real Rondo had.) Mulligan did a little research about destructive dogs and learned that it was usually the result of separation anxiety. The solution—another dog to keep Brady company. Enter Rondo, another rescue from the local kennel.

As I sat at my keyboard day after day, Mulligan’s two dogs grew inseparable, just as my two big boys did. And soon, their personalities emerged on the page—personalities that corresponded nearly exactly to my real dogs.

Rondo was protective, displaying his suspicion of strangers by barking incessantly at them. Brady was gregarious and affectionate with every one he met. Rondo was eager to please, constantly studying Mulligan for clues about what he should do next. Brady was stubborn and independent, obeying commands to come or stay only when it suited him. Rondo loved to fetch, gleefully chasing tennis balls across the yard and carrying them back to Mulligan. Brady watched the balls sail over his head and tossed Mulligan a look that said, “You expect me to get that?

But the two dogs—both named after New England sports heroes (Tom Brady of the Patriots and Rajon Rondo, formerly of the Boston Celtics—surprised me by becoming integral to the main plot. Both—but especially Rondo—were always on alert for intruders. More than once, their barking alerted Mulligan to the nighttime appearance of bad guys who intended to do him harm.

Cat the Ripper shocked me by playing a larger role too. One day, instead of depositing the corpse of a mouse or a wren on Mulligan’s porch, he showed up clutching a severed human ear in his jaws.

Although The Dread Line marks the first time in the series that Mulligan has lived with a dog, I’ve always included dogs in my novels. Why? Because they are invaluable for developing characters. You can learn a lot about people by the way they treat animals.

Bruce DeSilva: Politics and the Sports Betting Industry-A Scourge of Vipers

Today I welcome back Bruce DeSilva. Bruce DeSilva’s crime fiction has won the Edgar and Macavity Awards; has been listed as a finalist for the Shamus, Anthony, and Barry Awards; and has been published in ten foreign languages. His short stories have appeared in Akashic Press's award-winning noir anthologies. He has reviewed books for The New York Times Sunday Book Review, Publishers Weekly, and The Associated Press. Previously, he was a journalist for forty years, most recently as writing coach world-wide for the AP, editing stories that won every major journalism prize including the Pulitzer. His fourth novel, A Scourge of Vipers, has just been published in hardcover and e-book editions.

Bruce DeSilva:
Politics and the Sports Betting Industry--A Scourge of Vipers

Ever place a bet on a sporting event? If you’re like most Americans, the answer is yes. About eighty-five percent of us gamble on sports at least occasionally, even though doing so is illegal nearly everywhere in the United States.

And boy, does it add up. The total we bet on sports annually, much of it on the Super Bowl and the Mach Madness basketball tournament, is estimated to be three hundred and eighty billion dollars. It’s a big number that looks even bigger when you count up all the zeros:

$380,000,000,000

To put it in perspective, that’s six times greater than the budget of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

In other words, the stakes are high.

No wonder, then, that all hell breaks loose in A Scourge of Vipers when Rhode Island’s fictional governor, a former religious sister known as Attila the Nun, proposes legalizing sports gambling to ease the state’s budget crisis.

I got the idea for this novel a couple of years ago when Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey, where I now live, proposed legalizing sports betting so he could tax it. But Christie, like my fictional governor, faces enormous obstacles.

For one thing, a governor would need to persuade the U.S. Congress to repeal the federal law that makes sports gambling illegal everywhere but in Nevada and three other states that were grandfathered in. Either that or successfully challenge the law in court.

For another thing, legalization has powerful enemies. The NCAA is dead set against it. The four major professional sports leagues oppose it too (although the NBA recent softened its stance), claiming it would damage the integrity of their games. The Las Vegas casinos are eager to hold onto their near-monopoly on legal sports gambling. And organized crime organizations are aghast at the prospect of seeing their bookmaking business wiped out.

But legalization also has powerful friends. Some public-employee unions see it as a way to save their endangered pension plans. Some casino owners outside of Nevada are salivating at the chance to get into dive into the lucrative sports-betting business. And then there are those hard-pressed governors desperate for a way to balance their budgets without raising taxes.

Most of the pro- and anti-legalization forces have very deep pockets. As soon as Christie floated his idea, I was saw the makings of a great hard-boiled crime novel.

In A Scourge of Vipers, the NCAA, the major sports leagues, casino operators, public employee unions, organized crime figures, and others with a lot to lose—or gain—if Attila the Nun should get her way, flood the state with millions of dollars in cash to buy the votes of state legislators. Some of them do it legally, with big campaign donations. Others aren’t above slipping envelopes into politicians’ pockets.

All that money pouring into an economically-depressed state where the average campaign for the state legislature costs just ten thousand dollars.

Before long, things take an uglier turn. A powerful state legislator turns up dead. A mobbed-up bagman gets shot down. And his cash-stuffed briefcase goes missing.

Liam Mulligan, an investigative reporter for a dying Providence, R.I., newspaper (and the protagonist of my three earlier novels) wants to dig into the story, but the bottom-feeding conglomerate that recently bought the once proud daily has no interest in serious reporting. So Mulligan, who’s never been inclined to follow orders, goes rogue, investigating on his own.

Soon, he finds himself the target of shadowy forces that seek to derail him by threatening his reputation, his career, and even his life.

The writers I most enjoy reading are the ones who use the popular form of the crime novel to explore important social issues. George Pelecanos, Lippman, Richard Price, and James Lee Burke are among those who spring immediately to mind. It’s not surprising, then, that while each of my novels works as a suspenseful murder mystery, each also has a serious underlying theme. For example, the Edgar Award-winning Rogue Island explores the high price the American democracy is paying for the decline of newspapers. And Cliff Walk examines what the era of ubiquitous pornography is doing to American attitudes about sexual morality and religion.

A Scourge of Vipers gave me the opportunity to write about the hypocrisy surrounding legal and illegal sports betting. For example, not only the federal government but most states have laws against it, yet they see nothing wrong with raking in hundreds of millions of dollars from state lotteries. And the sports leagues that oppose legalization know full-well that they profit handsomely from sports gambling. After all, it’s the reason a lot of people follow sports. Furthermore, keeping sports gambling illegal helps keep a lot of organized crime organizations in business.

The story also allowed me to explore one of the major issues of our time--the impact of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision and the corrupting influence of big money on politics.

While the new novel has a serious purpose, the tone is lighter than my other Mulligan novels. The first three were strewn with innocent victims. But in A Scourge of Vipers, most of the people who get hurt had it coming.

D is for DeSilva: Bruce DeSilva

Continuing the Mystery Author Meme today with D is for DeSilva. O.k., we're a bit out of order, but I'll do a summary when we finally finish up :-) Today I welcome Edgar Award winner and Macavity Nominee Bruce DeSilva.

Bruce DeSilva is the author of “Rogue Island,” winner of the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Award for best first novel of 2010. Rogue Island has also been short-listed for the Anthony, Barry and Macavity awards. “Cliff Walk,” the second book in the Providence, R.I.-based crime series, will be published early next year, and DeSilva is currently writing the third. He worked as an investigative reporter, editor, and writing coach at The Providence Journal, The Hartford Courant, and, most recently, The Associated Press, before retiring from journalism two years ago to write fiction. Stories he edited have won virtually every major journalism prize including The Polk (twice), The Livingston (twice) and The Pulitzer. His book reviews have appeared in The New York Times book review section, and he continues to review fiction regularly for the AP.

BRUCE DESILVA:

Ever since I read a paperback copy of Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye about fifty years ago, I have loved hardboiled crime novels; but when I finally sat down to write my first one, I confronted a problem:

How could I write in a form that has been around for eighty years and still produce a book that would feel contemporary?

Back in 1968, I had sat in a darkened dormitory rec room with fellow college students to watch a screening of “The Maltese Falcon.” Within minutes, most of us were chuckling, and by the third scene the chuckles were replaced by belly laughs.

The dialogue in John Houston’s 1941 masterpiece was so clichéd, and the characters were such stereotypes: the cynical detective who worked both sides of the law, the spunky but loyal secretary, the trench-coat draped gunman who talked out of the side of his mouth, the femme fatale who manipulated men with the promise of sex.

We reacted as if we were watching a parody like the one Carl Reiner directed when he poked fun at the genre in his 1982 movie, “Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid,” with Steve Martin in the lead role.

But to those who saw “The Maltese Falcon” when it was first released—or who read the Dashiell Hammett novel it was based on when it was published in 1930—every scene was a revelation. Sam Spade, Effie Perine, Wilmer, and Brigid O’Shaugnessy are stereotypes today, but Hammett and Huston were the artists who first gave them breath. “The Maltese Falcon”–both the movie and the novel—were works of astounding originality.

Before the “Maltese Falcon” appeared, there were two kinds of crime stories.

Most were puzzle mysteries in which murders were committed in drawing rooms and solved by clever detectives like Sherlock Holmes, who unmasked the guilty through unlikely deductive reasoning.

In them, the world was portrayed as a just and orderly place. When a crime intruded, it created a sense of menace and disorder. Then the detective arrived on the scene, solved the crime and restored the natural order of things. It was a Victorian world view, one of faith in progress and human decency.

When that faith was shattered by the carnage of World War I, a new kind of story was born. In it, Chandler explained, the world was a madhouse that had “created the machinery for its own destruction, and was learning to use it with all the moronic delight of a gangster trying out his first machine gun. The law was something to be manipulated for power and profit. The streets were dark with something more than night.”

At first such tales were sordid and poorly written, appearing only in five-cent pulp magazines that men read in barbershops and hid from their wives and children. But with their mastery of style and storytelling, Hammett and Chandler lifted this new kind of story from the pulps and turned it into literature.

In doing so, Chandler said, they took the murders out of the drawing rooms and gave them back to the people who actually committed them.

Chandler’s and Hammett’s heroes, Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade, established the archetype on which nearly all private detectives who followed were based:

n The detective’s attitude toward authority. (“It’s a long while,” Spade said, “since I burst out crying because a policeman didn’t like me.”)

n His invulnerability to the wiles of women. (“You’re good. You’re very good. It’s chiefly in your eyes, I think, and that throb you get into your voice when you say things like, ‘Be generous, Mr. Spade.’”)

n The detective’s code of honor, essential to maintaining self-respect in a treacherous world. (“When a man’s partner is killed, he’s supposed to do something about it,” Spade said. “It doesn’t matter what you thought of him. He was your partner and you’re supposed to do something about it.”)

But by the late 1960s, many of us who revered Chandler and Hammett had grown aware of how dated all of this had become. Many wondered if a great contemporary hardboiled novel was even possible anymore. The knight errant with a pistol in his shoulder holster (Browning, not the poet but the automatic) had become an anachronism.

“Back then,” says my crime writing buddy, Ace Atkins, “most people looked at it as a museum piece.”


Lucky for us, however, Robert B. Parker and Gregory Mcdonald appeared on the scene in the 1970s and breathed new life into the genre—although Parker is the one who received most of the credit for it.

The traditional hardboiled detective had always been a loner. But Parker’s hero, Spenser, was a modern man. He had close friends. He respected women and (some) cops. He had a long-lasting, monogamous relationship. He even cooked. Parker turned this hero loose not just on underworld murders but on modern problems including child abuse and schoolyard bullying.

Most importantly, Spenser faced the problem of the anachronistic knight-errant head on, turning his novels into an examination of the limits heroism in the modern world.

Mcdonald’s two series characters, a non-conformist investigative reporter named Fletch and a quirky Boston police inspector named Flynn, addressed the problem differently.

Although Fletch was something of a loner, Flynn was a family man, something almost unheard of in the genre.

“Neither of them could have existed before the 1960s,” Mcdonald once told me. “In the great mystery novels of the ‘30s and ‘40s, the woman was either a Madonna or a doll. Neither Fletch nor Flynn has this regard for women. Women are their equals, their friends. Their regard for authority is also completely new and contemporary. They are not anti-authoritarian for the hell of it, nor do they give in to authority for any reason. They see it for what it is—something set up by humans that is fine only when it works.”

If it weren’t for Parker, Atkins says, “I wouldn’t have a job now.” But Mcdonald deserves some of the credit, too.

Still, it’s going on 40 years since Parker and Mcdonald’s characters burst on the scene, and now they can feel a bit dated, too. But today, a host of writers including Walter Mosley, Dennis Lehane, George Pelecanos and Robert Crais are following their lead, creating modern detective heroes for today’s complicated world.

My series character, Liam Mulligan has joined them. Like Fletch, he is an investigative reporter for a metropolitan newspaper. And like Fletch, he’s got a smart mouth that often gets him into trouble.

But newspapers were thriving in Fletch’s day. The newspaper Mulligan is working for is dying, like most newspapers are now. He’s never sure how long he’s going to have a job, giving the plots an extra layer of tension and making them not only hardboiled stories but lyrical tributes to the fading business that he and I love.

Mulligan is a 21st century man with complex, often troubled, relationships with the opposite sex. He’s got a strong but shifting sense of justice that leaves him uncertain about the right thing to do in a world where neither movies nor problems appear in black and white.

And the cases he investigates involve not just murders but the larger issues of today’s society. For example: the second novel, “Cliff Walk,” which will be published next year, has a plot built around an unsolved murder, but it is also an examination of sex and religion in the age of pornography.

Does this work? Reviewers seem to think so; the notices for the first novel have all been raves. But ultimately, that’s a question for readers to decide. Still. the comment I’m most proud of came from Joseph Finder, a New York Times best-selling thriller writer, who said this about my first book:

“Bruce DeSilva has done something remarkable: He takes everything we love about the classic hard-boiled detective novel and turns it into something that is fresh, contemporary, yet timeless.”

Now I’ve got to get back to work to see if I can do it again.