INTERVIEW WITH DAN BRONSON, AUTHOR OF SHOUT AT THE DEVIL
Q: I see that the first sentence of Shout at the Devil was featured in a recent issue of Southern California Mystery Writers of America journal, The March of Crime.
A: Yes. Every issue of the journal concludes with “The Last Word.” In it the editor showcases a sentence from one of the members of SoCalMWA, members who include Michael Connelly, Walter Mosley, Laurie R. King, Nicholas Meyer and many other prominent mystery writers. I was thrilled when she made the first words of my new novel “The Last Word.”
Q: And those words are…?
A: “I died three times that day.”
Q: Okay. I’m hooked. How does someone die three times in one day?
A: You’ll have to read the novel to find out. The book is, after all, a mystery, so it seemed to me that it would be fun to begin it with a mystery.
Q: Shout at the Devil, like its predecessor Someone To Watch Over Me, is set in old Hollywood. Why not set your story in today’s Hollywood?
A: Because today’s Hollywood is a corporate catastrophe—a dull bunch of suits who have neither love nor knowledge of motion pictures in place of the colorful characters who invented Hollywood, who knew the movies inside and out and were willing to risk their studios on a film they believed in. Many of them were monsters, but they were fascinating monsters, and the denizens of the town itself were a family, a dysfunctional family but a family nevertheless. Everyone knew everyone else, and everyone knew everyone else’s secrets—often shameful secrets underneath the outward glamor. If you’re a writer interested in the difference between the way things seem and the way they actually are, the Hollywood of the studio era is a wet dream.
Q: Yet you’ve set your Jack Shannon novels in 1947 and 1951—the post-war period when the studio system was breaking down.
A: Exactly. The studio system reached a peak of power in 1939—the annus mirabilis that produced a dozen classic films like Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz. It appeared to thrive during World War II, but the cracks were already developing, and they began to open wide in the post-war period with the Paramount Consent Decrees robbing the studios of their distribution system, the stars breaking way from the indentured servitude of the studio contract, and the challenge of television. By the end of the fifties, the studios were still standing physically, but their power had been broken, and they were on life support. It's against this conflicted background that Jack Shannon works to solve the mysteries that confront him.
Q: Where did Jack Shannon come from. Is he a version of you?
A: Hardly. Back in the late nineties when I myself was still working in Hollywood, I got the idea that I’d like to do a series of mystery novels set in post-war Tinsel Town. I thought it would be interesting to make my protagonist a veteran, and as I read about D-Day, the Battle of the Bulge, and the freeing of the death camps, I decided to make my guy an actor on the verge of stardom when the war broke out, someone who gave up Hollywood to defend his country and returned physically and emotionally wounded—a big scar across his cheek emblematic of the scars inside. The studio takes pity upon him and makes him a publicist, where his real job is to suppress publicity about the bad behavior of the stars. He's good at it because he’s a burnt-out case. He just doesn’t care until…
Q: Until…?
A: The best answer to that question is Someone To Watch Over Me and, of course, Shout at the Devil.
Q: So we’re not going to get any spoilers from you?
A: None.
Q: Not even an answer to the question of how a man can die three times in one day?
A: You only have to read the second paragraph of Shout to get the answer to that one. I’m hoping, of course, that once you get started you won’t be able to stop, that you’ll be like actor/writer Jameson Parker, who read the book and offered this blurb for it…
“Be careful. I made the mistake of deciding to just glance at the first page and then call it a night. Right. Long after midnight, I finally staggered off to bed, a bleary eyed but well-satisfied wreck. No doubt about it. Shout at the Devil is the very definition of a page-turner.”