1.  You chose quite the controversial topic for your latest novel, how did you come about choosing it?

2.  You obviously did some research, what was the most surprising thing you learned?

I suppose it was the staggering number of criminal offenses by priests against children over the years—thousands that we know of in the U.S. alone, and many more, I’m sure, that we’ll never be aware of.  That, and the scope of the cover-up by so many Church officials, who deliberately kept the crimes quiet, obstructed justice, thwarted investigations, and continued to employ these priests knowing they were active pedophiles, often resulting in more boys and girls being molested or raped.  In some cases, bishops encouraged abusive priests to flee the country to avoid investigation or prosecution, to protect the image of the Church.  Because the statute of limitations has run out, most of the offending priests and officials will never face trial or punishment.  It’s an immense scandal that should have come to light decades ago.  Too many of us, from Church officials to parents to the media, turned a blind eye, and thousands of children suffered because of it.  Hence, my title, Blind Eye, which comes to have a grim double meaning in the course of the book.

 

3.  Let's talk about Ben for a moment.  You've given him quite the tragic past, why?

When I sat down to write my first novel in the series, Simple Justice, which won an Edgar for best first novel in 1997, I didn’t plan on so many complications in the life of my lead character.  But a lot of problems and pain from my own life worked itself into the character and the story and that’s how it played out.  Once I established such a troubled character, with each new book he faced a new crisis that evolved from his own dark past.  He’s a deeply flawed, troubled, reckless guy who also has tremendous investigative skills and a powerful sense of justice, and is forever seeking redemption for the way he’s screwed up his life, and the guilt he carries from letting so many people down.  Simple Justice started out to be what I hoped was a good, dark, entertaining L.A. noir murder mystery.  What it’s really about, I realized long after it was published, is grief, and surviving grief.  Simple Justice, by the way, is out of print.  But a prominent producer has just acquired the film rights and I hope to have the novel back in print in 2005.  My agent, Alice Martell, recently re-acquired the rights to the first four books.
 

 

4.  Tell us a bit more about his HIV status.  What does that mean for future Justice novels?

As I mentioned earlier, Justice faces a new life crisis in each new novel. He ages and evolves naturally from book to book, as he might in real life.  In the third book, Justice at Risk, which won a Lambda Literary Award, he was getting particularly reckless in his investigation of a murder.  He paid a terrible price, getting raped and infected with the virus, which dovetailed into the issue of “barebacking,” or unsafe sex, which was a central issue in the novel.  Like most people with HIV, the future for Benjamin Justice is much better than it would have been a decade ago, though he’s dependent to a great extent on his medications, his emotional state and how well he takes care of himself.  Most men and women with HIV these days are living healthy, active, stable lives, but with uncertainty always hanging over them.  HIV and its serious complications are part of his life, along with other challenges, and are a part of each storyline, though no longer dominant.

 

 

5.  He's wonderfully human, and a bit self-destructive, as most humans are.  And he has so much to overcome.  Why this path for him as opposed to the sane and balanced one?

We’re all a product of our pasts, good and bad, and we all deal differently with the challenges we’ve been handed.  Being who he is, Justice makes a lot of bad choices.  He can be arrogant, self-destructive, foolish, as well as courageous and heroic.  Fortunately, he has people around him who care about him and try to steer him back on a safer, saner path—his loyal friend and intrepid crime reporter, Alexandra Templeton, for example, a smart, gorgeous black woman inspired by someone I worked with in my newspaper days.  And his elderly landlords, Maurice and Fred, a couple who have been together nearly 50 years, who provide the novels with a solid, stable center.  They’re the family Justice needs so desperately, which is another theme that runs through my novels—the need for a family or support system that is truly caring and nurturing, even if you  have to create it on your own terms, challenging convention.

 

 

6.  Now let's talk about your writing itself.  When did you realize that this is what you wanted to do with your life?

I started thinking about being a writer at 18 or 19, when I first read Hemingway’s short stories.  Then other writers whose work so engaged and impressed me—Jack Kerouac, James Baldwin, Norman Mailer, Graham Greene, Joan Didion, so many others, both fiction and nonfiction.  But I didn’t believe I had the talent and intellect for it.  They were all so great, and I was this dreamy young guy without much talent or real intelligence.  I suffered from a total lack of confidence in that department.  However, I wrestled in high school and college, and fell into journalism by chance, covering sports for my local newspaper at 19.  Ever since, I’ve worked  pretty steadily as a freelance or staff reporter or editor, with forays into screenwriting and fact-based TV writing along the way.  I’d loved mysteries as a kid, devoured them, but abandoned them in college because I found them to be too formulaic much of the time, too derivitive and predictable.  In 1994, on the advice of a friend, I read Walter Mosley’s Devil in a Blue Dress and was enthralled not just with the quality of the writing, but the way Mosley also dealt with social history, racism, anger, so many vital issues, while telling an engaging mystery. I started reading mysteries again and discovered how much they had changed, how the genre had opened up to women, gay men, lesbians, people of color, everyone.  It made me think that perhaps I could become a mystery writer myself, and I started mulling a lead character and a possible story. In 1995, when I was between TV jobs, I sat down and wrote Simple Justice in seven weeks, working loosely from an outline. It was the first time I’d written fiction in the first person, after trying and failing in the third person.  I immediately discovered this very dark and expressive voice I didn’t know I had, and the novel practically wrote itself.  All kinds of pent-up stuff poured out of me and into the character and story.  After my agent sold Simple Justice to Doubleday and I signed to write three more novels in the series, I realized I needed to learn a lot more about mystery writing, so I made a quick, intensive study of the genre and the craft.  I work much harder on my plotting now, which doesn’t come as easily to me as character and dialogue.  By the way, in addition to the darker Benjamin Justice novels, I also write the lighter, more romantic and nostalgic Philip Damon mystery series with legendary bandleader Peter Duchin.  Our first Damon mystery, Blue Moon, is already out and the next, Good Morning, Heartache, is due out in December.  Both are set in the early 1960s in the world of high society dance orchestra music, set against a culture on the brink of seizmic change, with our bandleader-sleuth trying to survive.  Fun to write, kind of a vacation from the tougher, grittier Benjamin Justice novels.
 

 

7.  What do you think is the most important thing good fiction should achieve?

Speaking purely subjectively, I stay with an author and a book because of its original and compelling voice.  For me, the voice needs to be powerful and honest, if only in a quiet, confident way.  That, and a well-told story with fully dimensional characters that involve me emotionally, fine wordcraft that impresses me without calling attention to itself, and subject matter that has some meaning to me.   As my friend, author Dennis Lynds (aka Michael Collins), puts it, a novel that’s “about something.”  Each of us, as readers, look for something different in a novel, but those are the qualities that I find most essential.

 

 

8.  Who or what is your greatest inspiration?

First and foremost, The Hardy Boys!  I was about 10 when I discovered that series and I couldn’t wait for the next book to come out.  A bunch of us who hung together loved those books.  (My sister was reading Nancy Drew.)  But we couldn’t afford them—as I recall, each new hardcover was 99 cents—so we pooled our money to buy them and then traded them around.  I went on to read a lot of mysteries as a kid—Agatha Christie, Sherlock Holmes, the Perry Mason whodunits, you name it - but I consciously fell in love with books and writing as a teenager.  Hemingway really engaged me - the short stories much more than the novels—especially for the craftsmanship, saying a lot with a few words.  Kerouac excited me—On the Road and Dharma Bums were my favorites—because he showed me a different, freer way of expressing oneself, of breaking rules and barriers, at a time when I was trying to find my own way, my own identity, and feeling stunted and suffocated by conformity.   I read everything I could get my hands on, from Raymond Chandler, to G.K. Chesterton (the Father Brown stories), to Joyce Carol Oates, who mesmerized me the way she got so deeply inside the heads of her troubled characters, probably because I was a troubled character myself.   I’ve read Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley several times.  I think it’s a gem and, most important, so subversive and different.  Graham Greene, of course.  In more recent years, I’ve discovered Thomas Harris, Ruth Rendell, Dennis Lehane, and a number of other mystery and suspense writers who write character-driven novels on the darker side.  And I have to mention certain gay and lesbian writers who have been so important in my life—James Baldwin, for Giovanni’s Room, Rita Mae Brown, for Rubyfruit Jungle, and, of course, Joseph Hansen for the groundbreaking Dave Brandstetter mystery series, which opened up doors for a lot of gay mystery writers when it appeared in the 1970s.

 

 

9.  What's your schedule like?

I generally work every day, whether it’s researching, outlining a new novel, or just thinking—about characters, settings, relationships in books, plot elements and the like.  There’s always something more to do, including promotion, which is so important.  When I’m actually writing a novel, I try to write a chapter a day, straight through, seven days a week, until it’s done.  I kind of go into a trance, living in Benjamin Justice’s world, inside his skin, inside his head, which isn’t always pleasant but can sometimes be cathartic.  I write very fast, then polish later.  I use a trick many writers do, which is to write the first line of the next chapter at the end of the day, so I don’t have to face the blank page when I sit down to write tomorrow. This also serves to keep the flow going, a natural transition from the last chapter into the next, to maintain the logic, the momentum, the right mood, even if that mood changes radically with a chapter.  I’m fortunate to be working with a brilliant editor at St. Martin’s Press, Keith Kahla, who offers wonderful insight and guidance.  Connecting with Keith has been a real blessing.

 

 

10. What do you consider the greatest book ever written?

Wow.  I’m afraid I can’t answer that one.  Even though I’ve won a few awards as a writer, I’ve never liked the idea of competition among creative people or their work, saying that one is somehow better than all the others.  That said, I’ll never give back my Edgar! 

 

 

11.  And finally, what's next for Ben Justice?    

 

With Blind Eye out and on the shelves, I’m now writing Moth and Flame, the sixth novel in the Benjamin Justice series, which will be out in the fall of 2004.  In this one, I’m finally getting Justice into therapy and on Prozac, so he can find some peace of mind.  He deserves it, and readers will probably enjoy a break as well.  I know I will.
 

 

Bio:

John Morgan Wilson is the Edgar Award-winning author of the Benjamin Justice mystery series, which has also won two Lambda Literary Awards.  The fifth and latest Justice novel, Blind Eye, has just been published to positive reviews, including a starred review from Booklist, which wrote: “At its best, Wilson’s work recalls the best of Graham Greene’s mysteries.  He writes meditations on repentance and forgiveness as well as whodunits, giving discerning readers reason to rejoice.  His contemplation of the anguished soul and its redemption makes him Greene’s heir apparent and the savior of the mystery as morality play.”  John also writes the lighter, nostalgic Philip Damon mystery series with legendary bandleader Peter Duchin, with Blue Moon out and Good Morning, Heartache set for December publication.  John lives in West Hollywood, California and teaches fiction writing workshops for the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program.  Visit him at www.johnmorganwilson.com.