with Stefan Kanfer
We are delighted to welcome crime novelist Stefan Kanfer to Omnimystery News today.
Stefan's new thriller, The Eskimo Hunts in New York (StoneThread Publishing, January 2013 ebook formats), introduces former Navy SEAL Jordan Gulok, an Inuit who freelances his talent and expertise.
We recently had a chance to talk to Stefan about his book and the character.
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Omnimystery News: Why did you choose to write a book featuring a recurring character?
Photo provided courtesy of
Stefan Kanfer
Stefan Kanfer: Even as a youth, I realized that the most compelling aspect of the Sherlock Holmes stories was not that the World's First Consulting Detective was a scintillating intellect. It was that readers would get to see him perform his deductive (and sometimes muscular) miracles again and again, in tale after tale.
Raymond Chandler knew as much, and so did Dashiell Hammett and Robert Parker and Lee Child and scores of other writers who followed Conan Doyle's example. My protagonist, an Inuit named Jordan Gulok, grows in experience and personality at each turn, but his essential personality, formed in the Arctic Circle and recounted in italic flashbacks, remains as hard-nosed and incorruptible as his predecessors.
OMN: From the synopsis of your book, we'd call it a thriller. Do you agree?
SK: I suppose the category of thriller best characterizes the Eskimo books. I don't mind marketing them as such, but believe that a genre tends to be something of a straitjacket. Most good thrillers have something of the crossover in them, touching as they do on psychology, sociology and history.
OMN: Tell us something about your book that isn't mentioned in the synopsis.
SK: One of the things I haven't mentioned about the book is its origin. After writing four bestselling biographies of show business icons, I thought to return to the thriller genre (I had written two previous ones; The Eighth Sin became a Book of the Month selection.) My publisher, Knopf, wouldn't hear of it. That provided the springboard I needed. I chose an e-publisher (or perhaps more accurately, StoneThread chose me) and here we are.
OMN: We've often heard that you — at least in fiction — you should write what you know. How much of "you" is in this book?
SK: I have taught creative writing at several universities, and the first instruction I give students is not to write about what they know. People who write about what they know have given us sheaves of ghastly confessional poems and pseudo sensitive self-absorbed stories. No wastebasket would be complete without novels about coming of age in the U.S. some 20 years prior to the writer's birth.
OMN: OK then! So how did you come up with the character and story for The Eskimo Hunts in New York? Did you start with an outline?
SK: I always know where the plot is leading, but never write a chapter- by-chapter outline, because at various junctures the novelist should be as surprised as the reader.
OMN: As an author of biographies, you must be familar with fact-checking your details. Is it the same with writing fiction?
SK: Fact-checking remains the same process whether I'm writing a social history, as in The Last Empire (the story of the De Beers diamond company), Ball of Fire (the biography of Lucille Ball), or The Eskimo Hunts in New York (the thriller under discussion.) That is, interviews where possible with people with knowledge of the subject; soaking like a teabag in the stacks of the 42nd Street and Lincoln Center libraries; and, finally, checking the Internet. Google, however, is the last place I consult because there I can only find what I'm looking for. Serendipity, essential to any serious writer, is totally absent.
The most exciting topic to research for this book was not — or not only — the crime itself, but the background of the Inuit, some of whom I knew in Washington state, a place where I spent time in the army and, later, in civilian life.
OMN: We tend to start to visualize actors in roles when we read a book. Any ideas who you'd like to see playing the roles in a film adaptation of your book?
SK: Because my protagonist is an Inuit — an Eskimo — I can't visualize the customary Brad Pitt-Tom Cruise types playing him. Keanu Reeves might fit the part, but there are so many gifted Asian actors who aren't given the chance to star in a film. I'd love to see one of them get a crack at Jordan Gulok.
OMN: The storyline in The Eskimo Hunts in New York takes place in Manhattan. Are you familiar with the setting?
SK: I was born in Manhattan. Since then I've worked and played and lived and raised children in many of the city's neighborhoods. I would consider it a violation not to render them as accurately as Rand McNally.
OMN: What kinds of books did you read as a child?
SK: My father was a teacher and a scholar of Shakespeare. We had 3,000 books in the living room, and I was allowed to read everything I could reach. My literary influences are too numerous to mention by name, but the contemporary writers who most inspired me were Joseph Mitchell, the somewhat-neglected New Yorker nonfiction writer; Ernest Hemingway (of course); John Cheever; Somerset Maugham; and the humorist S. J. Perelman, out of whose overcoat stumbled Woody Allen and many others.
OMN: What are your hobbies? Do any of these activities find their way into your books?
SK: I am a maker of duck decoys and other birds. Occasionally people buy them or I give them to friends, but mostly they're made to decorate the house. (My wife might have another definition). Perhaps one day a Saw Whet Owl will appear in one of the thrillers, but not yet.
OMN: How do you engage with your readers?
SK: I always enjoy interacting with readers, and am happy to answer questions about the story or the characters, real or fictional. The only time I balk is when college students ask me, in effect, to do their homework. Those queries go unanswered.
OMN: Are there any authors whose books you rush out to buy as soon as they are published?
SK: Alice Munro and William Trevor are writers whose latest productions demand immediate attention. As you might expect I'm a fan of biographies, particularly on subjects far from my own knowledge — books on Mozart, for example, or on Darwin or on the great painters.
OMN: Give us a top five list on any topic.
SK: For five years I was Time magazine's cinema critic, and I'm currently a member of a film club (which these days means a DVD club.) Rather than view contemporary movies, we go back to the classics. If I had a top five I would choose one in each category:
Thriller: The Third Man
Comedy: To Be or Not to Be
Fantasy: The Thief of Bagdad (1939 version)
Western: The Searchers
Musical: Top Hat
I could never do a top five books — too many great works would have to be omitted — indicating, I guess, that I consider print to be more important than celluloid.
OMN: What's next for Jordan Gulok?
SK: I am writing the next in the series, this one called The Eskimo Hunts in Miami. There are few things more incongruous than an Inuit on the beach. I can't wait to see what happens …
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Stefan Kanfer is the author of fifteen books, including the bestselling biographies of show business icons: Groucho; Ball of Fire (Lucille Ball); Somebody (Marlon Brando); and Tough Without a Gun (Humphrey Bogart). He has also written many social histories, among them The Last Empire, about the De Beers diamond company; and Stardust Lost, an account of the rise and fall of the Yiddish Theater in New York.
Kanfer also wrote two novels about World War II and served as the only journalist on the President's Commission on the Holocaust. He was the first by-lined cinema critic for Time magazine, where he worked as writer and editor for more than two decades. He has been given many writing awards and was named a Literary Lion of the New York Public Library. He lives in New York where he serves as a columnist for the City Journal of the Manhattan Institute.
You can find Stefan Kanfer online at his website, StefanKanfer.com, Facebook or Twitter.
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The Eskimo Hunts in New York
Stefan Kanfer
Jordan Gulok is an Inuit, an Eskimo in common parlance, and a former Navy SEAL. In his freelance capacity he can do things — like tracking and on occasion killing malefactors — that are beyond the authority of the uniformed services. Jordan has an expense account and liberty to travel throughout the U.S. In turn, the U.S. government has plausible deniability should he ever get caught stretching or violating the law.
Jordan's assignment involves stopping a lethal international group who's manufacturing illegal and sometimes toxic pharmaceuticals and selling them to victims in Africa, Asia, Europe and America. In one of the worst blizzards in the City's history, subways, buses and taxis become useless. Even fire trucks and police cars are rendered immobile. But for Jordan cold weather is only a minor obstacle; after all, he grew up hunting polar bear and reindeer on ice and snow.
His targets are managing a multi-billion dollar business that has killed thousands, and they soon become aware of him as their Enemy Number One. The idea of a lone man bringing down their organization is unthinkable. In previous cases, Jordan always acted alone, but as the cartel closes in on him, he turns to Rose Ho, a possible love interest and operative in a regional office of the Department of the Navy.
Rose has great connections — for example, her wealthy father is the unofficial mayor of Chinatown — but are all her connections among the good guys? Can she provide the help he needs, or is she trouble in a green silk skirt?
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