We are delighted to welcome author Bruce DeSilva to Omnimystery News today.
Bruce's fourth mystery to feature investigative reporter Liam Mulligan is A Scourge of Vipers (Forge Books; April 2015 hardcover and ebook formats) and we recently had the opportunity to talk with hiim more about the series.
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Omnimystery News: Your background and that of your series character Liam Mulligan are remarkably similar. Coincidence?
Photo provided courtesy of
Bruce DeSilva
Bruce DeSilva: Liam Mulligan is a lot like me. He's an investigative reporter in the corrupt little city of Providence, R.I. I used to be. He has trouble with authority. I was never good at taking orders. He's prone to wisecracks. I get lots of complaints about the same thing. He has a strong but flexible sense of morality, willing to break rules or even the law to expose corruption and bring bad guys to justice; and when he encounters injustice, he's determined to get to the root of it no matter the personal risk. When I was a reporter, I was like that, too. As the son of a good man who raised a family on a milk man's paycheck, he has a lot of working-class rage. I've got some of that in me. But Mulligan isn't me. Among other things, he's six inches taller, twenty-two years younger, and hasn't had much luck with women.
OMN: A Scourge of Vipers is the fourth book to feature this character. How has he changed from Rogue Island, in which he was introduced (and which earned you an Edgar Award)?
BD: Those who teach literature with a capital L insist that a novel cannot be successful unless the main character is transformed is some meaningful way. Yet the protagonists of some of the most successful crime series remain unchanged in book after book. Lee Child's Jack Reacher and Robert B. Parker's Spenser immediately leap to mind. But I can't write like them. The ordeals I put Mulligan through in each novel can't help but change him. At the start of Cliff Walk, for example, he believed that prostitution was largely a victimless crime — that what men did with their money and what women did with their bodies was nobody's business but their own. But as he dug into the political corruption that allows prostitution to thrive, he trekked through the dark underbelly of Rhode Island's sex trade. What he found there challenged everything he had believed about sexual morality and religion. The evolution of Mulligan's character is what makes each new novel fresh for me.
OMN: Into which mystery genre would you place this series?
BD: How an author gets labeled is largely a marketing strategy. Think of it this way: If Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote Crime and Punishment today, that brilliant literary novel would be marketed as a psychological thriller. My publisher has promoted my books as suspense novels or thrillers, but I think they're basically hardboiled crime novels — the sort of thing Dennis Lehane did in his fine Kenzie and Gennaro series. On the other hand, each of my novels addresses a theme of major social concern — the damage the decline of print journalism is doing to the American democracy, the impact of ubiquitous pornography on American culture, and, in my latest novel, A Scourge of Vipers, the hypocrisy surrounding illegal sports betting and the corrupting influence of big money on politics. So that makes them more like the work of writers such as James Lee Burke and George Pelecanos. Meanwhile, reviewers have likened my work to Elmore Leonard, Raymond Chandler, Robert B. Parker, George V. Higgins, and Dashiell Hammett — which I find odd because those writers aren't all that much alike. So any label you attach to my books is bound to be imprecise. Still, labels can help readers find what they are looking for among the many very different kinds of books that crowd bookstore mystery sections. For example, noir fans tend to loathe cozies — and vice versa. But sometimes labels do more harm than good. For example, a number of superb literary novelists such as Tom Cook are shelved with mysteries because crimes are committed in their books. But readers seeking literature with a capital L rarely browse the mystery section.
OMN: How would you tweet a summary of A Scourge of Vipers?
BD: Forces for & against legalized sports betting flood R.I. with cash to bribe legislators. As Mulligan investigates, they try to destroy him.
OMN: How much of your own personal or professional experience have you included in your books?
BD: Providence Rag, the third novel in the Mulligan series, is a fictionalized version of a news story I covered years ago as a journalist — the story of Craig Price, who started stabbing women and little girls to death when he was just 13 years old. But the plots of the other novels have all been made up. Still, each of them was inspired in part by real events. I got the idea for A Scourge of Vipers when New Jersey Governor Chris Christie proposed legalizing sports betting so the state could tax the profits. I imagined what would happen if the governor of Rhode Island did the same thing. I pictured the NCAA and the major sports leagues, who oppose legalization, flooding the state with money to lobby against it. And Las Vegas casinos, who want to preserve their sports-gambling monopoly, and mob figures who would be aghast at the prospect of losing bookmaking revenue, arriving with suitcases full of cash to lobby against it. All this in a state where the average state legislative campaign costs just $10,000. It was a great subject for a murder mystery — and a way to explore what big money is doing to politics.
OMN: Tell us a little more about your writing process.
BD: I never outline. I begin only with a general idea of what each book will be about and then set my characters in motion to see what will happen. I write this way partly because it's how mind works, and because I figure that if I don't know what is going to happen next, my readers probably won't either. The result is a lot of happy surprises. In my first novel, Rogue Island, a character who began as a hulking hitman shrank to five-foot five and developed a bad case of psoriasis. Mulligan's ex-wife started out as a minor irritant and turned into a vengeful bitch. A fire chief who began as a minor character decided to become a major one. And then he decided he was a she. But the main reason I work this way is that discovering the story is what plants my butt in my writing chair every day. If I knew in advance how the story was going to turn out, my passion for writing it would disappear.
OMN: How important is the setting to your stories?
BD: When I left journalism after a 40 years in order to write crime novels, I knew they would be set in Providence, R.I., the place where I got my start in the news business. I never considered any place else. Providence is much smaller than the huge metropolises in which so many crime novels are set — so small that it can be a hard place to keep a secret. Yet it's surprisingly cosmopolitan and rife with urban problems. In a city this small, many things are accomplished through an exchange of favors. Need a plumber's license? Your cousin is on the board. Need a traffic ticket fixed? Your best friend is a captain in the traffic division. But if you don't know someone who can help, you can probably get what you need by offering a small gratuity. Mulligan says that without the grease of graft and personal connections, not much would get done in Providence, and nothing at all would happen on time. His job as an investigative reporter is too root out corruption, but he grew up in Providence. He is not only from but OF this place. So, he sees nothing wrong, or event hypocritical, about placing a bet with the local bookie or paying a small bribe to get an inspection sticker for his wreck of a car. He views that kind of bribery as a public service. Rhode Island is not a prosperous place. A lot of people drive junk cars. If they couldn't get an inspection sticker by slipping somebody forty bucks, they'd have to walk to work. Mulligan reserves his ire for the big corruptors, the rich and powerful who manipulate the system for their own gain. If he had grown up in, say, Iowa or Vermont, his attitudes would be quite different. Providence isn't just the setting from my novels. It is a major character in its own right — one that profoundly affect everything that happens in this series. I take pains to be accurate about the history, culture, and geography of the place, but I do take a few liberties. For example, Mulligan drinks at Hopes, the same bucket-of-blood bar I frequented when I worked as an investigative reporter for The Providence Journal in the 1970s. The bar closed down years ago, but I enjoy resurrecting it in my novels. Still, a writer who sets his stories in a real place needs to get the details right, because if you make a mistake, readers will call you on it. The best email I ever got from a reader was an angry one — so angry that I could feel the spittle flying out of the computer screen. What he was angry about was a throw-away line about a retired Providence fireman who "swore in Italian, even though the closest he'd ever been to Italy was the three-cheese-and-meatball pizza at Casserta." But, the reader snarled, "Casserta doesn't MAKE a three cheese and meatball pizza. Therefore, you are a complete fraud. You know NOTHING about Providence." I can't tell you how much I loved that email.
OMN: What is the best advice you've received as an author? And what might you say to aspiring writers?
BD: The best advice I ever got was from Elmore Leonard, who said, "Try to leave out the parts that people skip." The best advice I have to offer is that writing is a job. Do it every day, whether you are in the mood or not. Do not wait for inspiration. Do not search for your muse. Just put your butt in the chair and write.
OMN: How did The Scourge of Vipers come to be titled?
BD: Until now, the marketing folks at Forge, my publisher, have not liked most of my titles; so I have had to fight off their insistence that I change them. They complained that readers would think Rogue Island was a book about pirates. I told them they could fix that by not putting a guy with a peg leg and a parrot on the cover. They didn't like Providence Rag, either, because it didn't sound like a crime story. I loved it because of the way it invoked the dying newspaper Mulligan works for; and because a rag is a song, and the entire series is something of a song for both the city and the newspaper business. So with A Scourge of Vipers, I decided to give them a title they'd like. The fact that "Vipers" is merely the name of a minor league basketball team that figures in the story didn't faze them. Of course, metaphorically there are a lot of human vipers in the novel too.
OMN: Suppose your series were to be adapted for television or film. Who do you see playing the key roles?
BD: My Hollywood agent thinks the Mulligan novels are better suited to a quality TV series than the movies, and I'm inclined to agree. Movies about crime are filled with car chases, gunfights, and things that blow up. There's little of that in my books. But the best TV crime dramas (The Sopranos, American Crime, Breaking Bad, Justified) are character-driven — just like my novels. Before I wrote my first book, novelist Dennis Lehane advised me not to imagine any actor in the title role. If you do, he said, you'll make the character fit the actor instead of giving him a life of his own. But once I finished the first novel, I couldn't help myself. So here's how I'd cast a TV show.
— Denis Leary (Rescue Me) as Mulligan. Why? He's a bit old for the part but can play younger, and he embodies the smart mouth and bad attitude toward authority that is Mulligan.
— John Francis Daley (Bones) as Mulligan's young newspaper sidekick, Edward Anthony Mason IV, AKA Thanks-Dad. Why? Because like Thanks-Dad, he conveys a misleading naivety that makes him easy to underestimate.
— Frankie Valli (The Sopranos) as Domenic "Whoosh" Zerilli, Mulligan's bookie and close friend. Why? Because Daniel J. Travanti (Hill Street Blues) might not be available.
— Robin Wright (House of Cards) as Rosella "Rosie" Morelli, Mulligan's best friend since childhood and the first woman battalion fire chief in Providence history. Why? Because she has the grace and commanding physical presence that is Rosie.
— Steve Schirripa (The Sopranos) as Joseph DeLucca, the often unemployed, smarter-than-he-looks friend of Mulligan's. Why? He's got the right look and the right working-class manner of speaking.
— Jada Pinkett Smith (Gotham) as Yolanda Mosley-Jones, Mulligan's on again, off again love interest. Why? Because she embodies Yolanda's elegance and intelligence — and because, dammit, Mulligan deserves a woman like her.
— Kevin Bacon (The Following) as RI State Police Captain Stephen Parisi. Why? Because he does the steely-eyed thing really well, and because Parisi doesn't talk much. In Mystic River, Bacon did a lot with a character who didn't talk much.
— Bruce DeSilva as Ed Lomax, managing editor of The Providence Dispatch and Mulligan's boss in the first three novels. Why? Because Lomax is a man of few words, so I should be able to remember my lines.
OMN: What's next for you?
BD: Over the next three months, I'll finish writing the fifth Mulligan novel, tentatively titled Dreadline, for publication next year. Then I may take a short break from Mulligan. A new character named Dante, a young guy who grew up in a criminal family and is struggle to decide which side of the law to live his life on, is bugging me to write about him. I also plan to write a crime novel with my wife Patricia Smith, the finest poet working in the English language. It will be set in her native Chicago in 1968, when the riots that followed Martin Luther King's assassination wrecked her Southside neighborhood.
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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 award including the Pulitzer.
For more information about the author, please visit his website at BruceDeSilva.com and his author page on Goodreads, or find him on Facebook and Twitter.
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A Scourge of Vipers by Bruce DeSilva
A Liam Mulligan Mystery
Publisher: Forge Books
To solve Rhode Island's budget crisis, the state's colorful governor, Attila the Nun, wants to legalize sports gambling; but her plan has unexpected consequences. Organized crime, professional sports leagues, and others who have a lot to lose — or gain — if gambling is made legal flood the state with money to buy the votes of state legislators.
Liam Mulligan, investigative reporter for The Providence Dispatch, wants to investigate, but his bottom-feeding corporate bosses at the dying newspaper have no interest in serious reporting. So Mulligan goes rogue, digging into the story on his own time. When a powerful state legislator turns up dead, an out-of-state bag man gets shot, and his cash-stuffed briefcase goes missing, Mulligan finds himself the target of shadowy forces who seek to derail his investigation by destroying his career, his reputation, and perhaps even his life.
— A Scourge of Vipers by Bruce DeSilva
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