A Conversation with Screenwriter and Novelist John Schulian

We are delighted to welcome author John Schulian to Omnimystery News today.

John's debut crime novel is A Better Goodbye (Tyrus Books; November 2015 hardcover, trade paperback and ebook formats) and we recently had the opportunity to spend some time with him to talk about his work.

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Omnimystery News: Introduce us to the lead characters of A Better Goodbye. What is it about them that appeal to you as a writer?

Photo provided courtesy of
John Schulian

John Schulian: When I was writing sports for newspapers and magazines, there was a school of thought that the best stories could be found in the loser's locker room. Something about being on the short end of the score gave athletes a sense of perspective that winners tended to lack. Losers were more honest, more introspective, and the best of them could achieve a kind of nobility in defeat. Those were qualities I wanted Nick Pafko. After all, his dreams of becoming a boxing champion went off the tracks when he killed a man in the ring, and now, as we meet him 10 years later, he's broke, jobless and pretty much beyond caring whether he lives or dies. Then he hires on to provide security at a massage operation in a Los Angeles high-rise and falls under the spell of Jenny Yee, a community college student who works in the sex trade to pay for her education. Her dream is to get into UCLA, though she's not sure what she'll do if she succeeds. Her life is largely unfocused, a blur of drugs and sex, loser boyfriends, and Elizabeth Bishop's poetry. She's as lost in her way as Nick is in his, and that, to me, was their appeal as characters. The two of them represent the kind of people L.A. forgets about in its fascination with wealth, power, fame and glamour. Consigned to the margins, all Nick and Jenny have ultimately is each other.

OMN: A Better Goodbye is your debut novel. Can you share some background about your path to publication, including your time as a sports columnist and TV writer-producer?

JS: I spent 16 mostly wonderful years working on newspapers. For a couple of months before I was drafted into the Army in 1968, I was a copy editor at the Salt Lake Tribune. But I've always felt I didn't really go pro until the Baltimore Evening Sun, H.L. Mencken's old paper, hired me as a news reporter two years later and gave me a chance to write about cops, politics, local characters and rock 'n' roll. After I free-lanced a Sports Illustrated story about a Baltimore boxing promoter who ran a gym above a strip joint, the Washington Post hired me as a sports writer in 1975, and suddenly my career was in overdrive. Eighteen months later, I got my dream job as a sports columnist at the Chicago Daily News in 1977, and when it folded 13 months after I hit town, I moved to the Chicago Sun-Times, where I became part of a stable of writers that included two newspaper legends, Mike Royko and Roger Ebert. It's almost embarrassing to describe the roll I was on, winning awards, being called one of the country's best sports writers, and having the nerve to turn down a job offer from the New York Times. But like all good things, my hot streak came to an end, in this case because Rupert Murdoch, the Australian press baron, bought the Sun-Times and trashed it overnight. Clearly, Chicago wasn't big enough for both of us, so I left. I landed at the Philadelphia Daily News, which was famous in the business for its smart, passionate and highly readable sports section. But I soon found myself repeating what I'd done in Chicago. The walls were closing in on me. I needed a new challenge and it turned out to be Hollywood.

I started the transition in 1985 by sending Steven Bochco, the mastermind of such classic TV shows as Hill Street Blues, L.A. Law and NYPD Blue, a copy of a collection of my boxing writing called Writers' Fighters and Other Sweet Scientists. A year later almost to the day, there I was in Bochco's office at 20th Century Fox working on the story for the L.A. Law script I was going to write. I'd never written a script of any kind before, but somehow I survived the experience. My next stop was Miami Vice, where there were two episodes about boxing in the works. I co-wrote both of them and earned a place on the show's writing staff. I later moved on to The "Slap" Maxwell Story, a half-hour dramedy about a sports writer, and then Wiseguy, a brooding, lushly written drama about an undercover agent investigating organized crime. Midnight Caller came next, the best job I ever had in TV, two years of writing everything from straight-ahead crime drama to social issues stories to romantic comedies. The years flew by, each with a new gig written next to it: Reasonable Doubts, Lawless, JAG, Outer Limits, Tremors. In the midst of them was Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, which will be remembered primarily for spawning Xena, the warrior princess who got her own series, became an international syndicated hit, and made a star of Lucy Lawless. I introduced Xena in an episode of Hercules, she appeared in two more, and the next thing anyone knew, she had a series all her own. There was no pilot script, no network or studio meddling, no endless rewrites or second-guessing. What normally might take six months or a year, maybe even longer, happened almost overnight. Sometimes it really is better to be lucky than good.

OMN: Into which genre would you place A Better Goodbye?

JS: I'd call A Better Goodbye crime fiction, L.A. noir to be specific. Of course that makes it sound as though I've invaded James Ellroy's territory, but my work isn't like Ellroy's, and I'm nothing like Ellroy personally, either. What I've written isn't big or loud or full of literary pyrotechnics. I approached my story the way I imagine Daniel Woodrell approaches his excursions into Ozark noir. It's small in scale and perhaps more devoted to character than plot. Indeed, I was told the marketing people at one major publisher shot down A Better Goodbye because they didn't know whether they would sell it as crime fiction or literary fiction. Calling it literary fiction does wonders for my ego, but it was crime fiction first and foremost, and that's what it should stay.

OMN: Tell us something about your book that isn't mentioned in the publisher synopsis.

JS: A Better Goodbye has its roots in the best TV script I ever wrote. It pains me to say it was never produced, but that's show business, just like my claim for how good it was. My script was a pilot for the Fox Network commissioned in the fall of 1994 — a family drama built around a young boxer from what was then the blue-collar Chicago neighborhood of Bucktown. The name of the series was The Ring. (This was before the Korean horror movie series of the same name.) The name of the fighter was Nick Pafko. He's the same Nick Pafko we meet in A Better Goodbye, on the other side of a life that hasn't worked out the way he hoped it would. Not that his life wasn't complicated when I envisioned him as the central character in a weekly TV drama. He had a father with a heavy-duty gambling problem, a mother who was ready to leave her husband, a kid brother who was in and out of trouble with the law, and a sister who had graduated from college and was trying to distance herself from the family. God, how I loved that world and those characters, especially Nick.

I was going to follow my young middleweight as he rose from pretender to contender to champion, got married and became a father, lost his championship, nearly destroyed his marriage, and pulled himself together for a comeback. There wasn't going to be a fight a week; there might be only one fight a season, two at the most. What was going to happen the rest of the time was life in all its sweet, sad, happy, confusing, painful, exhilarating permutations. I could see it all stretching out in front of me as I wrote the pilot script: a novel for television, five glorious seasons. The president of the Fox Network read my first draft and proclaimed it one of his two favorite scripts of that pilot season. But when it came time to pull the trigger and order it into production, he couldn't do it. "Too blue collar," he said. "Too bleak." I argued that it had to be blue collar because rich kids don't get their noses broken for a living. And too bleak? What was bleak about a kid chasing his dream? I got no answer. But years later, when I was stuck doing sci-fi claptrap, I ran into an executive who had been at Fox while The Ring was in play. "It was the best pilot we never did," he told me. I damn near wept.

OMN: Tell us a little more about your writing process.

JS: This was my first time out of the box as a novelist, so everything was new to me. All I knew about structuring my workday was what Pete Dexter, who has become one of our very best novelists, told me when we worked together at the Philadelphia Daily News: Get three pages done every day. Some days I was good for five or even ten, but three was the norm, and pretty soon the stack of pages on my desk began to look suspiciously like a manuscript. I didn't work with an outline although I did have a rough idea of where I wanted the story to go. My last creative act nearly every day was to scratch out a few notes about what I wanted to write when I returned to my computer in the morning. Just a little something to get my engine started. Most days I went in the direction those notes were pointing, but not always. Sometimes I surprised myself, which seemed like a good thing. After all, what's the creative process without surprises? It was one of those happy blips that led to the creation of a balky, nameless middle-aged woman who unwittingly disrupts the build-up to the novel's showdown. And then there was L.A. traffic, which surprised me more than it should have by becoming so constant a presence that it qualified as a character. After all, when is there not L.A. traffic?

OMN: How does writing novels compare and contrast to the writing you did for television?

JS: You write for TV with other people's voices in your head. If you're working on a series, the voices belong to everyone from the show's creator to the show runner and your fellow staffers to network and studio executives. I've even heard janitors offering their two cents' worth to writers working late and thinking the cacophony was over for the day. The voices usually begin in the writers' room when you're trying to plot an episode, a place where those who are loudest and quickest of wit often dominate, not always to the betterment of the writer being force fed their ideas. Personally, I always did best on shows where I worked out my story in solitude, pitched it to the show runner, made the changes he wanted, and then went back into my cave to write the script. It wasn't quite the same as writing a novel — the main characters always remain the creators' — but it was good enough for me.

Now that I've shared my feelings, you can imagine how liberating it was for me to write a novel. I was free at last to work on a story that was mine, populated by characters that were mine. And yet I made sure I didn't work in a vacuum. I read parts of it to trusted friends on the phone and asked for feedback. I shipped my first draft to people I thought would be critical readers, and slowly but surely my novel began to change. The biggest change came about after my agent began submitting it to publishing houses and I began collecting rejection letters. A widely respected editor at a major publisher gave me some honest feedback instead of another rejection: Nick radiated too much gloom for readers to invest in him emotionally. As soon as I heard that, I rewrote a third of the book. Then I sent it to a freelance editor recommended by a screenwriter friend, and her notes generated more changes and at least one good laugh when she caught me tiptoeing through a scene that demanded a kick in the ass. "Nick sounds like a wienie here," she said. I didn't argue the point. I just made the change. When I sent my revised manuscript to the editor who had inspired me, he campaigned for it at his publishing house and got shot down by the marketing people. They said they didn't know how to sell my novel. And here I thought selling books was their job.

OMN: If you could travel anywhere in the world to do research for your next book, all expenses paid, where would it be? And why?

JS: I wish you were talking about time travel, not pack-your-bags-and-go travel because I'm already where I want to be geographically, in Los Angeles. What I want to research is the L.A. of sixty years ago. I was a child here then — it's where I was born and lived until I was thirteen — but my memories are nowhere near as sharp as they need to be to write about the city as it was. The streetcar was a common mode of transportation then, the only freeway in town was the Pasadena Freeway, vast tracts of land were waiting to be overrun by developers, white picket fences embraced cottages in what are now glitzy neighborhoods, jazz turned nights on Central Avenue to velvet, baseball fans followed the exploits of the city's two minor league teams, and every five-year-old boy wanted to be Hopalong Cassidy. But all that lies on the surface, and I want to see what was beneath it. So I wait to catch a ride on the Wayback Machine, and wait and wait and wait.

OMN: What are some of your outside interests?

JS: Ever since I discovered a book was my best friend on an airplane, I've been a passionate reader of crime fiction, from Chandler and Hammett to such contemporary masters as Elmore Leonard, James Crumley, Donald Westlake, James Lee Burke, Charles Willeford, Richard Lange, Daniel Woodrell, George Pelecanos, Carl Hiassen, Paul Levine, Joseph Wambaugh and Michael Connelly. But I've also reached the age where I want to read the Shakespeare I've somehow missed, and re-read what I've already worked my way through. The same goes for Charles Dickens and Graham Greene. If I could do that while listening to the music that stirs my soul — alt-country, bluegrass, folk, blues and classic R&B — my golden years would be sublime. But those are genres where the words tend to matter — shame on me if I were to consign them to the background. So I turn my car into a rolling jukebox as I drive to see the Dodgers and Lakers play. After all, my passion for sports didn't stop when I walked away from full-time sports writing. I do, however, draw the line at wasting time with pro football, which is too heartless and money-grubbing for my taste. But I am fascinated by how the University of Utah's football team has become a force in the college ranks. That certainly wasn't the case when I was an undergrad there.

Anyone reading A Better Goodbye will probably find traces of all these influences. Most obvious, I think, is the music. Nick feels the great James Carr hit "The Dark End of the Street" deep in his bones. Onus DuPree Jr., the scourge of seemingly everyone who crosses his path, gets his blood up by listening to the relentless rap of Nas. Only Jenny professes no interest in music, but she can't get away from Mazzy Star's memorable debut album, So Tonight That I Might See. That's because it seems to have been essential listening as many massage girls went about their business. As fate had it, I owned the album, and liked it, before I learned of its place in the rub-and-tug subculture, but I can't think of anything else the girls listened to that meshed with my musical taste. Still, I had an imaginary soundtrack playing in my mind as I wrote. LL Cool J was on it with "I Need Love," but so were great L.A. bands like X and the Blasters as well as such iconic figures as Ry Cooder and Lucinda Williams. I even worked the underappreciated Steve Young's version of an old Merle Haggard song onto my playlist. My reasoning was simple: "All Her Lovers Want To Be the Hero" sounded like it was written for Jenny.

OMN: What is the best advice — and harshest criticism — you've received as an author? And what might you say to aspiring writers?

JS: Harsh criticism doesn't work on me. Honest criticism does, even if it seems to be wrapped in barbed wire. Don't yell at me or belittle me. Just tell me what the problem is and I'll do my utmost to fix it. I didn't know I was capable of responding that way until I was writing my first story for Sports Illustrated. Though I was as full of myself as any young writer could be, I knew enough to realize the story needed a fresh pair of eyes on it. I gave it a fellow reporter at the Baltimore Evening Sun, a guy older than me who I knew would be honest because he didn't give a damn about anyone's feelings. He came back to me a day or two later and said, "This would be fine if you were writing it for the paper, but it's not good enough for SI." Then he proceeded to tell me what worked in the story and, more importantly, what didn't. I wasn't used to having my work carved up, but this was no time for me to get huffy. I rewrote the piece and it ran unchanged, the beginning of a forty-year relationship with what was then a glorious showcase for some of the best writing anywhere on any subject.

Rather than discuss my work with other writers, I tend keep my head down and my mouth shut especially when I'm doing my first draft. But that doesn't prevent me from finding sources of inspiration, usually in unexpected places. I don't go to the movies to get tips on writing, but there's a moment in the Oscar-winning Tender Mercies that has had a profound influence on what I do creatively. Robert Duvall plays a boozy, washed-up country singing star who is putting his life back together when a local band that clearly idolizes him visits with an invitation to watch them play. As they're leaving, they ask Duvall's character if he has any advice for them. "Just sing it like you feel it," he says. It's a call for artistic honesty, for being true to yourself and what you're attempting to do. I can't think of any better advice to give a writer who thinks he has a novel in him.

OMN: Many readers who are not in show business have a mental image of what the characters look like. As someone who works in Hollywood, was it difficult not to "cast" the characters as you wrote? Or did you cast them?

JS: There wasn't a single day I worked on my novel that the face of an actor popped into my mind. Nothing against thespians, you understand, but I was dipping into my own experiences for the details that informed my characters. Nick, for example, had a lot of my boxer friend Johnny Lira in him — fearlessness, a smart mouth, and a willingness to help people no matter how great the risk. Onus DuPree Jr. possesses the ropey physicality and bird-of-prey menace common to NFL safeties. Scott Crandall, actor turned pimp, bears traces of a housepainter who did a lot of work for me until he was caught bilking elderly customers out of a fortune. (For the record, he still owes me $4,000.) I'm not surprised that the character who intrigues most male readers is Jenny — there's nothing like prurient interest to draw a crowd. She's an amalgam of the two masseuses who were my best sources, but the way she speaks comes straight from the then-UCLA grad student who put me in touch with one of them. I just couldn't resist having a character who works in the skin trade, carries an off-the-charts GPA, and talks like a twelve-year-old. Like, know what I mean?

If A Better Goodbye were to become a movie, I'd want Tom Hardy, one of our best young actors (Locke, The Drop, Inception), to play Nick. Vince Vaughn would make a perfect — and perfectly sleazy — Scott. For Onus DuPree Jr., I wouldn't settle for anyone except Idris Elba, who was so brilliant on The Wire. The toughest part to cast would be Jenny. Right away there would be studio and network executives calling for a California blonde or a Latina or an African American, mainly because there are an abundance of them while good Asian actresses have historically been harder to find. But they're out there, I know it for a fact. When I was head writer on Hercules, we wanted to do a martial arts episode. Who should walk in to read for us but Lucy Liu. One week she was doing flying kicks for us, the next she was a regular on Ally McBeal and bound for stardom. I wish we'd cloned her.

OMN: What kinds of books did you read when you were young?

JS: My mother read me fairy tales and my father, a Danish immigrant, made sure I received a healthy dose of Hans Christian Andersen. I remember reading Treasure Island, Swiss Family Robinson and Tom Sawyer by myself sooner than expected. My solo visits to the public library coincided with the birth of my passion for all things related to baseball. If I wasn't playing or collecting baseball cards or whaling away on a board game about the sport, I was reading about it. I read players' biographies, history, statistics and, best of all, the wonderful fiction of John R. Tunis and the all-but-forgotten Duane Decker. I suppose in some roundabout way these books factored into my decision to become a sports writer. But an author of crime fiction? Maybe that seed was planted when I read all those Hardy Boys mysteries in the seventh grade. There's no telling for sure, though, because I don't remember the plot of any of them.

OMN: This may be a tough question for someone with so many connections in Hollywood, but what do you enjoy watching on television? And what do you look for when you pick out a movie to watch?

JS: I thought I was working in a golden age of TV when I came to Hollywood nearly thirty years ago. There was brilliant work being done everywhere I turned — Hill Street Blues, L.A. Law, Moonlighting, St. Elsewhere, Miami Vice, Thirtysomething, Northern Exposure — and I couldn't imagine the bar being raised any higher. But cable TV has changed all that, giving writers the kind of freedom they can't find even in feature films, delving into subjects that still make network executives squirm in their seats. I don't think there has ever been anything on the small screen as consistently brilliant as The Wire, and I know there are people who feel just as strongly about The Sopranos or Breaking Bad or, going back, The Larry Sanders Show. It's an embarrassment of riches, really, and I say that as someone who never was much of a TV watcher. I haven't even worked my way through my boxed set of The Rockford Files.

At the moment, I'm still mourning the end of Justified, which captured Elmore Leonard's voice and sensibility so perfectly for six seasons. There have only been three movie adaptations of Leonard's crime romps that match what it did — Out of Sight, Get Shorty and Jackie Brown (based on Rum Punch) — and none faced the feet-to-the-fire pressure the TV series did. Justified's departure puts extra pressure on Better Call Saul, which was already filling the hour that Breaking Bad left empty, but Saul's first season ended so strongly that I see no reason to defect. Other than that, I'll catch up with the Bosch series based on Michael Connelly's novels and Rectified, a low-key, low-budget drama about a wrongly accused man freed from prison that is as cool and funky as a J.J. Cale guitar solo.

Movies are far more problematical for me, mainly because I'm no longer part of the target audience. I've seen enough mayhem and explosions to last me several lifetimes, and even though the technology is better than ever, a big bang is still just a big bang. We're approaching the only season of the year when movies rely on what should be their reason for being all twelve months — human beings. (You thought I was going to say Academy Awards, didn't you?) It doesn't matter whether the story being told onscreen is a comedy, a tearjerker, a character study or a straight-up adventure. I want it to have a heartbeat. The End of the Tour certainly does as it contemplates the curse of genius that ultimately drove David Foster Wallace to take his own life. Now that we're heading toward awards season, I'm glad David O. Russell has a new film on the way (Joy) and disappointed that Katherine Bigelow (Zero Dark Thirty) doesn't. Quentin Tarantino is coming forth with another western, The Hateful Eight. Johnny Depp's presence as the murderous Whitey Bulger makes Black Mass look promising, and Tom Hardy plays psychotic twins in Legend. I'm not sure how much a movie about a blacklisted screenwriter will appeal to anyone besides other screenwriters, but I'll make a point of seeing Trumbo. Though I complained earlier about all the explosions in movies, I'll go see Spectre because I think Daniel Craig is the best James Bond since Sean Connery. Sure, I may end up with more strikeouts than hits, but I'm ready if I do. I keep a DVD of Casablanca within reach, and it hasn't disappointed me yet.

OMN: What's next for you?

JS: I hope I have another novel in me. The one I'm thinking about would be quite different than A Better Goodbye: no crime, a different era, a slice of Americana really. I've done a lot of research for it, and my protagonist has been speaking to me for quite while. Just the other day, he was filling my head with a way to end the book, and I had to tell him I needed to find a way to start it first. When you're my age — 70 — the worst thing you can do is get ahead of yourself. If you get too far ahead, they start measure you for a funeral suit.

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John Schulian was a nationally syndicated sports columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times before moving to Hollywood to write and produce TV dramas. His short fiction has appeared on the websites Thuglit and The Classic and in The Prague Revue. He lives in Southern California.

For more information about the author, please visit his website at JohnSchulian.com or find him on Facebook.

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A Better Goodbye by John Schulian

A Novel of Suspense

Publisher: Tyrus Books

Nick Pafko knows he can't be a professional boxer forever. But he never guessed it would end so quickly, and so wrong. Broke and unemployed, Nick has little choice but to call a number given to him by a friend. On the other end? Scott, a washed-up B-movie actor who runs a so-called massage parlor looking for somebody desperate enough to work security.

Jenny Yee doesn't really mind massage, until the day she finds her coworkers robbed and assaulted. Fearing for her safety, she resolves to never work without security again. With mounting expenses, she knows massage is the fastest way to get paid. When an old massage acquaintance calls Jenny to ask her to work for Scott, she agrees — and before long, she's the top earner.

Scott is an arrogant moron, but he's harmless compared to the thug he calls "friend" — Onus Dupree. When DuPree decides to rob Scott's massage joint, it's the perfect opportunity to beat up Nick and take advantage of Jenny. Can Nick stay true to his promise to protect Jenny? Can he protect himself?

— A Better Goodbye by John Schulian