We are delighted to welcome author William Lashner to Omnimystery News today.
William's latest suspense thriller is The Four-Night Run (Thomas & Mercer; May 2016 trade paperback and ebook formats) and we recently had the chance to catch up with the very busy author to talk more about it with him.
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Omnimystery News: Introduce us to J.D. Scrbacek, the ostensible hero of The Four-Night Run. What is it about him that appeals to you as a writer?
Photo provided courtesy of
William Lashner; Photo
credit Sigrid Estrada
William Lashner: J.D. Scrbacek is a criminal defense lawyer with a fancy suit and a beguiling smirk. He doesn't ask questions about who he is defending or how, only about how much he's getting paid and how good he looks crowing to the press. He's a man ripe for a fall and that's what he gets.
What attracted me to J.D. was that he could justify whatever he did by the tenets of the Constitution, and therefore never looked deeper into his responsibilities to his clients or to the town where he plied his trade. The events of the book require him to rexamine his life and his practice and what he sees isn't pretty.
OMN: You write a popular series featuring Victor Carl. Why have you elected to write a number of stand-alones without him?
WL: I love writing about Victor, but I felt that for the time being I had reached the end of his rope. Each Victor book was an attempt to develop one more element of his personal code. By the eighth installment, I'd figured I had laid it out pretty clearly. In stand-alones I have the freedom to match a new personality with the very circumstance that will crack that personality like a walnut. Then I get to squeeze.
OMN: Suppose Scrbacek was interviewing you. What would be his opening question and what would your answer be?
WL: Q: Dude, why are you trying so hard to kill me?
A: Are you saying you don't have it coming?
OMN: Into which genre would you generally place your books?
WL: My books are sort of crime suspense thrillerish things, usually with a lawyer at the center. There is something about lawyers — and I am one myself — that make you want to slap the smile off their faces. The problem with labels come from readers' entirely justified expectations: you call it one thing and, bam, readers expect certain elements and feel deprived if those elements don't show up. I try to make each of my books unique, something you haven't seen before, and while that makes it harder to characterize, I hope it adds to ride.
OMN: Tell us something about The Four-Night Run that isn't mentioned in the publisher's synopsis.
WL: In its way, the book is a take-off of Dickens' A Christmas Carol with J.D. Scrbacek in the role of Scrooge and a fortune-telling countess in the role of Marley.
OMN: What advice might you offer to aspiring writers?
WL: My best advice is to learn how to finish. Starting something is easy, riding it all the way to the end, even when it disappoints, is hard. One key is to have faith in the rewrite, and we're not just talking about changing a comma here or there. When I complete a first draft I then go about outlining the entire novel, making decisions about structural changes based on the outline. It ends up costing me a lot of work, but the book ends up so much better. You can't save a book in the rewrite if you don't finish that first draft.
OMN: What kinds of books did you read when you were younger? And do you think any of them influenced how and what you write today?
WL: When I started reading adult books I read classics like The Count of Monte Cristo and Robinson Crusoe. I tried to read anything fun and thick. I remember I went through a huge red volume of the complete Sherlock Holmes in the fifth grade. Then, suddenly, I dropped big meaty novels for comic books. I'm old enough that they were still 12 cents a comic and I used to buy 8 at a time, with enough change from my buck to buy bubble gum. Bargain! Truth is, if you wanted to get a sense of my novels, think of a mix between Sherlock Holmes and those old comic books.
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William Lashner is a graduate of the New York University School of Law and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He worked as a prosecutor with the Department of Justice in Washington, D.C. before retiring to write full-time. He lives outside Philadelphia with his wife and three children.
For more information about the author, please visit his website at WilliamLashner.com and his author page on Goodreads.
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The Four-Night Run by William Lashner
A Suspense Thriller
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
J.D. Scrbacek has just won the biggest trial of his career, but even as he crows to the press, his entire life blows sky-high. Was the bomb meant for him, or for his mobster client? In this seaside casino town where the tables run hot and the tensions run high, the odds say the attorney is a marked man.
Alone and on the run, Scrbacek flees into the city's forgotten underbelly, a ruined corridor called Crapstown, where he is forced to confront the ghosts of his past, his present, and his future. Somewhere in the sordid stream of his own existence lie the answers he needs. But in order to emerge from the depths of Crapstown, Scrbacek must argue for his life before a jury of the forgotten and the damned. Is he lawyer enough to save his own skin?
— The Four-Night Run by William Lashner
