with Ed Falco
We are delighted to welcome author Ed Falco to Omnimystery News today.
Ed's new crime thriller is Toughs (Unbridled Books; August 2014 trade paperback), a novel set during the Great Depression and based in part on real characters and a series of historical events.
We recently had the chance to catch up with Ed to talk a little more about his books.
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Omnimystery News: Introduce us to the principal characters of Toughs. What is it about them that appeals to you as a writer?
Photo provided courtesy of Ed Falco;
Photo credit Jim Shoup.
Ed Falco: Vince "Mad Dog" Coll is the character who got the ball rolling on Toughs. In researching depression-era criminals for my previous novel, The Family Corleone, I kept coming across Coll and he was invariably portrayed and a vicious killer — and indeed some of his more notorious criminal acts were indeed vicious. In fact, I wound up using some of Coll's criminal history to create my Luca Brasi character in The Family Corleone. There were things about Coll, however, that were fascinating. First he was very young, only in his late teens and early twenties during his brief reign as a notorious criminal. Next, he was an Irish kid leading a gang of Italians — which was unusual for the time. And finally, he was an outlaw's outlaw who kidnapped fellow gangsters and held them for ransom when he needed to raise money. At one point in his career, fellow gangster from all over the country met in the Forest Hotel in New York to discuss ways of getting rid of Coll, who was causing trouble for all of them. So Coll was the character who got me started writing Toughs, but I tell his story through the eyes of a fictional character, Loretto Jones, who I imagined as growing up with Coll on the streets and in an orphanage. Loretto has his own story and turns out to be the central character in a novel that follows Coll's career and imagines its consequences for everyone who knew him.
OMN: Tell us something about Toughs that isn't mentioned in the publisher's synopsis.
EF: Loretto Jones took form for me as a character as I thought about my own grandfather, who was quiet, gentle man — but who, it turns out, appears to have had a violent criminal past. It was hard for me to imagine my grandfather as a violent man, and in thinking about that I came around, as usual for me, to thinking about the complexity of the human spirit, how people are never only one thing but rather, usually, a composite of possibilities. I imagined Loretto Jones as someone who had the potential for both violence and gentleness, and tried to tell his story.
OMN: How much of your own personal or professional experience have you included in the book?
EF: I grew up in Brooklyn, NY, and used my memory of Brooklyn neighborhoods for some of the scenes. I set one particularly gruesome scene, for example, in the house on Ainslie Street where I was raised, and I used elements of that apartment in creating Vince Coll's childhood home. Beyond those particulars, though, my sense-memory of growing up in an Italian neighborhood played a significant role in the neighborhoods I created for the novel.
OMN: Describe your writing process.
EF: My process is different from novel to novel. For The Family Corleone I wrote a detailed 140 page outline, and I found that some of the most creative work happened in the outline-writing process. I wasn't able to do that for Toughs. I had to begin telling the story — actually writing it — before I could figure out where it might go. In general my writing process is a combination of orgainic development (letting the story evolve in the process of writing) and outlining. I start writing with a character and a situation, and as ideas for story emerge out of the writing process, I jot them down on another screen, and that eventually evolves into an outline.
OMN: Where do you usually find yourself writing?
EF: I have a small study in my home where I do all my writing. My desk is an old hollow-core door, which I've been writing on since grad school days, where I found the door abandoned in an attic. I write on a 27" iMac, which has a large enough screen for me to keep two or three pages open and visible at once. I do the writing on one screen, keep notes on another screen, and use the third screen for research materials, including images and maps.
OMN: You mention research materials. What kinds of materials do you typically reference?
EF: I use the typical research materials: newspapers, books, the Internet (though the Internet is wildly unreliable). For The Family Corleone, I relied heavily on books, both fiction and nonfiction. For example, E. L. Doctorow's novels set in the depression provided a wealth of details that served as starting places for further research. For Toughs, I relied heavily on the only biography of Vince Coll: Mad Dog Coll by Breandan Delap. For both novels, I read through my library's archives of newspapers from the period.
OMN: How true are you to the settings of your books?
EF: I do my best to be accurate when a scene is set in a real place — though I'm not obsessive about it. I see my job when it comes to setting as working to ground the reader in a sense of place. To that end, I want the details to be convincing, but convincing and completely accurate are not the same thing. Most readers are not going to be so familiar with a particular section of a city eighty years in the past that they'll be upset with me and the novel if I invent a grocery store on a corner where there was actually a factory.
OMN: What kinds of books did you read when you were young?
EF: There weren't any books in my life growing up. There was an ancient set of The Harvard Classics mildewing in a dark hallway, and I remember reading Guy De Maupassant's "The Necklace," and Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado," and a bunch of other stuff that I didn't understand. The first really important book in my life, though, was Jack London's The Call of the Wild. I had no idea then why as a Brooklyn kid I was so influenced by that story of the Alaskan wilderness. Later, looking back, I was able to see what elements of the novel spoke to me. What's important, though, is that the novel did speak to me. It, in fact, made me a writer.
OMN: What films do you enjoy watching?
EF: I love crime dramas. Sidney Lumet's Prince of the City is one of my all-time favorite movies. I'm also a huge Scorcese fan, from Mean Streets to The Departed. And of course The Godfather movies — and many many more. I just recently saw The Drop and liked it a great deal. Also, these days, cable television is serving up a lot great crime dramas, from The Sopranos and The Wire, to Breaking Bad. Crime dramas provide a vehicle for looking into the both the beauty and horror of human nature, and I find that exciting as a writer and as a consumer.
OMN: Create a Top 5 list for us on any topic.
EF: Top 5 favorite crime novels.
1. Crime and Punishement;
2. An American Tragedy;
3. Native Son;
4. Beloved; and
5. A Light in August.
And a couple of gangster novels that are pretty good too: Billy Bathgate and Legs, by Doctorow and Kennedy respectively.
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Novelist, journalist, and playwright Ed Falco lives in Blacksburg, Virginia, where he teaches in Virginia Tech's MFA program and edits The New River, an online journal of digital writing.
For more information about the author, please visit his website at EdFalco.us or find him on Facebook and Twitter.
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Toughs
Ed Falco
A Crime Thriller
This is the story of Loretto Jones as he finds his life intertwined with the fate of Vince Coll, a 23-year-old Irish gangster who for a brief moment rose to the level of a national celebrity during his war with Dutch Schultz, Owen Madden, and Lucky Luciano.
Tagged "Mad Dog Coll" after killing five-year-old Michael Vengelli in a botched assassination attempt, Coll was the subject of a shoot-to-kill order issued by New York City Police Commissioner Edward P. Mulrooney, a $50,000 bounty offered by Dutch Shultz and Owen Madden, and $30,000 in reward money from by the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association and the city's newspapers.
Loretto and Vince are bound to each other by years spent in an orphanage and on the streets, but in the summer of 1931, with Loretto in love with newly-divorced Gina Baronti, and Vince in thrall to the beautiful Lottie Kriesberger, their world of tough guys in tough times is hurtling toward disaster, and Loretto finds himself faced with impossible choices.
Mac
