We are delighted to welcome author Domenic Stansberry to Omnimystery News today.
Domenic has a new novel coming out next month, The White Devil (Molotov Editions; October 2016 hardcover, trade paperback and ebook formats), and we recently had the chance to catch up with him to talk more about it.
— ♦ —
Omnimystery News: Your new book, The White Devil, seems to be a change of pace for you, from writing a very noirish series set in San Francisco centered on a male investigator to a stand-alone novel told from the point of view of a young woman living in Rome, who may or may not be guilty of the crimes she is accused of. Tell us a little more about her.
Photo provided courtesy of
Domenic Stansberry
Domenic Stansberry: The main character for The White Devil, Vicki Wilson, has been in my head a long time. The first notes I have on her are from a file I created fourteen years ago in 2002. At the time, I had just read the original White Devil, a play by John Webster written in 1612. I loved it. The play is a revenge tragedy. It seemed to me to be very contemporary in its sensibility. Steeped in this noirish atmosphere is a story of corruption spurred by greed and lust.
OMN: So you based your novel — which has a contemporary setting — around a female character in Jacobean drama you read fourteen years ago. What held your attention on the character for so long?
DS: I was working on other things at the time, and it took me a while to figure out how to tell the story. Meantime I kept going back to the material. Almost obsessively.
OMN: What was the source of the obsession?
DS: It was the mystery surrounding the female character's motivation, I guess, and the questions surrounding her role in real life events. I guess I should explain. The young woman — the character in Webster's play — was based on Vittoria Accoramboni, a real life figure who was accused of encouraging her lover to commit several murders on her behalf. It was a notorious case at the time. The real life Vittoria was variously seen as quite innocent or very scheming. In the play, she is a scapegoat for the immortality of the men around her. But she's not guiltless by any stretch of the imagination.
So she fascinated me in that way: as to her true nature, and how much she was victim, or not, and her own role in events, the mystery around her.
Also that play, what I found so interesting was there is no real center of morality. No one is admirable. But it is riveting. Which goes against the truisms you hear about likable characters being at the heart of good drama.
OMN: Did you ever consider setting your story at the time events actually happened? In the historical time period?
DS: Well, very early on, my first attempts at capturing her voice were set in that time period. But I never really intended to set the book then, or write a historical novel. I figured John Webster had already told that story. My interest was in taking that basic dramatic situation — and the characters — and moving it to a more contemporary time period.
OMN: What kind of research did you do?
DS: I read the original play over and over. Also, I looked into the historical basis of the play — which was based on a true story that was source of a great deal of gossip and scandal at the time. I also went to Italy, and did a lot of research into contemporary Rome, looking for analogous character types and social situations.
OMN: But the Renaissance was a much different time than today. How did you deal with that?
DS: That's a great question, and very much part of my struggle to write the novel in a way I hope is convincing. That tension — between worldviews — is part of what makes these kinds of projects interesting to work on. But to answer your question — I tried to find contemporary equivalents to the original characters, to their social roles. The real life Vittoria was a very young woman, from a declining family, whose parents were seeking to marry her into a higher station. She herself was charming or scheming, depending on whom you believe — and read poetry at court and was very much sought after by different men of "noble" station. Things were pretty licentious during the Renaissance, with orgies up at the papal garden … so I looked for contemporary equivalents to those characters. Actresses, politicians, people seeking glamour.
OMN: And what about her brother Johnny?
DS: Yes, he had a rough equivalent in the original play as well — and also in the historical record. But in the 17th century play, he was a pander, seeking personal advancement by bringing his attractive sister to the attention of the nobility. Of course we don't have the same kind of nobility now, so I kept certain aspects of his character, but changed other things.
OMN: How close did you stick to the original storyline?
DS: In some ways, pretty close. What Webster did a long time ago in writing the play was similar to what James Cain did with Double Indemnity. Webster took a scandal of his own time, the story of a double murder motivated by greed and lust, and dramatized it. Cain did a similar thing centuries later, fictionalizing a true story from his own time period. Writers work this way all the time. But of course, when a story gets fictionalized, a lot of things change.
I took my storyline and characters from a much different space and time that I live in. But the fundamental events, the driving action, the general outline … I drew a lot from the older story. But a lot changed. The cause and effect can be different, when you move around in time, when you change cultural environments.
OMN: Did having this original model make things easier or harder? And how did you maintain your own voice?
DS: Having a model in mind does give you some some guide posts. But also it's a prison you have to break out of it at times, because there's only so far you can maintain the parallelisms. In regard to voice, for a book like this, ultimately, I don't think it's a matter of your own voice. You are trying to channel another voice. And obviously, as far as events, there are things that happened in Renaissance Italy that just would not happen in the same way now.
OMN: Now that this project is complete, do you have any plans on going back to your Dante Mancuso novels set in San Francisco?
DS: I wouldn't rule it out. At the time, six years ago — after four Dante books in San Francisco in that Italian neighborhood — I felt a need to get away from that material. The way that series ended, I left an avenue back in, I think …
But I really don't like talking about future projects. I'm a little superstitious in that way.
OMN: How's that?
DS: Maybe because I'm not quite sure myself. Also I am a slow writer and I change directions a lot. I like to say it's because I am thoughtful, it's part of my process, but there's also laziness involved and bad habits and sometimes I just care more about other things than sitting in front of the computer. But for whatever reason, I try to avoid talking too much about work in progress … I think it's important to protect the material … not so much because I am worried about someone stealing the idea … but because I worry that talking about it too much saps the energy from the actual writing.
OMN: What authors have influenced how and what you write today?
DS: That's really all over the map. I don't read that much contemporary crime fiction. I used to be embarrassed by that, but I think it's okay. It's okay to be a little out of step, to read idiosyncratically, or even just read in a narrow area. While working on this book I read and re-read some older classic crime fiction … Muriel Spark … and Dorothy Hughes and Patricia Highsmith. Sparks wrote The Driver's Seat pretty much from within a female consciousness. The latter two everyone in the field knows: women crime writers writing often from male consciousness. Highsmith's Ripley novels, of course, are set in Italy. But I also read a lot outside the genre. Albert Moravia, the great Italian novelist whose Woman of Rome was told from the point of view of a woman prostitute. Hardly anyone reads Moravia in America. I also spent time reading Celine and short fiction by an American writer from Watts, Wanda Coleman. It's very hard edged stuff, her portraits of Watts, with a lot of characters on the edge. It's noirish, and dark, but I don't think you would call it crime fiction. But to some extent all those labels are arbitrary, they can prevent people from seeing the work.
OMN: Do you regard yourself as a noir writer?
DS: I got labeled as a noir writer after my first novel, and that label has stuck. I shouldn't admit this, but I didn't know exactly what the term noir meant at the time. So I watched all the classic noir films and read the books and embraced the label as true and even became kind of a purist about what noir meant: about the fatalist view at the heart of "true" noir. But after a while that fatalism seemed kind of narrow to me. Not that I have escaped it, but it also strikes me that a lot of writers I admire — Muriel Spark, Graham Greene, Flannery O'Connor, Jim Thompson, Moravia, even Celine — were either Catholic or fallen Catholic, and as often as not saw themselves in that allegorical tradition. Or reacting against it.
OMN: So do you put yourself in that tradition?
DS: Catholic allegory? … Well it's a rich tradition and more complex than a lot of people might want to admit, in it's presentation of evil and human nature and the paradoxes therein. Also in the questions it raise — at its best — about the nature of faith and the role blasphemy plays in the exploration of the divine.
But me … are my crime novels in that vein? That's not a question I can answer. Or want to, anyway.
OMN: Why not?
DS: Partly, again, it's superstition. I don't think a writer should necessarily talk too much, or too directly, about the meaning of their work or what they intend. Partly because it limits interpretation. But also because it saps the mystery out of it. And I think ultimately that's the business we're in. Presenting mystery to the reader.
OMN: Why not be more direct with readers?
DS: Don't cast pearls before swine. That's how Boccaccio answered the question, centuries ago, when the moralists wanted to string him up for not appending moral adages to his stories. The answer must have satisfied his persecutors, because they let him walk away alive. Not everyone, of course, was so lucky.
— ♦ —
Domenic Stansberry is the author of ten novels and a collection of stories. In 2005 his novel The Confession received the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Paperback Original for its portrayal of a Marin County psychologist accused of murdering his mistress. Stansberry grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and currently lives in a small town north of that city with his wife, the poet Gillian Conoley, and their daughter Gillis.
For more information about the author, please visit his website at DomenicStansberry.com and his author page on Goodreads, or find him on Facebook.
— ♦ —
The White Devil by Domenic Stansberry
A Novel
Publisher: Molotov Editions
The White Devil tells the story of an aspiring American actress, who — together with her too charmng brother — is implicated in a series of crimes dating back to their childhood days in Texas.
The novel begins in Rome, among the American ex-patriot community, and from there follows the siblings' latest obsessions: an aging Italian actress and her charismatic husband.
Vicki Wilson, narrates the story in a voice alternately intimate and distant, a cipher of unwholesome impulse and erotic intrigue. The result is an elegant tour de force, a psychological noir exploring the murky depths where the differences between familal and erotic love, between criminal and victim, merge in deadly, unexpected ways.
— The White Devil by Domenic Stansberry
