Marshall Karp has a note pinned up by his desk that asks: "Right now, what’s going on in the hearts and minds of the characters you are writing about?"
It serves as a reminder to the writer that whenever he sits down to work on his comic crime thriller series, it is the mood of Hollywood detectives Mike Lomax and Terry Biggs that matters, not that of Marshall Karp.
That he is thinking of them, and others such as Big Jim, Lomax's interfering father, is hardly surprising. Karp's first two novels, The Rabbit Factory (TRF) and Bloodthirsty, are heavily character-driven and the friendship and badinage between the two cops elevates the books.
Karp's affection for his characters leaps off every page. "I adore them", he says. And with very good reason: they got him published.
"I did not plan on writing a series but even before the first book the publisher wanted more. The interesting part of it was that like even though I had a lifetime history of writing I had not written a novel, so when I started and the agent submitted it I got all the classic rejections; 'Not our kind of book', and 'He’s good, but let’s see the next one'. When it was bought I had been turned down by 30 plus companies," he says.
"When I spoke to him (the publisher) I said can I ask why you bought the book - but I reminded it's too late to back out! - and he said 'I sat down and by the time I got to the end of chapter 3 I loved the characters, I wanted to be with them, wanted to know what they were going to do. I was involved with them."
I had a similar experience. You can't help but like Lomax and Biggs. They're honest, hard-working cops without a drink problem between them. They have everyday problems - paying for college, family issues - and they are entertaining. Biggs is a larger-than-life, wise-cracking New Yorker, Lomax a perfect foil.
"I didn't want the alcoholic, burned out detectives down on life. I wanted them to have real lives. If TRF has one too many sub plots it’s because it’s the first and readers had to be given real feeling for the characters," Karp says.
One of the initial problems Karp had n drawing these characters was that they are a lot younger than him - "children of boomers, rather than boomers like me" - and so he had to get into that mindset. What were their life experiences?
"Learning about sex education for example," he says. "So I asked my son how old he was when he learned. Three, he said. 'You told us about the penis and how you put it in the vagina'. We told all kids and well, we were modern parents. They were raised differently. You have to learn all about the character."
Bearing in mind, I have only two novels and one sixty minute conversation, I have to take a punt here: but I would say that that anecdote is the essence of Marshall Karp. Wacky, with a mind that is slightly off the beaten track and which he is not afraid to speak in defiance of the tedious conventions of political correctness.
I am sorry that the interview did not take place in person, because I imagine him sitting in his Upstate New York office waving his arms around and running through a full range of exaggerated facial expressions.
Many well-known people - be they writers, sportsmen, comedians, whatever - do not live up your expectations of them when finally met face to face. Carl Hiaasen, though charming, was not as funny as his books. And why should he be? But Karp is as funny as his books.
Part way through the interview my wife calls on another line to say she has picked up the kids and is taking them to the dentist. I tell Karp. He makes a joke about British teeth, which he says is a staple of the late night sitcom. I retort that at least our predominant national characteristic is not obesity (although most of the evidence seems to suggest that it might be).
"Not today pal," he yells triumphantly down the line. "You can write that Marshall has lost 21 pounds in the last 4 months and he looks fantastic."
But before I can answer, he's off again.
"I live 100 miles from the Big City (New York) where people walk up and down the inside aisles of the supermarkets. They don’t go down the outside aisles where the fruit and the vegetables are. They go where the donuts, cookies and candies are. It’s pathetic. They have motorised scooters, probably invented for people who were handicapped, but you don’t see the handicapped people, just big fat-assed people who have to reach up into the beer cooler for another 24 pack."
This, he says, "will probably make me sound like a jerk", and doubtless it will to those who exclusively shop in the centre aisles of supermarkets, but it also answers a question for Karp that he has for me: "Why do these books resonate so well in the UK? Why have they had such a good reception there? I feel like there's Prince William, there's Prince Harry and there's me. I feel very grand."
I tell him that I cannot speak for other readers but that I suspect that his sharp sense of humour, one that pokes fun at authority and at some of the absurdities of American life, is in tune with the British sense of humour, and that many US import that display such qualities are successful here (The Simpsons and The Onion being two that spring immediately to mind).
"One of the qualities I try to bring to writing and phone-calling and talking to waitresses or anything is a total sense of irreverence. Get off your high horse and have a little fun. If you can deflate the importance of things, then great. Irreverence is a quality. I cross the line 20 times a day - well, perhaps not so much any more - and then I have to..." and his voice trails off halfway through a thought as it often does during the conversation as something else occurs to him.
"Terry is the voice of all that he certainly has a way of bringing out the portentousness in things. I have a little fun with American culture and when I write about a Hollywood producer who fired a dozen chickens off the set and then bought them back and served them for lunch the next day, well I made that up but it was founded in fact."
The chickens who went from extras to plate in the space of a day appeared in Bloodthirsty, Karp's second novel, which is in part an exposé of the Hollywood scene he used to inhabit in a former career as a scriptwriter.
"I am a former insider I bend and massage the truth but the hideous people you see were all real, and I can’t name any names I’d wind up with a lawsuit," he says.
But having trashed Hollywood in one novel, and the theme park world of a Disneyesque corporation in TRF, do Lomax and Biggs have a future in film?
"My agent said while there is a lot of interest in what you write and how you write, the studios who should be making these films won’t do it as it makes them look so hideous. They don’t want to make a film that craps over the industry," he says.
But unlike Robert Crais, who has said he won't sell film rights to his famous partnership, Karp would put his two guys on the silver screen.
"I am afraid that if Holywood came knocking I would say who is involved and my wife might say how much. I do believe that what I do is a blend of art and commerce and I have a film agent in California, who takes calls about the books and would be glad to sell it as a movie."
(This point obviously got him thinking, because a day after the interview, an e-mail arrived from Karp on this point: "If someone offered to make a Lomax and Biggs movie, I wouldn’t just take the money and run. But I would listen carefully. My criteria would be can this creative team give Mike, Terry, Big Jim and the others the broad audience that films provide, yet still do justice to the characters?")
So for now fans of Lomax and Biggs will have to make do with books, but the good news is that there are two more on the way. The third - to be called Flipping Out in the US, Dead Wives Club in the UK - follows the story of a group of women who "flip" houses - that is to say buy them cheap, do them up, and sell them on - who become the target of a serial killer. Given that one of the group is Terry Biggs' wife, there is the potential for the overwelmingly (and unusually for crime novels) optimistic tone of Karp's books to be challenged. But probably not: optimism comes easily to Karp.
"When my son was 7, he said 'I figured out the difference between Mom and Dad. They walk past a vacant lot and Mum goes, uh oh a place for winos and addicts and Dad goes wow this is so cool we could build a theme park or a playground'. That’s me. The glass is more than half full," he says. "Don’t know how I got it, but it came and my wife and I are perfect counter points. She thinks I live in lala land and I think she sees doom and gloom in everything. I am optimistic about everything, and it makes a difference in the things I like. I don't want to write misery I want to fix it."
One of the ways this manifests itself is in his association with Vitamin Angels, the charity which provides vital nutrition to families and children in need, and is running Operation 20/20 which is looking to curtail childhood blindness by eradicating Vitamin A deficiency by 2020.
"I have been with them since right after 9/11. Like so many of us I had a 9/11 life changing moment of epiphany. My daughter was at ground zero, she escaped unharmed, but was missing for 90 minutes. 90 minutes doesn’t seem like a long time unless you’re watching the buildings collapoe and don’t know where your daughter is."
A lot of people that day had no chance, and Karp decided he could do something to help others who have no chance and got involved with Vitamin Angels.
"They collect vitamins, and I didn’t have any, but I knew corporations and they have money and they gave enough money to cover 3 provinces in India to start saving kids, because preventing blindness also saves lives. When they go blind it's a downward spiral and more than half of them die," he says.
If Karp throws himself into the project with as much enthusiasm as he does his writing or even his conversations with bloggers, the 20/20 goals should be met by about the middle of 2014.
Even 3,000 miles away down a scratchy phone line, his effervesence is palpable just as it is in his writing. He's clearly having a ball.
"I am having the best time of my life and this is my retirement career. One day right about when you’re 42 and look at life and say, 'is this is all there is?', you can plan a life in your 60s beyond your wildest dreams. There is room in your life for more than one adventure."
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