Copyright By Dan Leissner
What is the date you began writing this piece of fiction and the date when you completely finished the piece of fiction? I began writing my “noir” crime novel “Guilty City”, a sequel to “The Big Farewell”, in early June 2021 and it was finished by mid-May 2022. I was able to start it so soon after the publication of “The Big Farewell” (April 2021) because I already had the outline for a story. Like “The Big Farewell”, “Guilty City” was inspired by a true-life unsolved murder, so I had a ready-made framework for the plot. In the case of “The Big Farewell” the mysterious death of Starr Faithfull in New York City in 1931, which I re-located to the dizzy heights of the Roaring Twenties in 1927. And for “Guilty City” the murder of Vivian Gordon, coincidentally also in N.Y.C. in 1931, this time re-staged at the time of the Wall Street Crash in 1929.
Click on the link below to read about the murder of Vivian Gordon
https://www.history.com/news/tammany-hall-corruption-downfall-fdr-seabury-investigation
Where did you do most of your writing for this fiction work? And please describe in detail. And can you please include a photo? I did my writing on my PC stationed in front of the doors leading out to my roof terrace in the living room of my one-bedroom apartment (see photo). I live on the top floor of a Victorian building on the suburban fringes of Greater London. My “workstation” harks back to my time as a freelance copy editor and proofreader, prior to which I worked as an Editor in Law publishing for companies based in London.
What were your writing habits while writing this work- did you drink something as you wrote, listen to music, write in pen and paper, directly on laptop; specific time of day? I’m not one of those who sets himself the task of writing so many words or for so many hours a day. My brain doesn’t work that way. I’ve been told that I have a “cinematic” style and that’s the way my creative juices flow. I write “scene” by “scene”. I wait for the next scene to percolate which can take hours or days. And then it comes out on the page virtually fully formed. Often, I just need an opening line and the rest of the scene just flows onto the page. And it can be “character driven”. I’ll have a rough idea of what the scene is about, and the characters dictate how it pans out. So, I don’t always write every day; and depending on the length and complexity of the scene I’m on I may only write for an hour or two in the day, or all day. I often make notes on a notepad but do the actual writing on my PC. I occasionally have music on while I’m writing, something in period to get me in the mood, in the case of “The Big Farewell” Jazz from the 1920’s. I do, however, have my “props”: a scale model of the car that my hero drives, a Stutz Black Hawk Boat-Tail Speedster; a period Private Detective badge; and a set of deactivated firearms of the period (see photo). I’m not much of a tea or coffee drinker and normally just drink water while I write.
Click on the below link to purchase THE BIG FAREWELL from Amazon
Please include just one excerpt and include page numbers as reference. This one excerpt can be as short or as long as you prefer.
(Chapter Nine, pp. 120-125 of the paperback version of “Guilty City”)
The hand holding the gun was trembling badly. I made a big target but even at ten feet I was sure he’d miss me.
“Give me your wallet!”
His voice had a shake in it. He wore mismatched jacket and trousers that looked like charity handouts. A frayed woolen scarf around his face and a shapeless hat pulled down so only his eyes showed.
He was half my size. I looked down at him. I knew I could take the gun from him and snap him in half any time I wanted.
“Say, pal,” I said. “Are you sure you want to do this?”
He jabbed at me with the gun.
“I’m warning you…I’m d-desperate…!”
The weapon was oiled and gleaming. A treasured possession. A massive revolver with a gaping .45 bore.
“Nice piece,” I said coolly.
Confused, he blinked at me.
“I carried one just like it,” I told him. “In France back in ’17-’18.”
The gun muzzle wavered.
“You were in the War?”
I nodded. Now, the big pistol hung loosely at his side. His shoulders sagged.
“Better put that away,” I advised him. “Before somebody sees it.”
He sheathed the gun in his waistband and buttoned his jacket over it.
“Sorry…,” he mumbled.
I waved it away.
“No problem, buddy.”
My business was concluded. I was about to climb back into the Stutz. Parked in front of some offices tacked onto a small factory unit in the Garment District. A hive of industry crammed into less than a square mile, between Fifth and Ninth Avenue, from 34th to 42nd Street.
What I’d seen there was a “sweatshop”. There was no other word for it. I saw the hunched shoulders and silent grim faces of the women who toiled on the production line. Making hats they could never afford.
The owner was a fat man with framed pictures of his fat wife and four fat children on his desk. He choked me with his fat cigar while he complained about the trouble he was having with the Union. He told me he thought his workers were stealing from him and that he wanted me to do something about it.
I told him to go to hell.
“Here….”
I gave the ragged man a Lucky. When I got out my brass trench lighter, he showed me one just like it. He unwrapped the scarf and we smiled at each other.
“Hard times, huh?” I asked him.
His shoulders rose and fell heavily.
“They saw me coming,” he said. “Talked me into putting all my savings into stocks that aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on now.”
A tear was snagged by the stubble on his cheeks.
“Got laid off. Don’t know how I’m going to feed my kids.”
I pointed at the suspicious bulge in his waistband.
“Well, that ain’t your racket,” I suggested. “You’re not cut out for it.”
I took him to a workers’ café around the corner and bought him breakfast. Peeled off some bills and offered them to him, enough to see him through the month. Mrs Crater had been very generous.
He smiled and shook his head. I put them in his hand and closed his fingers around them.
“You’d do the same for me, buddy,” I told him. “Soldier to soldier.”
And then I saw them, crowding a far table.
“Dusty” Miller, his devilish grin clamped on a big stogie. “Bunny” Warren, still just a kid, blue-eyed and apple-cheeked, with those baby blond curls. Dwarfed by hulking “Swede” Johansson, unlovely as ever with his shaven scalp. “Chalky” White, two-time Army middleweight champion, flashing his remaining teeth. And the rest of them….
At the head of the table, my best buddy Pat, with the map of Ireland for a face. As he was back then. Solid muscle, not an ounce of the flab he ran to when he made Lieutenant on the N.Y.P.D. And was snared in a web of corruption, ordered to clip me, only I got him first.
I killed my best friend. Pat forgave me, said I saved him from a life of shame. Said if I hadn’t pulled the trigger, he’d have only done it himself.
Pat told me that when he came to see me later, with the rest of the gang. To celebrate with my girl and me, in our apartment. After I’d avenged the abuse she’d suffered. Redeemed her, and myself, and earned a new life for us both.
And now, they were all there again, sat around the café table. The ten men of my Army Rifle Section. Five headstones with names on them. Three never found. One hanging in his cell at the asylum they sent him to after the War. And one I left lying in the forest with a bullet in his skull.
They were young and bursting with life. As they were when we arrived in France in 1917 and marched before cheering crowds. Their uniforms spic and span. Grinning and giving me a big thumbs-up.
The man I was with stared across and saw an empty table. Jumped in his seat when I saluted them and burst out laughing.
The narrow trench was submerged in a yellow fog that stank of sulphur, scalding my throat raw. Gasping, I pushed through it, wading knee deep in a thick soup of mud swirling with blood and the sewage of decay.
Their red eyes bulging, enormous rats swam past me, coming from the opposite direction. Fleeing something. I wanted to follow their example, but I forced myself on, my arms and legs aching, lungs rasping.
As I struggled forward, sounds came towards me. Dulled by the dense smoke. The shrill whistle of a shell that you knew was going to be close, making me shrivel inside. The “crump” when it landed; the hot whirlwind of its blast expanding. Shrapnel hissing and whirring above my head.
I ducked and pressed on. The steel helmet was crushing my head down into my shoulders. The rifle in my hands weighed a ton. Towards the rattling spasms of machine-gun fire. Through the smoke, I glimpsed the flicker of their muzzle flashes. I saw the filthy yellow curtains punctured, heard the bullets crack the air close by.
I was terrified. My brain, my whole body, was telling me to turn around and run away. But I kept on going. Towards the boiling noise that was getting louder and louder.
I shuddered to a halt. Just ahead of me, a mangled arm, projecting from the wall of the trench. At a place where the boards had collapsed, mud dislodged by shellfire. And left some unlucky bastard half-buried there.
The flesh on the dead hand was greenish and rotting away, fingers tipped with bone. Horrified, I saw that the arm was slowly, rhythmically waving me on, a skeletal forefinger beckoning.
Shouting hoarsely, I hunched my shoulders and tried to make myself small. Made to dash past it, the thick mud sucking at my thighs. Flinching as the green decaying hand seemed to reach out to catch me.
I screamed as those raking claws ripped into my face. Down to the bone. As a roaring white-hot blast came crashing down on me.
I sat up, shouting, both hands pressed tight to my face.
“It’s alright….”
In bed next to me, my girl took my wrists and gently prised my hands away.
“It was just a dream,” she whispered softly.
I was shivering, drenched in sweat. She wrapped herself around me, warming me with her body.
“Just a bad dream….”
Click on the below link to purchase GUILT CITY from Amazon
Why is this excerpt so emotional for you as a writer to write? And can you describe your own emotional experience of writing this specific excerpt? This passage depicts the lingering mental scars inflicted on my hero (now earning his crust as a Private Eye) by his experiences in the trenches during World War One, some ten years before the time in which this story is set. It’s a scene that’s quite personal to me. In part because my hero’s “Socialist” leanings reflect my own (my grandmother worked in a sweatshop making hats in the Garment District in New York City). But mainly because ten years ago I experienced a major mental breakdown and spent several months on a mental ward with a diagnosis of Severe Anxiety and Depression. And I too am still scarred by my experiences.
Were there any deletions from this excerpt that you can share with us? And can you please include a photo of your marked up rough drafts of this excerpt. No, as far as I recall, there were no significant deletions from this passage. Bar the usual tinkering and polishing. After a “scene” has percolated in my brain it almost always goes straight onto the page pretty much as I want it. When a “first draft” is finished, I polish it until any changes I make are so minimal that they’re hardly worth making; and then I tell myself to stop. As for a marked-up rough draft, there isn’t one I’m afraid. It goes straight from my head onto the screen, in the Word document manuscript. Or I may have written it out in a notepad beforehand, but that gets thrown away as soon as the text is onscreen. So, there are no “rough drafts” of my books.
Click on the link below to visit Dan Leissner’s Facebook page
https://www.facebook.com/Dan-Leissner-Author-108392741538057/
Most of the INSIDE THE EMOTION OF FICTION links can be found at the very end of the below feature:
http://chrisricecooper.blogspot.com/2021/03/stephenson-holts-arranged-marriage-is.html