Filed under: Interviews, Hot Picks, Reviews, Fiction
After churning out a record 12 New York Times bestsellers and selling more than three million novels over the past 14 years, novelist Eric Jerome Dickey tells us that he is going on an indefinite hiatus -- but not before stirring up a lot of trouble --the literary kind, that is.
His latest novel, 'Tempted by Trouble' is a taut crime thriller about love and deception that will keep you riveted to the page.
The protagonist is Dmytryk Knight, a college educated family man, who had job at a car factory in Detroit until the economy went belly-up and obliterated the auto industry. After two years of struggling to pay the mortgage and other bills, he and his wife, Cora, decide honesty does not help keep the lights on.
Then in walks Eddie Coyle like new money in a safe. Coyle, a ruthless crime boss, gives them chance to return to the lifestyle to which they were accustomed. The catch: Dymtryk has to be the wheelman for a ring of bank robbers.
With each heist, money becomes Dymtryk's drug. But when a bank job goes bad, Cora turns up missing and he finds himself engulfed in a life of crime. And there always will be that time before he started robbing banks and the time after -- a diminishing point of no return that will even make readers questions decisions in their lives.
Blackvoices.com caught up to the Memphis, Tennessee,native. Excerpts of the conversation are below.
BV on Books: How did you come up with the story?
Eric Jerome Dickey: Everybody who writes crime has written a bank heist story, from Robert B. Parker to Ed McBain to Elmore Leonard. And look at all the black and white movies with Humphrey Bogart. Characters of that generation always were robbing banks and racetracks and any place with money. It's not a huge stretch. They were popular during the Prohibition. Initially when people were robbing banks, the banks weren't federally insured. So you could rob banks in Ohio all day and they couldn't come to Chicago to get you.
BV: Is this a Bonnie and Clyde story?EJD: This is no Bonnie and Clyde story by any stretch of the imagination. Hollywood romanticized Bonnie and Clyde and made into we're in this thing together as a couple. In reality, it wasn't even like that. 'Tempted' is primarily a story about Dmytryk and the people involved in his life. Eddie Coyle is the one who ends up working with him. Dmytryk and his wife are living under the economic conditions that we're living in now. He's well educated and unable to find a job. For some people, their options for survival are to rob a bank. They think they will do it for a little while because they keep thinking a job is going to come in, a job is going to come in. Then it becomes six months, nine months and then a year. The next thing he knows, two years have gone by and he's really struggling to make ends meet.
BV: How did you pick characters?
EJD: First with 'Tempted,' I knew I wanted to have characters that were going to rob a bank. Really what I started doing was I started writing scenes and developing everything I could with a character, the way they talk, the way they walk, and then threw in background. That's over a period of time, not all at once. It's like casting a movie. The original 'Back to the Future' had Eric Stoltz cast as the lead, but no one ever saws that because halfway through, they pulled him out and put in Michael J Fox. It's the equivalent of me doing that in my stories. I may have the right story, but not the right character to make the story work. So I will pull him or her out and replace the character with someone else, which basically means I just rewrite the character from scratch, including their childhoods, education, everything.
BV: Do you draw from people you know? They would be some far out people.
EJD: No, uh-uh. Any character I've written is not anyone I know. There are some great books for writers that instruct them on how to create characters on everything from personality to background. The character Dmytryk is almost like someone who should have been born in the 1950s, but he wasn't. He has values for the most part that are no longer celebrated, not in our culture anyway.
BV: Why did you take a break from the Gideon series?
EJD: I like writing different things, but I'm not a machine. I also don't want to be pigeonholed by any one thing. That's why I'm surprised I started writing a series at all. Gideon's lifestyle and story are really rich and I can pull in a lot of secondary characters. I really enjoy writing Gideon. The characters are real. They are over the top without being written over the top.
BV: What's next Eric Jerome Dickey?
EJD: At the moment I'm on hiatus. I haven't had a break since 1996. I'm forcing myself to take a break to recharge my batteries and come back in with it.