Interview with author Brad Parks

By Sarah Schiavoni and Christopher Stokum

We recently spoke with Brad Parks, author of Faces of the Gone, the first book in the Carter Ross Mystery series. Faces of the Gone is about Carter Ross, an investigative reporter who finds himself faced with discovering the true story behind a gory quadruple murder in the city.

WNW: As a journalist [with The Washington Post and The (Newark, NJ) Star-Ledger], you covered a quadruple murder in New Jersey which proved to be influential when writing Faces of the Gone. Have other real life news stories worked their way into your stories?
Parks: When have they not? One of the great things about being a journalist was the wealth of subject material thrust on me. Meeting strange and wonderful people, learning new things, seeing new places – that was all in a day’s work. And it’s become the bedrock upon which my fiction is built. I steal bits and pieces from my reporting days and stick them in my novels all the time. The second Carter Ross novel – while not based on one crime in particular – draws heavily on reporting I did about the subprime mortgage scandal. Oh, and, of course, political corruption (there’s just a little bit of that in Jersey).

WNW: Looking at your website, we can see you have quite a sense of humor. How do you incorporate your humor into gritty crime stories?
Parks: I wear one of those arrow-through-the-head jobbers and write while sitting on a whoopee cushion. Pfffft! Okay, seriously now folks… Actually, that’s just it. As a human being, I’m just serially incapable of being serious for long stretches. So, especially early in a book, when the plot is still taking shape, I find myself taking my characters on little humorous side trips that, while somewhat germane to the story, are really just there for entertainment purposes. I think it helps that my characters are newspaper reporters. Newsrooms are dens of gallows humor. A story about the most awful disaster imaginable can be breaking and it doesn’t take more than about five minutes for someone to crack a joke about it. I suppose it’s a coping mechanism of some sort. That, and we’re just wiseasses.

WNW: Looking through your cast of characters, it seems as if you have characters that are stock on the surface but are actually more complicated than they initially appear. Did you intend to play with stereotypes in this way when you wrote the book?
Parks: Whoah. That’s deep. Can you send a copy of this to the New Yorker so maybe they’ll consider me for their next 20 Best Writers Under 40? (See what I mean about not being serious?) But, actually to answer the question, quickly: Yeah. That’s exactly what my characters are. I know there’s a school of writing – I think it’s out in Iowa somewhere – that says your characters should never, ever be stereotypes. But I think people often start out as stereotypes when you first meet them. They only get complicated when you get to know them. Plus, sometimes the hooker really does have a heart of gold.

WNW: Between your website, articles and interviews, you do a lot of promotional work. How important to you think this has been to the success of your novel?
Parks: That’s a very nice way of calling me a whore, isn’t it? That’s okay. I’ll take it. To quote my father, the former typewriter salesman: Nothing happens until somebody sells something. I know some of my fellow writers bemoan it – because, what, it’s beneath them or something? – but I think of the promotional stuff as being part of the modern author’s job. So you can either gripe about it, which doesn’t change the need to do it; or you can accept it and embrace it, which is what I’ve done. Mostly, I think I do it for survival. I love being an author, and I know I’ll only get to continue doing it if my sales numbers are good. Plus, the broader my audience becomes, the more I get to share my words. And that’s the reason I became a writer in the first place.

WNW: Compared to journalism, what is your relationship with your readers like as a novelist?
Parks: It’s much, much more intimate. There is a one-on-one aspect to the author-reader relationship that doesn’t exist in journalism or other forms of media. If you’re reading an article in a newspaper, what you’re really seeing is a collaborative effort. The story may have been pitched by one editor, modified by another editor, molded further by the reporter, then changed altogether as it goes through the editing process on the back end. The same is true in, say, television or movies: The story is a combination of a screenwriter’s words, a director’s vision, an actor’s interpretation and so on. Not so in novels, where it’s just you and me, the reader and the writer. And we’re both equally important players, because, sure, I tell the story, but it only comes alive in your imagination as you read the words and turn the pages. So there’s a shared experience there. And, yes, I enjoy the hell out of it. Just today (I’m writing this Thursday, June 24, 2010) I had a conversation with a woman in my local coffee shop who told me she read my novel twice and enjoyed it more the second time because she wasn’t just racing through to the end, but really savoring some of the details. Hello! If I heard that every day for the rest of my life, I’d die a happy man.

WNW: Do you think you preserved any kind of readership in your move from journalism to fiction? Have you received feedback on your book from former readers of your newspaper articles?
Parks: I’d like to think so, in the same way I’d like to think that someday I’ll have six-pack abs and be able to dunk a basketball. But the reality is I’m soft in the middle and can barely touch the rim. In the same way, I think most newspaper readers ignore bylines – to the point where I had neighbors, who knew I worked at the newspaper, come up to me and start telling me about this interesting story they read. And I’d be like, “Uh, yeah, I know, I wrote it.” There have probably been a few people in The Star-Ledger circulation area who picked up the book and thought the name “Brad Parks” sounded vaguely familiar. But only in my fantasies are there large numbers of people out there who have been devouring my every word across multiple media. And I think if you asked any other newspaper reporter-turned novelist – Michael Connelly, Laura Lippman – they’d say the same thing. Readership-wise, you basically start fresh as a novelist.

WNW: How do you balance the work involved in being a novelist and a stay-at-home dad?
Parks: Two words: Reliable daycare. I’m amazed by parents of little ones who can write during naptime or in the evening after the kids are in bed. I can’t. I have help. I also have an incredibly supportive wife and in-laws/parents who pick up the slack when I’m on the road. It really takes a village to raise an author… uh, child.

WNW: What has your experience working with a large publisher like St. Martin’s Press been like?
Parks: How could I not love it? I know we’re all supposed to be moving toward this democratic utopia where we’re all self-published on e-books and there are no gatekeepers and the readers make buying decisions based on the quality of the work itself and blah-blah-blah. But, in the meantime, being able to throw around the name St. Martin’s Press – and its crime fiction imprint, Minotaur Books – has really opened doors for me. At risk of sounding too crassly commercial, it’s a brand that really means something to people. And I actually believe that as the publishing world gets more confusing – and there are more people going it on their own across more platforms – having someone like St. Martin’s Press in your corner becomes more, not less, important. And, sure, there’s a bit of that little-fish-big-pond thing going on. But it’s an awfully nice pond.

WNW: What opportunities have you encountered as a novelist that you did not as a journalist?
Parks: I’m not sure it qualifies as an “opportunity,” but it’s still a little weird that people are actually happy to see me. When I was a journalist, it wasn’t unusual that I would end up talking to people on one of the worst days of their lives. Something bad had happened to them or to someone they loved, and there I was to ask them all about it. I got a lot of doors slammed in my face. Funny, that hasn’t happened once at a library or bookstore signing.

WNW: What, if anything, do you miss about working in the newspaper business?
Parks: The immediacy. In my old life, when I wrote a story, it was in the newspaper the next day (or online within the hour), and readers would be reacting to it – to love it or hate it – almost instantly. I remember one Valentines’ Day, I wrote a story about a man who loved to dance with his wife and kept dancing with her across 60 years of marriage. She died in the end, of course – hey, I didn’t say it was a happy story – but really it was just a tribute to a beautiful partnership that lasted a lifetime. I got into work the next morning and already had 27 voice mails, and the calls kept coming in all day long. I knew immediately that story had touched people. Now? I’m just putting the finishing touches on a book that will be out in 2012. And I’m about to start writing a book that will come out in 2013. By the time people get a chance to react to a particular passage, I may or may not even remember writing it. That said? I wouldn’t trade my new life for anything. I’m enjoying it way too much.

For more information about Brad Parks, his book Faces of the Gone, and his upcoming books, please visit his website or Twitter page.