S.G. Browne

Meet my monkey. He’s going to be accompanying me around San Francisco as I promote my newest novel Lucky Bastard, on bookshelves April 17. We’ll be visiting and blogging about all the places frequented by Lucky Bastard’s main character Nick Monday—a private investigator, luck poacher, and corporate coffeehouse whore. That’s my monkey on the left, sitting on a barrel out in front of O’Reilly’s Irish Pub in North Beach, which is one of the locations that appears in the novel.

Why a monkey? Because monkeys are funny. Just the name “monkey” is funny. Say it out loud. I dare you not to laugh. See? I told you so. But what makes this monkey relevant is that I just so happen to have an eBook exclusive collection of short stories coming out on March 27, entitled Shooting Monkeys in a Barrel. The problem is, my monkey needs a name.

So what’s this all about? Well, a giveaway, of course. And what am I giving away?

• Signed collection of my books (Breathers, Fated, Lucky Bastard)
• eBook of Shooting Monkeys in a Barrel
• $50 gift card to Apple iBookstore, Barnes & Noble or Amazon (your choice)

So how can you enter? All you have to do is pre-order a copy of Lucky Bastard, follow me and my monkey through my blog posts, and then suggest a name by entering the Sweepstakes through my Facebook Author Page. (Unfortunately, I’m not able to accept contest entries left here on this blog post. Sorry.)

Only persons residing in the United States who are at least 18 years of age can enter. Contest runs through April 16, 2012 at 11:56pm PST. Check out the Official Rules.

And good luck!

When I started writing Lucky Bastard in the spring of 2009, my main character was named Jon Rolli. I wasn’t thrilled with the name but it held him in place. Once I finally made him a private detective, I decided he needed another name. Something that suited him better. Something with a little more panache.

Back in 1991, I wrote a screenplay titled A Fish Out of Water—an Airplane! and The Naked Gun inspired comedy spoof about a private detective in Chicago dealing with corrupt developers while trying to find a rare, stolen Australian myna bird purchased from a specialty hybrid pet store called The Fish Out of Water Pet Shop. That’s the screenplay over there on the left.

The script includes a lot of word play and silliness and characters with names like Nick Monday, Warren Peace, Sandy Beach, Al Chemy, and a band named Umbilical Dan and the Chords. Nothing ever came of the script, but I always liked the name Nick Monday, so I stole it from my Chicago detective and gave it to my luck stealing P.I. in San Francisco. I also took the name of the female lead in the script, Tuesday Knight, and gave it to my main femme fatale in Lucky Bastard.

Even though they share the same name, the Nick Monday in my screenplay and the Nick Monday in my novel are two completely different people. In A Fish Out of Water he’s easily confused, honest, and rarely gets laid, while in Lucky Bastard, he’s competent, steals luck, and has sex more often than Charlie Sheen. He’s also developed some repetitive consumptive behaviors that, while not destructive, are a definite by-product of his lifestyle.

Cappuccinos. Apple fritters. Lucky Charms.
Mochas. Mentos. Corporate-coffeehouse baristas.
Just to name a few.

And while you might think someone who was born with the ability to poach luck would live in a Pacific Heights mansion or own a place in Nob Hill, luck poachers live a nomadic lifestyle and often have to pick up and leave at a moment’s notice. Plus, there are definite karmic consequences to stealing someone else’s good fortune.

So even though Nick lives in The Marina neighborhood, with it’s Art Deco buildings and views of the Golden Gate Bridge and abundance of attractive Kens and Barbies decorating the cafes and bars, Nick ended up with something less than what he’s grown accustomed to:

I live in a studio on the third floor of a four-story building on Lombard Street, next to a dry cleaner’s, across from a transient motel, and just this side of dilapidated. Not my first choice for living accommodations, but sometimes you take what you can get. Or go where your mistakes take you.

Again, I’ve played with reality a bit here, as Nick’s building doesn’t exist in the location I’ve described. But I wanted him to live in The Marina, so I placed his fictional apartment building on Lombard Street across from the Bridge Motel. While The Bridge has recently been “cleaned up,” for years it was a crime-ridden motel whose residents had to deal with bed bugs, rats, and on-site drug deals.

Above on the right is Nick’s view of the Bridge Motel from the front door of his apartment building, where he often finds a homeless person and gets to enjoy the smell of fresh urine. The photo on the immediate left is from the parking lot on the side of the motel, which gives you a better idea of it’s unique neighborhood charm.

When I initially sat down to write Lucky Bastard, all I had was the concept of luck poaching and the novel starting out on the roof of a hotel. I didn’t know where the story would go, how I would get my character back on to the hotel roof, or even my character’s name. I just had twenty pages of an idea with a couple of characters and some potential for plot.

It was around this time in April 2009  that I sold my second novel, Fated, and my agent asked me to send her a synopsis of Lucky Bastard that she could share with my publisher. Which is all well and good if you’re a plotter but when you’re a pantser, writing a synopsis of a novel you haven’t written yet poses a bit of a problem.

After all, how the hell am I supposed to write a synopsis when I don’t have any idea what’s going to happen?

My agent told me to just make up something, so that’s what I did. I made something up. And it started out like this:

Jon Rolli is a private detective who lives in San Francisco with his cat, eats Lucky Charms every morning for breakfast, and has an affinity for corporate coffeehouse baristas. He’s also a luck poacher.

There was another page-and-a-half of gibberish about luck and plot points and other characters, and we’ll get to the name of my protagonist in a minute, but the idea for him to be a private detective popped into my head for a couple of reasons.

One, I’d recently read and critiqued a couple of detective novels written by other members of my writers group. And two, I walked past the building on the right, located at the corner of Fillmore and Filbert, at least a couple of times a week over the previous three years. On the second floor, the one above the defunct Irish bakery, is Immendorf Investigations, Private Detectives. (Click on the photo to enlarge).

At that point, I still wasn’t sure my main character was going to be a private detective. It was just an idea that I thought might be useful. Even nine months later, in early January 2010, with only eighty pages written, he still wasn’t a P.I. (I know this because I save every version of a manuscript I’m working on on as a separate file).

Nick Monday wouldn’t become a private detective until nearly a year after I’d written the synopsis, which is when he would finally get an office at the corner of Sutter and Kearny. On the left you’ll see two buildings. (Again, feel free to click on the image for a larger picture). The one on the far left is the actual building located on that corner. In reality, the offices and units on those five floors are much larger than the cramped 10′ x 10′ office Nick inhabits in Lucky Bastard. As Nick describes his digs:

I have my own little office in downtown San Francisco. And when I say little, I don’t mean in a quaint or a charming kind of way. Like a little cottage or a little eccentric. It’s more like a little hungover. Or a little anorexic.

The building on the right, which is just up Kearny on the other side near Bush Street, is more like the office building I imagine for Nick. But I preferred the sound and feel of him having an office on the corner of Sutter and Kearny rather than near the corner of Kearny and Bush. So I took some creative license with reality and left him there.

As for how Nick Monday got his name, I’ll share that in my next blog post.

Welcome to the final installment of Fiction Friday – Lucky Bastard Edition, where I’m spotlighting the books that influenced the writing of Lucky Bastard. We wrap things up this week with the quintessential detective novel: The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett.

Naturally, the quintessential detective novel deserves the quintessential detective. Enter Sam Spade, the novel’s protagonist who is often considered to be a major influence in the development of the hard-boiled detective genre. Sam Spade is a man’s detective: cold, detached, defiant, and relentless in his pursuit of justice. At least justice as defined by his personal code of ethics.

If you’ve read my other book reviews, you know I’m not going to regurgitate the plot. Rather, I focus on the writing, the characters, and the overall story. And this one has all of that in *cough* spades.

Hammett’s prose is sparse and economical, and his dialogue is fast and to the point. Although I admit that I occasionally found some of his dialogue to be a little overly dramatic, but it’s a small criticism. His style fits the genre perfectly and he does a great job of capturing the mood of San Francisco in the late 1920s.

In addition to Sam Spade, who alone is worth the read, The Maltese Falcon is populated with classic characters: tough guys, cops, gangsters, and a femme fatale who are all sharply defined. And the story, which begins with the death of Spade’s partner and ends with the revelation of who killed him, is a well-constructed, intertwined plot that involves murder, betrayal, and, of course, the titular valuable figurine.

While I personally don’t find Hammett’s prose to be as engaging as Raymond Chandler’s, the writing is solid, the plot intriguing, and the characters well defined and mysterious. If you’re looking to take a crack at your first detective novel, you can’t go wrong with this one.

“It’s my understanding that naked women don’t generally tend to carry knives.”

That’s the opening line to my third novel, Lucky Bastard—a detective/noir/comedy/satire that takes place over the course of a single day in San Francisco.

Since I live in San Francisco, I thought it would be fun to take a virtual tour of the locations that factor prominently in Lucky Bastard and the inspirations behind how the book came to be written. Then I had the idea to add pictures.

Thus was born the Lucky Bastard San Francisco Blog Tour! (Cue the trumpets and orchestral music.)

Since all books have to start with Chapter One, that seems like a good place to kick things off. To quote James Lipton: We start, as always, at the beginning.

Lucky Bastard opens on the roof of the Sir Francis Drake Hotel in Union Square, with our hero, Nick Monday, being threatened by an unidentified angry, naked woman holding an eight-inch carving knife. That’s the view from Powell Street of the Sir Francis Drake, known by locals as “The Drake,” on your right. They wouldn’t let me on the roof to take pictures for liability reasons. And I couldn’t find a woman willing to remove her clothes and menace me with a carving knife. So you’ll have to settle for this view, instead.

So what made me decide to start my novel out on the roof of a hotel? And why did I pick The Drake?

Lucky Bastard started out as a writing exercise for my writers group back in July of 2006. I can’t remember what the exercise was, but the opening line just popped into my head and I followed it up with a one page scene about a guy on the roof of some generic hotel and a naked woman holding a knife. That was pretty much it. I had no idea how he got up there or why the woman had the knife. It’s just what showed up on the page.

I didn’t do anything more with the scene until March of 2007. At the time I was working on my second novel Fated when  an idea popped into my head of what to do with that guy on the roof. So I sat down and wrote twenty pages of a novel that was loosely based on a short story about luck titled “Softland” that I’d written back in 2004. Which, by the way, you can read in my upcoming e-book collection Shooting Monkeys in a Barrel.

Another two years went by before I picked up those twenty pages and decided to see where the story wanted to go. For those who aren’t familiar with the way I write, I don’t plot out my stories. I’m a pantser. I write by the seat of my pants, discovering the story as I go along. Although the book starts on the roof of a hotel, that’s not the story. The story is everything that came before that opening scene. So I had to figure out how to get my protagonist back up on the hotel roof.

The first thing I needed to do was pick a hotel. While I’d set the novel in San Francisco, I hadn’t given the hotel a name, so I went out in search of one located in or around Union Square. The Chancellor Hotel had the right look and the colorful local history, but at fifteen stories it wasn’t tall enough for me. And while the Marriott and the Grand Hyatt were both over thirty stories tall, they lacked a certain panache.

So I decided on The Drake. One, it had the right look and feel. Two, having been built in 1928 it had the local history. Three, at twenty-one stories tall it was the right height. And four, it had something none of the other hotels could match: Beefeater doormen.

In addition to the architecture and the height and the Beefeaters, sitting atop The Drake is Harry Denton’s Starlight Room—a nightclub with a 360-degree view and 1930’s style throwback that I thought might turn out to be a useful setting at some future point in the novel. And I was right. It most definitely was useful.

But that’s another blog post.

If you’d like to read Chapter 1 of Lucky Bastard, you can check it out here.