S.G. Browne

Unfortunately, I’ve been laid up with the flu since St. Patrick’s Day and haven’t had a chance to take my monkey out to play. Yes, I know how that sounds. Yes, I said it on purpose. You see now why I chose a monkey.

In any case, I’ve been trapped in my apartment for four days and haven’t been able to take my Monkey-Who-Has-Yet-To-Be-Named around San Francisco with me to visit the places that appear in Lucky Bastard. Fortunately, I already took pictures of most of the locations sans monkey, which just means I’ll have to get a little creative.

For this installment of the Lucky Bastard San Francisco Blog Tour, we’re going to O’Reilly’s Irish Pub in North Beach, located right across from the Green Street Mortuary. Just in case you need one-stop shopping. O’Reilly’s is a great place to grab a pint or three of Guinness while grubbing on some fish ‘n chips or corned beef and cabbage.

The centerpiece of O’Reilly’s is a thirty- foot long mahogany bar with a fifteen- foot tall back bar decorated with pillars and antique Celtic stained glass panels. Opposite the bar, the walls and drinking nooks are plastered with old photos and framed pictures of Ireland and Irish celebrities, the shelves above filled with Irish memorabilia. And covering the corner walls at the back of the bar is a hand-painted mural of famous Irish writers, including W. B Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, Samuel Beckett, and James Joyce (not shown).

The scene that occurs here in Lucky Bastard takes place in Chapter 29, when Nick Monday meets Tuesday Knight to discuss…well, I can’t tell you what they’re going to discuss because that would be a spoiler. But I can tell you that they sit in the back of the bar near the mural (by Oscar Wilde, actually). And when Nick orders his drinks, he stands at the bar in front of a small brass plate that reads: THIS SEAT IS RESERVED FOR CHOCOLATE DICK.

Apparently, a regular customer named Dick brings chocolate with him whenever he comes to the bar and shares the chocolate with the bartenders. So he has his own place reserved for him. No, I’m not making this up.

How Nick and Tuesday ended up at O’Reilly’s wasn’t planned out in advance. It’s just the way the story unfolded as I wrote it, where the characters told me they wanted to go, so there wasn’t any devised plan for them to meet there. But I can’t say I didn’t enjoy the research.

By the way, if you didn’t notice my monkey Photoshopped into the mural of famous Irish writers, then you weren’t paying attention.

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.