S.G. Browne

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.

Welcome to Fiction Friday: Lucky Bastard Edition, where I’m spotlighting the novels that influenced and inspired the writing of Lucky Bastard.

Last week I interviewed Ian M. Dudley, author of Marlowe and the Spacewoman. In Dudley’s novel, the main character is a futuristic clone who has taken on the identify of a famous fictional detective. In The Big Sleep, written by Raymond Chandler more than 70 years ago, the real Philip Marlowe makes his literary debut.

First, a little background:

Prior to writing Lucky Bastard, I hadn’t read a lot of detective fiction. And what I had read was years ago and mostly forgettable. But as I’d decided to make Nick Monday, my main character, a private detective, I thought it would be a good idea to do a little reading research before I got started.

On the advice of a couple of members of my writers’ group, who had both written novels that featured private detectives as protagonists and contained some mystery/noir elements, the first book I picked up was Raymond Chandler’s debut novel written in 1939. And if The Big Sleep is the only book I would have read, I wouldn’t have gone wrong.

I was hooked on the first page. The narrative voice, humor, style, and tone pulled me in like a pair of inviting arms and held me in their embrace.

Without getting into any plot details: the story moves along at a brisk pace and the mystery unfolds page by page, keeping you turning them, until you arrive at a satisfying conclusion and can’t wait to pick up another Chandler novel and get back into the world of Philip Marlowe.

Even though the plot is compelling and the story well-crafted, it’s the writing that brings you back. Chandler has a knack for narrative drive and creating characters and writing dialogue that seems like it could have happened. And it never gets dull.

While I didn’t know much about Chandler before I read The Big Sleep, I’ve learned that he is considered one of the fathers of hard-boiled detective fiction and has had an immense influence on other writers of the genre. Consider me influenced.

Purchase The Big Sleep at:

• Indiebound
• Barnes & Noble
• Amazon.com

I’m proud to announce the (almost) two month countdown to the publication of my third novel, Lucky Bastard, which is scheduled for release on April 17 in hardback and e-book. I’ve marked the occasion by publishing information for the novel on my web site, including:

Synopsis
Cast of Characters
Reviews
Chapter 1 Sneak Peek

And, of course, at the bottom of each page I’ve included links for various sites where you can pre-order a copy.

Over the next couple of months, I’ll be blogging about the book, how it came about, and taking pictures of various locations throughout San Francisco that appear in the book and giving some background on the writing of the novel as it relates to those locations.

Also, since I found inspiration from a number of authors and novels in the writing of Lucky Bastard, I’ll be spotlighting the novels that influenced me in a series of blog posts on Fiction Fridays.

*          *          *          *          *

In addition to the upcoming release of Lucky Bastard, I’m excited to announce the impending e-publication of my first collection of short stories, Shooting Monkeys in a Barrel, an original e-book of ten dark and twisted humorous tales scheduled for release on March 27.

Shooting Monkeys in a Barrel is a mix of never-before-published tales and stories that have appeared previously in print anthologies, all gathered together for the first time. It includes stories about extraterrestrial sex toys, a group of professional guinea pigs, a zombie gigolo, and a reality TV show starring the Seven Deadly Sins. It also contains the stories that gave birth to both Lucky Bastard and Breathers.

If you’d like to learn more about the stories included in Shooting Monkeys in a Barrel, or if you’d like to pre-order it for your Nook or Kindle, just click on the image for the book cover. Or just CLICK HERE.

Here’s the preliminary schedule for where I’ll be appearing for Lucky Bastard. I’ve added dates the first week of May in OR and WA. More dates are forthcoming, so stay tuned!

April 17 – San Francisco, CA
7:30PM – Reading & Signing
The Booksmith
1644 Haight St.
San Francisco, CA

April 20 – Redondo Beach, CA
7:30PM – Reading & Signing
Mysterious Galaxy Bookstore
2810 Artesia Blvd.
Redondo Beach, CA

April 24 – San Diego, CA
7:00PM – Reading & Signing
Mysterious Galaxy Bookstore
7051 Clairemont Mesa Blvd., Suite #302
San Diego, CA

April 28 – Capitola, CA
6:30PM – Interview & Signing
Capitola Book Cafe
1475 41st Avenue
Capitola, CA

May 1 – Beaverton, OR
7:00PM – Reading & Signing
Powell’s Books @ Cedar Hills Crossing
3415 SW Cedar Hills Blvd.
Beaverton, OR

May 4 – Seattle, WA (*NEW LOCATION)
7:00PM – Signing
Ravenna Third Place Books
6504 20th Ave. NE
Seattle, WA

May 5 – Seattle, WA
4:00PM to 6:00PM – Interview
Book Date at the JewelBox Theater
2322 2nd Avenue
Seattle, WA