Thursday, March 28, 2024 Mar 28, 2024
43° F Dallas, TX
Advertisement
Publications

SWANSON’S WAY

CRITICS LOVE BIG TOWN AND DREAMBOAT, DOUG SWANSON’S DALLAS-BASED DETECTIVE NOVELS. HIS SECRET: SLOW, STEADY WORK-AND DON’T GIVE UP YOUR DAY JOB.
By Carlton Stowers |

IT IS AN EARLY SPRING Saturday morning and Jack Flippo, a down and almost out ex-assistant distric attorney-turned-private eye, is waiting-perhaps to slug it out with yet another ill-tempered bad guy; perhaps to slip into bed with one of the exotic, boozy women who inhabit his world; perhaps simply to see which new turn for the worse his life will take.

On this day, however, there are distractions.

Flippo’s creator, 42-year-old Doug Swanson, currently being acclaimed as one of mystery fiction’s brightest newcomers, is keenly aware that the deadline is drawing near for his third novel featuring Flippo and his Dallas-based exploits. He has planned to spend the weekend with his protagonist.

But at the moment Swanson is standing in the front yard of his Denton home, monitoring the progress his Little Leaguer son Sam, 9, is making as he sells fund-raising candy in the neighborhood. Inside, wife Susan waits for Swanson to return and watch over 5-month-old daughter Katie while she gets away for some overdue grocery shopping. And in the hack yard, Spike and Sherri, the Swanson family’s mixed breed “accidental dogs,”blissfully ignorant of their master’s creative demands, ate barking for weekend attention.

Swanson grins and sips from his coffee cup. “Plenty of good excuses today,” he says.

It is a flippant remark that hides the truth of Swanson’s admirable work ethic. Despite the distractions, the weekend will not end before he has measurably added to the stack of manuscript pages neatly stacked beside the word processor in his home office. And, that done, he’ll report Monday morning to his job as a reporter assigned to the national desk of The Dallas Morning News.

Despite the accolades his fiction has earned-the Crime Writers Association of Great Britain recently named his Big Town winner of the John Creasy memorial award, given annually to the author of the Best First Mystery, and Swanson was among the five finalists for the 1994 Mystery Writers of America Edgar Allen Poe award in the same category-he has no immediate plans to give up his day job.

Swanson, who began his journalism career as a student reporter for the University of Texas campus daily and wound through Biloxi, Mississippi, Corpus Christi, and Miami before he finally settled at the News in 1982, enjoys the immediacy of daily journalism. Whether he’s covering a presidential campaign, the release of boxing champion Mike Tyson from prison, or the horrific tragedy of the Oklahoma City federal building bombing, the frantic pace of newspaper work is in his blood.

“I don’t think,” he says, “I’ll ever get past that feeling one gets from writing something one day and finding it printed and on the doorstep the following morning.”

Which is to say that Swanson is, for now, quite comfortable straddling the boundary between newspaper journalism and hard-boiled fiction. “What 1 do, I suppose, comes from different parts of the brain,” he says. He’s also a realist. He’s garnered excellent reviews, signed a new contract with his publisher, optioned Big Town to a movie production company, and seen his novels published in England and Japan, hut Swanson remains light-years removed from the rare financial success of the John Grishams of the literary world.

“What Doug has accomplished already,” says his editor at Harper Colins, Eamon Dolan, “has been impressive, but in the mystery genre it takes time and patience for a writer to really establish himself. Big Town sold reasonably well for a first novel [the hardback, according to Swan-son, sold something between 4,000 and 5,000 copies] and Dreamboat is selling better.” He’s not talking celestial figures, mind you, but Dolan points out that another of his authors, best-seller Tony Hillerman, didn’t make it into the five-figure sales range until his seventh book.

Such is the course of what the industry refers to as “genre fiction,” which depends heavily on sales at specialty book stores.

Says Carol Ann Luby, assistant manager at Dallas’ Mystery Book Store, “Doug’s books are selling very well here, both in hardback and in paperback. He’s got a wonderful talent for being gutsy, tough, and really funny, sometimes all on the same page. And, of course, the fact that he uses Dallas as the setting has added greatly to his local popularity.”

“For a long time,” says Swanson, whose journalism efforts have seen him honored as a Pulitzer finalist for feature writing in 1981 and as the Austin Headliner Club’s Texas Reporter of the Year in ’86, “I’ve wanted to write fiction. I came to a point where 1 would find myself getting depressed in the evenings, realizing that another day had passed without my having started a novel. I began to really crucify myself for not getting on with it. But it never occurred to me that if and when I did get started it would be on a mystery. In fact, aside from reading a lot of Raymond Chandler when I was in college and Elmore Leonard in later years, I’d never been an avid consumer of mysteries.”

Once committed, Swanson made the logical decision that it was foolish to write the kind of novel that wasn’t likely to sell. And what has resulted is fond comparison to such mystery masters as Leonard and Robert B. Parker.

Big Town, to be sure, wasn’t exactly written at a fevered pace. It began, Swanson remembers, in 1988 in an Orlando, Florida Travel Lodge and was finally completed in 1992 in a Sheraton in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. “I started writing it while covering one presidential campaign and finished it while covering another.”

In between he would write on weekends, get up early in the morning and do a few pages before leaving for the office, then polish a scene over a solitary lunch. Far more strait-laced than his protagonist Flippo, Swanson says he’s not a “hang our” sort of person. Co-workers have long since stopped inviting him on excursions to after-work watering holes.

“Even as I was writing Big Town,” Swanson says, “I really had no idea about how the publishing business worked. I figured I would get it written, ship it off to someone, and then wait as long as a year to find out if anybody wanted it.”

Finally, though, impatience set in and he sent four chapters to a New York literary agent. In a matter of weeks the agent contacted Swanson, asking to see the complete novel.

“Of course, I told him I would send it along immediately,” Doug recalls. “What I didn’t bother to tell him was that, while I had finished the book, all but the four chapters I’d sent to him were still in longhand on legal pads.” Taking three weeks of vacation time, he frantically typed the manuscript, rewriting along the way.

What ultimately resulted was a two-book contract with Harper Collins. “Actually,” says editor Dolan, “we publish a very limited amount of mystery fiction. But what Doug is doing is a kind of ’Texas noir’ that is quite remarkable. He’s managed to capture the charming, chilling, highbrow, low-brow, and no-brow of the locale in which he is writing.”

Though Swanson insists it was never his intent to fall into writing a “series,” he is not balking at his publisher’s urgings that he continue telling Flippo stories- despite the fact that he really didn’t care much for Jake when he created him.

“When I wrote Big Town,” Swanson says, “I had no idea that I would ever write another book. So the idea of a series never entered my mind, In fact, 1 can certainly understand writers who feel they’re trapped in their series and come to hate their protagonist. I’m just on my third book and I’m already wondering just how many more old crises Jake can confront, how many ghosts one man can have hanging around in his attic.”

On the other hand, Swanson entertains no thought of taking another course now that his new career has begun to gain momentum.

“I’m still learning what you can and can’t do with fiction,” he says. “So far I ’ve thrown away a lot more pages than I’ve sent to my publisher. But it’s tun to sit around and make up people and situations. Unlike journalism, you can manipulate your story any way that you choose. Hey, if I want to bump someone off, I can just do it. If I want to have a fling with some gorgeous woman, there she is, willing and eager.”

It’s not Chaucer, he says, but it ain’t chopped liver, either. “As a reader I’ve always liked books with fast-moving plots and lots of action. As a writer, 1 like to think I’m putting quality into what I’m doing, I try to write as well as I can within the limitations of the genre in which I’m writing.

“Regardless of the field an author chooses-science fiction, romance, westerns- there are those who are striving to do quality work,” Swanson says. “Some just aren’t taken as seriously as they’d like to he. I read a quote from Elmore Leonard one time that has stayed with me. He said, ’I’ve finally gotten good enough-or had enough- to be on the New York Times best-seller list.’ He was talking about how selectively quality is judged.”

While critics have generally praised Swanson’s books, he particularly enjoyed one recent comment. “The reviewer said some very flattering things about the writing, then closed by pointing out that ’there is not a great deal of intellectual heavy lifting required.’ I have absolutely no argument with that observation. What I’m trying to do is write something that will entertain a reader for two, three, or four hours- and if I can accomplish that I like to think I’ve succeeded in my task.”

“DON’T FORGET THE DEAD”

-an excerpt from Big Town

IN HIS FINAL MONTHS WITH THE DA’s office, Jack had taken three homicide cases to jury trial. One victim was a night clerk at a motel in Oak Cliff, shot in the mouth during a $58 robbery. One was a prostitute, beaten to death in a Texaco rest room when the John discovered she was really a he. Number three was a potato chip delivery man, shot outside a West Dallas store by a kid who was dumb enough to try to escape in a bright red van with a smiling Mister Krisp potato head painted on the side.

For each case Jack had begun his final summation to the jury the same way, The dead, he said, don’t forget the dead. Remember the ones in the ground who can’t speak for themselves. And then Jack had tried to make the jury see a human being like themselves, someone whose death demanded justice. That was easy enough with the clerk and the potato chip route man. They were hard workers with families and dreams, snuffed for a few bucks. But as a general rule in Dallas County, Texas, it was hard to give a jury the weeps over across-dressing hooker. You hoped for some kind of redeeming factor. Maybe the hooker was supporting a retarded brother at home, something like that.

Related Articles

Local News

LeadingOff (3/28/24)

It's a beautiful day for some baseball.
Image
Travel

Is Fort Worth Really ‘The New Austin’?

The Times of London tells us it's now the coolest city in Texas.
Image
Dallas 500

Meet the Dallas 500: Chakri Gottemukkala, o9 Solutions

The o9 solutions leader talks about garnering a $3.7 billion valuation, growing 10x over the next few years, and how the company is innovating.
Advertisement