THE DON BRUNS INTERVIEW:

BARBADOS HEAT

McDonald: Michael Jackson was arrested yesterday; Phil Spector was charged with murder the same day — it seems excellent timing to be releasing a novel about the sordid lives of recording artists. Are those cases something you might use as source material for future books?

Bruns: When the first novel came out, Jamaica Blue, about a Rastafarian band in which murder follows them everywhere they go, at the same time, they caught the two snipers in Washington, D.C., and there was this whole back story about a Jamaican Rastafarian band and that Malvo and his partner were following the lyrics of this band. I said, "Oh my God, that’s exactly what this story (Jamaica Blue) is about." I think like most mystery themes, there’s something out there that’s real that happens either before or after.

McDonald: Fox News crops up here and there in Barbados Heat. Was the recent Bill O’Reilly crusade against Ludacris on your radar or in any way a trigger for the novel?

Bruns: (Chuckling) My son works for Fox News in Washington, D.C., so I threw that in there. My son was working the news desk — the only one in the office — the night they captured the snipers. He was brand new, had just graduated from Ohio State, and he had to orchestrate the coverage from Fox News’ point of view. I thought about that afterward — O’Reilly — but it had more to do with my son than anything else.

McDonald: There is much debate among characters in Barbados Heat about the culture — the romanticizing — of guns, sexual violence and misogyny within the Rap recording world. Are these conflicting arguments reflective of your own ambivalence to Rap’s treatment of these subjects, or is there a character whose side of the argument you firmly fall on?

Bruns: That’s a good question. I don’t want to see any form of art sterilized. I also have a lot of problems with some of it. I like all forms of art — I’ve always considered myself to be somewhat creative and enjoy the creative world — but I guess I’m in between. I feel like Sever did: I can’t say that it shouldn’t be done but I can’t say that I necessarily agree with it. I just have to be in the middle on it.

McDonald: The character T-Beau in Barbados Heat observes that rappers are writing what they know — "gangbangers, whores, thieves."

Bruns: I believe that. I think you have to go with that. I think some of these guys had such nasty childhoods. If you can make a living with that, then do it, I guess.

McDonald: But the concern would be many of these kids don’t have those lives, but then they see these artists and the rewards they reap glorifying those kinds of behavior and try to emulate that.

Bruns: Sure. Sure, that’s always going to happen: The kid who grows up on the west side tries to sound like he’s off the streets.

McDonald: Did you listen to a lot of Rap music in order to write the book?

Bruns: I did, I did. I watched a lot of Black Entertainment Television and watched a lot of interviews with these guys. It’s wonderful now, with cable and the Internet you can immediately find all this stuff. And I did. I printed out a lot of Rap lyrics from the Internet. Then, when I wrote my Rap lyrics for the songs (in Barbados Heat), I had eight or as many as 12 references to real songs in the book — I had a Paul Simon song, I had a James Taylor song. The legal department cleared all of those in terms of how much I had used of the lyrics and it wasn’t enough to get us into trouble or where I would be sued. But I got a note back from the editor saying there were like five or six bits of lyrics in here — you can’t use these.

McDonald: They thought you’d lifted them from somewhere?

Bruns: I wrote back and said, "I wrote those." I felt kind of good about that. It made me think I could maybe actually write some of these lyrics.

McDonald: You have a recording background. Your publicist’s sheet notes you opened for Ray Charles, the Platters and Redd Foxx, among others….

Bruns: I had a partner. We met in college. We went on the road for about six years and we did a two-man standup. I did a solo act for a long time after that and I still play once in a while. About three years ago I put out a CD of original stuff that I just self-published. But I’m really proud of it. It’s a good CD and I take it along at some of the signings and if people are interested we give it to ’em with the book.

McDonald: How would you describe your music? I checked out a discography at Amazon.com and I can make some guesses from the titles, but….

Bruns: People say it’s a little bit like (Jimmy) Buffett. It’s got a Caribbean flavor to it. It’s got a country/rock kind of feel to it. I never tried to pattern it after anyone. They are more ballads. Even the up-tempo stuff has got more of a ballad feel, I think. It’s the kind of stuff I like. I was kind of a Folkie — I go back to that time.

McDonald: I saw on your Web site that a couple of the songs have been covered by other artists. I wondered who they are?

Bruns: Nobody you would ever have heard of. Brand new artists who have not yet, or never will, make a name for themselves. I got excited, because one of them was out of Los Angeles and she was signing with a subsidiary of Capital, I think. It was a year-and-a-half ago and nothing has ever happened, so I’m guessing it didn’t take off. I didn’t solicit anything. I got a call, and they said, "We want to use this song and here is the royalty arrangement we will pay you."

McDonald: You also run an ad agency. You’re pretty diversified.

Bruns: The ad agency thing is funny. I’ve done that for 23 years. I have a company called "Adman" and we do traditional advertising. But we started 23 years ago writing messages on telephone systems. We called it "Hold It Systems." That’s the name of the organization. We think that we probably invented, on a national level, messages on telephones. So if you hate that….

McDonald: Damn you!

Bruns: I know, I know. We’re kind of like billboards on a highway, though: Pretty soon, if there’s nothing there, you say, "Wait a minute! Where are my messages?" The thing is, I do a lot of the talent and a lot of the writing. We have 13 people who work there, so it’s not just me. I learned how to write 15-second and 30-second soundbytes. I do it well. I can keep the excitement in it, yet I can get down to the meat real fast. I think that has helped in writing. There have been critiques on my style and they say it’s "fast-paced" and "it’s short." It’s in bites you can grab ahold of and I think that’s because of the advertising background. I think that has helped in my writing style. There are too many writers who over do it. They’re over-flowery and they spend much too much time on something. I’m sure I have problems, but I think that a lot of the writing style I have is based on writing advertising copy.

McDonald: It’s very propulsive. Did you try to write anything out of genre before you attempted crime fiction?

Bruns: I wrote a lot of technical stuff. I’ve written articles for a lot of magazines — advertising-related and marketing-related columns. I used to be a regular contributor for a national publication that went to all of the appliance dealers in the country. I wrote my first short story when I was 9 and sent it to Alfred Hitchcock Magazine. They didn’t buy it.

McDonald: So you were looking at the genre from the get-go?

Bruns: Oh, from the time I was a little kid, I was reading Ellery Queen and all of that stuff. It’s always been my favorite genre.

McDonald: I take it since you made this bid for Sue Grafton’s editing services at a convention in Tucson that you were moving around the edges of the crime fiction scene in terms of the conventions….

Bruns: A buddy of mine named Jay Wagner, who teaches with my wife, came up to me about six years ago and said, "Hey, there’s national mystery writer’s convention — do you want to go?" And I said, "Sure, let’s go." He knew I had been playing with the idea of a book at that time. The people you have interviewed I have gotten to know real well. Some of these guys, I have their phone numbers and we can pick up and talk to one another and it’s really a lot of fun. These are guys I have admired for years — people like Michael Connelly and Dennis Lehane and Harlan Coben and on and on and on. It was a thrill to me when last March I was at a convention in Boca Raton called "SleuthFest" and I’m sitting at a table talking to a couple of well-known writers and Sue Grafton walks over and throws her arms around me and kisses me on the cheek. The whole table looks at me like, "Who are you to have Sue Grafton giving you that kind of attention?" It was a lot of fun and a lot of networking we did over that six years. And it’s helped. There is no friendlier group of people. No group gives more to struggling new people than this group of people. They are just so excited when somebody in their ranks makes it big or when somebody new comes along.

McDonald: I’ve always been somewhat surprised by just how genial and amiable crime writers seem to be. You move into other genres, or out of genres, and the writers are extremely competitive and often seem to truly despise one another.

Bruns: Yeah…. They say that Romance writers tend to be that way — real vindictive and real hateful. I’m not saying that — "they" say that. But mystery writers, to a one, are just so into each other and so helpful and they love to sit around and discuss the business.

McDonald: How much of your first book — that draft that Grafton critiqued so heavily — found its way into your first published novel?

Bruns: I really started from scratch. I used Ginny and Sever in Jamacia Blue. I probably took three chapters of out of that — chapters that I liked and that she (Grafton) had had praise for. It was an interview down in No Name Key — a former boyfriend of hers where he has to go down and confront this guy about some things. It was so colorful and I love the Keys so much, and I wanted to bring that flavor in so I was able to use a whole lot of that, but that’s it. I pitched a lot of it. Grafton said, "Don’t give me that crap: I wrote five books and I didn’t publish any of them." She said, "If you can’t write one more then you shouldn’t be doing this," and I said, "She’s right." So I totally pitched it and decided 90-percent of it wasn’t worth saving.

McDonald: Was the writing of Barbados Heat any easier than the first couple swings at your first novel? Are you falling into a rhythm?

Bruns: Number three, which I just turned in and is going through a little revision — not much — was maybe a little bit easier. Barbados Heat? No, I didn’t think so. And I’m not sure I want it to become easy. I want to struggle with it a little bit. I want to sit back and think, "Jeez, have I forgotten something?" I’m not comfortable with having a "rhythm" in that respect. I don’t like it when I’m writing songs and I don’t like it when I’m writing ad copy. If I write out five or six pieces of ad copy in a morning and I just pitch ’em out there then I feel like maybe I’m not doing my job because it shouldn’t be that easy.

McDonald: Are you an outliner?

Bruns: No. I know in my head where it’s going. Barbados Heat — I was a little surprised and maybe I shouldn’t have been. I wasn’t sure, but at the end I was a little surprised.

McDonald: The third book is another Mick Sever book, I take it? You’re in this for a series?

Bruns: Yeah. I’ve got a couple nonfiction ideas, but I want to do this until at least it’s established enough that my editor, agent and whatever fan base I have, says, "Keep going," or "That’s enough." The problem is, you’re really two books beyond whatever is out. I mean, I’ll be starting number four, and so on your second book, three weeks out, you really don’t know — no clue — what’s going to happen. I don’t know how well it is going to be received. We’re just now starting to get reviews from the newspapers and the real readers out there, so we’ll see.

McDonald: You live in Lima, Ohio, but also have a place in Florida?

Bruns: We have another house in Sarasota.

McDonald: Do you have a favorite place in Florida?

Bruns: I did a lot of advertising for a company called Key West Aloe until they sold about three years ago. For almost 20 years, I did all of their radio advertising. So, I had a lot of opportunities to go down to Key West. I just really got comfortable with it. I got to watch it grow over the years. I’m not really happy with that, but it’s a neat place and I know a lot of people down there. When I first started doing the advertising, I did it from Ohio and had never been down there. I met somebody who put me in touch with the owners (of Key West Aloe). This is a company that makes suntan lotion and cosmetics of all kinds. They’re regionally pocketed around the country. They have places in Hawaii and some other major cities. About a year-and-a-half into doing their radio commercials, my wife and I had a chance to go down there. My wife and I went down to visit her folks in Fort Myers and I grabbed a plane and flew down to Key West, never having been there. I was just so taken with that island. Just so laid back, and so hedonistic, in some areas. There’s so much art. It’s a great, wonderful island and the people are so cool. I rented a car and drove down to the Southern Most Point. At that time it was just a little wooden sign. Now they have a huge concrete, buoy-kind of thing. It was just a little hand-painted sign that said "90 miles to Cuba." I get out of the car, and the engine is still running with the door open. I look out over the water and think, "Is this so cool?" And all of the sudden, I came on the radio, doing a commercial. All these guys and girls in my time had gone off to "find themselves," you know. And I "found" myself — I was down in Key West, on the radio.

McDonald: You have a picture on your Web site taken of you with Gregorio Fuentes, Ernest Hemingway’s first mate on the Pilar and the model for the Old Man in The Old Man and the Sea. How’d that meeting come about?

Bruns: That was so neat. I went from Jamaica, about five years ago, to Cuba. I wanted to do a Hemingway Quest. God, what a trip — unbelievable. I could talk hours about that. But, the basic thing, I went over and got a taxi driver take me down to Obispo to start the whole thing. I went to the Floridita first, where Hemingway basically invented the daiquiris. I got to experience that whole thing and sat at the bar and talked to some old men. I speak a little Spanish, not much. I played with a band that afternoon down in a bar on Obispo Street. It was a little acoustical band. We spent like three hours and people were just jammed on the street looking in. I said, "You guys are really popular." The guy said, "No, they know an American is in here playing and they want to come and watch." They were doing ’50s songs. We’d trade licks on Paul Anka songs and stuff like that. They were sort of mired in the 1950s.

McDonald: Including their cars.

Bruns: Oh yeah. You see the pictures, but you think, "Oh, they’ve picked and chosen." But, no. There are a lot of old Russian rust traps there, but any American car — you know, it’s a ’56, ’57 Chevy, a Ford, the Harleys and they keep ’em immaculate, and how they keep them running nobody knows…. Where do they get the parts? Anyway, I found a taxi driver to take me to Cojimar. I walked the streets and it was so romantic. It was just a desolate little fishing village in the middle of nowhere and the restaurant where the old man and the kid in the novel hung out before and after the fishing experience itself is still there. It’s Sunday morning and I’m there, asking people if they knew where Gregorio Fuentes had lived because I didn’t know he was still alive. Finally, some guy understood me and took me and pointed his house out to me. I went up and knocked on the door and this 76-year-old lady answers the door and she speaks English — she spoke it well — and I said, "Is this where Gregorio Fuentes lived?" She says, "Come in" and then yells, "Gregorio!"

This old man comes out. He’s bent over and he’s got pre-cancerous growths on his face and he has this hat on that says "El Capitan." She tells him in Spanish I’m there because of Hemingway and he goes back in the kitchen and brings out this fishing rod and it was, God, 12 feet tall, I swear, and he sits down and he pulls out a photo album. I sit down next to him and he starts showing me pictures of he and Hemingway with this fishing rod on the Pilar. I asked him questions for 25 minutes. His daughter translated — this 76-year-old woman.

McDonald: His 76-year-old daughter.…

Bruns: He was 102 at the time. Finally, the last thing, he’s there, and he’s got these cigars in his pocket. And I said, "What kind of cigars do you smoke?" He didn’t wait for the translation. He said, "Monte Cristo." His daughter looked at me and said, "He smokes too much." I said, "Ma’am, he’s 102 years old — give me a break." I went down to the restaurant and I was just walking on a cloud. I thought, "What a great way to finish this trip — to actually interview this guy." I walk into the restaurant and it’s noon on a Sunday. Not a soul is there. Just the barmaid and the bartender. I ordered a Coke, and a guy walked in. I’m in a country that I’m not allowed to be in, I know nobody, but I know this guy.

McDonald: No kidding?

Bruns: I looked at him, and I thought, "Wait a minute." It’s Michael Palin of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. I walked over and said, "My God, what are you doing here?" He said, "What are you doing here?" I said, "I’m here on a Hemingway thing." He said, "So am I. I’ve got the BBC outside and we’re doing a tour. We’re going to go up and see the Old Man." I said, "I just came from there." He said, "Sit down, I’ll buy you a beer. Let’s talk about it — I want to know a little bit about what happened." So I got to spend 20 minutes with Michael Palin, too. It was a very cool trip.

McDonald: Hemingway and liquor tend to be linked in many minds. I notice you have these mixology instructions for drinks bearing your book’s names on your Web site.

Bruns: Yeah. When Jamaica Blue came out, I had a friend who said, "Why don’t you have a drink named that — that’s a great drink name. So he came up with a drink recipe. When we did Barbados Heat,, I called a bar down in Sarasota because a lot of the book takes place there. I got this barmaid, Cat, at Fred’s. I told her what I wanted and she said, "I’m going to call you back in a couple hours." I was calling about 8 or 9 p.m. She calls me back at about 11 o’clock and she said, "I think have a bar full of drunks. We have tried at least 12 different recipes and this is the one we settled on." She said, "We’ve never had so much fun — we sat here and invented this thing."

McDonald: You also have an interest in a rare book store in Lima. Are you a book collector yourself?

Bruns: Oh yes. I am, I am. I do collect Hemingway. I do collect Mark Twain first editions. For about eight years, I have belonged to a first edition, first writer mystery club from a lady at one of the leading independent bookstores called The Poisoned Pen.

McDonald: Ah yes, out of Scottsdale (Arizona).

Bruns: Yeah. Barbara has been a big help in my career too — really pushed me and helped. But she has this wonderful ability to read 400 books a day. Now, she does: she just reads, reads, reads, and runs a very successful business, and plus, they now publish 26 books a year, maybe. She reads all of these new authors and then she gets them to sign them and she sends them out. She’s got 120 members in this club. I don’t read it all, because there’s way too much stuff that comes in. But this buddy of mine who travels with me on this convention circuit, we compare notes and a lot of these books are worth $300 or $400 on the collector’s market now. A lot of these authors have gone on to become successful, so that’s been a real nice thing.

McDonald: You’ve also got a shorter work coming up in an anthology, right?

Bruns: Yeah, yeah.

McDonald: Have you written many short stories?

Bruns: No, in real terms, I wrote the one when I was 9-years-old, and now this one. A lady named Claudia Bishop — Mary Stanton is her real name — she writes culinary mysteries and works for Berkley Prime Crime. She came up to me in Florida and she had read Jamacia Blue and liked the idea of the Rock ’n Roll tie-in. She said, "Why don’t you write a short story for this next anthology?" I don’t know what the title is going to be, but it’s coming out in April or May of next year.

McDonald: I’m wondering how you approach a book signing, given the fact that you’ve got this performance background. Anything unusual you do?

Bruns: When I started, I thought it would be neat to take a guitar along. But signings are so strange. Yesterday, I did a signing at a Barnes & Noble in Birmingham. It was strictly a stock signing and people walked through, but they’d not advertised it and I knew that coming in. But they had quite a few books there. They had sold a lot last year and they felt really good about the new one. While I was there, I sold some books to people who just came over to see what was going on. Last night was an hour performance. I didn’t know at the time that I’m prepared to do little stories. I did the Hemingway story — I fleshed it out a little bit. I had a story I came up with about two or three weeks ago about my grandfather, who loved smoking Monte Cristos and finding the Old Man, who smoked Monte Cristos and about how cigars played a part in both my books, and they do. I love the romance of a cigar and I think a lot of it is to try and preserve memories of people in my life. I find myself doing that with other characters. I think I’m a good entertainer. I think I can take any given situation — any crowd, or no crowd — and I can work it very well. It’s a natural thing because I’ve done it for so many years and I’m never thrown off.

McDonald: You’re actually recording your own books now?

Bruns: My publisher actually sold the recording rights to Jamacia Blue to Blackstone Audio in Oregon. I had my agent call Blackstone and ask, "Could Don do the book?" They came back with an emphatic, "Absolutely not. We don’t have authors read. We just don’t do that. They’re just notoriously bad…they don’t get it." So I sent them three chapters, anyway. They came back and said, "You can read your book, and would you be interested in doing some other ones." So that was kind of cool. I did it in my studio. It was kind of fun to go through that process. It was fun to see the editing process. It’s different. You get a cassette back, and a sheet, and you listen and the sheet tells you what page to turn to. You listen to the cassette and you hear how you did it. Then you read the note on how you should have done it. They sent me back three pages — 26 editing problems. I thought, "God, I can’t believe I screwed that up that badly. I listened, and, sure enough, there were things — I mispronounced a word…I slurred one…I missed three lines somewhere. I really felt bad and I called them back to apologize to the guy who had done the editing. He said, "Don, the majority of our readers will get 18 to 25 pages back. You only had three."

© November 2003 by C. McDonald

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