Interview with Thomas Pluck, author of Bad Boy Boogie
1. Tell us about your first book.
Blade of Dishonor was a challenge from editor David Cranmer, who
liked my fighting background and suggested I write a story about a
"fighter vs ninjas over a stolen sword." The idea captivated me, I
grew up on the lurid and over the top action and martial arts films
from Cannon Group, the Shaw Brothers, and the Lone Wolf and Cub
"samurai baby cart" movies, and my great-uncles all served in World
War II. Then I read an article about the most treasured Masamune
katana disappearing after the war ended in 1945, and the exploits
of the Devil's Brigade, and the story wrote itself.
2. You are an author of more than fifty published short stories. Why
did you choose this format?
Walk before you run. Short stories leave little room for error, you
need to grab the reader quickly, and you learn story structure. I
wrote after college but gave up after spending a ton on postage and
never hearing back from lit journals. I had a crime story published
in Blue Murder, then they folded, and I let rejection get to me. A
few years later, I was a movie reviewer on Twitter and a friend
introduced me to Shotgun Honey and Flash Fiction Offensive, two
venues for short-short fiction, and Fictionaut, a community where
writers shared stories and gave criticism, and I started writing
again. I had ideas backed up in my brain, and they just
flowed.
3. Your novel Bad Boy Boogie is compared to books of James Lee Burke and Dennis Lehane. What’s
the main theme of this book?
Our addiction to revenge, and the consequences, and especially male
entitlement to revenge. The victim is not a woman in this novel,
but I'll use that example anyway--how many stories start with a
female corpse and a furious male avenger? I wanted to turn that on
its head. Jay kills a brutal rapist and bully and serves 25 years
of a life sentence. But time does not heal all wounds: the family
of the murdered rapist want their own revenge, and the people he
assumed he saved-- the victims-- don't see Jay as a hero, but as a
reminder of a past they want to forget.
4. Bad Boy Boogie is described as ‘a Jay Desmarteaux crime thriller.’ Does it mean
that we’ll meet Jay again? What waits for him in the next
installment?
Jay's own dark past is hinted at in the first book and he heads to
Louisiana to unravel it. It involves an old heist gone bad,
generations of evil, and the Angola prison rodeo, where lifers with
nothing to lose risk life and limb for glory and bragging rights. I
attended one for research. They call it "the wildest show in the
South" and it's controversial, because the inmates are not trained
and the prison makes a lot of money. But they also hold a crafts
show where the inmates can sell their wares, and the prison has
more programs than many. There are four thousand men in Angola who
will never walk free, all lifers. Yet there is little violence, and
they don't all have cells. It's a dorm prison with bunks, and ample
opportunity to raise hell. The last warden resigned under a cloud
of corruption and his son is on trial for fraud, so it's not all
rosy, either. There's a character serving in Angola and Jay has to
get them out. I'll leave the rest to your imagination.
5. Your book Blade of Dishonor is described as ‘true 70’s-era pulp in its finest form’ (Jason Stuart). What can you
tell us about this book?
I wanted to pay tribute to my great-uncles, who told me of their
time in World War II. It's dedicated to them. I don't think the
Devil's Brigade, the First Special Service Force, a joint
US-Canadian commando unit, ever got its due. There was a
forgettable '60s movie, and Tarantino based Aldo Raine's unit on
them, but both ignored the true, nearly unbelievable feats of the
brigade. They scaled sheer cliffs in the alps during a rainstorm to
take out SS chemical artillery. They would sneak into SS
encampments and slit the throats of nine out of ten enemies and
leave "death cards" that read "The Worst is Yet to Come!" in
German. They were feared and hated by the SS.
6. You trained martial arts in Japan. How did it help you in writing Blade of Dishonor?
While there are yakuza ninja cults or samurai villages hidden in
the mountains outside Niigata, I made all the fights plausible
instead of cartoonish. I choreographed a few of them on the mats at
Advanced Fighting Systems, and asked my teacher Phil Dunlap for
advice. The Philoktetes fight gym in Kameda, Japan, taught by
sensei Jin Kazeta, was a big influence. He's a great fighter and
teacher and the fighters there are such characters, that a few of
them, especially Kubota, influenced Mikio. I also think that even
visiting a place briefly gives you a "feel." You need to research
all your facts, but you can't get the feel of a place from
research, in my opinion. You have to go there.
7. David Cranmer, editor of Beat to A Pulp, calls you ‘a new pulp master.’ What does this genre mean for you?
Pulp is less a genre than a style. You can have pulp SF, pulp
adventure, pulp noir... It tends to be a little more gritty or
flashy and more concerned with moving the story along than studying
the scenery. Sometimes that means going over the top, but in my
opinion it doesn't have to be that way. Paul Cain's FAST ONE set
the bar for pulp crime, and Stark's Parker is the king. It starts
in media res and wastes no time getting to the point. Some might
not think Parker is over the top, and it's not a criticism of the
character--I love the books--but he's a criminal animal, the
ultimate pro, a heat-seeking missile of vengeance. We don't know
why he steals, he just does. That's pulp at its finest.
8. You aren't only a writer, but plus an editor of story collections,
an Anthony Award Finalist. Please tell us about your anthologies Protectors and Protectors 2: Heroes.
The response, when I reached out to writers to support this cause,
was overwhelming. The two books have nearly 100 stories total, from
authors of all genres, from James Reasoner to Joyce Carol Oates,
Roxane Gay to Harlan Ellison, Laird Barron to George Pelecanos,
Hilary Davidson to Johnny Shaw, illustrated stories by Alex Segura
and Dennis Calero, an exclusive story by Ken Bruen, fantasy and
horror from Charles de Lint and Chet Williamson, I was stunned by
everyone who responded. The second book came along because so
many wanted to be in the first. The first volume is a little
darker, the second lighter. They make a great pair.
9. Arthur Conan Doyle helped victims of miscarriages of justice. Erle
Stanley Gardner founded The Court of Last Resort. You are working
with the National Association to Protect Children. Please tell us
about your work.
These anthologies came about because I wanted to help in the fight
against child abuse and defeating online predators. I am not a
police officer, I do not have the skills or the temperament to
interrogate or apprehend rapists and predators. But I can write,
and I know how to publish a book, and I am a good project manager.
I can get people enthused. So I leveraged my skills to assist in
this fight. People always ask "what can I do?" and you can always
do something. You may not be a firefighter, but you can bring water
to the firefighters when they take a break. There was a great story
recently about a journalist who downloaded the Zello app to cover
the flooding in Texas, and she saw the need for more dispatchers to
help direct rescue crews, and to talk to people in peril and keep
them from losing hope, and she stayed up all night to join the
rescue effort. She's a hero, the same as the Coast Guard pilots in
the choppers and the "Cajun Navy" boaters out saving people from
rooftops. And she never thought she could be.
10. Why is so important to combat bulling, including bullying in
schools?
For one, the abuse of power is morally wrong. Monkeys understand
injustice, there's an experiment with slices of fruit. They know it
and they have brains the size of a tangerine. We understand
fairness as children, but it's taught out of us. Something in our
system teaches us to accept power as its own authority, that might
makes right. And not all bullying is a big kid pushing a little
one, emotional bullies are just more clever. I had one who taunted
me endlessly because he was a teacher's pet, and knew if I pushed
him or lashed out, I'd be punished and my grades would suffer.
Secondly, the consequences last decades. Whether its the victim or
the bully learning that this is how things work, these people grow
up and run the world. Some even become President.
11. You say: ‘Men are as wounded by patriarchy as women’ [in the
context of Susan Schorn’s book.] Tell us about your views on
equality and masculinity in the modern society.
This is nothing I came up with. I learned it first from bell hooks,
but it's a tenet of feminism, that this hurts us all. We are taught
to express our emotions mostly through anger or stoic suffering and
wonder why we die 8 years younger than women, on average. We say
it's "nature," but men imposed our Victorian-era beliefs on
nature--read up on "alpha" wolves, they don't exist as we think;
and ape hierarchies are much more complicated than we first
assumed--and now we use that flawed science to justify our
behavior. There's no war on masculinity, just on being an asshole.
I train in fight gyms, a traditionally male space. Some of the
toughest fighters I know are women, and they are no less "feminine"
because of it. My grandmother taught me to cook and crochet, and I
deadlift 555 pounds and enjoy nothing more than jumping onto the
mats to grapple. People are more than what is dreamt of in our
rigid gender roles, Horatio. I suffered from anxiety from an early
age, I speak openly about it, and many of my man friends visibly
relax, just because a big hulking goon told them, "It's okay to be
you." They're so afraid they're not "real men." There are no real
men or real women, there are people, and there's no wrong way to be
human unless you're a predator. Then we got to lock you up for the
safety of the species.
12. What’s the true writer’s goal — to describe the world or to change
the world?
Can't we do both? In quantum physics you can't observe a reaction
without affecting it. Shining a light on it showers it with
photons, which affect the reaction. What if writing is the same? If
by observing the world and informing more people about its hidden
reactions and secret dark spaces, we are shining a light and making
it an ever so slightly brighter place? I like to think we are.
Stories matter. They shape the world.
Thank you for this opportunity, I enjoyed answering your questions.
-Tom
Thanks for a great interview, Thomas.
About Thomas Pluck:
Thomas Pluck is the author of Bad Boy Boogie, a Jay Desmarteaux
crime thriller, and Blade of Dishonor, an action-adventure novel that
BookPeople called “the Raiders of the Lost Ark of pulp paperbacks.” He
has slung hash, worked on the docks, and even swept the Guggenheim
museum (but not as part of a clever heist). He hails from Nutley, New
Jersey, home to criminal masterminds Martha Stewart and Richard Blake,
but has so far evaded capture. He has trained with fighters in the U.S.
and Japan, but he's no tough guy: Joyce Carol Oates calls him a "lovely
kitty man."
He shares his hideout with his sassy Louisiana wife and their two felines.
He shares his hideout with his sassy Louisiana wife and their two felines.
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