"Dead Man Blues" author, Silas House (Photo by Kevin Nance)
You can both listen to and read a conversation about the murder mystery novel “Dead Man Blues” between Undermain's Kevin Nance and author Silas (S.D.) House. Our transcript of the Q&A has been edited for flow.
Kevin: Welcome back, Silas. I thought we'd start by just talking a little bit about the story of “Dead Man Blues.” Tell us, give us a little bit of what the premise is, and then I'm going to have a follow-up question to that.
Silas: Well, it's set in the 1950s, 1955, in a little-bitty town on a lake straddling the Kentucky-Tennessee border, and the main character, Dave Hendricks, is the disgraced former mayor of this little town. He's lost everything, his wife, his best friend, his house, and he's living on a houseboat on a little marina and just sort of starting over, you know, in his late 30s. And suddenly, a couple of grisly murders happen in this little town, and he becomes the prime detective in solving the cases. So, it's sort of, you know, he's not a cop. He's deputized, but it's a very sense of place-based, very character-driven, sort of old-school mystery.
Kevin: He was the former sheriff of this town, which is called Shady Grove, and he then became the mayor, and then he found out that his best friend, who was the sheriff, was having an affair with his wife, and that just drove him nuts. And he ran his car into the courthouse, which led to his resignation as mayor, and he's been hanging out. When we meet him, he's a little bit, you know, got his tail between his legs.
Silas: He's looking for his purpose, and he finds it in that he's really good at — you know, he has a former case that he's sort of regionally famous for having solved — so, he has a knack for solving crimes. Yeah.
Kevin: The murders at Fogtown.
Silas: That'll be its own book someday.
Kevin: Well, you know, I thought that when I read the title, “The Murders at Fogtown”: that sounds like the sequel right there. Is it the sequel?
Silas: It's not the sequel, but I'll get to it eventually. Yeah.
Kevin: Well, Dave is, he's caught up in this story because the sheriff deputizes him. He's really the only guy around that has a whole lot of experience as a murder investigator. You mentioned the two grisly murders, and they are a young man who works at a fishing camp, and then his father, who is sort of the bigwig of the town, who's the state representative. He's very rich. He has a big, fabulous house up on the hill, and then before you know it, he too turns up dead in the river in very much the way bodies tend to come up through from lakes and rivers in movies like “Carrie” and “Deliverance.”
Silas: It's the favorite scene in the book. Who discovers him? It's pretty — I enjoyed writing that.
Kevin: Yeah, there's a terrible moment where a young girl is swimming in the lake, and she gets tangled up with this dead body. It's really –
Silas: Yeah. Pretty cinematic.
Kevin: It's really ghastly. Yeah, yeah. Well, also “The Night of the Hunter” reminded me of that too.
Silas: “The Night of the Hunter” was an influence on this for sure. Yeah.
Kevin: Well, the location is very important in that this lake is not just any lake. It's a lake that formerly wasn't even there. It's a lake that is the result of the damming of rivers that were coming together in this location by the Army Corps of Engineers a generation earlier. And we learn very early in the book — I'm not revealing anything [that] I don't think that I shouldn't — that when both of the dead bodies show up, they have messages that refer to the sins of the fathers.
Silas: Yeah.
Kevin: So, we immediately get the sense that the motive of the murder has something to do with something in the distant past, which is something right out of Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald and other novelists. Did you have specific antecedents for this book in terms of who you were thinking of, or what kind of approaches to the material you were taking?
Silas: Well, that aspect of the book is really mostly inspired by growing up in a lake town and growing up on a lake where people were, you know, we were thankful to have the recreation, the flood control and the electricity generated by the lake. But there was also something lost in that people had been run off their land and this beautiful land had been covered by the lake. So, you know, anywhere you have a lake, there's those positives of the recreation, electricity and flood control. But there's that negative of the loss that so many people from that area feel, you know.
Kevin: The graves of their ancestors got covered up by the water and all that.
Silas: Yeah. It takes a lot from people. And that's a story that is especially pertinent all over the South, especially where the TVA lakes are. It's beautiful for us and wonderful for us now, but we have to remember that people lost their ancestral land for those lakes to exist. And so that's really at the heart of the book.
Kevin: And in this case, they got cheated out of their lands –
Silas: Yes, exactly.
Kevin: – by somebody who knew, as they did not, as their parents did not.
Silas: Yeah, it's nice to have like an element of corruption in a murder mystery, you know.
Kevin: Yeah.
Silas: And you bring in lots of layers of class and things like that.
Kevin: It's sort of like, you know, “It's Chinatown,” right?
Silas: Exactly. Yeah.
Kevin: Did you have a lot of fun writing this novel? I mean, I don't know if you've ever thought about this. It's weird when you think about it, that people love murder mysteries, and they find them relaxing in that often you hear people — we read murder mysteries for enjoyment.
Silas: Yes.
Kevin: But, of course, if those events were happening in real life, they wouldn't be remotely entertaining. I mean, it's the most horrible thing. But somehow reading about murder in a fictional form is just delightful.
Silas: Well, I think it's because we know, we have the expectation that we're going to have a solution, that somebody is going to be held accountable. You know, everything is going to be wrapped up. And that's not the case in real life, you know. Often there's not justice. Often there's not a sense of satisfaction when you witness injustice and things like that. So, in a murder mystery, we have that promise that it's all going to be revealed, and everything will be good at the end. Even though, yeah, you have to witness some violence and some bad stuff to get there, but ultimately, the satisfaction is that somebody's going to pay for this.
Kevin: I think you said one time that you used to read a lot of murder mysteries, Agatha Christie and others. Did you — was that something that helped you out in the writing of this book?
Silas: Oh, yeah. I mean, the thing that I love about murder mysteries is that there is a formula. Now, having said that, some people think that means if you have a formula for something, that makes it easy. I would argue that it makes it even harder because you know there are certain things you have to do, and the main thing is you cannot leave any stone unturned. You have to make sure all the plot holes are filled. The main way to lose a mystery reader is not to get all the threads tied up properly.
Kevin: Well, you also, I feel like, have to give your reader sort of a fighting chance to —
Silas: Exactly. That's the hard part.
Kevin: Yeah. Because the reader likes to be kind of guessing all along.
Silas: Yeah.
Kevin: Well, who is it? And you raise our suspicions about all kinds of characters. I was thinking, oh, well, this is going to be a femme fatale right here, but she turns out not to be.
Silas: Yeah. Well, your opinion changes throughout the book on who it might be, right?
Kevin: Right.
Silas: And the way I wrote this murder mystery was that every suspect I introduce, I wrote a scenario in which they did it. And then I didn't really pick who did it until I got to the end. And I took one of those scenarios and that was the person. So, each one of those five suspects has to have a realistic story that could be.
Kevin: Yeah. Well, and I think the motive for the murder is tied up with the lake, as we've sort of talked about, but not just that. There's personal bad blood, retribution, revenge and all of those things that come into it. What did you – what made you decide to write a crime novel as opposed to the literary novels that you're known for?
Silas: Well, I love writing literary novels, but I also have always loved the mystery form, and I just wanted to see if I could do it. I just thought — I like every book that I do. I want to take on a new challenge. I think it makes you a better writer and so I want to do that. And I also wanted to write something that much more escapist that when the book is over, you can put it aside and that's it. You don't have to really think about it anymore. With literary novel, you're meant to keep thinking about the literary novel and keep exploring. It's not all tied up. You don't necessarily have real neat resolutions and things like that because you want the reader to keep thinking about it. But I wanted to write a piece of escapism. You pick the book up and the rest of the world falls away. The book is over and you just wait for the next entry in the series.
Kevin: Speaking of which, I happen to know that you are in the process of writing more books and stories about Dave Hendricks, with Dave Hendricks as the detective, yes?
Silas: Yeah. Yes.
Kevin: And in fact, you've already written one?
Silas: Well, I'm writing it right now. Yeah. I'm writing the sequel, and it takes place the following spring. I'm thinking each of them will take place, you know, in consecutive years. And so hopefully I'll be able to write enough that we can move through the '50s and the '60s.
Kevin: That's a lot of new … But do you –
Silas: I have high hopes.
Kevin: Well, but do you want to –
Silas: Hoping to live that long.
Kevin: But what about your literary — you're not leaving literary fiction behind?
Silas: No, no. I'm always writing four things at once. I have never ever, since – I don't know. Ever since I was 25 years old, I've been working on four projects at once. And I think that makes all four projects better because, when I flag out on one, I move to the next one. I peter out on it. I move to the next one. And so, my energy is always up in each one that I'm working on.
Kevin: I see. You also had a book of poems came out recently.
Silas: Yes.
Kevin: And that turned out to be a bestseller. My gosh, how unexpected was that?
Silas: Well, it's most unexpected because books of poetry, you know, rarely make it onto the bestseller list. I mean, some of the lists don't even count poetry. That's how the industry looks down on poetry so badly because, you know, that they don't even list it sometimes.
Kevin: Right.
Silas: And it's historically because, well, you know, there's the famous line – oh, the songwriter leaves my brain right now, but he said, ‘‘Ain't no money in poetry. That's what sets the poet free.’’
Kevin: One more thing about “Dead Man Blues,” and it's suggested by the title. There's a lot of music in this book. Dave seems to be a fan of old-time jazz and blues. There are references to, I think, Bessie Smith and all kinds of people that are, you know, well known. So, he has eclectic musical taste. He also listens to Ernest Tubb and —
Silas: Yeah. Hank Williams.
Kevin: – Hank Williams and all these people. I think you have a practice of creating a sort of playlist? Is that right?
Silas: That's one of the things that sustains me when I'm writing a novel is I have a song assigned to each character that helps me get into that character. I have a song for a particular scene. When I'm writing a scene, it will have its own song that I'm listening to. And that way, if I'm working on that scene for a week, every time I sit down, I can listen to that song and it takes me back. It's just a technique that I've developed that works for me. And all writers have to find, you know, those ceremonies that work for them. [Click here for House's “Dead Man Blues” playlist]
Kevin: Last thing, you have written this novel under a pen name, a loose pen name, S. D. House. Why is that?
Silas: Well, I wrote it under a pen name of Jasper Walker, named from my two grandfathers. And they wanted me to use my real name. I couldn't use my real name because of contractual obligations. So, it's sort of boring contractual stuff. However, I also love having the pen name because it does separate it in a way and lets people know this is something a little different. I mean, I'm not sacrificing language or characterization or sense of place, but there are places in the book where I probably would have spent more time on description. But I also know that, okay, we've got to keep this moving. We're getting near the end. People want this action. So, on one hand, I'm not sacrificing any of that. But on the other hand, you know, it's a genre book, so I'm focused more on keeping you entertained than anything else.
Kevin: All right. Well, congratulations on the book.
Silas: Thank you so much. I appreciate you reading it.