Wordcraft – What's the state of book culture in Dallas?

It’s the best of times for books in Dallas, agreed panelists at the recent reunion for the Dallas Noir anthology. And the worst of times. But then, it always is.

Dallas Noir is the brain child of local literary agent David Hale Smith, published appropriately shortly before Halloween in 2013 as part of Akashic Books’ series of noir anthologies based on cities around the world. Smith solicited short stories from 16 North Texas authors from a variety of literary backgrounds. Some of them were people whose names have appeared in this blog before: Ben Fountain, Daniel J. Hale, Clay Reynolds, Kathleen Kent, David Haynes, Harry Hunsicker, Suzanne Frank and more.

And then there was Smith’s former English teacher from Episcopal School of Dallas, Fran Hillyer. (I wonder: did Smith dare correct his former teacher’s word usage? Her grammar? Amazingly, they remain friends. Fellow contributor and noir novelist Hunsicker also says he was one of Hillyer’s students, but she disclaims any remembrance – or perhaps that should be, responsibility – for him.)

Smith wrangled nine of his contributors – Fountain, Frank, Hale, Hillyer, Hunsicker and Kent, as well as Catherine Cuellar and Merritt Tierce – back together last Saturday night for a discussion and book signing at what The Wild Detectives bookstore in the Oak Cliff neighborhood billed as Oak Cliff Wild Literary Festival #1. (Cuellar is the executive director of the Dallas Arts District. Tierce’s Dallas Noir contribution was a chapter from what would become her highly-regarded debut novel, Love Me Back.)

So, is there good news or bad news for books, book lovers and writers of books in Dallas?

The good news includes The Wild Detectives, the brain child of Spanish engineers and longtime friends Paco Vique and Javier García del Moral. The pair turned a rundown bungalow on Oak Cliff’s Eighth Street into a bookstore, cum coffee and wine bar, cum event center last year. The Wild Detectives is currently Dallas’ only independent bookstore specializing in current books, and is among those indies nationwide reporting sales for inclusion in The New York Times bestseller lists.

“First I’d like to say thank you to The Wild Detectives,” said Fountain, author of one of those NYT bestsellers, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk (whose movie version by Ang Lee is scheduled for release Veterans Day 2016). “Living in Dallas is like living in the belly of the beast. It’s a hard culture for a writer. . . where people will pay $60,000 for a car but God forbid we should pay full retail for a book, but it’s also a very fertile climate for a writer.”

“I want to honor the groups like Wordspace and the Writer’s Garret that have been fighting the good fight for years,” Cuellar said. It’s such organization, she said, that make the “organic connections between naturally-occurring communities” such as the emerging Bishop Arts district in Oak Cliff near The Wild Detectives' location.

But really, what chance do most writers in Dallas have of getting the kind of attention, for instance, that Fountain has. Or that Boudrant has garnered. (Matt Boudrant claims to have caught Hale’s eye for inclusion in Dallas Noir when his novel The Wettest County in the World became the basis for the movie Lawless.

“You’ve got to write the best possible story,” Boudrant said. “The literary world is still operating in New York City, but once you break out, the attention is really out of your hands.”

Hale agreed. “If Charlaine Harris (author of the Sookie Stackhouse books that inspired the series True Blood) could do what she did from Magnolia, Arkansas, you can do anything you want in Dallas.”

“You can’t try and follow the market if you’re going to be authentic,” Fountain said. “Do the genuine thing.”

Wordcraft -- New genre for ‘ferocious’ women

What does a writer with three award winning historical novels do for her next project? If she’s Dallas writer Kathleen Kent the answer is: something completely different. She spoke this weekend to the Southwest Chapter of Mystery Writers of America to say she’s one of us, a crime writer.

Not that she doesn’t still love the historical fiction of her first two novels, The Heretic’s Daughter and The Traitor’s Wife. Telling a fictionalized version of several times great-grandmother, Martha Carrier, one of the women hanged as witches during the seventeenth century Salem witch trials, The Heretic’s Daughter became a New York Times bestseller. The Traitor’s Wife (first published in the U.S. as The Wolves of Andover) told the story of Martha Carrier’s husband, Thomas, rumored by family legend to be one of the executioners of King Charles I.

For her third book, Kent fast forwarded a couple of centuries, basing her most recent novel, The Outcasts, in post-Civil War Texas. “My dad used to say, out of earshot of my mother, of course, that all the witches were on my mother’s side of the family, but all the horse thieves were on his side,” Kent told her MWA audience.

Then, last fall, she got an assignment from a local editor she never expected. Would she like to write a crime story for an anthology set in the Dallas area? Why not? The result was her short story, “Coincidences Can Kill You,” starring Dallasite by way of Brooklyn detective Elizabeth Ryczek, aka, Detective Betty. Betty made her debut in the Akashic Books anthology Dallas Noir last October, alongside stories from such other Dallas writers as Matt Bondurant, Ben Fountain, David Haynes and Suzanne Frank.

“What do a Civil War general, an antique sword, and an AK-47 have in common?” Betty asks. “Nothing. Unless they all converge during one of my cases.”

At first glance, Betty couldn’t seem further removed from either the accused witch of The Heretic’s Daughter, or the unrepentant epileptic prostitute of The Outcasts. But Kent brought up another nugget of family history that links all the women. “When I asked if Martha Carrier was really a witch,” she was told, “‘there are no such things as witches, just ferocious women.’”

Then came another call. “My publisher, Little Brown, who published all three novels, said, we love Detective Betty. How about writing a full length novel about her?”

Following Betty’s appearance, Kent had returned to work on a sequel for The Outcasts. But given the research she’d already done on previous centuries’ crimes and legal processes, Kent felt able to tackle a case of merely modern detection.

Her biggest challenge had been finding the authentic tonality for each period. “I had to get my tonality, voice and pacing different. What remained the same in writing about all her ferocious women, Kent said, is the method of character development.

“To get me thinking out of the box right away, I set up a character with challenges, who are contrary to expectations, who have difficulties. It makes (the writer) draw on resources you didn‘t know you had. (And) the characters are developed not by what you say about them, but by what other characters say about them.”

Detective Betty’s novel is still untitled. For more about her progress, stay tuned to Kent’s website, www.kathleenkent.com/. Or hear her this Thursday, October 8, when she’ll discuss The Outcasts for Read Across McKinney. For tickets and additional information, see www.readacrossmckinney.org/.

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Last fall, Kent inaugurated Dallas Heritage Village/Dallas Historical Society’s Farina Lecture Series. The speaker for this year’s lecture is Victoria Wilcox, author of Southern Son: The Saga of Doc Holliday (Book Two). Doors open at the DHV, 1515 Harwood, at 6 p.m. October 21. Register for the free event through the events calendar at www.dallasheritagevillage.org/.