Speaker 1: This is me, Craig Ferguson. I'm inviting you to come
Speaker 1: and see my brand new comedy hour. Well it's actually
Speaker 1: it's about an hour and a half and I don't
Speaker 1: have an opener because these guys cost money. But what
Speaker 1: I'm saying is I'll be on stage for a while. Anyway,
Speaker 1: come and see me live on the pads on Fire
Speaker 1: Tour in your region. Tickets are on sale now and
Speaker 1: we'll be adding more as the tour continues throughout twenty twenty.
Speaker 2: Five and beyond.
Speaker 1: For a full list of dates, go to the Craig
Speaker 1: Ferguson show dot com. See you on the road, my DearS.
Speaker 1: My name is Craig Ferguson. The name of this podcast
Speaker 1: is Joy. I talk to interesting people about what brings
Speaker 1: them happiness. Welcome to the Joy Podcast. Welcome to the
Speaker 1: Kids Super Studios here in Brooklyn. I am your host
Speaker 1: Podcasts Craig Ferguson. My guest today is a great American writer.
Speaker 1: If you don't know his work, you're in for a tweet.
Speaker 1: And if you do know his work, you're in for
Speaker 1: a treat. His name is Lawrence Block. He's a friend
Speaker 1: of mine, but more importantly than that well, it depends
Speaker 1: how you look at it. But he's just a great
Speaker 1: writer and you should read him if you like to read.
Speaker 1: And if you don't like to read, then just listen
Speaker 1: to him talking today. And if you do like to
Speaker 1: listen to people talking and like to, I'll let you
Speaker 1: get on with it.
Speaker 2: Here's Larry Block. You told me like.
Speaker 1: Five minutes ago, ten minutes ago maybe when we were
Speaker 1: walking outside in the intense feet while why we've got
Speaker 1: a lot of beverages right, because we had got the
Speaker 1: dates wrong for this recording. Specifically, you said it was Thursday.
Speaker 1: I said it was the eighteenth. But Thursday is the seventeenth,
Speaker 1: and so you were right about Thursday and I was
Speaker 1: right about the eighteenth. I think we can agree that
Speaker 1: that's fair.
Speaker 2: We're here now, that's the main thing, all right, There
Speaker 2: you go.
Speaker 1: So you said to me outside as we were walking
Speaker 1: towards the subway to maybe go home and come back tomorrow,
Speaker 1: that you are retired.
Speaker 2: You're not going to write anymore. Is that right? That's true.
Speaker 2: I haven't written in gee, it's just about three years now.
Speaker 2: I feel like I've heard that from you before, though, No, no, no,
Speaker 2: there have been times I thought I was probably done
Speaker 2: writing novels and that, but this is categorically different, and
Speaker 2: it's it's curious in that in twenty twenty two I
Speaker 2: wrote two novels in the course of the one year.
Speaker 2: I wrote a book called The Burglar, The Burglar Who
Speaker 2: Met Frederick Brown, which is a nice way. I think.
Speaker 2: I haven't read that one. Oh well, what a treat.
Speaker 2: You haven't a treat. I haven't stared, right, don't tell
Speaker 2: me it. No spoilers, all right, no spoilers. But it's
Speaker 2: it's a fitting volume, I think, to conclude the series.
Speaker 1: The Barney series, the Bernie series. Yeah, yeah, that's and
Speaker 1: you've done with Scudder. Scudder, you finished a wild back, right, no.
Speaker 2: I wrote, I wrote a final volume of that in
Speaker 2: twenty twenty two. Also, I haven't read that either.
Speaker 1: I thought the Scudder one that you finished with was
Speaker 1: a drop of the hard.
Speaker 2: Stuff that had been the last one. But then, so.
Speaker 1: That's why I thought you'd retired before, because you said, okay,
Speaker 1: that's Scudder done.
Speaker 2: That well it seemed to be. But this the new book,
Speaker 2: I thought i'd send it to you, and I clearly
Speaker 2: did not. Sorry, maybe I go I'll get it tomorrow.
Speaker 2: It's called the Autobiography of Matthew Scudder. I do not
Speaker 2: have that. And what it is is a fellow that
Speaker 2: approached me about doing a short like three or four
Speaker 2: thousand word biography of Scudder, to write about the character.
Speaker 2: And I thought, I don't want to do that, and
Speaker 2: I thought about it a little more, and I thought,
Speaker 2: if Anyone's going to write Scudder's biography, should be the
Speaker 2: man himself. And I thought, I thought about it a
Speaker 2: little more and realized that what I wanted to do
Speaker 2: was a full length book and it would be Scudder
Speaker 2: telling his story. And the premise was that I've been
Speaker 2: approached to do this, that I the Lawrence Block for
Speaker 2: years has been writing books about Matthew Scudder which have
Speaker 2: represented slight fictionalizations of his cases and that and this
Speaker 2: is his Scudder giving his own memories. Do you go
Speaker 2: back over the books that you wrote for Scott particularly,
Speaker 2: some of them are referenced, certainly, but it's more filling
Speaker 2: in blanks than about his life and background and everything else.
Speaker 2: It's it may be the most enjoyment and satisfaction I've
Speaker 2: ever had sitting down, sitting down and writing it, and
Speaker 2: it's you know it's it's kind of meta, which is
Speaker 2: a word I generally avoid using because I don't think
Speaker 2: I or anyone else knows exactly what it is. No,
Speaker 2: it doesn't, you know. And and once it became the
Speaker 2: marks up Zuckerberg's new name for uh, for Facebook, it
Speaker 2: was even more reason not to use the word. But
Speaker 2: that I kind of kind of is what it is conceptually,
Speaker 2: it's a divice.
Speaker 1: I've seen before though a few times people use it
Speaker 1: from tank time in literature. I remember, uh Carvonicet used
Speaker 1: it with Kilgo Trout, didn't he the other way around?
Speaker 2: All kind of kind of yeah, there was an awareness,
Speaker 2: uh that way, But I think this is I had
Speaker 2: thought that this was the first time that a writer
Speaker 2: had who after a long standing series, had turned the
Speaker 2: the I think it probably is not quite Oh, it
Speaker 2: turned out that Seminon did something similar with McGray. Yeah.
Speaker 2: I got a hold of a copy of that to
Speaker 2: see what it was like. Unfortunately, well fortunately for my ego,
Speaker 2: it was lousy. It was it wasn't real.
Speaker 1: Honestly, a bit of Simon and a lot of those
Speaker 1: make Gray books. I'm like, you've that could use a rewrite. Yeah,
Speaker 1: a lot of a miss company out like one a week,
Speaker 1: you know, but.
Speaker 2: This it wasn't terribly interesting. But anyway, I did have
Speaker 2: a good time with it, and when I finished, I thought, well, gee,
Speaker 2: that was nice. I wrote two books in the course
Speaker 2: of a year. I'm pleased with both of them. I
Speaker 2: had a good time doing them. I'll probably write more.
Speaker 2: And as the weeks passed, it became clear to me
Speaker 2: that I was wrong about that, that I was done,
Speaker 2: that I felt really complete. This was a nice capstan
Speaker 2: for this Scudder series. It was a nice ending to
Speaker 2: the Bernie series, and I didn't want to write anymore.
Speaker 2: I've been doing this all the time for sixty five years.
Speaker 2: I've written more books than anybody could should read let alone.
Speaker 2: Have you any idea how many of there are? Do
Speaker 2: you know? Yes, because a fellow has done a marvelous
Speaker 2: job compiling a bibliography for me, and his list of
Speaker 2: book titles individual volumes of mine, which includes anthologies that
Speaker 2: I edited, and that they're probably about close to a
Speaker 2: dozen of those. It comes came to about two hundred
Speaker 2: and ten titles something like that. That's a lot of
Speaker 2: It's a lot of us. That's it's enough, you know,
Speaker 2: I feel I've written four. Yeah, well I think that's enough. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I think four is enough. Well, come to think of it,
Speaker 2: if I had made that decision early and I just
Speaker 2: saved myself a lot, a lot of work.
Speaker 1: Yeah, But it's interesting these two characters, Bernie rodenbar who's
Speaker 1: the kind of gentlemen burglar, and Matt Scudder, who's the
Speaker 1: in many ways an archetype for a lot of detectives
Speaker 1: who came after. Yeah, you know, the hardbitten, New York reformed, drunk,
Speaker 1: bad past detective. Both of these eyes. I have have
Speaker 1: a long history with you. When did you start writing
Speaker 1: because like, you started writing these guys in your thirties, right.
Speaker 2: I've thought you meant the nineteen thirties. Nineteen thirties. Did
Speaker 2: you start writing them in the night? That would be sure.
Speaker 2: I'm a detective shape, right. I started writing them in
Speaker 2: within about a year of each other. The characters were conceived,
Speaker 2: and I started writing about them in the the the
Speaker 2: mid seventies.
Speaker 1: It's interesting because I was I was a very I
Speaker 1: was a huge fan of Scudder right away, and Bernie
Speaker 1: was a slower burn for me because Bernie felt like
Speaker 1: it was a little more kind of almost PG Woodhouse
Speaker 1: and it's kind of like light on his feet type
Speaker 1: fun character. And because I'd come to you through Matt Scudder,
Speaker 1: I was like the grimy the New York streets and
Speaker 1: the yeah and the bad people and stuff. And then
Speaker 1: Bernie was was kind of I was kind of looking
Speaker 1: for that there and it wasn't there. And it wasn't
Speaker 1: until I had the same thing with with Woodhouse though.
Speaker 1: The first couple I read, I was like, what the
Speaker 1: hell is this? And then once you get into it,
Speaker 1: you go, this is actually great and actually in a
Speaker 1: weird way, is brilliant, unbelievable right, and contains an odd
Speaker 1: skewering of the British upper classes that I didn't spot
Speaker 1: at first.
Speaker 2: I mean, but it's it's so wonderful.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the kind of like the way he cuts up,
Speaker 1: the kind of doubt Nabby set is fantastic.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. Also heah evidently had a real resentment against
Speaker 2: older female relatives, Yes for sure. Yeah. Do you do
Speaker 2: that in books?
Speaker 1: Do you put people in books that you're angry at,
Speaker 1: like if you run across somebody?
Speaker 2: Did you ever do that with Bernie or with No? No,
Speaker 2: I don't think I ever have. If I have it's
Speaker 2: it's uh slipped. My mind has so many things too.
Speaker 2: But do you ever read the book? And I have
Speaker 2: no recollection of write now. No, well that's not entirely true.
Speaker 2: Early on, I did a lot of erotic paperbacks, you know,
Speaker 2: under pen name. I did tons of those. That was
Speaker 2: the way to earn money, right, it was like your
Speaker 2: only fans page. No, it was you liked erotic. It
Speaker 2: was what I did, and you know the it was
Speaker 2: it was to make money. But they're all to make money. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I guess that's your job, that's what you did. But
Speaker 2: some of those, in uh, later years, I've because I'm
Speaker 2: shameless and because Ego and Avarice are my two motivators,
Speaker 2: their stoken horse, for sure. Yeah, absolutely, I've I've reprinted,
Speaker 2: both electronically and in print printed form, all my early work, right,
Speaker 2: and and I figure, why not. There are people who
Speaker 2: like them, and that's that's fine with me. But doing that,
Speaker 2: I've had to determine what books were mine. And there
Speaker 2: was a stretch there where I engaged other people to
Speaker 2: write books under my pen name. Really yes, yes, this
Speaker 2: was back in the early to mid sixties. Okay, and
Speaker 2: some of those, you know, I don't remember immediately if
Speaker 2: I've written them or not. But it never takes more
Speaker 2: than reading a page, you know, for me to know
Speaker 2: what it's my worthy or no.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I suppose if you if your output is it
Speaker 1: like it's a fairly prolific output.
Speaker 2: You can't remember all that.
Speaker 1: I look at old episodes of Late Night, so was
Speaker 1: if something comes up from my old Late night show
Speaker 1: on the internet, I'm like, I have no recollection of that.
Speaker 2: None. I remember most of them, But there were stretches
Speaker 2: late in the game, in say nineteen sixty four or so,
Speaker 2: when I there was one time when my second daughter,
Speaker 2: my daughter Jill, was born and I had to pay
Speaker 2: the abstetrician. This was long enough ago so that people
Speaker 2: did not routinely have insurance and so that you could
Speaker 2: live without it. Yeah right, Yeah, So I had to
Speaker 2: come up with one thousand dollars to pay the abstetrician. Now,
Speaker 2: of course that would be the Copey right if you
Speaker 2: had really excellent, excellent coverage. Yeah. So I called my
Speaker 2: agent and I said, how can I earn a thousand
Speaker 2: dollars in a hurry because I want to pay this
Speaker 2: fellow's bill. And he said, well, I think Bill Hamling,
Speaker 2: who was a publisher of mine on outfit called Nightstand Books.
Speaker 2: He said, I'm sure he'd take an extra book for
Speaker 2: me this month. So I found three days and wrote it.
Speaker 2: You know what booking three days I did? Was any good?
Speaker 2: I have no idea.
Speaker 1: Were you taking any stimulants?
Speaker 2: It was the sixties. No, I did occasionally, but not then.
Speaker 2: It was a little later there that I started using
Speaker 2: dexamil occasionally when I wrote. But this time I wasn't
Speaker 2: using any stimulants, and I just I just went to
Speaker 2: the office and typed for about eight hours the first day,
Speaker 2: and about eight hours the second day, in about five
Speaker 2: or six hours the third day, and then the book
Speaker 2: was done. That's amazing. By twenty minutes after the book
Speaker 2: was done, I'd forgotten the names of all the characters.
Speaker 2: I mean, they didn't they didn't occupy space in my
Speaker 2: head for very much time. There was no way to
Speaker 2: remember that. It's do you remember the name of the book,
Speaker 2: because I'd like to read it. I don't know which
Speaker 2: one that was, Oh, because I.
Speaker 1: Feel like that would be a fascinating kind of almost
Speaker 1: like automatic writing, you know, the old spiritualist automatic writing
Speaker 1: thing that I mean, be kind of a.
Speaker 2: Real in them were written at not at that speed,
Speaker 2: but frequently in a week. I find that fascinating because
Speaker 2: they're especially the detective books in particular, are very complicated.
Speaker 2: The police were not detected right right. Hello, this is
Speaker 2: Craig Ferguson.
Speaker 1: And I want to let you know I have a
Speaker 1: brand new stand up comedy special out now on YouTube.
Speaker 1: It's called I'm So Happy, and I would be so
Speaker 1: happy if you checked it out. To watch the special,
Speaker 1: just go to my YouTube channel at the Craig Ferguson
Speaker 1: Show and is this right there? Just click it and
Speaker 1: play it and it's free.
Speaker 2: I can't look.
Speaker 1: I'm not going to come around your house and show
Speaker 1: you how to do it. If you can't do it,
Speaker 1: then you can't have it. But if you can figure
Speaker 1: it out, it's yours. You have a very emotive style,
Speaker 1: though even even Bernie first, I it was a mistaken
Speaker 1: identity for me with Bernie Roden bar at first because
Speaker 1: I thought there was no depth to that, and there's
Speaker 1: an extreme amount of depth in Bernie, and I feel
Speaker 1: like that You're very emotive as a writer. There's big sweeps,
Speaker 1: big human emotions in there. I remember in particular, Actually,
Speaker 1: what was the small town? The one you wrote after
Speaker 1: nine to eleven? Is an extremely almost like you were
Speaker 1: heartbroken when you wrote that book or something, or you
Speaker 1: were terrified.
Speaker 2: That kind of was. Yeah, that was That was a
Speaker 2: time that imprinted itself rather deeply on one's consciousness. Were
Speaker 2: you in New York, Georgiana eleven? Did you see it
Speaker 2: all happened? Yes? Actually we were in the line of sight, yeah,
Speaker 2: because you're downtown. Yeah, yeah, on the high floor we saw.
Speaker 1: And that book. Did that book happen in the aftermath
Speaker 1: of nine to eleven? Was it like in the space
Speaker 1: of weeks, months, days.
Speaker 2: It was a curious thing because it was a book
Speaker 2: that I had started before that, right, and I'd written
Speaker 2: a chunk of it, introducing several of the couple of
Speaker 2: the characters. I probably wrote about it and twenty pages
Speaker 2: of it before, and then after nine to eleven, I thought, well,
Speaker 2: I can throw this away because the world had changed
Speaker 2: in some fundamental ways, and certainly the city had changed.
Speaker 2: And a little time passed, and sometime I think it
Speaker 2: was in the spring of two thousand and two, so
Speaker 2: maybe six months after after I thought about it, and
Speaker 2: I thought, because what my object there was to write,
Speaker 2: for the first time for me, a big, multiple viewpoint
Speaker 2: now bill set in New York, with as much of
Speaker 2: New York as I could fit in it. I thought, gee,
Speaker 2: I could still do this. I would probably want to
Speaker 2: rewrite almost everything in the beginning portion, but there's there
Speaker 2: are scenes there that work, and there are characters who
Speaker 2: I find interesting. And I thought, I don't want to
Speaker 2: write a book in which nine to eleven happens. I
Speaker 2: want to write an aftermath book. And and did and
Speaker 2: it it was no to what extent the book succeeds
Speaker 2: or fails?
Speaker 1: I don't know. I rarely know with my own stuff.
Speaker 1: But what would that? What's the metric you use for that?
Speaker 1: How do you know if a book succeeds or failed?
Speaker 2: I don't.
Speaker 1: So once you write it, it's done. It is what
Speaker 1: it is, and there's no kind of judgment on it.
Speaker 2: There isn't really no I you know, I want them
Speaker 2: to do well. Sure, you want to do a real
Speaker 2: justice and may be well received. That's incidentally brings to
Speaker 2: mind a very interesting effective the retirement of not doing
Speaker 2: this anymore. Okay, And it's not just that I'm not
Speaker 2: writing anymore. But that I'm detached from the whole career
Speaker 2: in a way I wouldn't have anticipated. Is that product
Speaker 2: of aging? Do you think everything in my existence is
Speaker 2: so one way or another product of aging? But also
Speaker 2: it's no, it's part of it is that my life
Speaker 2: as a writer feels like a closed chapter. Right. And
Speaker 2: I'm very grateful that I got to spend those years
Speaker 2: doing that, like sixty five years, right, yeah, And I'm
Speaker 2: very grateful that I got to write all those books,
Speaker 2: the good, the bad, and the indifferent. But but I'm
Speaker 2: detached from them in an odd way. I don't too
Speaker 2: much care now what anybody thinks to them. I know
Speaker 2: they won't outlast my lifetime by any substantial margin. Nobody's due, really,
Speaker 2: and I don't know. And that's fine. The thing, the
Speaker 2: thing is, that's that's fine. It kind of I kind
Speaker 2: of feeled with with a book.
Speaker 1: I remember because the first time when I the first
Speaker 1: book I wrote, I remember you were very very.
Speaker 2: Kindly read an early draft of.
Speaker 1: It and and you let it was interesting because it's
Speaker 1: a it's the only novel I've written so far, and
Speaker 1: it's an unusual book. And you said, it's an unusual book,
Speaker 1: and you sent me a copy of a book that
Speaker 1: you had written years and years ago, which is also
Speaker 1: a very.
Speaker 2: Unusual book called The Long Walk, The Random Walk. Random Walk.
Speaker 1: That's right, and random Walk is such a weird, out
Speaker 1: of time, out of style book for you.
Speaker 2: I know what was going on with that?
Speaker 1: I mean, it's a very it's almost like magical realism
Speaker 1: or something going on in there.
Speaker 2: It was something, it was. It was a very strange experience. Yeah,
Speaker 2: Lynna and I had gone on our first really adventurous trip.
Speaker 2: We went uh on a trip that was under the
Speaker 2: auspices of the Institute for the Advancement or something of
Speaker 2: no Weddics Sciences, whatever the hell it was it was.
Speaker 2: It was it was an outfit founded by Edgar Mitchell
Speaker 2: when he came back from the moon. What isdics science?
Speaker 2: I don't know, Okay, I forget. It's fine. Somebody in
Speaker 2: the internet, right, I at one point could have supplied
Speaker 2: a definition of the word. But it's it's remarkable enough
Speaker 2: that I can recall the word any idea. What nouetics
Speaker 2: science is? Yeah, all right, okay.
Speaker 1: So disciplinary study that brings scientific tools and techniques together
Speaker 1: to basically solve the subjective inner knowing study of nature
Speaker 1: of reality.
Speaker 2: There we are, there we go, there we are. Anyway,
Speaker 2: they had this trip to Africa, right, that's where you go,
Speaker 2: with just about just about eight or ten of us
Speaker 2: on the whole trip, and we started. We spent a
Speaker 2: lot of time in Togo, and one thing we did
Speaker 2: in Togo was we met with a fellow named Akoite,
Speaker 2: who was I think he had a German father and
Speaker 2: Togule's mother, and he'd grown up there. He'd gone to
Speaker 2: school some in Germany and at the Sorbonne he qualified
Speaker 2: as a doctor. He decided that that wasn't really where
Speaker 2: he was, and he became this spiritual healer and conductor
Speaker 2: of Voodo type ceremonies in Lomay in Togo. And we
Speaker 2: met him and he was a powerful personality and he
Speaker 2: did this whole thing with Afterward, one of the things
Speaker 2: I'd sort of hoped for was that a new direction
Speaker 2: in my writing would come out of this. Okay, so
Speaker 2: it ended, and then we went to other places in Africa.
Speaker 2: We went to Cote d'avoir and we went to Mali.
Speaker 2: We had a good time, and we came home and
Speaker 2: I had booked a session a space at a writer's colony,
Speaker 2: the first time I'd ever done that, or retreat where
Speaker 2: you can go for two weeks or a month or
Speaker 2: whatever whatever it is, and what do you do. You like,
Speaker 2: you hang with other writers, or you hang with other
Speaker 2: writers to whatever extent you want. But what it mostly
Speaker 2: is is that they supply a room for you to
Speaker 2: work in, a room for you to and three meals
Speaker 2: a day, and you go there to work. So I've
Speaker 2: met some people I've become very fond of at Reuter's colonies,
Speaker 2: but that was never the point. The point always is
Speaker 2: to go there to work. And I had the spacebook,
Speaker 2: and I thought, I have to go there. It's my
Speaker 2: first time at a colony. What the hell am I
Speaker 2: going to write? And I thought, well, there was a
Speaker 2: Burglar book I sort of had in mind. Had you
Speaker 2: started the Bernie series. Oh yeah, the Bernie series had
Speaker 2: gone on for a while. This would have been seventy seven. Okay, no,
Speaker 2: pardon me, this would have been eighty seven. Okay, yeah.
Speaker 2: And I so I thought it would be nice if
Speaker 2: there was something else that I could write that I
Speaker 2: had more firmly mind. And I was sitting one day,
Speaker 2: we were living in Florida at the time, and I
Speaker 2: suddenly had this vision of people walking through the mountains.
Speaker 2: Of course whatever, and bits and pieces started coming to
Speaker 2: me over the next several days, and I thought, well,
Speaker 2: you know, I don't have a book here, because this
Speaker 2: is a complicated book, but maybe I've got enough of
Speaker 2: a beginning so that i can spend my time at
Speaker 2: the colony roughing it out, you know, making some sort
Speaker 2: of outline. And it was about two weeks from that
Speaker 2: time that I drove up to the car. He was
Speaker 2: in Virginia, and I'd been thinking about the book throughout,
Speaker 2: and it wasn't so exactly that I'd been thinking about
Speaker 2: it as things were coming to me. And I got
Speaker 2: to the colony, I was assigned my room, I was
Speaker 2: assigned my office, and I went to sleep. I got
Speaker 2: up the next day, I went to my office and
Speaker 2: I wrote twenty pages of a novel. And I did
Speaker 2: that every day for the next twenty three days. I'll
Speaker 2: do it twenty pages a day. It's a low. Every
Speaker 2: day I woke up knowing what would happen in the
Speaker 2: book that day, still not necessarily the day after that,
Speaker 2: and and when I was done that was under walk
Speaker 2: I've never had an experience at all like that before
Speaker 2: or since.
Speaker 1: It's an interesting thing. And it's funny because you the
Speaker 1: way you describe it. The novel that I'm talking about
Speaker 1: that you were there, it was called Between the Bridge
Speaker 1: and the River that I wrote, it's a very similar experience.
Speaker 2: I would wake up in the morning not knowing what
Speaker 2: was going to happen, but interested to find out. Uh huh.
Speaker 1: And so I would have these characters and there was
Speaker 1: disparate plot lines, and I was like, I wonder, what's
Speaker 1: going to happen today, and I would write it down
Speaker 1: to find out.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And it was an.
Speaker 1: Odd excuse me, an oddensation of not having planned out
Speaker 1: the book.
Speaker 2: Yeah, at the end of it.
Speaker 1: Because anything I've written since then has been autobiographical or anecdotal,
Speaker 1: with the exception of a short story I wrote for
Speaker 1: you for that Edward Hopper collection and the so I
Speaker 1: know what happens because I was there when it happened,
Speaker 1: you know, and elaborate the story, or if I tell
Speaker 1: a little bit of this and that about it doesn't
Speaker 1: really you know. It's it's me doing what I want
Speaker 1: to do as I embellish a story which I know
Speaker 1: has already happened, but I didn't have that experience with
Speaker 1: that book. It was it was a very odd thing.
Speaker 2: And I talked to.
Speaker 1: Stephen King about that experience and he said that he
Speaker 1: when he was writing The Shining he was also getting
Speaker 1: sober at the same time.
Speaker 2: I didn't know that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And it was very interesting because you go back
Speaker 1: and read that book with him just flippantly saying at
Speaker 1: the time, I was getting sober at that time, having
Speaker 1: gone through getting sober myself, and I know you were
Speaker 1: sober doing that that that it's like it takes on
Speaker 1: a completely different perspective.
Speaker 2: Even looking at the movie, which I don't think he likes,
Speaker 2: but the it's all very different. If you look at
Speaker 2: the lens through.
Speaker 1: The Monster of of Alcoholism, it's like, oh my god. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's fascinating. But he said about that that he felt
Speaker 1: there was all this stuffie waiting to get through and
Speaker 1: he just had to kind of get it through for
Speaker 1: that book. I thought it was a fascinating way to
Speaker 1: look at it. I wonder how often that happens to people,
Speaker 1: even like if you write two hundred and ten books,
Speaker 1: wherever it is, and it's happened to you, once that way.
Speaker 2: I frequently don't know where I most of the time
Speaker 2: don't know when I started a book exactly where it's
Speaker 2: going to go when it evowws. But this was as
Speaker 2: close as I ever came to having, oh, what you
Speaker 2: might call a channeled book. Right. It's not as though
Speaker 2: I felt this felt like I was taking celestial dictation.
Speaker 2: It was very clear to me that I was making
Speaker 2: the choices and everything else. It was somehow categorically different
Speaker 2: from other writing experiences I've had. It gave me like you're.
Speaker 1: Talking about the Nouetic Science trip to Africa, and clearly
Speaker 1: there was there was some kind of you were, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, I'm gonna say it sounds dismissive, but but
Speaker 1: but you were, you know, in some kind of spiritual
Speaker 1: search at that point in your life. Yeah, is that,
Speaker 1: you know if I was. But it worked certainly worked
Speaker 1: out that way. I was the process.
Speaker 2: Of that translate state. Where there were there stimulants, where
Speaker 2: the drugs were. There were there was alcoholic a verbal
Speaker 2: thing to take, but it didn't feel that it was
Speaker 2: a drug experience. And there were lots of people's around
Speaker 2: in there and dancing and things like that. It's hard
Speaker 2: for me to remember of that clearly. But in ways
Speaker 2: it was transformational. Lynn had had not a delusion, but
Speaker 2: a sense for years that just out of the corner,
Speaker 2: in the corner of her eyes, there would be a
Speaker 2: huge snake.
Speaker 1: Okay, and she knew, like in her life, she was
Speaker 1: thinking that all the time.
Speaker 2: Frequently what happened, she knew it wasn't there, right, you know.
Speaker 2: She was never like directional or anything, but she just
Speaker 2: had the sense of a presence, you know. And so
Speaker 2: she mentioned that to a Quoite, and he said, you know,
Speaker 2: he gave her something. He said, take this and participate
Speaker 2: in the ceremony, and you will possess the snake, the serpent,
Speaker 2: the power whatever. So she did, and and she never
Speaker 2: had the sense that there was a snake again. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and she did feel a kind of empowerment after that
Speaker 2: she realized that she hadn't before. So I'm I'm willing
Speaker 2: to believe that he did things, you know, I keep
Speaker 2: an up in mind about it. I wrote a story,
Speaker 2: the hell did I call it? I wrote a story
Speaker 2: in which there's a character like based on a Quoite.
Speaker 2: I hardly ever pattern characters after specific people, but here
Speaker 2: I felt comfortable doing it. I called him a twilee
Speaker 2: I think in that and again it's set in Loma
Speaker 2: in Togo, and it's sort of a a piece of
Speaker 2: spy fiction somewhat, but it's in a big collection enough Rope.
Speaker 2: I'll send you an ephile of the story.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I must have read, because the given enough Rope,
Speaker 1: I've I've read that collection.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but but in context it might be yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: I'll send that.
Speaker 1: You know, one of that springs to mind as well.
Speaker 1: And I think this might this might be a story
Speaker 1: that's in that collection, The Merciful Angel of Death.
Speaker 2: The Yeah, that was a scudder story, right.
Speaker 1: And it was in the It was a scudder short
Speaker 1: story though, right, And it was the kind of fascinating
Speaker 1: look at a period. And that's why I think your
Speaker 1: your idea that that the canon of your work will
Speaker 1: not outlast you by much is perhaps not as accurate
Speaker 1: as you think it is from my perspective, because there
Speaker 1: is a huge sweep of time. You know, those sixty
Speaker 1: five years that you documented some very you know, profound
Speaker 1: moments in the history of that time, the Age Crisis
Speaker 1: nine to eleven, the changing of this city, that goes
Speaker 1: through the life of Matt Scudder, the detective who's is
Speaker 1: crushed by a mistake he makes, and you know, and
Speaker 1: like it's you know, taken.
Speaker 2: In the context in New York, and I'm amazed.
Speaker 1: I haven't read the autobiography of Scudder because I've thought
Speaker 1: I'd read everything, so that is a trait.
Speaker 2: But I will send, I will send you. Do e
Speaker 2: books work for you? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I actually read a kindle, Yeah.
Speaker 2: I will. I will send all those. Do you self
Speaker 2: publish this stuff? Now? Yeah?
Speaker 1: I think more and more I talk to authors like, yeah,
Speaker 1: why would I bother with?
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, the big publishing industry now, I think
Speaker 2: may do a good job with commercially important books. But
Speaker 2: on a level that I that I don't play it
Speaker 2: anywhere or doing it. And I just found it so
Speaker 2: much simpler and more straightforward and everything to publish the
Speaker 2: books myself. And that way, you know, they don't you
Speaker 2: don't make much money that way, But you don't make
Speaker 2: much money anyway, no, I know. It's kind of a
Speaker 2: it's kind of a.
Speaker 1: Thing though, that it has rewards, because listen, I think
Speaker 1: I made as much on that novel as i'd make
Speaker 1: for a Wednesday night in a casino in Ohio.
Speaker 2: You know what I mean.
Speaker 1: But it's but I don't remember the Wednesday Night casino.
Speaker 2: I remember the journey on the novel. It's a difference.
Speaker 1: So no, And it's hard sometimes, especially when I think
Speaker 1: when you're young and you want to make your bones
Speaker 1: and maybe I'm just being for myself, but it's hard
Speaker 1: to appreciate it, or it was for me, hard to
Speaker 1: appreciate the value of something that had no real intrinsic
Speaker 1: financial value.
Speaker 2: And I remember you said, you and I.
Speaker 1: Had had lunch once and I was talking about money,
Speaker 1: and you said that because I was getting hosed down
Speaker 1: with it at the time. I remember it was during
Speaker 1: the end of late night and all that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1: And you said, the danger of having a lot of
Speaker 1: money coming at you is you start thinking that it's
Speaker 1: the only thing that mars. Yeah, And it was for
Speaker 1: a little while I thought about it, and.
Speaker 2: It's kind of stuck with me. Do you ever do
Speaker 2: you ever think I I.
Speaker 1: Could have should have would have made more money, or
Speaker 1: should have been more.
Speaker 2: But the thing is, I've often had the thought, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: because you know, I I look at my career and
Speaker 2: there were there never were any big dramatic financial successes,
Speaker 2: not even when the scudder sies like the Mascutter movie.
Speaker 2: I made a decent living, but never, you know, never
Speaker 2: there were no I think one book inched its way
Speaker 2: onto the Times best seller list, but that's that's that's all,
Speaker 2: you know. And lots of people whom I've known and
Speaker 2: been friendly with, you know, have have made big money,
Speaker 2: right ah, they keep it in proportion. Most have made nothing.
Speaker 2: But and I've thought about that, and one thing that
Speaker 2: struck me was that if I'd had big early success,
Speaker 2: I'm sure I wouldn't have kept writing for sixty five years. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2: And also it's hard to know how much you tell
Speaker 2: yourself because you want to hear it. But I'm I'm
Speaker 2: kind of I'm happy with the way things turned out.
Speaker 2: I think I reached just about the level of success
Speaker 2: that was best for me.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I understand that. I think because I, especially
Speaker 1: people like us who you know, have have taken the
Speaker 1: kind of the alcoholic bronkle for a while, that I've
Speaker 1: seen people who succeed so much after they get so
Speaker 1: bored that they don't do so well with it. And
Speaker 1: there may be I mean, there's been decisions I've made
Speaker 1: when I thought, I don't I don't care enough about this,
Speaker 1: and I feel like it might be dangerous and every
Speaker 1: and there have been times when I have been achieved,
Speaker 1: and it's usually some financial or or some kind of
Speaker 1: kudos that makes me forget something I heard in a
Speaker 1: meeting in Glasgow when a woman said, an old lady
Speaker 1: said to me.
Speaker 2: That she's probably amazing as I am now. But like
Speaker 2: you said, but she.
Speaker 1: Said, I son, if you forget what you are, if
Speaker 1: you get what If you forget what you.
Speaker 2: Are, it will not matter who you are, because you
Speaker 2: won't be there. Like it's okay. And I think that
Speaker 2: the idea of the success that's appropriate for what you
Speaker 2: can handle is a nice one.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a it's a way of maintaining some kind
Speaker 1: of gratitudinal equilibrium, which is a phrase that I picked
Speaker 1: up in my nice one.
Speaker 2: Yeah, in my where did I get that? In the
Speaker 2: science thing? What do we call that science thing? Nodic science?
Speaker 1: It's my noetic science phrase, gratitude and the equilibrium.
Speaker 2: But what about now? You said to me when we.
Speaker 1: Were hanging around outside, you said, do you feel like
Speaker 1: you're happier now than you've ever been?
Speaker 2: Is that you think that's right. I think I'm having
Speaker 2: a better time these days than I can recall, and
Speaker 2: I'm enjoying the life I'm leading in retirement. As I
Speaker 2: think I mentioned before, I've become an absolute gym rat.
Speaker 2: I'm at my local gym. What do you do? You
Speaker 2: left weights and walk around? I do. I do weights
Speaker 2: work and I generally put in about a half hour
Speaker 2: on the trap. Wow, and you know I'm I'm in
Speaker 2: and out in about an hour and a half. Is
Speaker 2: that something you get into after the old the heart thing? Oh? No,
Speaker 2: I got into you know. I don't have many regrets,
Speaker 2: but one thing I can find myself regretting is that
Speaker 2: I didn't get into working with ways when I was
Speaker 2: a teenager because I was a terrible athlete. I was
Speaker 2: hopeless of sports and all of that. But lifting weights
Speaker 2: that I could have done, and I think I could
Speaker 2: have enjoyed it and stayed with it and things like that.
Speaker 2: It is. I got into it finally when I was
Speaker 2: about forty and and have you know there have been
Speaker 2: times when we didn't live in a gym, or I
Speaker 2: didn't go that frequently, but I've I've been a member
Speaker 2: where I am now for about almost twenty five years.
Speaker 2: I joined this gym shortly after nine to eleven, and
Speaker 2: I'd been going to another one in the neighborhood before that,
Speaker 2: but it closed and and I really enjoy it. You know, I.
Speaker 1: Started lifting weights. I hadn't done it for years. I
Speaker 1: really love the sensation of having done it.
Speaker 2: Yes, you know that, Yes, it body feels good. It does.
Speaker 1: It's kind of it has a kind of parcascet vibe,
Speaker 1: you know what I mean. It's like you get to
Speaker 1: the other end and you go, sure, I feel kind
Speaker 1: of everything's okay, yep, yep.
Speaker 2: You don't get high so much.
Speaker 1: It's kind of like, oh, okay, I can handle it.
Speaker 2: Absolutely. Also, the feeling of.
Speaker 1: Serenity that comes after physical exhaustion, it's pretty good, true. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And I still I find myself even now I've been sober.
Speaker 2: You've been sober longer than me. I've been sober thirty
Speaker 2: three years. I don't know. You've been sober like one
Speaker 2: hundred or something, forty seven years, right, so the bard
Speaker 2: forty forty eight years a long time. It's a long
Speaker 2: time for anything.
Speaker 1: Yeah, really, But you know the thing is about it
Speaker 1: is that even now.
Speaker 2: After all this time.
Speaker 1: I don't know about you, like if I have to
Speaker 1: go and get any kind of medical procedure done, which
Speaker 1: kind of as one gets older, you know, it kind
Speaker 1: of like clicks up when they they have that that
Speaker 1: moment when they're going to put you under. But there's
Speaker 1: I can see the drip in my arm and the
Speaker 1: anistasis says, Okay, you're going to feel a little dizzy
Speaker 1: or woozy, or you'll feel this. I want you to
Speaker 1: count backwards. That moment when that drop goes into the
Speaker 1: IV live.
Speaker 2: For the fucking.
Speaker 1: I live for that fucking moment when they say, oh,
Speaker 1: you're going to need a scope or a thing. I'm like, okay,
Speaker 1: is the propofile involved because I'm there, and and that
Speaker 1: when they drop that thing, because I can't have it.
Speaker 2: You know, I can't have it unless you know.
Speaker 1: But but when they dropped that, I remember, I even
Speaker 1: said to the guy. The last time I had have
Speaker 1: done it was a couple of years ago. I said
Speaker 1: to the anistatist. He said, okay, you're gonna I'm just
Speaker 1: gonna drop the sanamony. You count backwards and actually the
Speaker 1: dropman and I said, can I stay here? Just before
Speaker 1: I just before I left. It's funny, I still feel
Speaker 1: the call of it, you still feel It's not the call, No,
Speaker 1: Booze doesn't call to me, not in that kind of
Speaker 1: a way.
Speaker 2: I don't. But but the idea of some kind of.
Speaker 1: Relief sometimes calls to me, some sort of altered state. Yeah,
Speaker 1: a little bit like maybe maybe it's time for me
Speaker 1: to go to Togo and and transit up.
Speaker 2: Oh he's gone, jeez.
Speaker 1: So let me ask you now then, because we're about
Speaker 1: out of time. But I but just before we go,
Speaker 1: I want to ask you, what is given the fight?
Speaker 1: You wrote books for sixty our story, you wrote everything
Speaker 1: for sixty five years, and now you don't write at all.
Speaker 2: What do you do? Well, as I said, I go,
Speaker 2: of course, go to the gym. You go to the gym,
Speaker 2: I read, I listen to music. I hang out with
Speaker 2: my wife, who's a lovely woman. So that makes sense.
Speaker 2: That's uh, that's a delight. Patient I would imagine as well.
Speaker 2: Patient she would have to she fucking would a saint,
Speaker 2: she is kind of yeah. Uh. And we travel. We
Speaker 2: travel quite a bit, not as it enterest as in
Speaker 2: the past, because no Africa trips more or what mostly
Speaker 2: mostly cruises, but we spent I think two weeks in
Speaker 2: Tasmania on a cruise around Tasmania earlier this year. That's
Speaker 2: a long flight, yes, And I decided, even though it
Speaker 2: was a perfectly comfortable flight, we had a decent enough time.
Speaker 2: And I hate flying. I hate airports. I hate the whole. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: I mean I love it and hate it. And this
Speaker 2: one was I don't know, sixteen hours, however long it was.
Speaker 2: I thought, I don't think I have to do that again. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: especially if you get this somewhere. I am.
Speaker 1: I've never been to Tasmania, but I can imagine you
Speaker 1: could probably get a similar effect geographically by not leaving
Speaker 1: the continental United statef am.
Speaker 2: I right, uh, probably. We did. Like Saber, it's a
Speaker 2: very livapool city and we enjoyed we enjoyed the GA
Speaker 2: Cruz and everything.
Speaker 1: But it's too far away, not for the Tasmanians, let's
Speaker 1: be fair. From their point of view, it's right there,
Speaker 1: it is, it's right there. They're fine, Larry's great to
Speaker 1: catch up with you.
Speaker 2: P Uh, have more power to you. They keep going
Speaker 2: to the.
Speaker 1: Gym and I'll speaks excellent. It's so good to see
Speaker 1: it's lovely to see