"Making the PI Cool Again"

By Christine A. Verstraete

You gotta love a guy that takes no prisoners, tells it like it is, and makes the tough PI cool again.

That's what author Ed Lynskey does with PI Frank Johnson in his latest mysteries, "The Dirt-Brown Derby," published in August 2006 by Mundania Press, and "The Blue Cheer, " scheduled for release in March 2007 from Point Blank/Wildside Press.

So, why a private investigator as a main character, you ask? Well, what else do you expect from a guy who seems to emulate his own writing habits after old pulp writers like John D. MacDonald?

"Some folks are night owls. Others like me hop up before the crack of dawn and get cranking," Lynskey says. "John D. MacDonald, the pulpster, and Travis McGee, author, used to write six days a week and take off Sundays. I seem to like striking that balance in my own work schedule."

And like the authors he emulates, Lynskey prefers his stories with an edge. A funny thing is he actually started out writing in a more "literary" style, and still enjoys reading and reviewing such books. But he says he noticed a definite change, not in his storytelling, but in how he views a story, when he started writing in a "grittier" style.

"I'd bet there hasn't been that much difference in my fiction, just in my approach," he says. "My vision shifted when I moved away from writing literary stuff to more crime fiction. Telling a cracking good yarn with full-bodied characters became my new focus. After all, the goal is to entertain and interest readers, hopefully to entice them to plunk down their sweat-earned money to buy my books."

Ed believes he was among the first students to get a master's degree in non-fiction writing from George Mason University in Virginia , located near Washington , D.C.

He started his career in technical writing, something he still plugs away at from his home office in Virginia only a few miles from the Pentagon, and came to fiction as a kind of lark. It was something he thought he'd try out, never expecting the outcome.

"I took a creative writing class at a community college as an elective, you know, thinking it'd be a cushy class," he recalls. "I never dreamed of actually spending so much of my adult life writing. Some cushy class, eh? But I got hooked and started writing really bad short stories and poems. Eventually I sent out a few and published them in the small presses."

Twenty-five years later, Ed has published "a ton of stuff" in literary magazines and small press publications. He's published poetry in the Atlantic Monthly and book reviews in the New York Times and Washington Post.

His other books include, "Pelham Fell Here" and "Troglodytes." Those are among at least a dozen novels he's written over the past six years, an achievement that he calls simply the result of hard work.

"I've been called prolific, but I don't think that I am," he says. "I just follow a work regimen every day."

That Ed became a writer may not be surprising given his early affection for books, nurtured in part by necessity, but also by the sheer love of reading.

"Hurray for the local public library," he says. "I was one of those kids who liked to steal away with a good book, especially in the summertime. We lived out in the sticks, so a book was a way to pass the time."

Ed may be writing the books now, but he is still a reader, favoring works from Southern Gothic novelist Harry Crews, whom his master's thesis was based on, to old pulp writers like Charles Wlliams and Ed Lacy, along with noir writers like Al Guthrie and Duane Swierczynski.

Reader or writer? Why pick one? Ed says it's a great time to be both.

."I've started reviewing 'literary' fiction again, and I'm thrilled and impressed by the titles," he says. "You know, it's a great time to be a reader of fiction. Lots and lots of variety and energy crackles out there. I've heard on the list groups the frequent complaint that there are so many books and so little time to read them."

www.mundania.com/books-dirtbrownderby.html

Favorite Quote :

"A sonic force engulfed the mountainside and echoed up the laurel hollows. Even the treetops quivered. I craned my neck to gaze over the cabin's roofline at a bursting fireball. The heat's explosive wave stopped me in my tracks."

--Excerpt from, "The Blue Cheer," Point Blank/Wildside Press

Favorite Writing or Other Moment:

"I met my wife in a writing class many years ago. If I never publish another book, that's enough reward for me. But to be more prosaic, I have to laugh at myself, like when I read something I wrote the day before in a white heat. Of course the writing doesn't pack near the same punch it had while I was writing it."

Famous Last Words:

"The prickliest obstacle I've encountered in my fiction writing is dealing with rejection. Somebody said it's a heartless, heartbreaking business, I'd agree with that assessment. Every day is a new place to begin and build."

www.oivas.com/pointblank/bluecheer.html