Interview with Jeffrey Fleishman, author of Good Night, Forever (The Sam Carver Series, Book 3)

 

Today it gives the Indie Crime Scene great pleasure to interview Jeffrey Fleishman, author of Good Night, Forever, which debuts on June 28.

Good Night, Forever is the third book in the series featuring detective Sam Carver. How far does the series reference vintage Noir, as well as contemporary psychological darkness?

I grew up watching old Hollywood noir films. They were my introduction to Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. I was fascinated by the resilience, cleverness and urbane worldliness of detectives like Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe. They knew secrets and understood the sinister whispers of human nature. They were sensitive, too, in their own ways, which sometimes got them into trouble. I wanted to create that in Sam Carver -- a man who is seldom surprised by the illicitness in others even as he tries to reconcile the darker truths that have made him. That to me is noir. In Carver’s self-exploration and in the murders he tries to solve, the novels drift into psychological fables about wealth, power, deception that touch on contemporary themes such as homelessness, politics, spies, climate change and the intrusions of technology. 

In Good Night, Forever, Sam Carver encounters someone he has met before - the killer, Dylan Cross, who first appears in the novel My Detective. What can you tell us about Dylan?

Dylan Cross is a gifted, aggrieved architect seeking vengeance for the wrongs done to her. She is six-feet tall, a standout tennis player and, like her mother, suffers from bi-polar and other disorders. She is as intelligent as she is damaged. And in her crimes – swift, calculating and brutal in their craft -- she finds beauty and revulsion. These are the strange twins inside her. Dylan has endured the discrimination and misogyny of her profession while finding a redemptive and calming peace in the precision and art of her architectural designs. Her favorite is a church in the desert near Joshua Tree, where she occasionally escapes demons from within and without. Dylan is alone in the world. Trapped inside her fantasies and prayers no one hears. 

The book is described as a detective story and love story of delusion and obsession. How would you describe the relationship of the two main characters?

Sam and Dylan carry psychological scars. The son of a boxer and a writer, Sam is a cynic with a good heart. Dylan is a killer who craves vindication and love. She has chosen Sam to be her redeemer. She’s hacked his laptop, read his deepest thoughts. She sees in him a kindred spirit, a man accustomed to bruises both literal and metaphorical. She leaves him clues and sends him long untraceable emails. She wants to draw him closer so that he will see not the murderer but rather “the girl I was before all those things done to me.” As Sam investigates each of her crimes, he begins to unravel Dylan’s past. He is reviled by the killer in her, but feels compassion and pity, knowing that, like him, she is a victim haunted by voices that never quiet. They finally meet in ‘Good Night, Forever’. In the darkness of a rented cabin on the Pacific coast, they are man and woman, cop and killer, fugitive and hunter. They feel suspicion, anger, betrayal, tenderness, and unspoken things they have never felt with anyone before. They close the door and face one another. Like two souls colliding.  

Sam Carver is a detective with the Los Angeles police department. Has your own experience living there and working as a journalist and editor on the Los Angeles Times fed into your evocation of place in your fiction?

I moved to Los Angeles eight years ago. I was, like many, struck by its contradictions: beauty, ugliness, wealth, homelessness, artists, opportunists, clear skies and sudden hailstorms in the San Gabriels. So much to draw from, yet so hard to discern. There is not one Los Angeles. There are many. They feed into whatever one desires or whatever one fears. The city can be as mundane as it is visceral and enigmatic. It can tempt a drought with the promise of rain or set loose a wildfire through an arroyo. The elements conspire. The sunlight scours and the dusk flares clear and hard on the horizon. Crime plays well here. It echoes through the palms, Beverly Hills mansions and the ragged tents on Skid Row. It’s a land of film sets, gang bangers, priests, laborers, hairdressers, producers and the famous, who wander the hills and canyons looking, I suppose, for something between refuge and validation. It’s invented and ancient. A madman’s dream at the edge of the continent.      

You were a Pulitzer Prize finalist in feature writing and a longtime foreign correspondent for The Times, serving as bureau chief in Cairo and Berlin, and in Rome for the Philadelphia Inquirer. What challenges does writing fiction, especially crime fiction, present when compared with reportage?

Ernest Hemingway once suggested that being a journalist was good training for a novelist so long as the journalist knew when to quit. My years as a reporter and editor have – I hope – sharpened my skills as an observer and helped me write concisely about complicated matters. Somewhere between nuance and fact lie grace and truth. I think the novelist strives for the same thing, but the facts he or she relies on are, unlike the journalist, constrained only by the breadth of imagination. The trick is to build an imaginary world on its own facts. Liberating but with its own rules and expansive rhythms. To go beyond the notebook into deeper dimensions. 

In recent years, there has been an unprecedented attack on journalism and fact in the States. What role might fiction play in this situation? 

You are correct about the ongoing attacks and distrust of journalism. But much of it is coming from people with agendas who have created universes of untruths they peddle as reality. It’s a shame people fall for it. But this is the world we live in. Confusing, exasperating, so hard to define. It’s dangerous to a democracy and makes the job of the journalist all the more important. I don’t know if there is a role for fiction – it seems many are already turning reality into fiction -- in this equation. I’ll have to think on that.  

 

The crime Sam Carver sets out to investigate is a series of murderous attacks on homeless men. Why is the subject of homelessness important to you?

I live a few blocks from Skid Row. I see everyday the degradation of humanity and the realities of addiction, mental illness, bankruptcy and other scourges. It is intractable. Governments have failed. Families have failed. Society has failed. People have failed themselves. I don’t think we can be evolved and compassionate as a nation if we allow tens of thousands of people across a swath of city blocks to live like this. I don’t pretend to know the answers. But I wanted to make homelessness a thread in ‘Good Night, Forever’ to show how much it is engrained in who we are as Angelenos.   

   

The investigation leads Carver into the world of militias and neo-Nazis, groups that have become increasingly visible. What can you tell us about this aspect of the novel?

When I was writing ‘Good Night, Forever’, America was in the throes of an impending pandemic, social justice protests and the rise of the alt-right. I was intrigued by the influence QAnon and other conspiracy theorists had on some conservative Americans. I wanted to explore right-wing extremist groups and how – although they were at the fringes – were well-armed, dangerous, committed to their ideologies, and an unfortunate part of our country’s history. In writing the novel, my interest wasn’t just the militiamen in the Northwest woods but the big money behind extremist causes that have had a hand in shaping our politics. There are several characters in the book who embody the range of the alt-right movement, including a billionaire and two brothers who run a group called The Flag.         

   

Another important social issue that the novel references is the climate crisis. How is this important to the narrative and why?

It’s raining through most of ‘Good Night, Forever’. That of course is unusual for Los Angeles. I wanted to do two things: create a noir atmosphere and allude in subtle ways to how global warming is affecting the planet. The novel doesn’t go deeply into climate change. It barely mentions it. Rather, it makes the incessant rain a secondary, subtle character, as if a foreboding shadow. I play with the concept of a perpetually cloudy, stormy LA, which, I hope, allows the reader to look at the city in new, unexpected ways. How weather can change the character and mood of place. Even what we see.  

    

To what extent have your experiences as a foreign correspondent influenced the writer you have become?

My experiences abroad covering wars, the fall of governments and being exposed to different cultures have been invaluable. They taught me how to observe and see past preconceptions to understand the nuances that make us at once different and the same. One can find the universal in the specific. This has inspired me as a novelist. I can draw on many places from the mind’s eye to create fiction that, I hope, has the resonance of reality. I also think my years as a war correspondent have helped me specifically in writing crime fiction – a war is one big crime scene. Just look at what’s happening in Ukraine.          

What novels have influenced you and are there any writers that you return to?

I return to a lot of writers including Ernest Hemingway, Jeanette Winterson, Rebecca West, Czeslaw Milosz, Norman Mailer, James Baldwin, Clarice Lispector, Michael Ondaatje and of course Raymond Chandler.   

Will there be a further novel in the series, and what other plans do you have for the future?

If I answer the question ‘will there be a further novel’ in the series, it might give away the ending of ‘Good Night, Forever.’ Wouldn’t want to do that.   

Blackstone Publishing

About Jeffrey Fleishman:

Jeffrey Fleishman is a Pulitzer Prize finalist and longtime foreign correspondent. He has had postings in Rome, Berlin, and Cairo and has covered wars in Iraq, Libya, and Kosovo. He returned to America in 2014 and is Foreign editor of the Los Angeles Times. He has written four other novels, My Detective and Last Dance (the first two Sam Carver books), Shadow Man, and Promised Virgins: A Novel of Jihad.

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