Interview with Gary Earl Ross, author of Nickel City Monsters: Interconnected Stories from the World of Gideon Rimes (Nickel City Series)

 

Today it gives the Indie Crime Scene great pleasure to interview Gary Earl Ross, whose collection Nickel City Monsters: Interconnected Stories from the World of Gideon Rimes had its debut on 17th July 2024.

Nickel City Monsters is a collection of stories and a novelette, subtitled Interconnected Stories from the World of Gideon Rimes. What can you tell us about PI Gideon Rimes, the protagonist? 

Like one of my sons, Rimes is an Iraq War vet who went into law enforcement and later left. After a job-related injury required surgery, my son took a job with a government contractor. After a shootout with a spree killer left his partner paralyzed, Rimes became a PI. Haunted by his failure to protect his partner, Gideon is a good man sometimes forced to do regrettable things. Also, he is fearless, a loyal friend, persistent in the pursuit of truth, and devious.

You are a prolific writer of novels, plays, essays and much more, and a winner of the Edgar Award, presented by the Mystery Writers of America. What led you to focus on crime fiction and the career of Gideon Rimes?

An old trope holds that serial killers and career criminals have mommy issues. So I’m going to blame my mother—in a good way. She loved to read and devoured books she then passed to her firstborn. She was especially fond of mysteries, and I grew to love them too. Over my career I wrote lots of short stories, an historical novel, and several staged plays. When Matter of Intent won the Edgar, I decided to abandon the idea of writing the Great American Novel or Great American Play and dove into mystery and didn’t come up for air.

The earlier volumes in the Nickel City Series were well-received: Nickel City Blues, Nickel City Crossfire, Nickel City Storm Warning, and Nickel City Naked Lady. What can you tell us about those earlier volumes?

Having loved the PI genre since childhood, I wanted a PI who was African-American, like me, and devoted to his friends and lover.  Nickel City Blues was a title floating in my head for years, but I didn’t write it until I retired. My detective underwent a dozen or so name try-outs, but the only one that came back with no hits in a Google search was Gideon Rimes. Blues involves a murder perhaps the result of political corruption and also introduces ongoing supporting characters. In Crossfire, Rimes is hired to find a missing Doctor of Nursing Practice on the run from drug dealers. Storm Warning has Gideon protecting a diversity conference’s keynote speaker, whose journalist husband was murdered by white supremacists planning an attack on the conference. In Naked Lady, Rimes is hired to locate the young man who surreptitiously video-recorded his sexual encounters with a passionate sixtyish woman prominent in the community. The Naked Lady is also a classic Conn saxophone, which keeps intact my practice of making my titles double entendres. Finally, Monsters has not only stories about Gideon Rimes but also about people in his world: his lover, attorney Phoenix Trinidad; his professor godfather Dr. Robert Chance; his foster sister Mira, a medical examiner; his friends on the police force; and even some of his antagonists from earlier novels.

What prompted you to write a crime series set in Buffalo, the Nickel City itself? And is Buffalo one of those places in America that seems to generate its own folklore or myth? 

My hometown is a troubled, complicated, too poor rust-belt city blessed with wonderful people. The second largest city in New York, it is also called the City of Good Neighbors, proven in every blizzard when people step outside to help those who live near. No longer an industrial giant, the area’s largest industries are health care and higher education. Erie County has just under a million residents, but we have a world-class philharmonic, one of the ten best art galleries on the planet in the AKG, and more than two dozen theatre companies. We are rich in history—next door to Niagara Falls, a major player in the War of 1812, the site of the 1901 assassination of President McKinley, and the first city lit by electricity. Buffalo is the home of the chicken wing, the windshield wiper, the grain elevator, the cardiac pacemaker, instant coffee, and the electric chair. In recent years we’ve undergone a Renaissance, most prominently marked by Canalside, a thriving area developed at the end point of the Erie Canal. In a good mystery series, the setting—whether New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, or Cabot Cove—becomes another character. I thought Buffalo needed—no, deserved—a rough-and-tumble PI to walk its streets in print.

The Coen Brothers set a retelling of Homer’s Odyssey in the Deep South of the 1930s (O Brother, Where Art Thou). Is there something about America that lends itself to magical realism, or is that merely how it seems from outside?

America’s biggest myth, I think, is the romantic idea of the Old West. The PI is just the modern equivalent of the cowboy bringing a semblance of justice to a place chaotic because of its lawlessness. Today the mythic hero must work through an abundance of unknown or poorly understood laws that create a different kind of chaos underscored by modern technology. It’s quite a playground for a PI.

You have a short story due to appear in Black Cat Weekly, and a new play that will be performed in 2025. What can you tell us about those?

“Split Wit” is the story version of last year’s play Split Wit, in which the only witness to a murder suffers from split brain syndrome, a severed corpus collosum, the nerve bundle through which the two sides of the brain communicate. The lead detective, Maxine Travis, first appeared in my play The Scavenger’s Daughter and later became a supporting character in the Nickel City books. The theatre company for which I wrote Split Wit—and the actress who played the lead—asked for another Maxine Travis stage mystery. They will perform A Length of Chain in 2025, which has Maxine searching for her kidnapped husband, a doctor also part of the world of Gideon Rimes.

You are Professor Emeritus of the University at Buffalo, having held a language arts professorship until 2013. What, if any, are the challenges of moving between teaching and creative writing?

I published lots of papers and stories and did public radio essays for my university’s NPR station but managed to write only one novel during my academic career. With so much of my time taken up by planning, grading, and mentoring students and younger faculty, I retired to write full. While I hated university politics, I did enjoy the classroom. Recently I came home so excited from a presentation I did for a Sherlock Holmes study group that my better half told me I really miss teaching. She knows me so well.

As well as writing novels, short fiction and plays, you have been an actor, director, and audiobook narrator. How does that experience influence your writing, in terms of dialogue and action?

There is a circularity in the things I’ve done. Being in and writing plays has helped me develop characters for my fiction. I take note of actors’ gestures, behaviors, tics, and tells to pass on to the people on the page. Likewise, plays have helped me develop dialogue skills to tighten narratives by making my dialogue reveal more in fewer words. Each medium of storytelling forces me to dig into the emotion that makes people real.

Your plays have been performed internationally and two of them, The Scavenger’s Daughter and Matter of Intent have been adapted into motion pictures by CITOC Productions of Mumbai, India. How did that come about and what was the experience like?

Somehow, producers in India came across my scripts and asked if they could adapt them into films. I wasn’t sure how much money to ask for because things are different without a Writer’s Guild to set a scale. It took a bit of research to find out what screen rights went for there, and I asked for an amount about two-thirds of the way to the top of their scale. The hilarious part is that the week after they paid me, the sewer line in front of my house collapsed. All the money went into the repair. As for the films, they never sent me copies but I found them on the internet and promptly burned them onto DVDs. I liked them both. Matter of Intent was a courtroom drama about murder across racial lines in the U.S. in 1960. State vs. Malte Mhaske was about a contemporary murder across caste lines. The Scavenger’s Daughter was a murder mystery that revolved around how Alzheimer’s disease affected an African-American family. The Indian adaptation carried the same title and made the family Indian immigrants to the U.S. The last I heard, both were streaming on Tata Sky, a service there.

What prompted your interest in writing and what were your influences growing up?

When I was ten, I got a copy of Ray Bradbury’s R is for Rocket from our neighborhood library and decided I wanted to write stories. Mom pushed more books at me, and Dad gave me his old typewriter. My influences growing up included Mark Twain, John A. Williams, James Baldwin, Isaac Asimov, H.G. Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Alfred Hitchcock through his anthologies and TV show.

Though you have retired from full-time teaching, your output is still prolific. How do you organise your time?

In the morning I work out for an hour, then sit down at the computer to write, rewrite, or do research for something to write. I usually work a few hours, then do other things with the rest of my day—tend to family matters, read, visit friends, play games or work puzzles. If I’m caught up in finishing something, I can work for five or six hours.

What has your experience of being an indie writer been like, and do you have any advice for those starting out?

Though I am older now and slowing down, I have loved being a writer. I feel blessed to have published several books and hundreds of shorter works. I haven’t become New York Times bestseller rich, but I’m thrilled to have seen my dream come true.

As well as crime, you have also written some stories with a supernatural element. Is that something you might return to?

My fantasy and science fiction writing is limited to things I enjoy. I don’t want to create elaborate fantasy worlds with fantastic creatures. Nor do I want to get lost in Star Trek-like technobabble. Like H.G. Wells, I may give someone strange abilities just to tell a story, and my science fiction is limited to time travel because I love history enough to play with it. Recently, I sent such a story to an anthology.

Will there be more adventures for Gideon Rimes?

My publisher, SEG, is on hiatus from accepting manuscripts, so Nickel City Monsters may be the last Rimes book. Publishers don’t like to pick up a series with the sixth book unless they have rights to the earlier titles. I have a play and a non-Rimes mystery novel in development. The last Rimes story published (and included in Monsters) was “Nickel City Eavesdropper” in Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine earlier this year. (I so wish my mother had been here for that.) Rimes can always come back in a future short story. In fact, I’m certain he will.

Nickel City Blues | Nickel City Crossfire | Nickel City Storm Warning | Nickel City Naked Lady | Nickel City Monsters

Shadows and Mirrors: Four African-American Suspense Plays | Killing Grounds: Three Stage Thrillers and One Anti-war Play

About Gary Earl Ross:

University at Buffalo professor emeritus Gary Earl Ross is an award-winning playwright, novelist, essayist, audiobook narrator, and occasional actor and director. He is the author of Blackbird Rising, Wheel of Desire, Shimmerville, Beneath the Ice and the Gideon Rimes mysteries: Nickel City Blues, Nickel City Crossfire, Nickel City Storm Warning, Nickel City Naked Lady, and Nickel City Monsters. His plays include The Mark of Cain, The Guns of Christmas, The Trial of Trayvon Martin, Picture Perfect, Stoker’s Guest, Matter of Intent (winner of the Edgar Award from Mystery Writers of America), and the Maxine Travis Stage Mysteries (The Scavenger’s Daughter, Split Wit, and, onstage in 2025, A Length of Chain). His short stories have appeared in numerous magazines, journals, and anthologies, including Medium for Murder, Buffalo Noir, Intimacy, Black Cat Weekly, Mystery Tribune, and Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Both The Scavenger’s Daughter and Matter of Intent have been adapted into motion pictures by CITOC Productions of Mumbai, India.  Ross is a member of MWA, International Thriller Writers, Crime Writers of Color, Private Eye Writers of America, the Short Mystery Fiction Society, the Dramatist Guild, and the Just Buffalo Literary Center. The father of five adult children, he lives in Buffalo, nicknamed the Nickel City after the bison-head five-cent piece.

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