Sometimes, the key to this whole “discover
a new writer” thing
is simply being in the right place at the right time. Earlier
this year, I attended Bouchercon, and I naturally spent a fair
amount
of time at the Mystery News booth in the book room. One day,
Chris Knopf came up to the table. We talked and he mentioned
that his
first book was just out, called The Last Refuge. He was kind
enough to give me a hardcopy and I said I’d give it a
read. I’m
glad I did; it’s terrific. And I knew about twenty pages
into it that I wanted to interview Chris for this column. I recently
caught up with him working late at his office in Connecticut.
“I’m a principal in a communications
agency. I do marketing, communications and PR, and other things.
I was a copywriter for
thirty years. I guess I still am. I’ve grown up in the
commercial writing world. Eventually my wife and I bought the
agency we were
working for and we’ve been here for about five or six
years. I always wrote fiction for my own edification and always
had ambitions
about writing fiction. I went to graduate school for creative
writing. The only classes I ever got A’s in all my college
years were in creative writing. I tell people I’ve been
writing my way out of trouble my whole life.
“I studied creative writing in London, through
a program sponsored by Antioch College. This was in ‘75-76.
One of their professors was a guy named Michael Lynch. He taught
at Johns
Hopkins, which
was a premier writing program. I had applied there and was
turned down and then when he was recruited to teach in London,
he recruited
me. He said ‘I would have had you come to Hopkins. If
you’d
like to study with me in London, come on over’ so I did.
I was there about a year in total. The program was a joy. I
had been working for a couple of years so I was kind of desperate
to
get some space to write. The idea to combine that with a degree
was fantastic. We had a lot of contemporary literature programs,
and people like Margaret Drabble and Edna O’Brien would
go out and have drinks with us. It was a glorious time.”
The
Last Refuge tells the story of Sam Acquillo, a guy trying
to run his life in as slow a speed as possible. He’s
inherited a house from his parents in Southampton, and with
it, the occasional
care of his next door neighbor Regina Broadhurst. When Regina
is found dead in her bathtub, Sam gets appointed administrator
to
her Estate. In the process of putting together her affairs,
it becomes clear that there is more to her death than meets
the eye.
The book is filled with marvelously evocative writing about
the part of the Hamptons that aren’t featured in the
pages of Architectural Digest, and among the people who inhabit
the place
year round.
It’s not that easy to find a place to drink
in the summer out here, for obvious reasons, but by early October
the good places
are mostly back to normal. The Pequot was such a crummy hard-bitten
little joint that even regular town people mostly overlooked
it. The inside walls were unfinished studs and wood slats that
had
aged into a charred, light-absorbing brown. There wasn’t
even an operable juke box or Bud sign. There were Slim Jims,
and lots of fresh fish year ‘round, since the steady
clientele were mostly professional fisherman.
So, I asked Chris
to fast forward to the present, working at his agency and working
away on what would become The Last Refuge. “One
of the things I do on the side is design houses. My wife spent
her summers growing up in Southampton and so her parents have
a little cottage in the North Sea area, so we’d go out
there and spend time in the summers. We were able to sneak
in and buy
some land in the 90’s when there was a real estate bust.
We built a house there. So, I had spent time with my wife’s
parents out there getting to know the neighborhood and we’re
out there every minute we can spare. The story came to me at
one point and I thought it would be fun to set it out there.
It was
a run-down working class world for regular people. That was
the inspiration.
“I’ve been continuously writing fiction
pretty much forever. I was always writing things, so I think
about five or six years
ago, I started this book. I had a lot of starts, and eventually
I finished it. My agent sent it out and we had some good response
but it was rejected, but I did get some good feedback. They
said the plot wasn’t acceptable, so with her encouragement, I
decided to take another whack at this thing. I pretty massively
changed the plot and simplified it, but kept the same characters,
same setting and voice. She resubmitted it and it got accepted.”
Chris
told me that part of the rewriting involved stealing from the
book’s sequel, which was already underway. “I stole
some flashbacks about [Sam’s] past from the sequel and
put them in and shaped them out.”
I asked Chris about
his crime fiction influences. “I used
to think that I read a lot of crime fiction, but now that I’ve
been to Bouchercon, I realize that I’m a rank amateur.
It’s
amazing the size and the depth of the genre; it’s just
startling to me. I had always read the ‘greatest hits’,
like Chandler and Hammett and Ross MacDonald. Anyone who reads
my book
will see those influences, obviously. I read Erle Stanley Gardner
and John MacDonald when I was a kid. I love Jim Thompson’s
stuff, very dark and noir. I guess if you had to pick the one
area, it would be the early twentieth century stuff. I studied
a lot
of that, so I’m very much devoted to Hemingway and Fitzgerald
and Nathaniel West.”
As a devotee of Chandler and other
writers who wrote in the first person, I wondered how Chris
was able to resist the easy
temptation
to write with their voices in his head. “The way I do
it, is I read a lot of non-fiction. I stopped reading fiction
a while
ago, because I’m a bit of a magpie and I pick up other
people’s
voices if I’m not careful. I read the best non-fiction
I could get my hands on, like Lewis Thomas, a medical researcher
and essayist. I read Stephen Jay Gould and Winston Churchill.
You’d
be amazed how good some of these guys are. Sometimes I think
the great thinkers of our time are acknowledged as such because
they
were such good writers. Once I had the first eighty pages or
so, I knew I had the way that Sam talked. After that, it wasn’t
as hard.”
As for Bouchercon, Chris was a bit overwhelmed. “I
learned so much, since I know nothing about publishing or about
the genre
or the culture that’s there. I think the community is
really engaging. I liked the feeling and the culture. I was
very welcomed,
and everyone was friendly and kind to me. I didn’t get
a feeling of snotty elitism, which people might think you get
from
writers. This really is a gracious community. I come out of
advertising, which is kind of hardball. Even though it’s
competitive and like a high hurdle race without a finish line,
this is still a
welcoming community and not as cutthroat as I thought it might
be.”
So, what’s next for Chris and his character? “I’ve
got Two Time coming out in the spring. Same character and setting.
It’s been through the mill, and should be out in June.
I’ve
started the third book, and I’m working on another. It’s
one of the books I started years ago and I’ve been playing
around with. I’m not sure what it is yet, but I don’t
think it’s a mystery. It’s more of a general fiction
book, so I’m concentrating on those two right now.”
Even
though I’m aware of the old adage that you shouldn’t
judge a book by its cover, the cover image for The Last
Refuge is one of the best I’ve seen in a long time. The photo
stares out to sea, with a shingle style cottage off to the
left, protected
by a thick perimeter of hedges, accented with a split rail
fence. “My
wife shot the picture! We took pictures in the neighborhood
where this takes place, and [my publisher] saw this shot and
he said ‘Wow,
let’s use that.’”
A wise editorial choice
fully consistent with the atmosphere of the book. The Last
Refuge is a compelling debut novel written
of
a world many only see through a passing car window. It’s
worth a lengthy stop.
