Interview with mystery author Gillespie Lamb

My special guest today is mystery author Gillespie Lamb to chat about The Junkyard Dick.

During his virtual book tour, Gillespie will be giving away a $25 Amazon or Barnes and Noble (winner’s choice) gift card to a lucky randomly drawn winner. To be entered for a chance to win, use the form below. To increase your chances of winning, feel free to visit his other tour stops and enter there, too!

Bio:
Gillespie Lamb is a former journalist and still is a freelance writer for print and online publications. The Junkyard Dick is his second novel. He also co-authored a nonfiction history book published in July, The Aviation Pioneers of McCook Field.

Welcome, Gillespie. Please tell us about your current release.
The Junkyard Dick is what I call a PG-rated beach read. It is not profound, but it is pleasurable. With the exception of the “bad guy,” the novel’s characters are appealing. They work hard. They mostly play by the rules. Each has defining idiosyncrasies. While the story is not complicated—the crime is committed on the first page in full view of readers—it defies explanation. Readers think they know, and then they’re not sure, and then… wait a minute! I believe the story has sufficient gravity to pull readers all the way to the end.

What inspired you to write this book?
The protagonist, Tak Sweedner, owns and operates a salvage yard in a county seat Texas town. The idea originated from my own experience—a friend asked me to come work for him for a few months in his… salvage yard. I didn’t replicate that work experience but becoming familiar with the day-to-day yard routines certainly informed the novel. I also wrote the book as a testament to blue-collar workplace people and values. Tak is a regular, hard-working, practical small business owner, and it shows on every page. So, when someone keeps trying to kill him, it is very disconcerting.

The following excerpt describes one of those episodes, when his truck is forced off the road on a steep Hill Country highway:
The collision jarred me. I was thrown against the door, the steering wheel almost twisting from my hands. I regained control of the wheel, but not until the rollback had begun to drift off the pavement at an angle I recognized was irreversible, not with that much momentum behind it. From instinct, I turned the wheel back toward the roadway. The loaded truck tipped right in response and began to roll over. I had lost the battle to stay upright. The ground seemed to tilt and the tumble down the long hillside began.

The noise of what followed was nearly as excruciating as the physical pummeling. I thought my eardrums would burst from the shrill screech of metal being wrenched apart. The booming of steel sheeting repeatedly being smashed against rock was so terrible it scared me all by itself.

Glass from the windshield sprayed me as it exploded under pressure. My eyes closed an instant before I felt my face pelted with the shards. Time and again, I was thrust against my seatbelt so hard that I expected the nylon either to part and send me flying or to bury itself in me like an extra diagonal rib. My jaw began to hurt after I banged my head against the door frame or the steering wheel or something unyielding while the truck and I tumbled and bounced.

The noise finally reached a crescendo and began to recede and the jolting ride morphed into what seemed like a long, long skid. And then nothing.

What exciting story are you working on next?
I am polishing a contemporary novel about the cultural and political tumult in the country and how a middle-aged businessman deals with it. The man feels compelled to contribute his voice to the public discussion in a reasoned way. He just doesn’t know how he can become engaged short of running for public office. He finally does figure out how to be heard—and quickly finds himself in the middle of an imbroglio. The balance of the novel deals with the impact of his that on his business, his family—and his relationship with a woman in the other camp. The story is not polemical, nor especially political. It is a fair-to-all treatment of contemporary issues in the guise of a middle-aged love story.

When did you first consider yourself a writer?
I had a career as a journalist and still am a freelancer, but as for writing writing, that is, creating fiction, that only began a few years ago. I had a middle-grades reader published in 2017, The Beamy Courage of Gerta Scholler. It was well-received though I hardly promoted it. I felt somewhat validated by that experience. Now that I have this novel as well, I do consider myself an author, for better or worse.

Do you write full-time? If so, what’s your work day like? If not, what do you do other than write and how do you find time to write?
No, I still am busy as a freelancer, so work on fiction is wedged among everything else going on. That is one reason why years came and went between the first novel and the latest one. I work on a book, then put it aside, then work on it some more. While that sounds frustrating, I am not sure that it hasn’t been to my advantage. Having a life besides a novel-writing one has given me important perspective. I don’t have time for navel-gazing or esoteric writing fraternity activities. I’m too busy living… and writing.

What would you say is your interesting writing quirk?
I’m not sure I want to own up to being quirky! Eccentric, perhaps. I don’t have any habits related to writing that are especially interesting. However, I have been very private about it. When the first novel was published, I never told anyone, not even my family. I was content to have created something of value. With The Junkyard Dick, I decided it was only fair to the publisher and to friends and family to openly acknowledge the book and to market it. We write to be read, correct? I finally am admitting that. Therefore, I am marketing both books with emphasis on the latest one. A private writer is a diarist, and I aspire to be more than that.

As a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?
Well, my father was a farmer and I’m sure he hoped I would farm with him. I always was a little daunted by the prospect because Dad was an award-winning farmer and I wasn’t sure I could match that. When I was in high school, I wrote an essay by assignment and in it I concluded that traveling around the country being an odd-jobs guy would be an ideal vocation. As it turned out, I did that for a few years before settling in to newspaper work. My parents were happy, I am sure, when I finally got on track.

Anything additional you want to share with the readers?
Something happened in May that has impacted promotion of The Junkyard Dick. The novel is set in the Texas town of … Uvalde, where I live. The town was thoroughly shaken by the school shooting that was national news. As I contemplated marketing the book—which is identified by name and contains many identifiable characteristics of the multicultural town such as live oak trees in the middle of the street, favorite gordita restaurants, swimming holes in a nearby clear-water river and so on—as I considered all that, it became clear that pushing the book at this moment would be seen as trying to capitalize on a tragedy. Therefore, I formed a nonprofit organization into which will go any royalties from the book along with contributions from the publisher. That will be seed money as I launch a fund-raising campaign to support new creative-writing programs for elementary-age children in Uvalde. I believe the programs will help the community recover from horror. You can learn more about the nonprofit, which I named The Story Inventors Club Inc., by visiting the website, storyinventorsclub.com. Thank you.

Links:
Website | Facebook | Story Inventors Club | Black Rose Writing | Amazon | Goodreads

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