Twenty Questions:
Name: John
Crawley
Title: The
Myth Makers
Genre: Mainstream
Mystery
Publisher: Venture
Galleries/Lulu Press
John Crawley has just
released is 11th novel, The
Myth Makers. It is his fourth novel from Venture Galleries. John makes his home in Texas along with a
wife, two cats and a rather spoiled dog.
1. What was
your first published piece?
Answer: I
believe it was a letter to Paul Crume, a columnist at the Dallas Morning News. He had a column called Big D. It covered the
goings-on in the area. Sometimes with a wink and other times with a tear. I, if
memory serves me correctly, gave him a wink. Must have been around 1967. I also
had my own column on the high school newspaper about the same time. It was a
student’s perspective of world events. It had a less –than-subtle, anti-war
point of view running through it. Unlike Fox News, I never cared to pretend to
be Fair and Balanced.
2. The Myth Makers is your 11th
novel. It is your fourth with this publisher. But until recently you have been
self- published. Why the change — why go with a publisher?
Answer: Less work for me. The publisher, in my case
Gallivant Press, an imprint of Venture Galleries, handles all the details for
me. They get the manuscript ready for publishing, see to a cover and then help
with the promotional work at launch and beyond.
3. Things you
were not doing yourself?
Answer: No. I was, but not in such a detailed manner
in which they do it. Plus, when I handled it, it took time away from writing
and now I can write while they do their thing. I would send out a couple of
emails to friends saying, “Come and get it.” But the guys at my publishing
house have a strategy and a map and I am seeing some real progress.
You know,
publishing has recently been turned upside down with the democracy of the web.
There is a virtual avalanche of new faces and new voices appearing almost
overnight. How do you compete in that environment? We are all learning the new publishing
game. Even the giant houses are. They are merging trying to survive. We are
doing guerilla tactics to be smart street fighters, taking readers almost block
by block. It is a big battle, but we are starting to see the successes.
4. Before
Venture Galleries, you were using Lulu Press, is that correct?
Answer: Yes. And we still are for our print-on-demand, hard-copy
product like paperbacks and hard-cover books.
My publisher only deals in the eBook media. But then again, that is where the lion’s share
of our sales is coming from. I’d say well over 70% now. That is up from about 40% just a few years
ago.
5. The Myth Makers reads like a real — how
should I say — non-fiction story. Did it start out as a non-fiction article?
Answer: It was supposed to. It started out being a
non-fiction research project for a different kind of book, but I kept running
into dead-ends and hidden innuendo surrounding the invention that is the basis
for the story. So in order to make it work, I turned it into a novel and
focused the story on the reporter who was trying to uncover the truth
surrounding the myth. Not unlike the very problem I was trying to do in
researching and writing the book myself.
6. What is the
myth?
Answer: Actually it comes and goes and depending on
where you live there is a slight variation of the story. But it goes something
like this. During the energy crisis of the 1970’s there was a story about an
inventor who developed a thing for a car, which doubled, tripled and even
quadrupled its gas mileage. In fact, the worse the energy crisis became, the
more outlandish the claims of his invention grew. If you were in Texas you heard that the guy
put his invention in a Chrysler New Yorker or a General Motors Buick Park
Avenue and drove it from El Paso to Midland on a thimble-full of gas. If you lived back East he was a blacksmith
from Maine. Out West he was a chemist from Palmdale. And in the Midwest, he was
a college professor who came from Canada.
But each story had a similar plot.
Man makes incredible invention. Puts it in car and then sells the car to
a major car manufacturer or to the government. Car always disappears and in
most cases, so too does the inventor.
One day I
got a lead onto the story and discovered some details about three research
engineers in New Mexico who had actually made an early attempt at a fuel cell
powered hybrid car. They were very
successful. And as in the myth, they sold their car and that’s where the story
died. I couldn’t find anyone who knew anymore about it or them.
Then one
day I got a call from a man who claimed to be one of the engineers’ sons. He
remembered the car being carried away on a transport truck under the watchful
eye of the United States Army. Made me feel as if there might be a story here
after all. I dug and dug but all I came up with is that the guys were frauds
and the invention as a hoax. Not much to go on.
But off the
record, people would tell me they had heard that the invention had worked. And just as the claims in the original myth
grew exponentially as time passed, so too did the tales of people who
remembered the car from Alamogordo. But there was never anything concrete to
trace. No solid evidence. So I turned it
into a novel. But I asked and still ask the same question that Jack Lawrence,
the reporter in the book, asks. Were these guys con artists or was their
invention for real? And who would sit on
such an invention? Big oil? The energy lobby? Government?
7. And the
answer is?
Answer:
As my publisher has taught me to say, “You’ll have to buy the book and
decided for yourself.”
8. Your
publisher taught you well. When you look back at your list of books, you don’t
have to go far to find The Man on the
Grassy Knoll. Another book based on conspiracy theories. There is even the
hint of conspiracy woven into the plot of Beyond
a Shadow of a Doubt. Is that a theme of yours?
Answer:
The short answer is no. But a
good conspiracy does help weave a twisted tale and helps build intrigue, which
is always good for book sales. But to your question — I have never thought
Oswald acted alone. My earlier novel was
simply an exercise in a ‘what if’ scenario. It was a look at the dark and seamy
underbelly of the nefarious arts practiced in our foreign policy. How we recruit and train and then send these
people out to do our bidding. And sometimes it bites us back.
9. This was the
book with which your publisher discovered you?
Answer: Yes.
I had sent The Man on the Grassy Knoll
to a friend of mine who had signed on with a publisher and asked him to take a
read and if he would, write me a review. He did, but he also shared his new,
yet-to-be-published book with me and asked for quid pro quo. He shared my
review and my novel with his publisher, who said “We need to get this signed
with us.” And the rest, as they say, is history. I have been with them for four novels now.
I had lunch
with the publisher; he asked if I had anything I was working on, I happened to
have with me (wink- wink) the manuscript for Beyond a Shadow of a Doubt. I gave it to him and before you can say
John Grisham six times, I had a contract and was on my way.
Next came Stuff, the novel about the wildfires,
which raged through Bastrop, Texas last year (Editor note: summer of 2011).
Then I was going to publish The Myth Makers but the publisher liked a
book I had finished called Dream Chaser and wanted to use it in a new venture
they were starting called serial novels, or chapter-a-day novels. It was and is a great marketing took for
people to find you and read you for free and be led to your other works. It is
a fun and fresh new idea. And yet, it is as old as the serial books and the
movies they begat.
There are
about ten of us doing these now at Venture Galleries. Some of the guys are
actually writing their chapters day-by-day, but I don’t handle the stress of
the deadline that well. I wanted mine
all tidy and bundled up nice and finished.
10. Have the
serial novels increased sales for you?
Answer: To be sure. People, who before would never
spend the outrageous sum of $4 for an eBook can now try me out on a test drive,
see if they like me, and then go plop down some serious cash for an eBook.
Heck, there have even been a few who have bought hard-copy versions of my books
after reading the serial novel.
11. You are
getting some incredible reviews on The
Myth Makers. Both from men and women. Why do you think it has struck such a
nerve?
Answer:
There is something for almost everyone in this story. There is a love
story. A love triangle. There is a mystery to be solved. There is a sense of
thrill in the chasing of the story. There is science —but no math, I promise
you. It is not science fiction, either.
12. That was one
of the hardest things about writing The
Myth Makers, — the science —as I hear it. Why was that?
Answer:
To be sure. For the myth to work,
it has to be grounded in possibility. If it is not, it becomes fantasy. That
meant the machine these guys “supposedly” made had to be practical. It had to
be able, in some form or another, to do what they said it would do. So I went
to an engineer friend of mine and proposed how they might have done what they
did and he said, as engineers are want to say, “No way.”
I then
recruited the help of some scientists — in theoretical chemistry and physics.
They got into playing the ‘what if’ game about the invention and in fact, found
several ways in which an early fuel cell, as it is described in the book, might
have actually achieved some of the staggering numbers suggested in the
myth. They were the ones who suggested
that what gave the car its incredible gasoline mileage was the hybrid nature of
the system the inventors built— not simply some miraculous finding or
discovery.
I returned
to my engineering friend and still there was a phrase about the inventors
discovering something new in the knowledge of chemistry and physics that gave
him heartburn. Back to my two theoretical guys who suggested that the inventors
didn’t discover something new, but tripped over some anomalies within the laws
of physics. (By the way, this is what led to the scene where the scientists are
having a meal with the journalists in Hollywood, and discussing the invention
in the novel.)
Finally
everyone agreed with that language. And I was off to the races. But that was
the hardest re-writing I had ever done. They were all so very critical of the
details within the language of science to make this invention not only
believable, but possible as well.
13. So, with such
a great invention, why the cover-up?
Answer: As Agent Harris, the FBI agent in the book
says, and I am paraphrasing now— “If you invent a pill that cures all the know
ailments of man, do you think for a moment that the hospitals, the insurance
companies, the medical associations, the government, the pharmaceutical
companies are going to let you go to market with this pill? Fat chance.”
And that is the rub in the book. Who is conning whom? Who are the good
guys and who are the bad guys?
I mean on
one hand, the inventors could have been con men. Taking freely from the public
trough. Duping investors and the government left and right. Or, they could have
invented exactly what they said they did; then who is it that wanted it shut down?
And why?
14. I suspect you
are not going to tell us here?
Answer: Nope. In fact, you have to make up your own
mind as you read The Myth Makers. I
am not going to do it for you.
15. In Beyond a Shadow of a Doubt, you did the
same thing. You made the reader become the jury to judge Mason Chase’s
innocence or guilt. Is that a recurring theme of yours?
Answer:
To a certain degree it has become that.
Even in The Man on the Grassy
Knoll, I make the reader decide if the story they have just read from the
transcript is for real or not. They have to get involved with it on that level.
I think that makes literature interesting and fun. I will not spoon-feed you.
You have to have some skin in the game.
16. Why that process?
Answer:
I think that keeps the ball game interesting. In the case of The Myth Makers, the reader gets wrapped
up in the who did what and how and why and suddenly you are into the book with
the complete acceptance that this device actually works. It is like a magician. I get you to look over
here, while I replace the rabbit in the hat with a turtledove.
17. What else do you
have up your sleeve for the future?
Answer:
I am working on a love story that surrounds an intellectual property
crime. It deals with a philosophical look at life— winning, losing and just
existing. I have a book of short stories coming out based on a fictitious East
Texas community. And I am researching a novel based in the 1920’s-and 30’s in
Paris, France.
18. One of my
favorite time periods. What will it be about?
Answer: There has been an on-going minor character that
has had a cameo role in a few of my earlier novels: Clare de Fontroy. Her
poetry even graces the pages of The Myth
Makers. I have always wanted to do a longer piece about her and her life
and her writings. She is a most interesting lady. A daughter of a slave, a
member of the Harlem Renaissance and the Lost Generation, she was a Jazz
singer, a poet, served as a spy and a journalist during World War II, as well
as led the civil rights movement back here in America after the death of Rev.
King. Her life and times have a most interesting storyline. It will make a
great book. If I can find a way to effectively tell her story.
19. Any ideas on
how you will do that?
Answer:
I am thinking of using a technique, not unlike that of Raul Salazar’s
interview, in The Man on the Grassy
Knoll. Only instead of a transcript, I will use Clare’s letters to friends
and co-workers and other writers, as well as her columns from Europe during the
war and her poetry. But that takes a lot of research and a lot of understanding
the situations she will encounter. It is at least a year off.
20. So you think
that far into the future for your books?
Answer:
It takes me about a year from the time I start writing to get a novel to
press. Add another year for research. It is a long process. The Man
on the Grassy Knoll was started in 1984-’85. I did six complete versions until I found a
way to tell the story that wasn’t so damn boring.
I had
poured every fact and date and detail I had ever uncovered into the manuscripts
and one right after the next they became more and more stilted. Too
academic. I said that to a class the
other day at the University of Texas at Austin and then I thought, ‘I probably
shouldn’t have chosen that phrase.’ But they understood and even laughed. One
professor said, “Yeah, I hate to read anything I have spent years researching.
It is dry and boring as hell.” We all
had a good laugh at that.
But I found
a technique — the interview transcript— that allowed me to have Raul tell his
story unburdened with all the facts and times and dates that I was putting in
the way of the plot. It just came out to be a pure story. I’ve used a similar technique in telling a story
of two women’s lives in Baby Change
Everything, by using the interwoven diaries of two very different women
from diverse backgrounds and in so doing, I paint a picture of America’s have’s
and have not’s.
So maybe I can find the same or similar technique for
Clare’s story. One of the things that made The
Myth Makers so much fun to write, like Stuff
before it, it is simply a straight ahead mainstream novel. It was fun to get
into that form and genre. It really makes you work extra hard at your craft to
keep things interesting.
That’s the fun part of the creative process. Finding the best way to tell a story and then
telling it with all your ability. I mean, I love getting up and going into the
studio every morning. It is a new adventure each day.
John Crawley’s The Myth Makers, from Venture Galleries
and LULU Press is available on Amazon, Barnes and Nobel, Lulu.com and other fine eBook and hard-copy retailers.
Also catch his on-going serial novel, Dream
Chaser at
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