Interview with Michael Koryta

Some of the best crime fiction authors around have built their careers on a series character, creating a popular archetype and throwing him or her into different circumstances from book to book. For authors inspired by this path, the endeavor can be rewarding—an efficient vehicle for exploring various plots, settings, and social ills. For others, the stories at the edge of their consciousness won’t always fit into the series mold. Regardless of which camp an author falls into, it can be intimidating to wade into the uncharted waters of a standalone novel, especially if they’ve had initial success with a series. But that’s just what New York Times best-selling author Michael Koryta did fairly early in his career.

Koryta’s first four novels—starting with the Edgar Award-nominated Tonight I Said Goodbye (2004), which was published when he was just 22 years old—fell neatly into the hardboiled PI genre, and garnered comparisons to John D. MacDonald and Raymond Chandler. With his Lincoln Perry series, Koryta intermingled the conventions of the classic PI novel with a psychological and emotional depth that earned him both critical acclaim and commercial success. Despite this early success, Koryta switched gears in 2008 with Envy the Night, a standalone neo-noir thriller that deals with themes of loss and revenge. Two years later, he mixed it up again with So Cold the River, the first of several of his novels to blend elements of noir and the supernatural. In 2011, he took the supernatural theme even further with two more books, The Cypress House and The Ridge. Masterfully blending gothic horror and noir, Koryta’s supernatural novels not only proved his versatility, they helped create a genre within a genre, inspiring others to follow in his footsteps.

Koryta’s rich life experiences have served him well. His work as a private investigator has ensured authenticity in his depictions of PIs. His career as a journalist has shaped his prose so that it is direct, spontaneous, and succinct. And his experience teaching creative writing has kept his work inventive and streamlined. Koryta has used all of this to great effect in his subsequent crime novels, such as The Prophet (2012), Those Who Wish Me Dead (2014), How It Happened (2018), and If She Wakes (2019).

Michael Koryta’s latest novel Never Far Away was released by Little, Brown and Company this past February.

AFG: What year did you receive your first publishing contract?

MK: That would have been 2002. I was a sophomore in college, 20 years old. That was a fun year.

AFG: How were you able to accomplish that so quickly, when most people can spend years trying to get a publisher?

MK: Well, the perception that I did not spend years trying to get a publisher is inaccurate. People make that correlation between age and first novel and assume I scored on the first shot, when in reality Tonight I Said Goodbye was the fourth book I’d written. It was the second Lincoln Perry novel. I’d gotten fairly close with the first one—to the point where it seemed a pretty sure thing that an offer was coming, actually, and then they backed off. But you’re talking about four or five years of daily writing and revising, and some submission and rejection, to get to that point.

How did I manage it in four years instead of 14, though? Generosity. People gave me an inordinate amount of undeserved time and kindness. Bob Hammel was my writing teacher/mentor. Bob is one of several people who went out of their way to help me. I was introduced to Bob by another friend, the [Herald-Times’] general manager, Michael Hefron, who was a constant source of motivation and encouragement, a guy who was always on me to have a plan to get better, and was unimpressed with the mere idea that I was writing or wanted to write. If you want it, how are you going to achieve it? That sort of thing. The private investigator who gave me a chance to learn the business, Don Johnson, is certainly on that list. Remove those people, those unearned acts of generosity, and I suspect it would have been many more years before I finally broke through.

AFG: What would you say are some steps a writer can take to increase the odds in their favor?

MK: I don’t know anything that helps the odds, but I know you won’t hurt your odds if you focus on improving your craft first and keep the marketplace out of your mind. I’m also a big fan of shorter writer’s conferences that have first-rate faculty. The MFA route is right for some people, but I think a lot of writers will be stunned by the benefits they’ll take away from just a week around writers who are talking craft, rather than the industry.

AFG: It’s one thing to get a publishing contract, but in this congested field, how have you managed to stay at the top of your game after writing so many novels?

MK: I don’t think much changes in approach from the second novel to the seventeenth. The requirements are the same, the challenges are the same, but you do know that you have found your way through this unmapped wilderness before. The only secret I know is the Ray Bradbury diet: write every day, read widely and intensely, and don’t spend much time thinking about the marketplace. If you can actually stick to that formula day after day, you’re likely to have a pretty satisfying career.

AFG: By all accounts, you wanted to be a writer at a very young age. What helped propel that dream?

MK: Love of stories. It’s that simple. When you fall in love with books at a young age, it is pretty natural to want to write them. When I understood it could be a way to make a living, I could never imagine anything more appealing. Still can’t!

AFG: What were some of the books and stories you enjoyed reading? And what’s on your nightstand or digital reader today?

MK: I read everything, so that list is a little overwhelming. Recent favorites range from a memoir by Monica Wood to the latest novel from John Hart to a biography of a forgotten photographer named Kosti Ruohomaa.

AFG: You have written several standalone novels instead of solely relying on your series character. How can you keep fans of your series characters happy while also allowing yourself to flex your creative muscle by writing standalones?

MK: You can’t keep them happy. Trust me! Different readers like different books. You’ve got to write the best book you can at that moment in time. Nobody benefits from force-feeding a protagonist. Not the reader, certainly not the writer. Possibly the publisher once did, but even that idea relies on an outdated machinery, I think.

AFG: You were a private investigator and reporter—tell me your PI adventures didn’t primarily involve being the clichéd PI hired to tail a spouse who might be cheating?

MK: No, we didn’t do much infidelity work, which was pleasant. I worked everything from insurance fraud to wrongful death investigations, and even a death-penalty defense case. It was a really broad range, which was fantastic—both as a PI and as a novelist. Grist for the mill.

AFG: Do you ever use some of the skills you used as a PI today?

MK: I have been accused many times of treating conversations as interrogations. And I make no apologies for that. You’ve gotta stay sharp!

AFG: The Ridge reminded me of the ghost stories of some of my favorites like E.F. Benson, Arthur Machen, and M.R. James. What made you decide to try your hand at a ghost story?

MK: I’ve always enjoyed the form as a reader, but the first one, So Cold the River, really came from its setting. Those bizarre little resort towns and their extraordinary hotels and their flash-in-the-pan moment of fame. So Cold the River needed to bridge eras, and a ghost story does that so well. After I got that first taste, I was determined to return to it. The Ridge came from a convergence of an idea and a setting—the visual of a man building a lighthouse in the woods came to me—I have no idea why—and wouldn’t let go of me. Then there is the real Exotic Feline Rescue Center, this place in the middle of nowhere with hundreds of tigers and lions and leopards. That just begged to be used as an eerie setting.

AFG: Would it be accurate to say that you have several ideas floating inside your mind at any given time or do you find that you need to come up with a new idea once you’ve completed your latest work?

MK: It has gone both ways. Sometimes, I finish with a clear sense of what is next. Others, it requires a bit more trial and error. I have started probably a dozen books that didn’t make it much beyond 50 pages.

AFG: When I was reading Envy the Night, I have to say, I had to look up your bio several times to make sure that my eyes weren’t playing tricks on me about how old you were when you wrote it. When you read your earlier books, are you ever surprised at how seasoned they are, or do you have the writers’/actors’ disease of thinking that all your older work could’ve been so much better?

MK: I definitely have the disease. To this day, I struggle to go back and look at the old stuff. I don’t hate it by any means, but I want to get out the red pen. The point, though, is that the book is a time capsule and shouldn’t be changed. I like them fine as time capsules. Envy the Night is the one where I can feel a sense of clear growth. That one feels like a leap forward instead of a step.

AFG: What are the ingredients that help propel an author’s writing to another level? Is it putting something in your novel that you’ve never tried before? Is it relying on the tried-and-true formula of a good plot, reliable pacing, tight dialogue, and great characters, and finding the right balance for all that? Or is it just making a mark in a way that as an author feels mysterious even to you?

MK: All of the above, but the first point is the crucial one. You’ve got to try to do new things. Maybe that will be a new thing that feels obvious—a change in genre or style—but most of the time it’s a private thing, a technique or approach you’re working on that most readers will never see. But you’ve got to be pushing toward new boundaries.

AFG: Your books are often set in towns that are not very big. A small area—surrounded by a vast landscape—where there is a play of everyday people fighting a decayed maniac. I think the best example of that was Rise the Dark. What inspired you to write that book?

MK: I love that description, and I think it is accurate. I’m fascinated by the idea of the thing you’ve left ignored or neglected that is going to rise up and cause trouble. Looking back from the vantage point of 2021, I’m pretty proud of what Rise the Dark identified about the country: fringe movements gathering organized force via social media, and a decaying infrastructure that can be exploited. I wrote that book in 2015. I thought about it on January 6, 2021, and had an “I told you so” moment. What Rise the Dark got right, I think, is the idea that domestic terrorism would gather fuel from seemingly disparate parts of America in both geography and ideology. I think it pointed to a pulse of paranoia, a willingness for unexpected partners to buy into a baffling level of commitment to a violent cause, and the ease of manipulation that was available on social media.

AFG: What has attracted you to writing supernatural mysteries?

MK: It’s the hardest needle for an intellectual skeptic to thread. I’m a reporter and a PI—talk about cynicism! I also don’t cheerfully suspend disbelief as an audience member. I don’t hand you the keys and let you drive; you’ve got to earn it. Fantasy novels, sci-fi, superhero movies; I really struggle to buy in without a grounded, emotionally authentic story beneath it all. The challenge of trying to convince a skeptic to take the wild ride with you is often overwhelming to me, but enormously rewarding when it works.

AFG: Tell us about your latest book.

MK: Never Far Away is the story of Leah Trenton, who has been living under a new identity for ten years. To protect her family, she was forced to flee her family. When her husband is killed in an accident, though, she has to come back on the grid for her children—only they have no idea she is their mother.

AFG: What are you working on now?

MK: I just finished a rewrite of the second book under the Scott Carson pseudonym which comes out in October. It’s called Where They Wait, and it is a cheerful imagining of a mindfulness app like Calm that turns on its listeners. I love the idea of taking something soothing and relaxing and using it to create nightmares. Great fun! And I’m working on the screenplay adaptation of Never Far Away with a great production team. Excited about that one.

AFG: I am hoping that in six months this question will be horribly dated, but any advice to beat those quarantine blues?

MK: Audiobooks and hikes have been my saviors in the past year. But I’m hopeful to add a vaccine to that mix soon.

AFG: What inspired you to create Lincoln Perry? And will you bring him back?

MK: I loved—still love—the PI genre, and the city of Cleveland. I’d enjoy seeing Lincoln again. I hope he checks in one of these days.