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AN INTERVIEW WITH WILLIAM BAYER- From the Walden Books Newsletter
William Bayer originally hails from Cleveland, and he occasionally likes to pay homage to his hometown by introducing Clevelanders as characters in his novels ("usually the killers," he noted). Other than consistent excellence, that is about the only discernible pattern in his work. Bayer (pronounced "buyer") has established himself as an important writer in the mystery field without creating a series character, and without even specializing in one subcategory of mystery, as do most popular writers.
Bayer's 1981 Edgar winner, Peregrine, featured a psychotic killer whose weapon of choice was a trained falcon, and a minutely-observed Manhattan setting. Switch was a well received police procedural, again set in New York, with a likable detective named Frank Janek. And for his recent hit, Pattern Crimes, he introduced David Bar-Lev, an Israeli cop faced with a serial killer.
His new offering, Blind Side, returns to New York for its setting, although much of its action takes place on the road: Key West, Cleveland, the New Mexico desert. The protagonist - it would be stretching things to call him a hero - is Geoffrey Barnett, a photographer with a curious mental block. But why don't we let the author introduce the book in his own words?
WB: Could you give our readers a thumbnail sketch of the new novel, Blind Side - some idea of what to expect?
William Bayer: First, it's a crime novel. Second, it's my attempt at what I call noir writing. My other crime novels have not been written in this style, but it's something I've been interested in doing for a long time. I wanted to do something in this style which would be different from what had been done before, and as strong as I could make it. But thirdly, I really set out to write a novel about photography. All my books begin with some body of knowledge that interests me. In the case of Peregrine, it was falconry; in the case of Pattern Crimes, it was Jerusalem, and so on. I explore the material and research it and look into it and find a story in it - usually piece by piece - and then I build the story and explore that world. Photography has been an interest of mine for years; it's something I'm quite passionate about. I had used it in Switch, where the leading lady is a photographer, but I wanted to do something obsessively photographic, with the "I" of the first person narrator and the "eye" of the photographer equally important. It sort of came to me that it should be a noir kind of tale. Anyway, I read all the novels about photography, and I was rather surprised how little there really was, considering that almost everybody has a camera and takes pictures - this is the biggest hobby of all, in dollar volume. There's some good work in the crime field; I think Dick Francis's Rollex is good, although he and I write different kinds of novels. There are some good "straight" novels like Paul Theroux's Picture Palace, which is very fine indeed. And there are a few movies. Rear Window is a great one; Jimmy Stewart uses the camera as his spying device, his telescope, and then uses the flash later as a defensive weapon against Raymond Burr. Then there's the most famous of all, Blow Up, which is a murder mystery, too. I looked at all the movies, not to get ideas so much as to see what had been done, to explore the material and see if there was an opening there for me.
WB: It must have been fun doing that research with so many good books and movies.
William Bayer: Yeah. If you can recognize them, you'll see that the book has all the classical ingredients: a femme fatale, and one thing I kept that I thought at first I wouldn't, the gun concealed in the camera. I remember thinking, "Ill be damned if I use that old cliche," and then a week later I thought, "Oh boy, I'm definitely going to use it." I think it was after I saw Foreign Correspondent; I rented the video and that convinced me. Then I had to figure out a way to do it for the '80s, how to put a gun in a little camera, rather than one of the big flash cameras they always had in the old stories. So I got some advice from a friend of mine who's a gunsmith and photographer, and we figured out you could put a chopped Beretta inside a Leica; we were convinced it would work, so I put it in the book. I ended up by having the leading guy, the narrator, be a collector of noir videos and make ironic references - playing off the noir idea.
WB: Its a sort of double perspective - the hero seeing other people going through situations that parallel his.
William Bayer: Exactly. I'm writing a contemporary novel, but I pay homage to the classical noir novels, and to movies like Double Indemnity, one of my favorite movies of all time. It's my way of acknowledging the connection although I want people to read it not as a museum piece in an empty style but as a real story that works in the present time. I hate imitative writing, these people who imitate Raymond Chandler - I don't hate them personally, I hate their books. I don't believe in private eyes any more. I'd rather read the originals than their copies. So I made a conscious effort not to write a James Cain novel, but my own novel.
WB: And yet it's not quite like any of your others, is it?
William Bayer: People have told me all my books are different, and some of them say that if I just stuck to one genre I'd build more of a following. I'd rather have people say, "Well, you never know what you're going to get from him, but it's always good." I'd like to think they say that. Each book really is different.
WB: What qualities do you think your books have in common - the key ingredients that make them all yours?
William Bayer: I think they are all psychological, in one sense or another. They all have a crime. This is a crime novel, as I said, and it's also a detective novel without the detective. The guy is his own investigator, sort of like Hitchcock's character in Vertigo. I didn't really think of that film as an influence until I saw it again, but then I saw elements that were similar: the girl disappearing, the obsessiveness, the guy caught in a web, who for some reason can't go to the cops but has to figure it out himself.
WB: And who ends up becoming progressvely more involved in it...
William Bayer: Yes, and ultimately, he becomes extremely damaged. The book seems to be a bit controversial, but I think the people who object have missed the point. Some people don't get the idea of a photographer with "writer's block," either - the think you just point a camera at people and take a picture. But when they read the book, I think they understand what the character is about, and that what happens in the end, when he's released from his block, is a empty, hollow success. He's very damaged, and I think that again is in the noir tradition. He's drawn slowly and then with greater and greater speed into this vortex of crime, which is not part of his nature but which he is obviously open to. That's the "blind side." He doesn't see it coming because he is, in a sense, blind to that side of himself; that's his weakness.
WB: That whole school of writing and filmmaking is going Through something of a revival of interest these days. Writers like Cain and Jim Thompson are suddenly getting reissued, and there are a lot of contemporary writers trying to emulate their work. Why do you think that's happening at this particular time?
William Bayer: In the first place these were very strong writers. Writers go through waves of popularity and really strong voices do come back. Hemingway was out of fashion for long time, and I think he's back strong as ever. When I was in school, he was like a god to those of us who wanted to be writers. Thompson and Cain and Woolrich, these are people who wrote novels with character and sense of place, a strong story line, real people and really good dialogue. Real novels, whether they're about crime or anything else, are probably more appealing to people than puzzle books. How many puzzles do people want to solve? If a piece of writing is going to last, then the novelistic values are going to win out over "the butler did it," you know? I consider myself a novelist, not a mystery writer, and I came to crime writing from the novel, not from being a fan of mysteries.
WB: Do you think that that novelistic orientation is related to your not having taken the usual route to genre success, cranking out a series with the character from Switch, or with David Bar-Lev, and getting repeat customers that way?
William Bayer: That could be part of the reason. But the real answer to your question is that I have to entertain myself, and when you use the term, "crank out," that says it all. The very thought of cranking something out causes my eyes to haze over. And yet I'm told that if you really want to go for the big money, you do what Robert Parker does with Spenser, or what Rex Stout did with Nero Wolfe. With all due respect to them and to others, I don't think I could do it; I don't think I could sustain an interest. What I like to do is find some area of knowledge and really go into it and enrich my own life while I'm writing: learn something, discover something, explore something. And I think that if a writer can't sustain his own interest he's hard put to expect his readers to sustain interest. The readers may want more of the character, but as a writer, you'll bring your readers along with you. If I'm interested in something, it's my job as a writer to compel interest on the reader's part, to let my passion come through the words and bring my audience into my world. The other thing is that you must never forget that you are telling a story. I have a sign over my desk to remind me of that, because I have that tendency. There are some very famous writers, literary writers who are all over the front page of the Book Review, who seem to forget that. I can't read them, but we won't mention any names. I can get involved in my subject, or in some of these novelistic values we were talking about, but I always remind myself to tell the story, because that's what I think it's all about.
WB: Blind Side is illustrated with several of your own black and white photographs. What was the relationship between the text and the photographs? Did you write the scenes first and then try to find a picture that illustrated them, or did you find photos you'd taken and try to turn them into scenes?
William Bayer: When I first started writing, I didn't think of illustrating the book. Then a little later, after I'd written it, I thought about getting a photographer and working up some pictures. Then one night I just said, "Gee, I'm a photographer; I'll take the pictures." The point is, the pictures aren't clues. They were taken after the text was written, or almost completed, and they express different things. I wanted to deepen the sense of place, in some instances, or I wanted to show the readers something - direct their eyes. I didn't want to have too many photos, because I didn't want to deprive the readers of the pleasure of having their own picture in mind, which is one of the great pleasures of reading. I think the text stands well without them; they may not even be in the paperback edition. They're sort of a luxury, as if I'd gotten an artist to work with me; John Gardner and Stephen King have both had illustrators work with them. Since it was about photography, since it was about a photographer, since the themes were photographic, it was very natural to put some pictures in. Some of the pictures in Blind Side are photographs the protagonist is supposed to have taken, and some are not. I hope that they'll have an impact, that they'll enrich the reading experience for people. One picture in particular says something, but only photographically - not in the content but in the way it was shot. It's taken with a telephoto lens, and it's two lovers silhouetted behind the blind; you know they're being spied on because of the lens. One is just a spot in New Mexico; it picks up a little, almost throwaway line and amplifies it, giving a sense of the place. Another is the femme fatale, the leading lady, in one of the early scenes, where she's holding her hand up and creating a shadow to fall across her eyes and face. She's mysterious, and he's having trouble shooting her face, in the beginning, and it seemed like the right picture to take.
WB: Photography and writing seem superficially very different. The one is an almost pure recording of what's out there, a pushing of a button. The other is somehow rooting around inside your head and trying to turn what you find into words. As someone who does both, how would you describe the connections between the two?
William Bayer: I am fascinated with images. My major in school, and my early interest, was fine arts, visual images. I also became a writer, but I didn't want to give up the part of my creativity that expressed itself in images, so I became a photographer. And I've done it for years. I'm serious about it. It's a different kind of creativity for me, something I didn't want to give up, and Blind Side was a chance to somehow combine them. And yes, they are different. I mean, an image is an instant - a moment. It's an image of a period of time, something that doesn't really exist. When you write, you draw a scene, then you color and build and develop it in a more temporal way. A still photograph is opening your lens for roughly a hundredth of a second. Also, writing fiction is a story-telling technique, and most photographs do not tell a story. There is a kind of storytelling photograph, but generally speaking photographs do not tell you a story. A photograph captures something: a look, a place, "a certain slant of light," or whatever. But it's not a narrative form. Photography and writing satisfy different needs of mine, and so I practice both. I'm glad I don't have to give up photography. I still have a camera I bought at the PX in 1963 when I first went to Saigon. It's an original Nikon F and it's all battered and the brass shows through, but I still use it, although I have newer ones. Geoffrey, the protagonist, uses an old F without the lens as a weapon - he hits a guy with it. Mine went through combat; it went through everything. I'll never give it up. Same with my Leicas. I can't imagine not taking pictures. I think my life would be less fulfilled.
WB: Sounds like the same way I feel about my guitars.
William Bayer: Exactly - it's that kind of thing. And here was a chance to bring it into my writing, my mainstream work, to explore it fictionally rather than just doing shots for travel articles. I think that was really the inception of this book. I didn't know how I was going to do it, but that was what I wanted to do. It'll be interesting to see what some photographers think.
WB: What can we expect to see from you next?
William Bayer: At this point, I'm writing a TV miniseries based on a true crime, the so-called "Soldier of Fortune" case where murders were contracted through the personal services ads in the pages of Soldier of Fortune magazine. It's for CBS, and it's just in the writing stage. You'll be seeing it in roughly a year to a year and a half.
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