"I can't imagine ever stopping."

An interview with Anthony Neil Smith

Good morning, Callers. Thank you for being here.

We are knee-deep in submissions right now, and I am blown away by (and deeply grateful for) the response we’ve gotten so far. We’ve got a wealth of great stories to choose from, and I’m excited for you to read them when we start publishing in earnest this summer.

But today? Today I am thrilled to share a conversation with Anthony Neil Smith, one of the noir fiction’s great writers, editors, and long-time champions. He was kind enough to answer a few questions about his influences, how he navigates the highs and lows of a writing career, and what got him to pick up his pen in the first place.

Tell me about your path to becoming a writer. How young were you when you started writing? When did you realize this was something you wanted to really commit yourself to?

I knew from a really young age that I loved books and stories and wanted to write them myself. I'm talking second grade, like seven years old. It started with the school library book fair, where I bought my first books - still remember that day - to when I discovered the mystery novels on the library shelves. Over the years since, I faded in and out of a lot of other interests - comic books, guitar, songwriting, but I always came back to books and writing.

I think I was nineteen and in college when I finally decided to send out my first attempt at a crime story to Alfred Hitchcock and Ellery Queen mystery mags. Rejected, yes, but it was what hooked me from then on. But after some failed attempts, then some time in a Pentecostal church that very much looked down on the sort of novels I liked, I finally decided to go to grad school for creative writing in my early twenties, and that was all she wrote.

Who were your best teachers and mentors? How did they help shape your development as a writer?

I took ONE high school creative writing class where the teacher really enjoyed what I was writing, but I was always a bit nervous about sharing it. It wasn't until my undergrad years that I took a college workshop in fiction, thinking I'd be humbled. Instead, it boosted my ego because out of about fifteen students, there were only about four of us who really got it, who were writing stuff at a level or two above everyone else. So that Professor, Steve Barthelme, was a huge influence on me, and when I went on to grad school, his brother Frederick became my mentor.

He was a well-known "minimalist" writer in the seventies and eighties, teaching at Southern Mississippi when I was there. He really encouraged what I was doing - going back and forth between literary fiction and crime fiction. In fact, at my dissertation defense, he told me to pursue crime writing because my fascination with it really showed in all of my fiction.

Of course by then I was already deeply involved - editing Plots with Guns crime zine, attending crime conferences, and publishing short stories in magazines like Blue Murder, Handheld Crime, Judas, Thrilling Detective, and many others. Rick told his students once to write "fast and dirty," that story was more important than pretty sentences. I've tried to hang onto that my whole writing life.

In crime fic itself, I'd say James Ellroy was the first author I read who was doing such amazingly odd and stylish stuff with crime fiction. White Jazz floored me. After him, a slew of "literary Jims" influenced me, mostly Crumley, Burke, and Harrison. And Thompson. Reading Walter Mosley's Black Betty got me hooked on his work, which led me to Chester Himes and his Harlem books. Wild!

When I discovered Vicki Hendricks' books - and through her Harry Crews' books - I felt I'd found my "home," this hyper-real, gonzo noir feeling. I'd gotten a feel of that from Flannery O'Connor, too , with "A Good Man is Hard to Find" and "Parker's Back." Weird, loud, and unforgettable.

Were those authors your first exposure to the genre? Or were there earlier influences?

As a kid, finding a Hardy Boys book at our school library - one with a cover where the boys are trapped on a small plane heading straight for the ocean - really excited me. I wanted to know what happened to that plane! The librarian thought I was a little too young for it, but she agreed to let me check it out if I would keep her updated on my progress.

So I devoured that one and many other Hardy Boys and Encyclopedia Brown books. The series that got to me the most, though, was Robert Arthur's Three Investigators. Where the Hardy Boys seemed to have money and a lot of gadgets around, and lot of cars and boats whenever needed, The Three Investigators were suburban kids like me with a backyard secret headquarters and a lot more limits to what they could afford (although they somehow "won" access to a limo service, which was odd).

Alfred Hitchcock was a part of these, too - a character who helped them along sometimes, and that led me to find his TV show, which was rerun on some local channels late at night, and led me to his namesake mystery magazine, which I was able to get because my grandmother let me subscribe with her Publishers Clearinghouse entries. I didn't get to see his movies until much later, when Psycho became a big favorite.

And there was one other weird thing. Coleco made a handheld quiz game, like a very early Gameboy with no screen, with a bunch of different categories you could buy and change out. I had the "Crime & Mystery Fiction" category, which covered nearly *everything* up to that point (late seventies). I learned about Sherlock Holmes, Poirot and Marple, Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe, Nero Wolfe, just on and on. It set me up to head for the public library and start searching for them. Once I got there, the crime novels with the best covers and words like "blood" and "evil" and "dog" in the title were the hardboiled and noir books. Again, hooked for life.

How has the landscape changed for genre writers since you began publishing? Do you see more opportunities or is the fractured ecosystem making it that much harder for new voices to break through?

I just don't know. It seems the Big 5 in New York have steered away from anything controversial or transgressive unless it's "approved" politically, I suppose. It seems that way, but I can't be sure. I see noir used as "flavoring" for crime stories rather than full-on existentialism. And I'm pretty sure I'm right when I say the number of men who read books - and they were the ones who most liked hardboiled and noir lit - has fallen off a cliff in favor of movies and gaming.

Yet you're right about the fractured ecosystem giving opportunities to writers who might not have had as many chances before, like Alex Perez often says. What I don't see is anyone breaking through in a major way just because someone writes great books. Many, many, many great books are either published and ignored or not picked up at all in NYC due to...what? Fear? Snobbery? I hear agents are telling writers they need a strong social media following before they can offer representation. That's insane. It says there's something other than interest in a good story going on. And, shit, I'm trying to have LESS of a social media following because too much kills your writing time, your creativity, and it brainwashes you into a bit of "well, everyone in the community thinks this, so I guess I have to, too."

And say you do land your dream agent who helps you get a decent advance at a Big 5 publishing house. Then what? Well in the majority of cases, the publisher barely promotes the book and expects the writer to take on all of those duties - and pay for them - then tells the writer their books didn't sell well enough for them to publish the next one. That's not investing in the writer. That's, "Here's 10 bucks, now go buy some ice cream and play outside while we hang out with celebrities."

Fantasy and "romantasy" (sigh) are having their big moments right now, and horror, too, and there's always room in NYC for literary writers, especially those whose protagonists are also literary writers (NYC agents and editors love books about writers, for fuck's sake). And story now takes a backseat to "message" - look at book summaries in catalogs the last few years and you'll find themes instead of characters. "Trauma" instead of "This character wants something."

Ultimately, I'm older now (in my fifties) and missed out on the action of the last twenty-five years - lots of "almosts" but never any yeses from the Big 5 - and things have changed a ton since I first started publishing novels. I'm grateful to small presses for taking chances on more interesting fiction, but so many of them struggle to get attention and sales.

Some self-publishers are doing well, but that takes an incredible amount of time and effort to keep yourself front and center, and it takes some of your own money going out, and if you don't have much to start with, what can you do? I recently gave self-publishing a shot on Substack, and it started great, but the chase for more subscribers meant I kept trying to think of new ways to gain their attention (and money) to the point of burnout, like trying to start a fucking podcast, and nothing moved the needle. Ugh. It was getting in the way of my day job and home life, and I absolutely realized that was not the life for me.

As frustrated as I am with the Big 5, agents, the whole literary "scene" and "community" and business in general, the one thing I'm still passionate about is writing stories and finding small presses and magazines who are thrilled to publish them. I can't imagine ever stopping just because all of the crap surrounding the business has left me broken. To be fair, though, I burned a LOT of bridges that I do not regret at all because the alternative was to change who I was in order to please some agents or bean counters.

Your "Springtime Bullets" post really connected with me—specifically the part about Tobias Forge and committing yourself to something you love even when it's hard to know what will come of it. How have you dealt with the ups and downs that come with making a life as a writer? How do you keep the love alive even in periods of doubt or frustration?

I've dealt with it badly. Awfully. I'm now at a place in my life where I am more accepting of what I've achieved and enjoying it, even if it wasn't what I expected when I got into this long ago. Really, I once expected to sell some books to NYC for a modest advance and hopefully build a crime series that enough people enjoyed so I could keep doing it, with occasional non-series novels. I expected I'd make half my money there, and half as a professor. That never happened. The professor part did, and I've been teaching for pretty much a solid quarter century - next year marks twenty here at SMSU. I love my job, and I'm thankful for it, because all of my expectations about publishing cratered.

Is it because I'm a bad writer? I don't think so. I mean, I've published a ton of stories with sharp editors, nearly twenty novels, and have appeared in The Best American Mystery and Suspense anthology for 2023, which had been a goal of mine since I picked up the first edition in 1997. Is it because I don't play well with others? I cheer on a lot of younger writers and give them advice behind the scenes (I don't make it all public like *some* authors, but that's just me). I have been a truly friendly person to a lot of book store owners and agents, only to be peered down upon like litter on the street - and expected to take it with a smile. Thing is, I didn't. I called it out. Fuck off. And I'd urge other writers treated like that to do the same. Is it because of my politics? My politics are none of your business. They're a bit complex and very personal... But whatever. Is it because I'm unlucky? Probably. Luck is the elusive thing that is required above talent and persistence. My luck sucked.

It's not about money. It's about readers. It feels as if every novel for me starts back at zero. I couldn't catch a wave, couldn't catch momentum. If things seemed to be going well, my publishers would shut down. When it looked like I'd get a superstar agent, he got pissed off over a tweet about an upcoming book I was looking forward to and never spoke to me again. When I had close calls with the Big 5, or a larger indie like Atlantic Monthly Press, there was always one person there to kill the deal even though the editors were pushing for me. So yeah, bad luck. Circumstances. Fate. I handled it badly because I had such high hopes that were swatted down one after the other.

And that's fine. It really is. I recognize that things are otherwise great - wonderful wife, great pets, fantastic job, money to travel and drink good wine, longtime friends, all that stuff is amazing and I'm truly grateful. But it still hurts when the thing you've wanted since age seven feels like it has passed you by.

Then I look at the shelf full of my books, the stacks of lit mags with my stories, and that copy of Best American, and think yes, that's pretty damned impressive, ain't it?

What projects are you most excited about right now? Is there anything in particular you'd like to share?

What's funny is a couple of weeks ago I would've said my Substack, which I had called NOIR IS NOW and was running a serialized novel and supposed to host my next Billy Lafitte novel this coming summer. Then I took a few days off at Spring Break to go visit Lake Superior in Duluth, and I had the revelation I could no longer keep up the pace and all the projects for NOIR IS NOW while also grading papers, working on reports for my writing program at school, going to meetings, etc. etc., Something had to give.

Now with it off my back, I'm still planning to complete the serialized novel and the next Billy Lafitte, but I'll probably try them with small presses instead of doing it all myself.

At the moment, I'm poking the "Bear" to see if he'll wake up and maul me. I've also got a short story looking for a home, which might also be the start of another novel. I'm surprised it's taking so long to get picked up.

I'm really excited about two books coming out one after the other. THE TICKS WILL EAT YOU WHOLE is just out from Cowboy Jamboree Press, a story collection of some wild stuff. And a novel I wrote before the pandemic, called MURDERAPOLIS, is coming in April from Urban Pigs Press. It was me making a swing for the big league epics of writers like Don Winslow and Richard Price, but I could not get one agent out of a hundred to even look at a partial. I was going to bottom drawer it when I changed my mind and decided to try the Pigs, led by James Jenkins, a fantastic noir writer, because they seemed to have a good eye for things. He loved it, his partner loved it, and pretty much everyone I've sent it to for some early feedback has loved it, too. That felt good.

---

Anthony Neil Smith is the author of crime novels including YELLOW MEDICINE, HOGDOGGIN’, THE DRUMMER, SLOW BEAR and many more. His short stories have appeared in Bull, HAD, Dark Yonder, Rock and a Hard Place, Cowboy Jamboree, many more, as well as BEST AMERICAN MYSTERY AND SUSPENSE 2023. He likes California wine, Mexican food, French noir, and Italian exploitation flicks. A professor at Southwest Minnesota State University, he lives, teaches, bikes, and grills meat on the edge of the Northwoods.