Prequels & Sequels with author Steve Hockensmith

I’m thrilled to welcome author Steve Hockensmith to the very first edition of Prequels & Sequels here at A Serial Reader. Mr. Hockensmith’s current release is World’s Greatest Sleuth! His 5th entry in the Holmes on the Range mystery series. Prequels & Sequels features books past and present that have impacted an author’s life from childhood through today.

1. On your nightstand now:
Oy, my poor nightstand! I can’t believe it hasn’t collapsed under so much weight! My To Be Read pile isn’t even a pile at this point. It’s a mountain! Just last night I picked up Lee Goldberg’s satirical thriller Beyond the Beyond (also known as Dead Space), which has been gathering dust at my bedside for three years now. Still waiting for their turn: Invisible Boy by Cornelia Read, A Cast-Off Coven by Juliet Blackwell, A Bad Day for Pretty by Sophie Littlefield, Thank You for Smoking by Christopher Buckley, The Girls of Murder City by Douglas Perry, The Ten-Cent Plague by David Hajdu, A Crack in the Edge of the World by Simon Winchester and much, much more, including a drawer full of old Nero Wolfe paperbacks.

2. Favorite book when you were a child:
I can remember reading Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH over and over again when I was 7 or 8 years old. I liked animals, I liked adventure stories, and in a few years I’d figure out that I liked science fiction, and that book’s got all of the above. I was also a big fan of those old school You Are There history books. If you wanted some blood’n'guts action, they were the only game in town in my school library. So I’d be up until the ungodly hour of midnight reading about the Alamo or Jim Bowie or whatever in the classic kid-hiding-under-blanket-with-flashlight pose.

3. Your top five authors:
Kurt Vonnegut, David Sedaris and Raymond Chandler are my holy trinity. Beyond them, you get a patchwork of books I love by authors I haven’t read widely enough. (I read very, very slowly, you see, so there are few authors whose bodies of work I know with any depth.) Catch-22 is in my crazy quilt of influences, as are Thomas Berger’s Little Big Man, Gregory Mcdonald’s Fletch novels and everything Carl Hiaasen wrote before 2002. (It’s not that I don’t like Hiaasen’s later books. I just haven’t read him in a long, long time. So many authors, so little time, so few brain cells.)

4. A book you’ve bought for the cover:
I haven’t been hooked by a cover in years — these days, I only pick up books I’ve heard good things about beforehand. When I was a kid, though, I used to browse the science fiction section of the local Waldenbooks, and if a cover grabbed me on the right day, I’d buy the book. I picked up The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy that way around…oh, probably 1981. I’d never heard of it until I saw that paperback with the big thumb and the teasing/laughing planet dude. That purchase obviously worked out O.K., so you’d think I’d still go by covers from time to time, but nope. As mentioned above, I read too slowly for that. A book doesn’t get into my TBR pile without a proper introduction first!

5. A book that changed your life:
When I first got serious about fiction, I thought I was going to be an SF writer. I was a huge science fiction fan in my teens and I thought I knew the genre pretty well. It turned out I didn’t…at least when it came to writing any of it myself. I just couldn’t get a handle on SF, creatively. I even took a writing class taught by the great SF/fantasy master Gene Wolfe, but it wasn’t helping. Then one day, because I was burning out on aliens and robots, I picked up Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep. I hadn’t read many mysteries before, aside from some Arthur Conan Doyle, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. What I got was the life-changing experience you asked about. Chandler’s voice hooked me from the first line. This guy was funny and engaging and cynical and *real*. I loved it. A few months later, I gave up on science fiction and tried my hand at mysteries, and it wasn’t long before I was selling short stories on a regular basis. Thanks, Ray!

6. A book that made you want to be a writer:
I was lucky. Though I lived in a tiny, rural West Virginia town when I was a teenager, the high school library had a copy of Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions. I can’t imagine any small-town school having it today — people are so much more uptight, and here was a book filled with obscenities and crude drawings of body parts you’re not supposed to mention let alone sketch. But it’s all absolutely hilarious, of course, and the strange, rebellious spirit of it really captured my imagination. I immediately began cranking out horrible pseudo-Vonnegutian poetry and stories. Even today, when I’m trying to figure out what I want to do as a writer, I turn to Vonnegut. I haven’t written my own Breakfast of Champions yet, but maybe one day….

7. Favorite line from a book:
I have a horrible memory for things like that. It’s funny, because words mean so much to me, and I love a well-turned phrase. So I’ll just throw out what I can remember, because it comes from a book I read recently: “Just because some of us can read and write and do a little math, that doesn’t mean we deserve to conquer the Universe.” That’s Kurt Vonnegut from the novel Hocus Pocus, and I think it’s his bottom line on science fiction (among other things).

8. When you’re not researching or writing or reading:
I’m a stay-at-home writer/dad, so if I’m not working during the day, I’m hanging out with a 4-year-old and a 7-year-old. At night, once the kids are in bed, I’ll maybe go for a run, take a bath and catch part of a movie. (I almost never watch films in one sitting anymore. I feel guilty about loitering passively on my couch for more than an hour at a time. Which is funny, considering how much time I waste sitting on my duff in front of a computer….)

9. Anything you’d like to share about the current or upcoming title in your Holmes on the Range mystery series.
World’s Greatest Sleuth! is the latest in the series, and it might be the most entertaining book of the bunch. The third and fourth Holmes on the Range novels, The Black Dove and The Crack in the Lens, got a little dark, so I decided to make WGS! fun fun fun. Hopefully, I succeeded.