Interview with Robert McClure
Tell us a bit about yourself.
I’m a trial lawyer turned crime fiction writer, a husband and a father, born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky, where I still live. I was born and raised in downtown Louisville directly across the street from the backside of Churchill Downs Racetrack, the site of the Kentucky Derby. My father Charles (who died young when I was 22) was a gunsmith who owned Charlie’s Gun Shop, a small business on 7th Street Road, not far from our house right in the heart of a notorious block that was then known for its strip clubs and prostitutes.
Growing up in the Churchill Downs neighborhood was a study in the characters that surround any race track–professional gamblers, bookies, bail bondsmen (one of the most notorious being the father of my then best friend), fences, pawnbrokers, loan sharks, prostitutes and pimps, hustlers of all stripes and nationalities, and cops. Lots of cops. All these people were my father’s customers, especially the detectives and patrolman who purchased their service weapons from us and often asked Dad to modify shotguns and handguns to their specifications. I hung out at Charlie’s often and worked the counter during summers when I hit 20 or so, and like my father grew to respect all these people, and I liked most of them.
Not surprisingly, I majored in Criminology in college, and worked in jails a couple years before and after graduation. So, I’ve come to know many cops, crooks and other shady characters over the years. Every single one informs my writing to some extent.
Tell us about your most recent book.
There’s a lot going on in DEADLY LULLABY—gangland politics, violence, murder mystery, romance, pure lust—but at bottom it’s a story about a man who loves his son, and about a son who isn’t sure how to feel about his father. The protagonists are Babe Crucci, a career hit man just released from San Quentin, and his son Leo, an edgy LA police detective, who are estranged from each other due to Babe’s extended stretch in prison. Babe wants to retire from the life of a mob assassin and live straight, but needs to pull off a few more hits to have the money to live comfortably; not surprisingly, this goal frustrates his supposedly higher one of reconnecting with his cop son. Babe and Leo’s relationship becomes even more complicated when Leo is called upon to investigate the murder of a young prostitute and he deals with some very bad people, some to whom he becomes too close.
Early reviewers are describing DEADLY LULLABY as a “rollicking” crime thriller with a murder mystery component that still manages to be darkly humorous; the primary focus of the book remains on the family issue of whether Babe Crucci can achieve his goal of successfully reuniting with his son Leo. Crime fiction guru Otto Penzler, the editor of Best American Mystery Stories, said I write “pulp fiction the way Chandler and Hammett did—with depth and heart.” Roger Hobbs, the bestselling author of GHOSTMAN and VANISHING GAMES, said my book “was too compelling to put down,” and Peter Swanson, the author of THE KIND WORTH KILLING, and THE GIRL WITH A CLOCK FOR A HEART, said that I’ve “written a rousing debut, elevated by pitch-perfect dialogue and a whiplash pace.” With all this advance praise for the book, hopefully it will draw a diverse base of crime fiction readers.
Who is the villain or antagonist in your story and what is he/she like?
The villain(s) are difficult to identify without spoiling the plot. The unique feature about Deadly Lullaby is that most people would probably have a hard time finding a character in it who’s “good” in the traditional sense, including the two protagonists, Babe and Leo Crucci. From the very start, though, my goal in writing crime fiction has always been to create characters that thieve, kill and create other forms of mayhem who readers can’t help but love, and the guiltier the reader feels about it, the better. I feel like I accomplished that with Deadly Lullaby. Stridently summarized, the list of “bad” guys who play significant roles are an LA mafia kingpin named Joe Sacci, who is Babe’s ex-boss, Sacci’s top henchmen Ricardo Donsky and Michael Fecarotta, a Russian gangster named Viktor Tarasov who spent time in San Quentin with Babe, a Cambodian drug lord named Khang Nhou who helped found The Oriental Lazy Boyz gang in LA, and Babe’s sidekick Jack Barzi who goes by “Chief.”
Who is one of your favorite fictional villains (can be from a book, movie or television)?
There are so many, but perhaps the one that had the most profound effect on me was the Wicked Witch of the West in the Wizard of Oz. I first saw the movie when I was very young, four or five, and the Wicked Witch struck me as evil personified, pure greed and corruption, pure danger. The character gave me horrible nightmares that usually began with me riding my tricycle down the yellow brick road, in the dark woods, then POW, WHOOSH, here she comes . . . The Wizard of Oz aired annually on network TV back then, prime time Saturdays, and my nightmares were so bad my mother tried, in vain, to prevent me from watching it.
When I was in the second grade, the actress who portrayed the Wicked Witch, Margaret Hamilton, made an assembly appearance at my elementary school (she was in town to attend the Kentucky Derby, I think). What a wonderful lady she was. Ms. Hamilton had the witch costume with her on display, and the broom, of course, but was dressed elegantly in a business suit and impeccably made up. She told us anecdotes about making the film, about how Judy Garland would sing and whistle between takes, that sort of thing, but the true purpose of her presentation was to make us understand that the Wicked Witch was make believe. Ms. Hamilton knew her character scared the living bejesus out of us—she even mentioned the nightmares she knew she caused—and was very concerned about it. When our applause died down after her speech she stood at the door as we filed out, and shook our hands and hugged us, asked us our names, did all she could to come across as a warm human being.
The next time I watched the Wizard of Oz, I did so with different eyes—at least for a while, then the movie swept me away again.
Did I still have nightmares about the Wicked Witch? Damn straight I did. Just maybe they weren’t as bad as before.
To you, how important is a good antagonist?
Drama 101 dictates that a realistic antagonist—or multiple ones in the case of DEADLY LULLABY—is indispensable to any work of fiction. Someone, or something, has to frustrate the protagonist’s quest. The conflict produced by the opposing forces complicates the plot and brings out the best in the protagonist, motivates the reader to cheer for him or her. Take away the antagonistic force and the hero achieves his goal easily and there’s no story to tell. The reason the so-called “American Success Story” is so popular is because it always involves someone who fights their way to the top. Success without struggle is boring.
My fiction didn’t start to take form until I learned to be hard on my protagonists, to frustrate their goal at every realistic opportunity. It was especially difficult to do in DEADLY LULLABY because, as strange as it sounds, I love Babe and Leo. I want to see them thrive, to see them live happily ever after. I finally learned that if I went easy on them, no one would see the kind of men they really were underneath their rough exteriors, that no one would want to get to know them. That would be a real shame. So, I roughed up Babe and Leo a lot. They both loved it.
Title: Deadly Lullaby
Author: Robert McClure
Genre: Thriller / Suspense
For readers of Harlan Coben and Robert Crais, Robert McClure’s rollicking crime novel of family and felony takes readers on a relentless thrill ride through the L.A. underworld.
Fresh off a nine-year stint in San Quentin, career hitman Babe Crucci plans to finally go straight and enjoy all life has to offer—after he pulls one or two more jobs to shore up his retirement fund. More than anything, Babe is dead set on making up for lost time with his estranged son, Leo, who just so happens to be a rising star in the LAPD.
The road to reconciliation starts with tickets to a Dodgers game. But first, Leo needs a little help settling a beef over some gambling debts owed to a local mobster. This kind of thing is child’s play for Babe–until a sudden twist in the negotiations leads to a string of corpses and a titanic power shift in gangland politics. With the sins of his father piling up and dragging him down, Leo throws himself into the investigation of a young prostitute’s murder, a case that makes him some unlikely friends—and some brutally unpredictable enemies.
Caught up in a clash of crime lords, weaving past thugs with flamethrowers who expend lives like pocket change, Babe and Leo have one last chance to face the ghosts of their past—if they want to live long enough to see their future.
Excerpt:
Chief frisks us, then leads us inside. Through an area big enough to store the cargo off an ocean liner, which now contains nothing but hundreds of wooden pallets stacked against support beams and concrete walls. Into a maze consisting of two stairwells and three hallways, all of it dark and dusty and in need of pest extermination and paint, then into an elevator. We exit the elevator and are walloped with blasts of cleanliness and fluorescent light, walk down a blue-carpeted hallway.
We stop before a metal door and Chief raises an eyebrow at me, no doubt a reminder of the friendly advice he rendered outside. “See ya later,” he says. “I hav’ta go back downstairs.”
“Hold down the fort,” I say, and give him a wink that I can tell makes him uncomfortable.
I open the door.
Three goons are in the reception area, Macky’s A-Team. They are polluting the atmosphere with wiseguy talk until they see me, then silence grows so thick in the air you can hear the humidity rise.
They sneer and shrug and straighten their jackets and ties.
Before I can say Where’s Macky? the fat hump appears at his office door.
“Babe Crucci!” he says with outstretched arms, “Paisan!”
Paisan , shit. Macky is no more Italian than Sammy Davis Jr. was. He is a fucking mick with a Godfather complex, a punk paddy with Pacino pretensions. He has the kind of Irish face Mama always warned you about—dirty-red hair, rheumy eyes, a bloated face, and a splotchy complexion that reminds me of a diseased lung.
I do not usually allow men to hug me—call me homophobic, go ahead; it is still behavior that sends confusing signals on the old cellblock—but circumstances dictate I let Macky do so today.
The hug is over with and Macky turns to my son. “So, you’re Leo.”
“Wow,” he says, “you figured that out all by yourself?” and starts to light a smoke.
At which point Macky slaps him in the mouth so hard the cigarette ricochets off the wall a good twenty feet away.
My son lunges and I step between the two of them like a bolt of lightning just shot up my ass, grabbing his hands inches from Macky’s throat. Pushing him back and motioning with my head at the bodyguards, who have all pulled their weapons by now, I pull my boy close to whisper in his ear. “Look around you. You want to commit suicide, do it outside my presence. Understand ?”
Author Bio
Robert McClure read pulp fiction as a kid when he should have been studying, but ultimately cracked down enough to obtain a bachelor’s in criminology from Murray State University and a law degree from the University of Louisville. He is now an attorney and crime fiction writer who lives and works in Louisville, Kentucky. His story “My Son” appeared in The Best American Mystery Stories, and he has had other works published in MudRock: Stories & Tales, Hardboiled, Thug Lit, and Plots with Guns.
Links
Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00TNDOYL6?tag=randohouseinc7986-20
B&N:
Books-a-Million:
Google Play:
https://play.google.com/store/search?q=9781101884980&c=books
iBooks:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/deadly-lullaby/id993474454?mt=11
Penguin Random House:
http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/251406/deadly-lullaby-by-robert-mcclure/
Goodreads:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25387184-deadly-lullaby?from_search=true&search_version=service_impr
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