Interview with Bruce Cook, author of Blood Harvest

About the book:

What drives a small town in New England in the late 1920's to lynch a man? Immigrant Nic DeCosta's skill as a wine grower makes him a fortune as a moonshiner and puts him at odds with the 'shine sales of the MacKay clan, even though he's wed to their wild youngest daughter. But is this the real reason he is killed? And who is the second corpse in the woods?

I had the pleasure of being able to interview Bruce as part of his virtual book tour with Pump Up Your Book Promtion. This is what he had to say:

Where are you from?

I was born in south central Los Angeles. I currently live about 30 miles of LA in the small town of Castaic, at the base of the Grapevine, which winds its way along I-5 to northern California.

When and why did you begin writing?

I took screenwriting from Irwin Blacker at USC. He had been the head writer on Bonanza, had been nominated for a Pulitzer for his novel Taos, and had written hundreds of hours of television and film. It was a summer course lasting only six weeks. I was working on a PhD in cinema and needed a B or better to remain in grad school. The only item for a grade was to complete a feature length screenplay.

We weren´t allowed to begin writing until we had pitched a story to the entire class that they agreed was worthy of being developed as a studio movie. They didn´t accept my first two stories. Finally in week three I pitched an idea that the class greenlighted. I now had 21 days to write a 110 page screenplay. If it wasn´t completed by the end of the course I would receive an F, be dropped from grad school and be unable to begin a PhD elsewhere.

I did finish—an hour before I had to hand it in. The script went on to be optioned by a studio. I received a B.

But what I really got was the self-knowledge that I was capable of working under pressure and that I could tell feature length stories. Prior to that I had only written poetry, short stories, and short films.

When did you first consider yourself a writer?

When I finished my first feature length screenplay and it was optioned by Columbia. I thought I was on the road to fame and riches. I didn´t know how many scripts are optioned and how few get made. But I certainly thought I was a writer at that point. I later discovered that writers keep on writing after rejection.

What inspired you to write your first book?

I had been writing and directing movies for 30 years. I realized that the joy of staying up all night to make a movie had been replaced by the aches and pains of age. It stopped being fun, but I still had stories to tell. Novels were a natural progression.

Do you have a specific writing style?

I want to write books that grab you by the eyeball and drag you hell-bent to an unexpected but inevitable conclusion. I want the dialog and dialect to ring true. I want the emotions to be both raw and occasionally tender. I want to leave with things to think about when the story is over.

How did you come up with the title?

I had just read Hammett´s Red Harvest. I liked the dialect, the era, the hard-boiled characters, the dark story line. The title Blood Harvest was an homage to that.

Is there a message in your novel that you want readers to grasp?

Yes. History is not a real object, but an amalgam of reports by unreliable witnesses who have their own agendas.

Does an author owe anything to the historical record? Is history a verifiable, testable, provable thing?

My recent novel, Blood Harvest, is an attempt to give a new perspective to a past that is still within living memory. When most people hear the background of my story they express either astonishment or disbelief. A few confirm it and add more details to what I have learned.

In the 1920s the Ku Klux Klan had as many as six million members in 35 states. It controlled state legislatures. It controlled the Democratic National Convention in 1924, stalemating the nomination of Al Smith (a Catholic) for 103 ballots.

Its power base was NOT the south. It was the northeast and Midwest. It certainly was anti-black, but in the 1920s it was especially anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, and anti-Catholic. There was a rally of 20,000 Klansmen in Worcester Massachusetts in 1924 that ended in a riot, where the opposition was the Knights of Columbus. There are films of the KKK marching down Pennsylvania in front of the Capitol in 1925, fifteen thousand strong, in full Klan regalia.

My question to you is this: where was all this information when I was falling asleep in high school history class during the height of the civil rights movement?

I read a number of histories of the period, then histories of the KKK. I did research on the net and found photos and film of KKK rallies in front of the White House in the 1920s. I read contemporary accounts in newspapers of the day.

Best of all I interviewed friends and family whose memories extend back to the 20s. Their reminiscences were wonderful and invaluable. I found that as they spoke of their childhood they often dropped into the jargon and slang of the times.

In fiction as well as in non-fiction, writers very often take liberties with their material to tell a good story or make a point. But how much is too much? Have I told a "true" story in my novel?

Since three eyewitnesses to the same event come up with three different (sometimes contradictory) accounts, I don´t put too much value on "history" as written by historians. They always write with the filter of their own culture and education.

And anyway the word history contains the word "story" within it. As long as I´m not preaching I can shape the story as I wish.

Still, all this elision of history is troubling. I currently teach cinema at a college where 50% of my students are attending on international visas. In one discussion I was asking what the name for World War II was in their home country. (Since not all countries fought in WWI, I expected some variation.) Mexico calls it the Great War. Vietnam has no name for it. And a Japanese student told me it is the War Against American Imperialism.

As Nietzsche said, "There are no facts, only interpretations."

How much of the book is realistic?

It is as realistic as I could make it by diligent research. Most of the story is based on actual occurrences. Of course I rearranged them to make the story flow better. I also invented dialog and motives for people who are long dead and could not tell me why they acted the way they did.

Are experiences based on someone you know, or events in your own life?

This novel, Blood Harvest, grew from an incident related to me by my grandmother when she was in her nineties. She was a Scotch-Irish girl from rural New England, one of twelve children, though two died in infancy.

I knew she had married young, perhaps at sixteen, though she sometimes claimed she had been eighteen. She said that after her wedding day she never returned to her home town. I assumed that she eloped or otherwise angered her parents. At one point I asked if her parents disliked my grandfather, who I remembered as personable and charming.

She claimed that they liked him very much. He was a perfect example of the immigrant success story. Came to America from Greece at sixteen, without any English. Started working the next day. Within five years he owned his own restaurant, and in another five he added a chain of candy shops and drug stores.

"So why didn´t you ever return to your home town?"

"It was those dumb clucks." She used this expression only when quite angry. "My brother-in-law didn´t think it right for a white girl to marry a non-white European."

This was new territory to me, but when I read my grandfather´s immigration papers I found that southern Europeans—the Greeks, Spanish, Italians, and Turks—were classified thus until 1912. But it was her next revelation that stunned me.

It wasn´t dumb "clucks." It was dumb "klux." It was the KKK that had driven my grandparents from the town. This was not consistent with what I had learned in my history classes (if only they had been so interesting!), and so I began to research.

What I learned about the KKK in New England in the 1920s astonished me. I hope it will intrigue you as well.

What books have most influenced your life most?

Hands down it is How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler. He made me understand that I could and should have an interactive conversation with the author. This holds true for non-fiction, plays, and fiction—whether they are good or bad, true or false, well written or clumsy. It changed the way I read everything. This book is almost 70 years old and has never been out of print.

Plato´s Republic made me realize that "modern" thought began more than 2,000 years ago. What he has to say about citizenship and the good life are still relevant.

Aristotle´s Poetics taught me the basics of storytelling—how to construct a drama, how to bring a character to life, how to set the story in motion.

If you had to choose, which writer would you consider a mentor?

Joe Lansdale, author of The Bottoms and Sunset and Sawdust. His ability to create fresh characters and bring them to life in a single paragraph amazes and humbles me.

Add to that his ability to keep a story moving at a lightning pace and make the endings both unexpected and inevitable—well, that´s the kind of writer I want to be.

What book are you reading now?

Just finished Lansdale´s latest, Leather Maiden. Excellent.

Are there any new authors that have grasped your interest?

Robert Fate in his Baby Shark series handles action well without skipping characterization or details of the time and place that make his books alive.

Sheila Lowe has created a new character Claudia Rose who is a handwriting analyst. I love seeing the details of her craft applied to solving a crime, much like the early Scarpetta stories.

Gwen Freeman has created a character named Fifi Cutter who is so contemporary, so sarcastic and witty, so bound by Los Angeles that I laugh out loud.

What are your current projects?

My third book, Tommy Gun Tango, is due out in July 2009. It concerns the corruption of the Los Angeles Police Department in the early 1930s and the way they helped the movie studios cover up murders by stars.

Name one entity that you feel supported you outside of family members.

The Santa Clarita Valley Mystery Writers critique group. Supportive, smart, analytical, ego-free. They offered critiques and guidance that made me a better writer. Four of us are now published.

Do you see writing as a career?

I wish.

What I can see from my other published writer friends is that it takes full time effort and provides part time pay. If I can build a backlist of half a dozen novels then perhaps it will be a self-sustaining career.

What do you think makes a good story?

Fresh characters that speak in their own particular voice. A story that moves at a lightning pace. Visceral detail that appeals to all the senses. Endings that are both unexpected and inevitable. Something that sticks in your mind to think about and share with others when the story is finished.

Did you learn anything from writing your book and what was it?

This is my most crucial life/writer lesson—you are not your work; you are not your creation.

I had written nearly 30 screenplays and directed six movies before I attempted my first novel. Hollywood is a very competitive place so I had already experienced dozens of rejections before I sold my first script. It was painful and ego-shrinking the first time it happened. My "child," the offspring of my imagination, had been critiqued and criticized and cut down to size.

In fact, the first script never sold at all and I "suffered," developing my aura as an "artist." The aura and a part time job put groceries on the table.

After half a dozen sales of scripts that were made I finally achieved a more balanced perspective. I consider this the most important thing I have learned as a writer. Here it is---

My scripts, books and movies are not my "children." They are creations: some good, some bad, some better than others; some ahead of their time, some behind. But in every case they were not ME, they were not my "babies." (I have real children who are now grown men. One of them is the author Troy Cook.)

These creations exist apart from me, just as Beethoven´s symphonies are not the man and Emily Dickenson´s poems are not the woman.

Publishers are much like film producers. They may like "art" but they keep their jobs by putting out projects that appeal to a larger public than just their own tastes.

Having adjusted my attitude, I then adjusted my working pattern. I joined a writer´s critique group. I cannot overstate the value of having other writers look at, respond to, critique, and make suggestions for improvement to my work.

About the Author:

Bruce Cook, who also writes under the pen name Brant Randall, has earned credits as writer, producer, or director on eleven independent feature films as well as commercials. He has written more than twenty screenplays, including the films Husbands, Wives, Money & Murder; Line of Fire; and Nightwish.

Since 1973 he has taught at a number of film schools, including USC, UCLA, and Los Angeles City College. Among his thousands of former students are Matt Groening (creator of The Simpsons), actor Laurence Fishburne, Paramount VP of Marketing Lucia Ludovico, numerous directors and producers, six Academy Award nominees and winners, and twelve Emmy nominees and winners.

In 1996 Dr. Cook was invited by ABS-CBN, the largest television network in the Philippines, to teach a series of seminars on improving the production techniques of the film and TV industry. While there, he addressed an assemblage of 2,000 Filipino film industry professionals.

He later returned to the Philippines to conduct a market study on Southeast Asian film production and helped design a motion picture soundstage. While on location, he researched the background for his novel Philippine Fever.

Dr. Cook holds degrees in Physics, Mathematics, Film Education, and Communications. He worked as a laser physicist on the Apollo Project. He and his wife live in Castaic, California.

After discovering that there were four other authors named Bruce Cook, he published his second novel, Blood Harvest, under the pseudonym Brant Randall. His third novel, Tommy Gun Tango, will be published in July 2009. Bruce and Brant will collaborate on that one.

For more information, please visit http://www.brucecookonline.com/