Craig McDonald

Craig McDonald is a journalist and the author of The Hector Lassiter series, The Chris Lyon series, the standalone novel El Gavilan, as well as two collections of interviews with fellow fiction writers, Art in the Blood (2006) and Rogue Males (2009). He also edited the anthology "Borderland Noir" (2015).

Born in Columbus, Ohio, he grew up in Grove City, Ohio, a fictionalized version of which serves as the setting for his 2011 work of fiction, El Gavilan. McDonald’s debut novel, Head Games (2007), was nominated for the Edgar Award, the Anthony Award and the Gumshoe Award in the U.S. for best first novel, as well as the 2011 Sélection du prix polar Saint-Maur en Poche in France. He is managing editor of a daily newspaper in Licking County, Ohio.

Writing

In 2006, Craig McDonald published a collection of interviews with crime and thriller writers, Art In the Blood, featuring in-depth Q&A-style conversations with genre novelists discussing the craft of writing. (A sequel interview, Rogue Males, followed in 2009, from Bleak House Books. The second collection was a finalist for a Macavity Award for nonfiction.)

In 2007, McDonald published his debut novel, Head Games, which garnered American and European awards attention, including Edgar Award and Anthony Award nominations for Best First Novel by an American Author in 2008. Head Games featured fictional novelist/screenwriter Hector Lassiter, a character McDonald introduced in a 2005 short story (The Last Interview) selected for an online Mississippi Review anthology of “High Pulp” and subsequently selected for print anthologies and short story collections. The novel launched a series of further books featuring the Lassiter character. The Lassiter novels have been translated into numerous languages, some going on to achieve international best-seller status. A graphic novel of Head Games was announced as in production from First Second Books in 2008 and remains in production with a projected publication date of 2017.

Writing style/major themes

McDonald's Lassiter series uses historical crimes and personages, including several appearances by Ernest Hemingway and Orson Welles, over the course of his Hector Lassiter series.

The voice and style of the Lassiter novels have drawn comparisons to James Crumley and James Ellroy,^[1] both of whom McDonald interviewed as a journalist and whom he has confirmed in interviews and essays as significant influences, as well as James Carlos Blake^[2] and Jack Kerouac,^[3] among others.

In 2010, crime fiction critic and scholar Woody Haut described McDonald as "one of the few writers who can move comfortably within a post-Ellroy framework of crime fiction."^[4] In addition to noting his tendency to write in a historical fiction vein ala Ellroy and Blake, critics and scholars have focused on McDonald's exploration of the male psyche and critiques of masculine influences on popular culture and 20th Century art and history.

In her study, The Noir Thriller (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), in a chapter examining "Literary Noir in the Twenty-First Century," Lee Horsley identified McDonald as one of several "neo-noir" authors who embody "a recurrent motif of men in pursuit of a lost, treacherously illusive notion of masculinity …" ^[5]

Picking up a similar theme, Woody Haut, critiquing McDonald's second-published novel, Toros & Torsoes, commented, "By portraying Hemingway and Hector Lassiter, warts and all...(McDonald) critiques the effect of masculine values on the culture, and examines the relationship between reality and fiction."^[6] Hector Lassiter, known to readers and critics as the man who writes what he lives and lives what he writes, eventually comes to use himself as a character in his own novels as the series unfolds.

Works

The Hector Lassiter series

One True Sentence (Hector Lassiter series #1)

One True Sentence was first published by St. Martin’s Press Minotaur in February 2011. In original publication sequence, it was the fourth Lassiter novel to appear. European publisher Betimes Books re-issued One True Sentence in August 2014 as the first installment of the series, which Betimes determined to present in chronological order for the first time.

The novel is set in Paris, France, during one week of February in 1924, and revolves around the members of the Lost Generation and a literary movement that embraces nihilism that is dubbed “Nada.”

One True Sentence achieved international critical acclaim, including praise from Library Journal, the Dayton Daily News. The novel, along with Toros & Torsos and Print the Legend, also received significant scholarly attention in Ron McFarland's Appropriating Hemingway (McFarland & Company Inc., 2014), a critical work examining Hemingway's use by other authors as a fictional character.^[7]

Forevers' Just Pretend (Hector Lassiter series #2)

Forevers' Just Pretend, presented as a direct sequel to One True Sentence, was published for the first time in August 2014 by Betimes Books.

This sequel to the prior novel reunites Hector Lassiter and Brinke Devlin in Key West in 1925 and focuses on the Jazz Age-Florida real estate boom.

Toros & Torsos (Hector Lassiter series #3)

Toros & Torsos was the second Lassiter novel to appear upon original publication in 2008 from Bleak House Books. Chronologically, it is actually the third book in the series, opening in 1935 and taking inspiration from Steven Hodel's book "Black Dahlia Avenger" that attributed the 1947 murder of Elizabeth Short to a cult of surrealist artists and art collectors. Among the real-life characters featured in the novel are Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, Rita Hayworth, Orson Welles, John Huston, Salvador Dali, and Man Ray.

"Deftly mixes myth, history... McDonald's imaginative tale takes an enjoyably different approach to art and murder.^[8]" —Publishers Weekly

The Great Pretender (Hector Lassiter series #4)

First published by Betimes Books in 2014, the novel opens in 1938 with Orson Welles’ infamous War of the Worlds Panic Broadcast and follows Lassiter’s and Welles’ quest for The Spear of Destiny.

Roll the Credits (Hector Lassiter series #5)

Roll the Credits, first published in 2014 by Betimes Books, is a historical thriller that reveals Hector Lassiter’s adventures during World War II on behalf of the Office of Strategic Services, as well as the war's aftermath, turning on Lassiter's duel-to-the-death with a Nazi filmmaker starting in 1920s Berlin and ending in the jungles of Brazil in the early 1970s.

The Running Kind (Hector Lassiter series #6)

The Running Kind, first published in 2014 by Betimes Books, is set in the American Midwest in December 1950, in the immediate aftermath of a killer blizzard. The novel incorporates one of America’s most notorious serial killers—the so-called Torso Slayer or Cleveland Headhunter, a psychopath who has eluded capture by “Untouchable” Treasury Agent Eliot Ness. Ness is among several historical figures appearing in the novel, including singer Frank Sinatra and his wife-to-be, actress Ava Gardner.

Head Games (Hector Lassiter series #7)

Head Games was first published by Bleak House Books in 2007 and was a finalist of the Edgar Award®, Anthony Award, CrimeSpree and Gumshoe Award. It was the first Hector Lassiter novel in the original publication sequences, and is set mostly in 1957 America. In the new Betimes chronological release, Head Games becomes the seventh title in the series. Its re-issue by Betimes Books was announced for Spring 2015.

Print the Legend (Hector Lassiter series #8)

Print the Legend was first published by Minotaur Books, an imprint of St. Martin’s Publishing Group in 2010. This literary thriller about Ernest Hemingway's death weighs the role his widow, Mary, possibly played during the last moments of the legendary author’s life. It also explores the sinister and destructive FBI tactics actually employed by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to discredit writers and artists, sometimes with deadly results.

"McDonald tosses off throw-away allusions and inside jokes with apparent effortlessness... McDonald is a writer's writer, so the book is also, improbably but effectively, a meditation on the art of writing fiction."^[9] —The Hemingway Review

The Chris Lyon series

Night Town, LTD released in 2012 and 2013 four exclusive-to-eBook novels featuring a Cleveland reporter Chris Lyon, who investigates a centuries-old cult of fiends. These novels expand upon and tie back into Hector Lassiter’s world while offering a new saga based on infamous real-life crimes.

Standalones

El Gavilan

El Gavilan was published in 2011 by Tyrus Books to a starred review from Publishers Weekly. The novel is set in New Austin, Ohio—a fictionalized version of Grove City, Ohio—and deals with the impact of illegal immigration into the United States.

Nonfiction

Art in the Blood: Crime Novelists Discuss their Craft

Art in the Blood, published by Point Blank (an imprint of Wildside Press) in 2006, is a collection of interviews with a range of notable crime fiction authors. Authors featured include James Ellroy, Dan Brown, Ken Bruen, Michael Connelly, Liza Cody, George Pelecanos, Walter Mosley, Dennis Lehane, Ian Rankin, Karin Slaughter, Lee Child, Steve Hamilton, J.A. Jance, Peter Lovesey, Peter Straub, Ridley Pearson, Tami Hoag, Tim Dorsey, David Corbett and Charlie Stella.

Rogue Males: Conversations & Confrontations about the Writing Life

Rogue Males, published in 2009 by Bleak House Books, follow-up to the 2006 Art in the Blood dialogue with male authors and songwriters. This collection consists of sixteen interviews. Rogue Males includes conversations with Elmore Leonard and James Crumley (in one of his last interviews); James Sallis, Daniel Woodrell; noir kingpins James Ellroy and Ken Bruen, and thriller writers Lee Child and Randy Wayne White. Rogue Males was a Finalist of 2010 Macavity Award in “Best Mystery Nonfiction” category.^[10]

Nominations and Awards

External links

• Craig McDonald's Official Web Site
• Craig McDonald's Blog
• Craig McDonald's Twitter page
• Craig McDonald's Facebook page
• Craig McDonald interview with Jean Henry Mead
• Craig McDonald's interview in Shotsmag

References