The Island Where It Happens

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Nantucket changed my life. Truly. It’s where Jonathan and I met, and my every memory of the place is wrapped in gossamer happiness. So when I heard about Steven Axelrod, who sets his mysteries (from the amazing Poisoned Pen Press) on the island, I was instantly hooked. 

So—welcome Steven! And I laughed and laughed when I heard about his main character--a bad poet! Brilliant.

HANK:  Your protagonist, Henry Kennis, has to be the world's most literate police chief, bar none. How did you decide to create a cop who writes poetry on the side? 

STEVE: First of all, I write poetry myself -- very much like the accessible reality-based verse that Henry composes, which is not really in fashion now. The wife of one of my MFA program professors, a very prominent modern poet, read Nantucket Five-Spot (which was written as my creative thesis) and remarked. "I love the fact that hero is such a bad poet! So charming." I guess I couldn't resist the urge to let some of these "bad" poems see the light of day. 

But it's an appropriate hobby for a detective. Crime solving and poetry require the same leaps of intuition, the same ability to make and recognize odd connections and relationships. Beyond that a poem is a good x-ray of a character's heart and soul. The poems help the reader get to know my Police Chief a little better.  

HANK:  The backdrop of your new book is the backstabbing world of local theater, in this case Nantucket's. The vicious confrontations between the characters who populate this  novel feel quite authentic... Have you yourself participated in local theater and experienced this level of drama?

STEVE: I did a fair amount of community theater acting when I was Henry's age, and I saw my fair share of high drama and low comedy in that milieu. The theater scene on the island seems much more serene these days. But  that's okay -- inventing conflict and setting crazy characters at each others' throats is part of my job description.

HANK:  You spent a portion of your childhood in a Hollywood environment, with your father being the famous writer/director George Axelrod. (Listen to this, reds and readers. His father is  best known for his play, The Seven Year Itch, which was adapted into a movie starring Marilyn Monroe. He was nominated for an Academy Award for his 1961 adaptation of Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's and also adapted Richard Condon's The Manchurian Candidate.  MY total FAVORITE. ) Anyway. So cool! 

STEVE: My Hollywood ties have frayed somewhat over the years though I remain a member of the WGA(w) thanks to a development deal some years ago with a big TV producer. There is currently some interest in the Kennis books as a series from different "content providers" I guess I should call them, to be as vague and cryptic as possible ... but it's hard to tell how serious any of them are. I keep my fingers crossed, though it tends to interfere with my typing.

HANK: I know the feeling!  So--When you prepare for a new novel, do you first outline everything from soup to nuts? Or are you a write-by-the-seat-of-your-pants kind of guy?

STEVE: I'm a combination of the two. I've always envied writers like Stephen King who apparently just charge into a book and let the plot details sort themselves out, with what Nabokov called "the velocity of intuition". 

HANK: Oh, I’ve never heard that. I love it. Is that what you do? 

STEVE: I tend to be more cautious. I need to know the ultimate outcome before I start -- who done it and why, and at least some of the clues red-herrings and detours that will lead Henry to the culprit. You're always telling two or three parallel narratives in a mystery, with several of those scenarios throwing  suspicion on the wrong people. The links between these versions of reality are the clues, which can be interpreted different ways -- the RACHE written on the wall in blood that Gregson and Lestrade assume to be an almost completed name -- Rachel. But Sherlock Holmes knows it's the German word for revenge.

HANK: Oh, we have to talk. More I cannot say. But wait til you read my new book The Murder List. J  But we digress.

STEVE:  So ... within that macro-structure, the big picture of the novel, I attack the story one chunk at a time, carefully outlining the piece I'm working on and usually emerging from it with only the vaguest idea of where I'm going next. So I read through the notes, refresh my memory about the larger story and start outlining the next bit of the plot. 

This gets simpler as the story goes on. Tales narrow down and pick up speed as they approach their climax and the writing becomes easier as more and more decisions have already been made. 

My father always told me, "If you have a problem with act three, the real problem is in act one." He referred to those final blissful writing days that sweep to the end of the story as "picking the daisies" -- flowers you meticulously planted many pages ago. All that being said, the actual content of each scene remains wildly improvisational. Except for a few essentials, I really have no idea what my characters are going to say to each other, or which way their conflicts will go. 

And that makes every writing day fun.

HANK: We are the same! But you are so eloquent about it. I just freak out and cross my fingers. Last question:

With Nantucket being so tiny, is it a challenge to come up with new plot concepts that don't tread on the ground already covered?

STEVE: I wrote a thriller twenty years ago and my agent at the time warned me "You better know what your next couple of thrillers are going to be. I'm branding you as a thriller guy." That scared me. I had literally used every idea, gimmick, action set-piece and plot device I had ever come up with in that book. I had been pebble collecting for it since high school. Now I was supposed to write another one? I had nothing, and told her so. Maybe I should have faked it -- the book never sold. Anyway, it's just the opposite with Nantucket. The little resort island teems with stories, plots, feuds, grudges, history and conflict. I'm always learning new things, from the existence of secret cock fighting clubs (Which I used on the first page of the new book) to the fact that the dump was built on an Wampanoag Indian graveyard. Spooky! The material seems inexhaustible. 

Nantucket is America in miniature, with all the wealth inequality, immigration issues, opioid addiction, gang crime and bureaucratic malfeasance a crime writer would wish for. The island is experiencing massive tectonic social changes. The larger aim of my books is to chronicle those changes  -- and try to make sense of them.

HANK: Yes, yes, this is so thought provoking! Reds and readers, have you ever been to Nantucket? Would you like to? What’s your image of it? Or where’s one place that changed your life?

 

Nantucket Counterfeit by Steven Axelrod 

The fifth Henry Kennis mystery takes us into the closed, gossip-riddled, back-stabbing world of Nantucket’s community theater.            

Horst Refn, the widely disliked and resented Artistic Director of the Nantucket Theater Lab, has been found stuffed into the meat freezer in his basement. Most of the actors, all the technical crew, and quite a few of the Theater Lab Board members, whom Refn was scamming and blackmailing, are suspects in his murder. The island’s Police Chief Henry Kennis has to pick his way through a social minefield as he searches for the killer.

At the same time, Henry’s daughter’s new boyfriend, football star Hector Cruz, has been accused of sexting her. Carrie knows the offending pictures didn’t come from him, and Henry has to prove it before the boy gets suspended, which means probing into the family secrets of Hector’s father, a firebrand agitprop playwright, who happens to be a prime suspect in Refn’s murder.

Every story is a fiction, every identity proves false, and every statement a lie. The counterfeit bills found at the scene of the crime are the most obvious symbol of the deceptions and distractions that obscure the investigation. The truth lies buried in the past, in Refn’s earlier crimes and the victims who came to Nantucket seeking revenge.

When the culprit has been revealed, the last masks torn off, and final murder foiled—live, on stage, during the opening night of Who Dun It, the eerily prescient opening drama of the Theater Lab Season—Jane says to Henry, “Is everything counterfeit?” He smiles. “Almost.”

Steven Axelrod holds an MFA in writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts and remains a member of the WGA, despite a long absence from Hollywood. His work has been featured on various websites, including the literary e-zine Numéro Cinq, where he is on the masthead; Salon.com; and The Good Men Project; as well as the magazines Pulp Modernand Big Pulp. A father of two, he lives on Nantucket Island, Massachusetts.