Interviews


Talking about: The Ancient Rain


Below, Domenic Stansberry discusses his latest novel, The Ancient Rain, in which the melancholy San Francisco detective, Dante Mancuso, investigates a politically-charged slaying that finds a 70s radical on trial for a crime he committed decades before. The book is set in the aftermath of 9/​11. For more information contact: Jessica.Rotondi@​stmartins.com.


Q AND A


Q: DOES THIS LATEST NOVEL, THE ANCIENT RAIN, HAVE A POLITICAL DIMENSION?

A: The main thrust of the story concerns a man with a past. In this case, it happens to be a left wing past, a radical past, that comes back to haunt him at an inopportune moment—a moment of public hysteria—in the aftermath of 9/​ll.

Q: THIS STORY APPEARS TO MIRROR THE CASE OF WILLIAM HARRIS, THE ‘70s RADICAL. HOW MUCH DID THAT CASE INFLUENCE THE BOOK?

A: The book is fiction and really isn’t intended as a portrait of Harris, or anyone else. But the Harris case was very much in public view when I was on the early stages of this.... In the ‘70’s Harris had been involved with the Symbionese Liberation Army, the group that kidnapped Patti Hearst…. Then just after 9/​11 the feds arrested him on murder charges, related to a robbery some thirty years before.

Well, my first thought when I heard about his arrest was, honestly—like a lot of people in the Bay Area---“here we go: the government using the terror scare to go after Vietnam era dissidents.” To settle old scores, to stifle dissent.

Q: IT SEEMS YOU ARE SYMPATHETIC TO HARRIS. BUT THE BOOK ITSELF IS NOT VERY FLATTERING TO THE LEFT.

A: What caught my attention was the manner in which Harris was arrested. The feds had pulled him over in the morning as he was driving the kids to school, or that’s the way it was reported. On some personal level, that scene got into my head. It bothered me. It got into my dreams.

But I started to look at the case more closely, at the other side: the family of the woman who had been shot to death by the SLA back in the seventies. And I felt my sympathies torn.

Q: SO WHAT INSPIRED YOU TO WRITE THIS BOOK?

A: What inspired me was this back and forth, this division not only in my own head, but the fierce divide in public opinion. For the novel, I found myself imagining things from the viewpoints of different people, each with their own different stake in how things worked out. Some very personal—some blatantly political.

All these torn feelings—these different motives—the extreme rhetoric seemed emblematic of the kind of polarization that was going on at large in the country right then. It also seemed to be rich territory from a dramatic point of view.


Q: IN YOUR WRITING, HOW MUCH OBLIGATION DID YOU FEEL TO BE ACCURATE TO REAL LIFE EVENTS?

A: I want a sense of historical authenticity. But fiction is not the same as journalism, and the reality you are creating is more representational than factual, like an impressionist painting. Or certain kinds of photographs. You capture certain particulars, but not everything, and there’s a filter. For example, the Patti Hearst figure is front and center in a lot of other stories about the SLA—but she’s a very minor character in this novel.

Q: THIS NOVEL IS PART OF A LONGER SERIES. HOW DOES THAT FIT IN?

A: The book is part of a series of books, all set in San Francisco, in North Beach—the old Italian neighborhood——featuring an obsessive, melancholy detective by the name of Dante Mancuso. He has a very long nose.

This book, the Ancient Rain, follows Mancuso and another detective, a rival, who find themselves on opposite sides of the case.

Q: YOUR SAN FRANCISCO NOVELS ARE KNOWN FOR THEIR INTIMATE PORTAYAL OF THE NORTH BEACH SUB-CULTURAL AND THE USE OF HISTORICAL FIGURES. ARE THERE ANY SUCH FIGURES IN THIS BOOK?

A: Bob Kaufman was a real person—yes. He was a beat poet who died back in 1986 and his ghost haunts this novel. He’s an archetypal San Francisco figure in some ways—whose poetic vision defied the typical left wing orthodoxies; The Ancient Rain takes its title from one of his poems.

Q: AN EARLIER BOOK OF YOURS, THE CONFESSION, STIRRED CONTROVERSY WHEN IT RECEIVED THE EDGAR ALLAN AWARD. DO YOU EXPECT SIMIALR REACTION FROM THIS BOOK?

A. My goal in The Ancient Rain was to capture that moment of national fear—and the desire for vengeance that permeated the air—after 9/​11, and before the run up to war. There was all this searching under bushes for enemies, and the feeling that you better not complain about it, or you were somehow suspect yourself.

If there is anything controversial about the book, maybe, it’s the implication that the left wing in San Francisco is just as fear mongering and self-serving as their right wing brethren. In the twisting of history, in the way that legal system is manipulated for political and personal end. Some people on the left may not like how this book ends. But I don’t imagine the other side will be thrilled either.


Talking about: The Big Boom



2006 Interview with Domenic Stansberry conducted by Angelina Gabriel, of Pacific Book News, at Caffé Trieste in San Francisco. Stansberry discusses The Big Boom, the second book in the North Beach Mystery Series, as well as the controversy over The Confession, the pulp novel which won the 2005 Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Paperback Original.



ANGELINA: Tell me about a little about Dante Mancuso, The Pelican—the main character in the North Beach series.

DOMENIC: Well, Pellicano… it’s a family name really, on his mother’s side. Like a lot of Italian family names it’s based on mockery of some physical characteristic of the family. In this case it’s his nose. Dante has this very large, inordinately large, Sicilian nose…. So the people on the street. they call him The Pelican…

The other thing he has inherited, he fears, is the familial madness. His mother died in an asylum.


ANGELINA: He’s a private investigator?

DOMENIC:When the series starts, Dante’s been gone for a long time, and comes home on the eve of his father’s funeral.

He’s a homicide detective who’s been forced off the force, and has been working for the last half dozen years as an operative for an international security agency, known only as the company


ANGELINA: The company—that sounds like something out of Manchette, the French crime novelist.


DOMENIC: Well, obviously, sure, the book owes a debt to Manchette—not so much in the way it’s put together—but in the fundamental notion that there’s this octopus like security organization that once you join, you can’t get out, and after a while it’s operations are indistinguishable from those of all the other institutions surrounding us.

But Dante, as the series develops… and Dante’s paranoia deepens… there’s this whole question of what’s real and what’s not.


ANGELINA: What’s the storyline of The Big Boom?

DOMENIC: Dante’s investigating the disappearance of a childhood sweetheart, and that investigation gets intertwined, as it always does for him, with the incestuous history of Italian North Beach. All this takes place around the time of the dot-com boom. Or dot-com bust, depending upon how you look at in.


ANGELINA: You worked in the hi-tech sector?

DOMENIC: Yes.


ANGELA: What did you do?
DOMENIC: Dialogue writing mostly—for experimental software. Dialogue engines, they called them. For computer games—and training.


ANGELA: The book is pretty dark, and the violence, it all grows out of the boom, it seems. So is this a repudiation?

DOMENIC: It’s really not that simple. Pro-business, anti-business, I try not to think that way. Myself, I am pretty addicted to high technology-—I was just trying to capture a certain feel that was in the air at that time out here, when people were grabbing for the stars with their heads in the sand.


ANGELINA: On another subject, for a crime novelist, your writing has been a source of considerable controversy.

DOMENIC: I don’t know about that.


ANGELINA: As I was going to say… On one hand, your book The Confession, when that book won the Edgar, there was a pretty big hue and cry. One of the dissenting judges went public to condemn you, and even wanted the book banned.

DOMENIC: Yes.


ANGELINA: But on the other hand, some reviewers like Lou Zangani in the New Review of Literature, have commented on Catholic mysticism, and the allegorical elements in your fiction.

DOMENIC: I think, some of the people reacting to The Confession, were reacting to the fact that the book didn’t resolve on the side of good—that evil was not punished in the way they thought it should be. But look at the Ripley novels, or this new Woody Allen film, Matchpoint, or on a more literary front, Disgrace by Coetzee, the South African writer—these are all similar kinds of stories, in their narrative orientation, and have had similar charges laid against them.


What I think it is, some people, they want evil to be outside of them, separate, and anything that suggests, hey, no, it’s inside you, too, it freaks them out.


Some people, when confronted with their own innate evil, instead of acknowledging that, they roll over and play victim. That way they can be self-righteous. They can rant and rave and point their fingers and maybe find a witch to burn.


I would condemn them more, I suppose, if I hadn’t done the same thing myself on more than one occasion.


ANGELINA: What about the religious element in your work?

DOMENIC: I don’t know what you mean.


ANGELINA: The character’s name is Dante, there’s all those church scenes—and in The Big Boom—there’s that ending in which, you know, it reads almost like the time of the end, after the rapture.

DOMENIC: I am one of these writers that thinks a writer shouldn’t go too far towards explaining their own work. Look at it this way, I’m a crime novelist. I write about murder and mayhem and people who are deranged. My books have covers with women cowering in their night clothes.


When it goes down to it, these are entertainments. Dark entertainments, maybe, that have a certain kind of appeal.


But I don’t want to go any further then that.


ANGELINA: What’s next with the series?

DOMENIC: It’s a four book series. So I guess that makes me half way through. I am still in process, and a little superstitious about talking too much about the books I haven’t finished yet.


ANGELINA: No clues about what happens to Dante? How does it all end?


DOMENIC: In flames, I’m suspecting. How’s that for religious allegory?