DOMENIC STANSBERRY

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?