A Conversation with C.W. Blackwell

from the Central Coast of California

I discovered C.W. Blackwell’s work thanks to Bristol Noir. Since 2017, the online magazine published by John Bowie has featured a dazzling roster of writers, both new to the crime genre and established. Many have gone on to release books. C.W. has two, with a short story collection on the horizon. He has also won the Derringer Award twice, and been nominated multiple times. Take a couple of minutes to read this superb piece of flash, The Referee, published on the Shotgun Honey site.

Here’s what we talked about …

M.E. Proctor: The first book of yours I read was Song of the Red Squire. It starts like a mystery: Charlie Danwitter, a WW2 Army vet working for the USDA, is sent to catalogue apple orchards. There’s tension right away. The locals are suspicious of a government agent. Then the story slips into folk horror. What made you go that way with the story?

C.W. Blackwell: I’d noticed publisher Nosetouch Press had shared an article about a man named Tom Brown, who hunts what he calls “heritage apples” deep in the Appalachian Mountains. Some of the orchards he discovers go all the way back to pre-colonisation. More info here. I imagined what kind of trouble a fictional Tom Brown would find deep in those ancient orchards, and that’s how Charlie Danwitter was born. The book is trippy because I tried something unique, for me: I wrote the outline in a stream of consciousness with no restrictions, then I wrote the novella following the outline faithfully over a period of several months. There were times when I thought, no, that’s crazy, what was I thinking?—but I wrote it anyway. I ended up with this sort of Heart of Darkness descent into madness. I sent it to the publisher and said, look at this crazy shit you made me write, and they published it!

M.E.: Why do you think crime writers have such a strong affinity with the horror genre—I’m thinking of Nick Kolakowski who hops between the two, or Joe Lansdale who often brings fantastic elements in his stories. And the classics of course: Poe, Conan Doyle, or King who goes the other way and flirts with crime tropes in The Outsider and the Mr. Mercedes trilogy.

C.W.: I think horror fiction and crime fiction are closely related. Horror is a crime story having a nightmare. I’ve heard that, for some, horror helps process the frightening things our species is capable of. I believe that. To me, crime stories are ultimately scarier. Vampires follow rules, and they come with instructions on how to kill them. But real violence can be unpredictable and impossible to stop, especially with the gun culture so pervasive in our society.

M.E.: In horror fiction, the reader has a way out: it’s not real, it’s fantasy, it’s made up. Crime fiction pins you in reality. The goblins live next door or sit at the dining room table, or they’re strangers with unfathomable motives. In your book, Hard Mountain Clay, you’ve created a kind of monster that feels only too common, too real: Lou Holt, who dominates a family he’s invaded like a parasite. He controls the mother, Carolyn, through drugs, and terrorizes the kids, Ben, the narrator, and Maisy, his sister. It’s an insidious kind of terror. Can you talk about how Lou came to be?

C.W.: With Hard Mountain Clay, I wanted to write something local, set in the familiar redwood forests and mountain highways of my hometown. When most people think of California, their thoughts go to Los Angeles or San Diego, people surfing and playing beach volleyball. Baywatch stuff, right? But the Central Coast is its own thing. It’s Steinbeck country. We have the beaches, but we also have the farmlands and rugged mountain ranges like the Gabilans, the Santa Lucias, and the Santa Cruz Mountains, where I live. But unlike the Steinbeck days, our area has been struggling with an opioid and methamphetamine epidemic. So add a vulnerable family to the mix, and you have a situation where a guy like Lou Holt can wreak a lot of havoc. I’ve known guys like Lou growing up—or close enough. These are guys who can hollow out a family and leave nothing but ruins, then simply truck on down the road and start again. Once I had the setting, the vibes, and the villain, the story came together quickly.

M.E.: What struck me was the isolation of the family. It seems like they’re living in the middle of nowhere, and when the school principal comes calling, it's a trek to get there. The story is told from the perspective of the kids. That geographical distance might be partly their perception, because they have nobody they can turn to.

C.W.: I'd say there's definitely a geographical distance as well as an emotional and psychological one. That's really what makes the area so unique: one minute, you're riding the SkyTram at the Beach Boardwalk with an ice cream in your hand, and twenty minutes later you're descending into a dark and misty redwood canyon full of ferns and dragonflies and burbling streams. And the forest keeps going and going, and the mountains become so wild and rugged that you might as well be on the moon of Endor (the speeder bike scenes of Return of the Jedi were filmed farther north, in a redwood forest). As beautiful as it is, if you're a kid in a bad situation, you really do feel quite helpless and isolated. But the thing with Ben and Maisy in Hard Mountain Clay is they have each other, and when all else fails, that's what makes the difference. I heard the characters voices more in this book than any other project up until then. So when the publisher mentioned the novella was a little short on pages, I didn't have any trouble following their voices back into that sad little world to write a few more chapters.

M.E.: Your short story collection, Whatever Kills the Pain, comes out this year. I read the manuscript and I loved every story, they build on each other and the writing sings. It’s beautiful. What can you tell the readers about it?

C.W.: For me, “Whatever Kills the Pain” is the culmination of the past ten years of my writing career. I started out wondering if I would ever get a single short story published, and even though I still try to approach writing with a beginner’s mind, I feel like I’ve reached a place where I want to celebrate how far I’ve come. I feel like I’m finally writing stories the way I always wanted to write them. One half of the collection is made up of my favorite stories published these past couple years, and the other half I wrote for the book. I can’t think of a better publisher than Rock and a Hard Place Press. They’ve developed a reputation as a publisher of gritty, violent, emotional stories that champion everyday people with their backs against the wall. We share the same general ethos and worldview, and that’s not an easy thing to find in a publishing partner. Expect the collection to come out sometime this summer, and you better believe I’ll be making some noise about it when it does!

C.W. Blackwell’s books, Song of the Red Squire and Hard Mountain Clay, are available in paperback and eBook. You can also read two of his short stories here:

On Bristol Noir: The Shooting House

On Shotgun Honey: The Referee

Some publication news

I was a guest on the Ladies of Mystery blog, with a short essay about the birth of a character: The Detective Comes Calling. This is how Declan Shaw came to be, ten years ago! Happy reading!

Stone’s Throw has published their 2024 anthology. It includes the 12 stories that won the monthly call. The 2023 version was a blast. This one is again a master class in short story writing. My Deer Tracks is in it. You can get it here.