Volume 4, Issue 5 – October, 2001
Robert Asprin and Eric Del Carlo: No Quarter
(Photo by Jean Marie Ward)
Be careful when you try to interview Robert Asprin and Eric Del Carlo. Before you know it, they’ll start interviewing you. Which is only what you’d expect from Asprin, renowned for his comic fantasy series featuring Phule and the Mythadventures of Aahz and Skeeve, his single-title novels, and his work as editor of the Thieves World anthology series. Del Carlo, a short story writer nominated for the 2000 Pushcart Prize and a past semi-finalist for the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial award, boasts fewer credits to date, but he learns fast.
Recently, Asprin and Del Carlo began collaborating on a mystery series set in New Orleans which promises to be the kind of stretch writers dream about. The series marks Del Carlo’s first venture outside the world of fantasy, science fiction and horror short stories. For Asprin, it represents a change from the light, punny voice of his fantasy novels to something darker, like New Orleans coffee with a bit of chicory added. At Dragoncon 2001 they talked about their plans for the new series and their love of the city they both call home.
Crescent Blues: How did two people best known for writing fantasy start working together on a mystery series?
Robert Asprin: Ever since I first visited New Orleans back in ’89, I’ve been intrigued by the French Quarter. I always wanted to set something in the Quarter, whether it was historic or contemporary. Unfortunately, I was always tied up with previous commitments — earlier multiple contracts — and could not get a crack at it. I’ve had a five- or six-year down-spell as a writer, and now that most of the other contracts are cleared or down to the last book, I have a chance to do what I want to do — specifically, something set in New Orleans.
I was hanging around with Eric, and it occurred to us that we could do this. Not to speak ill of other New Orleans writers — there is considerable New Orleans fiction, particularly in the mystery side, some of it excellent. But for someone who lives in the Quarter, most writers’ rendition of the Quarter sounds very much like an Uptowner who has come down to visit. They never really caught the flavor of the French Quarter neighborhoods, the gossip circles…
Eric Del Carlo: That is our principal qualification — that we do live down there. Bourbon Street is the street that we cross to get to the A&P.; We are, very much, on the inside. We live it. We breathe it. I’ve gone months and months at a time without leaving the French Quarter. There’s everything there.
You actually can breathe it?
Eric: You get used to it after while.
Robert: It makes your hair go funny.
Seriously, when you live in the Quarter, a lot of your social life revolves around the bars. [The economy is] very heavily service industry. The staffs of the different restaurants hang out at different bars when they get off duty. And if something happens in the Quarter it can ripple through the area within a matter of a half-hour, if not a matter of minutes. If there’s a shooting at one of the bars, if something happens, if there’s a flash fire at one of the restaurants, within half an hour, all of the regulars in the Quarter know about it. “Do you know people who work there?” “No, but I know the people next door?” The Quarter is a very, very tight community.
There are about two thousand people who actually live in the Quarter, and a lot of those work Uptown, and only come back to the Quarter to sleep. But there are people who live and work in the Quarter who firmly believe you need a passport to get in and out of the Quarter. It becomes a little universe unto itself.
Is that how you met and decided to work together — you lived near each other?
Eric: Well, yeah. There was a particular bar that Bob hangs out at that I started to go to.
Robert: It’s also right across the street from where he works.
Eric: Where my wife works, and she would go there to grab a cab late at night to get home. Even though the French Quarter is small, it can be rough like any city, so my wife prefers to cab it home. I would go there to collect her there occasionally or just to have a cocktail with her, to decompress from the job.
It was Bob’s hangout. I got introduced to him. I had not read any of his fiction. Of course, I recognized his name. It’s a recognizable name. But I had not read any of his fiction, so I didn’t come across like a sycophant or even a fan. We got chatty, because he knows movie trivia, and I love movie trivia.
Does your mutual love of movie trivia factor in the series?
Robert: It factors occasionally in the “Bone” character. It crops up a bit more in the “Maestro” character.
Could you tell us a bit more about those two characters and their roles in the series?
Robert: The characters are roughly based on our own characters — our physical description and age. Some of the obvious differences are apparent. For the character of Maestro, for example, I believe I may have created a new position in the Mafia. As the story begins to unfold, it turns out that Maestro used to be up North — basically Detroit. You’ve seen the things with the knuckle-draggers and the knee-cappers who come in to collect. In the series, there are freelancers who are the actual hunter-trackers that go around and figure out the location of the [enforcers’] targets, which door to kick in. Once they point out the targets, the hunter-trackers step back.
Hunter-trackers are needed, because the knuckle-draggers can’t figure it out on their own.
Robert: Also because when the knuckle-draggers walk in, everyone is going to shut up. Maestro spent considerable time as a hunter-tracker. He worked with a mob where he picked up some street-fighting tricks. But he accidentally tapped the wrong person — the visiting son of another family — and ends up in his own self-created witness protection program. He’s on the run from both the mob and the police, and he’s hiding out in the French Quarter. Everybody in the Quarter uses nicknames or assumed names. He has been living down there for a while and keeping a low profile, because he doesn’t want any of the other trackers to pick up on him.
The basic story for the opener (No Quarter) is that word came through the bar that someone got knifed and killed up on the Moon Walk. It turns out to be one of the quarter regulars that everybody knows, including Maestro and Bone.
Eric: The Moon Walk is the promenade down by the Mississippi River.
Robert: The Bone character is…
Eric: Bone is much less exotic. He’s the perfect Everyman for my generation — I’m in my thirties. Bone is a waiter in a pretty much locals-only restaurant. He despises his job. He does it anyway. He’s an atrocious waiter, but he makes very good money at it, because he knows the people who come to the restaurant, he’s very quick with his wit. But he does not like to eat. Bone hates food. That’s why they call him “Bone.”
Is that a characteristic you share?
Robert: He usually eats once a week.
Eric: Whether I need to or not. I’m still waiting for them to release food in pill form, so I don’t have to deal with the mess of it.
I based Bone a lot more closely on myself than Bob based Maestro on himself. (I’m pretty sure that Bob hasn’t worked for the mob, though you never can tell. And I’m sure the rumors will fly after this.) I pretty much took my own neuroses and stuffed them into this character. The most important exception is that Bone has no creative outlet. I write, so I’ve always had something to aim for. There’s a brass ring at the end of this. You won’t be a waiter forever — I have waited tables, by the way. There will be a pay-off in this life, somehow.
Bone doesn’t have any of that, and I was always curious what I’d be like if I didn’t have writing. Essentially, I’d be screwed, because I’d be doing these rotten jobs until I keel over.
In the first book, Bone is a good friend of the gal that gets killed. He decides that he’s going to do something about this. We hook him up with Maestro, because, obviously, Maestro has more experience with this.
Robert: Bone starts ranting at the bartender in the bar he frequents, and the bartender says, “Maybe you should talk to Maestro before you try to do anything.” The bartender is an old friend who knows more about Maestro’s background than most of the Quarterites. After being annoyed at the bartender for saying as much as he did, Maestro concedes that Bone is a good man and about to go off half-cocked. So Maestro decides to calm Bone down or, at least, keep him out of too much trouble. These are the two hunters.
It is an interesting fantasy that we’re building with these characters, particularly in the first two books, and it is a fantasy that will fit in very well with the local New Orleans power structure. We all know that the Quarter is very small and closed, and there are undercurrents that the police never hear about. And if the police try to come in and get answers, they often get stonewalled.
Suddenly, here we have a couple of characters that are borderline vigilante. If something goes on that they don’t like or think is wrong, and they can pursue it, by whatever means possible, they can do it with the tacit approval of the police. And New Orleans being New Orleans, we can all jiggle the reports in the newspapers, and it all looks effervescent from the outside, and tourists don’t get scared. At the same time, everybody who’s interested in justice down there knows the Quarter is the Quarter, and it may take a couple of extra right turns to get justice there.
Eric: This is almost a fantasy wish-fulfillment. You wish that these two characters existed, so you could tap them for jobs no one else wants to do.
How does the character of Bone relate to the characters you’ve created for your short fiction? Were all of your stories science fiction, fantasy and horror, or do you write in other genres?
Eric: No, it’s all been fantasy, science fiction or horror. This is the first time I’ve strayed outside the lines. I believe that every writer who does it for a little while eventually winds up writing about him or herself as the main character. It’s the easiest thing to do, no matter how you disguise it. Robert Silverberg, for example — you can always find Robert Silverberg in his books. He’s always there, always the glum, introspective, dismal character with a bad view of the universe. [Samuel] Delaney, [Harlan] Ellison — they’re always the same.
Yet writing teachers always tell you not to write about yourself.
Eric: They also say write about what you know. I happen to know myself. But the resemblances are probably a lot more obvious to the writer than the reader.
Robert: You always put a little piece of yourself in every character you write. Lynn Abbey, my second ex-wife, summed it up very nicely: “If you don’t care about your characters and what happens to them, how do you expect the reader to?”
I think too many people try to distance themselves from the writing, because if it gets rejected, they don’t want to hurt too much. They try to go with formula, archetype or what-not — and wonder why it won’t sell or, even if it does, why people don’t respond to it. Again, if you don’t care about it, why should anybody else?
Eric: It’s much easier to get involved when, essentially, your life is on the line.
Bob, between the books you’ve written and the anthologies you edited, you know both the buying and the selling side of publishing. How do you keep the roles of writer and editor separate?
Robert: First of all, I’m not currently editing anything. I haven’t done that since the Thieves World series, eight to ten years ago. As far as the current work, No Quarter, we’re doing two main characters with two alternating viewpoints. Occasionally, we split a chapter. The springboard is that we work off each other. The fact that we have different writing styles is part of the characterization. Between you and me, I think that may be one of the things that will help with the collaboration, because there are things Eric thinks I’m moving too quickly on, and there are things I think he’s dragging out. When it gets to the editor they can arbitrate.
I figure if an editor feels the book needs an extremely heavy edit, then he or she doesn’t really like it. Some of the cosmetic stuff, the pacing, I’m more than willing to listen to an editor on. But there’s also the chance that the editor basically doesn’t like the book. They don’t like the idea or the way it’s written. If that’s the case, maybe you should take the book to another publishing house and an editor who is excited about it the way it is.
Exactly how did you work the collaboration?
Robert: We started filling it out over dinner. OK, here’s the basic story. What direction are we taking it in? What are we seeing for the next couple of scenes or chapters?
Eric: Essentially, a very rough outline.
Robert: One of us starts out. The other one takes the next chapter, and it goes from there. The story starts shaping itself. After x-number of chapters, we’ll sit down again and go: “OK, we’re going to need an element here. I see a couple of ways you could pull this in. Do you want to do it through your character or through mine?” Then we’ll discuss it.
Something that is very unusual for me — we worked without an outline. We were developing it as we led, letting the story flow through the characters and the investigation. Normally, I outline very tightly, because I hate doing rewrites, especially for humor. Trying to rewrite humor is a real drag.
It’s interesting that instead of having to get tighter and more restricted for a collaboration, strangely enough, from the beginning, we’ve actually been more confident that we could handle this.
Eric: We trade off chapters, but it’s not always boy/girl. Sometimes he’ll take two in a row, but we don’t really meddle in each other’s material.
Who’s the girl?
Robert: I saw that one coming.
Eric: I’m right-handed. I don’t want to talk about it.
But we really didn’t take each other’s material and say: “This is a bad sentence.” Sometimes we would say: “This could use an element.” But I didn’t take my stuff, give it to Bob and let him edit it; and I didn’t edit his. Our writing styles are so different, that we really didn’t want them melded.
Robert: It works better that way. Most of the commentary related to inconsistency of the lay-out. Or you’ve got a scene set at 10 o’clock; can you move it a bit later, because my scene is over at the pool table when so-and-so gets off work, and it would really clash.
New Orleans life is such a night life. The thing that comes up very often is that our day essentially doesn’t start until midnight or 2 in the morning.
One of the things that drew me to the Quarter is that they keep the same kind of hours I do. A lot of the bars and the supermarkets are open 24 hours a day. A lot of times I won’t head out before 11 or midnight, because the people I want to talk to aren’t there. They’re working the restaurants or whatever. The only time I see 8 or 9 o’clock in the morning is if I’m still up for it, and that happens on at least a semi-regular basis.
Eric: At least once or twice.
Robert: I sleep until 2 or 3 in the afternoon, and I usually don’t start crashing until somewhere between 5 and 8 in the morning.
You don’t sound like a Louisiana native, though. How did you come to live in New Orleans?
Robert: I was born in San Francisco. Where does “Bone” come from?
Eric: This is a perfect example of the fact that I based Bone rather more closely on myself than Bob based Maestro on him. Bone is a native San Franciscan. He left San Francisco, because he could no longer afford to live there. The line from the book — if I could be allowed to quote it — would be: “San Francisco had rejected Bone like a bad kidney.”
The housing market just went bananas with Silicon Valley. If you’re going to try to work for a living — or be a writer —
Robert: That’s not working for a living.
Eric: It’s just disastrous. I had actually lived in New Orleans in the mid-90s for a little over a year, and I liked it quite a bit. I ended up back in San Francisco for various reasons, but New Orleans was the best place that I had lived. So when I decided I was going to make one more move and that was it, I came down with a gal who I married two years ago. And am still married to. First and only marriage, thank you.
Speaking of New Orlean brings us back to inspiration. What writers inspired you? This question is for both of you. Also, Bob, I understand you were once very active in the Society for Creative Anachronism. Are you still part of it? Eric, do you share that particular interest?
Robert: I was very active in the Society for Creative Anachronism for about eight years in the late ’70s and early ’80s, and haven’t really been back since. Coincidentally, that was right about the time that the writing started to take off, and one only has so much time and money. Writing was paying me, and riding across the country to play Yng the Nauseating didn’t.
As for who you’re influences are, that’s one of the things people always like to ask: who are your favorite writers? Invariably it turns out to be who you’ve been reading in the last couple of weeks, and two hours or two days later you go, “Oh my God!” [Asprin smacks his forehead.] “I forgot to mention so-and-so.”
One of the writers I always keep coming back to is Edgar Rice Burroughs. He may not be considered high literature, but he’s an incredibly entertaining author. His stuff is still in print and still making money. I would love to be this generation’s Edgar Rice Burroughs. As a writer, I view myself as an entertainer. It’s not so much to “comment on the human condition.” (But it’s hard to write without commenting on the human condition.)
The other major influence would probably be my dad, who came from the Philippines. I’m old enough where we actually didn’t have TV until I was in junior high, and he would keep us amused over the dinner table with tales of his life in the Philippines. So I was raised very much on the oral storytelling tradition.
Humor is a family trait. I always loved getting on panels where they ask how do you do your research? The other writers say things like, “Well, I work for NASA, and all I do is read scientific journals,” or “I strap on chain mail and read tracts about William the Conqueror.” I watch Tiny Toons and the Marx Brothers, and [Bob] Hope and [Bing] Crosby road movies.
That’s literally what I’m often doing, particularly when I’m switching back and forth between No Quarter and Myth. It takes a different mind frame, a different voice. It does take a while for me to switch back, particularly to the Guido/Nunzio/Damon Runyon-esque, pseudo-gangster speech pattern.
Will you be doing more Myth books?
Robert: Myth-Ion Improbable, the eleventh book in the Myth series, is premiering this week (the week of Sept. 3), and I did a reading from Something Mythic, the twelfth, Saturday (Sept. 1). I hope Something Mythic will be done by the end of the year and out by the end of summer next year.
Myth-Ion Improbable was your first Myth book after a long absence from the series. What was the biggest challenge you faced returning to that world after such a long absence, and what was the greatest joy?
Robert: The reason I was gone from Myth for so long was a series of unpleasant events in my life that became very closely associated with the Myth series. Once I got clear of those events and would sit down and try to write Myth, it almost felt like there was a force field over the keyboard. All the side issues of family, health, whatever would be right back in my head again.
So the first thing was trying to cleanse that off my back. A lot of that cleansing happened last year when I finally settled with the IRS after a five-year brawl. Then it was trying to get back into the mood, the speech pattern. There is a particular light touch to the Myth series, which I only partially caught in the tenth book, Sweet Myth-Tery of Life, because that was when some of the stuff started. That book still looks to me a bit more bitter than funny.
The new book, Myth-Ion Improbable, actually occurs between the third and fourth books in the series. After a seven to nine year lay-off, it happened that the story which would’ve come up next in the cycle is probably the most complex of the Myth stories I tried to tackle. It’s not only multi-viewpoint, it is happening simultaneously with events in Sweet Myth-Tery of Life. Things criss-cross between the novels — shared themes from different viewpoints. It is an extremely complex story to tell. Plus, I was trying to get back into that nice, light voice.
I struggled with it quite a bit. Finally, someone suggested I was trying to take on a double-headed serpent. Why didn’t I go ahead and grab one of the other ideas that I’d had earlier and never gotten around to, and do up a pre-quel just to get back the voice and rhythm — which is basically what I did in Myth-Ion Improbable. Now I’m hitting Something Mythic [the twelfth book in the Myth series] with a bit of momentum and a bit more confidence.
Back to you, Eric. Who were your influences?
Eric: My answer is a little more mundane, because I do have authors who have influenced me. Having come up writing short stories, Harlan Ellison is almost certainly my favorite short story writer. I don’t always enjoy his stories, and I’m often infuriated by his stories, but I’m never unimpressed. What I’ve read of Harlan’s work shows just how far the boundaries can be pushed, that there are a lot of rules that don’t have to be obeyed as long as you know the rules. You can’t play the guitar until you know your chords.
One of the wonderful things about this convention is that I got to meet Harlan, just in passing, but… When I hooked up with Bob, one of the deals was, all right, OK, we’ll write together as long as one day I get to meet Harlan Ellison. That’s the deal. So Bob’s paid off, and now he’s got me for life.
And the contract was signed in blood in true French Quarter tradition.
Robert: And it only cost him 20 points off the money split.
I’m sorry, even Harlan Ellison’s not worth it.
Robert: I’m kidding. I’m kidding.
Eric: Bob’s got my soul, but it was only taking up space anyway.
Robert: We’re kidding on that. One of the things I insisted upon when we went into this project was that we are full partners, going fifty-fifty, both on the money and on the say of what’s going on with the books.
Anything else you’d like to add?
Robert: [After a long silence.] That’s a good question, but it’s like having a “Z” in Scrabble™ and no way to use it.
Jean Marie Ward
In addition to editing Crescent Blues, Jean Marie Ward writes for a number of Web-based and print magazines, including Science Fiction Weekly. She is the author of Illumina: the Art of Jean Pierre Targete (Paper Tiger) and several short stories, including “Most Dead Bodies in a Confined Space” in Strange Pleasures 2 (Prime Books). Her first novel, With Nine You Get Vanyr, written with Teri Smith, is scheduled to be released by Samhain Publishing in late 2006..