Chances are you’ve never heard of Craig McDonald. It’s okay, there’s a first time for everybody. Mine was about three years ago. I was trying to track down an interview of Ken Bruen and found that it was available in a book of interviews with crime and mystery authors, conducted by Craig, called Art in the Blood. The interviews illuminated my fandom of scribblers like Lehane, Pelecanos and Ellroy and also introduced me to some great writers (like Charlie Stella and David Corbett), but the star of the show was the low key McDonald. It was a solid piece of journalism. He was well informed, insightful and out of the way.
I looked for more pieces by him and found a short story he’d written called The Last Interview in the anthology The Deadly Bride edited by Ed Gorman and Martin H. Greenberg and checked it out. Turned out he wrote fiction as stellar as his tastes in it. My jealousy burned.
The Last Interview introduced McDonald’s chief literary creation Hector Lassiter, the mid-century pulp writer who “writes what he lives and lives what he writes.” In 2007, Hector got his own novel, the Edgar nominated, Head Games which was followed up by another Lassiter title, Toros & Torsos in 2008. Last year he published a second collection of interviews, the far more personal Rogue Males and this week, the third Hector book Print the Legend was released.
Throughout the Lassiter series, Hector has rubbed elbows and other anatomical bits with the likes of Orson Welles, Marlene Dietrich and even a future president or two, but the central relationship of the series has been between Hector and Ernest Hemingway who alternately admire and resent the other’s successes and fortunes.
The bulk of Print the Legend is set in 1965 and places Hector in uncomfortable proximity to the legion of vultures descended upon Ketchum, Idaho to feast on the body of work left behind by Hemingway.
The plot centers around discovering the truth behind Hem’s last days, when his friends believed him to be paranoid or deluded and he sunk into a deep and devastating depression. It goes into the practice of the FBI, under Hoover, to keep America’s greatest authors and artists under constant surveillance and hypothesizes on Mary Hemingway’s practices as executor of Hem’s estate and lost writings. In one passage, McDonald gives us a missing chapter to A Moveable Feast , one portraying Hector and Hem’s relationship through Papa’s eyes. The treatment of Hem’s unfinished manuscripts is clearly a sore spot for McDonald, but he refuses to handle Hem, the man, writer or legend with kid gloves, giving the lay reader peeks into the troubled psyche of one of our greatest novelists.
Print the Legend is the change-up in his repertoire and continues McDonald’s study of history, literature and masculinity through the eyes and against the backdrop of his central character. But Lassiter is evolving under the steady hand of his creator, adding layers of dimension, contradiction and depth with each book. The non-linear arc of each story and also of each novel in the cannon serves to highlight an aspect of the character, a point in history or an attitude held by author and character alike.
Print the Legend also expands the story, stepping, for the first time, outside Hector’s point of view and into the supporting cast: a scholar and his young wife, a demonically driven FBI agent and even Papa himself. This broadening of the canvas serves to deepen the reader’s appreciation of the earlier novels and certainly of those yet to come. The events of the next, (in order, but not sequence) novel Gnashville remain veiled, but are hinted at seductively, and those inclined to re-read Head Games, (the only one narrated by Hector thus far) and Toros & Torsos, (not to mention The Last Interview) after Print the Legend will be rewarded with a multi-layered appreciation of this rich and intricately conceived series.
McDonald baits his books with lurid subject matter taken from the shadows of recent history, weaving together disparate strands of the Twentieth Century into a singular narrative unfolding to the cadence and tune of a master storyteller.
In the end, the true pleasure is Hector himself, a fictional creation admirably fleshed out and filling the cracks in your memory – someone the author hopes "will seem strangely missing from the actual history books and biographies pertaining to the real events and people who populate this series."
He does.
(Read my interview with Craig here)
