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Photo by Michael Parmalee |
Kevin Wade is the author of the new novel Johnny Careless. He is also a playwright, screenwriter, and television producer and writer.
Q: What inspired you to write Johnny Careless, and how did you create your character Jeep Mullane?
A: So far as inspiration, I’d spent 14 years working on a CBS police procedural (Blue Bloods) and so had been in the thick of cops and their stories for a while.
On a wider scale I’ve been a huge fan of crime, police and detective fiction going back to my early 20s. I had some free time on my hands due to a writer’s strike and thought I was up for the challenge of trying my hand at a crime novel.
As for Jeep, he is a contemporary character who shares a lot of the attitudes, aspirations and disappointments that I do; he’s a cop mostly because that’s the genre that seemed most close at hand for me.
Q: The writer John Sandford said of the book, “Jeep Mullane is the kind of American hero cop we need now more than ever.” What do you think of that assessment?
A: I think it’s a fine compliment from a wonderful writer. Anything more I’ll have to leave up to the reader.
Q: Did you know how the story would end before you started writing it, or did you make many changes along the way?
A: I started with the two main characters, Jeep and John, their haves-and-have-nots circumstances, and the locale. Everything else was just made up as I went along, or came out of the research I did with the local police and other sources.
Q: As a longtime screenwriter and showrunner, was it a big change to write a novel?
A: Yes, in that it was a whole new form for me.
The biggest differences were that A), for the first time I wasn’t writing characters that actors would be portraying, as I had done for my whole writing life, and so whatever dimensions and relatability the characters would have for an audience had to wholly realized on the page.
B), frankly, was the sheer volume of words. Plays, screenplays and teleplays are 90-something percent dialogue with some brief indications of setting and characters present and a small fraction of the word count of a novel.
What broke that ice for me was realizing that I had to do all the jobs that other teams had always done when a script was made. I wasn’t just the writer, but also the cinematographer, art director, casting director, wardrobe department, editor, and on and on. I’d worked with some of the best and remembered just enough to start trying to fill those shoes.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I am working on a second Jeep Mullane book called Pirate Jenny.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: That I’m very grateful to Celadon/Macmillan for taking a chance on this, and I hope that readers will too.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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