Q: This is your second novel
featuring your character Detective Koa Kane. Did you know you'd be writing
another book about him before you started the first one?
A: I started my first
book, Death of a Messenger, more than 20 years ago and wrote off and on as
my busy legal career allowed. A second home on the Big Island of Hawaii had
afforded me respite from the outside world, and its stark contrasts were
fertile ground for my creative juices.
It wouldn’t be fair to say
that in the beginning I knew I would write a second novel. But not
surprisingly, that was my dream and in choosing the setting and fashioning the
characters, I certainly allowed for the possibility of a second, third, or even
fourth book.
And, as I progressed to the
editing and production stages, the thought of deepening and adding to my cast
of characters proved inspirational. Writing fiction was just too much fun to
abandon.
In addition, I became
attached to the characters. I began to see more complexities in their nature,
and I developed more backstory. These figments of my imagination became friends
- friends whose exploits I wanted to share.
Q: How did you come up with
the idea for Off the Grid?
A: The original inspiration
for Off the Grid came from a painting my wife and I commissioned from
an artist who lived in a remote part of the Big Island in a rather ramshackle
house deep in a rain forest. Entering her home, cluttered with mismatched
bric-a-brac, art supplies, and partially finished paintings, was a hoarder’s
wonderland. I knew immediately that the house held secrets whose stories I
could tell.
The artist, a talented but
eccentric painter, rendered nature in exacting detail and was for me a
character in waiting. Learning that her husband had some sort of clandestine
military background made the pair a writer’s dream.
When living on a rural island
in the middle of the Pacific, local news travels fast and, if nefarious, with
lightning speed. So, when a small country restaurant we frequented closed
after authorities arrested the proprietor as a fugitive from justice, it piqued
my curiosity.
After pouring through old
newspaper archives I realized the restaurateur was not the only wanted man
hiding out in the backwaters of the Big Island. Other refugees from justice had
been apprehended after living for years in remote corners of rural Hawaii.
The chance coincidence of
these two occurrences in quick succession led me to the first inklings of a
story about two fugitives, an artist and an ex-military orchid grower, living
in a remote dwelling off the grid.
Q: The novels are set in
Hawaii. How important is setting to you in your writing?
A: In some ways, Big Island
of Hawaii is the most important character in this series of mystery/thrillers.
The human characters and stories in my novels are informed by the island’s
unique history, multicultural population, language, and blended aloha culture.
Koa Kane, my native detective
protagonist, was indelibly shaped by the sugar cane plantations that crippled
and killed his father. He, like all native Hawaiians, has enormous respect for
his indigenous cultural history and divinities, the foremost of which is Pele,
the legendary goddess of Hawaiian volcanoes, who built and continues to build
the island.
He feels the pain of the
activists who still chafe under the United States’ theft of Hawaiian
sovereignty in 1893. And, when Koa takes his place in the second seat of a
double-hulled ocean racing canoe, he, like his ancestors, is one with the ocean
that surrounds the island.
Other characters reflect the
diversity of the island—the Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Philippine laborers
brought to the island to plant and harvest the sugar cane and pineapple crops;
the Portuguese engineers who built the irrigation systems; and the Spanish and
Mexican paniolos who tend the cattle on some of the biggest ranches in the
world.
Finally, the plot arises in
part from the setting. Where else can a loner hide from their past, and wind up
tortured to death and nearly buried beneath an active lava flow?
Q: What are some of your
favorite mystery novels?
A: I read a lot of mysteries
and thrillers and am especially fond of those with unique geographic settings.
Jane Harper’s books like The Dry and The Lost Man, set in the
Australian outback transport me to the hot, dry, windblown flats of the rural
land down under. I live in New York City and know it well, but in books
like Terminal City, Blood Oath, and Hell’s Gate, Linda Fairstein
leads her readers on an exploration of the secret places we walk past every
day.
On a lighter note I love to
go to rural France with Martin Walker. I can almost taste the cheese, the roast
duck, and the wine in books like The Dark Vineyard and A Taste
for Vengeance. No one does Wyoming like Craig Johnson or Mississippi like Greg
Iles.
Q: What are you working on
now?
A: I’ve completed the third
book in the Koa Kane series, Fire and Vengeance, which Oceanview has
agreed to publish in 2020, and I am working on a fourth which will delve deeply
into Koa Kane’s troubled past. After that, who knows.
Q: Anything else we should
know?
A: For me, writing fiction
posed a significant transition. As an attorney, my positions, briefs, and arguments
were always more or less constrained by the provable facts. An attorney who
strays too far from the record loses credibility with the client, the
opposition, and the court. Not so the novelist.
However, it takes a
substantial shift in attitude to exercise the full freedom to tailor facts to
suit my stories and, if need be, to make whatever corrections are necessary to
those that may not fit with the ending. But the freedom is liberating.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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