Photo by Tara Gimmer
Mike Lawson is the author of the new novel McKenna's Guy. His many other books include the Joe DeMarco series. He lives in the Pacific Northwest.
Q: What inspired you to write McKenna’s Guy, and how did you create your characters Roger and Grace?
A: The inspiration was one of those silly things. I had to look at my passport one day to see when it expired because I was planning to take a trip to Canada, and when I looked at it, I had the stupid thought: I’ll bet this would really be hard to forge. Duh.
My next thought was: What if a guy who makes passports decides to sell a few to criminals who needed fake IDs? No forging required. And that’s how I ended up with Roger Smith, an employee of the Government Publishing Office, and his accomplice, McKenna.
I knew from the beginning that I didn’t want Roger to come off as a slick character like Pierce Brosnan in The Thomas Crown Affair. I wanted him to be a mild-mannered civil servant, an older person, one close to retirement—not your typical protagonist—and I wanted him to be perceived as a good guy—or as good as he could be perceived considering that he’s a criminal.
The McKenna character was necessary because a man like Roger wouldn’t know any criminals who needed fake passports, but being the old rogue that he is, McKenna knows many.
As for Grace Lillinthal . . . Well, I needed someone whose job it was to catch Roger and McKenna, someone as smart and relentless as Grace. Which makes it even more fun when Roger beats her in the end.
Q: The Kirkus Review of the novel says, “Lawson’s stand-alone strips plot, characters, and prose down to exceptional efficiency, producing maximum thrills without a wasted word.” What do you think of that assessment?
A: Twenty-plus years ago, when I was trying to find an agent, one of the many agents who rejected my first novel said: A lot of what you’ve written doesn't advance the plot.
Another piece of advice came from Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing, which says don’t write things that readers tend to skip over, like long-winded descriptions of characters and settings.
And in my novels, I’ve always tried my best to continually advance the plot, to keep the reader engaged, and not to get sidetracked by philosophical musings or elaborate commentary on things that don’t really matter to the plot. So, I wouldn’t say that I’m consciously trying to be efficient because I’m not. I’m just trying to keep the book moving.
As for my revision process, I probably read my books 30 or 40 times before I send them to my agent and mostly what I’m doing when I’m editing is trying to make sure the story holds together and to make it “sound” better—and then when I hear the audio version of the book, unfortunately I often hear that I could have done better.
Q: Did you know how the novel would end before you started writing it, or did you make many changes along the way?
A: McKenna’s Guy was one of the few books I’ve written where I knew the ending before I started.
This is extremely rare for me. I always know how I’m going to start a novel—hopefully in a manner that immediately engages the reader—but I don’t usually have a clue as to how I’m going to end it. Which results, as you’ve indicated, in a lot of rewriting, going down one dead-end after another and having to backtrack until I’ve figure it out.
But like I said, McKenna was a rare exception.
Q: How would you describe the dynamic between Roger and Grace?
A: Cat and mouse, with Roger definitely being the mouse. Roger knows, right from the get-go, that Grace is coming after him and that she won’t stop until she gets him. But then Grace is almost the least of his problems because people are trying to kill him.
So most of Roger’s energy is devoted to finding out who’s trying to kill him and why, while knowing that it’s almost inevitable that Grace will arrest him—which is why he decides to flee the country. And when that plan fails—that is, fleeing—and Grace does arrests him, he falls back on what I called Plan B in the book.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I’m currently working on Books 21 and 22 of my long-running Joe DeMarco series. DeMarco’s a fixer for a vaguely corrupt politician named John Mahoney, and one book involves Mahoney being framed for murder. The other one is about some seemingly small-time thieves ripping off the government.
I’ll do that sometimes: work on one book for a while, then set it aside, then come back to it later hoping for some fresh insight on how to improve it.
I also have another standalone in my laptop, one that was sort of inspired by the Harvey Weinstein saga. I made a good start on that one, but then, and as noted above, ran into a brick wall and haven’t figured out how to end it.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: About the only other thing I can think of to tell your readers is that I enjoy writing. I used to have a real job—I worked as an engineer on the reactors in navy submarines and aircraft carriers—and writing novels has never felt like a job.
It’s a pleasure and I hope that the enjoyment I get out of writing comes across in my books. My only objective is to entertain, and not to preach or push a particular view. And I think a book like McKenna’s Guy met that objective: It’s a quick, fun read—definitely, a beach read—and I hope some of your readers will take a chance on it.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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