In Laymon's Terms

If that isn’t enough of a disgrace, few actually PAY the money on time. They have to be brow-beaten before they’ll put a check in the mail—and THEN many U.S. literary agents will keep the check for a few MORE months, apparently using it to cover gambling losses, or God knows what.

Which may all sound like wild exaggerations—except to those of your readers who are writers. I don’t know a single pro who hasn’t been shafted time and again by U.S. publishers. I also know quite a few writers who’ve noticed how wonderful, by comparison, the British publishers are.

For a writer, being published by a company such as Headline in England is like “Dying and going to heaven.” Also not an exaggeration. I have letters from a few writers who’ve used that actual expression.

A bit more than you probably bargained for, Ed, when you asked me that one.

EG: You seem to have started out as more of a mystery-crime writer than anything else.

RL: My first sale was to Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. I subsequently sold several stories to EQMM, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, and Mike Shayne’s Mystery Magazine. This was back in the 1970s. There were no good markets for short horror stories (other than a couple of men’s magazines) so I concentrated on the mystery magazines. They were each buying more than a dozen new stories each month.

My stories from that period were reprinted in my collection A Good, Secret Place. Though these early stories were published in “mystery” magazines, readers will probably find them to be a trifle quirky. Many of the stories contain elements of the grotesque and bizarre. I pushed things about as far as I could within the rather straight-laced boundaries of those magazines.

Once I moved on to writing horror stories for anthologies in the 1980s, my short fiction became a lot more liberated. I was able to write stories that have the same “voice” as my novels.

As an aside, I do think that there is a lot of overlap between crime fiction and horror fiction. The Silence of the Lambs is the example everyone cites. But I think it would be difficult to find a noir or hardboiled crime novel that doesn’t have elements of horror. Of course, I see horror everywhere. I think Lonesome Dove is a horror novel. (And it was part of my inspiration for writing Savage.)

EG: You seem to fit most comfortably in the category of “Dark suspense”-crime fiction that is not a whodunit, horrific fiction without a supernatural element. Is that a fair description?

RL: Pretty fair. Thinking about the subject, I find that I seem to be writing three different kinds of novels. One batch has strong supernatural elements: The Cellar, Beware!, Beast House, Resurrection Dreams, One Rainy Night, Flesh, and Darkness, Tell Us. Others treat a middle ground in which the supernatural is down played or merely hinted at: Tread Softly, Funland Blood Games, The Stake, In the Dark. But quite a few of them are straight, without any supernatural whatsoever: Out Are the Lights, Allhallow’s Eve, Night Show, Alarms, Midnight’s Lair, Savage, Endless Night, Quake, and my forthcoming Island.

Even when the supernatural does rear its head in my books, it is usually more of a catalyst—a device to trigger the conflict—than a major focus of the story.

I don’t worry much about whether or not one of my stories contains elements of the supernatural. If I come up with what I think is a nifty concept, I’ll give it a whirl.

With or without elements of the supernatural, all my books end up containing pretty much the same blend of other elements—what you define as “Richard Laymon World” in a later question.

EG: Following your first bestseller, The Cellar, you went through some rough times, right?

RL: Right. Here in the States, my career has never recovered. The Cellar, sold well over 200,000 copies and ended up on the B. Dalton bestseller list for a month.

But my second book, The Woods Are Dark, flopped. That flop ruined me here. They dumped me like a bad meal. Nobody here would touch my stuff for several years. At one point, a major editor at Berkley was all set to make an offer for two or three of my books, but the deal went south when their sales people checked with my former publisher. As recently as a couple of years ago, a possible sale to another publisher was killed because of what had happened at the old publisher more than a decade earlier; one of their people was working at the old publisher at the time The Woods are Dark didn’t sell up to expectations.