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The following interview by Stephen Miller appeared in the Anthony-award winning fan publication Mystery News in June/July, 2001. Reprinted here with permission.
Readers of private eye fiction have had numerous reasons to rejoice during the last couple of years as writers like Steve Hamilton, Bob Truluck and Lise Baker have all stepped forward with their debut novels. However, Mark Coggins, whose novel The Immortal Game was released during the last week of 1999, probably came the closest to capturing the classic sprit of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Consider:
"The left front tire of my battered Ford Galaxy jolted into a pothole, and the last of my factory hubcaps popped off and went rolling down the slope behind me…I had planned to use the hubcap with my silver tea service as a crumpet tray, but I could see now those plans were kaput."
But, before we get too comfortable with what we think initially is very familiar ground, San Francisco private eye August Riordan tells us that he's no Sam Spade with an overdeveloped notion of doing what is right:
"I was not walking away from this…It wasn't about the money, and it wasn't about doing the right thing, and it certainly wasn't something romantic like seeking the truth at all costs. No - it was about me not drinking myself stupid tonight in a shabby bar feeling like I was a loser."
The creator of this new kind of private eye came about his craft in a unique way, as he told me during a recent phone interview from his home in San Francisco.
"I was born in New Mexico and came out to California to go to school at Stanford and ended up staying in the Bay Area. I got my degree in, of all things, Soviet Studies and I thought I was going to be a lawyer. I went to work in software development for Hewlett-Packard and then got my Masters in Computer Science. I've stayed in high tech and software since then and worked in places like Netscape and some start-ups and venture capital firms. Obviously, that's influenced my writing and the things I write about."
The Immortal Game involves an eccentric software game developer who believes his paid mistress has stolen the only copy of the source code for the ultimate in computer chess games and sold it to a competitor. He hires August Riordan, a street savvy private eye who doubles as a semi-professional jazz bassist, to find the girl and the game. While Mark's professional experience colors a lot of the book, it's also clear that he's spent some time working on his craft. I asked him about his writing background.
"From a writing perspective, I took a number of classes in creative writing from folks who were starting out in their writing career and later became rather well known. One of them was Ron Hansen, who is a very literary writer, and another was Tobias Wolff. He [Wolff] had just had his first short story published at the time. He happened to read Raymond Chandler one day when he was talking about style. He read the first chapter from The Big Sleep and I got really excited and read all his books. By the time I got into Ron's class, I had written a short story called 'There's No Such Thing As Private Eyes' and it had a character that ultimately became my character in the novel."
I was glad Mark mentioned that story, since I had recently come across it in a back issue of The New Black Mask Quarterly, and I was intrigued by how the character developed during the many years between the story's publication and The Immortal Game.
"I had written the story in '78 and put it in a drawer. I got New Black Mask interested in the story and I started to write a second story called 'The Immortal Game' and it was about forty pages long. [Editor Richard Layman] actually bought it and then the magazine went out of business so it never got published. I put it in a drawer for a long time and wanted to get back to writing, but with my career and all, I never had the opportunity to do it. It wasn't until I had a chance to take some time off from work that I went back to it. I had always liked that story and pulled it out and started working on it. Part of August's change has to do with me getting older and more mature. I put him in the high tech environment and I added an extra layer to his character with the fact he plays jazz bass. He's more mature and more well rounded in the book, which is not surprising."
When I mentioned that the August Riordan of the novel is simply more fun to read about than the character in the short story, Mark added, "In the short story, he's kind of a loser. Maybe that comes from trying to make a point about private eyes, but in the novel there's more opportunity to show character and there wasn't the same agenda as in the short story. I definitely wanted to make him more approachable."
I asked Mark about his influences. "Outside of mysteries, I really admire James Dickey's Deliverance, and All The King's Men by Robert Penn Warren. They're both masterful first person stories. Ron Hansen had a book out called Atticus, which is a mystery, but it's told from two characters' perspectives."
I'm pleased to report that more is on the way. "I have a short story coming out in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine in September/October, in the double issue they're having. It's not a Riordan, but it is a private eye story, set in the 1920's. It's kind of a Continental Op homage; it involves Chinatown as some of Hammett's stories do. It's pretty hardboiled and I'm pleased they're publishing it.
"As for the next book, I had planned on writing a book called Vulture Capital and I started writing it before The Immortal Game was picked up by Poltroon Press, back when I didn't think the book would be published, so I decided to go in another direction. Vulture Capital has Riordan as a character, but he's not the protagonist and it's told in third person..."
Even with the passage of over a year and a half, The Immortal Game still has a lot of notoriety, though, especially in San Francisco. "After the book was published and it got some attention in the Bay Area, I got a call from my publisher who had met with someone, a real P.I., who wanted to meet me. So, I met this guy at a bar for drinks. Well, it turns out that this guy was convinced that I had based the book on his life, because he's a private eye who is a jazz bassist on a semi-professional basis and he had played two of the different places I had mentioned in the book, actual gigs. And, he had been hired by the company I worked for at the time to do some security work. He was convinced I had somehow learned about him and had based the book on him. Obviously, he didn't know the character existed twenty years earlier in that short story. Still, it was quite a shock!"
It's nice to know that August Riordan will be appearing again shortly, after a much briefer hiatus. In fact, you can say he's simply on a sixteen-bar rest, awaiting the completion of his creator's solo.
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