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Photography courtesy of Blank Slate Press
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Photo courtesy of Rick Skwiot
Writer (and frequent SLM contributor) Rick Skwiot’s new book, Fail, is set in St. Louis, and the Mississippi river runs, dark and ominous, through its pages. A disappearance turns into somebody else’s suicide, a murder threat turns into somebody else’s murder; a police detective gets dragged into a snarl of political corruption all too familiar here. At the heart of the back story is a white cop who shot and killed an unarmed black man. Skwiot was just finishing the manuscript when Michael Brown was shot in Ferguson. Suddenly, the nation was talking about the same issues he raises in his mystery: failing public schools, crime, poverty, injustice, and city government.
How did you come up with your immensely likable detective, Carlo Gabriel? He actually is patterned on a friend of mine here in Key West who has a very breezy manner and a world-wise way about him. The same kind of wisecracking, and he’s a mensch. He’s a down-to-earth guy.
Did you pick the name because St. Louis, in its jazz heyday, was called the City of Gabriel? Can you make it look like I knew that? I consciously chose the name, but for biblical reasons—Gabriel is the horn-blower who’s waking people up. He’s a guy who unwittingly stumbles into this morass that he really doesn’t want to be involved in, but ends up playing a role that enlightens other people.
And what about the book itself? Fail is a great title.
There’s a lot about academe in the book, so I started calling it F, as in a failing grade. That was a little too obscure. Then one of my early readers suggested Fail. It applies not only to the failed school system, but to the failure of city government and the personal failures of the people involved. And there’s this pop craze about “fail” right now—when something bad happens and people screw up, young people just say “fail.”
How did you decide which parts of St. Louis to depict in the book? All these things were a big part of my childhood, knocking around the streets near the North Side where my grandmother lived. The river was always a force… These were the iconic things: the city library, the Downtown Y.
I forgot to ask: Is Jonathan Stone’s name deliberate? He’s rock-solid. He is unbending, and that’s one of the things that almost did him in. The more he became humiliated and distraught, the more he started clinging to the old guides of his religion.
Did you grow up Catholic? The book feels that way. My father was a lapsed Catholic and my mother was a milquetoast Protestant. So I got very little religious training. But growing up in St. Louis—it’s Catholicism, the Cardinals, and catfish. A lot of my friends were altar boys.
Did you know at the outset that you’d make us suspicious of Carlo? That’s as much as I’ll say. It comes out of the subconscious, and these things just occur at the right time. There’s a lot of synchronicity. There are 100,000 decisions you make in writing a novel, because it’s a blank slate. You have to create this whole world. Everything you have ever experienced, ever thought, ever felt in life, even the smallest scent of an aroma, is all there in this big cauldron, and you just pull stuff out.
Zadie Smith describes two kinds of writers: those who frame the entire structure first, and those who just begin. I’m structured to the extent that I’m making notes before I sit down to do a draft. But it’s a really messy and convoluted process, and the end product’s nothing that reflects my original notes. I go back and look at the notes and think how inane, how empty and vacuous.
So then what was the biggest surprise when you reached the last page? How darn good it turned out. And I’m surprised by the growth in the point-of-view character, Carlo Gabriel. This started out being a book about Jonathan Stone. My working title was Professor Stone Vanishes—from Monsieur Monde Vanishes, because Georges Simenon is probably the most influential writer in my life.
You work in quite a few political scandals and a sleazy mayor. Were you at all worried that anybody would take it personally? Let’s be clear about this: None of the stuff there did I make up. The ghost workers in the treasurer’s office, we had people go to prison for that in 2013. We had the police chief resign in 2008 because of the towing scandal. We had a governor pleading guilty to improprieties with money. So I would hope they’d be upset.
You strike an unlikely balance: It's ivory-tower but noir-tough. It’s probably just a reflection of who I am. I’ve been a Teamster working truck jobs, and I’ve taught creative writing at Washington University. I grew up in a working-class family, and I had—not a tough life, but an earthy upbringing. And then later, aspiring to be a writer, I got a lot of formal education and a bunch of degrees.
There it is! That’s what I mean: “a bunch of degrees.” That’s a pretty rough-cut phrase for—what were they again? Bachelor’s in sociology, master’s in English literature, MFA in creative writing. And for someone who always hated school, it was really too much.
It sure taught you how to layer in the right details, though. When Jonathan Stone is sitting on the wharf by the Arch, I’m there with him, and I can smell the river. I can see the jumper off the Eads Bridge. So every time I write that scene, I’m getting all this new sensory detail—the sights and sounds and smells that put readers there. It’s about writing in a way that the words disappear. So it’s like when I was a kid listening to a radio show, and everything else in the room would disappear.
And you just keep deepening and polishing? Yeah, because every time I sit down to do a draft, I’m reliving the scene. I am in the world of each character. There’s part of me in all those people, and they are part of me.
Even Ellen Cantrell? She’s kind of a bitch. I reread the book this weekend, and I came away feeling great sorrow and sadness for her. She committed some of the seven deadly sins, one of the biggest being envy. Her ambition was her downfall. She got off center. It’s something that happens to a lot of people. A lot of politicians. People at the core of power who overreach and think they are invulnerable. Jonathan says she had so many people kissing her ass, she expected him to do it, too. She was a cold person, but I think there was a certain redemption for her. She came to her senses.
How long did you work on this? Well, I could say 20 years, because it was 20 years ago that I taught this remedial grammar course at St. Louis Community College–Forest Park, where I was handed 18 young African-American students who had all gone through 12 years of public education, and none of them could consistently write a grammatical sentence. All these years, that’s bothered me.
