Norman Green is the Author of Shooting Dr. Jack and his latest release, The Angel Of Montague Street. They are noirish crime novels set in New York and they are terrific. I think you would be negligent if you did not read these books, I think he is going to be one of the big names in the crime fiction genre. I saw him at a signing event recently and had a great time. I asked if he would do a guest column and the result is here for you to read. So read this column, and then buy and read his books!   ----- Jon

When I was very young I got hooked on the westerns of Zane Grey. I was probably around six or seven. It seemed magical at the time, and it still does now, how I could be transported out of myself, how something made up of nothing more than dried ink on paper could spirit me away from my problems and immerse me in a world of Apache Indians, horses, cowboys, and Colt revolvers. I doubt if I had ever been out of Massachusetts then, I don’t think I had ever even seen a horse, except on television. And
television was a poor thing at the time, snowy black and white images on a small screen, only a few channels, and somebody had to hold the piece of wire that served as an antenna just so or the picture would start to roll.

But a book! Oh, man. Ishmael, Ahab and the whaling ship were far more real than Art Linkletter could ever be. I think I was buried in Moby Dick for a year. I remember being shocked when the whale showed up about six pages from the end, sank the boat and killed everybody… I may have missed Melville’s point, but I loved the story.

I read all the time. It almost didn’t matter what it was. My father used to complain, he’d be working on something, send me for a tool, but if a newspaper blew across my path before I got back with it, I was lost. I read when I was supposed to be sleeping, I read when I was supposed to be studying, I read when I was supposed to be doing my homework, with predictable results. I was a true addict. I still am. Those are the guys who taught me about writing, though, Zane Grey and Melville, Robert Louis Stephenson, John D. MacDonald, Jack London, and many more.

Growing up, I had the nagging sensation that I should try writing myself, I even started in on it once or twice, but I never allowed myself to consider myself a writer, though, aspiring or otherwise. I think I  was too afraid. It seemed too impractical to take seriously. I never gave it up entirely, I wrote short stories for school, I kept a journal, I wrote poems, but you’ve got to be so careful when you’re a kid. What would you do if someone ever found that stuff and read it? And then life  happened, the way it does, and I went out and chased after all that stuff I thought I needed.

A few years ago, I took a friend of mine to lunch. I was singing the fixin-to-die rag, you know, I hate my job, I hate my house, I hate my cat, all of that. My friend had attended a Jesuit college and he was relentlessly logical. “All you need to do,” he told me, “is figure out exactly what it is that you want. Doesn’t matter what it is, brain surgeon or sanitary engineer. Once you know what you want, you just break it down into steps. How do you get from where you are to where you want to be? Then you start taking those steps. Don’t worry about how long it’s going to take or any of that. Just do it.” It may seem obvious now, but at the time it was a revelation. It had never occurred to me that you could sit down and figure out what it was that you wanted to do.

I went to career counselors, I took CLEP exams, I read a whole store’s worth of ‘Find Out What You’re Really Supposed to be Doing’ books, I thought about all the jobs I’d already had, I watched what my
friends were doing, but nothing I saw really wound my clock. I still had that itch, though, the one that kept telling me that I ought to try writing a novel. I resisted it for a while, because these flights of fancy are excusable in children, but when a grown man tells you he wants to be a writer, or an astronaut, you have to think there’s something wrong with his head. I couldn’t get past it, though, and finally I thought, just get it over with. Get it out of your system, go on and write your damned book, and when you’re done with it you can go back to school (back? yeah, right.) for something else.

So I started out, and I tried to do it the way my friend had told me. I didn’t think about how impractical it was, or how long it was going to take, or what the odds against publication were, I didn’t think about publication at all, all I did was write. It took me two years to do it.  I wrote after work, on the weekends, while I was on vacation. I didn’t really know whether or not it was any good, but I was pretty happy with it when it was done. Long story short, that manuscript became ‘Shooting Dr. Jack,’ available in finer bookstores everywhere. I am the last guy in the world anyone should listen to when it
comes to career advice. But I will say this: don’t do what I did, don’t wait forty-three fucking years for someone to give you permission to dream.

---- Norman Green - 2003