I would like to welcome the incredibly talented Josh Pachter to the blog for #ThisorThatThursday!
Hardest thing about being a writer: When I’m asked to be on a panel at Malice Domestic or Bouchercon, the one question I dread is “What’s your process?” I don’t have a process. I don’t write every day, I don’t have a daily or weekly (or anyamountoftimely) quota. When a story idea knocks on the inside of my head — which I guess happens more often than at any other time when I’m in the shower! — I get out of the shower and towel myself off and go write it. So I suppose the hardest thing for me is actually sitting down and doing the work.
Easiest thing about being a writer: When I do have an idea, I find the actual writing pretty easy. So I suppose the easiest thing for me is actually sitting down and doing the work!
Favorite foods: Crab legs. Spaghetti alla carbonara. A really good bacon cheeseburger. Frank Pepe’s white pizza. Vivoli’s gelato. Watermelon.
Things that make you want to gag: Sushi. Edamame. Lentils. Gross.
Favorite music or song: I like singer/songwriters, which is why I’ve been editing a series of anthologies inspired by the songs of, so far, Joni Mitchell, Jimmy Buffett, Billy Joel, and Paul Simon. (The next one is Happiness Is a Warm Gun: Crime Fiction Inspired by the Songs of the Beatles, and it’s coming from Down and Out Books in October!)
Music that drives you crazy: There’s some rap and hiphop I’ve liked a lot, but I’m really not interested in all the stuff about bitches and ho’s and f*ckin’ tha police.
Last best thing you ate: An early anniversary dinner with my wife Laurie at Demi’s Mediterranean Kitchen, our favorite Richmond restaurant. We shared a delicious fried-oyster appetizer, and then she had the dish I usually order (shrimp Santorini) and I tried something different (pork Marsala). Demi’s serves really big portions, and the next day we ate each other’s leftovers. So this was the last best two things I ate!
Last thing you regret eating: Like Edith Piaf, je usually ne regrette rien, so I have to reach back a while for this one. Laurie and I moved to Richmond at the beginning of the pandemic; before that, we lived for a decade in Northern Virginia. When a Bonchon franchise opened up near our home, we tried it — and that Korean fried chicken was like crack cocaine, absolutely addictive. One day, though, I had lunch there with Lisa Nanni-Messegee, my officemate at Northern Virginia Community College’s Loudoun Campus … and we both wound up horribly sick. I suppose we just hit the place on an off day, but neither one of us ever went back … though every once in a while I’m tempted to give Bonchon another chance. I’m serious: that chicken actually is finger-lickin’ good, unlike certain other fried chicken that claims to be and isn’t.
Things you always put in your books: Easter eggs. I love hiding little treasures in my work. It’s fun when readers find them, but — and I’m sorry if this sounds cruel — it’s even more fun when they don’t. For example, each of the stories (eight so far) in my Helmut Erhard series includes a truly massive Easter egg that (so far) no one has spotted, and I get a huge kick out of knowing that those eggs are there but have (so far) remained hidden.
Things you never put in your books: Gratuitous sex and violence. That’s just not my thing. I shared Dutch Threat with a friend who writes cozies — (not Heather; another cozy-writer friend) — and she didn’t finish reading it because, despite the tea drinking and the cat, she told me that the occasional four-letter words prevent it from qualifying as a cozy. I debated taking out the swears pre-publication, but finally decided that my first-person narrator is a guy who does sometimes curse, so I left them in. (When I told another writer friend, Gigi Pandian, about this, she laughed and said she just writes “she swore” in her books but doesn’t actually include the swearwords. By then, though, it was too late for me to go that route. Damn!) Anyway, so if you read my book you’ll find some cussing, but no gratuitous sex or violence….
Favorite places you’ve been: I lived overseas from the late Seventies through the early Nineties and continue to do a lot of traveling, so I have a lot of favorite places. Tuscany in Italy, Fes in Morocco, Annecy and Eze in France, Amsterdam in The Netherlands, the Diamond Beach and the Secret Lagoon in Iceland, Meteora and Parga in Greece. I could go on….
Places you never want to go to again: Rome. I was only there once and that was fifty years ago, so perhaps I’d feel differently today, but Florence is smaller and less mobbed and easier to navigate … and in my opinion everything worth seeing in Rome — okay, except for the Colosseum — has an even nicer equivalent in Florence. I could also live without returning to Athens, although I love everyplace else I’ve been in Greece….
Most daring thing you’ve ever done: Skydiving. Only once, although I would have loved to do it more often. Nowadays, a novice’s first jumps are tandem jumps with an instructor wrapped around the newbie, but when I did my training in 1973, your first jumps were solo. There was none of the leaping out into the Wild Blue Yonder and yelling “Geronimo!” like you see in the movies. Instead, you stepped onto a strut sticking out from the side of the plane and held onto another one, and a jumpmaster would tap the back of your leg when it was time to let go of the top strut, at which point the plane would keep going and you would begin to fall and what’s called a “static line” connecting your parachute’s ripcord to the plane would pull the cord for you, so all you had to do was enjoy the ride. Well, my jumpmaster got distracted and tapped me off the strut too late, so instead of landing in a carefully manicured drop zone I wound up hitting the hard Nevada desert and wracking up my knee so badly I was never allowed to make another jump.
Something you chickened out from doing: I almost chickened out from skydiving. Once I was under the canopy and descending through three thousand feet of absolute silence, it was perhaps the most glorious experience I’ve ever had, but while I was still on the plane I was terrified. The only reason I went through with it was because my then-girlfriend and I had taken the course together and, as luck would have it, she’d already jumped — and I was more scared of looking like a coward than I was of the jump itself.
The coolest person you’ve ever met: I’m not sure that the general public would call him “cool,” but I certainly do. When I was a teenager, Frederic Dannay — who was one of the two cousins who wrote as “Ellery Queen” — took me under his wing and guided me through my first years as a crime writer. Whatever measure of success I’ve had in the publishing business, I owe to his kindness.
The celebrity who didn’t look like he/she did in pictures/video: I grew up on Long Island, and from the time of my first publication in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine at the age of sixteen until I went off to the University of Michigan I would take the train into New York City to attend the Mystery Writers of America’s monthly cocktail parties. One evening, unofficial bartender Chris Steinbrunner — who would sneak me adult beverages though I wasn’t legally old enough to drink them — pointed out a gorgeous woman who looked to be in her late twenties sitting on the far side of the room and told me she was a former Hollywood star who’d written a couple of mysteries. (I want to say Hedy Lamarr, but I don’t think that can be right.) I was pretty shy at that point in my life, but I was very interested in old movies — I would ultimately wind up studying and then for fifty years teaching film history — so I screwed my courage to the sticking place and walked over to her … and with every step I took, she got five years older. By the time I reached her, that lovely twentysomething had aged into a woman in her seventies. Still beautiful … but not in the same way the work she’d had done made her appear from a distance.
Besides writing, what’s the most creative thing you’ve done: In 1986, I helped make a little human! Her name is Rebecca K. Jones, and she’s now a successful attorney in Phoenix — and the author of the Goldie-finalist courtroom novel Steadying the Ark. (A sequel, Stemming the Tide, comes out next week and is up for pre-order now!)
A project that didn’t quite turn out the way you planned it: In 1991, I moved from Europe back to the US. I wasn’t sure where I was going to wind up, so I put almost everything I owned into storage in Germany, figuring I’d send for it when I was settled. Before I had a chance to do that, though, the storage company changed ownership, and the new owners sent me a letter giving me until such-and-such a date to have my things shipped to me. Unfortunately, that date had passed by the time the letter reached me. I got on the phone immediately — but I was too late. Everything I owned (except some boxes of books I’d mailed to a cousin in New York) had already been destroyed. So at the age of forty I had to start accumulating possessions all over again. (I should add here that my personal motto on my Facebook page comes from John Lennon’s “Beautiful Boy” — “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.”)
Some real-life story that made it to one of your books: In 1982, I taught a course on a US Navy ship that was doing what was called a “show the flag” run through the Persian Gulf from Bahrain to Pakistan. At one point, one of the sailors spotted a gunboat streaking toward us, and the ship went to full battle stations. It turned out to be an Omani vessel, though, and it was coming to escort us, not attack us. I used that incident in my Mahboob Chaudri story “The Ivory Beast,” which you can read online for free or in my Wildside Press collection The Tree of Life (which includes the complete ten-story Chaudri series), although in real life there wasn’t a murder during the incident….
Something in your story that readers think is about you, but it’s not: Since my name is Josh Pachter and the protagonist of Dutch Threat is Jack Farmer, I expect that any readers who might happen to know that “pachter” is the Dutch word for “tenant farmer” will think I based Jack on myself. I didn’t, though. I made him up out of whole cloth.
