Game On . .

By CRAIG McDONALD

HECTOR LASSITER, narrator of my debut novel, Head Games, is a Black Mask Magazine-era pulp author turned novelist and screenwriter.

Born in January, 1900, by ’57 when the novel opens, as critic Bruce Tierney puts it, Hector is “a man with several marriages and countless bottles of booze behind him…a little worse for wear. Still, he carves a dashing figure — (a) sort of man’s man.”

In Hector’s world, for better or worse, he has become known as the man who lives what he writes and writes what he lives. It’s a public relations legend Hector doesn’t break a sweat trying to live down.

James Ellroy has rued a “certain unvarnished maleness” that has all but disappeared from contemporary crime fiction. Hector is a feint back to those lost qualities. Hector drinks, smokes and eats red meat; he chases women. He wears open-collar shirts with loose-fitting sports jackets (the better to obscure the Colt .73 Peacemaker he habitually and illegally carries).

He’s probably the kind of guy of that springs for a new Chevrolet every couple of years whether he needs one or not. (Head Games finds Hector tooling around the American Southwest in a ’57 ragtop Bel Air).

I conceived the Lassiter character as a conglomeration of the World War I, II, Korea and Vietnam veterans I grew up around or met in the course of my journalism career. There’s also a little taken from a couple of Pershing Expedition members from my hometown who somehow survived into the 1980s.

Hector is a composite of several pulp-era authors,

as well — most notably Jonathan Latimer — with a

big dash of Ernest Hemingway stirred in.

Like Hemingway, Hector exerts a kind of irresistible

gravity on those around him. Men, particularly, feel

reckless need to measure up in Hector’s eyes — often

driving themselves to crazy ends to earn the large-living

crime writer’s dubious approval.

Bud Fiske, a young poet sent by True Magazine to profile Hector, finds himself in a shoot-out in a Juarez cantina in the opening chapter of Head Games. Within the first twenty or so pages, Hector and Bud have slain several men, committed arson, stolen the head of a long-dead Mexican icon and committed grave robbery. Bud is soon carrying his own liberated gun, packing smokes and lighting them with an engraved Zippo that mirrors Hector’s own personalized lighter.

The head in question belongs to Mexican Revolutionary general Pancho Villa. Legend has it Villa’s skull was stolen on orders of the grandfather of U.S. President George W. Bush (Senator Prescott Bush allegedly stole Geronimo’s head too, according to urban legend).

Once in possession of Villa’s head, Hector and Bud find themselves chased by U.S. intelligence forces, Mexican nationals, soldiers of fortune and scads of frat boys. The latter bunch includes members of Yale’s Skull and Bones secret society…a fraternal organization to which George W., his father and grandfather all pledged.

The ensuing pursuit stretches across the United States and down into the Mexican desert. Along the way, Hector and Bud brush shoulders (and other body parts) with Marlene Dietrich, Orson Welles, a future president and a mass-murdering Mexican legend.

Head Games is in most ways Hector’s last hurrah — a kind of fitting of the capstone on his sprawling, picaresque saga. Future novels with Hector will catch him at earlier points in his life — leapfrogging time and often recontextualizing what readers have come to think or believe they know about Hector.

In books to come, he’ll be running up against a cabal of murderous surrealists, locking horns with a certain grand dame of British mystery fiction, chasing a baseball bat-wielding killer in old Key West and in a war with the Cleveland mob.

Those novels, like Head Games, will blend fact and fiction and stir in some black humor…exploring old unsolved crimes, the dark corners of history and bringing Hector in contact with Hemingway, John Dos Passos, Gertrude Stein, Eliot Ness, John Huston and Rita Hayworth, among many others.

The books will also continue to explore the strange and often treacherous tensions between a certain kind of writer and his source material, as well as the effects that shadow-play can have on those around the author … ones like luckless, loyal Bud, who finds out how dangerous it can be to become tangled in the web of another’s creativity.

:: Head Games is published by Bleak House at $14.95.

:: Visit Craig's website at: www.craigmcdonaldbooks.com