Max McBride is a lawyer, novelist, playwright, and poet. He
writes. He reads. He works. The bulk of his time is spent at the office.
He will never read all the books by his bed or watch all the shows saved
on his DVR. Max enjoys art, design, college basketball, ballet, modern dance,
and sacred music. Bob Dylan, Shakespeare, Rumi, and Yeats are just a few of the
greats who have had an impact on him. His book Mink Eyes, a novel he
calls “white noir,” and Tenebrae,
a collection of poetry centered around the death of his wife (but also
including several snapshots of growing up Irish in America) are both available
for purchase in print and digital form from Amazon, B&N, and bookstores
nationwide, as well as directly from the author. McBride is also a social
commentator of sorts, and his occasional observations about culture, travel,
and—when he can’t hold it in any longer—politics can be found on his website: www.Max2theMax.com.
Mink Eyes
October 1986—the tarnished heart of the “Greed Is Good” decade. Private detective Peter O’Keefe is a physically scarred and emotionally battered Vietnam vet. Hired by his childhood best friend, ace attorney Mike Harrigan, O’Keefe investigates what appears to be merely a rinky-dink mink farm Ponzi scheme in the Missouri Ozarks. Instead, O’Keefe finds himself snared in a vicious web of money laundering, cocaine smuggling, and murder—woven by a mysterious mobster known as “Mr. Canada.” Also caught in Mr. Canada’s web is the exquisite Tag Parker, who might be the girl of O’Keefe’s dreams—or his nightmares. Mink Eyes weaves murder, addiction, obsession, sex, and redemption into a fast-paced, compelling detective novel that also brings in themes of duty, fatherhood, friendship and love. Peter O’Keefe is a reluctant hero who struggles every day to choose in favor of life over death.
Who are your influences?
I
am able to say who my “inspirations” or “admirations” are, but I am reluctant
to call them “influences” because they all wrote so differently, and so
much better, than I do. In poetry and drama (and everything else),
Shakespeare above all. In poetry, Wordsworth and especially Yeats.
In prose, Dickens, Turgenev, Joyce, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Salinger,
Donleavy, Joyce Cary, Simone Weil, Joseph Campbell, Robert Stone, E.L. Doctorow.
In detective fiction, Chandler and the MacDonalds (Ross and John D)
showed me how good it could be, and Elmore Leonard showed me not only how good
but how funny it could be and how ordinary people could be its heroes.
When did you begin writing?
Since
high school I have felt the strong and persistent “call” to “write.” But,
due to an unfortunate combination of not knowing how and where to enter and not
having enough confidence in my abilities to take the risk of plunging into it
as a full-time vocation, I instead pursued a career in academia and then in
law, both of which involved a lot of writing, creative in its own way but not
of the imaginative variety. Yet I have periodically managed to find
enough time to actually finish a creative writing project. I have written
several plays, one of which received a staged reading at a theatre in NYC, but
it didn’t go anywhere from there. I have written a few short stories that
I have just kept in a drawer, an occasional poem, and two other plays.
Finally,
the “call” was just too strong to resist any longer, and, while continuing a
very busy legal practice, I wrote and have now published, a novel called Mink Eyes and a book
of poetry called Tenebrae.
How do you come up with your
stories, characters, character names, POV, etc?
The
milieu of Mink Eyes—lawyers
and courts and bankers and financial manipulations, both legal and otherwise–is
one I have worked in all my life, but the plot itself is pretty much pure
imagination (although I did get involved with a failed mink farm once, although
it was far less exciting than the events portrayed in the novel), which I
worked out very deliberately, knowing how I wanted it to end but working hard
to figure out the best way to achieve that end and asking myself at every
step—is this realistic, could it really happen in the real world? It’s
easy enough to have a message but so much harder to embody it in believable
characters, situations, and outcomes. I am not sure where the names of my
characters come from; they often change and more than once, as the writing
proceeds. The main characters are in my mind from the start although some
good ones “pop up” as the plot moves along, and characters have their own way
of evolving as the book evolves. As for POV, although it can be very
tricky, I like the omniscient with fairly frequent changes in POV.
Tell me about your favorite
scene in your novel.
That’s
a really hard one, and I am afraid to give too much away, but three stand out
in my mind as I answer this—the Halloween scene, the interview with Ullman, and
the last chapter of the book.
Can you tell us a little about
your writing philosophy?
Make
it interesting, with main characters that people will care about; make it worthwhile
in terms of themes and message; and make it real—believable in every
way--believable characters with believable reactions, thinking and saying
believable things, in believable situations with believable outcomes.
Have you ever tried writing in
any other genres?
A
screenplay of Mink Eyes.
I have written several plays, in fact my original efforts were all plays,
one of which has enjoyed a staged reading in New York, and several of which I
still hope to get produced. Also a few short stories, no publications.
I
have also recently published a book of poetry, Tenebrae. The lead poem in the
collection, Tenebrae: A
Memoir of Love & Death, is an interlocking chain of 15 verse
and prose poems that amount to a single narrative of my wife’s final sickness,
her life under a death sentence, and her death itself, a hero’s journey
(heroine’s in this case) if there ever was one and one that we all are fated to
take. My effort in poetry is to be as clear and direct as possible, but
to use poetic techniques of concision, rhythm (and even rhyme occasionally,
violating the contemporary notion that rhyme is puerile), and relatively
simple, but hopefully exalted, language to reach as personal and as deep an
emotional level as I can. As in Mink
Eyes, I try to convey the way that the foundation literature of the
West—myths and fairy tales—are still with us and how the grand rituals of
Western religion, even emptied of their original theological content, still can
connect us with the sacred in our everyday lives.
Do you have any interesting
writing-related anecdotes to share?
Writing
itself is pretty uninteresting really. Often painful too. Best I
can come up with is this bit of irony: One of my specialties as a lawyer
is business bankruptcy. Mink
Eyes was accepted by a publisher that was unable to complete
the publication because it had to file bankruptcy. The world can give
with one hand and take away with the other.
