Literary Birthday – 15 September – Loren D. Estleman

Happy Birthday, Loren D. Estleman, born on 15 September 1952.

Loren D. Estleman Quotes

1. Both [western and detective fiction] depend on suspense to drive the action. There is a simplicity to a nineteenth-century story I enjoy: having a man walk into a saloon and order a steak and a bottle without having to worry about his cholesterol and his liver. But I also look forward to tackling the complex strands of twenty-first-century society. (Texas Monthly)
2. I worked on newspapers to pay bills and to sharpen my writing and broaden my experience. I don’t miss the work, but I’m grateful for its part in my growth as a writer and as a person.
3. I collected l60 rejection slips (plays, stories, articles, novels) before I sold that first book. While I was peddling it, I wrote a 628-page novel about Ivan the Terrible. It’s still holding up the short leg of a table in my study.
4. What I know about police procedure, I learned as a police reporter. The greatest part of it is common sense.
5. I’ve created some good meaty characters over the years. Some are one-shots, while others have the legs to appear again. When a character slot appears in a new book and can be filled by someone I’ve already developed, I see no need to start over from scratch.
6. Breaking new ground is important in building construction, but if you make a habit of it in writing, you’ll burn out long before your reputation. I’ve done quite a bit to make an old form relevant to a changing world, which is more than I can say for those hidebound types who think the genre began and ended with Dashiell Hammett.
7. The book and the protagonist dictate the perspective.
8. Guns, conflict, law, crime, justice and injustice. No book worth reading failed to contain at least two of the above. Detective and western fiction let you use them all.
9. I try to produce five clean pages a day. I clean as I go, go back and clean, and clean again, using paper the way computer people use the screen. Some days I reach my quota in two hours; others, I’m lucky if I wind up with two pages. When you keep a steady schedule, you tend to produce.

Source for quotes 2-9: January Magazine

Loren D. Estleman is an American writer of detective and Western fiction. He is known for a series of hardboiled crime novels featuring the investigator Amos Walker. The latest in the series is Man One. Other series star Old West marshal Page Murdock and hitman Peter Macklin. He is the author of more than 80 novels and 200 short stories, as well as articles and books of non-fiction on a wide variety of subjects. His non-series works include Bloody Season, a fictional recreation of the gunfight at the O.K. Corral, and several novels and stories featuring Sherlock Holmes. He has won five Spur Awards in the western genre and four Shamus Awards for his mysteries. A former police-beat journalist, he is the recipient of 28 national and international writing awards, including three for lifetime achievement.

Source for photograph: Mark Coggins from San Francisco, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:LorenDEstleman.jpg

by Amanda Patterson
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