Michael Stanley is the writing team of Michael Sears and Stanley Trollip. I met these wonderful and talented gents briefly at Bouchercon 2012 in Cleveland where they won the Barry Award for Best Paperback with the third novel in the Detective Kubu series.

Once I returned home I bought the first Detective Kubu novel—A CARRION DEATH—liking the sound of the premise, and a promising, unique story. I read it quickly, enjoying the characters, loving the setting and atmosphere, gripped by the intricate plot, and by the time I finished the first novel I was ready for more.

While they were working on this interview I read the second novel THE SECOND DEATH OF GOODLUCK TINUBU (2009), which was excellent! Today (yesterday now) I ordered the third in the series: DEATH OF THE MANTIS (2011). Really looking forward to diving into it as soon as it gets here! They write intricately, beautifully and savagely, and Kubu and the supporting cast are such wonderful characters.

A big thanks to Michael and Stanley for their kindness at Bouchercon and for taking the time to answer some questions. Enjoy!

Lee: Welcome gents! What first inspired each of you to write fiction?

Michael: We had the idea for the start of the first book watching hyenas on a Wildebeest kill in the Savuti area of Botswana. They consumed basically everything over a period of hours. It struck us as a great way to get rid of a body! The perfect murder. No body, no case. Then we spent the next thirty years talking about writing a mystery around that premise!

Stanley: Michael’s response above shows the wonderful benefits of collaboration. What he wrote is correct – at least nearly! We only spent twenty years talking about writing a mystery. Without my input, your readers would have thought that we took a really long time to get organized – as some would say is the habit of academics. Now your readers know we only took a long time.

Lee: That’s great. How has your friendship influenced writing the series? Do you draw out the best in each other?

Michael: I think we bring different things to the table and that does generate a better result. But the main thing is that we have great fun doing it together. We’ve both enjoyed collaboration a great deal, and this project gives us an opportunity to work with each other.

Stanley: We certainly enjoy the process of writing together a great deal, but being friends brings other things to play as well. Because I have such respect for Michael, I listen very carefully to what he says about pieces I have written. If he were just another collaborator, I may be more inclined to blow some of his criticisms off. Being friends, I think we are more open to compromise than we may be if we weren’t.

Lee: Well put! Where did the idea for Detective Kubu originate? Even in the first novel he seems very fleshed out.

Michael: It’s strange. Kubu wasn’t even meant to be the protagonist. We meant the smart ecologist, Bongani, to solve the mystery. Since we have both been academics, we thought we should have someone in a lifestyle we understand as the hero. But clearly we needed a policeman to investigate the murder. So Kubu climbed into his Land Rover with his sandwiches and his music and took off into the bush. By the time he reached the crime scene, he was in charge of the book!

As to being fleshed out, I think you must thank his eating habits for that!

Stanley: What more can I add? Perhaps to say that Kubu’s take-over of the book was my first experience in realizing that the author is often not in charge of what happens.

Lee: I suspect that most readers have no idea how easily that can happen! But thank the gods for it. Has your love for creating new adventures for Detective Kubu only grown stronger with each project?

Michael: I think so. We feel that each book is a bit better than the previous one. (Well, we would, wouldn’t we?) And we’ve tried to use a different backstory for each one, which gives us an interesting canvas for each story. In A CARRION DEATH it was blood diamonds, THE SECOND DEATH OF GOODLUCK TINUBU deals with the decline of Zimbabwe after the vicious bush war, and DEATH OF THE MANTIS concerns the Bushman peoples of the Kalahari, their past and their future. Our new book – DEADLY HARVEST – has the use of body parts in black magic potions as its backstory. These are all real contemporary issues in Southern Africa.

Stanley: Not only has our love of creating new stories for Kubu grown with each story, but so has our attention to detail and our desire to tell a better story. We have learned a great deal from each book which, we hope, improves the subsequent one.

Lee: I’ve read the first two and think you’re hitting your goal. Can’t wait to read DEATH OF THE MANTIS and DEADLY HARVEST!

What challenges do you face writing a series character? Can you give us an example and what you did to overcome the challenge?

Michael: The books are stand alone, but, as you say, Kubu and his family and colleagues in the Criminal Investigation Department carry through the series. A challenge is that one needs to inform the new reader about Kubu, his name, family, and background, without irritating readers of the previous books. We try to do it quickly in a slightly different way in each book. That seems to work okay.

Stanley: A different issue in writing a series is keeping track of what has happened before. In each book, we add details, sometimes incidentally, about the main characters. Even though we may forget such detail, we have been amazed by how many readers let us know about even small anomalies. The readers keep us on our toes. We are thinking of hiring a student somewhere to write a biography of the main characters so we know their birthdays, their habits, their ages, their looks, etc. Having such a biography would be a great help.

Lee: I can see how both of those difficulties would take time to master. I felt you handled the backstory between the first and second novels very well. And I’m sure no matter how much you learn there will always be those sharp readers who still catch things from time to time. What do each of you bring to the collaboration table?

Michael: We do have different areas of expertise. I know remote sensing and did work for De Beers at some point; Stan is a pilot and studies human factor issues. But I think it is the combination of the two of us through brain storming and the like which is the major advantage of a collaboration.

Stanley: Another difference between us is that I have now lived in the USA for more time than I did in South Africa. So I have good insights into American ways, traditions, and most importantly, language. We write our books first in American English, which I know better than Michael, then translate them into English English for our UK publisher. Michael knows that language better than I do.

Lee: That sounds like a wonderful combination. What advice can you offer to writers who are considering collaborating?

Michael: You have to be willing to take blunt criticism and have your favorite writing ripped apart! If you can’t face that, don’t collaborate. (But your editor will do it to you anyway!)

Stanley: I would recommend that everyone should try it, subject to what Michael wrote above. People ask us how we can write fiction with someone else. We retort that the question is wrong and should be rephrased as ‘How can people write fiction alone?’ It must be an incredibly lonely experience to be a solitary author, with no one to bounce ideas off, to share successes and have a great deal of fun with.

Lee: There is only one writer I’m close enough to who I can handle their blunt criticism, and a lot of that is due to an unwavering respect for each others work and as personalities. And I agree and think it is a lonely profession for a lot of writers despite the social media they use to stay connected. What are your favorite parts of the process?

Michael: Probably the actual writing.

Stanley: There are times I can write for hours on end. When I stop and read what I have written, I sometimes wonder who has written it – it often seems to come from a different part of me that I am not in conscious touch with.

Lee: Very interesting! What are the biggest rewards for you #1: during writing, #2: after the sale, and #3: after publication?

Michael: #1 is the brainstorming I’ve mentioned before. #2 is that we can work in tandem to produce corrections and modifications to match the editor’s input and ideas. #3 is that we have fun doing book tours together. Hopefully people enjoy our presentations more because there are two of us and we can add variety to the process.

Stanley: I agree with #1 and #2 above. An additional reward after publication is getting to meet many interesting people, both readers and other writers. The mystery/thriller community is wonderful, filled with laid-back and generous people. We feel very privileged to be a part of it.

Lee: I’m sure people love the two of you touring together. There’s a very warm dynamic you create. What do you wish you knew when you started that you’ve had to learn through experience?

Michael: Very interesting question. Of course, like most things, you really learn something by doing it. We started writing and then read books about writing and the like. We were quite ignorant about the process too. But if we had realized that writing fiction as a team was so unusual, we might never have started at all!

Stanley: Although I don’t think it would have stopped us from writing A CARRION DEATH, knowing how much authors have to do with respect to marketing would have at least prepared us for that enormous effort. It would be very foolish for a new author to think that being an author only involves writing. At least the same amount of time will be needed for helping build a readership.

Lee: I for one am glad you started! I was also ignorant about so many things when I started but learning is an everyday thing. Marketing takes so much time and effort. One of the things I found very interesting, and really liked about A CARRION DEATH, was the respect and dynamics in Kubu’s marriage. Is that based off your personal relationships with your wives, or is it typical in Botswana?

Michael: I think we’ve tried to show the traditional aspects of a Batswana marriage, but Joy is actually much less traditional than Kubu in many ways. One of the nice things about a series is that you can watch their relationship develop over time.

Stanley: One of the interesting aspects of writing this series has been the realization that as time passes for our characters, so must their relationships with each other evolve. In A CARRION DEATH, Kubu and Joy have an almost idyllic relationship, perhaps a bit over the top, which our readers have really liked. With each book, the relationship has had to endure different stresses and strains which, we hope, mirror, a typical marriage. In addition, Kubu’s relationship with his parents is also about to undergo some major stresses – as happens in real life when parents age.

Lee: Agreed! I was pleasantly surprised to see that upon reading the second novel. It adds extra depth and really mirrors a real relationship. Gentleman, thank you so much for taking the time to answer questions for us! I can’t recommend the Detective Kubu series highly enough, people. Give it a go!

Michael: Thanks very much for the opportunity to chat about our books!

Stanley: Thanks very much indeed. We would like to invite your readers to find out more about Detective Kubu by visiting his web site http://www.detectivekubu.com. You will have the opportunity there to join our mailing list – we send out three or four newsletters a year to apprise readers of what Kubu is up to.

We’re also doing a beautiful giveaway and everybody should enter!

All you have to do for a chance to win is leave a comment below. In a week I’ll snag three random winners and send them either a paperback or digital edition of the first Detective Kubu novel A CARRION DEATH. It’s good fun! Thanks again to Michael and Stanley for sharing about their characters, themselves and the creative process!

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Chapter 26: The Collected Songs of Sonnelion

Posted in News on August 17, 2012

Two more weeks to go after today! Read chapter 26 on Darkfuse or Issuu while you can! Thanks!

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When We Join Jesus in Hell (Book Trailer)

Posted in News on August 16, 2012

I can’t sleep so I made a book trailer for my upcoming (September 25th) release of When We Join Jesus in Hell. Check it out! This is the one my hero Tom Piccirilli read pre-publication and another hero is going to read as well!

You can join the party once it starts on Goodreads next month, too. Hop over here.

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Chapter 16: The Collected Songs of Sonnelion

Posted in News on June 7, 2012

Up to chapter 16 already! About 12 more chapters to go! Thanks to everybody who has been following along!

If you know anyone who enjoys FREE dark fiction please let them know about the serial. A new chapter is going up every Friday, I’m pouring my soul into it, and it’s going to end up being a very special story. If you have fallen behind you can read all of the chapters on Issuu as well.

In this Division Mythos novel, which is being serialized on Darkfuse’s website, Red Piccirilli has known madness and magic. They’re in his blood and bound to his soul as much as love and loss are. But when his family moves to the town of Division, Pennsylvania, his father grows distant, his mother troubled, and a murderer roams the countryside.

He searches for meaning and truth while battling his own darkness and rage and despair, but corpses whisper answers the dead only share with one another.

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A few questions with author John Connolly

Posted in News on May 28, 2012

NY Times Best-selling author John Connolly was kind and generous enough to answer a few quick questions for us. A huge thanks to John for that as well as a huge thanks to Clair Lamb for arranging it. John is one of my biggest influences so this means the world to me. His work is always emotional, insightful, entertaining, and razor-sharp.

THE BURNING SOUL is out in paperback on June 21 in the UK and June 26 in the US.

THE WRATH OF ANGELS will be out on August 30 in the UK, and we’re waiting on a final date in the US.

John is also co-editor, with Declan Burke, of an anthology called BOOKS TO DIE FOR, coming on August 30 in the UK and on October 2 in the US. There’ll be a signing event for BOOKS TO DIE FOR at Bouchercon.

Me: Thanks so much for taking the time to answer a few questions, John! Who were your biggest writing influences?

John: In the genre, probably Ross Macdonald and James Lee Burke: Macdonald for his compassion, and Burke for the sheer quality of his prose, and the way in which he describes the natural world. I doubt that I’d be writing what I do had I not read those two. Mind you, Ed McBain’s Let’s Hear It for the Deaf Man was the first mystery novel I ever read, I think, so I owe the late McBain too. But most of my reading is outside the genre, and more and more so as I get older. I think Bleak House by Charles Dickens is the greatest novel in the English language, although interestingly Sara Paretsky chose to discuss it as a mystery novel for an anthology that I’m co-editing later this year, so I guess it’s all in the eye of the beholder.

Me: Excellent. I’ve yet to read Bleak House so will move that to the top of my TBR pile. Whose writing do you enjoy most out of your current peers?

John: That’s a bullet I’ll have to dodge, as there are just too many of them to mention, and I risk leaving someone out. I do think that the growth in Irish mystery writing in recent years has been remarkable, and there is such an array of tone and style among the writers who have emerged. Declan Burke’s blog is a good starting point if people want to find out more about Irish mystery writing.

Me: Thank you. What was the impetus for creating Charlie Parker?

John: I’m not sure that I thought in those terms when I began writing the books. The first piece of fiction that I wrote – almost eight years after I left school – was the prologue to Every Dead Thing, so he pretty much arrived with his baggage in tow. Like most writers, I simply wanted to write, and mystery fiction seemed like the form that would best allow me to explore the subjects and themes that interested me. But I suppose Parker now is not Parker as he was, just as I’m not the same writer who created him, as nearly two decades have passed since I began writing that first book. He’s more complex and nuanced, I hope. Then again, people still come up to me and say that Every Dead Thing is their favorite of my mystery books, which possibly suggests that it’s all been downhill ever since…

Me: Lol. You have definitely not gone down hill ever since. Thanks so much for your time, John. And thanks again to Clair. Can’t wait to read the new novels coming out later this year!

Happy Memorial Day to everybody! If you haven’t read any of John Connolly’s work I strongly urge you to give it a try, whether you pick up the Charlie Parker series, The Book of Lost Things, his collection Nocturnes, or the YA books featuring Samuel Johnson. Find out more at John’s website.

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Immersion from Thunderstorm Books giveaway!

Posted in News on May 25, 2012

I should have my author copies of Immersion (a stand-alone novella from Thunderstorm Books) next week. To celebrate that and all of the other awesome things going on I’m going to giveaway 3 paperback copies. But there is a catch! Since I’m a shitty self-promoter I need you to spread the word about my serial novel THE COLLECTED SONGS OF SONNELION (use this link that goes directly to the page on my publisher’s website) either on your blog, on FB, G+, or Twitter. Post where you shared in the comments of this post and in two weeks I’ll draw the three winners! Thanks to everybody who participates!

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Chapter 14: The Collected Songs of Sonnelion

Posted in News on May 25, 2012

Up to chapter 14 already. Time is flying. One more chapter and we’ll be to the halfway point of what will end up being a 90,000 word novel. I’m super proud of it and appreciate all who have followed along so far and those who have stumbled across it late in the game. There are dark times ahead for little Red Piccirilli and a lot of layers that play into the Division Mythos. If you know anyone who enjoys FREE dark fiction please let them know about the serial. A new chapter is going up every Friday, I’m pouring my soul into it, and it’s going to end up being a very special story.

He searches for meaning and truth while battling his own darkness and rage and despair, but corpses whisper answers the dead only share with one another.

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