From John Kenyon on his New Book:
The character of Griffin McCann popped into my head years ago.
Seven, to be exact. I wrote a page of notes in a notebook that, in looking back
for the first time in a long time, is still a pretty accurate summary of the
story.
Come in
as a bank robbery is unfolding. Gang of three is leaving with a bag of money,
pursued by the security guard, who shoots two, including the one with the
money. The third gets to a getaway car and leaves. The guard realizes he's in
an alley with no witnesses, so he grabs the money and throws it in the trunk of
his nearby car. He radios back to the bank that the third man got away with the
money.
A
paragraph later, I note that the bank guard is an amateur boxer, who will
ultimately use his fists to get out of the hole he has dug for himself.
At some
point, I fleshed out the idea with all kinds of complicating details, filling
the next page in the notebook with ideas about alternating chapters from
different points of view, and adding characters like the destitute father of the
guard who could use the money.
I went so
far as to type out a couple thousand words and saved it as "Hard Case
story," thinking that it was the kind of story that would fit well with
Charles Ardai's then relatively new imprint.
And
then... nothing. Other ideas came and went, Hard Case took off, and the story
of my bank guard-boxer languished. But he was never forgotten. I knew there was
a good story there, and thought about it regularly.
The
missing piece came when I learned about the Fight Card Series, edited by Paul
Bishop and Mel Odom. I learned about it from Eric Beetner, a great crime writer
I'm lucky enough to call a friend, who had his own early entry in the series.
The series is an homage to the great boxing novels of the 1950s, with a handful
of authors writing novellas all published under the pen name of Jack Tunney
(think Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney).
I read
the first few and loved them, and realized this was the forum my story needed.
I had played around with different eras, but the 1950s was where the story
belonged. And while I had cooked up enough bells and whistles to fill a novel,
I knew the story would hit hardest if streamlined, something the constraints of
the novella would allow.
The last
thing I needed was a title. Credit Warren Zevon for that. I took liberties with
a lyric from his song, "Boom Boom Mancini" from his great album, Sentimental
Hygiene: "The name of the game is be hit and hit back," to come
up with Get Hit, Hit Back .
The result is a tough little novella, true to the books that inspired it by suggesting more than it shows. As much as anything, it's a reminder to writers to never throw anything away.
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