Author Interview: Shelly Frome, author of FAST TIMES BIG CITY

Hello bookish people! Welcome to my stop on the Fast Times Big City blog tour, featuring author Shelly Frome. I’m lucky enough to be hosting an author interview, which you’ll find below. Also make sure you go all the way to the bottom of this post and enter the giveaway as well!

Like most people, Bud Palmer felt this was just another day. Though the era was drawing to a close, he assumed his life as a sports columnist in the subtropics, in keeping with the benign fifties itself, would go on as predictable as ever. But that particular autumn morning he was thrust into a caper that was totally beyond him, forced him to leave Miami and take the train to Manhattan, and suddenly found everything in this restless “Big Apple” was up for grabs, at a dicey turning point.

Does writing energize or exhaust you?

It energizes me once I’ve set up a compelling quest. Links I never considered pop up and cause things to deepen or detour into new promising territory. For instance, in “Fast Times, Big City” sports writer Bud Palmer, who has spent his whole life in lazy, semi-tropical Miami of the fifties, reluctantly finds himself in madcap New York. As it happens, his feckless Uncle Rick, a resident of Miami Beach, is in big trouble causing Bud to skirt around big city crime families in order to locate a naïve wannabe actress Rick inadvertently hooked up with. In turn, Rick’s machinations caused the loss of a mysterious attaché case the mob wants returned post haste. Following a lead, Bud winds up at a drama studio audition in Greenwich Village, is prodded to do an improv, selects a teddy bear, and for the first time ever, releases his pent-up emotions. It’s these happy accidents that serve as intensifiers that prod me to go on.

What is your writing Kryptonite?

All my life I’ve been an incurable storyteller for various reasons probably stemming from my sense of abandonment as a child. Given the depth of my experience as an actor, director, playwright and author coupled with my development process during every project, the results invariably jump off the page. In short, I seem to have what it takes to offer readers a lively experience.

Do you want each book to stand on its own, or are you trying to build a body of
work with connections between each book?

I only begin each project when I’m haunted by something I lost, something I never had, some basic assumption that is no longer true and/or some pressing unfinished business. At the same time, the protagonist is never me and the given circumstances are fictitious. I did, however, write a sequel to “Moon Games” because I wanted to deepen the main character and her background, give her a pixelated sidekick from Indiana, and felt she deserved a second chance to get over her shortcomings. Take on a more challenging set of circumstances and hopefully come through.

What’s your favorite under-appreciated novel?

British writer Kate Atkinson’s “Case Histories.” It’s been billed as a detective story but unlike the usual attempt at a can’t-put-it-down page turner, she allows herself to just write. Because she doesn’t map things out, much of this novel takes place inside characters’ heads creating the sense that everything is character driven, avoiding the usual neat patterns and solutions. As a result, there’s an amazing juxtaposition of innocence, grim reality and playfulness, with the distant past fully impinging on current circumstances.

In effect, there are three cases — unsolved (or unresolved) crimes from decades ago involving four sisters. Jackson Brodie–unlike stock detectives, has troubles of his own as things keep happening to him—and is subsequently hired to look into these matters. He does investigate, because something provocative has been brought to light, but does so mainly by interviewing people about what happened and who was responsible. However, his efforts and foibles are only part of the proceedings as the survivors’ stories take over and are much more compelling.

To illustrate, in this passage Atkinson takes time out to playfully enter the thoughts of Olivia as a little girl before she mysteriously disappeared over twenty years before: Olivia opened her eyes and stared contentedly at the nursery-rhyme wallpaper. Jack and Jill toiled endlessly up the hill, Jill carrying a wooden bucket for the well she was destined never to reach, while elsewhere on the same hillside Little Bo-Peep was searching for her lost sheep. Olivia wasn’t too worried about the fate of the flock because she could see a pretty lamb with a blue ribbon round its neck, hiding behind a hedge.

In short, Kate Atkinson offered me a free-wheeling experience that’s never bogged down by the
time-worn dictates of genre.

If you didn’t write, what would you do for work?

I’d go back to teaching acting and directing. But I’ve done all that for a good number of years and would rather not give up the freedom from a scheduled lifestyle.

Do you hide any secrets in your books that only a few people will find?

In the novel Shadow of the Gypsy, because I often felt like an abandoned orphan, I came up with a totally fictional set of circumstances, put the main character through the wringer, had a confrontation with my mother in another guise, and, in a sense, got it all out of my system.

What is your favorite childhood book?

It’s called The Tower Treasure centering on the Hardy Boys Frank and Joe. In this first case, the two brothers come upon a dying man who claims to have secreted loot in a dilapidated mansion tower. I didn’t know it was written in 1927. I just appreciated the chance to get lost in a world where brothers weren’t grownups with responsibilities and were free to go on adventures, unfettered by the demands of everyday life or the pressures of current events that I simply didn’t understand.