"I CAME TO SEE THE NOVEL'S STRUCTURE AS A SPIDER'S WEB": AN INTERVIEW WITH THE LENGTH OF DAYS' LYNN KOSTOFF

Lynn Kostoff's The Length Of Days deals with a house fire that kills a group of prostitutes and how it affects the town of Magnolia Beach, South Carolina, effecting it's police, political, media, crimmininal, and business structures and citizens caught between. I was able to ask the author a few questions about this unique book.

SCOTT MONTGOMERY: The Length Of Days is a unique take on the crime novel. How did it come about? 

LYNN KOSTOFF: The genesis of The Length of Days was the drafting of the first chapter. That’s all. I had no idea what would happen next. I had a murder, a retired steel worker who witnessed it, a burning house holding twelve women locked inside it, and two more women on the run and hiding out.

Setting aside Chapter One, I then held what I’ve come to call “Character Auditions.” I created a series of characters, twelve of them, and developed detailed notes and backstories for each one, making sure also that each character had a central problem he or she had to deal with.

Keeping in mind the events in the opening chapter, I then started various groupings of the characters, testing and trying out ways that might directly or indirectly relate to the events in the opening chapter.

I finally settled on the six that now inhabit the novel (two of the others, a widower and his wayward stepdaughter, spun off from the leftovers and became the dual protagonists of a companion novel, Broken Hymns, due out this fall from Shotgun Honey).

At that point I had no idea how the characters fit together and so started drafting, trusting that they would show me themselves. Each character carried a dual focus: his or her relationship to the fire and dead women and the person problem they were dealing with.

The novel’s structure grew out of the above. After three drafts, I came to see the novel’s structure as a spider’s web with the man who’d killed the women nesting in its center and the other characters as individual strands of the web, the parts and whole working together to hopefully create a unified effect.

S.M.: Was there any character you had particular fun writing for?

L.K.: I’d have to say the character I had the most fun writing in The Length of Days was Weldon Trulane III, the official Black Sheep of an Old South and monied family, particularly when he was paired up with the retired steel worker, Samuel Fulton. Weldon, the proverbial loose cannon, always managed to find the opportunity to overstep, even as that overstepping occasionally brushed shoulders with the truth.

The character that was hardest to write was Pam Graves, the young and naïve television journalist. The secrets fueling her family dynamics eluded both of us until they became life-changing and inevitable. I finally discovered where those family dynamics led a page or two before she did.

S.M.: Magnolia Beach itself is a character. How do you make a town its own living thing?

L.K.: A beach town has always seemed a natural setting for a noir or crime novel. Beach towns are built on transience. They’re porous, and anything can bubble up from below the tourist-friendly frosting and façade. Beach towns don’t make anything. They cater to the needs of those passing through, and those needs can take some dark turns beneath all the sunshine, seafood, and surf.

I live around one and a half hours from the Grand Strand, a series of beach towns on the South Carolina coast, the most famous of which is Myrtle Beach. My setting, Magnolia Beach, is an amalgam of the beaches of the Grand Strand. I felt it necessary to create a Magnolia Beach because even though I was familiar with the Grand Strand, it was constantly undergoing a frenzy of over-development. The whole region was in a constant state of flux. Unfortunately, that continues to be the case. Greed and overriding development constantly threaten what beauty and history remain there. In order to have some stable reference points, I created Magnolia Beach.

S.M.: Corruption appears to be a reoccurring theme in your work. What draws you to examining it?

L.K.: Corruption is the handmaiden of desire. We all want something. The question that noir or crime fiction often explores is how far we’ll go to get what we desire and what we’ll do to keep it when we do. Conversely, it’s what happens when we don’t get what we want and how we respond to that. Or, finally, what happens when we get what we want and it doesn’t turn out to be what we thought it would be.

Corruption enters so many of my characters’ lives because desire, if pursued far enough, is a destabilizing force. Noir and Crime fiction traffic in that destabilization and explore and reveal truths that our culture would like to ignore or hid behind window-dressing. In noir and crime fiction, corruption is often one breath away from saying I want.