An Interview with STREETWHYS author Christopher Chambers
by Peter Carlaftes, co-director, Three Rooms Press
After working with author Christopher Chambers on the first two books in the Dickie Cornish mystery series, I was thrilled to work on the third and final book in the series, STREETWHYS, coming out Three Rooms Press April 15 (preorder Bookshop, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Target, Walmart, or any indie bookstore on request). I recently spoke with Chambers about his new book, to find what’s driven the evolution of one of the most fascinating private detectives in the genre.
PC: STREETWHYS is the third and perhaps final (wink wink) novel in your Dickie Cornish mystery series –the first two being SCAVENGER and STANDALONE. How would you describe the way your “antihero” from the streets has evolved from the first and latest book?
CC: Evolution doesn’t necessarily mean better, it means change, to better adapt as things go to Hell all around you, or… if Hell comes calling. I figure I needed a trilogy to show the arc from unhoused and driven mad/addicted from despair, to an adapted yet still besieged functioning person. Anti-hero yet more and more invested in at least finding solutions and justice within a corrupt systems, not without. You see the change even in the narrative—the chaotic second person voice in SCAVENGER changes in STANDALONE and now in STREETWHYS the narrative’s “evolved” to a more recognizable indeed “professional” first person hardboiled voice. So now that we have the evolution, maybe it’s time for the revolution?
PC: Even more so than other brilliant mystery books, STREETWHYS features a main character and supporting cast driven by desperation. Can you explain how this same desperation has affected each plot line along the way.
CC: Note the setting of the Nation’s Capital—Pelecanos’ town, and he exposed as not as, for example, Robert Ludlum’s monuments, political intrigue, and gunplay at embassy black ties but a place of despair based on wild generational power and money disparities, themselves anchored in the racism that’s been a feature since the place was founded by slaveholders as the capital of freedom. Quite the dichotomy already. Lay that on the usual grim urban formula of every other city where every other crime novel’s set…and indeed crime novels are a mirror on society. Accordingly, SCAVENGER is one bookend, under Trump and it’s winter and cold and savage and the Obama hopefulness has been the usual pipedream. People die on the street, and street people ironically are “employed’ for a few bucks to trash the belongings of those who can’t pay rent. Along comes an oligarch—hell comes to Dickie—with a devil’s tradeoff to leave those streets. In STANDALONE, Trump’s gone but the promise of redemption’s been dashed by COVID deaths and a crap urban economy; Dickie’s getting treatment, a room, a vocation is bearing limited fruit until, again in irony, hell comes to him again. This time a war within a corrupt police department, and one side—as disgusting as the murderous, racist other—gives him another devil’s choice by saying hey you can get a PI license, be a true player, even a hero, not an anti-hero. Again, all premised on desperation. So we come to STREETWHYS, and the other bookend. We’re on the cusp of Trump and Trumpism’s return, with the powers that are desperate to enlist Dickie to stop it…yet all the while he sees nothing but the same desperation that’s always saturated him, infected people on the street…this time with fentanyl trafficking and addiction. The difference: Dickie’s not the desperate one. He’s the anti-hero setting everything to the equilibrium and it’s a sad one. No matter who’s in power, people will suffer. But he’s out there, maybe not enough to change things, but he survives.
“We’re on the cusp of Trump and Trumpism’s return, with the powers that are desperate to enlist Dickie to stop it…yet all the while he sees nothing but the same desperation that’s always saturated him, infected people on the street…this time with fentanyl trafficking and addiction. The difference: Dickie’s not the desperate one.”
PC: So much of the Dickie Cornish series including STREETWHYS focuses on DC’s transient, often unhoused, community, with much dialog using “street” terms—often in Spanish—that are not readily available to look up in the New Oxford American Dictionary. You once said, “The language adds to the verisimilitude.” For readers unfamiliar with this language, what do you recommend to help their comprehension?
CC: Google it! As vernacular changes even regionally so you can’t even pick it up by “just listening to blackfolks,” or “just listen to younger people.” Slang in Brooklyn isn’t slang in Baltimore or DC. Son, Dummy, Bro, Cuz, Moe, Slim, Bruv all mean the same thing but don’t use one in the wrong town out of place. “Jont” means spot or situation in DC, something entirely different in Philly. It’s fun to watch the “evolution” of James Patterson’s Alex Cross character in the film/streaming medium from Morgan Freeman to Tyler Perry to Aldis Hodge and I’d like to think I had something to do with that. Initially both the books and films didn’t seem “real.” Now, I feel like I’m “home.” Why? Because before, they seemed engineered for a suburban beach read audience. Somebody figured out that verisimilitude becomes a hook, too, and one way do get that is language. Watch it and see. I expect Dickie to pop up in every scene!
PC: Whatever corruption found in the street denizens that populate STREETWHYS, institutional corruption seems far more evil and widespread. How has living in DC for so long made you more aware of the amount of corruption in local and federal bureaucracies? How much have you used the Dickie Cornish series to expose this corruption?
CC: One plays off the other. Its no different that what you had in New York or Chicago, where you indeed have armed gangs, pluggers/dealers, folk juicing the system or looking the other way, nihilistic young folk on the loose… and paralleling them are folks sworn to uphold the public peace and justice yet don’t. Either because they are their own white-collar or gang in blue, or perhaps worse—they justify murder, oppression, human trafficking etc. as the price of keeping “respectable” areas “safe.” In DC you have that added federal element of national politics and policy affecting people close and personal —and unlike other areas where the feds might be the arbiter, clean-up crew, even rescuer. Here they are too often leading the corruption or washing their hands of it—as the people in the city have no vote, no say.
PC: Like many major cities, the unhoused population of DC has been steadily increasing for decades. Yet few books besides those in your Dickie Cornish series feature characters drawn from this community. It’s as if literature itself dehumanizes homeless people by ignoring them as much as people who live in those cities do. Explain how your books are helping to recognize the humanity of this population—even those in it who seem most unbalanced.
CC: I recall critics, from Publisher’s Weekly to newspapers saying that SCAVENGER and to some extent STANDALONE was a polemic on gentrification and homelessness. Yes and no. Those things were the backdrop and while I wanted to hold up a mirror, any time you show someone as a human being with a story, or detail their misery—even if they had some hand in it and continue to swat away hands that help—it humanizes and personalizes the experience. That’s also good for me as a crime/mystery writer. I’m not dealing with comic book good and evil. I’m dealing with people qua people as both plot driver and character study. Their essence and what stirs the evil and brings out the good in everyone, and perhaps in our institutions. Dickie started out at the lowest rung of society. And like most of these folks, he didn’t start off there. Yet no matter what de-humanized him or robbed his dignity, he always tried to help fix things, help others. That outweighs the negatives. Always.
PC: Also, perhaps the biggest change on the streets since 2020s SCAVENGER has been the growing supply and use of fentanyl, creating a more unpredictably dangerous scene on that level. Please explain how this scene in STREETWHYS brings Dickie Cornish into the fold.
“Fentanyl is both the artifice behind the government’s roping Dickie in, through Angela Bivens, but also a terrible tangible problem. … Unlike heroin or crack, there’s no re-up or long-term vampirism. It’s suffering, then death…like a true plague that needs a supply of new victims to replace the dead old ones.”
CC: It’s both critical to the plot…and a ‘McGuffin,’ a plot carrier to push the characters—and while I’m proud of that dance, or dichotomy technically as a writer, I have a responsibility to deal with the real-life toll. Fentanyl is both the artifice behind the government’s roping Dickie in, through Angela Bivens, but also a terrible tangible problem. He’s seen the toll its taken but also recalls back when it wasn’t the street drug adulterating all others—intimately as he himself got a hot dose years ago. It implicates local thugs and national bigwig political donors, ostensibly for our new President, and it also implicates the Mexican border. It’s the heroin of The French Connection or American Gangster, or crack of the 80s, in other words. Yet unlike heroin or crack, there’s no re-up or long-term vampirism. It’s suffering, then death…like a true plague that needs a supply of new victims to replace the dead old ones.
PC: How has your own opinion of your budding detective changed over the course of completing the third and final book in the series? What do you think of him now?
CC: Honestly, I’m in awe of his indestructibility. That’s what sets him apart. That’s why people—bad folks, and indeed good folks—are afraid of him. Because we are fragile, and when Hell comes calling or we blunder into it, we either fold or run or join in. He doesn’t. Is that enviable? I wish he’d be a little smarter regarding the work he takes. Maybe that’s the case now–he’s evolved enough to be picky? Part of evolution, as you asked, is survival. That’s what he does best, and that’s why Hell is afraid of him, too!
PC: Thanks Chris. We can’t wait until the latest Dickie Cornish mystery STREETWHYS hits the shelves in April.
STREETWHYS has a pub date of April 15. You can preorder a copy from Bookshop, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Target, Walmart, or any indie bookstore on request.
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