Giles Blunt biography

Giles Blunt on Giles Blunt

book signing

MY BACKGROUND

MY CAREER

WORKING FOR TELEVISION

HOLLYWOOD

OUT OF THE WILDERNESS

WHAT'S NEXT

	MY BACKGROUND. I grew up in North Bay, Ontario, a child of parents so English that the space on their passports for citizenship could only be filled in: British Beyond Belief. They had colorful accents and amusing habits and never allowed themselves to be influenced by Canadians. Consequently I lived in England at home and Canada at school. Things were further confused by my growing up Catholic. British people aren't supposed to be Catholic, but I attended a Catholic boys' school called Scollard Hall where I was subject to the usual bullying and injustice. I wouldn't have missed it for the world. Eventually, I negotiated a deal with my parents that got me into a regular school for grades twelve and thirteen. Algonquin Composite had actual girls in it and consequently my attendance improved. The result of this peculiar background was that I never felt truly Canadian; I always felt like a visitor. Then, in 1980, I moved to New York City where I lived for the next 22 years. Americans treat Canadians in their midst with a sort of amused condescension that's quite touching. You know: "They come down here, they take our women..." Living in New York gave me enough distance from northern Ontario to see it through a very long lens. I now visit North Bay and it seems exotic. It is exotic. It's ridiculous that anybody should live there, really, in the land of ice and snow. I mean, what kind of person comes to a hunk of rock surrounded by ice and pine trees and figures it's a good bet to settle down there? Okay, fur traders. But as soon as they have enough money fur traders head for Florida just like everyone else.
	MY CAREER: I started out writing poems. Got a few of them published in places like Grain and Poetry Canada. When I was just out of college, I wrote a novel that was heavily influenced by Samuel Beckett—mercifully unpublished. Then I fell in love with movies and decided to write screenplays. That was when I moved to the States. I moved there as an accidental alien. It never occurred to me that anyone took the border seriously. So I drove down there with a U-haul full of stuff and a cat. They turned me back with a stern warning, but they let the cat through, knowing full well she wasn't going to take any American jobs. So she went ahead and immigrated right there. Eventually, I snuck in and went to bartending school for two weeks, where I earned my Certificate in Mixology and proceeded to work in a series of bars and restaurants. I'd like to take this opportunity to clear something up: Bars and restaurants are always presented in movies and TV as interesting, amusing places to work. People always say, "You must get so much material." Believe me, bars are not pleasant places to work. The regulars are not charming eccentrics with hearts of gold. They are people with serious self-esteem issues. They collect bits of string and balls of tinfoil and they talk the ear off their bartender until he's in a homicidal rage. The low point of my restaurant life was working as a room service waiter in a ritzy hotel. We were all immigrants in that job and I was lonely because nobody spoke English. Some of them were quite rough, too, and if they thought you were slowing them down, they'd get quite nasty. Then this one fellow—a Gandhi figure, very kind and gentle and Indian-took me aside and said, "You don't worry. These poor fellows mean no harm, they are illiterate." I thought, "Illiterate. That's a four-syllable word. I may be able to talk to this guy." Then, half an hour later, Gandhi spies this cockroach scuttling along the floor and stomps on it. BOOM! He leans forward to peer at the mess on the sole of his shoe and I hear him mutter, "You illiterate..." I had to serve breakfast to Israeli U.N. Ambassador Abba Eban and his wife. Mrs. Eban insisted on speaking French to me, which rattled me so much that I didn't quite get the leaf of the table open correctly. A plateful of scrambled eggs landed steaming in her lap. She was understandably upset and berated me in French. The whole time, Abba Eban had his back to this fiasco, bellowing into the phone, "No! Absolutely not! I will not ask Israel to live like that again!" and punctuated these utterances with the most ballistic farts. It was like a Saint Bernard barking.
	WORKING FOR TELEVISION. My being a Canadian in New York proved to be lucky in one way. I was offered a two-year contract working for Grosso-Jacobson, the guys who co-produced a cop show called Night Heat. I also wrote the pilot for a detective show of theirs called Diamonds that ran for a couple of years. If you ever saw The French Connection, you know Sonny Grosso. He is the narcotics cop played by Roy Scheider. I can tell you that that portrayal is completely accurate. Sonny hasn't been a cop for thirty years, but he still carries his .38 around. I remember one story conference with him, where he studiously unloaded his gun and parked all the bullets nose-up on his desk, while I attempted to disagree with him on plot points. He was always amused when I did that. Basically I'd submit my draft. Rewrite it. And then it would go to the story editor. The story editor's job is to painstakingly remove any trace of wit or humour from an episode. No, I'm lying. Some of the shows turned out fine. It depends entirely who the story editor is. My one episode of Law and Order was co-written with novelist Robert Nathan, who is the most intelligent man I ever met in show business. We literally took turns at the keyboard. The cops find a body frozen in a restaurant freezer—of course, I had that restaurant background to help out with all the nuances on that one. Unfortunately, the producer, whom I never met, took a dislike to me, so I went back to writing novels.
	HOLLYWOOD: My first book, Cold Eye, was optioned by a big producer and a famous director. Cold Eye is a bleak story-Faust, set in the New York art scene-and the protagonist dies in the end. Naturally, that had to go, and since they were paying me well I had no objection to trying to redo the ending. Well, we struggled and struggled with it. After several story conferences, the producer said, "You know what this needs? This needs a really suspenseful climax-you know, like with the girl tied to the tracks in one of those fabulous silent movies." So I went away and worked on it and worked on it and finally came up with an ending that would fit the bill. The woman's in mortal jeopardy, the hero comes to his senses and saves her in the nick of time. The studio called me when they received this draft and said, "We just want you to know we think this is terrific. We think you're doing a fantastic job." Fifteen minutes later the telephone rang and it was the producer calling to fire me. He said: "I can't believe you wrote the ending this way. I mean it's ridiculous. It's like one of those goddam silent movies!" The book was eventually filmed by French director Alain Jessua as Les Couleurs du diable.
	OUT OF THE WILDERNESS. Cold Eye launched me from obscurity into outright failure. Although it was published in a half-dozen languages and garnered excellent reviews, it didn't sell huge numbers of copies in the U.S. and was therefore considered a disaster. It attracted the attention of increasingly ineffectual agents. Things got so bad I actually quit writing for three months. I stayed home all day playing blues guitar. But I had this nagging feeling that I hadn't given my Canadian crime novel (Forty Words for Sorrow) its best shot. My then agent had sent it around the States where it got turned down by fifteen publishers, but she'd only sent it to one Canadian publisher. So I called a friend, a pleasantly cantankerous fellow named Bill Booth who used to manage Sleuth of Baker Street, and asked him who would be the best agent for such a book and he said Helen Heller. He trotted it over to her and said you should read this. Helen called me after reading about two hundred pages and took me on. The thing about Helen is she's not just a terrific agent, she's a world class editor. If it weren't for her crucial suggestions, I'd still be at home playing the blues.
	WHAT'S NEXT. I'm currently finishing up a new crime novel called No Such Creature. It tells the story of Max and Owen, a father-and-son team who every year take a road trip across the United States in a huge Winnebago. They see the sights like anybody else--but they also pull robberies along the way. Unfortunately, Max is really old and starting to make a lot of mistakes that put them in ever increasing danger, not just from the law but from a legendary--and extremely violent--gang called The Subtractors. "The Subtractors?" Max says. "No such creature." But in this, as in so many things, he will prove to be disastrously wrong.

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