Welcome to the WordCrafter “Northtown Angelus” Book Blog Tour

Welcome to the WordCrafter Northtown Angelus Book Blog Tour. We have a great tour planned with a generous giveaway, so let me tell you about that first.

Giveaway

Each stop where you leave a a comment,

you get another chance to win one of five digital copies,

and one signed print copy of Northtown Angelus.

Opening Day

Today is opening day, and we have a special interview with author Robert White, where we talk about what draws him to crime thrillers, and writing in general. Of course, he will also talk about Northtown Angelus, and if you pay attention, he might even reveal a few insider clues about the story.

Interview with author Robert White

Kaye: Please tell us a bit about your author journey and how you got into writing as a profession and a business?

Robert: I taught five sections of freshman composition at a regional branch campus, which meant I was steeped in marathon grading sessions during the week and throughout the weekend in my tiny office circling to/too homonyms. The desire to write was always there but not the time. In the two decades of writing I’ve enjoyed—strictly as hobby—I’ve made a few bucks, but I knew even as a fledgling English major that no one but a lucky or extraordinarily talented few make a living at it.

The immediate impetus was serendipity (not a word to use easily). A student of mine called down from the IT lab where he worked part-time. He said my computer was scheduled for an upgrade and I would lose all my unsaved files. I’d written a Haftmann ms. a decade earlier for fun and forgotten it. He sent it to me, I looked it over, updated it with cell phones and laptops, and sent it out to Grand Mal Press. Ryan Thomas, still the managing editor, published it in 2011. Ryan has since brought out nearly all the Haftmann novels and this last novel in the Northtown trilogy.  

Kaye: What’s the most difficult thing about being an author for you?

Robert: Not a thing. I’ve been a stockboy in a grocery store, a factory worker, and a deckhand on the Great Lakes. I remember what hard work is. Sitting in my room, sipping coffee, and mulling over word choices is not it.

Kaye: What is the most rewarding thing about being an author for you?

Robert: Just having my foot in the door. When I was fifteen a girlfriend gave me a copy of William Styron’s Sophie Choice. I’d never read such beautiful prose before. To be a very junior member of that “club” is an honor in itself regardless of the boos I get on Amazon and elsewhere.

Kaye: What part of being an author was unexpected, something that you didn’t realize starting out?

Robert: That note of jaundiced humor that creeps into my narrative voice from time to time. Both my private eyes have it. I might have been influenced by  Chandler’s Marlowe more than I realized, but my fictional landscapes veer toward the grim.

Kaye: You’ve received a few awards for your writing. The Russian Heist won Best Novel in Thriller Magazine. Your book, Betray Me Not, was selected by the Independent Alliance as a Truly Best Independent Book, and your story “Inside Man” was selected by Otto Penzler of Houghton Mifflin for Best Mystery Stories of 2019. How important have these awards been in propelling your author career forward?

Robert: Any distinction is a pleasure. I’m not immune to flattery. I do think I have a proper sense of humility about my own talent vis-à-vis the outstanding writers I admire intensely: Martin Cruz Smith, Thomas Harries, and David Lindsey.

Kaye: Regarding Thomas Haftmann, Private Eye: The Short Stories, The Midwest Review said, “Clearly, author Robb White is a master of the noir style mystery genre…”, and many of your works are noir, hardboiled crime fiction. What draws you to this genre?

Robert: I suspect there’s a glitch in my DNA molecule that absorbed something from my mother. She loved paperback mysteries, especially Agatha Christie. It didn’t stick all the way because I quit halfway through one Miss Marple book. Not my cup of tea, as they say.

I’m drawn to the genre because of its ambiguity, the half existence between knowledge and ignorance, truth and lies, good and evil—trite as that sounds. That’s real life, isn’t it? “Peering through a venetian blind,” as metaphor, is wonderfully apt.

Kaye: What other genres, if any do you write?

Robert: I dip my toe into the horror genre from time to time because psychological horror and crime are intricately related and there’s a slender passageway between them, easy to cross. But I’ve never gone beyond short stories.

Kaye: Northtown Angelus is volume 3 in the Raimo Jarvi Investigates series. For readers who may not have read books 1 & 2, please tell us, who is Ray Jarvi? What drives him? How did he end up as a P.I.? What makes him good at his job?

An outstanding critic in U.K. crime fiction is Rowena Hoseason, who said Ray is “broken.” She nailed it. He fights his past as a victim of a boyhood fire that scarred his face and isolated him in society thereafter. He’s driven by his refusal to stay locked away in a brooding isolation despite his physical appearance that keeps people away, although he did have one love affair that ended in tragedy, and he has a boyhood friendship with a deputy. A few minor figures in law enforcement pop up to help Ray out because he’s running on a shoestring budget and doesn’t have access to the best  databases.

Kaye: Where did you get the inspiration for the Raimo Jarvi character?

Robert: I created Raimo Jarvi because Thomas Haftmann, my first series investigator, was set in stone. He was cast in the Spade-Marlowe mode and I couldn’t get him to “evolve” without denying the characteristics that made him. His surname is a play on “half-man,” and he wasn’t capable of aging gracefully, as flippant as that might sound. I needed a more self-effacing narrator akin to my own aging temperament.

Kaye: Please tell us a little about the first two books. Should the books for this series be read in order, or do they work as standalones?

Robert: I do think they’re standalones despite the fact a few characters and references follow from book to book. In Northtown Eclipse, Ray investigates a case involving his macho brother and some former classmates involved in a sordid catastrophe involving a female victim in the same sleazy resort town Haftmann has an office in.  In Northtown Blitz, Raimo is again drawn back to the past of his painful high-school days. A woman asks him to investigate the death of her sister. The main suspect is her own brother-in-law, a prominent lawyer in Northtown.

Kaye: What is it about Northtown Angelus that would make crime thriller fans want to purchase this book? Tell us a little about the story within.

Robert: I believe fans of mystery aren’t locked into a niche that inhibits, say, a lover of big-city crime fiction from appreciating a small-town mystery about people who hide behind masks of middle-class respectability.

In Northtown Angelus, a recent widow asks Ray to investigate her husband’s death, which the cops have written off as suicide. As Ray peels the onion layers away, he meets a bevy of high and low characters involved. There are dark, ongoing secrets that no one wants exposed to the light.  

 Kaye: Tell us something about yourself that your readers would never guess.

Robert: I’m a skywatcher, not a real amateur star-gazer, but I drag the telescope out of the garage now and then to check out the celestial skies. What goes on in interstellar space is so remote from the mundane and our puny, temporal existence that it appeals strongly to me.

About Author Robert White

Robert T. White writes from Northeastern Ohio. He has published several crime, noir, hardboiled novels and genre stories in various magazines and anthologies. He’s been nominated for a Derringer. “Inside Man,” a crime story, was selected for Best American Mystery Stories 2019. His second hardboiled p.i. series (after the Thomas Haftmann mysteries begun in 2011 with Haftmann’s Rules) features Raimo Jarvi in Northtown Eclipse (Fahrenheit Press, 2018) and Northtown Blitz (2020). British website Murder, Mayhem & More cited When You Run with Wolves (rpt. 2018) as a finalist for Top Ten Crime Books of 2018 and Perfect Killer in 2019. “If I Let You Get Me” was selected for the Bouchercon 2019 anthology and The Russian Heist (Moonshine Cove, 2019), another crime thriller, was selected by Thriller Magazine as winner of its Best Novel category. “Out of Breath” and Other Stories is a mixed collection of mainstream and noir fiction (Red Giant Press, 2013).

About Northtown Angelus

Johnny Dillon took his life. His wife Cora wants to know why. The Northtown cops don’t care; they closed the case as a suicide. The M.E. hasn’t got any answers for the discrepancies Ray Jarvi discovered in the autopsy report and from what Johnny’s wife told him about the days leading up to his decision to take his life.

This is the beginning of an investigation for private investigator Ray Jarvi, who follows a twisting path of corruption and vice in his rust-belt town on the shores of Lake Erie to help her find some resolution to the worst day in her life. Like a medieval play between warring devils and angels battling for a soul, he must deal with a variety of Northtowners who play one part or the other on his journey to find those answers. Getting past one obstacle only leads to another—and another. Before long, Jarvi does not know whom to trust. He realizes nothing in his town is what it appears to be and that there are some dangerous people who like it that way.

Purchase Link: https://www.amazon.com/Northtown-Angelus-Raimo-Jarvi-Investigates/dp/B0CRQ66L4Y

About the Tour

We have a brief, but great tour planned with guest posts from the author, a second interview on Day 3. So you’ll hear a lot more from author Robert White and learn more about this thriller that takes after the classic hard-boiled crime novels. Day 4 will feature a double stop day with a guest post on Undawnted, and my review of Northtown Angelus.

Visit each day and leave a comment for more chances at one of five digital copies or a signed print copy of the book. You’ll find the tour schedule with links below, but remember the links won’t work until that day’s stop goes live. I hope you all will join us.

Tour Schedule

Day 1: Writing to be Read – Interview

Day 2: Robbie’s Inspiration – Guest Post

Day 3: Patty’s Worlds – Interview

Day 4: Undawnted – Guest Post/ Writing to be Read – Book review

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Book your WordCrafter Book Blog Tour today!