The Inside Scoop with Gabriel Valjan
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Sleuths and Sidekicks is honored to host the prolific and talented Gabriel Valjan on The Inside Scoop. Gabriel writes multiple series, as well as short stories in several genres.
Tina: How did you become an author?
Gabriel:
I’ve mentioned numerous times before that I was not someone who as a child dreamt of becoming a writer. Yes, I did read voraciously, and I was fortunate that my parents allowed me to have an unrestricted library card. I read things I didn’t understand: humor, philosophy, and sex. I was enamored with words because I don’t hear well, and I was a typical latchkey kid of the 1970s, who learned to fend for himself. As an only child, imagination helped me with solitude and to combat loneliness. While I wouldn’t call it navel-gazing, from a young age I analyzed why I liked what I read.
After I’d become debt-free, landed a dream job that paid well and allowed me to have long weekends, I started writing. I began with short stories, one per week. Most of them were not good. I wrote the proverbial ‘in the drawer, never to see the light of day’ novel. I wrote another, and then I started sending stories out and I was lucky. My second story was shortlisted for the Fish Prize in 2010. Then the same month I was supposed to go to Ireland for Fish, I was diagnosed with cancer; experienced a malfunction with a machine in the OR that would put me in the ICU; endured a brutal course of radiation, and at the end of that marathon through hell, the friend who took me to all my treatments died. Rather than sink into depression or watch endless hours of television while I underwent R&R (Radiation and Recovery), I wrote each day for six months and produced three novels. All three were subsequently published.
In those six months that I don’t want to remember, or wish on anyone, I learned the following:
1) You are alone, so create the reality that will sustain you.
2) You can accomplish more than you think if ‘motivated.’
3) There are no excuses if you want to write. Start now.
Tina: What was the inspiration for your sleuths? How did he reach the page?
Gabriel: A word first. I chose to write crime fiction because I feel it approximates reality. We really don’t know someone else’s inner life or their motivation. I found that mysteries engaged my mind and encouraged critical thinking.
As a writer, I was aware of the tired tropes from all that I had read: the guy or gal with a drinking problem, anger-management issues, or the main character bangs around town either beating up people or getting his ass kicked. Another variation is the PI, who is so irresistible that both men and women can’t help but fall in and out of bed with them
I wanted to create a flawed individual who undergoes a journey of self-discovery. My Shane Cleary works the streets of 70s Boston, and he has a dark past. He has scruples. He makes mistakes. He tries to be a better person. He has to come to terms with his past with the Boston Police Department and with Vietnam (another tired 70s trope, I know). His biggest obstacles are learning to trust and to forgive. Two personal themes throughout my life.
Tina: How did your sleuth’s sidekicks come to be?
Gabriel: Shane has a cat named Delilah. She is his moral conscience. He talks to her, and she has her way of communicating with him. Delilah is my hat tip to cozy mysteries, and a way for me to introduce some levity in a dark world. I like to laugh, and I have a dry sense of humor.
Tina: You write about the CIA, the Mafia and The Combat Zone in 70s Boston. Why?
Gabriel: The Seventies was a dark and cynical decade. Some cities were bankrupt, and the country was recovering (never did, in my opinion) from defeat in Vietnam. The Seventies was where the idealism of the Sixties went to die.
I’ve written about the CIA because I see governments as entities whose sole purpose and concern is about maintaining Power, the body politic is secondary to them. My Company Files series is about individuals caught up in the insidious gears of a Darwinian machine that is far bigger than they are, and what keeps them alive and sane is their trust in each other.
Right or wrong, loyalty and friendships are a recurring theme in my work. Loyalty implies trust, or an alliance, between individuals. I understand why loyalty prevails in ethnic neighborhoods, but I also can see how loyalty is misdirected. For example, those who clung to that same ethnic loyalty in certain neighborhoods in Boston responded with violence when a judge ordered Boston’s public education and housing systems to desegregate in 1974. Yes, 1974. Boston was THE last city in the country to desegregate.
I write ambiguous people. Nobody is all good or all bad, and I’d argue that dichotomous thinking is very dangerous. ‘Good’ people do bad things. ‘Bad’ people do good things. Human beings have an extraordinary capacity to compartmentalize and rationalize their behavior. The irony here—and it circles back to my earlier comment about writing crime fiction—noir is about choices and consequences, though I would say I write more hard-boiled and less noir because I won’t allow myself to become a nihilist.
Organized crime in the Shane novels is another example of distorted loyalty. However, I don’t glamorize the mafia like Mario Puzo did in The Godfather. Organized crime in the 70s was violent, and the life of a mobster is predicated on blind loyalty, but, paradoxically, relies on betrayal. I view this allegiance as no different from life in the military, except for one crucial difference. The military since time immemorial learned that it had to dehumanize the enemy because human beings know it is wrong to kill. Like the military, there is structure, and decisions are delegated in the mafia. Murder in the mafia is not haphazard or taken lightly. Again another critical difference from the military—the mafioso doesn’t kill a stranger; he murders his best friend, someone he knows because that friend has violated a rule.
Tina: Final question: what books would you recommend to our readers?
Gabriel:
Three books I’ve been inspired by:
Fredrik Backman. A Man Called Ove.
Viktor Frankl. Man’s Search for Meaning.
Sara Paretsky. Writing in an Age of Silence.
And my recent reads:
James Lee Burke. Flags on the Bayou.
Jenny Erpenbeck. The Book of Words.
Dennis Lehane. Small Mercies.
Walter Mosley. Trouble Is What I Do.
David Talbot. Devil’s Chessboard.
Tina: Thank you, Gabriel, for your thought-provoking answers. You have left us with a great deal to think about and lots of good reading to add to our TBR piles. All of us here at Sleuths and Sidekicks are looking forward to your next book!
More About Gabriel
Gabriel Valjan is the Agatha, Anthony, Silver Falchion and Shamus nominated author of the Shane Cleary mystery series with Level Best Books. He has been listed for the Bath and Fish Prizes for short stories, and received an Honorable Mention for the Nero Wolfe Black Orchid Novella Contest. He received the 2021 Macavity Award for Best Short Story. Gabriel is a member of ITW, MWA, and Sisters in Crime. He lives in Boston’s South End and answers to a tuxedo cat named Munchkin.
IG: @gabrielvaljan
Twitter: @GValjan
