An Interview with Joe Mallon

Interviewed by Vincent Francone

Joe Mallon is a Chicago writer, through and through. And though I state in this interview that there is no one writing style inherent to city where we both live, there is nevertheless a kind of Chicago story, the kind Joe writes. The words “tough” and “funny” and maybe “gritty” or “dark” might be combined to get close to describing this style. We try to pin some of this down, and Joe nicely interrogates his work and details some of what fuels his voice, a voice you should definitely check out by clicking here. 

Vincent Francone: Reviewing your work, and trying not to reduce you to a genre or style, would it be fair to assume you’re interested in crime fiction? I see a fair amount of killers, crooks, hit men both sinister and principled popping up your stories. Can you tell us a bit about this interest? Where does it stem from, or if there is no grand story that will illuminate things, maybe how do you see your work interacting with the traditions of crime fiction? 

Joe Mallon: Rather than crime fiction, I would like to say I like dark fiction. And yeah, crime fits right into that. The perfect story? Everyone dies. As you know, I have one story, still in draft, where everyone dies. The anti-hero. The villain. The forlorn victim. It’s perfect. And I do have a thing for hitmen as kind of anti-heroes. I’ll freely admit that.

But back to dark fiction. Where does that come from? I’m not really sure. Everyone has a dark side inside them. That’s a certainty. Thomas Hobbes, the philosopher and predecessor of John Locke, says all men are equal because each man has the ability to kill his fellow man. John Locke just puts pretty words around it. So maybe that’s where it started for me, when I studied Hobbes in college. But I doubt it. It just sounded really cool to say. Like I’m smart or something.

But I did always like The Hardy Boys growing up. Maybe that was the start. Or maybe I’m Black Irish. I’ve believed that term “Black Irish” refers not just to the many Irish who have darker skin due to invasions by the Spaniards, but to the darker moods that the Irish can suffer. Maybe it was a way to unleash the inner turmoil inside me. But that sounds a bit mushy to me. 

Back to the dark side of the personality. I do believe it’s inside everyone. I think that’s what makes Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde such a unique story. I think but am not sure that there’s an episode of Star Trek where, in an alternative universe, all the characters have opposite personalities, which is kind of cool.

Can man kill his fellow man in the right circumstances? Absolutely. At least I think so. Similarly, a killer and/or hit man can be a good person in particular circumstances. For instance, he could care for somebody. Look at Leon: The Professional with Jean Reno and Natalie Portman. Leon is a stone-cold killer. Yet he sacrifices his own life to save the life of Matilda, a 12-year-old girl. Now that’s a movie.

My brother? He used to wonder whether he was seriously disturbed. I think he was joking. I hope. He and his friends used to go see movies like Silent Night, Deadly Night and Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things. The movies they saw made Freddie Krueger look like Santa Claus. So maybe it’s genetic. Or maybe I just like violence.

VF: A story that seems not necessarily atypical but different than some of your others is “Darkness.” There are dark and scary elements in some of what you’ve written, but this story is especially nightmarish. Tell us about that one, please.

JM: Wow. “Darkness.” Probably, in my view, the best and most serious piece I wrote. It’s downright creepy. I throw in a line from a disturbing Bruce Springsteen song. The line is one of my favorite of his lyrics. 

As you’ve no doubt noticed, it is written in the first person. Every time I give it to someone to read, I preface it with, “This is not me. I swear to God, this is not me.” No one believes it. After they read the piece, they ask, “Are you okay?” Because, yes, it comes from a really dark place. It’s based partly on a dream I had, but then I expounded it in a fictionalized manner. Some of it is true. For instance, I truly do have debilitating migraines for which I’m medicated. I’ll let the reader decide whether I drink or not.

As I wrote, the story continued to grow darker with a greater and greater sense of hopelessness. One reader, my cousin, had one word for it: “Scary.” I showed it to my internist, a wonderful and kind doctor. She said not to worry, I’ll be fine. I had to continue telling people this was a true work of fiction. Nightmarish is exactly the right word for this story. The only way to understand why is to read it.

VF: I was happy to include “Coffee Shop” in Open Heart Chicago: an Anthology of Chicago Writing.

The story has netted some great responses with a lot of the readers highlighting the dark humor. I certainly laughed out loud when I first read it. And I was sort of surprised when you read it during one of our promotional events, mostly because you maintained a very serious tone throughout your reading. Do you have thoughts about how you’re reading your stuff versus how other readers experience it?

JM: I have always gotten a laugh— pardon the pun— that you and others see it as funny. I have clearly always seen it as dark, but when I wrote it, I never saw this as a funny story. Maybe a funny, amusing character who does the dirty deed, but where is it written that a hit man has to be humorless? 

Take Pulp Fiction. Would you consider Jules and Vincent the stereotypical hitmen? They are more like philosophers, or they at least think they are. Sociopaths, no doubt. But arguing about miracles from God? 

I would say most people see a hitman as the guy up on the roof with a scoped rifle. Not true. A true hitman gets as close to his victim as possible. You get one chance. This guy? He wants it to look like an accident and he knows to do so he just can’t sit down and buy the guy a cup of coffee. He annoys the shit out of him first. It’s his style. He’s invisible. 

But what I do like about it is that a written story can be taken the way a reader wants to take it. Anyone who saw me read the story could only take it one way. My way. But as evidenced by our own discussion, the beauty of books and reading is that every story, every line, can be viewed by the reader in his or her own way. That’s the beauty of reading. 

VF: Boring question, but who and what are your influences? I sense the before-mentioned crime writing, but I also know that a lot of your characters are of Irish descent. I sense that the connection to dear ol’ Erin’s Isle is big for you and informs much of what you write.

JM: Boy, that’s a tough one. I guess there’s a lot of influences. I was a pretty shy kid growing up, almost neurotically so. No one would call me that now. I ran track in high school and college, and that really brought me out of my shell. So I think my own shyness had an influence. When you write, you can be anyone you want to be, do anything to anyone you want to. 

Yes, many of my characters are of Irish descent, or are in Irish neighborhoods like Bridgeport, the oldest Irish neighborhood in Chicago. I grew up in a very Irish household in a very Irish neighborhood. Blue collar, lots of city workers. Cops. Firemen. On my block alone, one side of the street, we had three cops, two firemen (who hated each other), a few factory workers, a baker, and— get this— a graphic artist. I still don’t know what the hell that is. Oh, yeah. We had a drunk, too.

My mom was from Limerick, Ireland, and my dad was from Glasgow, Scotland. His parents were from the North of Ireland and Catholic, so he considered himself both Irish and a good Scot. The Irish Hour played every Saturday morning in our house. From the time I was five years old until I was in high school, we always had a relative from the Old Country living with us until they got settled on their own.

And all my cousins, friends of my parents, etc. were REAL Irish. There was no “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling” in our house. It was the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem. The Irish Rovers. And when there was a party? It was always in the basement, decorated with those big ol’ Christmas lights. Dinner was around the ping pong table. And at some point in the evening, Cousin Moss would pull out the accordion and you’d soon see some of the most beautiful Irish waltzing one could ever hope to see. So yeah, a lot of Irish characters make it into my stories. And with a little pizzaz. Like the killer who wears a cowboy hat. Yeah, I like that.

You also can’t talk about Ireland without talking about death and war. My story “The Bog” exemplifies this. You don’t know if the character will live or die due to his dreadful mistake. And there’s many a body that’s gone missing in an Irish bog over the centuries. Ireland was ruled by England, and ruled cruelly, for over four hundred years. You can’t talk about Ireland and either not have a story about it or not have it have an effect on a person of Irish heritage. My mom, when she still lived in Ireland, worked for a British banker who owned a cat. I come from a long line of cat haters. So one day she got ahold of that cat and tossed it over that fine British wall. No more cat.

I also like Irish myths and legends. Particularly the Black Dog, a fearsome creature larger than a wolf with mangy fury and burning coal for eyes and drool dripping from its loathsome fangs. It is a portent of death, and is used as the basis for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Hound of The Baskervilles. A lot of the Irish will say they no longer believe in the old stories. So most Irishmen will talk about myths and legends like this. “Ah, it’s all a bunch of shite. However, there was the time that…” That’s the Irish.

And writers? Yes, I’d say there were many. I like a lot of the noir writers like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. As a kid, I gobbled up the the Hardy Boys, given to me by my Godfather Bus. I’m not afraid to say I like Michael Connelly, especially his Lincoln Lawyer books. I love Elmore Leonard. He can do no wrong. His story Justified is a work of art. And his character Deputy Marshall Raylan Givens? The guy wears a cowboy hat only because he found a nice cowboy hat. He actually gives a guy twenty-four hours to get out of town. I mean, that’s bad ass stuff. 

Richard Price is an influence as well, although it’s been a while since I’ve read some of his work. I love writing dialogue. And I mean love it. I don’t think there is a better dialogue guy in the business than Richard Price. I’m a big Dennis Lehane fan, too. Big on dialogue, writes stories that take place in the rough parts of Boston and captures the dialogue. The best of the neo-noir writers. He’s a really, really big influence. I’ve read—and watched— The Drop about five times, hand to God.

VF: I have the inside baseball knowledge on you, since we’ve worked together via a workshop, so I might be working from prior knowledge here, but I know you didn’t spend your career writing, at least not in the way you are now. I’ve long had this bias for the writers who don’t go through MFA programs and the traditional routes, even though I love those writers, too. Do you think your so-called “past life” has informed your approach to writing? 

JM: Yes, I’m from the business world. I was an attorney and CPA. Specifically, I was a partner at one of the largest multinational accounting and consulting firms in the world. It’s always been difficult for me to see the influence it’s had on my writing. I’d say where the influence lies are in the many people I met over my twenty-five years there. Lots of characters, good and bad. Lots of conflict, lots of kindness. But I will say this. It is NOT what’s portrayed on streaming shows or movies. Succession may possibly be the worst offender EVER of what the life is like. I mean EVVVVEEEERRRR. Which is a shame because there’s some really good material out there.

Having said that, I tried writing a business story and it was awful. But that was in my early days of writing. I’d say it would probably have to be a dark comedy. The show that comes the closest is The Office. And of course there’s the comic strip Dilbert. Dilbert is spot on. 

I once convinced one of my partners that there was a Jewish holiday called Rashashanika, with a traditional meal of lamb and fanuka. Fanuka being a form of pasta. I did this because she thought it odd that her boss wasn’t working on a Friday afternoon during the summer. I let her boss in on the joke. He told her that he was happy to talk to her but he was just finishing his twenty-four-hour vow of silence, and now he had to start all over again. She was scared shitless. It’s my position that she deserved it. But like any experience, it’s the people in life that give you the greatest chance for a story. You just have to listen.

As you also know, I ran cross country and track in college as well. That has had a big influence on my writing. I’m writing a story right now of a runner right out of college who’s losing his mind. Some stories I’m thinking about come AFTER races. When all that adrenaline of the race has shut down and the parties are over and you’re left only to your emotionless ruminations. Runners are kind of nuts, so there’s good stories there. I was once chased by a horse. Also running is a very intense, focused sport, so it really helps me with my focus and the discipline needed to write.

VF: I may be wrong about your roots, but I peg you as a south sider who now inhabits the South Loop. Chicago being the setting for much of your writing, do you have a south v north side thing going on? I ask because much of what I write takes place in the south burbs where I grew up, even though I’ve lived north for 30 years. Something about the south side permeates, makes me feel compelled to represent it, maybe. Not sure if that translates to your work.

JM: Yes, it definitely does. I love the South Side. All my stories are based there, unless I go back to Ireland. If I bring a character to the North Side, it will probably be to Lincoln Park, near Wrigley Field, and someone will die. Rather brutally, I might add.

One of the best T-shirts I saw was in 2008, the 100-year anniversary of the Cubs never winning a World Series. There was a tee-shirt making its way around the bars and sold at White Sox Park. On it was written: “Chicago Cubs— 1908 World Champs.” That’s the South Side.

I grew up in Mount Greenwood, a blue-collar neighborhood on the edge of the city. Very blue collar. A lot of my stories arise from growing up in Mount Greenwood. We went to St. Christina’s for grade school, but moved to Evergreen Park, a suburb right next to Mount Greenwood, when I finished seventh grade. Catholic high school for us four boys just wasn’t something my parents could afford. But Mount Greenwood always stayed with me. So many of my stories focus there… I call it Mount Olivet, based on the cemetery next to it.

VF: Speaking of Chicago, I’m of the opinion that there is no one Chicago style of fiction, but the tradition of Nelson Algren and James T. Farrell looms large. I see some of this muscular, streetwise, for lack of a better word, tradition going on in some of your stories. Any comment on this—maybe I’m making unfair connections. 

JM: Funny you mention Farrell. My son just got me the first of the Studs Lonigan books for Christmas!

I agree, I’m not sure there is a Chicago style of fiction. I’ll rephrase it. I’d say there’s a “city style” of fiction. And I’m going to limit that style to Chicago, New York, and Boston. LA? You can keep it. (Except for Chinatown, the movie.) If you look at the style, it is very dialogue-heavy. You could almost get away without describing the neighborhood just by listening to the dialogue, if the writer is a great dialogue guy. Again, I’ll mention Richard Price. Pick up one of his books. The Lower East Side of NYC just hits you in the face. Same with Dennis Lehane and Boston. 

And of course, out of our writing group, Paul Teodo is as good as you’re going to find. South of Cermak [link to: https://www.amazon.com/South-Cermak-Chicago-Paul-Teodo/dp/B0B3JK8W7L ] by him and Tom Myers really captures us Southsiders. We’re a cult. 

And I think “muscular” and “streetwise” are the right words, especially for the neighborhoods and cops and people I write about. Same with any story that takes place in a city. And don’t tell me you’ve got a good story that takes place in Oakbrook.