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Solid Stiehl: AmSAW: Your latest book, Solid Stiehl, is something of a rarity. It's a mystery, but it's also humor. I don't know too many writers capable of pulling off that kind of split genre. What made you think you could do it?
HERDA: I can do anything. [Laughs] Actually, I had an idea for a new mystery series bouncing around my head for quite a while. But I didn't want it to be just another mystery, you know? One of my all-time favorite characters is Dashiell Hammett's The Thin Man. I've always admired how an amateur sleuth like Nick Charles could be both a hard-nosed private eye and a raconteur about town. And, of course, he's wittier than hell. So, I set about creating a character who is as cultured, refined, and outrageously funny--in his own way--as Nick Charles. And Hymie Stiehl was born.
AmSAW: Well, Stiehl is certainly a stitch. He absolutely is. He's also Jewish--you call him the Yiddish Bulldog--and you're, what?
herda: Catholic. St. Rita High School. On the Great South Side of Chicago. Rah.
AmSAW: So, tell me, how does a fine Catholic and a graduate of St. Rita High School on Chicago's Great South Side manage to write so convincingly about a Jewish sleuth?
HERDA: Oh, that's easy. When I was editing The Elks Magazine a few million years ago, I had a Jewish secretary who drove me absolutely nuts. I mean it. When she wasn't standing around the water cooler gossiping, she was talking on the telephone to her furrier husband, Norman, who was rarely interested in anything she had to say. I mean, here's a hard-working schmuck just trying to make an honest living, be a good Jew, go to Temple every Saturday, and be looked up to. The last thing in the world he wanted was to get a telephone call from his wife--at work in the middle of the day, no less--complaining about what happened at the office that day. There were times when she'd talk for 15 minutes straight. The poor guy could have put the phone down and gone out for a blintz and never miss a beat. So, I took a little bit of Norman the furrier, a little bit of my secretary, some of their friends, and combined them with a few other genuinely unique characters I've been lucky enough to know in my life, and voila! Out came Hymie Stiehl.
AmSAW: Your Midwestern background serves you well in setting the scene for the novel. You certainly know a lot about Chicago. You get into the city's history, sports teams, politicians, and even the mob. Your writing is incredibly detailed, right on down to the items on the menu of--what's the name--the Cape Cod Room. Either you have a talent for recalling details, or you're a good schmoozer. Which is it? HERDA: I used to work as a columnist for The Chicago Tribune. Before that, I was a beat reporter for several smaller suburban papers. I also wrote fairly often for Chicago Magazine and some other local monthlies. Between all that, you pretty much learn the inner workings of a city. You have to. I mean, if you don't know your way around City Hall, you're not going to last long as a reporter in a town as big and competitive as Chicago.
AmSAW: And you are obviously a Chicago White Sox baseball fan. HERDA: Die-hard. I went whenever I could beg, borrow, or steal a ticket.
AmSAW: How about the Cubs? HERDA: Never. See a Cubs' game? In person? Are you kidding? I grew up on the South Side. The Cubs are strictly a North-Side commodity, or at least they were back in the Fifties and Sixties. If you lived on the South Side, you were a White Sox fan, period. Either that, or you got the stuffing kicked out of you.
AmSAW: So you missed the, how do they say it, the beautiful confines of... HERDA: Uh-uh. The friendly confines of beautiful Wrigley Field. That's where the Cubs play. Jack Brickhouse coined that phrase. He was the Cubs' television announcer for years, after leaving the White Sox. I saw a few Cubs' games on TV of course. And I worked as an editor on the North Side just off of Lake Shore Drive, so I saw the outside of the place quite often. It really is beautiful. But I cut my teeth at Comiskey Park, which is where the Sox played in those days.
AmSAW: Getting back to the novel, Hymie Stiehl, this is your, what, eightieth book or something phenomenal like that? HERDA: Something like that. I'm not sure. I'm too busy writing them to stop to count them. I think maybe the number of books I've published is in the low eighties. You stop counting when you hit 30 or 40. Not all of them were novels, though. Most of them were nonfiction. A lot of them were kids' books, Junior High, on a wide variety of subjects.
AmSAW: How does someone make the switch from being a nonfiction children's book author to an adult trade-book novelist? I mean, you must have been writing kids books for years. HERDA: Most of my life, yeah. Although I did sell my first novel to Playboy Press back in 1980-something. Eighty-one, I think. It was called The Winds of Kabul, and it did pretty well. With my family, anyway. They all loved it.
AmSAW: How about the general public? HERDA: I never got the chance to find out. Playboy sold its book-publishing division before the book came out, and the new publisher canned all of their old stock, so I never did see it on the stands.
AmSAW: That must have been disappointing. HERDA: Well, I got to keep the advance. But, yeah, it was disappointing. It's really a great book, and it was way ahead of its time, about some Pushtun freedom fighters in Afghanistan. And a young couple who go over there to work in the Peace Corps. Someone will pick it up eventually. It would make a great film.
AmSAW: That's something else that impresses me about your work. Your topics are so diverse. You've written books on satellites, Afghanistan as you just said, roller skating, famous Supreme Court cases, biographies. You must spend an awful lot of time doing research. HERDA: Well, I do some, of course. But most of my knowledge comes from experience. I worked for years as a professional photojournalist, so it was easy to write a series of books on photography. I worked as a freelance travel writer and got to travel the world, so I'm pretty knowledgeable about a lot of different places and cultures. Things like that help a lot. That and, of course, my training as a reporter. I'm always asking questions, always analyzing things, seeing how they work, including people. You know, what makes the world go round.
AmSAW: Would you suggest that a novelist starting out today get his feet wet writing for the local paper first, like everybody says? HERDA: Absolutely. If nothing else, a writer learns discipline when he's working under deadline. He also learns the value of accuracy. You can't guess at things when you're a reporter. Or at least, you couldn't back when I was breaking into journalism. The game has changed some since then, and not for the better, I'm afraid.
AmSAW: Of course, a lot of fiction writers would argue that accuracy isn't necessarily a mainstay of writing for them, since fiction isn't based on reality. HERDA: Well, it is to a degree. I mean, really good fiction writers have to write believable stories. When you create an alternate world--a fantasy world or something out of your head--you have to use enough accuracy to make that world believable, unless you're writing something completely personal, a fictitious account of life somewhere else, in another universe, for example. But even foreign worlds such as in fantasy and science fiction have to have a large degree of believability to them, or the reader just won't buy in. You have to be able to sell your notion of reality, even if its 99 percent made up.
AmSAW: Which brings up an age-old question. How much of what you write about in your novels is actually based upon reality and how much is pure fiction? HERDA: That depends. If I'm writing about a place, describing its people, I like to draw heavily on reality. I might change it around a bit to suit my purposes, but if I'm writing about London or Paris or even Billings, Montana, I want the reader to be able to identify with the place. The same with my characters. I want them to be different, unique, but I want certain universal elements in them that my readers can identify with.
AmSAW: What universal elements did you put into Hymie Stiehl? He seems totally unique. HERDA: Well, he is because of the combination of character traits he has. His uniqueness is what makes him likeable. He has an unpredictability about him that's an example of a universal truth. Take any unpredictable person you've ever known, and he's likely to resemble Hymie from that point-of-view. Of course, he's also vulnerable, and people can identify with that. He's thick-skinned--or at least he seems to be--and that's a universal trait. He's flamboyant, and he fits that mold. Educated, worldly, crude. Put all of those traits into a single person, and you have someone unique. But, unique or not, he's still identifiable. He's still someone the reader can relate to. And like.
AmSAW: You mention likeability a lot. Is that important in your writing--to create likeable characters? HERDA: Definitely. Oh, a writer can sell an unlikable person as the protagonist, but it's much easier if your main character has at least a few redeeming features going for him.
AmSAW: In the end, after all is said and done, what's it all about for you? HERDA: You mean writing?
AmSAW: Yes. HERDA: Or writing fiction?
AmSAW: Both. HERDA: Well, writing is my job. It's the reason I was placed here on earth. I'm good at what I do because I studied long and hard to become the best writer I could possibly be. I took jobs that would help me grow as a writer. Besides reporting and editing, I taught writing at the college level for years. I also write about writing--how to do it effectively--whenever I get the chance. All those things are great ways to learn to be a better writer. Writing fiction is like the icing on the cake. Not only do I get to do my job, but also I get to enjoy it. Don't get me wrong. I like nonfiction writing, too. But fiction...wow! There's nothing else quite like the feeling of taking a blank piece of paper and starting out on a roller-coaster ride through life. And knowing it all came from somewhere deep inside your own cranium. AmSAW: Paper? Don't tell me you actually still write on paper! HERDA: Oh, God, no. I threw away my last typewriter one day when a publisher contracted me to write a kids' book on computers. I was halfway through my research, pounding out the pages on an old IBM Selectric, when it suddenly dawned on me just how great computers really are. I've been writing on computers ever since. I wouldn't own another typewriter if you gave it to me!
AmSAW: Which brings up one last point. I just happen to have an old IBM Selectric sitting around the house, and I'd be willing to let it go to a happy home. HERDA: Well, keep looking. You'll find somebody crazy enough to take it eventually.
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