Jay Russell, Jay S. Russell, J.S. Russell & Marty Burns
by Paula Guran

A version of this interview first appeared in:
DarkEcho 07.02.98 [V.5 #27]

Although Jay Russell's three novels [BLOOD, BURNING BRIGHT, and CELESTIAL DOGS (see reviews of Burning Bright & Celestial Dogs)] were first published in England, where Russell lives, he was born and raised in New York, went to Cornell University for his BA and MA, then on to the University of Southern California for a PhD in communications. Grad school burned him out and he decided against professorial life in the groves of academe. Having toyed unsuccessfully with fiction writing back in undergraduate days, he started writing short stories while in L.A. Russell sold his first story, "City of Angels" to Jessie Horsting at Midnight Graffiti who sent it on to Paul M. Sammon. Sammon picked it up for anthology SPLATTERPUNKS, which wound up appearing before the issue of Graffiti came out.

Russell wrote a few more short stories after that, but he claims his misses greatly exceeded his hits. Having exhausted his academic funding, Russell supported himself in LA by working for an investigations agency. "They did dull insurance investigations, but it was a proverbial interesting experience." And, "If you weren't cynical when you started, which I was," says Russell, "you surely would end up hating humankind in the end. The only thing scarier than our clients were the people I worked with at the agency: junkies, closet queens, movieland wannabes, con-men and -women, mafiosi -- a lovely bunch."

Russell also wrote a novel while in L.A., BLOOD, that attracted the interest of a top New York agent who then couldn't sell it. The writer learned that "top agents are only 'top' if they sell your books." Meanwhile he had met his future wife in grad school in L.A., "She's English, so I moved to London with her."

Another novel, CELESTIAL DOGS, ensued and Russell was "lucky enough to send it to editor-extraordinaire Stephen Jones who loved it and bought it for the Raven line at Robinson Publishing." Jones soon left Raven, but Raven bought BLOOD and commissioned a sequel to DOGS: BURNING BRIGHT. U.S. rights for DOGS and BURNING BRIGHT went to St. Martin's Press (and French rights to Editions J'ai Lu for DOGS and BLOOD.)

Gordon Van Gelder of St. Martin's claims, "Editorially, I pounced on the books when I saw them -- I loved Russell's story in SPLATTERPUNKS and I thought I'd found a very smart and talented writer whom I could exploit mercilessly."

Whether Russell has been exploited mercilessly or otherwise is, no doubt, an unanswerable question, but he has had an identity crisis with his auctorial name. "When I started writing short stories, I used J.S. Russell, but when I sold CELESTIAL DOGS to Raven, they said that initials are less commercial, so could I use Jay Russell. I wasn't really bothered, so I said yes. Then when St. Martin's bought U.S. rights, they said that they preferred the initials, because it was more commercial." (That, as Russell says, "should tell you all you ever need to know about publishing.") The U.S. edition of DOGS went out as by J.S. Russell. The author then decided he wanted to stick with just the one name, so he asked if St. Martin's minded if he used Jay S. Russell for BURNING BRIGHT as a kind of compromise. Got that? (I won't even confuse this any further by saying anything about the fact that neither J. S. or Jay Russell is his realname.)

A more important confusion may be that bookstores seem not to know where to shelve the books. "Are they horror? Mystery? Fantasy? The solution seems to be not to stock them at all," says Russell. Although he says a few mystery reviewers seem to have had trouble with the horror elements in the books, horror readers are definitely more open-minded in their approach to new stuff.

St. Martins has also contracted Russell for a third novel, BROWN HARVEST, even though no American publisher has picked up BLOOD. Other than terminal myopia on the part of American publishers and, perhaps, an aversion to the "h"-word on their part, Russell isn't really sure why this is. "BLOOD is a *very* graphic novel," he admits, "And I think publishers can't imagine marketing it as anything but horror, despite the fact that it has a police procedural structure, SF elements and not a trace of the supernatural. It could easy sell as mystery or thriller if only a publisher would take a shot." The author doesn't think it's his best novel, "but I think it's the most purely fun thing I've written. It is meant to be a relentless, in-yer-face thrill ride of a book and while I may be biased, I think it would make a hell of an action movie. I still have hopes that it will eventually find a U.S. publisher, but at the moment none of the big boys seem interested in handling anything other than military space opera and dragonfart fantasy."

Russell's BRIGHT and DOGS protagonist, Marty Burns, is _quite_ a character: "I like Marty," says Russell, "He's who I'm not quite clever enough to be, offering those *esprit d'escalier* lines that I wish I was quick enough to deliver in real life. In his connections to and comments on Hollywood he is a kind of distillation of my experience of living in LA, where everyone really does think they're in The Business, and it's box office uber alles. Marty is most like me in that he's spent far too much of his life immersed in pop culture. He's least like me in that, when push comes to shove, he's pretty damn courageous. Marty started out at such a low point in CELESTIAL DOGS that I feared I'd messed up the character when I restored to him a measure of celebrity in BURNING BRIGHT. But, as I progressed with the book, I was happy to realize that success will not spoil Marty Burns. The voice is so natural to me, so comfortable, that I feel there's room to do lots more with the character (though I think he has to get back to L.A. for his next adventure). How publishers might feel about that proposition is a different question."

Both Burns and his creator are seeped in American pop culture, but the longer Russell lives in England, "the more my references become English/European. Given that the Marty Burns books are so heavily pop culture influenced, I sometimes worry about losing track of my referential roots. Does this mean the author is eventually moving back to the U.S.? "Our dream is to be able to afford to maintain a place in both countries, but that remains a distant dream for now. I visit the States about once a year and live on the Net for U.S. news (especially baseball). Living in another country is a remarkable experience and changes the way you see your native land -- I've tried to express some of this, along with observations about life in England, in BURNING BRIGHT. American culture/pop culture is *so* pervasive, and the American economy so central to the world, that you hear a lot more about the US in England than you do about the whole rest of the world in the U.S. So I do try to keep in touch with American life. Mostly, I miss the food: English cuisine is everything it's cracked up to be (ever see jellied eels?). And mad cows to boot. Man, some days I'd kill for a decent burger. Can't get that via email. Yet."

Currently at work on the "peculiar mystery" novel BROWN HARVEST, Russell thinks he should finish by the end of the summer and assumes St. Martin's will have it out in mid- to late 1999. As the title suggests, the book has "something to do with Hammett's RED HARVEST, but it is mostly a book about childhood literary icons and growing up in postmodern times. It's kind of Jim Thompson meets the Hardy Boys." He emphasizes, "It is *very* odd." Two Marty Burns short stories will be published in 1998: "The Man Who Shot The Man Who Shot The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence" in DARK DETECTIVES, edited by Steve Jones from Fedogan & Bremer; and "Sullivan's Travails" in DARK TERRORS 4, edited by Jones and Dave Sutton, from Gollancz in the UK. His short story, "Lily's Whisper," was selected for Datlow and Windling's YEAR'S BEST.

"The disgustingly talented Michael Marshall Smith" has written a screenplay of CELESTIAL DOGS for Smith and Jones Productions. It is currently being hawked to the various movers and shakers in Hollywood. He admits, "It is such a loopy business that one cannot expect anything to happen, but one -- that's me -- hopes for the best."

Advice for wannabe writers? "There is only one piece of advice to newbies: be the son/daughter or husband/wife of a senior commissioning editor. Or become a supermodel or stand-up comic and then write a novel. The truth is that there is no advice worth a damn. Read a lot. Don't waste your money on those stupid how-to-write books and magazines. You either write or don't write. The rest is a lottery. Don't expect to make a living from writing fiction."

As for Russell, he thanks a supportive and supporting spouse, and "I continue to await the arrival of fame, fortune and the adoration of screaming multitudes (or should that be the screaming adoration of multitudes?), but am very grateful to be in print and working."

Meanwhile, I'm trying to figure out how to email Russell a decent burger.