Interview

Beyond Noir

A Writer’s Interview with Lynn Kostoff

Andrew Geyer

Page 149 →Sometimes a writer manages to transcend genre and create lasting art. Lynn Kostoff is such a writer. Retired from his position as a professor and writer in residence at Francis Marion University, Kostoff is the author of four novels, with two more on the way. He writes the sort of dark, gritty, crime fiction known as noir. Like most of his characters, however, Kostoff is a transgressor. He refuses to be pinned down by the “rules” of the noir genre. In his own words: “Bottom line, you’ve got to tell a story; but I’ve always tried to do much more.” He has succeeded in gorgeous fashion, and the resulting fiction is unique.

Lynn and I spoke recently about his long career as a writer, and I was most impressed with everything I heard. He has paid his dues and then some. Having grown up on a farm outside Youngstown, Ohio, he put himself through both undergraduate and graduate school with a combination of hard work, scholarships, and plain old-fashioned moxie. He built his decades-long career as a university professor using the same recipe. He began teaching developmental English to college athletes and culminated as a writer in residence at Francis Marion University. But Lynn never forgot his origins. Throughout his career, he continued to teach first-year writers, finding great reward in helping novice writers find their voices. So, it should be no surprise that, over the course of his journey as an author, Lynn has become a writer’s writer—a dedicated craftsperson who has a great deal to teach those of us who aspire to write well and read with a writer’s eye.

I came to our conversation having read two of Kostoff’s four published books: his debut novel, A Choice of Nightmares (Crown Publishers, 1991), and the much more ambitious Late Rain (Tyrus Books, 2010). Because much of our conversation—which teased out Lynn’s philosophies on writing, living, and making art—focused on those two works, a bit of background may be helpful for those who may not yet have read these remarkable novels. A Choice of Nightmares revolves around a self-deluded dreamer named Robert Staples, a second-rate actor who has convinced himself that he is destined to make it Page 150 →big. His “agent” asks him to deliver a package, which Staples promptly loses, forcing him into the heart of a bloody, high-dollar, drug-running operation and drawing him into a relationship with an alluring but pitiless femme fatale. Late Rain revolves around the intersecting needs and desires within a group of characters brought into contact with each other by a murder for hire. When the hit goes wrong and winds up being witnessed by a senior citizen with Alzheimer’s disease, a former homicide detective named Ben Decovic—a scarred widower trying to make peace with his past—has to put together the jagged jigsaw pieces of the crime and his own life.

At the beginning of our interview, I confessed that I have never been much of a noir reader. Rather, I have always had a predilection for what the current market would label as literary fiction, which is to say novels that emphasize character and theme over plot. I quickly followed up that confession with another: “But I love your books.” What followed was an enlightening and delightful conversation about genre and art, language and the nature of perception, and the power of storytelling to capture the most important aspects of life.

Page 151 →Geyer. You said that when you set out to write A Choice of Nightmares, your intention was to do classic noir with all the tropes. Could you remind our readers of those tropes?

kostoff. These were some of the noir tropes I was writing toward, but please remember there are many other subcategories and shadings:

• Nods toward the tenets of existentialism and the dynamics of tragedy, though, as the novelist Dennis Lehane notes, “In Greek tragedy, they fall from great heights. In noir, they fall from the curb”;¹
• Antiheroes and common/everyday men and women as protagonists who are morally ambiguous;
• A sense of fate and free will colliding, usually with fate winning;
• A woman who functions as a femme fatale, which is to say as a temptress, like an Eve or Siren character;
• A confrontation with various forms of evil, both within and without the protagonist;
• A sense of widespread social corruption;
• An ending that denies easy comfort or reassuring closure.

geyer. Next, could you give us an example of each from A Choice of Nightmares and connect each with the incredibly vivid settings in which they play out in the book?

kostoff. Robert Staples, the protagonist, is a definite antihero. He has deluded himself into believing he will one day catch his big break and become a well-known famous actor, but his career has gone no further than work in low-budget films like Ninjas from Neptune, Meat Me, and It Won’t Die. His chasing after celebrity and fame is a mistaken and deformed version of the American Dream.

Staples is also a classic rationalizer; he is adept at blinding himself to consequences and believing his choices will lead to the fulfillment of his desires, and his blindness ultimately leads him into the starring role in a low-budget tragedy.

Page 152 →Staples also believes he has turned his back on “being ordinary” and is destined for fame and all that it promises. He has given up a stable marriage and life to chase his desires; but, like a line of tipped dominoes, every one of his choices leads to his tragic downfall. The femme fatale is a woman named Denice. She is stronger and smarter than all the rest of the males in the novel, but she is also missing a conscience. She is the embodiment of Robert’s fantasies, but he is too blind to see how empty and dangerous they will turn out to be.

Denice is intimately involved in the South Florida drug trade, and Robert’s involvement with her leads him to darker and deeper forms of corruption and evil; in particular, dealing with an “enforcer” who has renamed himself Barry From West Palm, as well as corrupt cops and DEA agents. Like the amoral greed behind the ivory trade in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the presence of cocaine in the drug wars corrupts everything and everyone absolutely.

The action in the novel takes place in South Florida, particularly Miami—referred to by a character as “Maimed-ami” because of the pervasive violence and damage the drug trade has produced—and Key West. In the novel, South Florida is a fallen Eden, and Key West, the southernmost point in the United States, becomes the place where everyone’s luck runs out. The settings felt like the perfect places for Robert Staples’s life and dreams to crash and burn. By the novel’s close, Robert has come to understand the concept of “least common denominator” and his place in the universe.

Geyer. Tell me about your choice of setting for Late Rain.

kostoff. I had originally intended to set the novel in Myrtle Beach, since it is only a couple hours away from Florence, where I live; but I ended up creating an imaginary beach resort, Magnolia Beach, because over the course of four drafts, many of the Grand Strand and Myrtle Beach reference points kept disappearing and changing. It was more than a little frustrating. The Grand Strand, like so many coastal cities, is constantly in danger of overdevelopment, too much of its earlier beauty and charm being replaced by sprawl. I wanted a setting that was on the verge of becoming a boomtown, not one already, so I created Magnolia Beach, known in Late Rain as “The Other Myrtle Beach.”

By doing so, I discovered that I had accidentally bumped into another piece of South Carolina history. It turned out that there also had been another Magnolia Beach, one between Litchfield Beach and Pawleys Island. Page 153 →That beach was famous for The Magnolia Beach Club, founded in the 1930s by Lillian Pyatt. Due to segregation, the Club was for African Americans and listed in the now-famous Green Book. The Club booked concerts by such musical greats as Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, and Ray Charles.² Magnolia Beach and the Magnolia Beach Club were wiped off the map in 1954 by Hurricane Hazel and eventually became known as McKenzie Beach. The resort, rebuilt there, went bankrupt in 1963. In many ways, the Magnolia Beach in my novels echoes the fragile dynamics of the original as well as the current state of the Grand Strand. It is a setting both inside and outside of history, existing like a promise that no one had bothered to keep or remember.

Geyer. You wrote A Choice of Nightmares in the third-person limited point of view. The narrator remains outside the novel’s action, but unlike an omniscient narrator, cannot see everything that has taken place. Could you share why you chose to use that viewpoint and if it was part of the original design when you began the novel?

kostoff. A Choice of Nightmares was my first novel and a big learning experience for me, particularly in choosing and using point of view. In the first draft, I let Robert Staples tell the story himself in the first person, and while that helped me learn more about his character, it ultimately worked against plotting and pacing. The draft was over five hundred pages because I was faithful to his character, especially his overriding ability to lie to himself and rationalize his choices. In the second draft, I decided to use a “close” third-person limited point of view, as if I were looking over his shoulder throughout the novel. This change immediately cut the draft in half and brought the pace and plot into sharper focus.

geyer. Moving on to Late Rain, the viewpoint you used in that later novel is third-person omniscient. Why did you make that choice for this particular book? Was it your original choice?

kostoff. In the early stages, I saw the characters simply as a group of people, each of whom badly wanted something, and the plot complications weren’t planned out. They arose when the personalities and agendas of the characters collided. I tried to nudge and focus the characters’ interactions more dramatically in each subsequent draft. The more the characters interacted and bounced off each other, the more they stayed true to who and what they were, and that’s what finally opened up the complications and conflicts among them and hopefully made the characters more complex and human for readers. Since there was an ensemble set of Page 154 →characters as protagonists, the use of the third-person omniscient seemed to fit best.

Geyer. For me, both as a writer and a reader, the most impressive element in Late Rain is the way you handle that omniscient viewpoint. The way you tie it in with character development is masterful. Specifically (without giving anything away), there are two viewpoint characters with mental handicaps of very different kinds, and the way you capture their individual quirks and challenges in prose almost makes it seem like you’re writing in the first person. Can you give the writers in our audience some insight into how you hit upon that strategy, and also some advice about how they might emulate it themselves?

kostoff. For me, character is bedrock; the plot and conflict grow out of that. I spend a lot of prewriting time doing notes and small sketches of and for each character. I see that as an “audition” of sorts that helps me get a fuller picture of each character. A lot of what I come to discover about the characters doesn’t end up in the drafts, but it does give me a larger and richer sense of who they are. For example, as a sketch exercise, I might give each character two hundred dollars and send them shopping, cataloging what they would buy at the grocery store and then where they’d spend the rest of the money and what on. Their choices suggest sides and elements of their personalities that help to round out their characters.

Another prewriting exercise I do is generating sentence patterns tied to each character. In many respects, syntax echoes consciousness, and consciousness unlocks character and how he or she perceives the world. Generating these sentences is admittedly an intuitive process; but if I stick with it long enough, I eventually find sentences that seem to fit the characters’ personalities. For example, I ended up developing a character by messing around and inverting his original name: Wendall Croy became Croy Wendall. I liked the idea that something did not feel right in the latter, and that led me to developing Croy’s way of perceiving the world and others. Croy is childlike and amoral and has constructed a private system of meaning based on numbers and word rhymes. Croy is a criminal and murderer, but functions in a realm beyond conventional judgments. He is the equivalent of an amphibian.

Another character, Jack Carson, is in the late stages of Alzheimer’s. While I hoped a man with Alzheimer’s witnessing a murder would serve as a good plot hook for readers, I did not want it to devolve into pure melodrama or a plot gimmick. I wanted to capture the feel of someone Page 155 →struggling to hold onto his sense of self and life since a number of sections in the novel are narrated specifically from Jack Carson’s point of view. It took quite a few tries before I found the syntax that reflected the slow ghosting of Jack’s former solid self.

Geyer. Speaking of characters, you said that you tend to people your books with characters who are willing to break rules. Can you expand on that idea of transgression and how you use it to define your characters?

kostoff. Of all the criteria for responding to a piece of fiction, the question of a character’s likeability seems to me to be the most reductive and least productive. It’s the equivalent of donning a set of blinders before you go sightseeing. Crime fiction, noir even more than other genres, seems susceptible to this kind of criticism. It’s hard to imagine crime writers not hearing at some point that their characters are not likeable or not likeable enough to keep readers turning pages.

That begs the question of why readers turn pages in the first place. The impulse for readers to identify with characters is perfectly understandable. It is the basis of one of the oldest bonds between storytellers and their audience. How that bond is defined, though, when it comes to noir can be problematic.

At bottom, noir is rooted in the concept of transgression. Lines are crossed. Rules are ignored. Laws are broken. Ethics and morals are tested. The fine print in the social contract is exposed. The everyday world and its foundations are put on trial. Because of that, noir does not always show the best sides of humanity. In every respect, it asks for an uncomfortable identification from the audience. Uncomfortable but necessary.

Likeable characters are a different story. They reassure us of our place in the universe and reinforce what we want to see in ourselves. In fiction, they are the mirrors that throw back flattering reflections. But, too often, likeable characters are also synonymous with the status quo. They can be the equivalent of “Do Not Disturb” signs. They may ask the right questions but duck the answers and where they lead.

Noir denies the easy dichotomy between likeable and unlikeable characters and replaces it with a different emphasis and perspective. It asks us to consider the full range of what it means to be human. Noir then goes on to ask the hard questions and doesn’t flinch at the answers, and there’s nothing comfortable in that. Because of that, the endings in noir works often are morally ambiguous or open-ended. The “mystery” is not solved, but deepened and enlarged.

Page 156 →Geyer. As we wind toward a close, I’d like to move to more general questions. Can you talk about your literary influences? For example, we briefly discussed echoes of The Great Gatsby in A Choice of Nightmares. Which writers have you learned the most from, and which do you recommend for our writerly audience to read and why?

kostoff. Two writers have been especially important to me: Flannery O’Connor and Nathanael West. At bottom, though, I think I’ve learned from every writer I’ve ever read, both in terms of what is done well and what isn’t. To read like a writer has always been important to me, and there are dozens and dozens of writers that have influenced me in large and small ways. I used to make it a practice of giving my writing students a two- or three-page, single-spaced list of recommended writers based on what they’d written for the class. The influences are everywhere once you start looking.

Geyer. Can you also talk about your love of film and whether your writing has been influenced by any films/directors in particular?

kostoff. As with writing influences, it’s hard to narrow down directors who have been important to me, but the primary ones that come to mind (though that could probably change tomorrow) are Terrence Malick/Badlands; Robert Altman/McCabe and Mrs. Miller and Nashville; Roman Polanski/Chinatown; David Lynch/Mullholland Drive; Billy Wilder/Double Indemnity and Sunset Boulevard.

geyer. And finally, is there anything in particular that you’d like to leave our audience with? Anything at all?

kostoff. Please read and read, and then read some more and support authors you love by word-of-mouth recommendations and with online reviews.

There is so much here to carry away, think over. But for me, I think the main thing that I keep coming back to from both the novels and the interview is the idea of redemption.

Raymond Chandler, another noir author whose work transcends the tropes of genre and rises to the level of literary art, once wrote that “In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption.”³ That is certainly the case in the work of Lynn Kostoff. The open-ended nature of the fates of Robert Staples and Ben Decovic, as each of the novels in which they figure as protagonists comes to a close, seems to imply that redemption is possible. Difficult. Costly. But possible. A different, perhaps darker, example of the hope for redemption in Kostoff’s work is the reader’s last Page 157 →glimpse into the consciousness of Jack Carson in Late Rain, as seawater washes around his waist. The night is falling, and the tide is rising. But the ocean is perhaps our greatest universal symbol of rebirth.

As a most important coda, in addition to A Choice of Nightmares and Late Rain, Kostoff’s other published works include the novels Broken Hymns (Shotgun Honey, 2025), The Length of Days (Stark House, 2025), Words to Die For (New Pulp Press, 2014), and The Long Fall: A Novel of Crime (Carroll & Graf, 2003).

Andrew Geyer currently serves as chair of the English department at the University of South Carolina Aiken and managing editor at The Petrigru Review. He is a member of the Texas Institute of Letters and the South Carolina Academy of Authors Literary Hall of Fame. His latest book is Southern Voices: Fifty Contemporary Poets (Lamar University Press, coedited with Tom Mack). His latest individually authored book is the story cycle Lesser Mountains (Lamar University Press). Honors for Geyer’s fiction include an IPPY, an INDIE, and two Spur Awards. He also has a long list of editorial credits, including coediting the award-winning composite anthology A Shared Voice (Lamar University Press, coedited with Tom Mack).