Mark Rogers is a writer and artist
whose literary heroes include Charles Bukowski, Willie Vlautin and Charles
Portis. He lives most of the year in
Baja California, Mexico with his Sinaloa-born wife, Sophy. His work has
appeared in the New York Times, Village Voice and other publications and his
travel journalism has brought him to 54 countries; these trips have provided
plenty of inspiration for his novels and screenplays. His crime novel Koreatown
Blues will be published by Brash Books, Feb. 2017; his mystery novel Red Thread
is available from Endeavour Press. Drop into his Wordpress blogs Pissing on My Pistols and Mark Rogers – Author https://markrogersauthor.wordpress.com/ for news about upcoming books from him.
You’re a journalist. Did you start off with
short stories or dive right in to fiction?
I started
writing fiction in the fifth grade, which was the year I discovered the writer
Edgar Rice Burroughs, the author of the Tarzan series. Reading was probably
like a drug for me, a way to shut out the world. I’ve never been drawn to
writing short stories, and didn’t write fiction at all for many years, until
the 1980s, when I wrote the novella now titled “Night Within Night.” Other
unpublished novels followed, as well as unproduced screenplays. Luckily, I
found rewards in the process, since I had very little encouragement. This all
changed last April, when I had four novels contracted in one month, from four
different publishers. Some of these works had been knocking around for decades,
while others, like “Koreatown Blues,” were written in the last year or so. That
very first novella, “Night Within Night” will be published next year by
London-based Endeavour Press. I’m very psyched to have made the transition from
“writer” to “author.”
Most writers are readers, who are the
writers who influenced you?
It’s a bit
like an archeological dig, with the deepest layer being Edgar Rice Burroughs,
up to Knut Hamsun and Henry Miller in my late teens, to Charles Bukowski,
Charles Portis, Charles Willeford, and Willy Vlautin. I’ve come to enjoy a
crisp, clean line, which is what I try to do in my own work. Kaurismäki.
On the crime novel
side, I’m a big fan of John D. MacDonald, Elmore Leonard, and Raymond Chandler.
There are other one-offs that I cherish, like “The Hustler” by Walter Tevis,
and “Fat City” by Leonard Gardner. I think I’m also influenced by film,
especially the movies by Finnish director Aki 
