Guest Post from Mark Rogers, author of Koreatown Blues

TITLE: Three Steps to KOREATOWN BLUES

By Mark Rogers

“As usual, I was the only white guy in the place.”

I had the first line of my crime novel KOREATOWN BLUES. From there the writing flowed; a series of 1,000 word days and a first draft in two months. But it took several steps to get to that first line.

#1

First, there was a solo stint in a one-room sublet in LA’s Koreatown that went on much longer than originally planned. The room had one window that looked out on a brick wall close enough to touch. I could stand it for a couple of nights at a time and then I’d have to escape. I took to going to a Koreatown nightclub a few blocks away. As far as I could tell the club had no name, just a plastic sign out front that said “Wine Beer.”

Inside, the Korean regulars welcomed me and yes, I was the only white guy, which was usually the case the months I frequented the club. They handed me a microphone within minutes of my sitting down at the bar and like that I was singing a karaoke version of “Yesterday.” Much like my protagonist Wes in Koreatown Blues, I began dropping in most nights for a couple of Hite beers and to sing a few songs.

My nights drinking beer and singing karaoke led to a one-sided romance with a Korean barmaid (I held up my side) and lots of glimpses into Korean culture. This served me well when I was writing KOREATOWN BLUES, while research filled in the missing bits.

Some wild things never made it into the novel, like the guy who insisted on playing the drums on my head with his chopsticks, until I raised my fist and called him outside; or the Korean who sang an impassioned version of the love theme from Titanic, “I Will Go On” and then at song’s end pulled out an envelope from inside his shirt: X-rays showing his inoperable lung cancer.

An Interview with Mark Rogers, author of Koreatown Blues

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

Koreatown Blues by Mark Rogers ... a review

A man walks into a Korean karaoke bar and …

It sounds like the beginning of a joke but it’s not, and by the time the first chapter of Mark Rogers’ outstanding Koreatown Blues concludes with a bang, you’ll realize it’s just the opening riff of a mystery that revitalizes the L.A. noir tradition from the inside out. Readers who know Los Angeles will be delighted by the specificity of the local color. (I lived in Koreatown when I first moved to L.A., and Rogers nails it.)

The story is tight, the prose is taut, and the pacing is cinematic as Rogers unspools his plot, a fantastic thing involving blood feuds and murdered husbands and what the proprietor of the bar refers to (with grim understatement) as “bad business.”

All that would be pleasure enough, but Rogers also knows how to flesh out a character so that everyone from his Latino employees to a flirtatious gypsy cab driver have their moments to shine on the page. Rogers’ L.A. is people with hard-working immigrants who give the lie to stereotypes, racist cops who couldn’t care less how people see them, wannabe actors, and cranky old guys like Jules, Wes’ former boss, who used to tell him that you can outsource a lot of things in America but you still have to go local to get a haircut, your sink fixed, or your car washed.