Petaluma native Bill Pronzini has made a career of writing crime fiction novels.

By Chris Samson, Argus-Courier Staff

As a boy growing up in Petaluma in the 1950s, Bill Pronzini was a voracious reader and an avid collector of mystery novels. "I used to haunt the library and buy every paperback I could get my hands on," he said.

His passion for books as a youth blossomed into a literary career and by the time he was in his mid-20s, Pronzini had become a full-time writer. Over a career spanning more than 30 years, Pronzini has authored more than 50 novels and has set the standard for other mystery writers. The Private Eye Writers of America has honored him with its lifetime achievement award and three Shamus Awards.

Pronzini, 58, is best known for his Nameless Detective, a series of 27 books that follow the exploits of a middle-aged private eye in San Francisco. But in recent years he has been concentrating more on stand-alone novels, such as his latest book, In an Evil Time.

In an interview at the west Petaluma house he shares with his wife, crime novelist Marcia Muller, Pronzini talked about the craft of writing, the state of the publishing industry, his collection of vintage books, his latest novel and his decision to retire his Nameless Detective series.

"I've always been a character-driven writer," Pronzini said. "I plot by the seat of my pants. I can't envision a completed book when I sit down to start it. I have a theme, a few characters and a general idea of where I'm going and then I plot as I go along. As you develop the characters, the more ideas occur to you. I think it's a better way to write, because it's the same experience that the reader is getting. It's sort of a voyage of discovery as you go along."

Pronzini is known for the plot twists and turns in his novels. "Those come out of the characters," he said. "They're almost never planned ahead of time. The stronger your characters are, the more well developed and real they are, the more the reader empathizes with them when they are placed in dire straits, like the protagonist in In an Evil Time."

In an Evil Time, recently published by Walker & Company, is about a law-abiding family man, Jack Hollis, who gets caught up in a horrific chain of events when he decides he must do something to protect his daughter who is being stalked by an abusive ex-husband. It is a suspense-filled psychological study that has received positive reviews.

Pronzini is a firm believer in creating a strong sense of place. "That way the reader gets a real feeling of the setting of the book, where it's taking place. I try to do realistic action scenes, a lot of sense of movement - things happening on-stage and off-stage and the characters moving from place to place."

Much of In an Evil Time is set in the fictional town of Los Alegres, which appears in some of Pronzini's other books. "It's Petaluma," he said. "Anyone who lives in Petaluma will recognize the places in town, although I change some of the names slightly."

Pronzini's ideas for his books come from all kinds of places. "I have a hyperactive imagination," he said. "I take different things and try and give them a twist. I try and do something, if not innovative, at least different. With the issue of spousal abuse [in In an Evil Time], I wanted to tell it from the point of view of the family of the abused and how they cope with the abuse. And I also wanted to say something about an individual's rush to judgment. The protagonist makes all the wrong choices, because he wants desperately to save his family, but by the choices he makes, he gets them in deeper and deeper."

In his 1997 novel, A Wasteland of Strangers, set in Lake County, Pronzini tells the story in 17 different first person voices. "I wanted to see if I could pull it off. It's a challenge. You can do stuff like that with stand-alone books. What keeps me interested as a writer is the opportunity to do different things each time out. I can experiment with format, with setting, with character." In his foreword to that book, Pronzini thanked his editor "for giving an old horse free rein on a fresh track."

The desire to try something new explains why Pronzini is ending his Nameless Detective series to concentrate on stand-alone novels. "My publisher is more interested in me doing that kind of book and I am too. There is nothing wrong with series fiction, it's been good to me over the years, but it's limiting. I'm running out of things to do with it and I'm afraid I'm going to start relying strictly on plot and I'm not a plot writer. I would rather end the series than let it become stale." The final Nameless Detective novel, titled Bleeders, is scheduled for January publication by Carroll and Graf.

"I've always treated writing as a business, not an avocation or a hobby," said Pronzini. "I work at least five days a week, sometimes longer when I'm finishing a book. I used to be very prolific and do three or four books a year. Now I'm trying to cut back and do a book a year, that's it.

"The best advice I ever got as a young writer is if you want to be a professional you have to do five finished pages a day. That's about 1,200 to 1,500 words a day. I worked on that schedule for many, many years. Now I might do a little less - two to four pages a day. But still, with two to four pages a day you have a finished book in six to eight months. There are some days you don't feel like doing anything. But you force yourself."

When Pronzini was in high school in the late 1950s, he covered high school sports and the semi-pro football team, the Leghorns, for the Argus-Courier. "I thought I wanted to get into newspaper work. But I was better at making up things than reporting the facts. I always wanted to change it and manipulate it. I think I would have made a lousy reporter."

Pronzini enjoyed reading famed private eye novelists Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett when he was younger, but the writer who had the biggest influence on him was Evan Hunter, also known as Ed McBain. "I learned how to write dialogue from him," he said.

Pronzini's wife Marcia is the author of 28 novels, most of them a series featuring San Francisco private eye Sharon McCone. The couple have co-authored three novels and one non-fiction book. They also read each others' work in progress, functioning as in-house editors. "There's a little bit of each of us in each others' books," said Pronzini. "When one of us runs into a plot problem or can't figure out what to do next, we just talk it out. It works out really well.

"When a manuscript leaves this house, it's usually really clean, because two people have gone over it, not just one. We trust each others' judgment and we also have the same approach to fiction - we're both character-driven writers."

Several rooms of Pronzini's house are lined with shelves to hold his collection of thousands of vintage hardback and paperback books. "I love the cover art on old paperbacks, old hardbacks, the dust jackets," he said. "There was a lot of good writing back then. Nowadays there's too much emphasis on best sellers."

The conglomerate takeover of publishing houses is the biggest change Pronzini has seen in the industry. "It's changed the whole shape of publishing. It's not so much about the quality of the work anymore. It's a product that sells to the broadest number of people. Which means you need to have a big-themed book with a big scope. Those of us who are more interested in character-driven fiction have a lot of trouble competing."

Some of Pronzini's earlier books were published under the pseudonyms Jack Foxx and Alex Saxon. "X is a lucky letter for me," he said. "I was very prolific when I was younger and I didn't want all the books coming out under my own name. I always wanted to be a professional writer and so I did whatever it took to stay in the game, which earlier meant doing a lot of books, short stories, editing anthologies. I wrote science fiction, westerns, a mainstream novel with Jack Anderson, the political columnist, some nonfiction and some book reviews. It was also a learning process. If I hadn't had that gradual learning, getting better and learning my craft as I got older, I probably wouldn't be in the business today. I wrote so much and I learned so much as I went along."

Pronzini considers himself a loner and an escapist - two qualities that have served him well as a fiction writer.

"Loners make good fiction writers," he said. "You can live inside your own head and you don't really have to deal with a lot of other people except at your choosing. You don't have to rely on other people, only yourself."

"I'm also an escapist. I want to just lose myself in escape fiction. The real world bewilders the hell out of me sometimes. I feel more comfortable in an escape situation I can control. When I'm writing a novel I can control what happens. If I want a happy ending I can have one, which is not always the case in life."