Tochi Onyebuchi is the author of Goliath, a Locus Award and Dragon Award finalist, the young adult novel Beasts Made of Night, which won the Ilube Nommo Award for Best Speculative Fiction Novel by an African, its sequel, Crown of Thunder, and War Girls. His novella Riot Baby, a finalist for the Hugo, the Nebula, the Locus, and the NAACP Image Awards, won an Ignyte Award, the New England Book Award for Fiction, and an ALA Alex Award. He holds a B.A. from Yale, a M.F.A. in screenwriting from the Tisch School of the Arts, a Master's degree in droit économique from Sciences Po, and a J.D. from Columbia Law School. His latest novel is Harmattan Season and he recently talked about it with Daryl Maxwell for the LAPL Blog.
What was your inspiration for Harmattan Season?
Back in college, I took a seminar (shoutout to Prof. Grimstad) on detective fiction, and that was my intro to Dashiell Hammett and G.K. Chesterton, Raymond Chandler and the like. I was also reading a bunch of crime fiction at the time. Dennis Lehane, George Pelecanos, and Richard Price all wrote for The Wire and both Lehane and Price have a claim at having written the Great American Novel with Mystic River and Clockers between them. And that’s not even to talk about Ray Chandler’s The Long Goodbye! I always admired how writers of detective fiction and crime fiction were engaged in the business of social examination. These novels are social novels in a lot of the ways Zola and Balzac were writing social novels, and I always really dug how, if you scratched through the genre conventions, you could find this massive world of social and thematic commentary. Harmattan Season was me seeing if I could take a stab at that kind of work.
Are Moussa, Oumar, the Urchin, Aissata, Zoe, Zanga, or any of the other characters in the novel inspired by or based on specific individuals?
They’re all tropes I’ve seen on screen or come across in books, so no specific individuals or characters come to mind. I think I just wanted to capture the aura of cool and fun that stayed in my memory whenever I saw any prototype of these characters in a piece of fiction.
How did the novel evolve and change as you wrote and revised it? Are there any characters or scenes that were lost in the process that you wish had made it to the published version?
Except for the final chapter, what you’re reading now is pretty much what I wrote in the first draft. Easily the smoothest writing and editing process I’ve ever gone through. MUCH less strenuous than Goliath.
Bouba is a direct descendant of Sam Spade & Philip Marlowe! You really nailed the hard-boiled, down on his luck, waiting for his next case detective that noir fans have loved since the 1940s. Was he as much fun to write as he is to read?
Oh, he was SO much fun to write. I could tell he’d been living in me for a while, because his voice came to me instantly and was a constant guiding light throughout the whole writing process. Also, it was not difficult for me to relate to how broke he was/is
Harmattan Season is being promoted as "hard-boiled fantasy noir." I’m guessing you are a fan of noir fiction and/or films? What are some of your favorite novels, films, and/or series? Who are your favorite authors and/or filmmakers?
Ray Chandler, of course. Walter Mosley’s Devil in a Blue Dress was also a huge inspiration. James Ellroy’s kinda gonzo noir fiction was also at the back of my mind. His stuff is absolutely off-the-wall. Daniel Woodrell’s Winter’s Bone made a huge impact on me and was kind of my first taste of Ozarks Noir or, noir that took place outside of big cities or Icelandic landscapes. Noir, especially in film, is a huge genre and you can find, in it, everything from Reservoir Dogs to The Big Lebowski. Heat and Miami Vice (both from Michael Mann) are personal favorites. I’ve probably seen Collateral like 50 times. Training Day, Nightcrawler, I could go on. All of this is to say that the noir vibe is very elastic and can be stretched to so many different scenarios and landscapes, which is why I didn’t worry at all about whether it would work in a fantastical West African setting.
Do you have a least favorite? (I realize that you may not want to address this one, and if that is the case, please don't. But I also realize it might be so bad that it could be fun to answer.)?
If I Speak They Will Ban Me dot jpeg.
What do you think it is about noir detective stories that draws you, as an author and/or reader, to these types of stories?
The vibe is a mix of being oppressed by forces infinitely larger than yourself (the capriciousness of the universe, oligarchy, etc.) and still managing to be cool and try to do the right thing. I know Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy isn’t technically noir or anything, but it’s at heart a detective novel. It’s a closed-room mystery. It’s pudgy, bespectacled George Smiley in a room unmasking the rot at the very heart of post-war English society.
Harmattan Season NEEDS to be adapted into a film or television series! If/when it was going to be adapted, who would your dream cast be? Your dream director?
Fam, Tell Me About It! By the time this runs, I’ll (insh’Allah) have seen Sinners, but already, I’d take any meeting with Ryan Coogler. If Mahershala Ali’s willing to put on a few pounds, I think he’d make an astounding Bouba.
What’s currently on your nightstand?
David Milch’s memoir, Life's Work. Deadwood is absolutely on my Mount Rushmore of Golden Age of American TV. I always keep a copy of A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon within arms' reach. Easily my favorite book of the past decade. (Has it already been a decade?!)
What is the last piece of art (music, movies, TV, more traditional art forms) that you've experienced or that has impacted you?
You wanna talk about closed-door thrillers? Conclave was my JAM!
What are you working on now?
Another Africa novel, of course.
