A new Gabriel Valjan novel is always reason to celebrate, and this one hits close to home! Gabriel tackles many of the same themes that I do – the unreliability of memory and our tendency to reframe history to suit our needs – though in his case, that history is the post-war era of the Cold War, the Red Scare, and the rise of the Mob. Book three in “The Company Files, The Devil’s Music comes out today. Here’s Gabriel to talk about his process, and how we shape and re-shape history to suit our needs.
I write what is inside my head. I can point to two experiences that illustrate how my mind and imagination work. The first example occurred in a freshman history class in high school. I was shy, the youngest kid in the room, thirteen years old in a prestigious school and feeling every bit of what we now call Imposter Syndrome.
A priest came in and drew a graph on the blackboard. He said that the chart correlated the economy with a certain violent phenomenon in American life. The x-axis was labeled YEAR, and the y-axis was numbered in multiples of 50. There were two distinct lines in a quadrant above x-y axes, a dramatic inverse relationship. When something went low, something else rose. He asked the class what the graph depicted.
I raised my hand, hesitated, and lowered it. Since I was the only one in the class who was attempting the challenge, he insisted that I speak my mind. I did. He then asked me to provide my logic. I did. It turned out that I was correct. I had deduced two things: the relationship between the price of a commodity, and violence over time.
Cotton and lynching. As the price of cotton declined, lynching increased. The tell for me was that the price of cotton during the Civil War peaked and crashed in the 1890s, which corresponded to a spike in lynching.
The lesson I learned here was that Crime = Economics + Sociology.
The second experience was something my grandmother had said when I asked her what it was like living through World War II. She said that the war was the best thing that had ever happened to our country. Orwellian before I read Orwell, I’d heard, “War is Good.” Every time I hear the song, “War (What is it good for?),” I think of her.
What she meant was that the war had taken the US out of the Great Depression, more so than any of FDR’s New Deal programs. I learned from her that History was more than facts in a book. History shaped the emotional life and psyche of people. I concluded that if war was good for the country, then it was imperative that we either find an enemy or invent one. That this nation has been at war for 93% of its existence says volumes.
By disposition, I’m contrarian. For example, I was taught that slavery was America’s original sin; the Civil War, its great psychological crisis. I’d argue that failing to keep religion out of politics as the Founding Fathers had intended is our mortal sin. When I hear presidents end speeches with, “God bless America,” it sounds wrong to me. As for catharsis, I don’t think we’ll ever recover from a sense of defeat, whether it was the last chopper out of Saigon from the rooftop of the US Embassy in Saigon, or the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan.
An idiosyncratic and quirky sense of humor has shaped me as a writer. Our democracy is an oligarchy, and its bedrock is not some noble experiment; it’s tax evasion, of wealthy men who didn’t want to pay an absentee landlord. The American Dream is not the green light seen in The Great Gatsby, it is Paulie Cicero in Goodfellas who reminds his protégé that no matter what calamities befall someone in life someone is there to say, “F-you, pay me.”
The novel Devil’s Music—like the diminished fifth in music—is discordant and chaotic. I subvert and invert expectations. A woman is in love with a woman. A young girl is the oldest spirit. The CIA are the good guys protecting Nazis they recruited for the Atomic Race. The FBI are the bad guys because of Hoover’s megalomania. Criminals demonstrate more integrity than lawyers do. As the pages turn, the law is about revenge, not what is moral and just. Roy Cohn had chosen from among several statutes the one that made the death penalty inevitable for the Rosenbergs. Robert Kennedy uses his connection to Senator Joe McCarthy to further his ambition. McCarthy was a close friend of the Kennedy family, and godfather to Robert’s daughter Kathleen.
The Devil’s greatest accomplishment was not that he had convinced everyone that he didn’t exist. His achievement through the ages is that he played his music in plain sight, ever so seductive and impossible to ignore.
An irony to consider. The song “Strange Fruit” sung by Billie Holiday was composed by Abel Meeropol, the man who, with his wife, adopted the orphaned Rosenberg children. A song about lynching paid for their education and needs.
The Devil’s Music. 9 November 2021. (Winter Goose Publishing) 240 pages. ISBN-13: 978-1952909139
Gabriel Valjan is the author of the Roma Series, The Company Files, and the Shane Cleary Mysteries. He has been nominated for the Agatha, Anthony, Silver Falchion Awards, and received the 2021 Macavity Award for Best Short Story. Gabriel is a member of the Historical Novel Society, ITW, MWA, and Sisters in Crime. He lives in Boston.