Interview By Brad Quinn

Corson Hirschfeld

Corson Hirschfeld is a native Cincinnatian, but his debut novel Aloha, Mr. Lucky (Forge) is set faraway in the land of Don Ho. The book concerns Star Hollie, a downbeat journalist who takes out a personal ad -- LADIES MEET MR. LUCKY -- with the hope of turning his experience into a magazine article. Hollie gets a variety of responses, from jail bait to a gorgeous widow, but his plan takes a sinister turn when one of the women ends up dead on the beach.

Oddball characters and smart, funny dialogue along the lines of Elmore Leonard and Carl Hiaasen make Aloha, Mr. Lucky a standout in the saturated field of mystery novels.

CityBeat recently spoke with Hirschfeld, who's already plugging away on his third novel. A photographer by trade, Hirschfeld also has a keen interest in archeology, mythology and history. His photographs of ritual places and objects of traditional cultures have appeared in the Smithsonian Museum and the Museum of the American Indian. His journalistic photography has appeared in Sports Illustrated, Omni and Newsweek among other magazines.

CityBeat: With your broad interests, how did you come to write a mystery novel?

Corson Hirschfeld: I've written some magazine articles and some essays on anthropological subjects and some zoology and that sort of thing, but I'd never done fiction. And I'd been doing some reading of fiction, which I've done all along. But I found something both positive and negative in the books I'd read, and I wondered whether I could do the same thing. The Hawaiian experience gave me the general idea for the story, because there is an ongoing dynamic in Hawaii between the traditional and the new and between development and preservation. And also I had been in Hawaii and there is really relatively little fiction set there, curiously enough. It seemed such a rich place to me. I think I was on the beach and I wanted something to read -- you know how you do on vacation -- and I couldn't find anything. So I kind of wrote what I think I wanted to read.

CB: Were you ever intimidated by the number of mystery novels that are published every year?

CH: Well, I think, fortunately, I didn't really think it through that far (laughing). When you're really interested in it, you just do it, and then I guess you're pretty close to finished with it before you realize how daunting the rest of it is. You think you're over the hump, and you're just barely starting. So I really didn't give that too much thought. I didn't sit down and say "What would the best genre be to write in or what would be the best cast of characters" or whatever. It just sort of happened.

CB: It seems to me that Aloha, Mr. Lucky has something in common with the Florida mystery writers like Carl Hiaasen or John McDonald.

CH: Yeah, I've probably read all of Hiaasen's work, and I really enjoy the humor in it. I think that probably inspired me to work the humor into this, although it really started as a very straight novel. But as soon as I got into some of the characters, they started becoming humorous, and before I knew it, that was the direction it took. But I think Hiassen gave me some rationalization and justification for the humor. I think the humor is kind of an unconventional thing to put in a novel like that. But if you know someone else has done it and gotten by with it, it's helpful.

CB: Apart from humor, you also share Hiassen's interest in environmentalism in the novel.

CH: Yeah, that just comes out of my own concerns. Over the years a lot of the places that I visited that were once wild are now paved over. And then in archeology, the same kind of thing has happened. So I'd have to say that I'm a preservationist at heart, concerned a lot with the environment, and that just kind of came out in the novel. It really wasn't conscious from the start. I'm sure I share that same concern with Hiassen. I guess my concerns are probably more generalist than his. He's very Florida specific.

CB: Do you have plans to write more novels with the main character of Aloha, Mr. Lucky, Star Hollie?

CH: Well I've actually completed the second novel, but I did not use Star Hollie, I used the archeologist Digger Fitz, a secondary character from the first novel. He's a Hawaiian archeologist, and he travels to Eastern Kentucky to visit a cousin for a reunion. He arrives in the hills of Eastern Kentucky to find his cousin murdered and himself surrounded by county cops. He's sort of an old hippie and he doesn't feel real comfortable around cops and finds himself the primary suspect in his cousin's death. So most of it takes place in eastern Kentucky, with some asides in Cincinnati, which people here will enjoy.

CB: How has the reception been for Aloha, Mr. Lucky?

CH: Around here it's been excellent. But it's kind of hard to get a handle on it elsewhere. I kind of watch the Amazon page, for whatever it's worth, They have a listing (of how well books are selling through Amazon) and it started out at around 900,000 (laughing) and it's down in the low four-digits generally, which is pretty good. I don't really know what it means, but you can compare it to other titles and it seems to be holding well. The people I've talked to who've read it seem to be enjoying it a lot and that's probably the most rewarding to me, but I guess, as they say, time will tell. ©

E-mail Brad Quinn

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