The Remains and Moonlight Falls author Vincent Zandri is an award-winning, best-selling novelist, essayist, and freelance photojournalist. His novel As Catch Can (Delacorte) was touted in two prepublication articles by Publishers Weekly and was called brilliant upon its publication by the New York Post. The Boston Herald attributed it as, “The most arresting first crime novel to break into print this season.” Other novels include Godchild (Bantam/Dell) and Permanence (NPI). Translated into several languages including Japanese and Dutch, Zandri’s novels have also been sought out by numerous major movie producers, including Heyday Productions and DreamWorks. Presently he is the author of the blogs, Dangerous Dispatches and Embedded in Africa for Russia Today TV (RT). He also writes for other global publications, including Culture 11, Globalia, and Globalspec. Zandri’s nonfiction has appeared in New York’s Newsday, Hudson Valley Magazine, Game and Fish Magazine, and others, while his essays and short fiction have been featured in many journals including Fugue, Maryland Review, and Orange Coast Magazine. He holds an MFA in writing from Vermont College and is a 2010 International Thriller Writer’s Awards panel judge. Zandri currently divides his time between New York and Europe. He is the drummer for the Albany-based punk band The Blisterz. His noir novel The Concrete Pearl is forthcoming from Stone Noir next year.
We’re talking today to Vincent Zandri about his latest thriller, The Remains. Thank you for this interview, Vincent. Can we begin by having you tell us why you chose to write thriller novels opposed to other genres? Do you think perhaps you might write another genre one day or will you stick to thrillers that you are widely known for?
I’ve actually written and published in several genres, from literary to noir to mainstream thriller, as is the case with The Remains. Actually my publisher for The Remains, Stone House Ink, is more known for their Edgy Christian Fiction novels, than anything else. So now there will be people in the industry out there who will scratch their heads and say, When did Zandri switch up to Christian? But it turns out that in this case, the Christian designation is a mere technicality. I’m not a practicing Christian. But the publisher, Aaron Patterson, is one of those once-in-a-lifetime young editors who just happens to love your work and will do anything to publish it. In Christian terms, he’s been a gift from heaven for me and resurrecting my career, which one (nameless and shameless) major publisher in New York almost succeeded in burying. He’s even publishing my out-of-print books and willing to start a brand new imprint in order to do it: Stone Noir. So you see, while I get to remain in my noir, thriller, comfort zone, Aaron gets to publish both Christian fiction and something quite different from Christian fiction while at the same time, bringing the two audiences together. Pretty ingenious when you think about it. But to answer your question more specifically, I will definitely one day write outside the thriller box, be it a more literary effort like my first novel, Permanence (which is being republished later this year in e-book and trade paper), and/or memoir. In fact, my most anthologized literary short story, “Portrait” has been translated into French and will be published in Paris’s new arts and literary magazine Chos’e.
