What led you to start writing a mystery series about a private eye who's a skewed version of yourself with the same name and a love of country music?
I think I wrote out of desperation, which is the best fuel for writers. I was in New York at the time, playing at the Lone Star Cafe, doing large amounts of Peruvian marching powder. I'd always liked mysteries because I guess they offer us a resolution, and life itself so rarely does. These are sort of semi-authorized autobiographies, and fiction, I've always found, sails dangerously close to the truth. I like to say that the line between fiction and nonfiction is one that I snorted in 1978.
In an odd way, your narrative voice evokes comparison to P.G. Wodehouse.
I haven't read him, but I have heard that before, so I guess I should. He's dead—death is the best editor. Those books by dead people are just pretty good.
Your latest Kinky Friedman novel, The Prisoner of Vandam Street, has a somber, downbeat tone. Is that due to the recent loss of your father?
Yes, it is. I think my life is a work of fiction, whatever's happening at the time influences me a lot because the books are written very fast. The next book will be the last one, wherein the Kinkster dies, called Ten Little New Yorkers.
Why did you decide to end the series?
The same reason Conan Doyle did—the main character was starting to get up my sleeve, and it's easy enough to kill off the other characters—it's a little harder to kill off yourself. If I hear the literary community clamoring for the return of the Kinkster, I'll have to invent a return.
What else are you up to?
I've just completed the [Texas] governor's ball tour, different balls from around the state for my race for governor. With the kind of people who are rallying to the campaign—everybody from George W. to Molly Ivins—it's off to a great start.
Wasn't there talk at some point about a movie based on these books?
The closest we came was Bill Clinton had me to the White House and tried to get a movie deal for me at Paramount Pictures with Sherry Lansing. She asked me, "The president says you write marvelous books that would make great movies, but who do you see playing Kinky?" I told her I see Lionel Richie and negotiations broke down from there. They're probably too good for Hollywood.
How do you approach writing?
Most of our successful writers today all write for their readers, so they're all essentially artistic whores. If you write for yourself only, you're a self-absorbed asshole, so I kind of write with an utter disregard for anybody, including myself. Sometimes I'm writing stuff and I say nobody is going to get this—you've got to be a Jewish Eskimo from Indiana to understand the joke. It's precisely that sort of line that gets a lot of mail, so I just pretend I'm Oscar Wilde behind bars with my hair on fire. And of course it helps that I'm an unemployed youth, that I don't have a day job, that I can write whenever I feel like it. Then there's the absence of self-doubt. In other words, a voice in my head is telling me this is good, people are going to like this, they're going to get this. I think the more miserable I am, the funnier I write. When I'm happier, the books tend to be a little flat. I'm 59 years old, though I read at the 61-year-old level. I've tried not to be too successful in my own Iifetime, so I don't have that obstacle in front of myself because I know that mass success is the kiss of death. This is like interviewing a man in a mental hospital, isn't it? Please just call The Prisoner of Vandam Street a great dark existential novel.
