Running the Risk in Reverse

Screenwriter-turned-thriller-author Scott Frost is getting marvelous reviews in the UK with his Alex Delillo police procedural series. Frost was brought to British Soil by Headline publishing who have been publishing his work in reverse order, with Never Fear last year, while his debut, Run the Risk, is about to be released in paperback later this month.

In Frost’s startling 2005 debut we find Delillo and her Southern California cop colleagues ensnared in a cat-and-mouse game with a seriously deranged bomber, who may or may not be a serial killer and international terrorist.

As in Never Fear, we see Alex’s family drawn into the mayhem of Risk, only this time it’s the life of Alex’s daughter that hangs in the balance.

After finishing the novel, I was curious how an acclaimed screenwriter ended up as a novelist, as normally it works the other way around, with a novelist becoming a screenwriter. So I decided to ask Frost to tell us a little about how he ran the risk in reverse. Frost did it up by responding at length:

I wasn’t a novelist when I first stepped an uneasy foot into Los Angeles. I was part of that invasion of writers who grew up watching the films of the 1970s that seemed on almost every level an equivalent if not a replacement for the novel. The novel was dead after all. Scorsese was our new poet laureate. Unfortunately no one told me that the 70s were history, and personal films were on life support.

While working for a film studio William Faulkner once asked an executive if they would mind if he wrote at home instead of coming into the studio lot every day where there were far too many distractions to get any work done. They happily agreed. When after a week of not hearing a word from him they dispatched a man to his apartment in Hollywood they discovered that by writing at home, he had meant Oxford, Mississippi.

Like every other writer, Faulkner (if you don’t count the Nobel prize, which did separate him just a bit from the rest of the scavengers) had gone west seeking bags of money and discovered what every writer before and after him has learned if they have any sense, or something approaching a soul: RUN WHILE YOU STILL HAVE A CHANCE!

So 14 years after arriving and faced with the prospect of driving across town to the Warner Brothers lot and having a panic attack in the car, flop sweats in the waiting room and an overwhelming sense of self-dread while sitting with 24-year-old executives telling me the great idea they had for a buddy cop alien invasion love story action adventure coming of age movie, I was finally face-to-face with that most terrible of all dilemmas every writer faces at one time or another if they ever bother to look in the mirror very deeply.

Write a book.

I could do it. No problem. What’s the big deal? Hundreds, thousands of books are published every year. I began as a short story writer. I had always intended to write books before I landed on the set of Twin Peaks talking to David Lynch about the inherent darkness and evil hiding in a bowl of cream corn.

In the words of the writer Red Smith, there’s nothing to it. You just slip a piece of paper into the typewriter and open a vein … and now we have computers, what could possibly be the problem?

There’s a reason the streets and cafes of Los Angeles are filled with people carrying three screenplays in their shoulder bags instead of novel manuscripts. The math alone is daunting. A TV script is 50 pages, a movie 120. Novels, even short ones, are a stack of pages half a foot tall. The sheer physical toll of carrying around that much paper would put most screenwriters in the chiropractor’s office if not a psychiatrist’s.

I remember a screenwriter friend looking at me with a puzzled look, then saying, “so you came to Los Angeles, to become a novelist?” It seemed the equivalent of someone moving to Bermuda to study glaciers.

A year and a handful of days later, I was staring at an eight inch stack of paper that after a rewrite or two became RUN THE RISK. I still went to the odd meeting or two about working on a television show where I would talk about having just finished a book which brought a puzzled reaction most often followed by, “A book … I used to read.”

But when one producer kept me waiting 45 minutes while she sat in her car on Sunset Boulevard talking to a caterer, I suggested to her assistant that a mistake had been made and they had meant she should meet with Scott Frost the screenwriter, not Scott Frost the novelist.

Shortly thereafter I followed Faulkner’s example and went home to work … in Montana.