Back in early 2012, I conducted a brief (okay . . . perfunctory) interview with movie-maker-turned-thriller-author Neil Russell. I knew there was a lot more about this man that I wanted to learn and share with you. Well, Neil graciously agreed to a longer (okay . . . long) interview. And I’m so glad he did: This one may be the most entertaining author interview I’ve yet conducted.
Neil’s remarkable life and colorful personality can’t be captured adequately even by his impressive biography. If you’re a movie or TV watcher, I’m sure you’ve seen some of the motion pictures he’s been associated with as a studio executive. Many are now considered classics. Born into a theatre-owning family, Neil Russell began his career in theatres, joined Paramount Pictures and later Columbia in theatrical distribution, where he handled some of the most acclaimed motion pictures of that era, including “The Godfather I and II,” “Chinatown,” “Serpico,” “Death Wish,” “Saturday Night Fever,” and “The Way We Were.”
Movie-maker and thriller author Neil Russell
Recruited by MGM prior to their acquisition of United Artists, he was charged with merging, then heading, the combined companies’ television distribution units. During his career, Neil has been a senior executive at Paramount, Columbia, MGM/UA, and Carolco Pictures (which produced the “Rambo” movies, “Terminator 2,” and “Total Recall”). He also founded and led Carolco Television Productions. These days he’s president of Site 85 Productions, which creates, acquires, and produces intellectual properties for motion pictures, television, and music, and which also has begun publishing books through its Rothington House imprint.
As he relates here, Neil has been a storyteller all his life. But after spending his film-making decades telling other writers’ stories, he decided to start writing and publishing his own.
With City of War in 2010, he introduced flamboyant thriller hero Rail Black — a towering, fabulously wealthy, ex-Delta Force operator who lives in Beverly Hills, and who turns his staggering wealth and lethal talents to helping friends in trouble. Rail might be described as a hybrid of John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee and Ian Fleming’s James Bond . . . but about a half-foot taller than either. New York Times best-selling spy author Gayle Lynds described City of War as “utterly gripping,” a “fascinating mystery” with “exciting suspense that doesn’t release the panting reader until the last page.”
Neil has since published two Rail Black sequels, Wildcase and Beverly Hills Is Burning. He started out as a traditionally published author with HarperCollins; but now he publishes independently, through his own imprint.
Rather than continue to summarize his fascinating story, though, why don’t I let him tell it to you himself in his own funny, sometimes salty-tongued fashion?
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The Vigilante Author: Neil, welcome again to “The Vigilante Author.”
Neil Russell: Thanks, Robert.
The Vigilante Author: You’ve created a truly fresh hero in your Rail Black series. The books are attracting quite a following and getting rave reviews. Personally, I love the fact they’re based in and around your stomping grounds in Hollywood. But you’re a movie executive. So how did you get started writing thrillers?
Neil Russell: Though I am third generation in the motion picture business, until now, I had never written about Hollywood. In fact, I had avoided it. So much acreage has been plowed — either brilliantly (see Nathanael West and Elmore Leonard); scathingly (see Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer); or amateurishly by a few who think they know how it works and don’t — that bringing something fresh to the arena can be daunting, even for an insider. Then there’s the problem of pushing back from your keyboard, turning to your bookshelf, and being reminded that Fitzgerald, Chandler, Cain, Ellroy, Huxley, McMurtry, and Schulberg have been there before you. It gives you pause.
The Vigilante Author: Yeah, I can see how it would.
Neil Russell: However, when you grow up and work in this industry, you meet remarkable people, experience things that couldn’t occur anywhere else, and hear stories you think can’t be topped — then they are the next time the door opens. My father used to say that every genius and pissant eventually finds his way to Sunset Boulevard. I steer clear of the pissants, but the chairs in my office have held Nobel Prize-winners and CIA directors, Colombian bounty hunters and Asian warlords, Cold War spies and Chernobyl survivors, along with various rogues and charlatans, and the rich, famous, and talented from all corners of the globe. I’ve also been invited places I never knew existed and discovered that everyone picks up the phone when they hear Hollywood is calling. I never cease being amazed by how fortunate I am.
And thus, into the maw my word processor and I dove.
The Vigilante Author: So, to borrow some ancient jargon from Hollywood gossip columnists, why don’t you dish the dirt about your latest novel?
Neil Russell: My third Rail Black novel, Beverly Hills Is Burning, is an edgy story about old mobsters, new movie studios, gruesome murders, and money — lots of money. It is also about the underlying anxiety of an industry that rides, not on technology or patents or how many shelves you fill at Walmart, but on the fragility of one hundred and twenty pages of words, written in a format few people can evaluate and even fewer can write. Pages that determine the fates of those who pursue the bright lights and those who own them — and upon which rest a trillion dollars of shareholder equity.
Beverly Hills Is Burning takes place in Hollywood, Havana, Palm Springs, and Laguna Beach, with a side trip to 1930s Matamoros, Mexico. And though clearly fiction, the story is rooted in reality. It is also unlike any other I am familiar with. So far, no one has told me otherwise.
The Vigilante Author: Havana? What’s that connection all about?
Neil Russell: For those who came along after Fidel and Che made mass murderer T-shirts fashionable, Havana had two Mafia- and Hollywood-entangled eras: The one portrayed in “Godfather II,” which took place in the 1950s, and a less-remembered but more-sophisticated, high-society version, which occurred twenty-five years earlier. Beverly Hills Is Burning derives half its plot from the one most people never knew existed, and the other half from the shrouded inner workings of modern-day Hollywood.
The Vigilante Author: Could a reader new to your work just dive in with this one, or should he or she start with the first?
Neil Russell: All three Rail Black novels are stand-alones, so it is not necessary to have read the first two, City of War and Wildcase, to enjoy BHIB. (Though, of course, I hope you eventually will.) I must note, however, that my books are not breezy reads but intricate, complex thrillers. They interweave events from the past with connected ones from the present, which requires keeping track of names and events in different time periods.
Eventually, everything comes together, but I’ve not yet had anyone tell me they unraveled the mystery before the reveal. If you like going places you’ve probably never been, looking at things through very different eyes, being challenged and surprised, Rail Black may be for you.
The Vigilante Author: I know enough about your stories to sense a “however . . .” coming.
Neil Russell: A very big “however.” All the Rail Black novels contain violence, profanity, and sex, some of it explicit. BHIB is the most explicit. This is pull-the-blinds, hide-the-picture-of-your-priest storytelling, and I strongly caution sensitive readers. Sometimes the world isn’t pretty — and Hollywood occasionally leads the way.
I encourage everyone to check the reviews at Amazon and Goodreads before buying any of my books — especially the reviews written by people who were not enchanted. My goal is to entertain, not have you fire it through your favorite Rembrandt.
The Vigilante Author: Yeah, I’d sure hate to damage my Rembrandt. So these are straight-out thrillers, right? Or how would you characterize them?
Neil Russell: Since I didn’t set out writing Rail Black from any particular genre standpoint, the books aren’t a straight-out anything. There’s some thriller, a lot of mystery, and definitely crime and suspense. The locations also range from LA across every continent except Antarctica, so the stories travel as well.
The Vigilante Author: But you’ve also taken a fresh approach to subjects and settings.
Neil Russell: The two things I made a conscious decision to avoid were terrorism and ticking nukes about to vaporize Washington or New York or some gentle, tree-lined neighborhood in Dubuque. There are very fine writers who cover those beats and who are so well-versed in the intricacies that I didn’t believe I could be anything more than derivative. More to the point, unconventional characters and entangled personal relationships are what interest me, not global conflagration.
It turned out that my books also have developed a substantial and loyal military following. I’m proud to have them as readers, and I thank them for making America safe for my family. I don’t think the special operator who sent me a recent email would mind my quoting his take on Rail: “Big, bad, rich, and gets laid a lot. Count me in.”
The best way I know to describe my novels is to ask yourself what you would do if you had more money than you could count, and some soulless asshole committed a dreadful act on you, your family, or a close friend. As a civilian, you don’t have the infrastructure of law enforcement, but wealth and celebrity open doors — some even the cops can’t get through. Rail Black’s a door-opener. And he doesn’t come with handcuffs and Miranda.
The Vigilante Author: Rail and Dylan Hunter would get on splendidly. But there are differences, too. What makes your hero special? Does he represent for you what Dylan does for me — an idealized fantasy projection?
Neil Russell: I’ll leave uniqueness to the reader to decide, but Rail Black originated from a voice I’d been using to guide stories and scripts for years, if only from a distance. The kind of man we’d all like to think we could be or would want as a friend. A big, physical man with an attitude and moral underpinning that refuses to be compromised. One who also occasionally makes mistakes — and they bother him. And just to keep it interesting, I endowed him with a heaping helping of wiseass.
Half-Brit, half-Brazilian, all-American, Rail Black is a former Delta Force operator who, through birth and inheritance, is extremely wealthy. He lives in Beverly Hills, and if you’re lucky enough to have him in your Rolodex, he’s the call you make when fools and scoundrels upset the balance of nature.
The Vigilante Author: I was pondering the similarities and differences of our respective heroes, Neil. Both of them are mysterious guys with loads of money and special operations backgrounds. Both are tough, smart, and operate like vigilantes. But I see Dylan Hunter as leaning more in the direction of a hybrid of Batman and Jason Bourne (with some of Ayn Rand’s philosophical pirate-hero, Ragnar Danneskjöld, tossed in); while I see Rail Black as more in the direction of a cross between James Bond and John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee. Am I totally off here? How do you see them?
Neil Russell: I’m not a big fan of the word vigilante. I prefer paladin; it sends people under the age of fifty to the dictionary. Otherwise, I’m good with your assessment. Maybe someday they’ll meet. But give Dylan a heads-up, Rail’s a big dude. How’s that for throwing down the gauntlet?
The Vigilante Author: Game on, dude . . . So, instead of “Wire Paladin, San Francisco,” you “Wire Rail, Beverly Hills.” What else makes him special?
Neil Russell: He has a low tolerance for those who take advantage of others, politicians, badge-heavy cops, and self-appointed, righteous blowhards who stand on the throat of personal freedoms. Rail also — scrunch your toes a little tighter in your Birkenstocks, NPR fans — smokes, which generates more angry mail than all the salacious sex and violence I’ll write in my lifetime.
I will add that Rail has an appetite for women. Smart women who are as attractive on the inside as they are in the mirror. And some of them smoke, too.
The Vigilante Author: Yikes! A rich, sexist, ex-military guy who uses guns! Gee, in a few more years we’ll have to read your books under the covers at night with a flashlight.
So, what kind of man created this Rail Black guy? Where did he come from?
Neil Russell: You may be sorry you asked that, but here goes . . .
I grew up in Canton, Ohio — an industrial city that in all respects was about as far from Hollywood as one could get. It was an era when people worked hard, went to church, took care of their families, held Fourth of July picnics, and rooted for McKinley to beat Massillon. (If you don’t know what that means, it’s not a football game but the American version of the Hundred Years’ War — only with more fighting.)
Though primarily blue-collar, the area was also home to a substantial concentration of wealthy and professional people, who belonged to country clubs, vacationed in the Caribbean (especially Cuba) and gave parties where scandal occasionally appeared. Divorce, however, was rare. Less cheered by the city fathers was that Canton was in the same organized crime circle that encompassed Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Steubenville, and Youngstown. After-hours clubs, gambling, and prostitution were openly on display. Major law enforcement raids were unheard of, but so was violence against innocents. Some would say it was an acceptable trade-off.
The Vigilante Author: Neil, I was born and raised in New Castle, Pennsylvania — twenty miles from Youngstown, sixty miles from Pittsburgh. And back in 1907, they found a Black Hand extortion headquarters in Hillsville, Pennsylvania, just two miles from where I grew up. So I know the area and culture intimately.
Neil Russell: My father was a theatre owner with business interests in several states. My grandfather, a glassmaker by trade, had begun in the entertainment business in a sawdust-floor nickelodeon. In that world, you have to deal with everyone, from the movie-going public down to the thieves and extortionists. More to the point, everybody knows you, which for a kid can be a two-edged sword. Like the time I was getting my hair cut next to one of the local wiseguys and saw him tip his barber five bucks. So the next time I went in, I swiped an Abe Lincoln out of my mother’s purse and slipped it to the barber along with my quarter for the cut. What my mother did to me was small change compared to the lecture from the wiseguy. At eight, I was out of the barber-tipping business for a few years.
The Vigilante Author: Well, at least he let you grow up. Tell me more about your dad.
Neil Russell: My father was a handsome, elegant man who people said looked like Robert Taylor. He wore dark, hand-tailored suits, monogramed, French-cuffed shirts, and never carried anything in his pockets but a handkerchief and a fistful of cash in a solid gold money clip shaped like a dollar sign. He had no business cards, personal stationery, or even a plaque on his office wall with his name on it. He also never referred to himself as an owner of anything, only a manager. That way, he said, if somebody had a complaint, he could tell the guy he’d refer it to ownership.
This carried over to the family. We never used the O-word, which was actually easy because I was out of college before he sat me down and explained what he owned and the deals he’d made to get it. I was dumbstruck — and a little irritated. I’d gotten a Corvette for college graduation; where the hell was it in high school?
Occasionally, he’d take the family along on business dinners, and you’d hear things. Mostly though, as a kid, you’d die of boredom. The one time I remember not being bored was when he was part of a group that had been approached to buy the Cleveland Browns. The price was $4 million. Too expensive, he said. His eye for deals apparently only applied to theatres.
The Vigilante Author: What about your mom?
Neil Russell: My mother, a banker, loathed everything about theatres, show business, and most of the men my father dealt with. She wasn’t too fond of him, either. They’d met in San Francisco during the war when his aircraft carrier docked there. She was a stately platinum blonde who turned heads, and he was already in his thirties with a business — which, unlike most servicemen, meant money in his pocket. He drove her down to Los Angeles in a fancy Packard to party with friends in the movie business, and they became an item. That was the high point of the relationship. She never got over leaving San Francisco — or reminding him that she had. A painting of the Golden Gate hung in her living room until her death.
After my father died, I found some letters from an old girlfriend and went to see her. She met me at the door in high heels, full makeup, jewelry, and a black, sequined evening gown, capped by long, flowing purple boa. She was ninety, but you could see she’d been a looker — and fun. Her laugh was nonstop and infectious. We spent the afternoon together, looking at old pictures in a bulging scrapbook. I learned more interesting things about my father from her than I ever had from him. Like that he’d been a helluva dancer, and the two of them had won contests back before the war. I’d never known him to even listen to music. When we meet again, he owes me a conversation. About a lot of things. Including the dancing gene I didn’t get.
Until he got married, my father lived in a hotel suite. The best one in town. His tailor, Art Drukenbrod, had his shop in the hotel too, and when I was old enough to have my first suit, Art made it. And many that came afterward.
The Vigilante Author: As a kid, did you encounter any famous celebrities?
Neil Russell: My birth was announced from the stage of one of my father’s theatres by Desi Arnaz, who was just a bandleader then. My father and Desi had spent the previous night on the town, showing up at my mother’s hospital room at dawn carrying bottles of champagne. They did a song-and-dance act for the nuns, and the monsignor came over from the rectory for sip of bubbly. My mother, I’m told, held her applause. She also never watched “I Love Lucy.”
Growing up, I met dozens of stars: John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, Gregory Peck, Tyrone Power, Kim Novak, Paul Newman . . . too many to name, really. But it was the men who controlled the business in New York and LA who were far more interesting: Darryl Zanuck, Jack Warner, Harry Cohn, the Schenck brothers. You could actually feel their power, and when you went to dinner with them, everybody — actors, directors, producers — came by the table to get noticed. Also, if you took a sip of water, waiters knocked each other over to keep your glass full. It made an impression.
The Vigilante Author: So you were born in the milieu of show business and raised in it, too. Did it feel glamorous?
Neil Russell: I don’t think as a kid you understand glamor, but I knew it was different because of how adults I’d never met knew my name and would stop me on the street to complain about a picture or ask for passes. And there’s nothing glamorous about people ringing the doorbell at three a.m. to beg my father to help them break into the movies. My mother lived for that.
I went to work for my father when I was seven, doing every dirty job you can imagine in theatres. And some you wouldn’t be able to imagine. The flip side was that I got to see every movie ever made. No restrictions. My father didn’t believe that a motion picture could hurt anybody, and since my mother and I had a somewhat uneasy relationship ourselves, a dark theatre several miles away was a good solution.
I loved sports, played the ones I could, and got good grades. They put me in classes for high achievers, which were interesting because you could read things other students weren’t supposed to. Like Harold Robbins and Henry Miller. Our house was always full of the latest books sent by the studios, and I had teachers who used to see what I was reading and ask to borrow them.
The Vigilante Author: How did you get along with your father?
Neil Russell: Until I went to college, I spent more time with him than any other person. I worked for him, traveled with him on business, and sat in countless smoke-filled screening rooms watching movies. He was exceptionally skillful at reading people, and he always went the extra mile to be diplomatic — often, in my opinion, too diplomatic.
But he could be tough when it mattered. In a cash business you have to be. If people think you’re a pushover, call the morgue, not the cops. He always kept eighteen inches of lead pipe within arm’s reach, and I once saw him back down six drunk badasses who were leaning on his new Buick suggesting he give them his money. (My Uncle Ted was tougher yet. He was a union boss who I saw break a man’s arm with one hand. But that’s another story.)
I learned a lot of life’s most important lessons from my father: Like how to keep your mouth shut when you saw somebody on a date with somebody they weren’t married to. Or how to spot a cashier cheating the boxoffice or a guy sitting in line at a drive-in with his trunk full of friends. After a while, you can tell there’s something wrong just by the way the air feels. My father used to say that there are only two kinds of people in the world: those who can work in a cash business and not get confused about whose money it is, and those who can’t.
Yet he gave more money to more people without their knowing where it came from than anybody I’ve ever met. A lot of hospital bills got paid, a lot of toys showed up under Christmas trees, and a lot of out-of-work guys found an envelope of cash in their mail. I’ve done my best to live up to his example, but I’ll probably never be his equal.
I think, however, I broke my father’s heart when I told him how much I hated theatres, and I didn’t want anything to do with them anymore. I wanted to go to work for a studio. That kind of thing never happened. Why would an owner want to become an employee? He didn’t try to change my mind, though; he just made a call, and two weeks later I was working for Paramount Pictures. I had helped buy “The Godfather” for him; suddenly, I was collecting the studio’s share of the boxoffice. We never spoke about the theatres again.
You’ll have to wait for my autobiography for the rest, but I began writing my first real novel the day I started at Paramount. A thousand pages of it still sit in a box a few steps from where I’m sitting. Along the way, I wrote screenplays too, which is something executives rarely do and are not applauded for. Even when you sell one for a lot of money. My congratulations was a suggestion not to do it again.
The Vigilante Author: What other early experiences and influences proved pivotal to you becoming a writer?
Neil Russell: I have what many people do not: that single moment and that one person who struck the match and put into motion all that came afterward. I didn’t understand it at the time, but I knew something remarkable had happened, and that I was different than I had been a few moments earlier. How much so only revealed itself over time.
I cannot adequately express the effect BettyRuth VerBeck had on me, because it is wound around my soul too finely to untangle. What I can tell you is that I remember precisely what I was wearing the day I first met her, what her earrings looked like, how she walked and even what time it was. I can also close my eyes and still smell her intense perfume and hear her unbridled laugh that was unlike any other teacher’s — or adult’s — I had ever heard.
As I walked into her English class that fall day in 1963, she crossed the room to me, smiled with her entire face and said, “I’ve heard about you, and we’re going to have the time of our lives.” In the early Sixties, teachers didn’t talk that way to students. Even the warmest were professionally distant. The rest were just counting down the minutes until they could get to the faculty lounge for a smoke.
In the ensuing years, I have met and worked alongside exceptional people, many famous, some powerful, a few legends. But none ever had a zest for life like Miss VerBeck. And none were nearly as intelligent.
The Vigilante Author: How and why did she leave such an impact on you?
Neil Russell: In the Canton, Ohio of my youth, the menu of pursuits beyond sports was not large. As I mentioned, I played sports — and with abandon. But I had a secret too. One you didn’t tell people about. I wrote.
I’d been creating stories since I was old enough to hold a pencil. It’s the one thing I thank my mother for. We had our differences, but she was extremely well-spoken and exceedingly refined. She drilled me in manners, grammar, punctuation, and speech until I would begin screaming at her. But she never let up, and I’m the better for it.
I wrote poems, short stories, songs, jokes, and even tried my hand at a couple of novels — all before I was fifteen. I still have a few of those early efforts, and they mostly belong with the ones that were lost. My one regret is not having copies of the love letters I sent to Candy Wykowski in fourth grade. She was the most beautiful being I’d ever encountered, and if a nine-year-old can be hit with the thunderbolt, count me impaled. I poured out my heart on those pages, and she reciprocated by smiling at me once in a while. Then, at the end of the year, she moved away. I sleep better knowing she probably still takes those letters out every night and ponders what might have been.
There were no handy role models for such an unmanly endeavor as writing, so I did it alone and sent my best work off to the Reader’s Digest, to be met with stony indifference, rather than the prizes they advertised. The rest I filed carefully away, never to be seen. Or so I planned.
Then, in a moment of insanity, I told a teacher about this enterprise and showed her a few of my stories. The next thing I knew I was in front of the class reading one. This was not, I assure you, a way to increase one’s standing among one’s male friends, and I immediately retreated back to a more advisable athletic, poker, pool, and Lucky Strike profile.
But my secret was no longer. Miss VerBeck found out about me and, I later learned, went to the principal to have me assigned to her class. It was the first step into a life I could not have imagined.
I can say without hesitation that I truly loved Miss VerBeck. But it was not the romance of films and novels. For the first time in my young life, I had met someone who, like me, thought and lived in moments. Small ones. Often seemingly insignificant ones. But moments in which a thousand things could be experienced in the blink of an eye.
I realize now it was the result of all those hours spent watching movies, where a single frame of film could capture the turning point in a battle or the pivotal moment of an affair or enough terror to make you scream. But until Miss VerBeck, there was no one to tell how time sometimes stopped for me, and that the image I was looking at never again left my memory. That I was terrified I would be forever trapped inside my head, watching those snapshots, powerless to describe them to anyone else.
Miss VerBeck lived a life unconcerned about what might happen tomorrow or had taken place before she met you. All that mattered was what she could drag out of you onto a page now. And if it didn’t fill a page, a sentence would do . . . or a word. But it had to be the best page or sentence or word you could produce. And you had to wring out of it all that it had to give. Even if it were profanity. Or you had to go back and keep trying. Until the semester was over, if necessary.
She wanted to know everything there was to know about those snapshots, and she taught me how turn them into words, down to the variations in color of an emotion. In the process, without knowing it was happening, I stopped writing for myself. She had made me want to write for her. And the possibilities became endless.
Over the decades, I have taken Miss VerBeck with me everywhere. I quote her to authors and screenwriters and encourage my creative employees to think in moments, not just arcs. And each time I launch a new project, she is there.
In the Acknowledgments section of my first novel, City of War, I remembered her as best I could:
I would like to thank the person who inspired me to write in the first place. She died before I could invite her to Hollywood and take her and her tall collars, flashy skirts, hoop earrings and French chanteuse hairstyle onto a studio lot, then to Spago for dinner. BettyRuth VerBeck didn’t look, talk or act like a steel town, high school English teacher. She twirled like a dancer when she read poetry, swooned over her desk when she loved an essay and laughed so loud when she was happy that you could hear her in the gym three stories down. But she sent this sixteen-year-old kid home every day with his mind racing with possibilities. Sleep in peace, Miss VerBeck.
Once, I was asked during an interview about City of War how I had formulated such a complicated story. My answer was that I didn’t write a story. I wrote disconnected moments and eventually, the story revealed itself. The interviewer had difficulty with that answer, suggesting that there had to be more to it. There was, actually. BettyRuth VerBeck.
The Vigilante Author: Neil, that is an incredibly touching story. Thanks so much for sharing it. As someone who also was decisively inspired by a teacher who cared, I understand what she meant to you.
What about writers? Which have left their stamp on you, and how?
Neil Russell: Each time I answer a question like this, my list changes. I think it has something to do with where I am in my writing at the moment. The constants, however, remain.
John D. MacDonald, for internal dialogue; Harold Robbins, for integrating an historical storyline with a present one; Charles Dickens, the best narrator in history; William Goldman, the master of perfect plotting; Nelson DeMille, the sultan of sophisticated sarcasm; Tacitus, the observational genius; and Marcus Aurelius, the general in the battle between fatalism and determinism.
The Vigilante Author: That’s a rich and varied lot. Now a different question: How would you compare your work to that of other writers?
Neil Russell: I have been compared to so many writers that I’m both flattered and disbelieving. My ego is vast, and every positive comment is magnified in my retelling until I’m certain it’s reached the Nobel Committee. However, when the wine wears off, as much as I would like to think of myself in the same league as Chandler or DeMille or Leonard or Fleming, I’m pretty sure I’m not even of the same species. The good news is that with advances in medicine, I could live to 150, which gives me time to get closer, providing I don’t outlive Rail Black.
The Vigilante Author: What does writing mean to you?
Neil Russell: Writing is like making love. If she’s sexy enough, you don’t even have to move, just look into her eyes. I try to make sure whatever I’m writing has really great eyes.
The Vigilante Author: What motivates you to do it?
Neil Russell: So many stories to tell. And 150 keeps getting closer.
The Vigilante Author: We’ve established that your hero is Politically Incorrect. Does that mean that his creator is pushing some kind of political point of view?
Neil Russell: Ah, the question that’s designed to get me driven to the LA city limits and dumped out with my WGA card stuffed in my mouth.
Actually, I don’t have any political views, but Rail Black does. He tells me that if you write timid, it will show. So thanks to Rail, even though I’m iffy leading a bar fight, I’m one bad dude on a page.
Some enterprising chap called my novels “mean-spirited and reactionary.” Up to that point, I hadn’t given it much thought; but now, the day they nail up a “Mean-Spirited and Reactionary” shelf at Barnes & Noble, Rail and I will move a few of his books over, so the guy can find them. Providing, of course, B&N hasn’t renamed itself the Vampire Romance Mart by then.
The Vigilante Author: Dylan and Rail would get on splendidly. Care to chat at all about your family?
Neil Russell: This is supposed to be about me. Let them write their own books.
On the other hand, Christmas is just around the corner, and I’ve got my eye on a new Gulfstream, so . . .
My oldest son, Andrew, a former Wall Street investment banker, is now the financial architect of our firms. My younger son, Trevor, is successful in another industry, and my wife, Sandra, has just completed her twenty-fifth year as a tireless fundraiser for children’s charities. My trusty muse and non-verbal co-writer, Annie, no longer sleeps on my feet while I type but lopes joyously across the Elysian Fields. She will, however, like most boxers, stop in her tracks if someone opens a bag of dog cookies two galaxies over.
The Vigilante Author: Anything you find hard about the writing process? And what are your methods?
Neil Russell: I don’t have trouble with any part of writing except finding time to do it. Running two companies and raising money for pictures, I could sit at my desk eighteen hours a day and do nothing but talk on the phone and answer emails. To make sure that doesn’t happen, I set aside mornings for writing and don’t speak to anyone until I’m finished. Unless, of course, somebody slips a check under the door.
The Vigilante Author: Yeah. Priorities, priorities . . . Anything that you are particularly proud of?
Neil Russell: I’ve got great blood pressure.
The Vigilante Author: You’ve been traditionally published and now self-published. What prompted you to make the switch?
Neil Russell: Having spent thirty-five years purchasing rights to books for filmed entertainment, I thought I knew my way around the publishing business. And I did. As a businessman. Not, as it turned out, as an author of fiction.
Six major publishing houses read City of War and pronounced it “excellent,” or “terrific,” or simply, “loved it.” (It wasn’t called City of War then, but we don’t have time for that story.)
As you travel from interested publisher to interested publisher deciding where you best fit into the system, you hear a lot of advice. Most of it can be ignored once you know something about the person offering it. Like the editor, several years short of his first shave, who suggested my character, Rail Black, shouldn’t have so much money because most readers aren’t rich. No shit, I thought. What a brilliant observation. Maybe he missed Gatsby. So I asked him what he’d do if he won the lottery. It took him about two seconds to say, “Quit my job.” That sounded to me like a man with a plan, and my book — any book — probably wasn’t as big a priority as getting out his resume. Next.
Then there was the editor who’d never ventured west of Tenth Avenue and told me I should relocate Rail Black from Beverly Hills to Manhattan to make him more “accessible.”
The Vigilante Author: You’re kidding.
Neil Russell: I’m serious. He actually said that. So I asked him if his company had ever published a bestseller that wasn’t set in New York.
“Of course, lots of them, but they were by big-name authors — not shitball nobodies like you.” Well, he didn’t exactly say that last part; he had it tattooed on his forehead. I had a snappy comeback I’d once heard in Brooklyn, but I didn’t know if he’d been that far east, so I just moved on. He recently called me for a job.
The Vigilante Author: “Living well is the best revenge.” Okay. Next?
Neil Russell: And then I met a real pro at HarperCollins who saw Rail Black as a major franchise. I ran to St. Patrick’s and lit a candle. Unfortunately, that editor decided to become an agent, and two novels and three editors later, I had become a bigger pain in the ass at HC than guys selling ten thousand books a day. They were professional; I was professional and emotional.
I could have taken Beverly Hills Is Burning to another house, but unlike the movie business, where it costs millions to be an intransigent independent, the entry fee to publishing is nominal. Voila, my own imprint. I don’t know if it will continue this way, but we’ve begun acquiring books from other authors and are now looking at purchasing one or two small publishers with good backlists. I think running the show is in my DNA.
Oh, and that HC editor who become an agent? He’s now mine.
The Vigilante Author: Nice. So would you recommend that other aspiring authors follow your example and go “indie”?
Neil Russell: I’m probably not one to give advice because I’ve never had a problem getting a publisher. I also think that if you’re new to any business, you should color inside the lines first. That said, if you don’t have a Rolodex full of relationships, and everyone in the conventional world tells you no — or won’t even read you — screw them. You put in the time writing the book. Let the market decide. But be prepared to work it. Otherwise, you’ll never really know, and the world already has a full complement of lazy complainers.
The Vigilante Author: What about writing advice?
Neil Russell: Use your own voice. The real Nelson DeMille is always going to trump the pretenders. And write something you actually know about. Jesus, there’s nothing worse than picking up a book by a new author whose depth of knowledge about his subject are two entries in Wikipedia.
The Vigilante Author: What can readers expect from you next?
Neil Russell: Two more Rail Blacks are on their way, along with the first installment of a high-suspense, YA trilogy. There’s also a WWII novel set in a place none has ever been set before and based on a story few left alive know.
The Vigilante Author: That all sounds intriguing. And being writers of suspense, let’s leave it there, to tantalize the readers. Neil, I’ve conducted a lot of great interviews, but this one has been the most entertaining, by far. Thanks so much, my friend.
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If you are interested in learning more about Neil Russell and his Rail Black series — and I hope you are — visit his website. All of his Rail Black adventures are available for purchase from his Author Page on Amazon.com. You can also check out his official Facebook page and follow him on Twitter: @NeilRussellAuth
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Photo (c) by Debbie Scott
