Gregory Galloway wasn’t sure he could write anything after the death of his father.
“He lived to be 94, so if you can have that, he had the sort of demise that he wanted,” says Galloway, recalling that he and his two siblings had gathered to be with their father at the hospital.
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“We sort of knew it was the last day, and the nurse came in and said, ‘Is there anything that you want?’ And he said, ‘Is it OK if I have some whiskey?’ And she said, ‘Absolutely,’” recalls Galloway. “We went and got a bottle of whiskey and toasted him.”
“At some point, he’s like, ‘What the hell are we doing here? Let’s go home.’”
So Galloway’s father spent his last evening at his own place with his grown children nearby, and he was gone by morning, says the author.
But Galloway’s father continues to inspire the novelist.
“For the bulk of my life, he was a voice on the telephone. I left when I was 17, never went back home, so we saw each other a couple of times a year, but most of the time, it was just talking to him once, twice, three times a week,” says Galloway. “Every phone call, he always said, ‘Keep writing.’ That was the way he always said goodbye, ‘Keep writing.’”
Galloway, the author of the 2021 crime novel “Just Thieves,” as well as two earlier YA novels, says he still hears that voice, urging him on. Even so, he was uncertain whether he could. Until one day, he did.
“It sort of crept up on me and I had this idea for this book,” he says of his new novel, “All We Trust.” “There was going to be a family component to it, and I didn’t know if I wanted to touch that hot stove. But writing is how I’ve always dealt with things. … There’s a lot of stuff that I went through that I haven’t really dealt with in writing before. And I think that’s me trying to come to grips with life with my dad and life with my family.
“I’ve had other books that have been more autobiographical,” says Galloway. “This one was a little bit tougher. It’s not autobiographical, but it’s more personal.”
Crime family
“All We Trust,” out now from Melville House, is the story of two small-time crooks, Al and Peck, who have steady work laundering dirty money through a bar and hardware store. But when a fire destroys part of Al’s home and a hard drive goes missing, mistrust begins to breed between the two, drawing in Peck’s teenage daughter Sara and threatening to undo both their relationship and their role in a larger criminal enterprise.
“For good or ill, I really don’t sit down with any sort of idea of a story. It usually comes from phrases, conversations that stick in my brain, and then I try to think about the people,” he says. “‘Just Thieves’ was really a conversation about value and worth, and what things are worth and what value they have. I started thinking, ‘Who would have this conversation?’ I came up with those characters, and then it sort of built from there.”
“In a criminal organization, they would be compartmentalized, like the boss isn’t going to tell them everything that’s going on. They have their jobs to do, and they’re doing that. And vice versa, the boss is then going to be somewhat of a cipher for them,” he says. “It’s a book about loyalties that are tested all the way around.”
Galloway says the origins of “All We Trust,” as well as the landscape of the small town where it takes place, came to him while out walking his dog.
“[The character Peck] walks his dog up the hill — that’s what I do every morning,” he says, referring to a location where a burning house ignites the plot. “In the book, it’s actually on fire. For me, it was just a house up the road that had some dirty furnace oil or something.”
“A lot of the novel is sort of about routine, like everybody does the same thing over and over,” he says. “As the book goes on, that routine gets upset.”
Apocalypse noir
Galloway says he’s always been interested in crime fiction.
“I grew up in a dying factory town on the Mississippi River, Keokuk, Iowa, and it was like the one town in Iowa that had nothing to do with farming,” says Galloway. “Very working class. We didn’t have a bookstore in town, probably until I was in junior high. So the library was really important.
“I was devouring Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle, the Sherlock Holmes stuff. And there was a librarian,” he recalls. “She gave me a box of paperbacks that had been left over from the book sale. And in there was a Dashiell Hammett, and I’m like, ‘That’s the guy. That’s what I want to do.’
“I love the noir tradition. [Horror novelist] Gabino Iglesias said noir and horror are sort of the same thing” – normal people thrown into abnormal situations who become more desperate, says Galloway. “That’s one of the definitions of noir: the everyman who gets dragged into something that is increasingly beyond their control.”
The classic noir characters typically need money, and instead of taking a safer route, a sense of greed, frustration or revenge leads them into “some crime scheme that makes zero sense, instead of going to get a job or something,” says Galloway.
As much as he loves crime fiction, the author bristles at the idea that the conventions of the genre should put limits on the story.
“People try to restrict what it is — think about punk music or heavy metal or whatever. People try to restrict what that is and really close it down instead of opening it up,” he says. “Why not try to be expansive?”
“With noir in particular, for some reason, people really want to be strict about what the definition is,” he says. “It has to be 180 pages long and have a dead body on page 50, and, you know, a gun and a fedora and cigarettes.
To illustrate the absurdity of adhering too closely to genre conventions, Galloway describes a plot about an innocent girl who winds up in a strange town. Hooking up with a small team of misfits and desperate to get back home, she commits crimes and people end up dead. “Is that noir? I think a lot of people would say yes,” says Galloway. “Well, that’s the [expletive] ‘Wizard of Oz.’”
As he sees it, there’s a wealth of terrific genre writing on bookshelves these days.
“Genre in general is maybe at a good place right now. There’s a lot of good crime fiction going on; certainly, there’s a lot of good horror,” he says. “I hope there’s a place for literary noir, literary crime fiction. Certainly other people are doing that. Dennis Lehane is great at that. S.A.Crosby is certainly great at that. Megan Abbott does a great job of … subverting the genre, and, you know, really changing it up in interesting ways.”
He recalls a bit of noir-splaining he got from a reader who claimed his previous novel, “Just Thieves,” lacked an essential component of the genre.
“Somebody wrote me and said that ‘Just Thieves’ was not noir because it didn’t have a femme fatale, and I can argue with the premise, but I will not. But I saw this as an opportunity to take that, which I disagree with, and flip it so she’s not the femme fatale in what people think of it as,” says Galloway, referring to Sara in “All We Trust,” Peck’s teen daughter, who’s smart, sensible and not a sexualized character. “She’s not the seducer, but she is the fatale part. She brings a lot to the story, and not all of it good.”
“I like the idea that it’s a high school kid who helps solve their problems for them,” he says, while admitting she might also inadvertently unleash an entirely new set of calamities.
The crime scene
If the small-town locales of “All We Trust” feel real and lived-in, and they do, that’s on purpose. It’s also true for the characters, even the minor ones, like Dale, a retired electrician who shows up daily at the hardware store, ostensibly on a mission to pick up some herbicide or grass seed, but who is clearly there out of loneliness and desire for conversation and maybe a free coffee.
“What’s missing for me in a lot of crime fiction is the attention to the world,” says Galloway. “That’s what I try to bring. Obviously, I’m a big fan of literary fiction as well, and hope I get some Venn diagram between the two.”
That Galloway likes literary fiction is apparent from the quality of his work, and it’s even clearer when you learn that he attended The Iowa Writers’ Workshop — as a poet.
Wait, how did he switch from poetry to crime?
“I applied for fiction and poetry, and I got accepted into poetry. So me writing crime fiction is my revenge against the workshop,” he jokes. “I loved both fiction and poetry and didn’t really make a distinction between the two. And in some ways, I think that poetry oftentimes is really good crime fiction — in that it’s an investigation of a topic. Look at Shakespeare’s sonnets or Keats’ odes, you know? It takes a particular subject and investigates the [heck] out of it.”
“I got good at poetry, and I really loved poetry, and got helped by some poets in the program who wrote letters of recommendation for me,” he says. “And then, you know, graduated and made a ton of money writing poetry” — hold for laughter here — “and then had to go work in the world and get a real job.”
Galloway has wonderful stories about his time at Iowa, where he met legendary writers like Denis Johnson, Barry Hannah, and David Morrell, despite occasionally having to overcome obstacles to do so.
“When I was there, Frank Conroy was the head, and he was a total fiction guy, so he didn’t want us poets anywhere near the fiction people,” says Galloway, who petitioned Conroy to let him take a fiction class. “He said that I could do that if I promised not to speak during class.”
“Francine Prose was the teacher,” says Galloway, who recalls the baffled writer Prose asking him who he was and why he was sitting silently in her classroom. “I’m over on the poetry side, but I wanted to take a fiction class. And then I said, ‘I’m not supposed to talk.’ And she’s like, ‘Well, that’s bulls***; why are you in class then?’
“She was fantastic,” he recalls, and shares similarly fond memories of Morrell, a helpful, well-read instructor as well as the author of the novel “First Blood,” which introduced the character of John Rambo to the world.
“There were amazing people either coming in to visit or just around, and by and large they were all approachable. That’s why they’re there, to help you.”
Building ‘Trust’
Toward the end of a long conversation, Galloway discusses why he redacted a few names and passages in the book, explaining he did it to add verisimilitude to the story. That was the hope, anyway.
“I did get someone who wrote to me and said, ‘Did you know that your publisher blacked out some of the text?’ I really wanted to write back and say, ‘No, I had no idea. Thanks for alerting me,’” he laughs.
Rather than strictly following the rules, he looks to one of his writing heroes who deliberately upended them.
“One of the reasons I love Chandler is that he sort of thumbs his nose at plot. He really doesn’t care about plot,” he says. “It’s really an investigation of these characters.”
Galloway recalls another piece of feedback he received about his previous novel and its exploration of the characters’ criminal motivations.
“Somebody said, ‘All it is is two guys in a car; that’s all they do,’” he says.
So does he enjoy hearing so much from certain portions of his readership?
“Some of them have strong opinions, which I love,” he says, laughing. “It’s like, ‘Moby Dick’? It’s just guys on a boat!”