LES is MORE

an interview with Les Standiford

by Joan McIver

He's friendly and open with a rugged outdoorsy look, but don't be fooled. Miami author Les Standiford makes terror his business and brings it close to home. After reading Black Mountain, his latest mystery thriller, few will wander carefree along backcountry trails without cringing at the sound of cracking twigs, rolling stones or distant footsteps.

In this high-energy thriller, diabolical killers stalk a group of city-slickers accompanying a powerful politician on a press-trek through Wyoming's mountain wilderness. Their only hope for survival lies with New York police officer Richie Corrigan, who's been yanked from a lowly subway beat by a heroic but troubling event, then dropped into an unfamiliar and threatening environment. Clearly out of his urban element and armed only with a sense of right and wrong, Corrigan battles nature's fury and human evil to a deadly showdown.

Some reviewers have compared the novel to Deliverance by James Dickey. "I like to write about the common, everyday, straight-up guy who finding himself entangled in mysterious situations that involve murder and violence, feels compelled to do the right thing," Standiford said. "I' m not interested in creating a superhero here. I like to tell a story that has application to real life."

In his mysteries, Standiford, a professor of English and director of the highly regarded Creative Writing Program at Florida International University, explores the landscape of terror with frightening detail. The vast western terrain, where he studied and wrote for twenty years, provided the majestic and ominous backdrop for his first novel Spill, a 1991 mystery involving environmental skullduggery. Standiford is equally at home in South Florida, where he has worked and lived since 1985 with his wife Kimberly, a native of Miami, and their children, Alexander, 8, Hannah, 10, and Jeremy, 14. Five of his previous mysteries featuring John Deal, an honest contractor with a talent for routing nasty evil-doers, unfold amid South Florida's swamps and palm-lined boulevards.

A native of Cambridge, Ohio, a small hilltown near the Ohio River, Standiford grew up reading and loving adventure stories and looking at great western scenes on a View Master. "I cut my teeth on the Hardy Boys and books by Mark Twain and Zane Gray," he said. "I thought it would be great to see books written by me in the libraries. I wanted to go out West because that's where all the adventure happened." Standiford said he went west as soon as he could. Along the way he racked up an impressive amount of academic credits including attending the Air Force Academy in Colorado and Columbia University School of Law. He earned a degree in psychology from Muskingum College in Ohio and a PhD. in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Utah.

He pursued a writing career and numerous other jobs such as manager of a French restaurant and a 100-bed nursing care facility. At times he worked with the U.S. Forest Department, The Utah Park Company and at National Parks such as Arches, Organ Pipe and Grand Canyon where he learned the wilderness wasn't always safe. "I'd go off by myself sometimes," Standiford said. "It could be risky. I ran across some unsavory characters."

His first breakthrough in writing came while tending bar at the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. Here he met Edward Abbey, the reclusive and legendary western writer and author of The Monkey Wrench Gang and other environmental novels. "He was a park ranger there and we would sit around and talk about writing," said Standiford. "I was able to sell an interview with him to a newspaper out west. That someone would pay for something I wrote gave me incredible encouragement."

Since then, he's been on a roll. Besides the mystery novels, a slew of short stories and articles have been published in such magazines and anthologies as The Kansas Quarterly, Writer's Digest, Fodor's Guide, Smoke Magazine, The Key West Reader and Perfect Lies: A Century of Classic Golf Fiction, Mystery in the Sunshine State and Communion: Contemporary Fiction Writers Reread the Bible. He's received the Frank O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, a Florida Individual Artist Fellowship in Fiction and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Fiction.

That's not all. Standiford co-authored Bones of Coral, a screenplay for MGM-Pathe based on a novel by James W. Hall, and wrote the screenplay adaptation of Spill, a feature film with Brian Bosworth shown on Showtime. "I think the mystery/suspense genre is the perfect vehicle for bridging the gap that sometimes threatens to divide the so-called 'high' road and the 'low' road in literature," Standiford said. "No question that mystery/suspense is charged with telling a cracking good story. But from Poe through Hammett down to LeCarre, the field has a long honor roll of practitioners who can combine the ability to tell a compelling story while focusing on characters and moral issues of the greatest possible significance."

Standiford writes daily despite a busy schedule as teacher and director of FIU's Creative Writing Program, which he calls "the blue collar school of writing for its emphasis on teaching students who want to communicate and not just express," "I start writing before 9 a.m. everyday," he says. "My advice for aspiring writers is to remember that getting published is 25 % talent, 25 % hard work, 25 % sticking to it and 25 % luck. So writers should take heart because that leaves 50 % entirely in their control." Currently, Standiford is working on a nonfiction project about Henry Flagler and his dreams for an overseas railroad to Key West.