Quick Hit Q&A: Kelli Stanley

Next up in our quick hit series is Kelli Stanley, author of the Miranda Corbie series. Stanley’s story “Survivor” can be found in Scoundrels: Tales of Greed, Murder and Financial Crimes, and was excerpted earlier this week over at the Criminal Element.

Down & Out: What inspired you to write the story you contributed to Scoundrels?

Stanley: I wanted to write a very dark story but one that verges on the baroque—one of y inspirations was Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard. The plot was inspired by the horrendous pain caused by unbridled and unregulated greed—not just in this country, but globally. Corporations, in contradiction to a statement by one of the current presidential candidates, are not people. They exist solely to make a profit for their stockholders or owners. Banks are corporations. We cannot expect these soulless, amoral entities to somehow rise above what they are designed to do in the interest of morality or ethics… and just how immoral they can become has been amply demonstrated, time and again, in the late 19th century, the Great Depression, and today.

That’s why we need laws—and bank and securities regulations.

D&O: What does your physical writing process look like? Do you need complete privacy? Write in short bursts? Have a specific CD you always play?

Stanley: I need privacy in order to enter the world I write about—that means no talking, no phone calls. One of my hats is a beat-up old brown Champ fedora, and that signals (to me and my household) that I’m incommunicado. I write at home, though I have written and can write in a crowd. I write in short bursts out of necessity rather than choice, since I also have a day job. I do listen to music… each of my books has a soundtrack that accompanies it: these are songs Miranda hears in the course of the novel.

D&O: Why crime fiction? What makes reading—and writing—crime fiction so compelling?

Stanley: Crime fiction wrestles with the most frightening, bleak and ultimately harrowing experiences a person can go through … and yet usually presents a justice, of sorts, by the conclusion of the plot. We would like to believe this happens in real life; it helps soothe our sense of outrage, our sense of victimization. Crime fiction empowers its readers to believe in karma, to have faith, to vicariously experience a resolution to the slings and arrows, both major and minor, that we suffer.

Crime fiction, in essence, is life… and literature with a plot.

You can visit Kelli Stanley online here.

The Scoundrels ebook is currently available for the KINDLE, but will be released in other ebook formats in coming weeks.

You can also buy this as a trade paperback from AMAZON OR you can ask for it from your favorite Indie Bookstore…they can get it for you.