The following is the final part in the "F. Paul Wilson Interviews Repairman Jack Series". If you have not been following the series, take a look at Parts 1-6 before reading the final installment.
www.literallyjen.com - Part 1
www.openbooksociety.com - Part 6
The first of three
Repairman Jack prequels, revealing the past of one of the most popular
characters in contemporary dark fantasy: a self-styled “fix-it” man who
is no stranger to the macabre or the supernatural, hired by victimized
people who have no one else to turn to.
We join Jack a
few months after his arrival in New York City. He doesn’t own a gun yet,
though he’s already connected with Abe. Soon he’ll meet Julio and the
Mikulski brothers. He runs afoul of some Dominicans, winds up at the
East Side Marriott the night Meir Kahane is shot, gets on the bad side
of some Arabs, starts a hot affair, and disrupts the smuggling of
preteen sex slaves.
The Repairman Jack Interview - Final Installment
We’re back for the last time: I’m winding up my talk with Repairman Jack
with some questions asked by his readers plus some of my own.
He’s adamant about no more stories after Nightworld, so I’ve gone back and
written a trilogy based on his first years in NYC, before he became That
Guy. Cold
City is the first.
FPW: Here’s another from a reader: “What
job do you think you might be doing if your parents hadn't been driving under
that overpass?”
RJ: (leans back with a sigh) You know, I
asked myself that same question countless times all through those years I
considered the incident a case of colossal bad luck, simply a matter of
tragically poor timing – if my father’s speed had been a few miles an hour
faster or slower, that cinderblock would have crashed through another car’s
windshield, and killed somebody else’s mother.
But as I came to understand the forces at work, the subtle manipulations
all through my life – I’m talking about since my freakin’ conception–
FPW: The reason your mother called you her
“Miracle Boy” in Secret Vengeance.
RJ: (gives me a warning look) You’re doing
it again. But yeah, exactly. I came to the conclusion that the overpass
incident was a setup. The psycho scumbag
who dropped the cinderblock was a tool.
Yeah, he was going to drop the block anyway because that was his sicko
thing, but I can see him standing there ready to do it, watching the cars,
going eenie-meenie-miney-moe until he sees ours and something in his head says,
Bingo!
FPW: So you think it was all part of “a
spear has no branches”?
RJ: Absolutely . Act One of that play. And I don’t think it was an accident that I
found him one night–
FPW: –and turned him into a human piñata
for the trucks on the Turnpike.
RJ: Yeah.
That screwed up my head. Nothing
seemed the same after that. Pushed me to
the point where I canceled the old me, closed up shop, and headed to New York
to become someone else.
FPW: Which I chronicle in Cold City.
RJ: As Abe would say, Enough already!
FPW: Okay, okay. One last question: What’s your all-time
favorite fix?
RJ: Hmmm.
Tough one. I might go with Luther
Brady.
FPW: From Crisscross–
RJ: You're pimping again.
FPW: Just adding a point of information.
Yeah, that was a nice one. Any reason in
particular?
RJ: Style points. The successful resolution of a fix is the
focus – that's what the customer is paying for – but isn't the whole
story. The means to that end matter as
well. To make it work for me, the
getting there requires a certain élan, an elegance, a symmetry. The fact that the Brady fix also rid the world
of Richie Cordova raises it to the next level.
FPW: Cordova’s demise was ugly.
RJ: Many of your bloodthirsty readers
thought he didn’t suffer enough.
FPW: Yep, those are my peeps. Any others?
RJ: Milos Dragovic and Luc Monnet – another
two-fer.
FPW: I love biter bitten.
RJ: The expression is "biter
bit."
FPW: But that's bad English.
RJ: Don't be such a tight ass. It's the idiom.
FPW: It's also from All the Rage.
RJ: Couldn't resist, could you.
FPW: I guess we're done here.
RJ: Ya think?
SIDEBAR
RJ: Please don't tell me you sneaked Gia
into Cold City.
FPW: How could I? She was still in college Iowa.
RJ: That doesn't mean you wouldn't find a
way for her to visit New York while that whole mess was going down.
FPW: No, it's Cristin all the way. And why would I write something like that if
it didn't happen?
RJ: Because of your fetish for
tie-ins. "Hmmm… what if Gia was
visiting on a trip to MOMA and passed Jack on the street." That kind of crap.
FPW: Hey, not a bad idea. She could–
RJ: Forget it! We're done.
