Alan K. Austin
Alan Austin has produced, written and narrated nine
documentaries for
PBS’s Frontline, Nova, and the Critical Events series: "The
Road To Bloody Sunday," "The Execution," "Does TV Kill?,"
"The Shakespeare Mystery," "Death Of A Porn Queen," "The
Great Wildlife Heist," "Monsters Among Us," "Secrets Of A
Bomb Factory," and "To The Last Fish."
Austin’s investigative documentaries, for WCCO-Television in
Minneapolis, received two national Emmys, a Columbia
University-Dupont Silver Baton, a Sigma Delta Chi Public
Service award, a Peabody and two IRE awards. One of those
documentaries – "The State Of Texas vs. Steven Lynn Fossum"
– resulted in the exoneration of a man wrongfully imprisoned
for rape.
His reporting from Vietnam, Cambodia and Northern Ireland
was awarded a Columbia University-Dupont Silver Baton, two
Sigma Delta Chi Public Service awards, a Peabody and two
RTNDA "Edward R. Murrow" awards.
From 1982 to 1985 Austin taught radio and television news
reporting at the University of Minnesota as guest lecturer.
He grew up in Arkansas City, Kansas, and attended Wichita
State University (on a tennis scholarship) and Kansas
University, majoring in drama.
He has a daughter, Jeni, an actress in Los Angeles, and a
son, John, who attends the University of Minnesota in
Duluth.
Visit Alan Online at
http://www.alankaustin.com
PageOneLit.com: Where did you grow up and was reading and writing a
part of your life? Who were your earliest influences and why?
Alan K. Austin: I grew up in a small south-central Kansas town,
Arkansas City. I discovered Dostoyevsky and Crime and Punishment
when I was ten and was hooked for good on the power of words to
dissect a human being.
PageOneLit.com: Why do you write?
Alan K. Austin: I've always liked being able to edit and re-write my
thoughts rather than just blurting something out. And over the years
I discovered I was getting better at it. That was satisfying. But
most of my career has been in journalism, a great chunk of it spent
inside prisons and on Death Rows. Each story left me frustrated. I
always knew important things that I couldn't report because I
couldn't prove them, couldn't report, for instance, how an innocent
condemned prisoner really felt, couldn't explain how his mind
managed to cope with such horror. But with this piece of fiction,
fully engaged in being inside the prisoner's mind, I felt able to
tell the story more truly. And so the writing had become not just
satisfying but fun. So I guess my answer to the question is that I
write because it's fun...while at the same time I can claim to be
working hard.
PageOneLit.com: Briefly describe the plot for your new novel THE
ADAGIO.
Alan K. Austin: It never really had a plot. Or an outline. Like many
writers I admire I don't want to know how my stories are going to
turn out. What it had was an eerie premise, or puzzle -- How did a
woman's scream find its way onto a recording of a piece of gorgeous
classical music? -- and a strange, aimless young hero who must find
the answer fast if he wants to avoid execution. What follows is as
much adventure as mystery, an odyssey that carries the hero into
ever deeper levels of hell. Or is he the hero at all?
PageOneLit.com: Describe the title THE ADAGIO as it relates to the
story.
Alan K. Austin: The Adagio (Adagio meaning slow) is the recorded
piece of music, composed by Samuel Barber and conducted by Leonard
Bernstein, that serves as the story's puzzle. Alfred Hitchcock would
call it a McGuffin. The music slowly ascends, three notes at a time
and gradually grows more intense until, nine minutes in, it resolves
into a chord of great passion and beauty. The hero, Jack Duncan, is
given the recording by a man whose wife Duncan has just seduced.
When Duncan listens to it, alone, he hears a scream embedded in the
climactic chord.
PageOneLit.com: Who is Jack Duncan?
Alan K. Austin: He is an unhappy, cynical deejay in the beginning
days of rock and the Vietnam War. He is also an amateur actor. An
underachiever. Not lazy but aimless. And in him aimlessness comes to
be something close to a deadly sin. He allows bad things to
happen...until those things force him to solve a mystery when he is
neither a detective nor a lawyer, and force him to discover who he
really is, and it's not all pretty.
PageOneLit.com: How is THE ADAGIO different from other novels in
murder mystery genre? Why should someone buy your book?
Alan K. Austin: Jack Duncan makes a very unusual investigator: a man
with no training in such work, no sources, escept those he manages
to trick into helping him or who discern a peculiar element in him.
The story follows no outline or formula or even a plotline; it
forces the protagonist to find his way out of one fix after another
the way an ordinary person facing extremely extra-ordinary
predicaments would have to do it. It is not a who-dunnit but a
what-in-hell-was-done? And a who-the-hell-is-this-Duncan-guy? And it
is a unique and scary plunge into the heart of a corrupt and broken
system of justice.
PageOneLit.com: THE ADAGIO would make great film - If Hollywood
called and asked you to cast the characters/actors who would you
select and why?
Alan K. Austin: Tobey Maguire leaps to mind for the protagonist
because of the way he has played several of his characters, giving
them an intelligence masked by apparent naivete and a subtle promise
of something mysterious about him.
PageOneLit.com: What's next?
Alan K. Austin: Jack Duncan goes in search of the real William
Shakespeare and finds some very nasty stuff going on amid the
keepers of the Stratford Man's flame. It's a book about half done.
PageOneLit.com: What was the last book you read?
Alan K. Austin: London Fields, by Martin Amis, the most outrageously
unusual book I've ever read, so much so that I may never know if I
liked it or not.
PageOneLit.com: Do you have any hobbies? What are they? How do they
enhance your writing?
Alan K. Austin: I don't know if you'd call it a hobby, but I
have spent so much time doing stories in prisons that I began some
time ago to cook up escape plots. One of the most promising -- or
wackiest -- may show up in a future story.
Like many writers I
admire I don't want to know how my stories are going to turn out. What
it had was an eerie premise, or puzzle -- How did a woman's scream find
its way onto a recording of a piece of gorgeous classical music? -- and
a strange, aimless young hero who must find the answer fast if he wants
to avoid execution. What follows is as much adventure as mystery, an
odyssey that carries the hero into ever deeper levels of hell. Or is he
the hero at all?
