VOLUME #1 | Interview with Paul C.K. Spears
When we redesigned and rebound our beloved Issue #5 (Human Resources), we also dug up this long-lost interview with the cover story’s author. Paul C.K. Spears shares the distinction as a three-time Scumm Alumn with only two other authors. Paul wrote the short story “Ain’t We Got Fun” as a prequel to his debut novel, Spirits of the Charles. We spoke by phone about the alternate history where these stories take place and the work that went into his ambitious first book.
PLANET SCUMM: Who in Spirits of the Charles is lifted directly from history and who is kind of an amalgam?
PAUL C.K. SPEARS: In the process of researching I came upon these amazing people who are forgotten to history. Like everyone knows Carlos Ponzi, AKA Charles Ponzi, right? He’s a household name. I flipped his gender for the purposes of this being a different world where things shook out a little differently, but everyone knows that name, so it’s to glom on to that character and understand what she’s about. She wants money. The end. Although that does change a little bit toward the end as she begins to understand the consequence of that rampant capitalism.
Other characters are fiction. Rose and Gus are basically cut from whole cloth—they’re characters that I can picture being in that time, dealing with the stuff they dealt with. Interestingly enough the gang that employs them, The Wallace Boys, those are real people. They had a stranglehold on parts of Boston during the 1920s, until they got driven out by another character, King Solomon, who shows up in the gala scene.
PS: He’s a real person?
PCKS: Oh yeah absolutely. King Solomon was a huge deal in Boston crime until he was killed in a nightclub shootout in like 1937-ish. He definitely eclipsed The Wallace Boys—the Augustan street gang as they were known. The guy with him, Doc Sullivan, was also a real person. Back when Scollay Square was a big spot for prostitution and things like that he was the guy running the books down there. I thought it would make sense for him to be working with King Solomon. There’s a lot of people in this book who were lifted from history.
PS: There’s a potential to look at this as a story about addiction and that cycle of losing yourself to these substances. I’m not sure if you were making a direct cocaine reference with Buda snorting out of that tin there?
PCKS: Yes, that was very intentional. I thought like what if you could dry it and powder it and I was like oh that’s coke for sure.
PS: So how much of this is about drugs and addiction?
PCKS: It is in a way, but it’s not really handled in a sensitive manner because it’s more of a story about how people are addicted to emotions than substances. Today we see people who are obsessively fixated on one emotion, whether its hate, outrage, the noble desire to change the world—all of this has consequences. I would never say it’s the only thing that influenced the book, but for me it’s a lot more about, like, if you could take and bottle the best day of your life, why would you not take that for the rest of your life? That kind of thing. How people get addicted on their emotional highs was the inspiration for the story. Real substance abuse kind of takes a back seat. The emotion takes the forefront because that’s the thing that we’re all looking for, those emotional and mental highs that we can’t always get over and over.
PS: As far as the crime families—are they real?
PCKS: They’re definitely real. So in Boston, when Prohibition took off, overnight people who had been sort-of small-time crooks suddenly had access to massive amounts of money for a substance that was readily available beforehand. That’s kind of how crime families began. The Family specifically is the Italian mob of Boston, although they didn’t fully rise to super prominence until about 1930 or something. They were out there—I didn’t get too deep into them because I didn’t know enough about them, but they were out there as agents of change.
PS: Is the lizard of greed just a dragon or is there some more specific thing you were referencing?
PCKS: Sort of. It was a mixture of King Midas and the dragon, because King Midas is a thing where everything he touches turns into currency, but then his life literally is devalued because all he surrounds himself with is more money. That was half of it, and the other half is a very traditional… well like if you're a being of pure greed what are you? You’re a dragon. You’re hoarding stuff. You’re pulling income into yourself like we see with the 1% and whatever. People are addicted to that sensation of more more more more and that’s the other half of it.
Spot illustration by Sam Rheaume
PS: For my own curiosity, what were you picturing with Palmer at the end?
PCKS: So, Palmer is a thing where there’s an absence of emotion. So Palmer is kind of a physical manifestation of trauma, right? ‘Cuz they torture him, they do all these terrible things to him, and then they pump him full of various fake emotions that have been drawn from other people and from himself, and so he’s just this nebulous mass of unholy motion and movement. I picture him almost like the spider, almost like an octopus, but definitely something that should not be. ‘Cuz trauma is like this enormous, squamous thing that’s always ruining everything around it because it affects people so deeply. I don’t think I landed that particular metaphor very well, but it was super cool to imagine a giant spider monster with a human dangling underneath it wrecking Boston. That was awesome.
PS: There’s some great pulpy moments, especially with Mick. I guess this is my own thing, but I was a bit disappointed. I wanted more Mick. I like the Pinkerton angle, the pulp angle that Mick has. His vulnerability. Gus sort of becomes invincible from this indulgence, but for Mick his indulgence makes him weaker. Everything makes him weaker.
PCKS: Yeah he gets the short end of the stick. Mostly because, at least for most of it, he’s unwilling to sink to that level. But then when he finally does break he’s a huge mess. I have big, big plans for him in the next project that I’m working on. I also wanted more Mick, but the book was also quite big and I didn’t want to overstuff it.
PS: So I guess we see in Planet Scumm when Gus becomes a myth for the first time. Is that right?
PCKS: That is exactly it. Thank you. That was definitely like the TV-spinoff moment for him because he’s just this small-time criminal, but suddenly he realizes this magic juice that's going around can give you superpowers. Why would you not indulge in that especially if it fixes various things about your life? So that’s his kick-off point, the short story in Planet Scumm.
PS: And Rose, her kick-off moment. She definitely is very passive when the story starts, but that’s not really her character.
PCKS: Yeah. She goes from being someone who’s at the very, very bottom. She is literally being drained for her emotions. To being someone who’s like, wait a minute, I can turn this around against my aggressors, against the people who are hurting me, and I can take something back. And once she figures that out she eventually becomes the character we know from the novel.
PS: And then, of course, Mick undergoes a big change between “Ain’t We Got Fun” in Planet Scumm and the beginning of Spirits of the Charles. He’s a very different guy, but it’s very believable and quite charming to see him become… just a little tougher and harder. He gets hard-boiled in between Planet Scumm and the novel.
PCKS: Yes, yes, yes. I’m going to get back into history for two seconds here. I promise I’ll be brief. In 1918 the Spanish flu hit Boston, killed a shitload of people. Very shortly afterward, because they had dealt with so much shit and they were tired of it, the Boston police force went on strike. The whole city went on strike. You want to talk anarchy? That was real anarchy. The minute people figured out that cops weren’t on the beat everyone was looting and pillaging. It was a nightmare. So, Mick was one of the cops who did not strike. He did his work, but he still got fired because at the end of the whole thing, Coolidge—you may know Coolidge—Coolidge brought in the National Guard to lock down the city and replaced every cop. ‘Cuz Coolidge was the governor at the time—replaced every cop in the city with new people. Every cop in Boston was fired. It was monumental. And Mick kind of gets caught up in that and he goes from the good cop that we see in the Planet Scumm story to a little bit of an anti-hero, an “I’ve been burned and I’m gonna show everyone that I’m worth it” kind of guy in the book, yeah.
PS: Right. It was good. I enjoyed getting to re-meet those characters, cuz Gus is much the same, but more.
PCKS: He hasn’t changed at all. He’s still a hard-drinking, money-grubbing scumbag. He doesn’t really undergo a huge arc between the stories.
PS: But Rose and Mick do. Rose reads very much the same in her actions and her demeanor. She comes into herself more than has an arc, I guess.
PCKS: She’s an opportunist, more so than a criminal.
PS: And she doesn’t mind a cheap thrill here and there.
PCKS: Yeah.
PS: Why does anyone use firearms in this world?
PCKS: Yeah if the drinks can give you invulnerability what’s the point, right? That’s the thing—the concept with the drinks is that they’re not very long lasting. They’re supposed to last for like the duration of a party and that’s kind of it, but if you keep hitting them over and over again they turn you into something weird. In the case of Rose mutating Alexandra in that one scene, that’s kind of an instant gimme of, oh, suddenly you just are a monster, because a person with these powers imbued you with pure rage. So you are, at least temporarily, indestructible. With the drinks its very much a thing like whatever they are, whatever power they have, goes away and comes back to where they came from. Only people who are rich enough will keep drinking them. It’s also a societal thing—like gangsters can get some mileage out of that for a little while but if you look like a seven foot tall walking dinosaur people are going to take notice, right? You’re going to get arrested. So it’s hard to do what Gus does.
PS: I guess I almost went in the other direction though, where if you just bomb a city with despair it shouldn't be that hard to occupy it right? You just walk in.
PCKS: Oh yeah. That will come in more in the next book, where we look into the military application of these weapons. What I tried to layer in there was these weapons were used in World War I. They were used to bomb trenches. When he goes into that Good Time feeling he’s like “Yeah we used to bomb trenches with that shit. Now they’re just like, smoking it.” So it did happen, but it was definitely a thing where the treaties were signed like “Woah, woah, woah we can’t let these things get out of control.” At the end of World War I, a lot of arms production was scaled back, so I imagined that was part of it. But it makes sense, you’re right. And that’s why they get to do these things, because it’s such a powerful weapon that when you bust it out just all hell breaks loose.
PS: Yeah. It’s a cool story. It’s an interesting conceit. I read a fair amount of science fiction, Paul.
PCKS: You don’t say?
PS: And I haven’t really read anything like it, which is cool. Do you have anything to say about where the idea came from? You spoke about people indulging in emotions and I suppose you’re talking a little bit about Facebook echo chambers and things like that.
PCKS: A little bit, yeah. A little bit. I read this book, 1920: The Year They Made The Decade Roar, and I was looking through it and I was kind of going like, well, history hasn’t really changed. We look at history as like this static thing, sepia tone photos and people standing in front of daguerreotype cameras, but it absolutely was not that. It was very active. It was very violent. It was crazy… the craziest shit happened in history that nobody knows about and these are real people who lived these events. So I wanted to kind of explore a world where these events happened, and dig into their lives, but I wanted to do it in a way that was fun, that was engaging and weird and creepy. I settled upon this “Well what if this happened? What if this branched off here and that branched off here and it kind of got out of control and I wrote a novel, so here we are.
PS: I know about the Tulsa, Oklahoma bombings. Is the Florida event real?
PCKS: Okay so I’m going to get back into the books one last time. One last time. That was real. Black men tried to vote in Ocoee county and obviously there was huge pushback against it. They managed to fight their way in and actually put ballots in the boxes. Then a big mob of white people came and just burned down enormous swaths of black neighborhoods in Florida. It was absolutely horrible. So Rosa’s trauma is carried right up the coast from that—she’s a direct offspring of that, which is why she comes across as a little cold to people because she saw some shit. And that’s real. Mario Buda really did supposedly bomb Wall St. in 1918 and killed a bunch of people. He’s the prime suspect for that although he was never caught.
PS: I was wondering if you’d talk a little bit about the prisons. There’s a few different prisons in the book.
PCKS: There are a couple of different prisons. Prisons are another area where I had a hard time find- you can get the names and the locations of the prisons, you can get where they were geographically, who ran them and stuff. It’s very, very hard to find concrete information on what happened inside these prisons, so what I essentially did is I took the prison, where they would reasonably be held, and I explored it a little bit. But really the person who’s really the expert on that is Dennis Lehane. He wrote a book called Live by Night where he goes into crazy detail on that. So I drew from him, I drew from a little bit of actual local stuff, I drew from old Boston maps and things like that but a lot of it is a detective game where you have to piece together stuff. And for a first book I definitely bit off a lot in terms of research and prisons are another area where I wish I could have gone deeper, but I just didn’t have time.
Spirits of the Charles is available on Amazon.
PS: Is there anything else that you want to talk about?
PCKS: I guess if I’m here to do plugs, obviously I should tell people buy Planet Scumm, buy my book please and thank you. Definitely do those things. Also while I’m here I do have a podcast called Spearing The Classics, which I’m obliged to mention at every opportunity. If you like my stuff, check it out. That’s all.
Paul Spears is a 26-year-old science fiction and fantasy author living in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts. He has an unhealthy interest in the apocalypse, and sometimes rolls 20-sided die while pretending to be an elf, among other ridiculous hobbies. Spirits of the Charles is his first novel.