The Velvet Badge: A New York Noir received a 4+ star review, making it an IndieReader Approved title.
Following find an interview with author Bob Mantel.
What is the name of the book and when was it published?
The Velvet Badge: A New York Noir is my first novel. The book’s paperback edition debuted on Amazon in May 2022, and I am thrilled that IndieRead’s reviewer called it “a stunning debut from a must-read author.”
Your audience can learn more about my background and reviews of The Velvet Badge at bobmantel.wordpress.com and follow me on Instagram, Twitter
and Facebook .
What’s the book’s first line?
The Velvet Badge took me forty years to write and rewrite, but the essence of its opening line never changed: “Faced with life’s deep dish pie of pain, Donny Damon always ordered his slices á la mode.”
The point I’m trying to get across here is two-fold. First, that the choices my characters make play a large part in determining their fate. And, second, that the instincts of most people make them select the door with the tiger behind it.
The opening’s tone is also intended to tip off the reader that the book is a black comedy and, ultimately, shouldn’t be taken terribly seriously because the characters and actions are sometimes cartoon-ish.
What’s the book about? Give us the “pitch.”
The Velvet Badge initially concerns soldier Donny Damon’s mistaken belief that President Kennedy has reached out to him during the Cuban Missile Crisis and his ludicrous, peripheral involvement in JFK’s subsequent assassination.
One of the celebrated takeaways from that killing was “triangulation of fire.” Much of the action of the book tracks the deadly results when the worlds of entertainment, politics and law enforcement, and tabloid journalism collide in 1970s New York.
Front and center in the action are three strong gay women: singer Sadasia Trayne, TV sitcom creator Capers Greenbergér, and New York City Chief of Police Detectives Ellia Chase. This is only fitting since the 1970s was the decade when the women’s movement in America first reached full flower—and experienced the first of its many backlashes. Much of the drama in the book pits the attitude and language of that era against those of our own time, and doesn’t always find that much progress has been made.
What inspired you to write the book? A particular person? An event?
The Velvet Badge is essentially a love letter to the down-at-heel New York City of the 1970s where I grew up while attending Columbia, written in a style that reflects all the film noir double features I sat through at the Thalia, New York, and Regency theaters and that completely absorbed me during those years.
It’s doubly nostalgic for me because I was in the throes of my big coat/floppy hat phase during college and also smoked a pipe, if for no other reason than my buddy Ben put a $5 bid on a crate at a post office auction that wound up containing forty of the damn things. So in film noir terms, I wasn’t so much imitating Bogey as Robert Young in Edward Dmytryk’s Crossfire.
What can I say, you’ve got to start somewhere. And Young’s all-knowing deadpan delivery in that film served me well as a model for a lot of the dialogue and narrative of The Velvet Badge.
What’s the main reason someone should really read this book?
I think there are actually several reasons why The Velvet Badge is stands apart from most crime and detective stories.
First, I’m hoping fans of classic noir fiction—and here I’m thinking of novels by James Ellroy and Jim Thompson, Elmore Leonard and Donald Westlake—will get a real kick out of some of the twists and surprises I’ve added to this well-traveled genre.
Second, the book’s undercurrent of black comedy gives unexpected power and an added edge to this hard-edged combination of murder story, tale of lesbian loves and police procedural.
And while The Velvet Badge may be enjoyed as straight, no-frills entertainment, it’s careful, detailed structure will repay closer inspection by discerning, sophisticated readers.
What’s the most distinctive thing about the main character? Who–real or fictional–would you say the character reminds you of?
My shaggy dog publicist, Constantine “Connie” Groak, is the key animator and travel guide to most of the action in The Velvet Badge. Part of the city’s seamier side, he and his cronies have the power to make things happen in 1970s New York, but not always so they turn out the way they desire. Much of the book’s fun and suspense comes from watching the development and learning the outcomes of Groak’s well-laid plans.
Most readers might guess that celebrity journalists or mobsters were my inspiration for Groak. Actually, he’s based on two unsung heroes who helped me learned my craft.
As far as the publicist’s physical characteristics go, my model was an utterly charming, old school publishing executive who spent his entire fifty-year career at one university press, let me help him write a history of that institution, always answered my daily “Hello, Mr. W!” with “Hello, yourself!” and, no disrespect intended, sported the “thick albino wheat crops sprouting from his nostrils” that I made Mr. Groak’s calling card.
As for the portrayal of Groak’s somewhat devious skill set, I hope that I have partially repaid my enormous debt to a boss I had during a three-year stint at a professional trade magazine in the mid-1980s. Bill had grown up in the New York newspaper game, starting at the New York Herald-Tribune as a copy boy serving guys who’d known Hemingway. When the pace of reporting became too much, Bill made the switch to trade magazines. Based in New York, its non-stop regimen of professional conference coverage proved equally brutal, and was punctuated by travel to boot. Bachelor Bill made the best of this bad situation by living at a YMCA for years and hanging out after work at go-go bars.
By the time I started working for him, he’d married, had a couple of kids, moved to Jersey and was happy with his life. He cleaned up my writing style and taught me how to generate stories from conference handouts and meet copy deadlines for our monthly magazine.
The company’s institutional art squad had a portrait of Jefferson hanging in Bill’s office for no reason. He’d crack me up by turning to it and asking, “What’s my lead, Tom? What’s my lead?” whenever we started work on a new issue. As he neared retirement, he liked to say that if the powers thought he was over the hill, he’d be perfectly happy to bag groceries at his local A&P.
My man Bill could write anything, anywhere, to any purpose, on any schedule. And, to me, that’s Groak’s talent and value in a nutshell.
When did you first decide to become an author?
My required freshman year literature course in college was taught by a brilliant young poet, who turned a casual interest in fiction into the firm belief that it was my calling. I’d kept an unopened copy of Ulysses on my night stand growing up, and that was the “dealer’s choice” the instructor decided to end with.
If he’d assigned the book in September, I would have found it too intimidating to get through. But since he’d taught the class how to read, by the following April, I breezed through it in three days and can still recall pages of it fifty years later.
That set me on my course as a writer. To the point where I went through draft after draft of my own book, probably over the course of ten years, to write Joyce’s masterpiece out of my system. That’s why I partially dedicate The Velvet Badge to “Joyce’s Ulysses, the great crippler of young adults.”
What do you do for work when you’re not writing?
More of the same. I spent my entire career as a financial services marketer. It paid the bills but was never my first love. When people asked how I earned a crust, I’d usually answer, “Write disposable crap for brokerages,” then refill my Scotch.
What’s a great piece of advice that you can share with fellow indie authors?
Always remember that no one’s waiting for your book. And don’t cry in your beer because of this fact. Celebrate it instead because no pressure gives you the freedom to write whatever you want, however you want, on whatever schedule you want, until you successfully finish the novel you always dreamed of writing.
I dreamt up most of The Velvet Badge in fifteen minutes and first began writing it the week President Jimmy Carter gave his Crisis of Confidence speech. That would make it the Summer of 1979. I finally finished the book to my complete satisfaction in the early spring of 2022.
What about the many years in-between? I did successive drafts, trimming my 600-page manuscript eventually down to 200 pages and change. More importantly, I slowly taught myself to write well enough to bring my complicated, multi-layered story entertainingly to life—something I hadn’t the technical chops to do when I began The Velvet Badge.
I took several multi-year breaks along the way, which is just part of the process. You may run into brick walls yourself as you labor on your magnum opus. But not writing doesn’t mean you’re not working. Once you’ve thought your way through your brick walls, the writing will be much easier because you’ll know what you want to accomplish in particular sections of your text.
Would you go traditional if a publisher came calling? If so, why?
I’m a baby boomer, so I grew up thinking traditional publishers were the only way to go. I also remember laughing myself sick at the only alternative anyone knew about in the 1970s, those “Rogue of Publishers Row” ads that used to appear at the back of the New York Times Book Review.
I couldn’t land a publisher for The Velvet Badge when I tried to find one about ten years into the project, but the manuscript was probably unsaleable at that time. By the time I had finished the book to my satisfaction, forty-plus years had passed, with many lengthy interruptions in between, and I chose to go the indie route to get my work before the public, rather than risk spending more years in a fruitless search for an agent and publisher that would mean The Velvet Badge would never see the light of day.
Now that the book has come out and earned a couple of very favorable reviews, I know how demanding (and exhausting) it is to take a book from conception from completion. But I know now that it can be done, and without having to compromising my vision to anyone else’s taste, schedule or budget.
I’m always willing to talk to a publisher, but would be hesitant to give up my independence and potential profits. I think that old joke sums it up nicely: “If I’m going to get screwed, I want to make sure that I’m wined and dined first.”
Is there something in particular that motivates you (fame? fortune?)
Fame and fortune were undeniable fantasies for me when I was younger. But now that I have no real choice but to put away childish things, my main motivation is to “get it right.”
Per page and within chapter, that will usually mean editing with an eye toward condensing the text. I’m a little long-winded by nature, and most readers won’t and shouldn’t put up with such self-indulgence.
Between chapters and overall, I will edit and rewrite to ensure that images and themes match and will not be missed by close readers.
I have to say, that when I went through this process countless times, and finally did a “cold read” of my Amazon review copy, prior to release, it was incredibly satisfying to think “Wow!” because I’d finally accomplished what I’d set out to do all those years and decades before.
Which author do you most admire and which book do you wish you could have written?
There are so many but, pound for pound, page for page, I have to say that Nathanael West and his Miss Lonelyhearts are the real champs, hands down. Black comedies don’t get funnier than this little gem, with its truly monstrous protagonists, Shrike in particular, and heartbreaking victims (“I stare in the mirror and cry all day”) plus throwaway lines (“She works in a bookstore, but wait ‘til you see her behind.”) seemingly inspired by the devil on a bad day.
West’s hilarious and heartbreaking biography only adds to the poignancy of this novel and his other three literary masterpieces. But, then, what else would you expect from S.J. Perelman’s brother-in-law?