The Sellout was the winner in the HUMOR category of the 2024 IndieReader Discovery Awards, where undiscovered talent meets people with the power to make a difference.
Following find an interview with author Andrew Diamond.
What is the name of the book and when was it published?
It’s called The Sellout. It was published in January, 2024.
What’s the book’s first line?
“The first royalty check came in at just over sixty thousand.”
That’s the narrator describing the first fat paycheck of his life, the one he got for selling out and writing a trashy thriller he knew was bad.
What’s the book about? Give us the “pitch”.
Years of writing thoughtful, heartfelt literary fiction have brought Joe McElwee nothing but poverty and obscurity. Now his blockbuster formulaic thriller, full of mindless action and tired but proven tropes, has him on the verge of wealth and fame.
Not everyone is happy though. Joe’s friend Veronica, a staunch supporter of his honest early work, criticizes him for selling out. Frustrated at his refusal to hear her concerns, she puts a curse on him, forcing him to live as a character inside the novel of an author he despises, the bestselling hack Niall Turner, who is the undisputed king of the detective-thriller genre.
McElwee wakes up in nineteen-forties Los Angeles to discover he’s entered The Turnerverse, a world marked by two-dimensional characters, outdated stereotypes, gaping plot holes, and poor editing.
Worse yet, he’s apparently just committed a murder. In short order, he has to figure out who he is, who his friends and enemies are, and how he fits into a universe that doesn’t quite make sense. Along the way, he picks up a beautiful mistress, a femme fatale, an inept assassin, and a sinking sense of shame as he’s forced to inhabit the kind of shoddy writing he’s now producing.
“I brought you here,” Veronica tells him, “to rub your nose in the Turnerverse, so you can see what you’re becoming.”
Will it be enough to save an honest writer? Or will the lure of wealth and fame be too much for Joe McElwee?
What inspired you to write the book? A particular person? An event?
Back in 2022, there was a discussion on Hacker News about Ronald Knox’s Ten Commandments of Detective Fiction. Knox was a mystery writer in the early twentieth century who laid down some ground rules for the detective genre that most writers agreed made sense.
In the Hacker News discussion, some readers complained about writers who violated these rules. One user posted the following comment:
Detective fiction is usually about the process of justice when someone breaks a commandment, frequently the sixth, often involving seven, eight and nine. I’m looking forward to the meta-detective novel in which a critic investigates violations of the Ten Commandments of Detective Fiction.
The appropriate punishment might be more suitable to a fantasy novel: To sentence the writer to live for a time as a character in a world built by an even more arbitrary, capricious and inscrutable author than Jehovah.
I’d read that.
I liked the idea so much, I sat down and wrote the book.
What’s the most distinctive thing about the main character? Who-real or fictional-would you say the character reminds you of?
The main character is a bright guy with a good heart. He’s torn between maintaining his artistic integrity and getting out of poverty. He’s got an angel on one shoulder, in the form of Veronica, trying to steer him in the right direction, and a devil on the other who’s willing to make him rich in exchange for his integrity and self-respect. He reminds me of all of us, because we all face choices like that in our lives, and we’re often torn like he is.
What’s the main reason someone should really read this book?
The book is funny. It’s part parody and part satire, the plot moves along at a good pace and has some unexpected twists. Readers will recognize the tropes of the mystery/thriller genre even as the book skewers them. And Veronica is an interesting, insightful character.