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PEST CONTROL |
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the author’s review |
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PEST CONTROL |
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the author’s review |
"Bugs and laughter, what could be better?"
"Take about 60 species of insects out of the more than a million that are available, mix them with a protagonist named Bob Dillon (and the sixty or so Bob Dylan references—some hidden, some not), add some New York bashing, and a British transvestite dwarf assassin and what do you have? PEST CONTROL. Pardon me while I toot my own horn, but The Times in London said, (I swear they said this) "One of the funniest, most off-beat thrillers to hit the bookstalls in years... an action packed plot, stuffed with streetwise lines and larger than life characters... Fitzhugh does for New York what Carl Hiaasen did for Miami." That’s true. I’m not allowed to make that sort of thing up. Elle magazine also said some terrific stuff about it (they used the word "hilarious") and Entertainment Weekly, well they gave me a B- (which is better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick) -- but I think their objection was mostly that I made New York sound like the sort of place where lots of nutbars are running around with guns. As opposed to the way it REALLY is in New York. Which is not to say I don’t like NYC, I love it. I’ve never even been mugged there, but lots of my friends have been. So check it out. If you don’t get a laugh I’ll... well, I’ll try to be funnier in my next novel. Oh! Don’t forget to check out the feature in People magazine coming in a few weeks. And believe me, no one is more surprised about all this than me."
Bill Fitzhugh’s first novel, Pest Control, is a wildly funny whirlwind tour of NYC seen through the eyes of Bob Dillon, a mild-mannered bug exterminator mistaken for an international hitman. Covert organizations rush to hire him while the real hitmen are determined to eliminate competition. Dillon repeatedly tells confused parties "I’M NOT A HITMAN, I JUST KILL BUGS!" but does anyone listen? Well, Partners & Crime read this wonderful story, were bowled over by Fitzhugh’s talent for wicked hilarity, and thought we could all profit from a little listening.
Curious? Read on:
"This whole thing came about when I co-wrote Pest Control as a screenplay in 1991 with my longtime writing partner, Matt Hansen. We shopped it around for years but never were offered more than a six-month option. I decided to try to turn it into a novel in 1993, and started researching insects. Took a novel-in-progress class at UCLA Extension in Spring of 1994 -- got good notes and incorporated them. Sent out 139 letters to agents (got 138 rejections) before finding Jimmy Vines in 1995. On 8/2/95, Jimmy called to say Warner Bros. bought the film rights. [All this time writing the book and the film rights sold first anyway! - ed.] Two months later the Japanese and U.K. publishing rights sold, followed by U.S. publishing rights then German and Italian rights. So far, Warner Bros. has signed a director and is having their first script rewritten by a second screenwriter (standard operating procedure).
"Pest Control was "modeled" after A Confederacy of Dunces. Not the style (obviously) but the chapter lengths, etc. I also think that is the funniest book I’ve ever read (it is my favorite book as well). I admire Carl Hiaasen’s writing (but I hadn’t heard of him until I was taking the novel-in-progress class). I like Fran Lebowitz, Christopher Buckley (and his dad, too), all the "old guys" like Wodehouse, E.B. White, Benchley, Graham Greene, etc, Tom Robbins, Woody Allen, all the Monty Python writers, and on and on...
"I’ve been writing since I was a kid. Someone once said don’t become a writer unless you have to. I had to I guess. I think it’s because there are things I want to say and I can’t say them with the articulation I desire just speaking off the cuff, so writing gives me the chance to say exactly what I want with just the right modifier and verb, etc. I love words. I’ve got lots of word books. Most of the "kick the bucket" idioms [there are a wild bunch of euphemisms for death used in Pest Control - ed.] came from Idiom’s Delight by Suzanne Brock. Some may have come from Native Tongues by Charles Berlitz or any of a number of odd word books in my library. I’m unable to learn foreign languages (and I’ve got the report cards to prove it) but I love how they translate to English and vice versa. Idioms are especially fun to try to convey to other cultures. And euphemisms are also one of my favorite things to collect.
"Since you asked, my day job for the ten years since I moved to L.A. from Seattle was as a paralegal. But the work was on contract so there were no guarantees. I made enough to pay the rent and write and little else. I met my wife Kendall a couple of years before I sold the book— in fact without her I probably wouldn’t have written it. She knew I wanted to do it and she told me to go ahead. She paid for the UCLA class. All she wanted in return was for me to have a hot meal ready for her when she got home. I converted her from being on a macro-biotic diet to craving pork loin chops with mustard cream sauce. She loves me for it. A decade from now I hope I’m still as excited about whatever I’m writing as I am now about my novel-in-progress [The Organ Grinders] and the two I’ve got planned to follow it.
"I wake up, make a pot of coffee (french roast), turn on the computer and start working on whatever I’m working on. Sometimes I do research on the internet, sometimes I use reference books I’ve got. I speak on the phone with experts when necessary. (For my next novel I got to go to a heart-lung transplant at Stanford University at 3 a.m. one day when I was researching the area.) I write all day interrupted by stuff like doing the laundry, cooking, shopping, scooping dog poop from the yard. etc. I write until my wife comes home from work. And depending on my momentum, I write into the night. Eventually I stop working on the computer, have a scotch, a cigar, some Stan Getz (or some such) and reflect on what I’ve done, making handwritten notes to start the next day with.
"My next novel is titled The Organ Grinders and, so far, it’s a finished first draft on which I have received notes from some writer friends. I agree with the notes and found some wonderful (I think) solutions to the "problems" that all first drafts have. I will delete about 30 pages from the 370 page draft, add two scenes, and modify the ending. My protagonist is a "Cause" driven guy (save the rainforests, stop the landfill overkill, no nukes, etc.). He has a longtime enemy who is tremendously wealthy and dying of an obscure (but real) disease. The antagonist wants to solve the xenografting problem so he can replace his organs when they start to fail and hopes to live long enough to cure the obscure disease. To that end he’s been breeding chacma baboons for size and treating them "transgenically." There are a host of characters, one of whom sells body parts—his own—for a living. There is an organ procurement specialist, an unknown eco-terrorist, a meth’d-out biker, a defrocked urologist, and, well, it’s quite good if I say so myself."
[If you’re interested in a copy of Pest Control, please contact partners@crimepays.com; collectors please note that no first editions are available.]
