2019 IndieReader Discovery Award Winner

 

When twenty-something post-grad Nick Fillmore discovers the zine he’s been recruited to edit is a front for drug profits, he begins a dangerous flirtation with an international heroin smuggling conspiracy and in a matter of months finds himself on a fast ride he doesn’t know how to get off of.

After a bag goes missing in an airport transit lounge he is summoned to West Africa to take a fetish oath with Nigerian mafia. Bound to drug boss Alhaji, he returns to Europe to put the job right, but in Chicago O’Hare Customs agents “blitz” the plane and a courier is arrested.

Thus begins a harried, yearlong effort to elude the Feds, prison and a looming existential dead end…. Smuggler relates the real events behind OITNB.

 

"Incredible, cinematic visual details ... An alluring and adventurous ride through a criminal underworld." Kirkus Reviews

"From Provincetown to Chicago and Paris to Jakarta, SMUGGLER pulls off a seemingly impossible mix of visceral, emotional, and psychological realism—all without sacrificing the thrill of vicarious transgression or entertainment. Protagonist (and author) Nick Fillmore's reflection and restrictive interactions never bore and—like the narrative—are rich with cutting insight." –IndieReader

"Smuggler starts glamourous and slow and then accelerates into a dark world where actions have consequences. Nigerian gangsters, black magic, international travels, heroin smuggling, moral justifications, and a descent into the inevitable. Excellent writing, believable characters ... an interesting read narrated by a very competent writer."  –NetGalley review

"This isn't your run-of-the-mill crime story but a work with true literary style." –Books Direct

"Riveting." –BookBub

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About the Book

I started fooling with a screenplay in prison around 1998 or 9, recognizing my story’s inherent dramatic possibilities, then put it aside for a number of years after I realized that all the inner action demanded something more novelistic.

Much of this time I puzzled over how I might present an unsympathetic protagonist (myself) who despite his villainy is not exactly an anti-hero, but more like a frustrated idealist.* Orwell’s narrative essays provided a clue, especially his “Shooting an Elephant,” as did Philip Lopate’s Art of The Personal Essay, which I discovered a few years later when I was out and teaching. Lopate’s introductory notes on the confessional element in personal essay, particularly, suggest how one might might navigate a moral fix by simply telling the truth—in Lopate’s words “drop past psychic defenses toward deeper levels of honesty … implicat[ing] first oneself and then the reader in a fault that seems initially to belong safely elsewhere.” Which brings us straight to Camus, whose ideas were never far from the psychological conception of character and from whom I drew a kind of inspiration as I sought to defend myself, maybe; Smuggler is not an apology, after all, which would be the easy thing to do, but an attempt to inhabit the logic of my choices. 

Anyway, I didn’t actually begin writing Smuggler in its current form until about ten years ago, in 2008, in Volcano, Hawaii (where the story ends). A lot of what I wrote early on was episodic, which there’s a clear trace of in the book; I spent a lot of time afterward trying to think like a novelist, connecting scenes and linking ideas and events, and conceiving of the work as a whole—something I imagined like engineering a long span … though in fact so much of the work was more a mapping of unconscious themes and recurring images than a logical progression or set of mathematical equations….

Then my wife and I moved from Big Island to Oahu and my wife gave birth to our daughter in 2009, so there’s another gap in the writing. In 2011, according to computer files, I really began again in earnest to write my way to the end of the story. I hooked up with an agent in 2014 and spent a year revising. Keith thought that I should look at Chandler. I subsequently spent a good deal of energy trying to resist his voice (just as I tried to resist all the other voices: Conrad, Babel, Nabokov). We had very serious interest at Nat Geo and I did a rewrite for a big editor there, but nothing, alas; did a couple of rewrites for an editor at an independent press after that, again nada; and finally, realizing that I needed to take matters into my own hands, submitted myself to the task of actually “finishing” the book. Of course it’s interesting to observe the various things that are forced to the surface under that kind of pressure, and in addition to the final coats of varnish I actually did a bit of  fancy joinery in the end.

Having published a magazine back in the day, I got hold of an academic copy of QuarkXpress and began designing and type-fitting the book, as well as figuring out marketing and distribution (and all that stuff I couldn’t bother to figure out back in the day), and was struck by a sudden, very clear sense, without my realizing it, that the weight of the world had been lifted off of my shoulders and I was very happy indeed.

 

* I’ve been asked elsewhere to clarify this distinction between anti-hero and frustrated idealist. That’s a little vague, is it not?

I think of the anti-hero as possessing an unconscious quality. At bottom he is deeply pragmatic, which precludes any deeper considerations of right and wrong.

The frustrated idealist, conversely, is someone who has made the conscious choice to do wrong (for its own sake). Morality is central to his outlook; thus, his choices are said to be immoral, as distinguished from the merely amoral choices of the anti-hero. The frustrated idealist exists inside society, as opposed to the anti-hero, whose unconcern allows him to float above consequences.

Some of this may be my own peculiar outlook. In writing my own character, it felt necessary to distinguish the blithe opportunist of Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Times from an anguished Raskolnikov; the picaresque from the tragic.

I wasn’t smuggling drugs just for the money. Or entirely for the experience. But partly out of a sense of injustice, and a deeply misdirected desire for revenge….

Most TV anti-heroes, lacking any real awareness of their calumny, fall into the former category of anti-hero. Tony Soprano is just a family guy, finally. Dexter is able to adapt his impulses to a very Aristotilean “code.” And Heisenberg seems to view his predicament not so much in moral terms, but as a logical puzzle requiring one merely to figure out the order of operations. Success and failure are the primary beacons.

In Smuggler I’m a little coy about my sense of injustice. That’s partly termperamental and partly an artistic choice. And partly the desire to have my character retain a sense of agency, not just be reactive and blaming. Suffice it to say he is aggrieved. Only from time to time does his frustration spill over into words:

“In another place and time I might have raised a fist. Or manned the barricades. But in our post-sixties era, cowed by Reagan and Bush Sr. and defeated by a rhetoric so inane that to oppose it would seem stupid, we resorted to punk rock’s effete gestures: ‘Don’t know what I want, but I know how to get it.’”

And so the problem for me was how to portray this character who’s not likely to win a lot of sympathy points from the reader. As I explain elsewhere, the solution was to simply tell the truth, to inhabit the logic of my own actions … which still leaves some readers who expect this big apology a little out of joint. Which is okay, I think. If everybody’s happy, it’s probably a boring party.

Details
Publisher: iambic Books
Publication Year: 2019
Format: Paperback
Length: 290pp
ASIN: B07KWW1JJL
ISBN: 9780578403489
Endorsements
The book starts glamourous and slow and then accelerates into a dark world where actions have consequences. Nigerian gangsters, black magic, international travels, heroin smuggling, moral justifications and a descent into the inevitable. Excellent writing, believable characters … an interesting read narrated by a very competent writer.
Relentless velocity drives us from Provincetown to Chicago, Paris to Jakarta, and elsewhere. Sleep is little more than punctuation, until the inevitable pause. Even then, Nick’s reflection and restrictive interactions never bore and—like the narrative—are rich with cutting insight.
"Riveting."
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