A Brief Q&A About the New Dakota Mystery

ATSTFIs any of A Truth Stranger Than Fic­tion based in real­i­ty?

Absolute­ly. With­out giv­ing any spoil­ers, I can tell you that the heart of the mys­tery in A Truth Stranger Than Fic­tion involves a high­ly con­tro­ver­sial cur­rent issue—an issue that is inex­tri­ca­bly inter­twined with the Earth­’s future. The nov­el also deals with cor­po­rate prof­i­teer­ing, cor­po­rate-gov­ern­ment col­lu­sion, and espi­onage.

 

One Ama­zon review­er calls A Truth Stranger Than Fic­tion “non-Nean­derthal noir.” What does this mean?

I think that cus­tomer review­er picked up on one of the things I’ve tried to do with the entire Dako­ta Stevens Mys­tery Series, which is this: to use ele­ments of the old noir detec­tive voice, includ­ing rich metaphors and fun turns of phrase, but to leave out the misog­y­nis­tic and gra­tu­itous­ly vio­lent ele­ments.

TSTF_Enhanced_20Yes, Dako­ta is attrac­tive to women, and yes, he finds them attrac­tive, but he does­n’t view women as objects. He tru­ly loves, admires and respects women (i.e., his asso­ciate, Svet­lana, is accom­plished in her own right as a chess grand­mas­ter). All of the female char­ac­ters in the books, while they might be sexy in some way, are also smart, wit­ty and great at what­ev­er they do.

 

TSTF_Enhanced_45But in the series, Dako­ta is not just pre­sent­ed as “attrac­tive to women”; he’s very attrac­tive to women—on par with James Bond. How real­is­tic is this?

I’ll admit that men as attrac­tive to women as Dako­ta are rare, but they are out there. I went to col­lege with two guys like him: Matt O. and Steve B. I won’t men­tion their last names because I don’t want to intrude on their pri­va­cy, but I can tell you that their appeal to women was leg­endary.
 

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Pho­to cred­its: “Reflect­ed Chess Pieces” by Adri­an Askew (http://goo.gl/3UGXem) and “Cool Busi­ness­man Stand­ing on Dark Gra­di­ent Back­ground” by Alek­san­dr Doo­d­ko.

By Chris Orcutt

CHRIS ORCUTT is an American novelist and fiction writer with over 30 years' writing experience and more than a dozen books in his oeuvre. Since 2015, Chris been working exclusively on his magnum opus. Bodaciously True & Totally Awesome: The Legendary Adventures of Avery “Ace” Craig is a 9-episode novel about teens in the 1980s. It’s about ’80s teens, but for adults (in other words, it’s decidedly not YA literature), and he’s applied this epic storytelling approach to the least examined, most misunderstood, most marginalized narrative space in American literature: the lives and inner worlds of teenagers.