Tell us about yourself.

I was born and raised in and around Albany, New York. I was educated in both denominational and nondenominational private schools. I did my undergraduate work at Providence College and earned my Masters in Writing at Vermont College of Norwich University. Presently I reside in a small hamlet just outside the Albany city limits in a home I share with my wife, Megan, and our boys, Jack and Harrison.

Are you coming to mystery writing from another job?

I've been a free-lance writer now for nearly ten years (I'm 34) having written journalism and non-fiction for such magazines and papers as New York Newsday, Game and Fish Magazine, Hudson Valley Magazine and The Albany Times Union. Right now I am concentrating solely on the second novel in the Keeper Marconi series. I also have a rough draft completed for a third Keeper novel and a short outline for a non-Keeper novel involving a true life pathologist who resided in Albany in the mid to late nineteenth century. Oh, but to answer your question. I am strictly a writer.

What led you to write mysteries? Are you a longtime reader?

I once read where Robert Parker decided one day to write what he loved to read. That's pretty much how it happened to me. From Parker to Crumley to Crichton, I am major thriller and espionage fan. I wouldn't call myself a mystery writer in the strictest sense of the word. While I try to nurture a mystery throughout a book, I'm not completely interested in "Who dunnit." I'm much more interested in the character whose life begins to crumble for no apparent reason at all. And of course, in this lies the greatest mystery of all. For instance, maybe he realizes he's being framed by the very people he has trusted for years and years. How does he react to the frame? Keeper could never simply accept money for a case like so many detectives. He has to have a personal stake in it. There must always be a huge risk involved with the cases he attempts to solve. Whether it be his reputation or his life that is on the line, or both. And when you take into account my commitment to adding true crime elements to the mix and the research that goes along with it, you could say that these novels are a challenge. More than a challenge.

Tell us about your road to publication.

I started out like many writers do, by reporting for the local newspaper and then working my way up to magazines and eventually to writing short fiction and publishing that in some of the more "literary" magazines and journals around the country, like Fugue, Rosebud, Orange Coast Magazine and others. I still have stories forthcoming from Maryland Review, Crazyquilt, Mississippi Mud and a couple others, I believe. I went on to spend a summer at the Bread Loaf Writers Institute as well as the New York State Writer's Institute where I had the opportunity to work with Tim O'Brien and Amy Hempel. Eventually I decided to go back to school for my MFA in Writing. I spent two full years in the writing program at Vermont College where I worked with Bret Lott, Chris Noel, Ellen Lesser, Douglas Glover and others.

What kind of research was involved for your first book?

I spent a lot of time in maximum security prisons like Green Haven and Sing Sing. Because I visited these places with a former Maximum Security Warden, I was allowed to forgo the normal, abbreviated tour offered most journalists, for the no-holds- barred tour. I visited the cages of each of these prisons, as well as the death house in Green Haven. At one point I actually laid myself out on the table utilized for lethal injection just to get a feel for the experience. I obtained (I won't tell you how) and utilized many formerly classified documents prepared by the New York State D.O.C.S. I also relied on certain books concerning Attica, as well as personal interviews. Then there's the local library as well as the Internet.

Who are your influences as a writer?

From the moment I first read Hemingway's In Our Time, I knew I wanted to be a writer. The short, terse vignette style that makes the reader feel like the fictional experience actually happened to him. Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Joseph Conrad have all been major influences. Tim O'Brien, Amy Hempel, Jim Crumley, Jim Harrison, Robert Parker are all contemporary major writers whom I go back to again and again and again. When it comes to style, they are the real thing.

What does your family think of having a mystery author in their midst?

They think I'm totally cool, the greatest. Well, no . . . that's not completely right. I still have to take out the garbage and do the dishes, normal things like that. Because I get up and go to an office outside the house every morning, my kids think being a novelist is like a normal sort of job. Like being a lawyer or an architect.

Tell us about plans for future books.

I am, in fact, contracted for another Keeper novel. It's presently untitled but it involves a writer who has gotten herself locked up in a Mexican border prison while researching a story on "Burriers" or female drug runners who run coke and marijuana for both money and the thrill. When her wealthy advertising executive husband hires Keeper to go after her on the sly, an awful lot of dead bodies begin popping up. This is the novel where Keeper will be convinced he is going crazy. Really paranoid in the great Hitchcockian tradition (at one point I was using "Crazy!" as the working title). My editor and I already taking about the third Keeper, for which I have a rough draft already completed (you may ask yourself, how did he complete the third one before the second one? It's a long story). I am also working on a non-Keeper novel--the one I mentioned earlier--based on Dr. John Swinburne, the true life Albany Pathologist. Catch has received quite a bit of Hollywood attention so there may be some screen work in the future as well.

How can readers get in touch with you?

My e-mail is VAZandri@aol.com
Readers are also welcome to drop a line care of
The Vines Agency
648 Broadway
Suite 901
New York, NY 10012
(212)777-5522

Contact me any time. I'm sure to respond to every question and/or comment.

Thanks, Vincent, and best of luck! Readers, check out our review of As Catch Can.

February 15, 1999