Our latest book “The Kiss of Night” is now available for pre-order. It ships the first week of March. What is it about? Well, we had a chance to sit down with author Mark Wukas and talk to him about it.
EP: To me, The Kiss of Night is a like a love-letter to hard-working journalists. The City News Bureau, which no longer exists, is like a character in the book. To younger readers who might not be familiar with it, how would you explain the City News Bureau to them?
Mark: It’s a bygone era, that’s for sure. When I was a kid in the 1960s, I had four daily newspapers from which to choose–The Sun-Times, the Chicago Daily News, the American and the Tribune. That’s a lot of reporters. We were a Daily News family, so I was reading Royko when I was 10. These four papers owned City New Bureau, which became a boot camp for young reporters on their way to the dailies. All gone now.
Journalism has changed enormously with the advent of the internet. Television began to compete with newspapers and cut into their ad revenues. With the advent of social media, advertisers didn’t know what to do. When it looked like people stopped reading print, ad bucks went online.
Someone recently said that social media is the new journalism, which means that any jackass with a PC, an ISP and a URL can publish anything they want online and call it journalism. If that’s true, then God help us all. Good journalism demands gatekeepers and editorial judgment. Sure, papers had their biases. The Tribune was the Republican paper and the Sun-Times distinctly working class, but they didn’t purposely mislead. Now you get bigmouths saying that school shootings didn’t happen.
Unless people know where to find it, the world has lost the conscientious professionalism that came with the nuts-and-bolts reporting I learned at City News.
EP: You’ve also captured a time and place beautifully. The less gentrified, grittier, rough-and-tumble Chicago of the 1980s really comes to life. How much of that came from your memories of that time, and how much did you have to research to stay true to the time?
Mark: Thank you for saying so. I have a pretty good memory, especially of those days. Experiencing all that, I mean, how can you forget? But I’ve also been keeping a diary since I was a college freshman, so I reread a lot of old volumes, and even more memories came back. But my novel is not autobiography. I mean, I saw 90 percent of what I describe in the book, but did any of the narrator’s personal experiences happen to me? No. I was still living with my parents when I worked for City News because I was too broke to move out. But writing Kiss did sometimes mean changing names to protect the guilty.
EP: I know one person who will be thrilled with this book. One of my sisters-in-law specializes in languages like Greek and Latin. The quotes you pepper in from Greek mythology required a whole different font and alphabet. Is that a subject matter that has always interested you, or was that an element you added to give extra texture to the main character?
Mark: Like the narrator of my novel, I fell under the spell of ancient Greece and Rome, especially the Trojan War, when I was 11 years old, so I’ve always been a closeted Classics guy. (Some friends would say not so closeted.) I took four years of Latin in high school, but Quigley had dropped Greek the year before I arrived, so I never had the chance to take it. Broke my heart.
I just kept reading the Classics on my own until I left public relations for the classroom. I loved teaching the Odyssey to high school freshmen, and 18 months ago I was on a tour of the Peloponnesus in Greece and met a retired Greek and Latin teacher from Scotland. She’s been teaching me Greek over Zoom. It’s really exciting.
EP: The Magikist sign is a landmark in Chicago. It’s in the title of your book (Kiss), it’s part of the cover, it’s part of the story line. Why did you choose to include that in the book?
Mark: When I was an English major in college, I’d always pass the Magikist Lips at 87th and the Dan Ryan on the way down to Champaign. When I was reading Gatsby and ruminating on the eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleberg, I said to myself that if I ever wrote a novel, I’d include the Magikist Lips. None of my fellow English majors, except those from Chicago, even remotely got the joke.
When it came to writing Kiss, I wondered how to include them, whether as a passing reference or a major symbol. I chose the latter, and I think it adds to the story.
EP: One of the big issues you tackle in this novel is the relationship between Chicago cops and the neighborhoods where they have difficulty keeping order. I thought you portrayed that with great compassion to both sides. Did that come from actually living that life reporting from police stations, and getting to know police officers in a more three-dimensional way?
Mark: I have a great deal of sympathy for police officers everywhere, but especially Chicago cops. A lot of this comes from working with them when I was a young reporter.
Chicago police have a tough job, a really tough job, and I don’t think that citizens understand the life-and-death nature of their work and how just being in the wrong place at the wrong time while trying to do a job can kill you. They’re incredibly brave.
At the same time, the strain of the job can lead police officers to errors in judgment and turn their idealism into the need to survive. And I’d be naive not to admit that there are some bad cops. There are some bad reporters, too, and I hope I captured a bit of that in my book.
EP: You’ve obviously written a million things in your journalism and teaching careers, but this is your first novel. Talk about what it felt like when you received that first copy in your hands.
Mark: Honestly, I could hardly believe it. I thought some other guy named Mark Wukas had written it. I might be the world’s oldest first novelist.
I’ve been living with this dream since college. As an English major and as an English teacher, I only read the best of the best. I can’t tell you the number of times I’d stare at the page that I’d just written and think, “This isn’t any good. Hawthorne or Fitzgerald or Faulkner or Hemingway or Vonnegut or any other writer I read and taught did a better job. I have no business doing this.” But I had to get this book off my chest. It’s humbling, especially since it’s about to launch into the marketplace of reader opinion.
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