Mythology is a fascinating thing. As one of the characters reflects in the book, we tell ourselves stories partly to place ourselves in the midst of the maddening swirl of life, to help us figure ourselves out. Tall tales serve two purposes: this big-picture, self-identification stuff, and also the good old-fashioned need to be entertained, which too many novels overlook.
RHPC: What was the toughest thing about writing this book?
TM: First let me say that it was an immense amount of fun to write. If people have half as good a time reading it as I had writing it, then I should have some happy readers.
I’m a fiction writer. I love cool stories. I love to make stuff up. So I was intrigued by the possibilities that these Depression-era bank robbers presented. They were so larger-than-life: bank robberies with tommy guns and fast cars and fedoras! Car chases and pretty girls and sharp suits and sharper lines! But there was a problem: This has been done before. We’ve all seen crime movies set in the thirties, we’ve all seen bank robberies in cop shows on TV, we’ve read the pulp classics by Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett and seen their visions on the screen as film noir. I wanted to tackle this milieu, these characters, the crazy crucible of the Great Depression, but I would only do it if I could find a new angle, a different way in, something that had never been done.
I tried a few times to start the novel. I tried to write a bank robbery scene; it was terrible. I tried to write a chapter about a twelve-year-old future bank-robber working in his moralizing father’s store; it was awful. So I put the chapters away and tried to write a completely different book on another subject. But I kept coming back to this idea, this time, these people.
One day I reminded myself that people called Dillinger “the man no jail can hold.” And of course there were those stories that Dillinger hadn’t really been killed, that it was a PR hoax by the government. Somewhere along the line, these various ideas got muddled in my mind, becoming a new question: What if there were bank robbers whom death itself could not hold? What if there were bank robbers who died and came back to life?
I had no idea where I was going with that. But I liked it. I pictured the first chapter, the two bank robbers waking up in a police morgue, covered in bullet wounds. I helped them up. We got in our 1933 Terra-plane, pulled on our fedoras, strapped on our bulletproof vests, and headed thataway, with no clear idea where we’d end up.
RHPC: I’m getting a sense that you’re attracted to the gray area where fact and fiction meld.
TM: Where they meld, where they fight, where they call each other names, tell different stories, make excuses, and try to see which one makes more sense.
After the publication of The Last Town on Earth, a few people said, “There’s a lot of history in this book. Did you ever think of writing it as nonfiction instead?” My answer was “Absolutely not.” I’m a novelist, I’ve always thought of myself as a novelist, and the thought of telling a story that had to be so tightly constrained by facts, dates, times, and places is outright terrifying. It just doesn’t seem as much fun.
This was 2006–2007, when memoirs were ascendant in the publishing world (even, ahem, the memoirs that turned out not to be true), and in general the sales of nonfiction works were dwarfing the sales of fiction. So I started thinking of this, of the apparent preference for nonfiction, for true stories, for things that actually happened. There seemed to be this popular distaste for fiction, for making things up, and I just didn’t understand it. I do appreciate nonfiction (much more than I used to), and I read quite a bit of it. But I love fiction, and I felt compelled to write a book that would show off all of fiction’s wonderful possibilities. Its ability to captivate and amaze, to enthrall and transport, to stun and move. The way it realistically portrays not only things readers have never experienced, but also accurately explains things every reader has experienced. I wanted to write a book that took the best of fiction and the best of nonfiction and threw them together, turned them upside down, played them against each other.
Sometimes when people praise a work of nonfiction, they use the old saying that “truth is stranger than fiction.” I took that as a direct challenge. If truth is stranger than fiction, then I wanted to write fiction that was stranger than truth.
RHPC: Here we are suffering through the greatest economic slowdown since the Great Depression, and now you’re publishing a book set during the Great Depression. Was that deliberate?
TM: Not at all. I wrote this book when we were in far better times. I wasn’t trying to draw any parallels, because there weren’t any at the time. I made the final edits on the third draft just as Lehman Brothers was collapsing in October 2008. During the time in which the book was out of my hands and in production, Wall Street had its financial meltdown, and much changed in the world economy.
That being said, part of the reason I wanted to write this book is because I’ve always wanted to tackle issues of financial struggle in fiction—not just the day-to-day dilemmas, but also the ways in which we define ourselves by what we do for a living, and what happens to us psychologically and emotionally when we’re out of work, or evicted, or desperately trying to feed and shelter our children. These issues don’t always make it into American fiction. They’re there a bit in The Last Town on Earth, but I wanted to explore it further: what it’s like to struggle through hard times, how it affects your worldview, your family, your relationships, your future. This is a tricky thing to address in fiction without becoming too dark or heavy-handed or preachy, and I realized that an exciting tale of bank robbers would allow me to work with these issues in a lighter way.
Also, I was struck by the fact that most books (fiction and nonfiction) and films about the 1930s bank robbers barely mentioned the Depression, or just used it as a backdrop, maybe tossing in a quick scene with a Hooverville or a poor farmer before proceeding with their stories of well-dressed, debonair robbers. It was as if these characters lived in a completely separate world from their fellow Americans. But that’s not how it really was. What about the robbers’ families, at home sick with worry, morally opposed to their crimes but relying on them to pay the bills, hounded by police and feds who want them to rat their brothers or sons out, watching amazed while their neighbors and total strangers read about and talk about their brothers’ or sons’ exploits, terrified and heartsick that one day they’ll be killed? What must it have been like for them?
I imagine that readers will find some of the details of the Depression, and the characters’ reactions to their situations, very different from what we’re living through now. But I think they’ll also find that some parts ring eerily true to today’s world, in ways I myself never could have imagined when I’d first put them down on paper. Certain passages that I wrote years ago feel different to me when I see them now; at the time of the writing, I was trying to use my imagination to conjure a very difficult and uncertain time. Now, unfortunately, the evidence of hardship is all around us, and inside us, in a way I never could have predicted. It just goes to show that no matter how hard you might try to guide how your book will feel to a reader, there are many variables between the writing desk and the images that wind up in readers’ minds.
QUESTIONS AND TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION
1. This book was written before the 2008 financial crisis that launched the nation into a recession, yet many reviewers have commented on its parallels with the present day. Do you see parallels, and, if so, did it increase your enjoyment of the book, by drawing newfound connections between then and now, or did it dampen the reading experience, by reminding you of your own hard times? Should fiction set in the past try to evoke the present, or deliberately avoid it by providing an escape? Or neither?
2. Jason seems enamored with his fame but also uncomfortable with it. Whenever people ask him whether certain stories about the Firefly Brothers are true, he dodges the questions with, “Don’t believe everything you read.” Why do you think he has this mixed relationship with his fame?
3. Jason and Whit are
thieves and murderers—and yet as readers, we root for them. At any point in the book, did you find yourself conflicted as to whether to hope for the brothers’ success or failure? Do you think they are heroes? Do you feel that the book presents these criminals too romantically, or judges them too harshly?
4. Jason tells Whit that they should not suffer in the Depression, that they’re “better than this.” We tend not to think that hard times will befall us, even when they’re happening to other people. Is this confidence important in helping us succeed, or is it irrational, leading us to take dangerous risks? Is it something unique about us as Americans?
5. The author mentions magic and magicians often—not just the stories about the Firefly Brothers’ mythic abilities, but also Weston’s observation that the unemployed look like “failed magicians,” and Jason’s thought that the lake looks so flat he could probably walk on it. What’s all this magic doing in a tale of hardened realism?
6. The book looks at the different ways in which we respond to tragedies and disasters, those of our own making and otherwise. Characters grapple with the Depression, with unemployment, with incarceration. Do these various struggles bring the three Fireson brothers closer, or do their different ways of responding push them further from one another? How well does this jibe with your own experience?
7. The majority of the novel’s fathers in one way or another fail and abandon their children—Pop Fireson, Jasper Windham, and even Whit are all guilty of this. Why do you think this is? How do their fathers’ actions affect the novel’s sons and daughters?
8. The kidnapped judge tries to convince Darcy that he could not be killed because he could not imagine his own death. What do you make of this conclusion in the context of the Firefly brothers’ experience?
9. If the Garret Jones murder had never occurred, do you think that Jason would have stuck to his (alleged) decision to abandon crime forever? Why do you think his father’s crime made him change his mind?
10. Much of the novel is written in the third person, but at times a narrator appears. Why do you think the author chose to add this perspective? Who do you think the narrator is? Why is he or she important?
11. What do you think the author is saying about mythmaking and folklore? Why do we love to believe outlandish stories?
12. What do you make of the ending? Do you prefer to think that the Firefly Brothers will be reborn yet again, or have they finally met their end?
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
THOMAS MULLEN was born in 1974, raised in Rhode Island, and graduated from Oberlin College. His first novel, The Last Town on Earth, was named Best Debut Novel of 2006 by USA Today, was a Chicago Tribune Best Book of the Year, a New York Times Editor’s Choice, and was awarded the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for excellence in historical fiction. He lives in Atlanta with his wife and son.
The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2010 by Thomas Mullen
Reading group guide copyright © 2011 by Random House, Inc.
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Random House Reader’s Circle and Design is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Mullen, Thomas.
The many deaths of the Firefly Brothers: a novel / Thomas Mullen.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-1-58836-971-0
1. Brothers—Fiction. 2. Criminals—Fiction. 3. Bank robberies—Fiction.
4. Death—Fiction. 5. Depressions—1929—Fiction.
6. Middle West—Fiction. 7. Suspense fiction. I. Title.
PS3613.U447M36 2010
813′.6—dc22 2009019712
www.atrandom.com
Cover design: Thomas Beck Stvan.
Cover images: © Yolande de Kort/Trevillion (man), © iLona Wellmann/Trevillion (woman)
v3.0
The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers: A Novel Page 45
