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by Mark Rubenstein

Readers often ask how an idea for a novel comes to an author. I’ve been asked how my new novel, Mad Dog House, came into being. It was a very strange—almost dreamlike—process for me. I’ve found ideas the same way for the other three novels I’ve written (which will be published over the next two years).

It’s as though my mind went through a semiconscious period where things from the past and present coalesced and began building on themselves. In all honesty, once the story was on paper, I was unable to precisely recall its genesis. It seemed very strange, almost the way you feel when you wake up some mornings knowing you’ve dreamed, but the dream dissolves before you’re completely resurrected from a sleeping state.
The novel begins with a scene in a classroom in which the class bully (named “Cootie”) is “finger-snapping” the ear of the boy in front of him (the protagonist). So how did this setting become the start of my novel?

When I was in the seventh grade, there was a kid in the class nicknamed “Cootie.” He was the class clown, unlike the Cootie in the novel. It was a strange nickname, and through all these years, the moniker has stuck with me. Many years later, while at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, tending to paratroopers of the 82nd Airborne Division, I worked with another medical corpsman whose laugh sounded like the howl of a hyena or an insane dog. We jokingly nicknamed him “Mad Dog.” That name, too, stuck with me, and I often think of him.

In addition, as a high school freshman, I sat in front of some wise guy who constantly finger-snapped my right ear. At the end of the period, the ear felt like a hot coal. It was, to say the least, annoying. At thirteen years old, I weighed a prodigious 105 pounds, and this bullying kid was far bigger—and very intimidating. I sat there day after day, feeling helpless and humiliated by the enforced passivity of the situation.

One day, after the third or fourth finger-snap, I turned to the bully and looked him dead in the eye. I was smoldering with rage. Not thinking, I challenged him to a fight behind the candy store near the school. He looked at me, and for a moment, I thought I detected a hint of fear in his eyes. Then he laughed. But somehow, my animal instinct kicked in, and I could almost smell his fear. He’d never expected so brazen a challenge from such a skinny kid.

When class ended, we walked outside and headed for the candy store. In an empty lot, out of view of the school, we went at it. Long story short: I beat the hell out of him.

So all of these very disparate elements wove their way into the first page—actually, into the first sentence—of Mad Dog House: “When he was twelve years old Mad Dog ripped off Cootie Weiss’s ear.”

Fist-fighting was a way of life in the neighborhood where I grew up. I eventually earned a degree in business, served in the army, learned plenty about acute medical care and guns, became a physician and then a psychiatrist, and now practice adult and forensic psychiatry. I’ve always loved and had an interest in restaurants but, wisely, never owned one. However, I could never have predicted that these vastly different elements from my life (past and present) would come together, be reconfigured, and coalesce into part of the plotline of a novel.

Writing Mad Dog House was a matter of letting one “what if” play off another, and the process of storytelling took over. One thing morphed into another, and the plot began taking unforeseen turns. By the time I reached, say, page 150, I had to go back and change page 35 to make things consistent. Eventually, I’d written the story as it now exists. And I simply cannot remember exactly how I put it all together.

Mad Dog House is the story of a successful suburban physician and his two friends owning a Manhattan steak house, with the protagonist, Roddy Dolan, and his best friend, Danny Burns, being silent partners. Things go very awry, and bad things begin to happen.

When I look back on the genesis of the novel, it’s clear to me that, on some very basic level, bits and pieces of my own past, my strivings, my knowledge base, my fears, my wishes, and my inner emotional landscape merged into the narrative. Everything came together and told a story—a crime thriller that seemed somehow to have leaped from my brain and its imaginings.

It’s all pure fiction, of course.

Mark Rubinstein
Author, Mad Dog House

http://markrubinstein-author.com/

Kindle edition now available! http://amzn.to/SdcjEI
Follow Mark Rubinstein on Twitter: @mrubinsteinCT