In the latest issue of CrimeReads, Tod talks about the nexus of gangster fiction and gangster rap…and how both formed him into the writer he is now:
The challenge, naturally, is that the youth aren’t great with nuance. Just as I, at 17, found someone announcing themselves as a crazy motherfucker narratively alluring, so, too, might a kid think, well, Tee Grizzley made his millions by being a violent criminal, doing his time and coming out with an authentic story to tell over a ferocious beat, that seems like an easy path…
Of course, that’s not going to be the case for most—Donald Westlake and Lawrence Block didn’t turn me into a hitman, they just made me want to write about hitmen—and so, too, can a kid look at Ice Cube and Dr. Dre and Jay-Z and see what they really were: Not gangsters, but cinematographers. Or, at least, not gangsters for the long haul, because as Too $hort once rapped, gangsters don’t live that long. Not long enough to become media empires, anyway.
