Occult Detective Q&A: Edward M. Erdelac (John Conquer Series)

March 22, 2021 Chris Well

“There is definitely a very good chance of a guy like me sticking his foot right in his mouth trying to pull off a book like this.”

The horror author talks about how his series evolved beyond the initial idea of “Shaft with magic.”

Edward M. Erdelac is the author of the acclaimed Judeocentic/Lovecraftian weird western series Merkabah Rider, Buff Tea, Coyote's Trail, Andersonville, Perennial, Monstrumfuhrer, The Knight With Two Swords, and the compiler of Abraham Van Helsing's papers (in Terovolas).

His latest book is Conquer, a collection of previously published and original stories starring supernatural private eye John Conquer, who solves occult mysteries in 1970s Harlem.

In this exclusive interview, Edward talks to Monster Complex about the origins of the series, the challenges for a white author writing a POC character, and what surprised the author the most as he wrote the stories.

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What sparked the original idea for the character of John Conquer?

I saw an open call for submissions from Ulthar Press' Occult Detective Quarterly for paranormal detective stories, encouraging unique perspectives and settings. I had been reading Ernest Tidyman's original SHAFT novels at the time and also writing a series of stories about the Harlem Renaissance writer (and Hoodoo initiate) Zora Neale Hurston encountering Lovecraftian threats in the course of her travels, and the idea of John Shaft with a mojo hand was appealing to me.

I had also, around that time, been watching Baz Luhrman's THE GET DOWN on Netflix, and I had gotten really enamored with that kind of semi-mystical/mythical take on 1977 New York City, when disco was dying and hip hop was rising from its ashes. Yahya Abdul-Mateen II dancing to DEVIL'S GUN brought Conquer into my head. That song, the lyrics. That's Conquer's theme in my head.

In the pantheon of occult detectives, where do the John Conquer stories fit? (These stories are for fans of what characters or series?)

I call Conquer a cross between John Shaft and John 'Hellblazer' Constantine. Tough, streetwise detective with a library and pockets full of charms, basically. He's a bit of Howardian occult detective, like Conrad & Kirowan, more physical than strictly scholarly, perhaps.

But I wanted to eschew the usual European magical practices and delve into something more uniquely American and suited to the character as I did with my MERKABAH RIDER weird western series (where Jewish folk and magical beliefs were the order of the day).

I love research and learning in the process of writing about cultures under-utilized in genre fiction. John Conquer's background is that he's steeped in lineages of both Creole Vodoun on his father's side and Hoodoo on his mother's - both ethno-religious magical and spiritual systems inidigenous to the United States, and southern African American cultural traditions in particular.

What surprised you the most about the character as you've been writing these stories?

I went into this basically wanting to write a straight up 'Shaft but with magic' kind of pastiche, very down and dirty, very 70's, not very PC....but as I went along, I found that the character sort of developed his own beliefs and personality outside of my original intention. As a student of not just Hoodoo and Vodoun but a wide array of magical practices, I found that Conquer necessarily couldn't be quite as close-minded a character as Shaft.

He is definitely a character of 1976 and has all the prejudices and macho issues of a John Shaft-type, but through the course of the stories, which are sequential, specifically in CONQUER AND THE QUEEN OF CROWN HEIGHTS and CONQUER CRACKS HIS WHIP, he wound developing a more...tolerant side that I had originally intended.

In the former story, he learns that a favorite uncle didn't die when he was a kid, but was actually ostracized by Conquer's father due to his homosexuality, a prejudice that Conquer has sort of inherited from his dad. But, in the course of the story, dealing with Conquer's uncle's former partner in trying to solve his murder, and being among the NYC drag queen culture, Conquer kind of comes around to a different way of thinking. It was a story I never expected to write with that character.

Similarly his hatred of pimps kind of developed into an interesting character trait. I had seen THE MACK and TRUCK TURNER, SUPERFLY, DOLEMITE, lots of blaxploitation classics, and read Iceberg Slim and watched the AMERICAN PIMP documentary but I'd also watched WHORES' GLORY and VERY YOUNG GIRLS, and a long time ago I'd read a book called DAUGHTERS OF JOY, SISTERS OF MISERY by Anne Butler, so I knew I wanted to portray a more holistic view and didn't want to glorify pimpery as would be expected from a book like this.

I thought of Conquer having a particular dislike of pimps stemming from an incident in his youth, and kind of ran with it, and then saddled him with the ghost of a pimp inhabiting his car which made for a neat character dynamic....as one reviewer pointed out a sort of 1970's version of KNIGHT RIDER, but where the guy and the car kind of hate each other. I was pleased how it turned out.

What have been the challenges or research required for a white author to write an occult "blaxploitation" series?

There is definitely a very good chance of a guy like me sticking his foot right in his mouth trying to pull off a book like this. The danger and challenge is finding the balance between the black and the 'sploitation.

But, I had approached MERKABAH RIDER with a similar place of respect and admiration for a culture not my own and come away OK with that, so I didn't hesitate too much to apply myself here as well, as I have a genuine love and affection for the blaxploitation horror genre (honestly, I consider movies like BLACULA and DR. JEKYLL, MR. WHITE up there with Universal Horror classics in terms of importance to the genre) and knew the importance of tracing what I enjoyed to its fundamental cultural roots, understanding 'why' I enjoyed BLACULA and SUGAR HILL, SHAFT and TRICK BABY.

The power and importance of blaxploitation movies and horror came not from the funkiness and the violence and the sex, but from the portrayal of black characters with agency. Whatever the intentions of white writers like Tidyman or non-black filmmakers, just trying to turn a buck with an untapped audience I guess, those images, Pam Grier kicking ass with natural hair, fur coat, and shotgun, Priest posing before his luxurious car, Richard Roundtree walking against Times Square traffic defiantly, looking bad as a hell in that coat to that iconic Isaac Hayes' score, they became indelible cultural representations of black identity and power, coming right off the civil rights movement of the 60s.

And in the case of blaxploitation horror, you had African traditions like Vodoun for instance being treated with a modicum of real understanding, as opposed to the bone rattling, xenophobic stuff presented by white creators and audiences in Voodoo horror movies of the 30's and 40's.

So the real challenge came in the research. Not just getting the setting and the clothes and the music and the lingo right, but doing diligence on the cultural underpinnings of the traditions and folklore represented, and making sure that all fit respectfully into the milieu of the time period. To do honor and homage, not just some cheesy send up.

Empathy is the greatest tool in a writer's kit. I exercise that to the best of my ability when tackling characters of this sort. The 'trick' if there is one, is to read primary source material as much as possible....listen to people in their own words. Then the so-called 'other' ceases to be so 'other.'

I can't ever know what it means to be a black man or a black woman in 1970's NYC. But I can latch onto the shared experiences I have with another human....feelings of helplessness, feelings of struggle, moments of pride and elation, sorrow and joy, and bring those out. Those commonalities are real, even if the characters are imaginary.

This book collects three stories that first appeared in Occult Detective Quarterly. How did those stories come about? (And why published there?)

I loved the stuff ODC was putting out in terms of traditional Victorian detectives like Carnacki and stuff, but also John Linwood Grant's Mama Lucy, for example, and I really wanted to crack that market with a unique character. They were really taking some interesting chances, something the bigger presses just...flat out don't do.

With the first Conquer story, CONQUER COMES CALLING, it started with an image for me. I wanted something strange and striking that could also be emblematic of the 70's. So I came up with a tiny dead man floating in a lava lamp.

Stories like these, I usually begin with an image like that or a title and try to find the story from there. How'd that happen? How can that be solved or regarded or dealt with?

For CONQUER COMES CORRECT, that began with a weird little news item I read, I think it was in THE BRONX IS BURNING by Jonathan Mahler....about a skinned and decapitated gorilla carcass that mysteriously turned up in a Bronx intersection in the 70s. That really happened.

For CONQUER GETS CROWNED, again, I had been watching THE GET DOWN on Netflix and had seen the documentary WILDSTYLE, and wanted to do something with graffiti taggers down in the transit tunnels.

The book also includes four original stories that have never been published. What challenges did you set for yourself when writing these stories?

The three Conquer stories that appeared in ODQ and ODQ Presents were very much one offs, so I wanted to tie them all together into a sequential narrative as I did with MERKABAH RIDER, where the novellas are basically long chapters. I wanted this to feel like episodes of a TV show, where they reel you in with the concept and the monsters of the week and then start slowly building a persistent world and a running narrative....like in ADVENTURE TIME, for instance.

So I did CONQUER CRACKS HIS WHIP because I wanted to explore the origins of Conquer's mysterious talking car that always gets a parking spot and never gets stolen and introduce that element to his mythos. And CONQUER AND THE QUEEN OF CROWN HEIGHTS, I wanted to do a coven of drag queen witches, and had just seen PARIS IS BURNING. That came out of that, and I got to explore his backstory and family a little with that.

I wanted to portray the first meeting of Conquer and his NYPD buddy Lou Lazzeroni, and I also wanted to reference BLACULA, so I did that in KEEP COOL, CONQUER. But I still didn't have a really satisfying intro story because now CONQUER COMES CALLING took place later in the story order.

DOLEMITE IS MY NAME aired around the time I was wrapping those up and I remembered Rudy Ray Moore's poetry and thought it might be fun to do a little Moore-esque poem for the back cover copy. Then I thought about...I had all these nebulous ideas for Conquer stories that weren't really gelling for whatever reason. A werewolf at a disco. Conquer fights a zombie. Conquer takes on a ghost, etc.

Like, I wanted to do something with Conquer defeating some supernatural threat at The Empire Roller Disco, but I couldn't come up with anything that wasn't just plain silly. Werewolf, vampire, the setting was too good for a normal beastie and it was frustrating because the other stories were locked in, so I just did this really short character piece to open the book of a bartender kind of talking up John Conquer and Harlem to a guy new in town, and I dropped the Empire Roller Disco escapade as this legendary public deed Conquer did that everybody knows about.

Almost like the infamous Giant Rat of Sumatra from Sherlock Holmes...teased but never related. Anyway, I was happy with the language in that one, an older guy giving a younger guy a hard time, maybe pulling his leg a little, the Conquer sets the story straight.

Edward M. Erdelac Online

Blog https://emerdelac.wordpress.com

Facebook https://www.facebook.com/ed.erdelac

Twitter https://twitter.com/edwardmerdelac

Goodreads https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/3055410.Edward_M_Erdelac

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Occult Detective Q&A: Edward M. Erdelac (John Conquer Series)

“There is definitely a very good chance of a guy like me sticking his foot right in his mouth trying to pull off a book like this.”

The horror author talks about how his series evolved beyond the initial idea of “Shaft with magic.”

FURTHER READING