Alabama’s Guy McCullough turns novelist with ‘The Last Luau’

If you know Guy McCullough, it could be from his work as press secretary to then-Lt. Gov. George McMillan. Or it could be his two decades marketing City Stages in Birmingham, or any number of candidates and other clients whom he’s represented as a strategist, media producer or at his own PR and communications agency.

Now, you can add author to that list. His “The Last Luau” is available on Amazon in e-book and print formats from Agile Publishing. It’s McCullough’s first novel, but, he hopes, not his last. Here, he talks about his work pre-novel, his burgeoning writing career and what the future may hold for him and his fictional detective, Mac Ross.

Tell me about you and your career leading up to the novel.

I was born in Anniston and grew up in nearby Oxford. Went to the University of Alabama. At age 20, I was Lt. Gov. George McMillan’s press secretary when we ran for governor against George Wallace. This touched off a 20-year career as a political strategist and media producer, in which I helped elect dozens of candidates to state and federal offices.

Politics is a young person’s game, and the pace and travel became too much once I was married, so I gradually transitioned to commercial pursuits, first with a conventional advertising agency and, in 2009, with Agile Brands, my current firm.

For 20 years (but not the terminal 21st), I marketed City Stages, Birmingham’s World-Class Music Festival.

These days I provide strategic communications and public relations counsel for Fortune 500 companies, like Airbus, Mercedes-Benz, Hyundai, Daikin America Inc. and others.

I lived in Birmingham from 1982 until 2014, when I married a Huntsville native and moved to The Rocket City, where I now live with my wife, Debbie Lemire, a morkie (Coco) and a mackerel tabby (Leo).

Have you always written?

I have. I remember filling up notebooks with short stories of highly questionable quality from a fairly young age. My entire adult life, I’ve been a professional writer, albeit of fact rather than fiction – first as a journalist with The Crimson White and The Anniston Star, before the political and business consulting careers.

How long have you had a book in the works?

In the 1990s I began working on a World War II spy thriller, set mostly in London. The only problem was I was working 12–14-hour days on behalf of commercial clients and City Stages, and so it was very hard to sustain any kind of creative writing effort. I still have that manuscript and may revisit it one day.

A lot of writers report that you have to “write one to throw away,” and that’s been true of my first, slow attempt. It’s completely unpublishable, in fact. But, there is a story in there trying to get out and I may rewrite it one day, time permitting.

In 2019, over a four-month period, I wrote “The Last Luau.” During the pandemic, I edited it and then, thankfully, found a wonderful editor in Halley Cotton, who is an English professor at UAB. I can’t say enough about how Halley transformed my first real novel for the better. Stephen King famously said that, as a writer, you have to “kill all your darlings,” which as I understand it means you have to cut out a lot of writing that you may like and be quite proud of, but if it doesn’t serve the narrative you have to ruthlessly get rid of it.

Hally helped me see the story in a new light, and by cutting out about 15% of the text, I was able to make “The Last Luau” so much better. Her counsel has also informed everything I have written since then.

I would guess you’re an avid reader. Who are your inspirations?

I’ve always been an avid reader. In my youth, I devoured all of The Hardy Boys series, of course, and other juvenile mystery series. As an adult, I’ve been a huge fan of Alan Furst, who in my view is the best espionage writer of his generation, perhaps ever. In fact, I would rank him above even John le Carré.

Furst writes atmospheric thrillers in which mostly ordinary heroes do extraordinary things in the interwar years and during WWII. A few characters weave in and out of his 12 novels but, for the most part, each book has a new hero.

I’ve also long been a fan of Ross Macdonald, the pseudonym used by Kenneth Millar. He created Lew Archer, one of the most memorable detectives in fiction. The name of the hero in “The Last Luau” — Mac Ross — is an homage to Millar, whose books I never tire of re-reading.  

Tell me about “The Last Luau.” How did you land on that title?

My concept was a detective thriller that begins on the evening of Dec. 6, 1941, the eve of the Pearl Harbor attack. After doing months of research, I began writing with the working title “Hotel Street,” which was the locale for Honolulu’s red-light district at the time.

After the story revealed itself to me, which happened fairly quickly, I changed the title to “The Last Luau,” which references a beachside luau Mac Ross happens onto on the night of the 6th. It is, in effect, the last luau before the war, marking a kind of end to one world and the beginning to a very different one.

Even I could see that “The Last Luau” was a much more evocative title than my first, temporary choice.

What about Mac Ross? There are a lot of literary detectives out there. How did you make him different from others?

That’s a great question, because there are so many detectives in the canon these days you can have your choice of personality types and even some fairly obscure quirks.

Mac Ross has something in common with the best-known detectives in the genre, and “Luau” is certainly genre fiction. It has no pretensions to literary fiction. There is a good measure of similarity with Millar’s Lew Archer, but at the same time, Mac Ross is quite different.

Ross is a soft-boiled detective of the old school. No less an authority than Raymond Chandler defined the soft-boiled detective, writing in a 1944 essay,  this way: “Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean.”

And, so, Mac Ross can be a tough guy when he needs to be. But he is also a very tolerant and even in some ways a cultured individual. He’s a standup guy. He is at ease on the mean streets, but he is far from mean. For example, he’s a good cook. He gets along with people from all walks of life and economic circumstances. Despite all he has seen, he looks for the good in people. He has a cynical streak, as seems inevitable for a private investigator, but he doesn’t allow his cynicism to define him.

Like the Territory of Hawaii even in the 1940s, Ross is comfortable with multi-culturalism. Most people are not aware of this, but Hawaii at the time was a kind of model for how a melting pot might actually work.

The largest ethnic group on the island at the time of the Pearl Harbor attack, for example, were Japanese Americans, including many first-generation native-born nisei, as they were known. Another third of the population were Native Hawaiians, and a third were haoles — white colonialists, basically. The book, beginning with that last luau itself, reflects that reality.

The day the bombs started falling all across Oahu, much of the security on the island was provided by ROTC members from local high schools who were nisei. They were thoroughly American in their dress and outlook and aspirations.

Ironically, Japanese Americans on Hawaii were free to go about their lives for the duration of the war, with a few exceptions for those who were allegiant to the emperor or had strong ties to the Japanese military establishment. Whereas, on the mainland, they were put in internment camps, as we know, to our eternal national shame.

This kind of environment, in effect, makes Mac Ross a different sort of detective from, say, Sam Spade, or even Lew Archer. And that actually made it easier in some ways for me to make him a fully formed and complex character.

A recent reviewer on Amazon described “The Last Luau” as “a ‘who done it’ reminiscent of the detective novels by Chandler, Spillane, Stone, and others of that time, except a bit more lyrical, as if the Hawaiian background and trade winds have softened the author’s descriptions.”

I felt very seen when I read that. It captured what I was trying to do maybe even better than I can. And she is a reader who lived in Hawaii for more than a quarter century, and so she understands the place. And certainly, it is immensely gratifying to be compared to writers of that ilk. I am no Chandler nor Spillane, but it’s really nice to have my work mentioned in the same sentence with detective writers like them.

Did you start from the end, knowing how it would be solved, or did you just let the story unfold as you wrote?

A combination of both, actually. I knew that, in the backstory, Mac Ross’ partner in a detective agency had been killed just a couple of months before the action begins, and I knew that particular murder and the mysteries surrounding it would be at the core of the novel.

I also knew going in that a beloved Japanese-American teacher who Ross knew would be the victim of an execution-style murder on the eve of Pearl Harbor and that this murder would also be at the center of the narrative.

In fact, the teacher’s murder leads Mac Ross into deeper waters and ultimately back around to the murder of his partner. Without giving too much away, the murder Mac Ross is hired to solve becomes the key to two other murders, including that of his partner.

But, as any writer of long-form prose will attest, the story and the characters don’t always behave themselves. They surprise you. They do things you had never even considered they might do.

New twists and turns suddenly arise that were not in the original plot outline and that’s really a huge part of the fun for me. There are times when it’s a bit of a struggle to know where to go next, but there are times when it comes so readily it’s almost like taking dictation.

Is this a one-off, or are you planning to write other books? Could this be a series?

I believe it has strong series potential. The cover of the print copies say, “A Mac Ross Mystery,” which at this point is something of an optimistic statement.

But I do have a pretty firm idea of what the second book would be and I think, if it goes well, we could go right through the war with Mac Ross and perhaps even beyond it, if he can tolerate the changes that we know are coming to his beloved islands.

In the time since I finished writing “The Last Luau,” I’ve written about 60% of a second book, but oddly enough it is not a Mac Ross mystery. It’s more in the vein of Alan Furst and is set in occupied Paris, beginning in the spring of 1941. The new book is written in third-person, omniscient narrator form, whereas “Luau” is a first-person narrative.

Of course, if “The Last Luau” really gets traction, I won’t have much choice but to write the second book in the series before I do anything else. That’s more a reflection of how publishing works these days, but I’m fine with taking that path if things work out that way.

I feel as if I have a firm grasp on who this detective is, and I will enjoy going with him into new mysteries and situations.

“The Last Luau,” by Guy McCullough, is available on Amazon.