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Read the Body in a Barrell Press Release
Forgive my bias: I love seeing water industry professionals writing books. Even more, I love seeing water practitioner-writers expanding their horizons into genres outside of descriptive or prescriptive non-fiction. There is a storied and meaningful relationship between water and noir crime fiction — stemming, perhaps, from the noirish behavior of water professionals in years (one hopes) past. Aaron Mead, in his novella Body in a Barrel, brings the past to the surface, quite literally, through Lake Mead’s slow, climate-change-induced unveiling of its long-covered depths.
In the following interview, Mead talks about how the Colorado River and his eponymous lake both inspire and play lead roles in the novella, as well as his ongoing path to publishing this and future water books.
Who do you consider to be the intended audience of Body in a Barrel? Another way of asking this might be, who do you most want to read Body in a Barrel?
When I’m not writing, I work at the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, helping to plan and manage the water imports to Southern California from the Colorado River. My work often takes me to places around the Colorado River Basin, which spans seven states in the American Southwest. So I have many friends from other water agencies in other states, all of whom are part of what I think of as the Colorado River community. The book is dedicated to them, so the group I imagined would be most interested in the book is this Colorado River community. With that said, water — and particularly Lake Mead — is something like a character in the book, so I imagine anyone interested in water might be interested in the book, including water folks in California, which is why I’m thrilled to connect my book with Maven’s Notebook and the Water Shelf. These are my people!
The second part of the audience I imagine for the book is readers of crime fiction, and perhaps especially mafia fiction. After all, at least on the surface, the book is about a body in a barrel that shows up on the shore of the lake. But I will say, the book is not a traditional crime or mafia story. The main character isn’t a mobster who commits crimes or a cop looking to solve a crime; rather, it’s a former mobster dealing with the aftermath of a crime. Nevertheless, I still think fans of mobster and crime fiction would enjoy it.
Was there a particular book or books that inspired you to write, or inspired you while you were writing, Body in a Barrel?
The most direct inspiration for writing Body in a Barrel was not another book but a tweet, if you’ll believe it. After an article emerged in May 2022 that a body with a gunshot wound had shown up in a barrel on the shore of drought-ravaged Lake Mead, a colleague flagged a tweet linked to the article that said something like, “Wouldn’t it be funny if the Las Vegas mob suddenly became climate activists?” After I stopped laughing, my gears started turning on a story about the barrel and the people who could have put it there.
Because the barrel had been in cold water until 2022, the clothing of the victim was well-preserved, allowing police to date the crime to the late 1970s or early 1980s — the heyday of the Chicago mob in Las Vegas. When I learned this, my research got more focused, and I consulted two helpful books on the Las Vegas mob from that era. The first was The Battle for Las Vegas: The Law vs. The Mob by Dennis N. Griffin, and the second was The Enforcer by William F. Roemer Jr. These books introduced me to the real-life mobsters who inspired two of the characters and some of the events in my story. I should say, though, that authorities still haven’t identified the body in the barrel from May 2022 or how it got there, so my story is very much a work of fiction.
As I was writing the book, Martin Scorsese’s movie, Casino, and the Mob Museum in Las Vegas also inspired me. Casino captures the height of the Chicago mobster era in Las Vegas and gave me a vivid picture of its most colorful characters. And the Mob Museum is a fantastic resource for all things mobster — not just the Las Vegas mob, but organized crime around the country, around the world, and across time. I visited the museum twice during my writing and publishing of the book. The museum co-produced a podcast called “Mobbed Up,” which was also inspirational for me in the writing.
Body in a Barrel is a work of fiction, but it is based on real-life events and people. Would you say there is a thesis or central argument in Body in a Barrel? If so, what is it?
You’re right that the book is based on real-life events and people. As I describe in the acknowledgements section of the book, although my main characters, Lenny Battaglia and Grace Kim, are both entirely products of my imagination, my character Frank Messina is modeled after the actual former mobster, Frank Cullotta, who died only recently during the pandemic and, incidentally, had a cameo role in Casino. Also, my character Tony Bonucci is loosely based on Tony Spilotro, the Chicago mob’s legendary enforcer in Las Vegas.
Despite this basis in real-life events and people, I would not say that Body in a Barrel has any kind of thesis or central argument. More generally, I would say that theses and arguments aren’t really the stuff of good fiction. Some fiction might have them, but that kind of fiction often comes across as preachy or teachy — at least for me — which tends to pull me out of the story. When I read fiction, I want to be absorbed in the characters and the plot, not necessarily contemplating evidence for a thesis or the validity of an argument. I do think good fiction often has something to say. But even so, I typically don’t want to reflect on that “something” until after I’m done reading a story (or at least part of the story), and the “something” is almost never as clear or tidy as a thesis or argument. I don’t mean to come across as picky or snooty, here. I just have a concern for how good stories work.
So what does my book have to say? Well, I don’t want to ruin the story, and I also don’t want to put too fine of a point on it, since I think good art says different things to different people. But I will say that the story is, at a minimum, about the aftermath of violence — especially gun violence, of which there is way too much in our country — and about how people deal with the fear and guilt that comes after doing something terrible. That may be the a central question posed by the book: how do we deal with fear and guilt? I’ll leave it to my readers to answer it.
There is a long-standing use of water themes in crime stories, most famously in the 1974 film Chinatown. How does Body in a Barrel fit into and/or challenge this tradition?
In addition to Chinatown, Paolo Bacigalupi’s 2015 novel, The Water Knife, comes to mind here. Although I’ve not yet read it — someone just gave me a copy that’s sitting in the to-be-read pile on my nightstand — it seems the role of water in the novel is similar to its role in Chinatown: in both stories, water is a scarce resource that kingpins use to exercise ruthless power over others. Body in a Barrel is similar to these stories in that they all fall within the genre of noir — they all have non-traditional protagonists who are deeply flawed.
However, the role of water in my story is a bit different from its role in the other two. In Body in a Barrel, a plummeting Lake Mead is the setting, which drives my protagonist’s main problem — the possible exposure of a barrel containing his victim. The struggle over water as a resource and a vehicle for exercising power doesn’t really show up in my story. Thus, Body in a Barrel may be more like Patricia Highsmith’s 1957 novel, Deep Water, in which a character disposes of his murder victim in a quarry reservoir.
What book(s) would you like to see next to Body in a Barrel on the water shelf? Are there specific books that you think would pair well with Body in a Barrel, that you see Body in a Barrel in dialogue with, either reinforcing, challenging, or playing off each other?
The effect of climate change on Las Vegas and especially Lake Mead plays a critical role in Body in a Barrel. You’ve got 115-degree weather, you’ve got Lenny sweating in his mobile home and in his truck with bad air conditioning, you’ve got wildfires burning, and, of course, you’ve got the level of Lake Mead dropping day by day, which functions as a kind of ticking clock in the story, threatening to uncover the barrel with Lenny’s victim in it. With that kind of setting, I think recent non-fiction books that take up the themes of drought, climate change, and the overuse of water in the Colorado River Basin would pair nicely with my story. Such books might include Science Be Dammed: How Ignoring Inconvenient Science Drained the Colorado River by Eric Kuhn and John Fleck (University of Arizona Press, 2021); Dead Pool: Lake Powell, Global Warming, and the Future of Water in the West (University of California Press, 2023); or Where the Water Goes: Life and Death Along the Colorado River by David Owen (Riverhead Books, 2018).
The other book I’d mention here is not necessarily one that would be on the Water Shelf, but, nevertheless, it’s one that has parallels with my book in its psychological treatment of crime and violence, namely, Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying my story is anywhere close to as good as that masterpiece of Russian literature. But I do think they both engage the question of what happens — especially psychologically — after someone commits a terrible crime like murder.
What was the process like for getting Body in a Barrel published? What is your advice for anyone writing about water?
Body in a Barrel is short for a book. It’s around 15,000 words or 90 pages in my layout. Because it’s short, I first tried sending it to some magazines to be published as a short story, but I didn’t have any luck. It was a bit too long for most magazines — 10,000 words is typically the upper end of a short story. But, of course, 90 pages is also too short for a typical novel. My story is really a novella — a book of fiction that’s longer than a short story but shorter than a novel. I suspect, also, that crime fiction magazines may not have liked it because, as I mentioned, it’s not a classic procedural in which a cop or private investigator is trying to solve a crime; rather, it’s a story about the aftermath of a crime that the reader already knows all about.
So, in both length and genre, it falls into the cracks between the kinds of fiction that typically get published. There are, of course, some famous novellas — John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men comes to mind, which is one of my favorite stories of all time. But unless you’re an established writer (John Steinbeck!), most publishers and agents would tell you novellas don’t sell well, and that they’re nearly impossible to sell as a first book. As a result, there was a point at which it felt like my story would sit on my hard drive forever, which seemed like a shame since I was convinced there was an audience for it, not least among my water people!
Now, I also have a novel (on a completely different subject) that I’ve been pitching without luck to agents and publishers for several years, and I’d begun to think seriously about self-publishing it. There was a time not long ago when self-publishing was viewed as second-class. People would slap together a Word document, upload it to Amazon, and call it published. But these days, there are so many resources available, it’s possible for a writer to put a little money into their project and produce something quite professional. Since it seemed like Body in a Barrel would never reach an audience without self-publishing, and since starting with a shorter book seemed like a good way to experiment with self-publishing, I decided to take the plunge.
I established my own little publishing company called Press Together, I hired a cover designer, I hired an editor, I bought some software to lay out the interior of the book, and I started reading about book marketing. I chose Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) — Amazon’s publishing platform — to actually make the book. They made it easy to produce both an e-book and a paperback with a nice look and feel, and they’ve helped with the discoverability of the book. On the whole, I’m very pleased with the result. I should also mention that I hired Skyboat Media to produce a companion audiobook, which is fantastic. The legendary Stefan Rudnicki narrated it, and he has the perfect voice for a mobster tale. It’s available on all the normal audiobook platforms.
How would I advise someone writing about water? It depends on whether you’re writing fiction or non-fiction, how long the piece is, and whether you want to publish it traditionally. For traditionally-published book-length non-fiction, you’ll need a proposal, and there’s lots of advice online about how to write one. Once that’s done, I would suggest researching books in the same genre, seeing which companies publish them, and finding out whether those companies take direct submissions. If not, then you’ll need to find an agent — Publisher’s Marketplace and QueryTracker are helpful tools for that. If you’re interested in self-publishing, I’ve found Reedsy.com to be incredibly helpful. They have lots of free articles on self-publishing and a huge marketplace of professional editors, designers, and marketing consultants to help with producing and selling the book. The process for book-length fiction is similar, though you’ll typically need a complete manuscript, not just a proposal.
For shorter pieces, newspapers and magazines are typically the way to go. For example, last year I had a water-related opinion piece published in the L.A. Times that got picked up by NPR. To place things in these traditional media, you’ll need to check the submission process for the particular publication, which typically involves sending some sort of pitch to an editor. To self-publish short pieces, I recommend Substack. It’s basically a blog with social media built in, which makes it easier to find readers than with a traditional blog. I regularly post short non-fiction on my Substack publication called “sub·plot.”
