By Sarah Tobol
Brooklyn Daily Eagle

CROWN HEIGHTS — There’s been graffiti at the local nursing home and detective Eugene “Huge� Smalls is on the case, driving his Cruiser around a New Jersey town with sick-minded sidekick Thrash in tow. This isn’t your usual hard-boiled detective novel, however: Huge is 12 years old, his Cruiser is a bicycle, and Thrash is actually a stuffed frog.

They are the stars of James Fuerst’s debut novel, Huge. A resident of Crown Heights who grew up in New Jersey, Fuerst was a professor of writing and social and historical inquiry at Eugene Lang College before he ventured into fiction writing.

Huge, set in the 1980s, tells the story of Eugene Smalls, an angry, angsty almost-teenager who’s skipped a grade, been left back and attends rage counseling. Adventures ensue when his grandmother enlists him to find the person who vandalized the sign at her nursing home. Huge investigates the crime in true hardboiled fashion, taking cues from Sam Spade and Phillip Marlowe while dealing with the challenges of adolescence. The following is an interview with the author.

What inspired you to write Huge?

I got the idea for Huge after I’d floundered for a couple of months on a different novel that I’d also intended to be a kind of detective story with humorous elements, but which wasn’t humorous in the least, either on the page or in the writing. So, I took a break to read some books and stories that were actually funny with the idea of trying to write something funny myself. Not long after, I started writing Huge, although it’s not at all clear to me where the idea actually came from.

What, if anything, do you have in common with Eugene “Huge� Smalls?

Huge and I share a few things in common: I grew up in a similar kind of town at about the same time, rode my bike everywhere when I was young, skipped a grade, played Pop Warner football, have a mother and a sister, and loved my grandmother very much (she died in 1996). Beyond that, however, his experiences are very different from my own at that age.

Was it a challenge to write a coming-of-age story?

Actually, I didn’t know I was writing a coming-of-age story until I was pretty well into it; in fact, I’d written about 40 or 50 pages in a completely different direction somewhere in the middle until I finally figured out where I was heading. So, discovering that it would be a coming-of-age novel was kind of a relief. The biggest challenges, for me at least, were maintaining the diction and plausibility of Huge’s voice and perspective throughout, writing jokes, and making what starts out as one kind of story (hard-boiled detective story) evolve into a different kind of story (coming-of-age) without forcing readers to suffer too much of a letdown. Why did you choose a stuffed frog as Huge’s sidekick?

I’ve always thought frogs were kind of neat, and the idea of a cuddly plush toy concealing an almost toxic form of evil just really cracks me up.

To what extent were you influenced by other works of detective fiction?

I’ve always enjoyed a good detective story and used to teach a college writing course on the art of detective fiction, so there’s definitely something about the genre that I’ve continued to find both compelling and entertaining and that has kept me coming back to it. Maybe it’s the built-in suspense of knowing that a solution is on the way, or maybe it’s the way that the best detective fiction simulates a kind of learning — it’s hard to say. However that stands, there’s no doubt that I’m a big fan of Raymond Chandler, as well as Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, G.K. Chesterton, Dashiell Hammett and many, many others.

Is Huge’s New Jersey neighborhood similar to where you grew up?

The town in which Huge takes place does bear more than a little resemblance to one I grew up in, and to surrounding towns as well. But large portions of the town are created out of whole cloth, simply because I needed those portions to develop the plot.

How would you describe Huge’s transformation from the beginning of the book to the end?

I hesitate to say too much about this because I don’t want to spoil anything for anyone, but I think Huge’s transformation tends toward exposing the limits of what he thinks he knows when the novel begins and then his attempts to come to terms with those limits at the end.

Why did you choose to set Huge in the 1980s as opposed to today?

To me, and from the outside (I don’t have children), today’s youth seem to have a much more mediated childhood experience; in other words, they have greater access to both information and one another online, more ways to tune out the rest of the world, more emotional-altering substances (both prescribed and not), more pressure to work hard and excel, as well as perhaps a more heightened awareness of what is waiting for them out in the world than was the case, say, 25 years ago.

Who is your target audience?

While I tried to write Huge for the broadest audience possible, I’ve always thought of it as a novel about childhood and early adolescence written for adults. Some of the language and themes may be a little too racy for younger teens, but my hope is that seasoned readers of all ages will be able to find something to relate to and to have some fun with.

Do you have another book in the works?

Yes, I do and I’m a couple of chapters into it at present. But since I’m not very good at planning out the minutiae of a novel before I start writing and because I have nothing at all approximating a “process,� it’s not very clear to me what the novel will ultimately be about or how it will be told, but I do have a couple of ideas that I’m working on.

James Fuerst will be signing copies of his book at Barnes & Noble at 267 Seventh Ave. in Park Slope this Wednesday, July 8.

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