Duluth-born author co-writes FX show, has new novel

Duluth native and crime novelist David Tromblay has had a string of interesting Tuesdays. From Sept. 23 to Nov. 4, he got to watch The Lowdown on FX, a TV show he was a writing consultant for. On Nov. 11, he released his fourth book Coydog, a Western crime thriller.

The book follows bounty hunter Moses Kincaid as he tracks his mark throughout Oklahoma, contending with violent motorcycle gangs, racist cops, the 24-hour news cycle and the for-profit prison system, all along the backdrop of the Oklahoma City bombing.

Tromblay resides in eastern Oklahoma, but started his writing career while attending Duluth East High School, even if he didn’t necessarily have aspirations of being an author at the time.

“I got it in my head where I didn’t think I came from a place that anyone would care about reading,” Tromblay said. “You see the books and most of the canon that you’re reading in college are old white men talking about people in New York City and things like that — they’re not reading about Midwestern tales.”

He began writing his first book as a teenager in the 1990s. Having a viscerally negative reaction to the 1976 Anne Rice novel Interview with the Vampire — and recently gifted a Smith Corona XD 7600 typewriter — Tromblay wrote his own treatment of the story, an endeavor that laid the foundations for his debut novel Ramblings of a Revenant: An Oral History of the Vampires, self-published in 2015 and completed nearly two decades after its inception.

“That’s how I ‘cut my teeth,’ so to speak — on a vampire book,” he said.

Tromblay moved around Duluth during his childhood, at times living with his mother, his father, his grandmother and on his own. After graduating from Duluth East in 1996, he briefly joined the Army, then worked odd jobs until he enlisted in the Navy, moving from Iraq to Eastern Europe to Africa. He returned to Duluth in 2013 to attend college on his GI Bill.

“After I left the military, I came for the winter of 2013/14 and January ’14 is when I started school at UWS,” Tromblay said. “That’s when I really started taking the writing seriously. And after 20 rejections for my first book, I published it myself.”

It wasn’t until he read novels like Scott Smith’s A Simple Plan, which takes place in the Midwest, and watched Fargo, a movie and show set primarily in Minnesota, that Tromblay knew he could write stories about the familiar character types he grew up with.

“I was like ‘This I can do,’” Tromblay said. “I know these people, I grew up around these people, I am one. So I started writing about that kind of stuff. I initially thought I couldn’t write about the things I knew because people wouldn’t care. Especially now with reality TV you’re bombarded with people like the Kardashians. It’s nice to read about a normal weirdo.”

Tromblay went on to get his master of fine arts degree at the Institute of American Indian Arts, as well as release two more books during the pandemic: As You Were, a memoir about his life, and The Essentials, another fiction book.

While attending graduate workshops at IAIA, Tromblay met Reservation Dogs executive producer Sterlin Harjo. He passed two novellas to Harjo, Sangre Road and Money the Hard Way, — early versions of Coydog — with the hope they might be adapted into a film.

“We had known each other beforehand, before he was the director of anything,” Tromblay said. “He had directed a few mini movies out there, but we had met essentially at the smoke pits at graduate school where he was visiting.”

“When we had Hollywood asking about the book and wanting to adapt the book, I sent him a copy and I said ‘If these producers get a studio, I would like you to direct,’” Tromblay continued. “And he read it based off of that thought. Right now, it looks like we’re all too busy to do that.”

Harjo invited Tromblay to be one of three crime novelists assisting with the script for the then-upcoming FX noir series The Lowdown, a show that follows a citizen journalist played by Ethan Hawke as he sleuths around Tulsa, Oklahoma. The Lowdown currently has eight episodes, the season-one finale having aired Nov. 4.

Coydog is Tromblay’s fourth novel and the first book in his Anadarko County series. The first half follows bounty hunter turned prisoner Moses Kincaid as he tracks down Eric Drumgoole, a man who crossed the Dirty 13 Motorcycle Gang. Intent on finding Drumgoole before the 13 do, Kincaid relies on the help of waitress-turned-lover Elise and information provided by Drumgoole’s relatives and associates to find his target. The last quarter of the book revolves around Kincaid’s time at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary — or the Big Mac — and his involvement in the penitentiary’s annual rodeo, a real event the OSP held from 1940 to 2009.

Tromblay created the name Moses Kincaid by combining two separate individuals listed on a Civil War memorial in Stillwater, Oklahoma. The memorial stuck with him since, as he notes in Coydog’s acknowledgements, Oklahoma wasn’t granted statehood until 1907 — 42 years after the end of the Civil War. He also said he knew a few people with the name Moses.

Kincaid is an amalgamation of Tromblay’s personality and experiences, and people he knew throughout his life. Both Kincaid and Tromblay have Native American heritage, are from the upper Midwest (Wisconsin and Minnesota respectively), and worked as MPs in the military.

“What it starts with is, I get a character saying something, and obviously it’s a sliver of my personality,” Tromblay said. “Then I try to say, ‘Who would say that?’ or ‘Who would think that?’ and ‘What would lead them to say that thing?’ And I build a character sketch around that.”

Tromblay described his technique as “journalistic” in nature, spending hours researching his material to inform his stories and to avoid anachronisms, errors he sees as lazy writing. For Coydog, Tromblay poured over 1990s laws concerning bail bondsmen in the state of Oklahoma to get the details right, similar to the intense research he conducted while writing Ramblings of a Revenant.

“I dug into it, I looked at it, I did the same thing for what’s coming with the next book. I read through every book that there is concerning private detective work, what you can and cannot do, things like that,” Tromblay said. “That way, I know when my character’s being a good detective and when he’s being a bad detective.”

The book is drenched in both violence and comedy, making heavier moments more digestible but never going overboard with either. Kincaid often takes the brunt of the punishment — a deadly punching bag that always has a one-liner. Tromblay explores a world where violence is a universal language, opiate use is rampant and love offers little respite, so people might as well try to have fun.

A sequel is in the works, though Tromblay is busy with three other books unrelated to his Anandarko County series. Coydog is available to order everywhere as a paperback, ebook or audiobook. Tromblay can be found on Instagram @davidtromblay.