Growing up, Mitchell Karbin had no literary ambitions whatsoever, so it came as something of a surprise to him, a few years ago, when he began work on his debut novel.
He’ll discuss that surprising development, along with his experience writing the crime thriller “Man is a Disaster, Air Conditioning is Divine” Aug. 17 at the North Shore Jewish Author Literary Series at Max and Benny’s deli in Northbrook.
“The thought of being a writer had never even occurred to me,” said Karbin, a Northbrook resident and attorney by trade. “I’m a great fan of movies, though, especially old film noirs and detective stories and for some reason this story came to me — and I just started to write it. Without knowing where I would go or what would come of it. And I just kept going.”
The story, by the way, is a certainly film-noir dark, a psychological and possibly supernatural suspense mystery with its villain as the main character — a psycho type who believes he is the ultimate omnipotent being, responsible for the creation of both God and the devil. A belief that Karbin also attempts to encourage in the reader, at least to a certain extent.
He’s a vengeful sort of omnipotent being as well, who first seduces an enemy’s wife into engaging in an affair and then falls in love with her — and then sets out to kill her teenage daughter when the woman decides to go back to her husband.
“He’s a genuinely anguished character,” Karbin said. “He’s planning to do something so violent and so horrific that even he realizes it’s wrong. But he’s unable to keep himself from doing it because he’s so injured.”
After completing his novel, Karbin was in for an unpleasant surprise when he attended a seminar on how to find a publisher — only to discover there were certain difficulties with his first draft.
“I had no formal training in writing fiction and within the first three minutes I found I’d violated every possible rule there is,” he said. “Anything that could be wrong — I’d done it. The only thing I could do was throw it away and start a completely new version.
“That was a tough three minutes,” he recalled with a laugh.
Some authors might not find it so easy to laugh at that memory, but Karbin said humor is important to him. So much so that he injected touches of it wherever he could in “Man is a Disaster, Air Conditioning is Divine,” when he felt it wouldn’t distract from the ominous mood.
Such as the title, for instance.
“As human beings, we have a lot of high ideas about ourselves and what we’ve accomplished,” Karbin said. “But when you come right down to it, most people aren’t that terrific. However, on a hot day, when you turn on the air conditioning, that’s pretty great.”
Mitchell Karbin discusses his novel, ‘Man is a Disaster, Air Conditioning is Divine’
When: 7 p.m. Aug. 17
Where: Max and Benny’s restaurant and deli, 461 Waukegan Road, Northbrook.
Admission: Free
Contact: (847) 272-9490 or visit www.maxandbennys.com
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or www.mitchellkarbin.com.