There's A Point in Here, Somewhere

Usually it's a mistake if you begin writing without a clear idea of your message, what the point is that you're trying to make. Sometimes, though, trying to focus on a complex thought can either distill it to something less than its whole or else leave you with something else entirely. But, as a comic book writer once said, "Some mistakes are too tempting not to repeat." I love that line, so here goes.

Many adults who are voracious or avid readers began by devouring the juvenile fiction of the day. In my case there was the Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators series, chiefly written by Robert Arthur, The Hardy Boys, of course, and a bunch of mysteries by a woman writer who may or may not have been Mary Roberts Rinehart. We can't forget Encyclopedia Brown and the books about Henry Huggins by Beverly Cleary, either. Today, of course, it would the Harry Potter books, perhaps Lemony Snicket, hopefully Robert Cormier. New editions of some of the Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators books are in print only with Alfred Hitchcock himself edited out of both titles and content.

But after these books were satisfactorily absorbed, many of us (apparently the male ones anyway) moved on to science fiction. This lasted throughout my school days and into early adulthood where mysteries, thrillers, bestsellers and some of the classics struck my fancy as being more adult fare. Now that I've found that this was not a unique progression and I spend time reflecting upon it, it dawns on me quite strongly that all too often the more "adult" we get, the worse the writing.

Sadly, I can't read "modern" science fiction: intergalactic wars, Star Wars ripoffs, evil empires and other cliches seem to have doomed it for me. This also seems to be true for the people who followed this same path. (Robert Charles Wilson is an exception for me, but I don't enjoy him so much as the oldies, and he's nowhere near as popular as he probably should be.)

As for modern thrillers and mystery novels, far too many are the same old thing, poor shadows of some well worn original concept. Isn't this a shame? Aren't we always on the lookout for new writers to like? Shouldn't we be more disappointed when the talented ones start out well and then fade into their own brand of complacency (the two book rule I keep ranting about)?

Kind of the point I'm trying to bring into focus has to do with how the old science fiction writers we grew up on had to work harder for less success than the blockbuster writers of today. Guys like Jack Vance, Larry Niven, Arthur Clarke, Isaac Asimov and many others simply couldn't pull a deus ex machina out of a hat and be taken seriously in the science fiction world. More was expected of them; they would have looked silly. Yet we excuse it in many of the works of today's bestselling mystery and thriller writers.

Consider Larry Niven who once said that you can't imagine the automobile without also imagining the traffic jam. Clearly there's a level of thought and consideration, of uniqueness, that he puts into not only an individual book but infuses as an element of his craft. When's the last time you were blown away by dialogue in a mystery/thriller novel? Clever wordplay (and I mean beyond the level of a pun)? In a short story Jack Vance created dialogue like this for a ship captain berating his shocked crew members into action: "Gentlemen, you hesitate. You fail to exert yourselves, you luxuriate in sloth." (That's from memory because I can't remember the name of the story itself.)

These are perhaps poor examples; I'm still drifting in a vagueness here. Do writers writing well in a particular field have to write better in genres with lesser status than others? Now that I think about it, it seems likely. So what if today's mystery/thriller writers learned from this? What if they pushed themselves to extrapolate their own universes to the degree of seeing cars and traffic jams, what if they wrote dialogue that inspired rather than disguised itself in cuss words and slang? Could we help break away from the rule of two-good-books-before-lower-standards for our current "stars?"

Here's another perspective. In the current issue of the literary magazine Granta, there is a story about a sightseeing couple who pick up a hitchhiker just prior to seeing road signs alerting drivers to the presence of numerous detention facilities in the area. Once they see the signs and pass the prisons, the mood in the car has shifted severely, and does so again when the passenger calmly states that he's not inclined to leave the car. There's another one with a shifting perspective that makes it difficult until the end to see which of the characters are really alive and which ones are ghosts. Sounds like Alfred Hitchcock territory, doesn't it?

Why are these literary stories and not genre ones? The writing itself doesn't hold a candle to say, the prose of James Lee Burke. The concepts and themes aren't revolutionary, either. In fact, I'd be tempted to say the writing itself, while okay, is the thinnest part of the stories. Is that their quality? Do the most literary stories not only have the weakest writing, must they have? In more trivial categorizations such as the science fiction and mystery genres, do we forge better writers as a necessary part of taking their work seriously?

That's not to say that literary writers can't write well; I'm merely implying a distribution (bell shaped curve?) rather than a hierarchical classification. But likewise genre writers aren't by definition inferior ones.

People who don't try to write well suck; it doesn't matter what kinds of books they write or how well they sell. People who try but fail are still okay. Let's just hope they work hard and try to get better. That's the key, isn't it? When we mistake sales figures for quality, when publishers and authors assume approval of this state of things because mediocre books sell well, we're missing an opportunity to look at our entire literary heritage and possibly evolve into something new and better.

So what's my point? We should be more genre inclusive in our reading tastes? Can we look at the best works across all of fiction and learn and improve our mastery of the craft? Is this enough babbling?