Publishing Flim Flammery

Shockingly enough, I was in a bookstore yesterday (to pick up the latest offering from Hard Case Crime). I saw something "new," the latest creeping invasion of tomfoolery and, I think, illogic, perpetrated on us book buyers by the publishing industry. I don't even know what to call the things; they're neither hardcovers, trade paperbacks or mass market paperbacks. They're nothing more than mass market paperbacks with two key differences: they're a couple of inches taller, and for that we're asked to pay $9.99.

Huh?

I've written a lot about the publicized plans to replace mass market books, and eventually hard covers, with trade paperbacks. I've argued exhaustively against this fallacy; the form factor of a book is not an impediment to its sale. It's the quality per price ratio. My point is simple: to sell more books, publish better ones at more affordable prices.

I'm guessing the push toward trade paperbacks hasn't lived up to hopes. I'm guessing that the book buying public has affirmed my belief that fifteen bucks is too expensive for a paperback of any dimension and that the mass market edition wouldn't die simply because it is the most economical way to purchase a book. And I'll stop so I don't repeat earlier entries...

This latest attempt at repackaging will fail for precisely the same reasons, and will do so even more transparently. First I'm to believe that mass market books are slumping because I want to pay for something more substantial, i.e. a trade paperback. Now it's being made clear that what was really happening was that mass market books were really a good thing, just a bit short. A problem easily rectified, as long as the price can get bumped up a couple of bucks.

This is added value? You think people won't notice what you're trying to pull? And you continue to decry the market for used books? Seriously, you're unhappy with sales for mass market books at $7.99 so you'll make them a bit taller and charge me two bucks more? That's supposed to sell more books?

Geez louise, get a clue. Sheep though we well may be, the public has never been so dull minded to miss such an obvious shuck job. To recap, you want to sell more books, publish better ones. You want to get people to take a chance on books and authors they don't know, make it economically feasible to do so by lowering prices, or for god's sake keeping them the same. Again, I'm repeating my earlier entries, so I'll stop, but you can see it's hard. If they keep going, they're going to drive me back to the library.

"Master and Commander" Review

Master and Command: The Far Side of the World is not only based on a book, it's based on a series of twenty books, so to folks who've read the entire set (I did, too) there's probably an even higher level of expectation than the usual adaptation. While I found it enjoyable to watch, and will watch it again, it isn't a very good movie because it doesn't tell a very good story. Usually a fatal flaw, every now and then a film can be so visually appealing or so unusually original that the viewer can be entranced in spite of themselves.

The books are based in large part on the dynamic relationship between the two very different main characters, Captain "Lucky" Jack Aubrey and his friend, surgeon, naturalist and spy, Dr. Stephen Maturin. Unfortunately, the movie had no idea how to deal with anything approaching as subtle as friendship and rapport and their casting and characterization of Paul Bettany is perhaps the greatest offense to lovers of the books.

Now anyone expecting a faithful motion picture version of any books is a cuckoo who should save his Thin Mint money and re-read the book(s). It is fair, though, to expect either a direct correlation in some number of major points or else a complete reworking of the book into something wholly new. In the latter case, it's best if the fimmakers change the names of the characters, and anything else they can, so that the ready made fan of the book (whom they're trying to entice into seeing the movie) won't feel so blatanty abused. Either deliver the essence of the book(s) or something new, but don't mangle and transmogrify the core of those things that make the book(s) so justly popular.

Which is what they did in the movie with the annoying, whiny character of Maturin. In the movie he and Aubrey profess to be friends yet every scene of moment is a grating clash with no basis of the friendship ever made evident. And since he's not a spy in the movie version, he doesn't serve a purpose in the film other than an annoying foil whose illogical presence serves as more of a distraction to the action of the film than anything else. When he's shot in the hip I couldn't help but wish the bullet struck higher up and a bit more in the center. His character does not belong in this version of the Aubrey/Maturin saga.

Russell Crowe as Captain Aubrey was, I thought, brilliant as usual. Crowe may have issues with telephones and desk clerks but he is every bit as charsimatic and captivating as the character of Aubrey in the Patrick O'Brian books. Along with the shots of life on the ship, the HMS Surprise, Crowe's performance keeps the viewer engaged in the movie, at least long enough to realize that you really don't mind that you're not seeing any real plot unfold before you.

Ostensibly the crew of Surprise is under orders to pursue and sink or take a French ship, the Acheron, before she can join Napolean's war effort and cause havoc to the British. You never feel this in the movie, however. There are a few scenes here and there where some of the characters tell some of the other characters what's going on. Without this exposition we the viewer would be clueless. There's no unfolding plot to propel us through the vision of the film. What we're offered instead are sets of confusing battle scenes where one ship fires (which one?) and the other suffers the damage (which one?); we don't know who's winning, how the battle's going, who's suffering, or anything until after it's over. It takes further exposition between the characters to let us know the Surprise's cannons could do no damage to the Achernar's hull. Huh, is that so? You couldn't tell from watching the movie.

The film was written and directed by Australian Peter Weir so both the bungling with Maturin's character and the lack of plot or driving story can probably be laid at his feet. The lack of clarity in the battle scenes may lie with him, the editing, or perhaps some notion of an attempt to show the confusion of battle as just that. I'd buy the latter for the fighting that takes place on the Achernar herself but not the shoot unidentified cannons show unidentified decking splintering and sailors torn apart.

But for all its faults as a vehicle of story the movie itself is eminently watchable. Crowe is Aubrey event though for this voyage he should have sailed without any thought of the distraction of Maturin. Show me some urgency in the war and the motivation of the nemesis ship Achernar, show me Aubrey's response and how he uses his unique talents, force of will, and ability to lead his men into an unlikely triumph. That's the kind of story that made Luck Jack lucky, and that I'd like to see. This movie is a pleasant distraction, like the theater snacks in the lobby, but its misfires are too great to be anything more, which is a pity. There is great material here.

Unfortunately this is simply a one dimensional, one sided depiction of a two sided conflict. This is the Captain Jack show fighting against a ghostly enemy mostly unseen, and it's too unbalanced to stand alone. The books work because of the complex relationship and companionship of a man wholly different yet completely complementary to himself, the character of Doctor Maturin. This is the main failure of the movie.

For more consistent Napolean era nautical adventures, check out A & E's Hornblower series with Ioan Gruffudd; they're every bit as gorgeous to look at and they tell their stories in a much better way. They should be must-sees for fans of Patrick O'Brian's as well as C. S. Forester's anyway, much as readers of one series shouldn't miss the other.

Review Preview

I'd like to write a review of some sort of Peter Weir's Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World starring Russell Crowe, a film I just watched yesterday. Before I do, though, I'd like to consider for a bit what a review could be, maybe should be, and sometimes actually is.

Offering a review of anything is a deceptively simple activity. It can be as uncomplicated as voicing an opinion, either dully or not, or as complicated as an in depth analysis of an item's place in its appropriate canon. But of what value is an opinion if it is not an informed one? And what makes an informed one?

Any idiot can spew out non-validated opinions all day long (just read this blog) and unlike an article or essay representing facts, a review is ultimately a simple opinion, not subject to any objective scale of accuracy. In other words, it can be of the nature of supercilious crap and get away with it.

I like John Irving's criteria for a book review where essentially he says that prior to writing one, the reviewer should be familiar with all of a writer's previous work so that a context can be identified and the current work better understood. Especially when a prolific author is involved, the sheer amount of preparatory work can greatly reduce the size of the reviewer pool. But what about for a film?

I've read books about screenwriters and screenplays but I've never written one. I've read books by and about directors but I've never made a movie. I was an extra once, in Prince's Purple Rain, and I saw Star Wars ten or so times during its original run. The sense of wonder I drew from Logan's Run kept me hopping on the city bus to the theater every weekend for a month or so of Saturdays and sometimes Sundays. I have not, however, ever seen a Fellini film or anything by Kurosawa other than The Seven Samurai.

Okay, so I'm not Peter Bogdonavich. But I'm not sure he is, either.

No matter the background of the reviewer, what should the actual review itself attempt to accomplish? Clearly to have any weight greater than an empty party balloon it must be written within the boundaries of the reviewers what? Expertise? Background? Credentials?

Within some kind of subjective framework, it should probably try to convey a sense of the film's entertainment value. Warts and flaws aside, was it fun to watch? Did it move you? Were there plot holes too large or too many to ignore? Did you emote with the actors, twitch when they twitched, cry when they cried? Was it corny, original, or incomprehensible?

Then, within some kind of objective point of view, was it a good film? Was it well written, well directed, well acted, well shot? How does the reviewer know? How does the film compare to similar attempts (because not much in Hollywood is original)?

Did the actors do anything new or the director break new ground? And like Irving's book reviews, did the director grow in his efforts on this film, did he take chances, did he reach out? How did he do this?

It's probably impossible for someone not of Hollywood to appreciate the hundreds of agencies at work necessary to the production of a film. If something went wrong in the movie, was it the fault of the script? Or did the director rewrite the key scenes on the fly? Did the studio dictate a certain style or element they felt commercially necessary yet turned out to be artistically detrimental? Was the script rewritten by the director's brother in law or the editing done by the his wife?

Again, impossible for an outsider to know but it begs the question: when a film goes bad, as so many of them do, whyfore did it do so?

In the end, the best judgment is probably always simply whether or not you like the damn thing, reasoning and articulation be damned. I may not know popcorn but I know when something's stuck in my teeth.

Next time I'll write the actual review. I'd like to write a review of some sort of Peter Weir's Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World starring Russell Crowe, a film I just watched yesterday. Before I do, though, I'd like to consider for a bit what a review could be, maybe should be, and sometimes actually is.

Offering a review of anything is a deceptively simple activity. It can be as uncomplicated as voicing an opinion, either dully or not, or as complicated as an in depth analysis of an item's place in its appropriate canon. But of what value is an opinion if it is not an informed one? And what makes an informed one?

Any idiot can spew out unvalidated opinions all day long (just read this blog) and unlike an article or essay representing facts, a review is ultimately a simple opinion, not subject to any objective scale of accuracy. In other words, it can be of the nature of supercilious crap and get away with it.

I like John Irving's criteria for a book review where essentially he says that prior to writing one, the reviewer should be familiar with all of a writer's previous work so that a context can be identified and the current work better understood. Especially when a prolific author is involved, the sheer amount of preparatory work can greatly reduce the size of the reviewer pool. But what about for a film?

I've read books about screenwriters and screenplays but I've never written one. I've read books by and about directors but I've never made a movie. I was an extra once, in Prince's Purple Rain, and I saw Star Wars ten or so times during its original run. The sense of wonder I drew from Logan's Run kept me hopping on the city bus to the theater every weekend for a month or so of Saturdays and sometimes Sundays. I have not, however, ever seen a Fellini film or anything by Kurosawa other than The Seven Samurai.

Okay, so I'm not Peter Bogdonavich. But I'm not sure he is, either.

No matter the background of the reviewer, what should the actual review itself attempt to accomplish? Clearly to have any weight greater than an empty party balloon it must be written within the boundaries of the reviewers what? Expertise? Background? Credentials?

Within some kind of subjective framework, it should probably try to convey a sense of the film's entertainment value. Warts and flaws aside, was it fun to watch? Did it move you? Were there plot holes too large or too many to ignore? Did you emote with the actors, twitch when they twitched, cry when they cried? Was it corny, original, or incomprehensible?

Then, within some kind of objective point of view, was it a good film? Was it well written, well directed, well acted, well shot? How does the reviewer know? How does the film compare to similar attempts (because not much in Hollywood is original)?

Did the actors do anything new or the director break new ground? And like Irving's book reviews, did the director grow in his efforts on this film, did he take chances, did he reach out? How did he do this?

It's probably impossible for someone not of Hollywood to appreciate the hundreds of agencies at work necessary to the production of a film. If something went wrong in the movie, was it the fault of the script? Or did the director rewrite the key scenes on the fly? Did the studio dictate a certain style or element they felt commercially necessary yet turned out to be artistically detrimental? Was the script rewritten by the director's brother in law or the editing done by the his wife?

Again, impossible for an outsider to know but it begs the question: when a film goes bad, as so many of them do, whyfore did it do so?

In the end, the best judgment is probably always simply whether or not you like the damn thing, reasoning and articulation be damned. I may not know popcorn but I know when something's stuck in my teeth.

Next time I'll write the actual review.

In Defense of K-Fed

Gawd, how I hate these hypehanted, abbreviated abominations foisted upon us by the same people who bring us E! television and renamed "photographer" to "paparazzi" (or some such spelling). Enough with the J-Lo's (although the "Jell-o" derivative is funny) and the A-Rod's and please, please, please rein in the Bennifers, Brangelinas and Tomkats. It makes me feel like these people are being elevated somehow, these shining examples of all that's good in humankind, and that mortal nomenclature somehow is too mundane for their like.

Crapweasels. I'm not a language snob and I think it's neat that new words creep into the vernacular all the time, but I find a have a problem with where some of them come from. I've never liked marketing concepts like "edutainment," informing me of something that should be so obvious that stooping to actually use this word would make me feel like a moron. Any words that are comprised with "Ameri" and suffixed with something designed to do what? Make a faceless corporation more at home with apple pie? We have a business relationship with "Ameriprise," and I used to buy from "Ameritech." These are ugly "words."

So why so much public bashing of Kevin Federline, Mr. Britney Spears, K-Fed or whatever tabloid nickname posed by gadflies everywhere? I actually went to his site on myspace.com and played the "song" he has posted there. It's lousy. But it's not a discernible whit lousier than any other piece of worthless dribble labelling itself hip-hop and masquerading as "art" or the cornerstone of an imagined "culture."

Everybody knows about the tasteless themes of violence, the negative attitudes towards women, police and law abiding society; the importance of street cred that can only be gained through jail time and the commission of violent acts; the dope and the limos and the partying. But there are also the "songs" themselves, with cadences that aren't consistent from line to line and words that are supposed to rhyme but only kinda sorta make it; lyrics that make no sense precisely because their authors lack the language skills to produce an actual poem or story or, no joking, a song.

You can't write anything like this material and get a passing grade in the fifth grade. "Rap" it to someone else's sampled hit (the actual music has to come from somewhere) and if you've done time, arrive in a limo with fancy rims, and where jewelry like a woman, you can be a star. Why single out poor Mr. Federline? Because he's married to a woman who's first marriage was a one day fling? Who cares? Truly, he's no worse and no better than any of these other guys.

There are exceptions to this rule of garbage out there that I think just prove the rule, and I listen to them. Surely they're derided by today's chart toppers but the Fresh Prince's "Summertime" (has Will Smith ever been convicted of a felony?) or LL Cool James' "Around the Way Girl" have homes on my MP3 player, along with dozens of other rap songs. But who remembers Father MC or Heavy D and the Boyz? At least today's "artists" turned clothing and fragrance moguls will be forgotten just as quickly.

I'm trying not to sound too much like Andy Rooney so I'll let this one go. One more thought, though. This "culture," these attitudes, the fact that anyone out there actually notices car rims and drives around with deafening bass speakers filling their back seats (being able to turn the volume up on your car stereo is apparently an impressive skill), and, last but not least, makes it cool for people to walk around having to hold up their pants with one hand, is divisive. I don't want everyone to be like me. I actually spend quite a bit of time trying to figure out how I can be less like me. But I would feel a lot more comfortable raising my children in a world where our differences are compatible if not openly similar. It's not cool to shoot people who laugh at your pants, for chrissake.

You want art, you want culture, then make art and make culture. Nobody needs to get hurt, offended, endangered, or fall down on the street when their pants slip out of their hand and drop to their ankles. Just try harder. Rhyme better even if it takes learning new words, have the appropriate number of syllables per line even if it takes learning how to count or what a syllable is. But you can't scream profanities at the media, K-Fed, or glorify jail time and misogyny and tell me it's your culture. It's just your cop out.

Rabbit Pellets

Easter gave us three egg hunts, one party and one enjoyable visit to my parents'. Leftovers abound, not to mention hard boiled eggs and enough candy to melt the teeth of an average sized school district, and another holiday is in the books. Holidays are big around here, given my wife's festive dedication and our two little children.

So now it's time to write a small bit about the third book of the vintage trio I've been writing about, Behold This Woman by David Goodis. I think I believe in John Irving's opinion that a good book review is the result of the reviewer having read all of an author's books, hopefully gaining an understanding of what the author is all about and therefore being able to appreciate the effort and risks taken with the book in question. In large part due to this principle, I haven't tried to review these three books, merely offer a perspective on something a modern reader can gain from an undeservedly "forgotten" book. And in this case, I haven't read anything else by Goodis, although I have an omnibus edition of four other works.

When dealing with a book of horror, or a book with a horror, a challenge is always how to depict the evil without destroying the sense of horror. Once the big bad is revealed, it's difficult to keep it scary. In Behold This Woman the horror is a woman, and not one who on the surface has any special talents or evil characteristics. She is an egotistical, designing woman with enough surface charm and personality to beguile a series of lesser burning males. She's a maneater but she's drawn so well, from her need to please herself by good food served by a belittled domestic, and so full of her own life, that the horror inspired, while wholly unsupernatural, is simply the more terrifying for it.

Clara's method of bringing her step-daughter in line is to physically beat her and then comfort with her with understanding, reaching out to her and confiding in her while encouraging the daughter to do the same. Broken down, the step daughter gives in and suddenly it dawns on the reader that Clara doesn't merely want to destroy the daughter or get her out of the way but to corrupt the daughter and convert her from a fine, normal young woman to a fresher version of herself. Evil spawns evil.

The "normalness" of the situations in the book remind me something of Donald E. Westlake's The Ax where an otherwise decent man does evil things after being laid off from his job. He advertises fictitious positions and murders the respondents, thereby eliminating the competition for a new job. The man has nothing against these people and is otherwise a normal human being leading a mundane life.

The difference in the two books is that in The Ax, the protagonist makes a conscious decision to do a series of evil things. In Behold This Woman, it's scarier because there is no such clear boundary to be crossed. It's evil by degrees and it has enough in common with people we all know to contain more than a little truth. It's fiction that's not stranger than fiction, but almost as real as real life. And therein lies the horror and the source of the book's ability to keep the reader enthralled.

There is a murder but it's more opportunistic than planned and no less evil. And there's give and take in the resolution of the novel where some good guys don't make out so well and some of the gray ones see some redemption. And then there's Clara, the shrew next door, and the final results of her designs. This is a very absorbing book, with pictures painted rich and full by the words of David Goodis, deep and heavy with an understanding of daily life in the trenches. Very highly recommended, and I look forward to reading more by Goodis, even if I have to scrounge reading copies of disintegrating paperbacks from used book sites on the internet. Easily worth it, and, I think, more worthwhile than concentrating on the bestseller list.

Street Legal

Author and lawyer M. Diane Vogt once said, in my hearing, something to the effect that she was surprised at the rise of "legal thrillers" because there really isn't anything inherently thrilling going on in the legal profession. Obviously depending on what it's about and who the characters are, not to mention the quality of the writing, a "legal thriller" can actually be exciting. Or on the other hand, it could be Grisham's The Street Lawyer.

When I read Charles Williams' Hell Hath No Fury (1953) it struck me that this kind of book isn't written any longer. I wonder how much of a factor this may be in the perception that reading older books is preferable to reading strictly newer. Success in the market is not always an indication of quality; in fact, it's probably the opposite.

As interesting as the concepts in The Da Vinci Code may be, the book is a poorly written, horribly constructed exercise in form over substance. It's not the religious implications that trouble me in the least, including the actions of Opus Dei or the Catholic church. Was there really a Priory of Sion? I don't care. But when the murdered caretaker fakes the death of his family in order to protect them, why does he not hide the connection to his daughter as well (or was it his granddaughter? Who cares?)? Logic would tell us that scrutiny would have been focused on her, ruining the plot. Or the fact that her last name, according to the hero, precluded her from being a descendant of Jesus: it just isn't that hard to change a name. Every time the girl rasied a question, the hero said, no, that can't be, and then explained it away. This is a very clumsy device, especially when used repetitively, when the points he debunks turn out to be the opposite of his conclusions. In other words, it's not the story that offends me, it's the deadly writing.

But I digress. That book will be bashed for decades and by people who care far more about it than I. It has spawned a mini-trend of "religious thrillers," though, and it will be interesting to see if it has any traction. I tend to doubt it if only because market watching authors concentrating on bandwagon jumping rather than writing well are unlikely to produce much of quality. What a snob I am.

Obviously techno-thrillers didn't exist in the forties and fifties, we were still transitioning from horses and radio. Romance novels existed but I wouldn't think they'd be in the same class now.

Hell Hath No Fury is a kind of book that doesn't seem to be around much anymore. A small time drifter with questionable morals and ethics pulls into town, messes with the wrong women, and goes for the shortcut to some easy cash. Only it's never quite so easy and it usually goes to hell when the right woman shows up and the poor shmoe can't get out of the mess he's already made for himself. A classic formula, and many other writers (Jim Thompson leaps to mind) have used it to good effect. Because of these common elements I suppose it could almost be called a mini-genre which might be good if it called more attention to these books.

Yes, when you pick the book up you know roughly how it will go and how it will end, but that's true of most books you pick up, old or new. What sets this book apart is its style. All the good writers of the period developed a strong and distinctive voice and flair for language. I think that's largely missing in today's bestsellers, with exceptions like James Lee Burke being far too few. Modern writers that try to write in an older style come off as forced and cliched. My guess is that yesterday's pros were just that, pros, and in order to feed the bulldog they were punching out word after word at a much greater pace than most writers today.

I don't mean to imply that quantity automatically begets quality because that is clearly absurd. But quantity produced by a talent yields a quality and a voice and a style that I bemoan in much of today's popular fiction. I don't want to be dazzled with pyrotechnics of plot, I want to be absorbed by the writing, by a style that makes me stay up too late at night, that relates the things I know must be coming in ways I've never heard before (even though it may have been written sixty years ago).

Most heavy readers are always looking for new writers; most are somewhat disappointed by the modern writers they claim to like, saying his new one is not his best, or this is for fans of the series only. I've written a lot about authors who write an excellent first book or two and then settle into mediocrity. I think many readers would be better served to expand their search to include vintage books like the ones I've been writing about as well as to the blockbuster du jour.

Plot Tectonics

Beginning the writing process with a better idea of plot than of story was less an experiment and more of a flat out mistake. While I had a basic premise and a good feel for who I wanted the characters to be, I didn't have any real idea of what they all were after. I didn't know why they were doing what they were doing, just that they were doing them. Clearly this can only take you so far. In my case it took me to 46,000 words.

I kept thinking that if I couldn't make a book out of all the cool stuff i had, something was wrong with me. I was right. And now I have to see if I can legitimately save it. If there's a real book here I'd like to figure it out and get it done but if there's not, I'd like to chalk it up to experience and move on, hopefully a bit wiser, to the next one. The one thing I won't do is work on it if I don't believe it can be truly resurrected.

After much effort, I've come up with more complete pictures of my characters, including new relationships and motivations. In other words, I know the story of the book now. The next thing is to hang a plot on it, the structure that takes the protagonist through the events and influence of the other characters.

The book is a thriller, with a strong element of international events, none of them involving terrorism, rogue nations with weapons of mass destruction, or other cliche-ish premises. As such, I want it to have suspense, a mystery and a sense of urgency. Writing without knowing what creates these elements is a classic sign of beginning the process too soon. You have the core of an idea, an intriguing concept that by itself is merely interesting. The plot is the telling of it so that it is interesting. It's the bookness of it, what makes it enjoyable to read about.

When I read Erle Stanley Gardner's (as A. A. Fair) Gold Comes in Bricks, it seemed to me that I could see my own process evidenced in the book and it can be readily reverse engineered and made clear. I think. Anyway, I'll try.

The core idea is that a defunct California corporation could be resurrected by buying out its outstanding shares and satisfying whatever outstanding obligations it had left behind. So what? Well, what if you did this with the idea of selling shares in a legitimate corporation that wasn't really what it was supposed to be?

We need to make it interesting and as a crime novel we need an actual crime so the obviouse thing is to involve fraud, and a big enough one to keep the stakes high. Since the book takes place in California, a state built on a gold rush, Gardner uses the notion of drilling on previously dredged land, going down to the level of the bedrock in pockets where the dredge couldn't reach. The theory is that the leftover gold represented an overlooked fortune and by purchasing shares now, immense profits could be had in a mere few months when full scale drilling commences.

So we have the concept of reviving a coroporate entity and a basis for a crime by using it to sell shares in a phony scheme. So far so good but this book isn't about a drilling operation or even the swindle. It's a series detective novel and Gardner has to develop a way to involve his characters in an interesting way worth reading about. Investigating a swindle isn't inherently all that sexy but he has the story elements at hand on which to hang his plot.

The book opens with the diminutive detective taking jujitsu lessons. In walks a man with a problem who meets the detectives and is initially fooled by what he takes to be their martial arts prowess and decides he needs their help. He's a recently remarried widower, wealthy and with a daughter in control of her own money from her mother's estate. In the past month she has written two checks for ten grand apiece to a company that runs illegal gambling parlors. But she doesn't gamble so he doesn't know what's going on. His son in law may be involved but he's not sure. The son in law had become a business associate with some of his new wife's acquaintances in some company and he had been trying to get the daughter to invest.

So now we have blackmail. In the course of trying to help the daughter, Lam (the detective) follows her to a hotel where he sees her making a third payment and receiving an envelope in return. She leaves but before he can do anything the blackmailer is shot to death. Since Lam was seen at the hotel, he becomes a suspect so now he not only has to unravel the scheme but stay ahead of the law.

From a plot perspective, and the reader's, the book is about the unraveling of the blackmail plot. It's made complex and interesting because of how the plot leads us not only to the gold swindle and the characters involved with that, but how they overlap with the blackmail scheme and the blackmail itself. The cohesiveness of the structure is such that the book is never confusing or overwhelming. In other words, an example of a well crafted novel.

I think this kind of analysis can help define the process necessary for success, by which I mean a novel with a sound foundation. It doesn't rely on gimmicks or wild coincidence or a deus ex machina to save the hero's bacon at the end. It's well crafted and, hopefully, well written but then that should always be the case, shouldn't it?

New Word: Retroliterary

After yesterday's post about the three books from the golden age of paperback originals (although the Goodis novel had originally appeared as a hardcover) I find myself wanting to rant against the notions of only reading what's current and popular. Instead I'd like to make a few generalizations about old vs. new and then tomorrow begin a sequence with three very different things I learned from those three very different books. I'll start it with the A. A. Fair book, Gold Comes in Bricks, and today's post can help lay some groundwork.

In earlier entries I wrote about vacating a session at a conference where two successful women authors were dictating what was right and what was wrong as far as writing a novel in today's world. They told a woman her protagonist was too old based solely on the writer's statement of her age. Not a word about the hero's story or what the book was about was uttered. Presumably the 50 some year old protagonist was not playing the part of an Olympic decathlete but was a successful businesswoman or aging housewife or some other appropriate role but it didn't matter to the speakers.

Keep in mind, they said, that many of today's editors are in their mid-twenties and won't understand cultural references made that pre-date Britney Spears; those must be avoided, too. And on and on.

Raymond Chandler said that writing for the market is a sure way to create something that will quickly sink to the bottom, fading away and taking the writer with it (or something like that). I want authors to aim high, take chances at will, be daring, just above all, create a good book. If you create something of quality, something truly worthwhile, it should find a home and it should find success. At worst, it helps the writer become a better writer. How could it not? And as I've said ad nauseum, producing better books is the surest fix for whatever ails the publishing industry.

I'm railing and I wasn't going to do that. Bad blogger. Deep breath, begin again. Read the old guys for:

Strong sense of style: It's missing in much of today's fiction which is too often filled with quick, short bursts, overwrought action scenes, and pacing too reminiscent of Arnold Schwarzenegger movies. Dan Simmons, on his site at www.dansimmons.com, is producing a series of essays on what he calls Writing Well. He's spending a lot of time on style and with his college lit background provides a lot of in depth information and analysis and is well worth checking out.

Use of simile and description: I'm not talking about spoofish Sam Spade passages and other ripoffs lampooning dated or now-cliched prose, but writing that was fresh then and still is now, probably because it's been forgotten. Why is that so? Dunno. Too many MFA programs to drum it out of writers? A marketplace that doesn't breed the sort of writers capable of writing a novel a month in order to make a living? A refinement of popular tastes? I submit that writing as well as one can as fast as one can will probably not produce a uniformly fine body of work but I do think as a training ground it can help one hone his or her voice and zero in on a style. It also accelerates the learning-by-doing of the craft of writing. The markets are different and this reality is no more.

Depiction of small town life: Most modern books now take place in either big cities or easily accessible suburbs or small towns whereas many classic noir settings take place in small out of the way towns no one from fifty miles away ever heard of. It's a smaller world now and not many places like this exist any longer. This gives them an atmosphere, a grit, that I don't find in books written about Florida beaches, Manhattan, or modern southern California. All those places are more similar than different, one not more alien than another. Not so of places like Lander, Texas in Charles Williams' Hell Hath No Fury. The small town becomes an exotic locale and adds to the style and atmosphere. I don't know if it's real anymore than I know if Rick's was a typical joint in Casablanca but it's absorbing as all get out nonetheless.

Some elements in these books are dated but that doesn't take away a lot for me. Sometimes there is too heavy a reliance on coincidence, sometimes a man and a woman fall in love after a single picnic, and there is no DNA or multi-million dollar police forces. None of this really matters when you're concerned about story and good writing anyway.

So these are some of the things I get out of reading from these unjustly forgotten masters. Not all their books are great but many, many of them are. And no matter what, I just can't get away from thinking how fresh and exciting a sixty year old novel can read when compared to most of what I read that's published today.

Can't we mix the two, write with the vivacity and vigor of a Peter Rabe and the atmosphere of a David Goodis with the characters of a Michael Connelly or a Randy White? Damn, I'd like to think so. We need to keep bringing back the old stuff first, bring it back into the light and make it part of what we read today. Keep going, Hard Case Crime, Stark House Press, and others. I really think we need you.

Fifty Bucks for a Used Paperback?

At the recent Antiquarian Book Fair in St. Petersburg, one of the things I kept an eye out for were paperbacks from the paperback original heydays of times gone by. And lucky me, I found a few. Not many, which makes sense if you consider that all of these vendors have to pack and ship their wares and probably lean toward showing pricier items, but I don't know. The next show I go to I should ask a few folks how they decide what to bring.

Anyway, at the first booth where I found some, the woman gave me a deal right off the bat. "I just want the damn things gone," she said. Um, no problem. I picked up a couple of Gold Medals and a Dell map book. I'm describing the publishers and not the authors on purpose: I'm hinting at an era.

At another booth I found some more and I just wish I could have bought them all, even the ones from writers I'd never heard of. But we do what we can. I've just read three of these books in a row and I'm blown away by their quality. The plotting, the characterization and above all else, the various styles, made me as happy as a reader as I've been in a long time.

The first was a Lam and Cool book by A. A. Fair, better known as Erle Stanley Gardner: Gold Comes in Bricks (1940). A straight up detective mystery, it was written around a plot that seemed organically fueled from an interesting concept involving reviving defunct corporations and then using them to sell shares in a seemingly legitimate company. This isn't what the book is about, but I think that served as the seed that gave rise to the plot and I'll write about that in another entry.

The second was the first book I've ever read by Charles Williams, which is bad, and is called Hell Hath No Fury (1953). Like many noir novels, it has a hard luck drifter lighting in a small town and doing bad things. He meets a woman who gives him a shot at redemption but his past mistakes catch up with him and all he can do is watch his hopes fade away, and for the last time. Classic noir themes but written so well with superb similes ("She crawled into my lap like an anxious Dachsund.") that it never reminds us jaded children of the post-Cold War era of a B movie parody.

And I just finished Behold This Woman (1947) by David Goodis. Damn, what a book. A woman destroys a family and those around her simply by the force of her own presence. She marries a good man and breaks him with her words and actions, all under the veneer of her pose as a good wife, as well as corrupts his daughter into nearly becoming a junior version of herself. This is not a traditional thriller or mystery and I have never read anything like it. It is superb in its portrayal of working class evil and its depictions of people and the hell they can make for themselves and inflict on others. It's brilliant.

I paid four dollars for the Goodis book and it is in good condition with creases in both covers and the standard slanted binding. The pages are in good shape, though, and there is a pencilled in price on the first page of $35.00. I looked the book up on Amazon and there was one used one listed for $50.00. ABEbooks.com shows copies starting at $17.00.

I've written before about reading only contemporary fiction or "what's hot now" and I want to climb back on this horse. I'll do it over the next few posts, though, especially since this is following one on wordiness and length. In the meantime, log on to the internet and buy a copy of the Goodis book, even if it costs you fifty dollars. In the immortal words of the sadly fictional Ferris Bueller, "If you have the means, I'd highly recommend one." Pick up all these books, or other titles from these same writers. Then you can tell me why, like our parents used to tell us all those years ago, they just don't make them like that anymore.

Length Matters

A good friend of mine is always keen to point out the size of my blog entries. He's used to reading encapsulations and blurbs instead of sentences and paragraphs formed into a cohesive something. I think he probably misses Ziggy cartoons; Peanuts can get so involved in four panels. Forget about the Sunday comics.

I ask him about the readability (for lack of a better word) and how easy, and coincidentally fast, that makes the entries. He has no answer; some of them are just too long for him to read. This is especially interesting to me because it is so opposed to how I think.

My first Dick Francis book was a supermarket paperback of Proof. I enjoyed it immensely and gave it to my father to read. His verdict: It was easy to read. I was disappointed in this because
it's always a disappointment to recommend something to someone who doesn't like it as well as you do. Worse, though, he made it sound as though the book were suitable for a third grade remedial reading class.

Eventually I realized that this wasn't how he meant it at all. The book made no undue demands upon the reader's vocabulary, it was clear and fast paced, there weren't long digressive discourses on societal ills; it was just as my dad said, easy to read. It turns out I think this is a good thing.

Moby Dick is not easy to read. You've got to work for that one, the same as other classics like Les Miserables, a book that tries to do more than merely entertain. Other books are not easy to read because they're poorly written. I picked up three books by a southern gentlemen (based on a starred review in Publishers Weekly, silly me) that I find impossible to read because of the writing style. Everything in the books is over-described, not just the things that are important to plot and story, but every damn noun and setting in each scene. I trudged through one, gave up on the second, will donate the third to the library.

This is not to say that being easy to read is a sign of quality. By itself it is most definitely not. Stephen King's good books are easy to read but so are his not so good ones. When I read my first King book I was struck by how you can sit down with it for twenty minutes and find yourself turning page 100.

Sometimes I want to be immersed in heavy, atmospheric, sometimes large casted serious novels, something like Robert Wilson's A Small Death in Lisbon or what may be the ulitmate, James Clavell's Shogun. Or an Eric Ambler book, or a Graham Greene. I have high hopes in this regard for Alan Furst, whose Night Soldiers I just picked up.

Whether a book is easy to read or requires more intellectual involvement it still has to primarily entertain and no matter what, never commit the sin of allowing the writing to get in the way of the story. I do regard the label of being easy to read as complimentary and enjoy it when I hear people say that of my work. I think it helps excuse the wordiness, which, if done right, should go unnoticed during the actual reading of the piece. It's necessary but not cumbersome and should never earn the epithet of wordy.

And on that note, I sure the hell better stop writing.

The Meaning of Life

At different times in our lives, all of us feel cut loose or adrift, disconnected, when all news seems like bad news and a positive outlook is an artificially induced state of mind intended to keep your spouse from murdering you in your sleep. At least I hope we all do. I'd hate to think I were alone.

Despite Nietschze's proclamation of the death of God, the vast majority of people on the planet believe in some sort of higher power. Their fatih in religion presumably gives them strength and hope and comfort. Even a non-believer can see the power in that.

Which is where I find myself. Going on three years of severe injury/illness without an end in sight and without a dogma to lean on. If I had a faith it might make me feel better about my situation but you can't make yourself believe just because you want to. If God only gives one as much as they can handle explain a suicide to me. And if there were one true God and one true religion, explain the ancient commonality of myth to me, those stories with nearly identical themes across disparate cultures and geographies. Religion answers questions common to us all yet no particular faith unifies the world.

So what's it all mean? Are we just random events floating along a plane of chaos, guessing our way through the years we coax out of our physical forms? Are we beings of energy and, since believers tell us that energy can never be destroyed, we will live forever? Maybe this is comforting. But a light bulb gives off energy until somebody flicks the switch.

When I look back at the traumatic or otherwise "bad" things that have happened in my life, I can see something positive that followed. Were these things fate or simply things that worked out as I lived life the way I thought I should?

I tore up my shoulder, ending whatever tennis career I may have had. My first surgery was only partially successful and the second left me with a frozen shoulder. The first therapy facility wasn't effective and the second was limited by the lovely way insurance companies run themselves. But I met the woman of my dreams there, who eventually became my wife.

I could go on and on with stories like that but they would be at least as painful to read as they would be for me to write. The point is that looking back on them all it's possible to draw a clear and distinct line from the bad event to a good one; it's almost too tempting to not call it an outcome.

So I've come to think that this may be a way to find the Meaning of Life: look backwards at your life, pick an arbitrary point then follow it forward in memory until you reach something good. You always will if you go back far enough. And you can see the connections that were made, the effects you had on people and that they had on you. You can get a sense of how different the lives of people you care about would have been had you not been there. And if you have children, my god, they simply wouldn't be at all.

Looking forward from this point is like looking at an unknown river and wondering where you'll end up if you jump into the whitewater. It's unknowable, chaotic, and you'll almost never end up where you'd think. But looking forward from a point already past tells you just where you landed. You see the effects of your actions and that's what gives them meaning, what shows you the choices you made were ultimately and inevitably the right ones. That was your life during those spans, and looking back from here you can see what it meant. The things you built were the meaning of your life. Keep on doing it.

The Nature of Evil

After watching our two year old boy fill his plastic watering can with Legos, our four year old daughter came running up to me and shouted, "Ricky's evil, I tell you! Evil!"

Now that may be; it's simply too early to tell. In the meantime, my money's on TV. And all she watches is the Disney Channel.

Flash

Cool rain struck pavement that was warmer than air and swirls of mists rose gently upwards toward the moonlight. Rushing cars carried it away with them, whirling down Fifth Avenue like a ghostly parade, daring the nightwalkers to follow.

"We won't have time to walk, you know," Audrey said to her date. Bill's cell phone was still glued to his left ear which left one open for her as a target. She was unhappy with how Bill wouldn't leave work at the office, how dinner had run late, and how little time they had left to enjoy the club before Bill began to exert the inevitable pressure to see him home. "Did you hear me, Bill? It's already eleven o'clock."

He shussed her with his free hand and mouthed the word taxi. Audrey merely shrugged, not encouraged.

As if reading their minds, a cab pulled slowly to the curb in front of them, the driver leaning toward the open passenger side window. "Need a ride?" he asked.

Bill, not missing a beat in his conversation, left the shelter of the awning and strode forward, pulling the rear door open for Audrey. She hesitated, not because of the constant drizzle, but because of something she thought she saw in the driver, a sudden but intangible feeling that made her uncomfortable.

"Bill, I don't think we should--"

He didn't lower the phone or interrupt his sentence. Frowning at Audrey he motioned her inside the cab with his free arm. She saw that he was getting wet and annoyed. Good, she thought.

Without looking at the driver she climbed into the back seat and slid across. Bill plopped down after her and pulled the door shut as the cab surged ahead into the mix of traffic. Audrey heard a mechanical click as the doors were electrically locked. She looked at the edge of the door below the glass and saw that the knob itself had been removed. The same with the one on Bill's side.

The rear view mirror was angled so that she couldn't see the driver's face. The back of his head showed a long mane of unkempt, greasy hair, dark and kinky as though it were thinning and not used to a brush. There was also a rank smell of body odor that was beginning to make her nauseous. She realized that neither of them had told him where to go.

"Bill," she said softly, grabbing his arm.

In the front seat the driver picked up a device that looked something like a cell phone. He depressed a switch as he drove. Instantly, Bill's reception was obliterated and his phone went dead.

"What the-" he said.

"Bill, the driver..."

Neither of them were ever seen again.