Detect and Discover

Although you had been fond of reading novels of detection and, indeed, many of your friends were writing and publishing them, you had no thought to actually write them. It was enough to think about them in a kind of hazy and noncritical admiration, aware that you did not see your own way clear to plotting such narratives in ways that could lead to a satisfactory conclusion. At one point, you'd even gone so far as to plan an elaborately complex novel, something even more prolix than Hammett's The Dain Curse, that ended with the protagonist saying in so many words,"I've fit all the pieces together and now have supporting evidence to bear out my conclusion: Phil did it." THE END.

Even when circumstances drew you closer into the net of acquiring and editing mystery novels and, in time, a mystery magazine, you still considered yourself more an adjunct. Being affectionately railroaded by Dorothy B. Hughes into serving as an officer in The Mystery Writers of America only brought you into contact with more mystery writers, more respect for their abilities at plotting which you did not believe you had, and, of necessity, more mystery writers.

Somehow the lines grew more blurred. Mystery writers were serious drinkers, and two of the more prolific at the time braced you, each in his own way, with the trope that only women mystery writers with husbands who had significant daytime jobs had the luxury of being able to plot and outline. When you recall the ways they braced you, you also recall that the process involved some quantities of bourbon. Your first mystery was done while you were still in high school and although it was bulky and filled with false clues and moments of suspense, most of it remained in pen and ink rather than finding its way into typescript. The first one you were paid for was a more intimidating experience since much of the advance was in a sense enough to pay an outstanding bill at a French restaurant on Highland Avenue, where you were known to have an affinity toward cabernets sauvignon and Gewurtztraminer. Nor did you shy away from the trockenberen auschlese and madiera desert wines nor Martel's VSOP cognac. Ah, no wonder you found yourself with a deadline and a brick wall beyond which you could not penetrate. Smaller wonder yet that you repaired to the very same French restaurant with mystery writer friends who insisted that sole with a tangy Veronique sauce would be just the thing to show you the way beyond your brick wall. Home at midnight with the strong hint of a buzz and no concrete way out of your problem, you had until nine the following morning to present the final pages.

The memory of all that. No wonder you migrated away from French restaurants and novels of detection. Is it fair to say that you have moved to Italian restaurants and novels of discovery? Yes; it is fair. You are able to salute the novel of detection from a distance, take some notion of security in your ignorance of any local French restaurants, and look at such novels of discovery as Richard Price's Lush Life and Clockers, Louise Erdrich's The Plague of Doves and The Painted Drum, and Richard Powers' The Echo Maker and, most recently, Generosity as role models, things to look at when the world of literary cynicism is too much with you. Instead of Martel's Very Special Old Plain Cognac, there is the occasional bottle of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale and all the hidden bottles of peppermint schnapps hidden here and there in the novels and novellas of Jim Harrison.

You could also toss in Richard Russo.

Could and did.

Good night, John Boy.

Good night, everybody.

Mystery

For reasons of pride, snobbery, and misunderstanding, readers and writers of the mystery novel were for some long while relegated to the literary equivalent of the back of the bus. The analogy uses racism as its fulcrum, and has been losing its literary overtones more quickly than the actual conflicts of racism in the real world. More readers and, indeed, more writers are coming to see that even such wildly drawn-out examples as Samuel Richardson's memorable Pamela bear some relationship to the internal thrust of the mystery. At the very least, the readers of Pamela wondered openly whether the eponymous Pamela would or would not, which is to say would or would not deliver her virginity to her most persistent suitor without the regalia of marriage. There was also the suspense of wondering who Pamela was in real life.

The mystery was the pre-television equivalent of television in the sense that back in the day, readers who turned their noses at mysteries were likely to have been reading them in the closet just as it later became fashionable to acknowledge the presence and draw of television but to opt one's self from the viewing public, establishing one's self as separate and with better things to do.

When no less a writer than Eudora Welty wrote a review of Ross Macdonald's estimable The Underground Man, which appeared on the front page of The New York Times Book Review and proclaimed The Underground Man as literature, the genie was at last out of the bottle. It was no longer infra dig to read or write mystery novels and the expectation was that, as so many novels do without having to be urged, the mystery novel would not only solve moral issues, it would address ethical conundrums in more detail yet.

At its simplest level, the mystery novel acknowledged self-interest and corruption to be epidemic, resulting in crimes against individuals, classes, organizations, and entire countries. Somewhere there was an individual, a Philip Marlowe or a V. I. Warshawsky, who would momentarily remove the occasion of corruption, even according some form of justice however rough to serve as an example that "they," whoever "they" were, could not get away with what they were doing forever. In some cases the heroes and heroines of the mystery were later-day Knights Templar, their drinking and screwing achieved off stage while on stage they pursued and brought to justice the modern equivalents of the Saracen.

For those of us who have read extensively in the mystery field, there is a significant pattern, Darwinian in its progression, of development, including the highly rational approach of Sherlock Holmes and the more treacly religiosity of Father Brown, that clerical product of Gilbert K. Chesterton. Mike Hammer worked among the private investigators as did Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer. These names, not intended as a laundry list, reflect some of the many approaches to the mystery, a format that seems to reach out to us, to each in the way and voice of the individual's politics and code of ethics.

Early in the game, mysteries tended to be set among the affluent, where there were such things as butlers, chamber maids, drawing rooms, and dressing for dinner. There were still crimes of violence in the urban areas but those were not abuses meted or suffered with the panache and decorum of estate angst. Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler were among a small group of mystery writers who more or less democratized crime, brought it into the corner saloon, the garage, the den, gave it back to the people. In earlier novels, the police were a bit on the thick side intellectually, ample proof that the more educated one was, the better one could detect or default. When mysteries came to America, police were not only thick, they were often corrupt. and it took a Phil Marlowe or Sam Spade to effect a better justice.

What better way to look at a given culture than through an investigation of its mysteries and secrets, and to assess the consequences of those very conditions? What man, woman, or child is not afflicted with mysteries and secrets?

Secrets of the Rich and Poor

The Molly story is definitely the arrival of you back on the plateau or the mesa, having overrun it like Wile E. Coyote some years back and spiraling downward to the ground below.  Thus you were beginning to form an affinity for said Mr. Coyote, seeing in him many of your own qualities and traits.  The Molly story is, appropriately enough, about a character who has become your alter ego, your fictional self.  The story is also an absurdist vision.  Who among us would think to begin a story with the character goal of stealing the dog of a close friend, then proceeding to raise the dog as his own?  You could say the conceit was a satire on those unhinged ladies who risked stealing someone else's child in order to raise it and, thus, have one of her own.  You are far enough along the path of self-knowledge to recognize that this interpretation never once ocurred to you.

Most of your stories since "Molly" have involved animals, particularly dogs, but in some cases cats, perhaps reaching full-out thematic force with the story of an actor who discovers he is being tolerated among a group of friends not because of who he is but because of his dog.  True enough, there is the story of someone who, more or less, you fear you might, if not careful, become, a man who is turned away at the animal shelter, after having picked a cat to adopt, that he is not a cat person.  Bureaucratic and societal themes play out for you as absurdities; individuals who recognize in themselves the disposition of a loner, then wish to take some step forth to close the gap of being a loner, are often your principals, and now you are toying with yet another notion that intrigues you, the same alter ego you from "Molly" finding himself in a managed living circumstance, perhaps the nearby Casa Dorinda, being engaged as an investigator by clients who are also residents there.  Because the grounds of Casa Dorinda are so sumptuous and the costs and maintenance fees so extraordinary, the irony of such titles as The Secrets of Casa Dorinda resides within you and would need some building and dimension to have meaning to anyone else, but nevertheless, there it is, in effect wagging its metaphorical tail at you:  What secrets could the very wealthy have that would be of any interest?  

The answer is all too clear:  Where ever they reside, secrets are sources of intrigue and curiosity.  The secrets of the wealthy are every bit as human in quality and implication as the secrets of the very poor, and thus how about a humble, perhaps even illegal alien, worker, a maid or gardener, approaching your protagonist investigator with a Case, which he or she is willing to pay for, of course, not wanting something for nothing, then digging into a wallet or pocket to extract five rumpled hundred-dollar bills as a retainer.  Secrets.  Investigate the landscape in which my secrets are buried.

The mystery or suspense novel has long been simultaneously my magnet and gravamen.  Like someone out in the cold too long, I huddle over the suspense novel, palms extended to catch the warmth.

Keep thinking absurdity, absurdity.  Then feel it all about you.

Categorically Speaking

genre--the various categories of fiction; specific niche fiction shelving in bookstores and libraries; a system for classifying types of fiction; defining characteristics of a particular type of fiction.

Readers approach fiction variously for escape, entertainment, inspiration, distraction, and other similar mind- and spirit-enriching reasons. The common denominator for all readers is the understanding that the characters and situations are invented, products of a writer's imagination. This common denominator extends to include the Reader's First Expectation, to wit that the reader will be given sufficient reasons to suspend disbelief, in other words to forget that the characters and situations are unreal, thereupon to consider them as though they were real and accordingly to empathize with them.

The Reader's Second Expectation is that the specific categories or genera will contain but not necessarily be limited to specific circumstances,complications, conditions, emphasis focus, and formulas.

Here are some of the more prevalent fiction genera and what readers expect from them:

Adventure: novels and stories about individuals at accelerated risk and danger.

Chick Lit: young women protagonists, confronting sexuality, shopping, romance, careers, friendship.

Chivalric Romance: men on horses fighting dragons, wicked royalty, and their own sexual urges as they pursue Ms. Right.

Comic Novel: Imagine Ivanhoe of chivalric romance fame, riding off into the sunset with Rebbecca on his horse instead of Rowena. Imagine also Chris Buckley, thanking us for smoking, or that other Chris, Chris Moore, in everything he writes.Imagine satire as a subgenre, in which case you'd have to consider Joe Heller's Catch-22 as an icon.

Crime Novel: one or more murders have been or will be committed,now someone has to find out who and why. The "someone" occasions subgenera such as private investigators, sworn police officers, little old ladies, large young ladies, park rangers, process servers, innocent civilians, etc.

Erotic Literature: Individuals of both genders attempting to get laid with a modicum of originality, told in evocative prose.

Fables, Fairy Tales, and Folklore: Since neither the reader nor writer believe the individuals in these narratives actually existed, the overall tone and payoff must offer the reader something, perhaps a moral or an insight or even a laugh, to repay the time put forth reading them.

Historical Fiction: stories set in a particular period in time, reflecting the details, manners, and customs of that time. These may actually include actual historical personages, either as protagonists or cameo roles.

Literary Fiction: novels and stories having to do with moral choices, philosophical issues, mankind as a species adapting to the social and ethical challenges that confront it.

Picaresque: a more-episodic-than-plotted novel in which a rogue, scoundrel, con-person, deluded or intelligence-challenged person sets forth on a mission (which is usually to seek a fortune, his own or someone else's). You could consider James Leo Herlihy's Midnight Cowboy in this category.

Political Novel: a novel in which one or more of the major players is a politician or is a close-at-hand observer watching politicians as they behave. George Orwell's 1984 is political as well as speculative and cautionary, demonstrating yet other genera. Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men is political as well as biographical. Allan Drury's Advise and Consent takes its title from the U.S. Constitution and involves a number of U.S. Senators in action.

Romance Novel: a youngish woman who is often more attractive then she realizes is forced to make romantic choices.
Speculative Fiction: a novel or story that portrays an if-things-continue-the-way-they're-going scenario; Utopian or dystopian views of as yet unrealized outcomes. Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, George Orwell's 1984, and Philip Roth's The Plot Against America are speculative; so is Robert Heinlein's A Stranger in a Strange Land and, indeed, Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451.

Alternate History: stories and novels that rewrite actual history, then improvise on what the result might bring. See Len Deighton's SS/GB, and Ward Moore's Bring the Jubilee in which, respectively, Germany won World War II, and the Confederate States of America won the U.S. war between the states.

Fantasy: stories and novels in which magic is a key element. These narratives may also involve alternate universes which are accessed through such a portal as the rabbit hole into which young Alice fell. A subgenera of fantasy has one or more individuals being transformed by magic into an other-than-human form. Yet another subgenera involves a quest for an object which is the power source of magic, such as the sword which only Arthur can withdraw from the stone in which it was embedded.

Horror: The writer's intent is to portray events that will seriously frighten the reader. See Stephen King for any number of role models.

Science Fiction: an extrapolation on actual scientific reality, extended to expand the dramatic, emotional, and moral landscape in the world as we know it or in imaginary worlds where most of the conditions we recognize exist in some modified form. Science fiction may use either the "hard" sciences such as chemistry, geology, or astronomy, or extrapolate on the so-called social sciences ranging from anthropology to political science.

Thriller: the clock is ticking, the metronome is hurrying the pace along, and the good guys are in, seemingly over their heads, in a mismatch against a hugely powerful opponent, while the risk to the protagonists increases.

Conspiracy Fiction: "they," whoever they may be, are against "us," whoever we may be in a paranoid scenario come to life. See Richard Condon's The Manchurian Candidate as a prime example, but see also the screen version of The Verdict, David Mamet's screenplay adaptation of Barry Reed' s novel in which a down-at-the heels lawyer, superbly played by Paul Newman, goes up against a particular "them," not to forget where it all began in Erskine Childers' still compelling The Riddle of the Sands, followed by Graham Greene's The Ministry of Fear. Lest the genre sound too pulpy, consider Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 and Umberto Eco's brilliant spoof, Faucault's Pendulum, by way of injecting literary tropes into the text.

Legal Thriller: bright young attorney goes up against prestigious firms with unlimited resources to tip the scales of justice in favor of an underdog client; fading, possibly alcoholic attorney scores a courtroom triumph, once again proving that justice will out. The deck in legal thrillers is always stacked against the good guys.

Psychological Thriller: Is the narrator psychotic or merely naive? Are the inmates running the asylum? Will the bright young psychiatrist break through the catatonic seizures of the targeted character? What about Richard Powers' penetrating dive into what an ego actually is, via The Echo Maker? If ever there were a rich example of a genre, both literary and thrilling in its implications, this is it. Unless, of course, you wish to consult Jonathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn, in which the private eye genre and the psychological thriller meet up in a back alley somewhere. The protagonist in Motherless Brooklyn is a PI who is afflicted with Tourette's Syndrome, a fact that may or may not trump Powers' protagonist, who is diagnosed with the Capgrass Syndrome.

Spy Fiction: Is it really espionage if you give vital information to a friend or worthwhile cause and are not paid for it? Are there moral justifications for spying? Suppose you are a spy for a cause you are willing to risk your life for as in, say, Graham Green's The Confidential Agent? Whatever your answers, readers of spy fiction are alert for betrayals, double-dealing, and covert operatives being lured into death traps, sometimes by alluring ladies wearing tightly belted trench coats, but sometimes by alluring young ladies wearing nothing at all. Any of the novels by Eric Ambler or John LeCarre will set the bar of performance at an appropriate level.

Tragedy: Back in the day,when Aristotle was alive to write about tragedy, the genre signaled the fall from grace or power of a member of the nobility; it might even mean the tumble from power of an entire family. Now tragedy has become democratized, Death of a Salesman earns its way in the front door, so too do the likes of John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, and the venture into tragedy inspired by the plight of Hester Prynne, Herman Melville's Moby Dick. Thomas Hardy's novels, particularly Tess, Jude the Obscure, and The Mayor of Casterbridge portray wrenching, tragic events which not only illustrate their own circumstances but remind readers how close at hand the prospect of tragedy is in their own life. Theodore Dreiser was well aware of the implications of his An American Tragedy, wanting to earn recognition as the American, middle- and working-class Henry James. If tragedy is not paced properly, that is to say, if it is speeded up, it tips over into the realm of comedy. Comedy is tragedy on steroids.

Western: first things first; a Western is a historical action novel, set in the American frontier some time after 1840. Some of its many potential themes are well dramatized in Jack Shaefer's magnificent Monte Walsh, which is an episodic, semi-picaresque growing up and aging of a cowboy. Other Western themes: Cows vs. sheep; ranches vs. farms; cowboys and Indians; Indians and the cavalry; the coming of the railroad: free range vs. barbed wire; cattle drives. Western writers to study for imaginative ways out of the conventional themes include Dorothy Johnson, Elmore Leonard, Larry McMurtry (particularly Horsemen Pass By and, later, Lonesome Dove), Mari Sandoz, and Wallace Stegner. In particular, the McMurtry Horsemen is a demonstration that the history of the West is still very much taking place now, involving some of the very issues with which it began its life under the hands of Owen Wister (The Virginian) and Zane Gray's epic, written in 1912, Riders of the Purple Sage.










See genre promise

In Search of Lost Times

At first I believed it was located in a book, a book I had not yet read—one that needed to be found by diligent research.

Accordingly, I moved from libraries to used book stores, searching, browsing, reading, even to the point of taking a job as a shelver at The Beverly Hills Public Library, definitely for the money, but more for the possible target of opportunity.

Then I began to think it was in my room, somewhere in the clutter of manuscript pages, magazines, perhaps books I had not read with as full a concentration as I might have employed. Missed opportunities, you might say. Perhaps next to a series of Remington and Underwood upright typewriters, all of which came my way on the cheap as a consequence of the occasional job with my uncle, the auctioneer.

Even to the time of my shift to the glorious red Olivetti portable, I looked for it as though for misplaced car keys or reading glasses or wallet, thinking it might be near the typewriter.

The shift from the Olivetti to an electric typewriter marked an end to a kind of innocence that only a shift from manual to electric can supply, but it, the equivalent of The Grail, was not to be found and although I had published many things by then, I thought perhaps I should never find the object of my quest. I thought this mordant scenario for some years, shifting in consequence from fiction to nonfiction, imagining myself doomed to live without it. After all, weren't some people born color blind or tone deaf? Didn't some in your acquaintance have a tin ear for the likes of dialog?

By the merest of accidents, I became an editor, devoted myself to that medium, began to feel the results of practice at it, even grudgingly liked it, and began to think, ah, well, better this than so many other things because, after all, I might some day come across the object of quest, might through editing find it.

An editing colleague, actually a competitor (he worked for Bantam, I for Dell) asked me to take his classes at the university while he attended a sales meeting. Why not? It might be found at the university. I have been there for thirty-four years, doing something else I had never thought to do before, and have seen fleeting glimpses of the quested vision, indeed have come to love the university for giving me so much to write about, for having given me my own sense of regionalism of the sort others had with such tangible grasp. Faulkner had his imaginary county. Sarah Orne Jewett had her own region, Flannery O'Connor her people. An entire raft of mystery writers had their venue and their quest. Bradbury and Sturgeon had science fiction. Orwell and Huxley had politics and dystopia.

It would be fun to say that I found it with the introduction into my life of computers, but nothing is that simple. I can remember my first typewriter, a Corona portable, a splendid gift from my parents, as a sort of bottle of champagne broken on the bow of a ship. But I cannot say it came from a computer nor can I remember what my first computer was.

It came some while ago when I turned in copy for a book review and because I'd included a cover letter, apparently had forgotten to append name and address to the copy. A sub-editor was baffled by the lack of proper identification, but Swindell, the editor, took one look at the first paragraph and said, "That's Lowenkopf. You can always tell."

I had probably found it, my voice, some time before that, had even grown used to it and had it begin to matter to me as much as being honest and honestly factual meant to me. In more recent years, I discovered at a remove an editorial challenge that was carried out beyond and without my presence. One editor complained of a review of mine containing a sixty-five-word sentence. "Doesn't he know anything about newspapers?" the editor asked. And another editor answered, "Perhaps too much."

Finding your voice is in some ways like accepting the fact that because you are six feet three inches tall, you may occasionally bump your head if you hang out with trees, get sprayed on your chest if you spend any time at all in cheap motels. You get used to it, even answer it back, which I have to admit does not go too far in the way of distinguishing you from a schizoid street person, particularly if you happen to be answering yourself while swatting at a fly.

You begin by looking for it, admiring the voices of others and trying to imitate them, then feeling the dissatisfaction of knowing you are a mimic but not a voice. You recall the times around ages twelve and thirteen when your speaking voice was at odds with your appearance, or when you squeaked inappropriately, or deliberately tried to lower your voice to some basso profundo level.

Of a sudden, it emerges and you realize you have been using it for some time, with no particular ah-ha moment. It was there as surely as your six three was there, reminding you to duck around trees and not expect too much from motel showers. Nice as it is to have a vocabulary and a wit and a love of poetry, it is nicer still to recognize yourself talking in a roomful of friends or strangers, comforting to be able to edit out the dross in the voices of others, and as a teacher to emphasize the simple truth that it is your voice that makes the story resonate to the point where it is yours.

More than your keys or fountain pens or reading glasses or your goddamned checkbook always going missing, it is as much yours as your fingerprints ever will be and it is your ticket into the auditorium and your place in line and your front row at the parade and your way of telling special persons and animals you love them. If you hear it recorded, you are disturbed at first, thinking it was a trumpet but realizing it is heard as a bassoon. Not to worry. In Beethoven's Third Symphony, The Eroica, a bassoon has an entire conversation with the full orchestra and holds its own quite nicely, thank you.

Practically speaking, it is all you have. You put yourself into it and it into you, then go out to encounter.

It's a Mystery to Me

As we are drawn to particular preferences in the things we eat, don't eat, drink, don't drink, and on down the line of pairs of opposites that claim our approval or disapproval, we are draw to a spectrum of story that sates what I like to think of as the mystical appetite of reading taste. This is the literary equivalent of comfort food in the sense that it has the potential of calming, exciting, infusing with nostalgia, transporting us to another era or place or age. As such things go, it is not a rational taste. The more I think about it, investigate its implications, compare it with the things I enjoy writing and actually do write, the more it comes to me that literary taste is quite contrary, bordering on impish and perverse.

We write to fulfill emotional hungers, just as we read to enter the domain of an individual writer and sign on for the chef's taste special.

One such writer awaits in person in a few days. I had been reading Joe Wambaugh from the first of his remarkable publication record. When he last appeared at our writers' conference, it fell to my happy lot to introduce him in is role as featured speaker of the evening. "Joe Wambaugh," I said, "writes the books we wish we'd written." He liked that and went on to say that he wrote books he was glad to have written. Although I had one long-term and warm relationship with a homicide cop, he was a different breed from Wambaugh, his reading tastes running to The Sporting News, Field and Stream, and the L.A. Times his writing tastes ran to field reports and summaries. I mention St. John, for that was his name, as a reference point for my being so fond of Joe Wambaugh's work. I admired St. John, ate and drank with him, But neither that crossing of paths with the man who worde badge Number one from the LAPD nor the opportunity to hang out with Joe Wambaugh explain to my satisfaction my interest in crime-related novels. To my tastes, Wambaugh has a quality greater than is inside knowledge of police work; he has an antic humor that explodes with wit and good humor of the ironic sort I often prefer. Things are not what they seem for any of his cops or civilians. I like Joe Wambaugh novels because his tone and word choice and sense of how relations play out pull me in as though, as though they were comfort food.

Of all his works, fiction and nonfiction, The Mysteries of Harry Bright became the equivalent for me of peanut butter and jam on a thick slab of bread.

Thinking about some of the legendary crime writers I knew, went on the carouse with and/or edited, writers such as Bill S. Ballinger, Day Keene, Bob Turner, Steve Fisher, Frank Gruber, Dorothy B. Hughes, Ken Millar, Bill Gault,Tom Dewey,John Wilder, all of whom I greatly admire, there is that special place for Joe Wambaugh because of that particular flavor he imparts, that edgy humor that pushes the boundaries but does not bleed over into cruelty or gratuitous violence.

The closest to have approached Wambaugh is Michael Chabon in The Yiddish Policeman's Union, and it is my suspicion that Chabon is a fan of Wambaugh.

I have come some distance then in saying Wambaugh writes the books we wish we'd written. Although I think this is still true, I also believe he writes the books we wish we'd read sooner.