One the great pleasures of publicity tours—yes, Virginia, there are pleasures to publicity tours—is teaming up with other authors for a panel.
Panels provide one of the great exceptions to the Less is More principle. Two minds are indeed better than one, as are—depending on the minds at issue—three and four or even five, though I think that’s the limit for a decent panel. After that, it’s a chorus line. Or a scrum.
There’s always a balance that needs to be struck between the joy of spontaneity and giving the panelists enough of an idea what the topic is that they can prepare a few interesting ideas and lines—and a couple good jokes.
This is particularly on my mind as I prepare for two panels I’ll be doing in the span of one week:
Frankly, with fellow panelists like that, I could sit there and drool and come off semi-smart. (Well, okay, maybe not drool.)
Ellen is a San Francisco writer I met through Murderati alum Cornelia Read at a reading for Dirty Words: An Encyclopedia of Sex, which Ellen edited. (Ellen’s entry on Happy Endings appears immediately before Cornelia’s on Hard-ons.)
In The Art of Character I use a scene from Ellen’s novel French Lessons to illustrate how to use clothing—in this case, a pregnant, jilted, miserable teacher’s fascination with a pair of turquoise pumps in a Paris boutique—as an objective correlative for the character’s inner life.
Ellen and I are doing a panel titled MY CHARACTER ATE MY PLOT!Creating characters that drive your story. It seems to be a bit of a mash-up of a workshop I proposed on how to balance story and character demands and an impromptu panel. Whatever. Ellen and I will have a gas.
The New York panel really has me intrigued. I’ve been reading A.M. Homes’s May We Be Forgiven and I’m mesmerized. Later this month I’ll be posting for the Books by the Bed column on the website for We Wanted to be Writers (the group memoir about the Iowa Writers’ Workshop). One of the books I mention is May We Be Forgiven, and this is what I say:
As deft a balancing act between heartbreaking realism and wicked black humor as I’ve read outside the works of Pete Dexter. An opening scene with a gutted Thanksgiving turkey, fingers dripping with meat juices, lips coated in same, and then an illicit kiss between the protagonist and his taller, smarter, more successful brother’s wife—and it just takes off from there. Uncanny pacing for a so-called literary novel—violent and smart and did I mention funny?
Many of you probably already know Duane Swierczynski, though you probably can’t pronounce his name. (It’s okay, no one can. Or spell it for that matter.) I also included his The Blonde in my Books by the Bed posting:
The reading equivalent of listening to Eddy Angel channel Link Wray. Gutsy and quick on its feet, with so many deft strokes and oddball observations and switchback plot turns, not to mention (lest we forget) the eponymous blonde who, of course, is not who she seems—a patch of red in a private spot gives her away. More to the point, she’ll die if someone isn’t within ten feet of her. Literally. Beat that, Salman Rushdie!
And Megan Abbott, after writing and winning an Edgar for creative re-interpretations of fifties noir (with an emphasis on the women characters so often trivialized in that genre) has broken out with two novels set in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, her childhood hometown: The End of Everything and Dare Me.
I mean, I’ll have to concentrate very, very hard if I want to screw up this panel.
Like my panel with Ellen, this one also will gravitate toward character, and Megan and Duane both want to talk about the difficulties of characterization in the compressed formats of graphic novels and film, and A.M. wants to talk about the challenges of writing about someone fundamentally different than oneself.
I also want to ask Megan about what characterization challenges she’s faced in switching from noir pastiches to more realistic novels, and generally just invite everybody to jump in and say whatever comes to mind. (Like I'll be able to stop them...)
If you live in New York and feel inclined, join us at 7 PM at the B&N UES at 86th & Lex.
Or if you’re ready for the whole smorgasbord of writing panels and editor consultations and agent pitches, check out the San Francisco Writers Conference—and join Ellen and me on Sunday morning (at the ungodly hour of 9 AM).
How we suffer for our art.
BTW: One final nod to Blatant Sell-Promotion (that's a deliberate typo): If you or someone you know is interested in the craft of characterization, and would like an inspiring, in-depth and yet practical guide, please check out The Art of Character. Follow the link to find out more, including where you can buy a copy. Or read a brand new excerpt here.
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So, Murderateros, what’s the best panel you’ve ever been on or seen?
What was the worst?
What made the one great and the other not so great?
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Jukebox Hero of the Week: Valentine’s Day will have come and gone by the time my next post goes up, so in premature celebration (ahem), I offer this Brubeck chestnut used to brilliant effect in the film Silver Linings Playbook. It beautifully sets the mood for a crucial scene, when Pat goes to Tiffany's house Halloween night for their first (this-is-not-a) date. It's spare and haunting but playful, with its 7/4 time creating an off-balance tension. Perfect.
I spent last weekend attending the 2012 Noircon, the biannual lovefest to all things noir devised and convened by Lou Boxer and Deen Kogan in Philadelphia.
I love this festival, which is far more intimate and writer-centric than most others I’ve attended. The participants largely form a congress of equals, and there is never a great divide between the contributions of the various panelists and the comments from the floor. It’s a smart group, widely read and not shy, and I always come away learning more that I could have imagined.
This year was particularly exceptional, with what at times seemed to be a continuous string of highlights. That said, one presentation stood out for me—the keynote talk by Robert Olen Butler.
Butler’s a gracious, witty, generous man with a knife-like body and a steel-trap mind. An astonishing talent, he’s written thirteen novels, six story collections, nine screenplays, an essential guide to writing (From Where You Dream—trust me, read it), and has won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and a Guggenheim Fellowship in addition to an almost unseemly bundle of other awards and distinctions.
Why, I hear you ask, is such a literary hotshot slumming at Noircon?
Well that’s an interesting question, one ironically answered by Otto Penzler the day before Butler spoke. Otto explained how, after studying English and American Literature at the University of Michigan, he discovered crime fiction and promptly realized that its best practitioners owe apologies to no one.
Butler agrees, not just in theory. His most recent novel, The Hot Country, is a historical thriller set in Mexico in 1914, combining intrigue from both that country’s revolution and the worldwide cataclysm routinely known as World War I. The plan is for nine more novels in the series, all to be published by Otto Penzler’s Mysterious Press.
But what Butler chose to discuss at Noircon was craft—specifically, the way in which fiction mimics the cinematic portrayal of events in the mind. (His remarks, I now know, were a distillation of his chapter, "Cinema of the Mind," within From Where You Dream.)
The American filmmaker D.W. Griffith, Butler informed us, once remarked that he owed everything he knew about cinematic technique to Charles Dickens—who died years before the advent of film.
By way of example, Butler turned to the following passage from Great Expectations, which appears shortly after the narrator, Pip, sets the stage, identifying himself and his family, then continues:
Ours was the marsh country, down by the river, within, as the river wound, twenty miles of the sea. My first most vivid and broad impression of the identity of things, seems to me to have been gained on a memorable raw afternoon towards evening. At such a time I found out for certain, that this bleak place overgrown with nettles was the churchyard; and that Philip Pirrip, late of this parish, and also Georgiana wife of the above, were dead and buried; and that Alexander, Bartholomew, Abraham, Tobias, and Roger, infant children of the aforesaid, were also dead and buried; and that the dark flat wilderness beyond the churchyard, intersected with dykes and mounds and gates, with scattered cattle feeding on it, was the marshes; and that the low leaden line beyond, was the river; and that the distant savage lair from which the wind was rushing, was the sea; and that the small bundle of shivers growing afraid of it all and beginning to cry, was Pip.
“Hold your noise!" cried a terrible voice, as a man started up from among the graves at the side of the church porch. "Keep still, you little devil, or I'll cut your throat!"
A fearful man, all in coarse grey, with a great iron on his leg. A man with no hat, and with broken shoes, and with an old rag tied round his head. A man who had been soaked in water, and smothered in mud, and lamed by stones, and cut by flints, and stung by nettles, and torn by briars; who limped, and shivered, and glared and growled; and whose teeth chattered in his head as he seized me by the chin.
"O! Don't cut my throat, sir," I pleaded in terror. "Pray don't do it, sir."
Butler called our attention to several techniques here, all of which have cinematic elements, and there are two particular points that stuck with me, involving the first and the third paragraphs.
Butler noted that the first paragraph serves as what in film is routinely called the establishment shot—setting the story in its initial setting. We start at a distance in a long shot then move in to the nettles of the churchyard and the headstones in arresting close-up, then look out across the landscape again, as though to put those deaths in perspective.
That perspective is not local. Dickens moves beyond the "low leaden line" of the river to : “the distant savage lair from which the wind was rushing ... the sea.” A great many writers might leave that phrase out. Such an omission, he argued, would be a mistake, for the establishment shot doesn’t just lay out the scenery. This crucial phrase broadens not just the physical landscape but the thematic one, extending our view not just to the immediate environs but to the world at large, setting the stage for so much of the story to come, and hinting at its universality.
And then, with incredible boldness, Dickens snaps us back again to "the small bundle of shivers growing afraid of it all and beginning to cry," the narrator himself, Pip.This movement in and out creates a marvelous sense of the larger savage world and the small scared soul that form the essential focus of the tale, and do it subtly with this implicit, cinematic movement in and out of the action.
Similarly, the third paragraph might readily find itself in many a writer’s Dead Darling file—another error. It’s not just the unnerving description of Magwitch we’d lose. Note the suspense that builds by separating “I’ll cut your throat” from “‘O! Don’t cut my throat, sir,’ I pleaded in terror.” Note also how that tension is created and how it builds. There are no independent verbs in the main clauses of any of the sentences, for the desired effect is one of attenuation—Pip staring in terror at the man emerging before him—and verbs in grammatical structure are the device for conveying movement in time. Omit them, and you're standing stock still.
The next example was one with which more of the crowd was familiar, the first few paragraphs from the second chapter Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon:
A telephone-bell rang in darkness. When it had rung three times bed-springs creaked, fingers fumbled on wood, something small and hard thudded on a carpeted floor, the springs creaked again, and a man’s voice said:
A switch clicked and a white bowl hung on three gilded chains from the ceiling’s center filled the room with light. Spade, barefooted in green and white checked pajamas, sat on the side of his bed. He scowled at the phone on the table while his hands took from beside it a packet of brown papers and a sack of Bull Durham tobacco.
Cold steamy air blew in through two open windows, bringing with it half a dozen times a minute the Alcatraz foghorn’s dull moaning. A tinny alarm-clock, insecurely mounted on a corner of Duke’s Celebrated Criminal Cases of America—face down on the table—held its hands at five minutes past two.
Spade’s thick fingers made a cigarette with deliberate care, sitting a measured quantity of tan flakes down into the curved paper, spreading the flakes so that they lay equal at the ends with a slight depression in the middle, thumbs rolling the paper’s inner edge down and up under the outer edge as forefingers pressed it over, thumbs and fingers sliding to the paper cylinder’s ends to hold it even while tongue licked the flap, left forefinger and thumb pinching their end while right forefinger and thumb smoothed the damp seam, right forefinger and thumb twisting their end and lifting the other to Spade’s mouth.
He picked up the pigskin and nickel lighter that had fallen to the floor, manipulated it, and with the cigarette burning in the corner of his mouth stood up. He took off his pajamas. The smooth thickness of his arms, legs, and body, the sag of his big rounded shoulders, made his body like a bear’s. It was like a shaved bear’s: his chest was hairless. His skin was childishly soft and pink.
He scratched the back of his neck and began to dress. He put on a white union-suit, grey socks, black garters, and dark brown shoes. When he had fastened his shoes he picked up the telephone, called Graystone 4500, and ordered a taxicab. He put on a green-striped white shirt, a soft white collar, a green necktie, the grey suit he had worn that day, a loose tweed overcoat, and a dark grey hat. The street-door-bell rang as he stuffed tobacco, keys, and money in his pockets.
As with the Dickens example, the main focus again resided on the creation of a series of mental images that form a vivid film-like sequence, visually clear in our minds, even including camera angles—the ceiling light shot from below, followed by the close up of the rolling of the cigarette, both mimicking Spade’s own focus.
But there’s more than that, too. Once again, suspense gets created through the use of detail an impatient writer might discard—or never visualize to begin with. Spade rolls himself a smoke right after learning his partner, Miles Archer, has been killed. We don’t know as yet for sure that the two o’clock phone call concerned Archer, and it’s not until later we’ll learn Spade was sleeping with Archer’s wife. Instead we get this enigmatic, slow-motion rolling of a cigarette. Its intrusion into the scene piques our interest, precisely because it doesn’t quite fit. It suggests without stating outright that Spade has something serious on his mind, and yet in the casualness of the activity we also sense no great alarm. There’s even a hint of relief.
Note: Interestingly, the day before, Lawrence Block had remarked that Hammett, sensing that his literary success might well depend on his novels being made into films, deliberately limited his descriptions to only what could be seen and heard. This wasn’t, as many have believed, a nod to Hemingwayesque technique. It was a professional calculation.
In the Q&A that followed his talk, Butler noted that as a teacher in the Ph.D. program at Florida State, he encounters some of the best aspirants to literary fame to emerge from the various MFA programs across the country. And all too often, “They know the second through tenth most important things about writing, but they don’t know the first.” The first, he explained, was that stories are about yearning.
He suggested that genre writers often understand this point well—if they sometimes have an insufficient grasp of the next nine most important things about their craft—because genre often has the yearning built into the premise of the form. Crime fiction is driven by the search for justice, romance novels by the craving for love, science fiction by the need to humanize technology, etc.
His talk burned a nasty little hole in my brain, and as soon as I could I got my hands on a copy of From Where You Dream and I’ve been devouring it ever since.
So, Murderateros -- how does the cinema of the mind guide you in your writing? Do you take time to envision camera angles? Do you consider tempo in your descriptions? Do you play with quick alteration betweeen and long shots and close ups to create a dramatic effect between thematic or narrative extremes?
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There were a great many other excellent presentations at Noircon, including but not limited to:
—Well-deserved awards bestowed on Lawrence Block and Otto Penzler, with interviews of both men, giving Block a chance to, among other things, recount his days as a writer of lesbian romance novels, and Otto an opportunity to discuss how obscenely cheap real estate was when he bought his first store in Manhattan.
—A panel on music with SJ Rozan and John Wesley Harding (who writes crime fiction under the pen name Wesley Stace), complete with songs.
—A wickedly lurid, funny, and confessional true crime panel with Megan Abbott, Allison Gaylin, Wallace Stroby, and Dennis Tafoya.
—A blackly comic panel of cautionary tales from Hollywood featuring Lawrence Block, Duane Swierczynski, Anthony Bruno, and Ed Pettit.
As I said, I had a gas, and I fully intend to return in two years. Even without Lulu Lollipop.
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Blatant Self-Promotion Segment: For all the month of November, Open Road Media/Mysterious Press is featuring 100 titles for less than $3.99, including The Devil’s Redhead at a nifty $2.99.
If you haven’t yet read it, pick it up. If you have, share it with a friend. (Or an enemy. I can live with that.)
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Jukebox Hero of the Week: In tribute to John Wesley Harding, who so graciously regaled us with song, here's "Ordinary Weekend," which he wrote after reading Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me. (In his performance for us, he remarked somewhat sheepishly he should have practiced, and ended up forgetting several verses, only to offer some of the best advice I've ever heard: He said years of performance had made him utterly un-selfconscious about fucking up. Not that anyone cared. We were enthralled):
Quick: What do the following upcoming films and television shows all have in common?
If you said they all feature poster art suitable for the Louvre, you're wrong. And you're blind.
If you said they all feature A-list talent whose work you never miss, well . . . I don't quite know what to say about that. Though the expression "get a life" does spring to mind. (Taylor Lautner??)
If, however, you said all four are burdened by an incredibly unimaginative and dumb-as-a-stick title, you nailed it. And therein lies the tale of this Murderati post.
Several months ago on my own blog, I wrote a post describing how much it mystifies me when creative people consciously decide to attach a one-word, generic title to something they've spent months, sometimes years to produce. This is what I wrote in part:
"Now, I know not every writer cares to spend a thousand sleepless nights trying to come up with a title for their book or film that's as fresh and original as it is memorable. It's a pain in the ass process and, sometimes, it hardly seems worth the effort. . .
"But here's where I'm coming from with all this: A writer busts his ass for months, maybe even years, to write a novel or a screenplay. He puts his heart and soul into the work, trying with all he's got to make it something special, something different, something he and he alone could have written.
"After all that, why on earth would he want to give the work a generic, overused, blatantly obvious title that anybody with a fifth-grade education could have come up with?
"I don't get it."
I was careful to point out in that post that this sort of thing happens far more often in the realms of film and television because the creative process in Hollywood, as Alex and Stephen know far better than I, is almost designed to produce something ridiculously simplistic at every turn, so as not to confuse our feeble minds when it comes time to turn on our TV or buy a ticket at the box office:
"Hollywood has a long tradition of treating the movie-going public like a herd of mindless cows that would forget how to chew cud if you gave them anything other than grass to think about. And its penchant for dumbing down titles to their most obvious and uninspiring form is only getting worse."
And every published novelist knows that the title his book winds up with is not always the one he chose for it, because publishers make the final call on such things. So my gripe is not with authors in any medium who are forced to live with a Dumb-Ass-Title (hereafter referred to as a DAT) by forces beyond their control. Authors who go with a DAT by choice are the ones with whom I take issue.
What, in my opinion, constitutes a DAT in the literary world? The following trifecta of death, "death" in this case being no interest from me whatsoever in reading the book so afflicted:
A length of one word (or two, if you include a preceding and pointless "the"). Think about it --- the entire scope and breadth of your novel can be reduced to ONE WORD? What kind of message is that to be sending to potential readers?
Ubiquity. If the word you choose for your title is as commonplace and ordinary as sliced bread, why should anyone expect your writing to be any different?
And most importantly:
Predictability. "Detective" is a nice word, and it really comes in handy when you write crime fiction, but I think we can all agree that it's rather lacking in multiple meanings, yes? Chances are, if the title of a book is DETECTIVE, its storyline involves someone who could most accurately be described as. . . well, a detective! Big surprise, huh? Yet another way to appeal to potential readers --- announce by way of your book's title not to expect anything unexpected.
To really qualify as a DAT, a title has to meet all three of the criteria above. For instance, BEAT may only be one word (yeah, Schwartz, I'm talking about you), but is that word particularly ubiquitous? And does BOULEVARD immediately suggest what the book is about? The answer in both cases is no, so these titles don't make my DAT cut. (Okay, Stephen, you can exhale now.)
In the comments to my original post, I engaged in a rather lively debate with a crime writer who objected to my assertion that he'd given his latest book a DAT. He argued that the title he'd chosen was in fact an ingenious one because, as readers of the book would discover in the end, it had a secret meaning. I won't rehash all the ways I debunked that argument here, except to say that the cleverness of a title with a "secret" or double meaning is completely lost on somebody who hasn't yet read the associated book --- i.e., somebody cruising the shelves at their local book store looking for something great to read. Like a duck, if it looks like a DAT, sounds like a DAT, and smells like a DAT, people are going to be inclined to assume that it is a DAT, and won't grant you 389 pages to disabuse them of that notion. The time to impress potential readers with your capacity to surprise is at the start of your book, not the end of it, and that start --- even before page 1 --- is your title.
If you're beginning to get the idea I could go on and on about DATs if left to my own devices, you wouldn't be far off the mark. This phenomenon doesn't just confound me, it saddens me a little, in the same way that all avoidable, self-destructive behaviors we humans sometimes engage in do. However, as I've beaten this poor, dead horse into the ground online once already, and don't particularly feel like being the negatron I usually am, what I'd like to do today is turn my old post on its head and devote the rest of this one to singling out some relatively recent crime novel titles that I think are the polar opposite of a DAT. The following are Kick-Ass Titles (KATs), the kind a reader can't help but notice and be drawn to, and in my estimation, all are no less exceptional and creative than the fine novels --- and authors --- they represent.
(As an added bonus, I'm including an Alternative DAT for each, just to demonstrate what might have been, had the gods not smiled upon us all.)
This title has blown me away since the moment I first heard it. Its primary message is immediately and abundantly clear: Somebody in Littlefield's terrific book is about to suffer the effects of a full can of whup-ass. And seriously, what more should the title of a crime novel ever need to say?
Shit. This title ticks me the hell off, and always has, because I wish to God I'd thought of it first. It makes all the jacket copy for Stroby's debut noir thoroughly unnecessary, as everything you need to know about his story is right there: Love; pain; sex; betrayal. No title in the tradition of Chandler and Ross Macdonald could be a more a fitting homage to the masters than this one.
All of Block's titles for his Matthew Scudder novels are memorable --- A DANCE AT THE SLAUGHTERHOUSE, TIME TO MURDER AND CREATE, etc. --- but this one, I think, is his best. Some reference to death in the title of a mystery or crime novel is a no-brainer, but it's hard as hell to work it in in a way that isn't blatantly obvious or unoriginal. Block managed that trick here.
Blondes are a fixture in classic crime fiction, and concrete is often used as a metaphor for the cold, hard city. Put these two things together and you have a title that promises nothing but trouble for a beautiful woman --- and by extension, Connelly's homicide detective Harry Bosch.
One thing a great title does, even as it's offering hints as to what kind of book it belongs to, is raise questions. Note that Child didn't title this Reacher novel 24 HOURS, or 48 HOURS --- it's 61 HOURS. And what in the hell can happen in exactly 61 hours? You have to read the book to find out, and Child is counting on you becoming curious enough to do just that. Clever. Very clever.
Lehane's another author whose book titles all tend to stick in the mind --- MYSTIC RIVER is a prime example --- but this one, for his second Kenzie-Gennaro mystery, which deals with a serial killer who targets children, is my favorite. It alludes to the temptation evil sometimes holds over us all, and what could be a more ominous intro to a crime novel than that?
Nothing conveys life-altering heartache quite like the expression "cut to the bone," and Sakey's title for his debut novel evokes this experience brilliantly. Could there be any doubt that this is a noirish thriller with serious attitude? None whatsoever.
Though Swierczynski is capable of dropping a DAT of his own every now and then --- THE BLONDE? Really? --- more than a few of his titles hit the Kick-Ass Title sweetspot for me. It's a toss-up which title I like better --- this one or POINT & SHOOT --- but they both speak volumes about Swierczynski's old school, pulp-era sensibilities, and the emphasis he places on entertainment above all else.
Actually, my appreciation for this title to Mosley's 2006 Fearless Jones/Paris Minton novel is entirely selfish, because it immediately reminds me of a debut novel near and dear to my heart that was published 19 years earlier:
Remember what I said earlier about THE BARBED-WIRE KISS being an homage to Chandler and Ross Macdonald? Well, that's got to be what this was, right? An homage to me? So I'm flattered. Really. I swear to God.
Alternative DAT: SPOOKED
One last word before I sign out: There's another level to the moronic-title descent into hell that I call "Just Plain Stupid." JPSTs can be of any length, yet still manage to be even more obvious and devoid of originality than DATs, and the reason I chose this subject for today's post is a JPST that's been all over billboards lately that makes me want to tear my hair out, rather than shave it cleanly from my scalp:
Hmmm. You think maybe this film has something to do with horrible bosses? Talk about a title that requires zero brainpower to interpret. The only mystery in it is just how long the geniuses behind it took to come up with it: four seconds or a whopping fourteen?
Pathetic.
Questions for the class: How about you, my fellow 'Ratis? Do DATs make the top of your head come off the way they do mine? If so, name a few that really bent you out of shape. Or conversely, name some titles that you think qualify as KATs instead.
Wednesday, February 6, 2013 at 3:01AM in 
