The Movie in Your Mind

By David Corbett

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:

“Hello?...Yes, speaking…Dead?...Yes…Fifteen minutes. Thanks.”

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?

* * * * *

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.

            —And last but not least, a panel on burlesque and noir, with Lulu Lollipop, Frank De Blasé, Timaree Schmit, and Susana Mayer.

As I said, I had a gas, and I fully intend to return in two years. Even without Lulu Lollipop.

* * * * *

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.)

* * * * *

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):

DRIVING MISTER PRESIDENT

by Gar Anthony Haywood

I have a dear friend who can't stand Oprah Winfrey.  A mid-list novelist like me, he thinks she's a literary snob whose book club was an elitist farce, a cultural enclave for readers and writers every bit as exclusionary to authors of color as Augusta National has traditionally been to black golfers not named "Tiger."  And if, God help you, you happen to write genre fiction, as my friend and I both do?  Well, the record certainly shows that the Big O' has never had any time for you, let alone love.

Personally, I think her shortsightedness is Ms. Winfrey's privilege.   She is entitled to like what she likes and make literary giants of whomever she pleases, be they dead or alive.

I wish she had broader reading tastes, sure --- the consistent "We Shall Overcome (Racism/Poverty/Abandonment/Death of a Child, Parent, Spouse, etc.)" flavor of her book club selections has always been somewhat annoying --- but, unlike my friend, I've never really had the energy to care, one way or the other, what she chooses to condemn or endorse.

Until now.

Now comes news out of Hollywood that Ms. O' is mulling a return to acting --- after a hiatus of more than 14 years --- to accept a part in THE BUTLER, director Lee Daniel's upcoming bio-pic about Eugene Allen.  Allen was a black man who worked as --- you guessed it, a butler --- in the White House from 1952 to 1986, where he served a total of eight presidents, from Harry S. Truman to Ronald Reagan.

Does Allen's sound like a compelling story?  Perhaps.  You live in the White House for over five decades, at the beck and call of eight of the most powerful men who ever lived, and you're bound to walk away having had more than a few experiences worth telling your grandchildren about.

But the title of Daniel's planned film of Allen's life makes it perfectly clear why African Americans should embrace it with all the enthusiasm of a nine year old given a fruit cake for Christmas: Allen was a butler!  Regardless of whose shoes he shined or meals he served, he was a servant, nothing more and nothing less.

In other words, a perfectly appropriate alternative title for Daniels' movie would be DRIVING MR. PRESIDENT.  And where have we all seen that film before?

At this point, I could surprise you not a whit by turning this commentary into yet another indictment of Hollywood's pathetic tendency to represent black people in only the narrowest and most stereotypical terms, those terms being: "domestic help" (nannies, butlers, maids, chauffeurs); "buffoons" (cross-dressing cops, matriarchs of large, dysfunctional families played by cross-dressing writer/actor/directors); po' folks (ghetto thugs, single mothers, pimps and drug dealers); and of course, 'ballers (base-,  foot-, and the ever-popular basket-).

But railing against this vicious cycle of cinematic racial profiling has proven to be as effective in creating change as a squirt gun against a forest fire, so I'll leave that noble endeavor for others to tackle, again and again, and again, until (it would seem) the end of time.  No, what I'm taking up arms against today is not the pinhole view Hollywood continues to have of the role black people can and should play in movies, but the apparent willingness of someone as iconic as Oprah Winfrey to enable it.

When an actor like, say, Oscar-winner Octavia Spencer of THE HELP receives an offer to play yet another character out of the Four Basic Negro Groups as outlined above (Help, Buffoon, Po' Folk, 'Baller), her choices are to take the role and keep eating, or wait for something more dignified to come along and starve.  Asking her to risk life, limb and career by taking a stand against the box Hollywood is so intent upon keeping our people in is like asking the one member of the SWAT team not wearing a Kevlar vest to take point.  It's suicide.

But Oprah?  Oprah has options.  Oprah has position and power and wealth.  Enough of all three with plenty left over to tell pretty much anyone in this town "no" and get away with it.

Which is exactly what she should have said when the script for THE BUTLER first came across her desk: no.  Flatly, unconditionally, "No."

"After waiting fourteen years to be offered a movie part worthy of my name and stature, I am not coming out of retirement for this recycled b.s."

(And before you suggest I would need to read the script for THE BUTLER myself to have any right to say all this, let me point out that reading it would do nothing to change the inalterable fact that, once again, it is the story not of an astronaut or a Nobel prize winner or even a simple dentist, but of a butler.  An exceptional butler, a wise butler, a butler with a heart of gold, no doubt --- but a butler, all the same.  (Please go back to the beginning of this post and start reading again if you still don't understand why this is a problem.)

Of course, I'm asking quite a bit of Ms. O' here because the premise of THE BUTLER sits right smack dab in the sweet spot of her literary preferences.  For Oprah, based upon her book club choices, anyway, tugged heartstrings and emotional tragedy trump originality and/or authenticity every time.

Still, it would have been great to see her get past her own affection for Hollywood's favorite cast of black characters to let this opportunity to play one go to someone else, and make a big stink about it in the process.

By publicly declining a role in Mr. Daniels' film, would Oprah accomplish anything beyond making it more difficult for its producers to get it made?  Probably not.  But her doing so would send a message to Hollywood regarding its myopic, unconscionable vision of African Americans that almost no one short of Ms. Winfrey could send and live to tell about it:

"To hell with this, I'm not having it."

True, were they in Oprah's shoes instead, it would only be fair to expect male superpowers like Denzel Washington and Will Smith to do the same.

But since I've just read they're attached to do a remake of the old Bill Cosby/Sidney Poitier slapstick comedy "Uptown Saturday Night," I wouldn't put my money on that happening, either.

Meanwhile, on another subject entirely. . .

Maybe you've seen this graphic that's been passed around a great deal on Facebook lately:

My writer friends say the right-hand image represents what the average career track looks like for professional authors who have achieved "success."  I suggest it actually looks more like this, at least for many:

I point this out now because I am myself about to climb even further up and out from the Pit of Irrelevance --- otherwise known as OOP (Out Of Print) Hell --- starting next Tuesday, April 17, when Otto Penzler's Mysterious Press officially re-issues all six of my Aaron Gunner novels as e-books.  To say that I'm excited would be to understate matters considerably.

How this development will affect my own career trajectory --- onward and upward, or more non-linear zig-zagging? --- remains to be seen.  But I'm hoping the books will find a whole new audience with Kindle and Nook owners and create a demand for a seventh Gunner novel.

Especially since that seventh novel is being written as we speak.

Wish me luck!

Scalps, Bloody Shirts, and Babies Carved in Half

by David Corbett

Got your attention yet?

I’ll get to the gore in a minute. First, some announcements:

From January 23^rd through March 12^th I’ll be giving an eight-week Monday night course titled Story Not Formula: Crime Fiction Essentials at The Grotto in San Francisco. Follow this link or this one for details on what I’ll be teaching and how to sign up.

I’ll be doing basically the same course online for Chuck Palahniuk’s LitReactor sometime next year, so those of you hoping for an online course, I’ll keep you posted, and check my website for updates.

Also, on the weekend of February 4^th-5^th, I’ll be teaching a course at Book Passage in Corte Madera titled Integrating Arcs and Acts in Fiction and Film. Here’s the description (follow this link to sign up):

Aristotle believed that plot was the most important and difficult challenge the writer faced. But by plot he meant the architecture of change in the hero's fortunes. Character and structure are inextricably linked. David Corbett, drawing on five iconic films—Vertigo, The Godfather, Chinatown, Silence of the Lambs and Michael Clayton—will demonstrate how the architecture of story deepens our understanding of character, with scene-by-scene breakdowns of how the drama is built. He will also, in the class discussion that follows, apply the lessons learned to individual student film and fiction projects.

Last, Otto Penzler has selected my first two books, The Devil’s Redhead and Done for a Dime, along with five short stories, for digital reissue as part of his Mysterious Press imprint at Open Roads Media. Hopefully the books and stories will be available for download early next year. I’ll keep you posted.

 

 * * * * *

Now back to scalps and such.

I had a completely different post in mind for today, but then I picked up the morning paper. As I wrote here on Murderati two weeks ago, my hometown suffered a bitter loss recently when a wonderful man and brave cop, Officer Jim Capoot, was murdered in the line of duty. I predicted that a tough political fight would soon be brewing over the issue of police staffing, city finances and public safety contracts.

Boy, that was quick.

A newly elected city council majority has decided to propose a public safety review committee that the police officers union and police supporters find not just pointless but insulting, calling it a travesty to their professionalism and the memory of their fallen comrade. They intend a mass demonstration at tonight’s council meeting, with T-shirts honoring Jim Capoot.

In short, the heat is already cranked up to boil, before most of us even know what’s going on. And this reminded me of one of my favorite historical insights, from Evan Connell’s Son of Morning Star, about General George Custer and the Battle of Little Bighorn. Somewhere in the mid-nineteenth century, a settler actually bothered to ask a Native American why the warriors of his tribe took the scalps of their victims. The response says everything about human nature: “Because our enemies do.”

Henry Adams likened politics to the systematic organization of hatreds. He’d feel right at home in my hometown. If he still had his hair.

In such a charged atmosphere, with emotions so high after Officer Capoot’s slaying, the city council majority’s decision to press forward now with this hot potato demonstrates a level of arrogance and political tone deafness that is almost inspirational. I know the time line is tighter than it seems, with police and firefighter contracts ready to expire in June, but this could easily have waited a month.

Beyond that, though, is the issue of merit. I've met a number of the cops in Vallejo and done the prep course for the Citizens on Patrol Volunteer program. I spent fifteen years exposing lazy, incompetent, lying, drug-addicted, corrupt and bigoted cops. I've testified against them. I think I have a pretty good nose for the breed. That's not the problem in Vallejo. In fact, V-town has one of the most professional forces I've ever encountered. The problem we have is simple: the cupboard is bare. We can't afford more police officers, no matter how much citizens and the police themselves may want them.

But the police union’s kneejerk outrage, its decision to crank up the heat and switch off the light, is equally disappointing -- though understandable, given the recent murder of Jim Capoot. The only thing more puzzling is that decision about the T-shirts. Apparently nobody’s explained to them the history behind “waving the bloody shirt.” It’s not complimentary. (Carpetbaggers on one side, KKK on the other—talk about systematic hatreds. Is this the political climate we want to emulate?)

Now I know enough officers to realize beyond any doubt that they mean no disrespect to Officer Capoot or his family. Quite the opposite. But they create an impression of a willingness to exploit even the death of a fallen fellow officer in pursuit of a political agenda and protection of their own bottom line.

And the city council creates the impression that they distrust the police on a fundamental level, and lack any faith that the public safety unions will play fair or provide honest information about what’s needed to keep this city safe. Instead city hall needs to create an independent body full of non-cops to gather the facts necessary to determine where we stand. This is moonspeak for "disaster."

Those impressions, regardless of their degree of truth or falsehood, feed a dragon that exhales poisonous smoke. And that smoke is suffocating this city.

The police are right, the review committee will harm not help public safety, and it will cost money, money this city doesn’t have, any more than it has the money for the increased staffing they want.

Postscipt: I addressed the council chambers tonight and made this point. I can't support the resolution. But I also requested the debate proceed with a little less heat, a little more light.

One solution to the over-arching problem is to have volunteers, as much as possible, help the police do non-patrol and investigation tasks. I’ve applied to be a volunteer for the police department and intend to put out the call for more. Because the unstoppable force has hit the unmovable object—we need more police, we don’t have the money—and the collision will incinerate this city (and a great many others in this country) if the citizens don’t stand up, get engaged, and empower themselves.

I’m not enough of a Pollyanna to think volunteerism’s the secret magic voodoo answer, but I’m also not so drunk on my own gall that I want to be the one standing there when one side or the other in this fight holds up half a bloody baby and declares victory. Solomon had it easy. Solving this fucker's gonna take real wisdom.

A recent Vanity Fair piece that covered the approaching financial apocalypse in California, and mentioned Vallejo in some detail, made the excellent and inescapable point that we’re on the cusp of a new social contract, one that demands not just more accountability from government and the powerful but much more engagement from its citizens. The Tea Party and the Occupy Wall Street movements are manifestations of the growing awareness of this transformation. Let’s hope to God they don’t just devolve into systematically organized hatreds.

* * * * *

Jukebox Heroes of the Week: I know I should be putting up a Christmas carol, or at least Robert Earl Keen’s hilariously heart-warming “Merry Christmas from the Family,” and wishing everyone a merry merry happy happy. But I couldn’t help myself—here’s the Boss singing Woody Guthrie:

Yes, have a wonderful holiday. This merry is your merry.

The Fascinating, Edgar-Nominated Bruce DeSilva

by Toni McGee Causey

Every once-in-a-while, you open a book and the first sentence intrigues, the second sentences lures you in and by the third, you're captured, kidnapped by a story so well-told by a voice that resonates with the authority to tell that story, that you know you're about to lose many hours of sleep, because you're not going to want to put this one down. Such is the case with Edgar-Nominated Bruce DeSilva's debut novel, ROGUE ISLAND.

I had the incredible good fortune recently to interview Bruce, thanks to mutual fabulous friend and fellow 'Rati, our own Alafair. His history in investigative journalism fascinated me, and I hope you enjoy the interview as much as I did. First, though, here's a quick bio:

Bruce DeSilva worked as a journalist for 40 years before retiring to write crime novels full time. At the Associated Press, he served as the writing coach, training the wire service's reporters and editors worldwide. Earlier he worked as an investigative reporter and an editor at The Hartford Courant and The Providence Journal. Stories edited by DeSilva have won virtually every major journalism prize including the Polk Award (twice) and the Livingston (twice). He also edited two Pulitzer finalists and helped edit a Pulitzer winner. His book reviews have appeared in The New York Times book section and continue to be published by The Associated Press. He lives in New Jersey with his wife Patricia Smith, an award-winning poet.

Toni McGee Causey (TMC): You're drawn to crime fiction, and with the glowing starred reviews from nearly every corner of the earth, including a nomination for an Edgar for best First Novel, you clearly have a knack for it. Tell us about your background.

Bruce DeSilva (BD): I grew up in the tiny mill town of Dighton, Mass., where the mill closed when I was ten. I had an austere childhood bereft of iPods, X-Boxes, and all the other cool stuff that hadn’t been invented yet. In this parochial little town, metaphors and alliteration were also in short supply. I spent my days catching frogs, chasing girls, chasing girls with frogs, rooting for the Red Sox, and playing baseball and hockey. When I left town to study geology in college, my favorite high school teacher told my parents that I would eventually find myself writing from compulsion. He was prescient. I soon abandoned science for writing. My first job after college was covering the little town of Warren, R.I., for the venerable Providence Journal. Over the next 20 years I wrote thousands of newspaper stories, many of them investigative articles or long piece of narrative journalism, for the Journal and The Hartford Courant. Then I spent another 20 years editing such stories for the Courant and The Associated Press, training my fellow journalists, and writing occasional feature articles and book reviews on the side. But in the summer of 2009, after 40 years in journalism, I was ready for something new. It was time for a second act.

TMC: As a reporter, you tried to ferret out corruption. Did you ever feel threatened? What's the worst of the repercussions that you faced when breaking a big story? What story gave you the most satisfaction?

BD: When I first arrived as a cub reporter in Rhode Island, a New England-wide war between organized crime factions was underway. That was my introduction to journalism. Over the years, I wrote about the Mafia, horrific conditions in state institutions for the mentally ill and the retarded, government corruption including the looting of Medicaid and low-income housing programs, and massive voter fraud. Over the years, an even 100 people (I once added it up) were indicted or fired as a result of my investigative reporting. I was sometimes threatened with libel suits; and now and then I was confronted physically, once cornered in a parking lot by a corrupt union boss and a couple of his thugs. But I find talking about threats against me both ridiculous and embarrassing. Over the years, a dozen of my colleagues were severely injured or killed on the job. One friend survived being shot in the head covering a civil war in Africa; and a few years ago, a close friend was waterboarded for trying to photograph the genocide in Darfur. I never put myself in that kind of peril. The stories that gave me the most satisfaction weren’t the ones I wrote and reported myself, but rather some of the stories I supervised and edited at The Associated Press. One of my favorites, an investigation that exposed the exploitation of child gold miners in West Africa, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

TMC: How did journalism lead you to writing crime fiction?

BD: Back in 1994, when I was working for a Connecticut newspaper, I received a note from a reader praising “a nice little story” I’d written. “It could serve as the outline for a novel,” the note said. “Have you considered this?” I would have tossed the note in the trash except for one thing. It was from Evan Hunter, who wrote literary novels under his own name and the brilliant 87th Precinct police procedurals under the penname Ed McBain. I sealed the note in plastic, taped it to my home computer, and started writing.

At the time, I lived 15 minutes from work, so I got up early every morning and wrote for two hours before going in. I was a mere 20,000 words into the novel when my life turned upside down. I took a very demanding new job; my new commute was 90 minute each way; I got divorced and then remarried to a woman with a young child. In this busy new life, I had no time to finish a novel. Years streaked by. Each time I bought a new computer, I taped that note from Hunter to it, hoping I would get back to the book someday.

Meanwhile, I was reviewing novels on the side for The Associated Press and The New York Times book review section. That gave me entre to the Manhattan’s literary circle. A couple of years ago, I found myself dining with Otto Penzler, the dean of American’s crime fiction editors, and happened to mention that long-ago note from Hunter.

“Evan Hunter was a good friend of mine,” Penzler said. “In all the years I knew him, he never had a good thing to say about anything anyone else wrote. He REALLY sent you that note?”

“He really did,” I said. “I still have it.”

“Well then you’ve got to finish that novel,” Otto said, “and when you do, you have to let me read it.”

So I went home and started writing again. I wrote at night after work and all day every Saturday; and six months later, the book was finished.

[Toni's note: Hunter knew what he was talking about here. Smart man. And, clearly, Bruce knew a thing or two about getting a book into shape...]

TMC:  As a journalist, you edited many award-winning stories, including two Pulitzer finalists and a Pulitzer winner.  You've obviously applied those same skills to your fiction.  When you look at books that could've been a contender, so to speak, what do they lack? What are the flaws or mistakes that that keep a book from breaking out?

BD: It’s become fashionable to say that the most important thing in a novel is the characters, and of course they matter. If I start reading a book and don’t care deeply about the people in it after a few chapters, I toss it aside and find something else to read. But, hey, everything matters—the plot, the quality of the prose, and don’t forget the setting. As one of my crime-writer friends, Thomas H. Cook, once said, “If you want to understand the importance of place in a novel, just imagine Heart of Darkness without the river.” For a book to be good, all of these elements must be handled well and fit together seamlessly.

But that doesn’t answer the question. The quality of a book doesn’t seem to have much to do with how it does in the marketplace.  Crime novels that become best sellers include wonderful work by writers like Dennis Lehane and Laura Lippman, as well as complete trash. Some brilliant crime novelists, including Cook and Daniel Woodrell, have only small cult followings, and some fine stuff never gets published at all.

When I ask publishers why some books sell and others don’t, they all say the same thing:  If you could give us the answer, we could all get rich.

TMC: What is “Rogue Island” about?

BD: On the surface, it’s about an investigative reporter on the trail of a serial arsonist.  But it is really about two other things.

First of all, it is very much a novel of place— an evocation of 21^st-century life in the smallest state in the union.  One of the many quirks of Rhode Island history is that no one can say for sure where the state’s name came from. One theory is that “Rhode Island” is a bastardization of “Rogue Island,” an epithet the God-fearing farmers of colonial Massachusetts bestowed upon the swarm of heretics, pirates, and cutthroats who first settled the shores of Narragansett Bay. The state has a history of corruption that goes all the way back to a colonial governor dining with Captain Kidd, but it also has a history of integrity and decency that goes all the way back to its godly founder, Roger Williams. Those two threads are woven throughout the state’s history and are still present today. The tension between them is one of the things that make it such an interesting place. But that’s not all. Most crime novels are set in big, anonymous cities. There are also some very good ones set in rural areas. But Providence is something different. It’s a claustrophobic little city where everybody on the street knows your name and where it’s very hard to keep a secret. But it’s still big enough to be both cosmopolitan and rife with urban problems. I strove to make the city and the state not just the setting for the book but something more akin to a main character. I never considered setting my story anywhere else. One reviewer called my portrayal of the place “jaundiced but affectionate,” and I think that’s exactly right.

Secondly, the novel is also a lyrical tribute to the dying newspaper business. The main character, a reporter named Mulligan, is never sure how long he’ll have a job; and he’s always in despair about the demise of the business he loves. This gives the book an additional layer of tension. And as the reader watches the character diligently pursue a serial arsonist, it becomes clear just how much is being lost as newspapers fade into history.

TMC:  Given the slow strangulation of newspapers nationally, what do you think of the state of journalism today? What do you think the future of journalism in America is?

BD: Newspapers see themselves as victims of the digital age, but they are so full of shit. The internet isn’t killing newspapers; they are committing suicide. In the sequel to “Rogue Island,” tentatively titled “Cliff Walk,” the main character explains it this way:

 “When the Internet first got rolling, newspapers were the experts on reporting the news and selling classified advertising. They were ideally positioned to dominate the new medium. Instead, they sat around with their thumbs up their asses while upstarts like Google, the Drudge Report, and ESPN.com lured away their audience and newcomers like Craigslist, eBay, and AutoTrader.com stole their advertising business. By the time newspapers finally figured out what was going on and tried to make a go of it online, it was too late. This all happened because newspapers didn’t understand what business they were in. They thought they were in the newspaper business, but they were really in the news and advertising business. It’s a classic mistake—the same one the railroads made in the 1950s when the interstate highway system was being built. If Penn Central had understood it was in the freight business instead of the railroad business, it would be the biggest trucking company in the country today.” [Toni's note: brilliant comparison, and so apt.]

Newspapers are circling the drain now. Within the next decade, most of them will be gone. I cannot overstate what a terrible thing this is for the American democracy, because there is nothing on the horizon to replace them.  The old broadcast TV networks, undercut by competition from cable, have cut way back on their reporting staffs—and they were never all that good to begin with. Cable TV news has deteriorated into warring propaganda machines. And online news organizations do little original reporting, drawing most of their news from disappearing newspapers.

Reporting is expensive. Investigative reporting is even more expensive. And so far, no one outside of fast-disappearing newspapers has demonstrated willingness or the resources to pay for it.

TMC: Tell us a little about your writing process.

BD: Some writers outline obsessively. Others, like Elmore Leonard, never touch the stuff. There’s no right or wrong way to do it. You do what works for you. Me? I’m with Leonard. I begin with a general idea of what the book will be about. For example, I began “Cliff Walk” (the novel I just finished) with the notion of juxtaposing the two extremes of Rhode Island society – the Newport mansions and the legal (until recently) prostitution business in the state. I just threw those two worlds together, set my characters in motion, and waited to see what would happen.  A lot did.  I find that when I write myself into a story, I am continually surprised by where it takes me. I think that’s a good thing. If figure that if I don’t know what’s going to happen next, my readers won’t either.

TMC: What are you working on now?

BD: “Cliff Walk,” the sequel to “Rogue Island,” will be published about a year from now, and I’ve made a small start on the third book in the series.  When that’s done, my poet wife and I are going to write a crime novel together. It will be set in her native Chicago during the 1968 riots and will have alternating narrators—a white Chicago cop and a black hairdresser from the city’s west side.

TMC: How do you deal with writer’s block?

BD: I was a journalist for 40 years. Journalists write every day whether they are in the mood or not. They aren’t allowed to have writer’s block. They think writer’s block is for sissies. [Toni's note: I'm grinning, since I've said this myself. But we may need to duck behind a wall to avoid the rocks heading our way.]

TMC: What do you do for fun? What are your hobbies? Where would you love to travel?

BD: I root for the Patriots, Celtics, and Red Sox. (I’m heading to spring training in Fort Myers next month.) I love playing with my dog, an enormous Bernese Mountain Dog named Brady. My wife and I collect daguerreotypes and other forms of early American photography. And I’m eager to visit Italy and make a return visit to Paris.

~*~

Toldja you all would enjoy Bruce. Here's the back cover copy from ROUGE ISLAND:

Liam Mulligan, an investigative reporter at a dying newspaper, is as old school as a newspaper man gets. His beat is Providence, Rhode Island, and he knows every street and alley. He knows the priests and prostitutes, the cops and street thugs. He knows the mobsters and politicians—who are pretty much one and the same. Now, someone is systematically burning down the working-class Providence neighborhood where Mulligan grew up, and people he knows and loves are perishing in the flames. With the police looking for answers in all the wrong places, it’s up to Mulligan to find the hand that strikes the match.

You can find Bruce at his blog, as well as on Facebook.

Now, I'm curious about what you all are thinking this fine Sunday about newspapers, the state of investigative journalism, and stories that have touched home or shocked you into seeing your own corner of the world differently. Are newspapers still needed? Relevant? Is the 24/7 news cycle helping... or hurting... investigative journalism? And for added fun, all commenters will be eligible to be entered in a contest for a $25 gift cerftificate to a bookstore of their choice. (Remember–some of our favorite indies will ship!) Winner will be picked and named in next Sunday’s column, so be sure to check back on Allison’s Sunday to see who won!)