Noir fiction for the modern reader.

There’s a blog today on The Outfit–A Collective of Chicago Crime Writers, written by David Heinzmann, which grabbed my interest. David mentioned that he was born and raised around Peoria, a solid middle-American town if ever there was one. On a recent visit, he noticed that what once was a lonely country road outside of town, rolling through miles of boundless cropland, is now a busy thoroughfare linking suburban subdivisions to the city proper. Of course, he lamented this change.

Naturally, this isn’t a new story. Many people have seen drastic changes to their hometowns over the years. But David went on to ponder this a little more, concluding that he can’t set any of his writing in Peoria, that it’s all set in Chicago and other locales of his adulthood. Peoria isn’t the same as when he was a kid, he says, and neither is he.

I had never really thought about my hometown as a locale for my writing, and now I know why. It’s a little place called Seneca Falls, nestled in the heart of the Finger Lakes District of central New York State. Back then, its population was 7000, and it bustled with manufacturing activity. Several large factories were there, employing most of the locals and pumping money into the economy. Unlike David’s experience, the town looks almost exactly the same as when I grew up there so very long ago.

Except that today, most of the factories have closed or moved away. The population is still 7000, but they’re on the ropes. Very little money is circulating and the people wear the hard times on their faces. Like so many fading mill towns, Seneca Falls lives in the shadows, on a slippery slope to oblivion.

When I was growing up there, I had no awareness of anything, especially anything regarding the rhythms of life that we all eventually learn. But through reading, television, and looking at maps, I slowly became cognizant of a wider world, a world that called to me all through my adolescence. I figured out that I had to answer the call, so by the time I went away to college at age 17, my mind was made up. I never returned there to live.

Many of the places I lived since then (and there have been somewhere around a dozen) have provided me with great settings for my novels. But I absolutely cannot write anything about Seneca Falls. Because like David, I’m not the person I was during those formative years. Back then, I saw things through the clear prism of childhood, of innocence, before I knew anything about mean streets or good whiskey or dangerous women.

But once I eased into adulthood, and I felt the toxic kiss of corruption, I learned a lot of what I needed to know in order to write crime fiction. I learned it in cities like New Orleans and Las Vegas and even Key West. My novels are set in those cities, and others, because my life in those places, and the choices I made while traveling this long road, transformed me into the man who is writing this today.

As David Heinzmann so aptly put it, I’m writing about places, not where I came from, but where I came to. And most of them exist in a sort of moral twilight.

How about you? Did you leave your hometown? Do you write about it now? Or do you write about the places you came to?

Russel D McLean put up a thoughtful post on today’s Do Some Damage blogspot. It concerned the length of novels, with a side conversation about pricing relative to length. The length part was what caught my eye, though. I’ve had all kinds of problems with this.

My first published novel, The Take, will be coming out in 2010, but that was not the first novel I had written. There were several others, the first two of which exceeded 100,000 words. One of those weighed in at 180,000 words before I called it a day, although subsequent drafts eventually “slimmed” it down to about 130,000.

After those two efforts, I never again came close to those numbers. Probably because they weren’t crime novels, and everything I’ve written after that has been in the crime genre. The Take, mentioned above, topped out at 51,000 words. My others are in the same ballpark, only one of them exceeding 60,000 words, and that just barely. My latest one, which I’ve just finished, limped across the finish line at 39,000! A second going-over added about another 2000 words, but it still sits at a paltry 41,000.

I don’t know what my problem is. These stories play themselves out in a natural fashion, and in my opinion, they don’t feel at all rushed. The 41,000-word novel is even a slightly bigger story than the others and fairly begs for more words (like twice as many), but I just can’t find them to put in there. I don’t plan it this way. It’s just that when the story is about to wind up, the word count is pathetically low.

Adding clunky subplots just for the sake of piling on the words is not an option for me. I hate books that do that. These novels of mine are not overblown short stories, either. They’re fully-developed novels in every sense of the word. Every sense, that is, except length.

Anybody got any ideas? Anything I can grab onto?

Well, I just bought the new James Ellroy novel, Blood’s A Rover.  Lindsey Losnedahl of the Las Vegas Review-Journal liked it, and I have to admit, I’ve been looking forward to it for some time, as I do all of his novels.  In my opinion, his LA Quartet ranks as one of the greatest achievements in all of crime fiction.  I’m even going to get him to sign this new book when he appears here in Las Vegas in a few weeks.  But things are just a little different this time around.

His last effort, The Cold Six Thousand, was the second installment in his current trilogy.  The first, American Tabloid, was, in my opinion, a masterpiece.  It stood to reason that Six Thousand, which began literally on the very day of the finale of Tabloid, would carry me through more wonderful reading sessions.  I saw myself being enveloped in Ellroy’s machine-gun writing style, swiftly transported into his cynical world of killers, drug dealers, hookers, and high-level political intrigue.

All those elements were there, all right, but about halfway through the 600+ page book, I started to lose interest.  The characters started to repeat themselves, the story bogged down in its own multiplicity of plots, and worst of all, I knew where it was all headed. Nevertheless, I plowed on, turning page after page, hoping the whole thing would resuscitate itself.  It never did, and so, I did something I have never done in all my reading life.

I put the book down seven pages before the end.

Wracked with guilt, I stuck the book in a drawer and never looked at it again until I moved a few years ago, at which time I donated it, along with many other books, to the local library.

I might add at this point that I’ve never spoken to anyone about this, and in the years since, have heard only outstanding things about The Cold Six Thousand.

Without question, I’m going to read Blood’s A Rover as though none of the above had ever happened.  I’m sure it will pick up precisely where Six Thousand left off, and I know I’m going to love it.

Aren’t I?

My short story, Pickup Across The River, has been published on the outstanding online site, A Twist Of Noir.  A crime tale set in New Orleans, it features a touristy couple who are able to make passionate love to each other, then calmly attach silencers to their semiautomatics.  A direct link to the story is on the right of this page under “E-Publications”.

While the story was partly inspired by an old country song by the great Gene Watson, called Love In The Hot Afternoon, it’s not the first thing I’ve written that sprang from a song.  Three of my novels were inspired by just bits of songs, in some cases only two or three lines.  The Take, a noir novel which was recently picked up by L&L Dreamspell Publishing and will be released in 2010, came out of just two lines in the Marty Robbins song, El Paso.  The novel is a contemporary crime story, not a western, but nevertheless, the idea for it was revealed to me in those two lines.

I’ve heard of authors whose novels have emerged from flimsier ingredients:  the sight of rain hitting the street, the way a woman sashays into a bar, a fleeting memory of a long-ago moment, a newspaper headline, even dreams.  Anyone got any such stories they’d like to tell?

I’m happy to say that one of my short stories, Block, will be published in the 2009 Wizards Of Words Anthology, due out later this month.  It’s a noirish tale with Hitchcockian overtones, spun around Lila Rakubian, crime fiction author, who finds the characters of her novel-in-progress have deserted her.

I’ll be posting the anthology’s release date as soon as I learn it.  You can also go to wizardsofwords.org for more information on stories that will be appearing by other published authors.

Welcome to my website, mikedennisnoir.com.  This is my first post, and I’m very excited to finally get this site up and running.  A boatload of thanks to Leslie Michaelis of Las Vegas, who built it from the ground up.

I’m a crime fiction writer, living in Las Vegas, who’s been toiling in the vineyards for years until L&L Dreamspell Publishing picked up one of my novels, The Take.  It’s a fast-paced little noir effort that will be out sometime in 2010.   Thanks go to Morgan St James for her energetic efforts in helping me with the preliminary editing.  You can read an excerpt of it here on this site. 

I’ve always admired the best of the crime novelists.  I’m talking about hardboiled fiction guys like Jim Thompson, Charles Willeford, David Goodis, Gil Brewer, and Raymond Chandler, among others, who between them, managed to kick the door open a crack or two, all the while operating under the stigma of  “pulp” writer.  They made it ”respectable” to write crime fiction, elitist public opinion notwithstanding.  Later, you had Lawrence Block, Donald Westlake, Elmore Leonard, James Ellroy, and so many others who shoved the door all the way open so guys like me could just walk right through it.  Speaking only for myself, I owe these men a serious debt of gratitude.