Noir fiction for the modern reader.

Today I saw an intriguing post by Russel D McLean on the Do Some Damage blogspot regarding the creation of characters.  Seems he’d written some PI short stories, which were published in national mystery magazines. Feeling he had something going with this character, he wrote a novel around him, which his agent promptly rejected, saying the character had too much backstory.

So Russel peeled away all the backstory, changed the character’s name, and took away his support network, including his one true love. This resulted in a much tougher, darker figure. Russel saw the humanity in this new character, he got into it, and presto! A novel, and probably a series, was born.

Like Russel, I’ve had characters spring from nothing more than whole cloth. The central character in my upcoming novel, The Take, was born one night in a New Orleans bar. I saw a guy who looked like a young Jack Palance sitting there with a gorgeous date. Overeager, he did everything to try to impress the girl–bought her expensive drinks, danced with her, etc–but all to no avail. She basically blew him off right to his face. The guy had “loser” written all over him. I remember wondering what his story was, what he did for a living, his background, and so on.

I wasn’t even writing at the time, but I never forgot that guy. So when I sat down to write The Take, he leapt to the front of my mind, and Eddie Ryan came to life. As every situation in the book arose, each time the stakes were raised on Eddie, I asked myself, “What would that guy in New Orleans do?”

One night, my girlfriend forced me to watch The Nanny From Hell on TV. Said nanny was up against a family with two girls and a boy, all between the ages of five and eight, with the boy being the oldest. The girls played horrendous tricks on him, blaming him for their own misdeeds, setting him up for punishment, and other awful things. The mother believed everything the girls said, and mercilessly chastised the boy every time, reducing him to a whimpering little blob, while the girls sat by, smiling wickedly. Watching this in disbelief, I thought to myself, “this is how a rapist-murderer is born”.

Next short story I wrote, I told the story of a guy who had these kinds of childhood experiences and grows up a psycho.

Another one of my novels was based on a friend of mine who was a best-selling author. He was very rebellious against his upper-crust family, and this led him perversely into a long life of crime before he discovered that he could write. He never resolved his family conflict, and killed himself as his first novel reached the NYT best-seller list. I changed him from an author to a 1950s rockabilly singer with similar lower-crust family problems, who did plenty of drugs and alcohol before committing one big crime. I found him to be every bit as human as his real-life counterpart, and every bit as tragic.

Anybody out there got any unusual tales of how their characters sprang into being? I like these stories, and I think others like them, too.

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?

I read an interesting blog today by Mike Knowles on the Do Some Damage blogspot. Mike is a successful Canadian crime fiction author, and he hit on a subject which I suspect has troubled many authors from time to time. Without putting any pink ribbons on it, it’s writer’s block.

He writes “without a net”, that is, with no organized outline or detailed plan. He pretty much wings it, and it works well for him. Every once in a while, though, he finds himself and his characters with their backs against the wall, plotwise. With no outs.

Eventually, Mike hacks his way out of the thicket, usually in an unlikely place–the shower, while walking his dog, etc–and goes on to finish the novel. But I wondered if he ever had to really put a novel completely aside because he just couldn’t find the escape hatch from his writer’s block dungeon.

Well, like Mike, I also “write without a net”. I don’t use an outline, because I can’t plan the story that far in advance, so I begin writing on the slimmest of premises. I have a novel coming out next year, a noir tale called The Take, which was inspired by two lines of a song. That’s all I had to go on when I started writing it. Another one began when I saw a guy in a bar one night trying in vain to impress a girl. The one I’m working on now started from an opening line. As soon as I wrote it, I had no idea what the second line would be.

But in every case, I soldiered on, transforming these fragile ideas into full-blown novels. Well, in almost every case.

There was one project which started off as a slam-bang idea. I sat down to write it fifteen years ago. A guy is killed by people who want the contents of a small box he is hiding. His widow takes her son and the box and immediately splits town, fearing she and her son will be the next to die. Many years later, she dies, and the son, who is now an adult, finally learns the terrible secret of what’s in the box. He also learns the killers haven’t given up and have located him. He then begins the dual task of trying to deal with the contents of the box and avoiding his pursuers.

Sounds good, right? Well, I got about 100 pages in and I just broke apart like a bug hitting a windshield. Suddenly, nothing came to me, I was completely stalled out, unable to write even one more line. Weeks went by. Nothing. I was so discouraged, because I loved the idea. But after endless hours of staring at a blank screen, I got nowhere. Then, I got some flimsy idea for another book, so I started that one, putting this one aside.

Years went by. Every so often, I would dig around in boxes, and on two or three occasions, I actually saw the 100-page printout of that aborted novel. A twinge of remorse shot through me every time I saw it, as I realized that such a good idea had gone down the drain.

Okay, so now I’m working on my current novel, you know, the one I started from just an opening line. I’m rolling along, but when I get 20,000 words in, I start to run out of gas. I feel the sputtering and I know that I will be at a complete standstill in very short order. I beg the characters to guide me out of this corner I’ve painted myself into, until…until…

Until I think, why not have the girl who was killed be the granddaughter of a guy who was killed in the same fashion many years ago? And they were both killed because…the killers wanted the contents of a small box the grandfather was guarding at the time of his murder. Bingo! His widow takes her son and splits town. Her son has two daughters, one is killed, the other teams up with a central character who has been dragged into this and…and…

Well, you get the idea. The fifteen-year-old idea was resuscitated, and is now kicking ass! And the end is in sight.

Say hallelujah!

While browsing the “Do Some Damage” crime fiction blogspot, I came across an interesting post by Jay Stringer.  He talked about novels as part of a series, and how everyone asked him if his upcoming book was in fact the opener of a series.  It led me to think more about the idea of series novels.

Series writing is often exemplified by Raymond Chandler and his Philip Marlowe novels and stories, in which Marlowe traipses from one book to the next in what was supposed to be “beautiful” Los Angeles of the 1940s and 1950s.  In each book, he encounters his requisite quota of lowlifes, edgy cops, and double-crossing dames, and each book can stand quite nicely on its own.

Chandler was one of the first crime novelists to employ a central character whose principal trait was his world-weariness, rather than a square-jawed righteousness.  Marlowe didn’t give a shit about truth, justice, and the American way.  At least, not so you’d know it.  He appeared to be driven by a need for money far more than a need for justice, but beneath his tough-guy veneer was what might be referred to as a “heart of gold”. Chandler called it “nobility”.  Either way, Marlowe would never relinquish it for any amount of money.

Earl Derr Biggers penned a whole lot of Charlie Chan novels way back when.  Today, the movies that were made from them are way better known than the novels, but that series about the Honolulu detective and his global exploits was wildly popular in its day.  The characters–Chan, his numbered sons, and others–ran through all the books and, eventually, the movies, but as with Chandler, each book was a stand-alone, satisfying the reader by ending with a neatly-tied wrapup of the proceedings.

Another type of series writing features not only the same character or characters running through a group of novels, but also a continuous story line.  Herman Wouk authored a masterful two-book series, Winds Of War followed by War And Remembrance, a titanic tale of a group of individuals swept up in World War II.  Each book could stand alone if it had to, but I can’t imagine anyone wanting to read only Winds and not insisting on finishing the story.  It was, as I posted in Jay Stringer’s blog, really one huge book divided in two.

James Ellroy, about whom I have written on this site, spent a good many years assembling his LA Quartet of novels, which include The Black Dahlia, LA Confidential, The Big Nowhere, and White Jazz.  I suppose any one of these novels could be read as a stand-alone, but it would be pretty difficult, because the story arc begs you to continue to the next one.  Taken as a whole, the LA Quartet is a masterpiece, both in plotting and style.

Not to say you can breeze through it, mind you.  Ellroy’s a tough read.  His staccato style and graphic description are off-putting to a great many readers raised on Sidney Sheldon or Danielle Steele.  Without question, he’s profane to the max, but that’s the truth of the world in which his characters reside. It’s a profane world, and a monstrously evil one at that.  He shows us the evil, and I mean real evil, that festers (and even prospers) below the world most of us know. But truly grasping the scope of this evil–and it is vast–requires the reader to plow through the entire series.  He lifts the veil on the LA of the 1940s and 1950s in a way in which Chandler never could, because Marlowe was too steeped in nobility.  Ellroy’s characters can’t afford to be noble.  They’ll end up with their faces shot off.

Ellroy’s new series, Underworld USA, is currently winding up with his latest release, Blood’s A Rover.  Unlike the LA Quartet, whose broad story line was more or less confined to Los Angeles, this trilogy spreads out over the whole country, as well as Central America and the Caribbean, covering the period from 1958 onward. It includes the runup to the JFK assassination, then on through to around 1972, an era commonly called “the sixties”.  Again, I can’t really comprehend how anyone wouldn’t want to read all three books, even though each one could theoretically stand alone.

Two of my favorite noir authors are Jim Thompson and David Goodis.  They never actually wrote series books, but if you read five or six novels by each of them, you get a very clear idea of a running theme.  Thompson got inside the criminal mind better than anyone, showing how seemingly ordinary people can become vile beasts.  Goodis takes you to the meanest streets you’ll ever walk, and makes you glad you never had to walk them by yourself.  Together, these two guys lead you straight into hell and never lead you out.  It’s this sort of non-series series writing that makes them so compelling.

I’m onto another, more unusual kind of series writing, but I’ll get into that another time.