Noir fiction for the modern reader.

Here’s a blurb for The Take, which appears on the back cover of the just-released print edition. It’s from the high priestess of noir, Vicki Hendricks:

Dennis writes true noir. The Take is a fast-motion train wreck from page one, twisting the reader’s heart for the desperate souls on a ride they never chose.

I consider this to be among the highest compliments I could ever hope to get for this novel. Vicki Hendricks has written some outstanding noir novels, such as Miami Purity, Cruel Poetry, Voluntary Madness, and her latest, a collection of short stories called Florida Gothic Stories. I’m really very proud to have her comments on the cover of my novel.

As of today, November 5, it’s available on Kindle and All Romance ebooks. Other formats will follow. The print version has just now come out! You can buy it on Amazon or on Barnes & Noble’s online page.

My new noir novel, The Take (published by L&L Dreamspell), is now available on Kindle and on All Romance ebooks, specifically, here and here. The print version will be out soon, but don’t ask me when. It was called to my attention by someone else that it was available electronically. I had no idea. But then, I’m just the author. What do I know?

I might add that All Romance gave it a “not rated” under their “sensuality rating”. That’s good to know. I mean, maybe it’s just so hot, they couldn’t come up with a sufficiently forbidding rating for it, so in their exasperation, they just called it “not rated”. Also, they didn’t rate it in their “Heat index”, presumably for the same reason.

Anyway, they charge $5.99 and Kindle has it at $4.79. I hasten to add that I did not set these prices.

Like I said, the print version will be out very soon (I’m assuming), so look for more BSP then. Meanwhile, here’s a brief description.

In the world of small-time bookie Eddie Ryan, only the cop cars and the TVs are black and white. Everything else swirls in a kind of gray soup. Overcome by greed, lust, and the survival instinct, Eddie steps into a morally treacherous world where no one can be trusted, and where life expectancy is short. Set in the dim half-light of the Houston and New Orleans demimondes, The Take is a fast-paced, nerve-jangling ride.

We interrupt this highbrow blog to bring you the following important announcement:

My noir novel, The Take, will be released soon. I know, I know, that’s what I said a year ago. But I was just kidding then. Now when I say it, I really mean it. It really will be released soon.

It’s a novel of human desperation, set in a world where only the cop cars are black and white. Everything else swirls in a kind of gray soup, without any way of knowing who can be trusted or what awaits around the next corner.

When I get a firm date from the publisher, I’ll post it here.

We now return you to our regular programming.

Over at the Ink Spot blog today, Darrell James posted a very interesting piece on song lyrics and how they influenced his writing. I would’ve left a comment, but Ink Spot doesn’t take URL signatures, and for some reason they have never accepted my Google ID, so I don’t bother commenting there.

But Darrell’s blog is worth noting. He had met the 1960s folk-rock group the New Christy Minstrels in a parking lot one day and, since he was a longtime fan, happened to have a CD of theirs in his car. They all signed it gladly and promised to buy his book. He went on to say that, as a child of the folk-rock generation, where it’s all about the lyrics and the story, music has played an important role in his writing.

Amen. I spent most of my adult life as a professional musician (piano), playing rock & roll, rhythm & blues, and country for decades. When I first turned to writing, I sat in front of a blank sheet of white paper with a pencil in my hand (I didn’t even own a typewriter in those days) for what seemed like hours. No ideas, no story, no character, nothing. Then, a line from a song flew into my head. It was from The House Of The Rising Sun, a big hit in the 1960s for the Animals. In fact, it was an old folk tune about a girl who is forced to choose between a life of poverty and one of prostitution, knowing that either way, she’s doomed. The line was this one:

I got one foot on the platform, the other foot on the train

I’m goin’ down to New Orleans to wear that ball and chain

Bingo! I was off to the races. I had my lead character, my story, and my setting. Of course, the novel went nowhere, but at least I had one under my belt.

Other novels of mine have started on such flimsy threads. Cadillac’s Comin‘, a rock & roll novel about a one-hit wonder from the 1950s, is about to go up on Kindle as a self-pub. It grew out of two famous lines from the Eagles:

Freedom, oh freedom, that’s just some people talkin’

Your prison is walkin’ through this world all alone.

I have a print novel coming out in a few months from a traditional publisher. It’s a noir effort called The Take, and sprang from possibly the greatest noir song of all time, El Paso by Marty Robbins. These were the lines that gave me the basis for the novel:

Blacker than night were the eyes of Felina, wicked and evil while casting a spell.

My love was deep for this Mexican maiden. I was in love but in vain I could tell.

You know, it just doesn’t get any more noir than that. (I blogged about this song sometime back. It was called “Music Would Play And Felina Would Whirl” and you can access it by clicking on “Personal” under the Categories.)

The thing is, I used to do all of these songs back in my playing days, and those lines always stood out for me. When it came time for me to write novels, the lines just found their way to the front burner and inspired three different books. Maybe there are others waiting their turn. I sure hope so.

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!

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?