David Thayer

Wallace Stegner has fallen from favor in the years since his death but he wrote two books I enjoyed a great deal, Angle of Repose and Crossing to Safety. He wrote Beyond the One Hundredth Meridian, a work of nonfiction that makes the subject of wind erosion compelling. The latter work is a study of how the western US was mapped, remapped, and settled in the Nineteenth Century. It reveals how little things have changed in our nation’s capital over the past one hundred thirty years, not through rant or cant, but by a simple  list of action, inaction, missteps, and greed. Stegner founded Stanford University’s creative writing program with Larry McMurtry being his most famous student.

Penguin USA has some of his work available including On Teaching and Writing Fiction written with his daughter Lynn Stegner. Stegner is described as a western writer although that’s misleading. The same could be said of Ivan Doig, Thomas McGuane, or Cormac McCarthy, Annie Proulx, or Rudolfo Anaya to stretch the point. How does all this relate to crime fiction?

Otto Penzler, crime fiction’s Old Faithful, erupted again, this time from the cutting room floor of Publishers Weekly. Sarah Weinman and Ron Hogan were exploring the genre divide between thrillers and more traditional noir. Ron posted Otto’s remarks at Galley Cat. Otto once again swings the big bat to smite the cozy, condemn chick-lit, to rail against cats who solve mysteries. Reading Otto’s words led me to this unlikely association with Wallace Stegner. Stegner’s simple style is not in fashion at the moment, nor is realism. Realism is the bedrock of noir which is perhaps the villain Otto meant to shoot before killing everyone in the room. There are worse things than cats solving mysteries, Otto, although these cycles feel endless. Twenty years from now someone will crack open Big Rock Candy Mountain and think, “hey, this is good.”

I think to write noir reading Stegner, Carlos Fuentes, Steinbeck or Gertrude Stein might be more inspiring than Jim Thompson, Hammett, or Spillane if only to find the root of the real battle in noir, not good versus evil, but the disenfranchised resolving one small mess just for the hell of it.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 17th, 2006 at 7:56 am and is filed under Crime Fiction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.