David Thayer

John Connolly, the Irish author of BAD MEN and other novels, has an interesting post on his blog describing Harrowgate’s Unique Voices panel; Connolly questions whether there any unique voices in crime fiction or if the genre is being compressed by commercial needs into a take no chances rut. Hat tip to Sarah Weinman for linking to Connolly’s blog and thoughtful comments by Sandra Ruttan and Laura Lippman in particular pointing out the realities for both a new author, Sandra, and a veteran, Laura.

It’s difficult to know whether Connolly is serious or being contrary for sport. The example he gives of Jeffrey Deaver’s historical novel GARDEN OF BEASTS not selling well in the US because Deaver deviated from his formula lacks context for the larger argument. Connolly asserts that GARDEN OF BEASTS is Deaver’s best book, but the novel’s setting, Nazi Germany, has been done, and possibly, readers are tired of that fictional environment. Connolly makes the valid point that established writers have the clout to experiment but career counselors might object to that idea. Imagine the consequences if Stuart Woods or latter day Robert Parker were to attempt a story like Bel Canto or a book such as CASE HISTORIES? I suspect those novels were not first drafts although BEL CANTO might have benefited from a Woodsian excursion to Palm Beach, and THE SHINING PATH from being a seventy five foot motor yacht.

Viewed that way Connolly’s idea is frightening. It would wreak havoc with ghost writers who’ve mastered the Patterson novel and now are expected to push into terra incognita with only an outline and a portable tooth brush. That’s anarchy, John, enough to send big box buyers screaming into the parking lot.

They say the state of Texas has a logic of its own. Everything is a little different in Texas, a little bigger, a little edgier than most places. Your reporter was once pulled over by a member of the DPS, the Texas Rangers. On a long stretch of highway between Fort Worth and Austin he picked me. He said I wasn’t “drivin’ friendly.” When he saw my New York drivers license he hitched his gun belt and laughed. “Boy,” he said. “You got yourself an attitude.”

The folks in Harry Hunsicker’s THE NEXT TIME YOU DIE have an attitude that makes social interaction a spectator sport with enough guns, knives, fists, and boots to satisfy a need for mayhem the size of the Texas Panhandle. Lee H. Oswald is a PI in Dallas and no, he’s not the guy who shot Kennedy, he’s only a namesake. Hank and his partner, Nolan, have enough firepower to invade Honduras, but they don’t have to look for trouble. A Baptist preacher with a drinking problem asks Hank to locate a missing file. What follows from that simple premise resembles a range war from Big D to East Texas and back again. While the bullets fly Hank manages to get involved with bad girl Tess, a boyhood friend, and a power struggle to control crime in wide open Dallas.

I always avoid spoilers and in this case it wouldn’t matter because I never quite caught the wave or understood what was happening. People in this novel shoot first and ask questions only in response to other questions most of which result in a hail of gunfire. Hank endures much for old times sake and I admire that in a PI. He carries a Browning Hi Power and from what I could tell, he doesn’t drive friendly. In fact for a good portion of the story he’s behind the wheel of a Bentley an automobile bound to raise eyebrows in the small towns where Hank finds the source of all the trouble.

Harry Hunsicker has an eye for detail and knows his turf. He pays homage to the old school of tough guy heroes updated with a female partner who’s as tough as Hank and a better shot. You get the feeling that if Miss Marple happened by, she’d have a six pack of Pearl and a double ought under her pink cardigan and live grenades in the bed of her pickup. Welcome to Dallas, ma’am, and pass the ammunition.

Since the Druidical & Literary is an imaginary newspaper we rely heavily on outside sources for the news. Just the other day Chief Correspondent Bernard B. reported this incident: “I was watching Paula Zahn interview an Israeli ambassador. Paula was telling the Israeli guy that he was running out of time when she suddenly morphed into a dead ringer for Jane Fonda and I fell to the floor believing that somehow Barbarella had been spliced into the feed and now Barbarella was telling the Israeli ambasador that she was running out of time and I thought we were cutting to a commercial, but no, we cut to northern Israel where Anderson Cooper was surveying the remnants of a Katyusha rocket before kneeling down to explain how the rocket launcher works…”

Bernard?

“So I think we are running out of time as a kind of post coital desire for a cigarette has inflamed the already combustible and volatile atmosphere here aboard Barbarella’s space craft. There’s a reentry window precisely calibrated for continental drift, wind speed, global warming, hot spots, wormholes, ozone buildup and those hard to reach spots near the dishwasher.”

To summarize, Bernard, are we running out of time?

“I don’t think that anyone anticipated this. Why would Barbarella choose to haunt the newsroom at this juncture? Why now?”

Bernard, let’s sum this up for our viewer(s).

“Thank you for not smoking.”

Good luck on reentry, Bernard.

“She totally real, man, she’s Barbarella.”

Okay, we’re spiking Bernard’s story. Let’s see if Alfonso Soriano has been traded yet. Greta?

“Time is running out for the Washington Nationals. With the trading deadline only days away tension is running high aboard Barbarella’s space ship…”

Let’s cut Greta off right there. Roy, get under the hood and check that RSS feed. I think a rival blog is having some fun with us here. Roy?

At some point we borrowed the word noir from the French and we’re showing no signs of giving the word back. The term migrated from film to books and while Hollywood drifts further from its roots, books are coming full circle. THE DARKEST PLACE draws on the classic elements of fiction rooted in the emotional juxtaposition of bad things happening to people in bad places. Nothing is more threatening in vintage noir than the hero’s own weakness.

THE DARKEST PLACE is set on Long Island’s East End close to the glamor of the Hamptons yet far removed from the playground of the wealthy. It’s winter and it’s cold: young men are dying, their bodies floating in scenic bays and private lakes. The local cops are pushing the idea that the boys are victims of bad judgment, swimming while drunk despite the weather. Like many theories this one begins to unravel as the body count rises.

The plot serves as a platform for the author to explore the thematic notion of grief and loss. Tommy Miller is a local boy with a bum knee and a need to prove himself. Deke Kane lost his son to drowning and the metaphor of sinking beneath the waves defines Kane and his state of mind. Private Investigator Reggie Clay is conflicted about his line of work while his boss, Ned Gregor, demands a kind of moral rigor that makes the business of crime solving more complicated than it would be otherwise. Into this world of broken men comes Colette Auster. She is not conflicted about seizing the main chance and understands human weakness the way a botanist undertands plant life.

To make this novel work the author has drawn from literary sources larger than the genre. The film noir was influenced by the German directors like Fritz Lang in look and feel, THE DARKEST PLACE creates a mood and atmosphere more reminiscent of Kafka than Raymond Chandler. This puts the internal conflicts of the characters at odds with the story’s events as each of them suffer consequences while questioning the reality of cause and effect. Colette’s character remains aloof, serving as a ground for the charged emotions of the others. At times the perilous disconnect between perception and reality creates frustration rather than tension, forcing the reader to judge for themselves whether or not the novel’s action meshes with the characters’ response. The author has something larger in play, and he has the skill and passion to push the narrative beyond the ordinary.
As crime novels go THE DARKEST PLACE blurs the focus on plot to explore the damaged psyches of the principal characters. The story’s climax fits with the novel’s construct that loss robs its victims of the human ability for self preservation, creating a vulnerability that is more compelling than any external threat. Daniel Judson respects the conventions of crime fiction while infusing his story with raw despair, delivering on the promise to find the place where the physical trumps the metaphysical, where death, so seductive in grief, is no longer welcome.

I went back to page one of The Working Dead to tighten, and eliminate some characters to bring the story up. Part of the plot involves a decree of nationalization by the government of a country that I chose at random, or so it seemed back when I plotted this out. That it’s Venezuela seems like I’m piling on the Pat Robertson bandwagon, poking Hugo Chavez in the ribs with the Big Stick of downhome diplomacy, but that isn’t why I chose Venezuela. A long time ago I had a minor work involvement with the Guri Dam down there, wherein Henry, then my boss, informed me that he was flying to Caracas ( Henry had a very large office with windows and we sat in a huge bullpen. He was an Ivy League fellow who wore garters on his socks and he’d ask people to come in to see him using me as the interlocuter. Henry once asked me to send Peter in, and when I told him he was on his way, Henry said, “On his way? On his way where?” For months Henry believed that Peter had gone somewhere, probably Venezuela, and he would scold me, reminding that he asked me to “handle” Venezuela, not Peter.)

That’s why I chose Venezuela.

We had a guy from Brazil in our unit, so he handled Brazil. Sometimes we’d all be laughing in the bullpen when an executive would appear demanding to know who handled Venezuela. That was me. They’d point to me. Even on the subway, or reading the paper I was handling Venezuela. A guy in the next row was from Buenos Aires so he handled Argentina, while a lady from Honduras handled that. I had the Guri Dam and that was in Venezuela. I had the Itaipu Dam on the Parana River between Brazil and Paraguay, and then the Bandama River dam which I think is in the Ivory Coast. The guy in front of me had studied Spanish at a university in Italy and spoke fluent Russian. Every third phone call to our company was from his ex-wife, and it fell to me to make excuses why he couldn’t come to the phone. Around this time Henry came to believe there was someone living in his office.
Whenever something went wrong Henry would ask me to explain it to him: why doesn’t geothermal power work? It works in Iceland, I said. Henry was surprised and asked me to handle Iceland, maybe do a write up so he could present his findings to The Board. Generally though, these sessions ended on a down note. He once asked for a list of countries shaded pink in the Rand McNally World Atlas. Poor little Iceland was pink. So was Peru. Venezuela was green. The Amazon was purple, the world was flat. We got paid every two weeks. We handled things.

Daniel Judson, author of THE DARKEST PLACE, took the time to answer a few questions.

Tell us about writing The Darkest Place.

My previous novels were all first person narratives that ran about 75,000 words each. My career had come screeching to a halt and I knew I needed to write a big book to get myself back into the game. The story I had in mind was a much larger story than I was used to telling, one that would require me to write in the third person and to alternate between the points of view of three very different characters, which I’d never done before. To pull this off I knew I’d need to do a lot of planning, so I spent about two months working on a detailed outline, charting the arc of the characters not only over the course of the story but also scene by scene. By the time this was done I really knew the characters inside and out, had the plot and theme worked out, and was ready to finally start writing. But around page 80 in the manuscript something strange happened: I was suddenly off the outline, heading in a completely different direction from the one I had planned. A crucial minor character had emerged – came out of nowhere, actually — and opened up all kinds of new, and better, possibilities. The really interesting thing for me is that I ended up exactly where the outline said I would be but had gotten there via a route I hadn’t foreseen. So the first act and the third act of the novel went more or less as planned, and the second act, the bulk of the novel, was just this free-for-all. It was both exciting and very, very nerve-wracking. In the end it took me seven months to write the book, and it came in at close to 120,000 words. I knew when I had finished it that I’d stepped up my game significantly. I also knew that I probably couldn’t go back to 75,000 word first person narratives again, at least not for a while.

Using the back streets of the Hamptons is working against type. Is this your favored technique for storytelling?

There are back streets in every town, and Southampton is no exception. It just amazes me that some people refuse to believe that the East End of Long Island has a seedy underbelly simply because it’s a playground for the wealthy three months out of the year. Like the wealthy are somehow above crime. And Southampton really isn’t all mansions and polo grounds. Working-class people live there year round – struggle to live there, to make a living and raise their kids and keep their homes. When I was out there I lived in border-line poverty, a wannabe writer scrambling to make rent. I saw my share of desperate people, felt my share of desperation. So for me writing about the back streets isn’t working against type, it’s telling it more or less how I saw it.

What happened after the release of your first two novels? Tell us how they were received?

My first novel, The Bone Orchard, was nominated for a Barry and a Shamus Award. My second novel, The Poisoned Rose, its prequel, published the same year, won the Shamus. The only other author to get two Shamus nominations in the same year was Laura Lippman, so that was exciting. My then-publisher and I had parted ways long before my first book was even in the stores, and not knowing any better, I wrote a third novel that no one would publish because it was the third book in a series – the final book in a trilogy, really – and no publisher would publish the third book in a series when they don’t have the first two on their backlist. We’ve since gotten the rights for two Mac novels back, so maybe someday someone will bring out all three in one volume, like Philip Kerr’s Berlin Trilogy.

Some of the writers you’ve expressed admiration for include Donna Leon and Henning Mankell. Would you expand on why they in particular appeal to you?

I enjoy it when an author creates a strong sense of place, and Leon and Mankell certainly do that. I like the feeling of having almost been somewhere when I finish reading a book. Every year I reread The Stranger by Albert Camus. I love the second chapter of that book, when the narrator does nothing but pass a Sunday. It gives me a sense that I’ve lived a day in his life, and for me, really, that’s what reading is all about. Same thing with Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. As Frederick Henry and Catherine Barkley escape the war, I’m with them all the way, feel what they feel, see what they see. Some of the scenes from that book are as vivid as actual memories of my own. I love it when that happens. Leon is so good at capturing the small details of Venice life, in a very Hemingway kind of way, and I admire that. Mankell does that, too, but, really, what his books taught me is how to slip into the mind of the killer for a few crucial pages and leave the reader with a strong and lasting impression.

St. Martin’s Press went back to the well to promote The Darkest Place. This is unusual. Can you share what happened behind the scenes?

I tend not to bother the good people in publicity, so I can’t speak to what’s happening behind the scenes. I think SMP’s persistence in promoting this book is a testament to how much they believe in it, and I’m very grateful for that. So far my relationship with St. Martin’s has been the stuff dreams are made of.

<> Tell us about your next project.

I’m working on another Southampton novel, what my editor and I call “a geographic sequel”. It’s a stand-alone, featuring a new hero, but borrows some of the supporting characters from The Darkest Place.

Thanks, Daniel.

Mickey Spillane died last week at the age of 88. The creator of Mike Hammer and author of “I, the Jury,” helped invent a form of literature that tells the story of blue collar men and hard luck women, social novels that distill passion from experience without the overtures and fanfare of mainstream literature. The PI, the private investigator, is always wise in the ways of the street, tough but a sucker for a pretty smile or a good story.

Crime fiction has broadened from the Spillane tradition. PIs come in all shapes and sizes from Sarah Paretsky’s VI Warshawsky to Walter Mosley’s Easy Rollins. While more books are published now than ever before, a shortage has developed on the PI front. There are more procedurals, more cozies, more literary, more romantic suspense, but the traditional PI? They’re scarce: Max Allan Collins’ FADE TO BLONDE from HARD CASE CRIME comes to mind as a classic of recent times, but fewer writers are working the beat. Micheal Koryta’s SORROW’S ANTHEM is an exceptional PI novel. Is this a cyclical thing?

Dennis Lehane moved on, as did Walter Mosley. Jim Fusilli defies convention with his books; Harry Hunsicker has his Lee H. Oswald character working the back streets of Dallas in STILL RIVER. Books have moved with the times into the suburbs ( Harlan Cobain) or across the pond with Lee Child. I’m not complaining about the state of crime fiction just this one little corner of it. Male, female, black, white, who cares? As the Dude once observed, it’s all about attitude.

War by proxy has been raging since the Korean Conflict whose convoluted multinational array  of armies disguised a conventional fight between the US and China. The Fifties were a decade of modern marvels in the kitchen and bloody fights with Communist insurgents in the Phillipines, Malaysia and what was then French Indochina. While Vietnam raged in the Sixties the PKI revolt in Indonesia took a staggering toll in the final days of Sukarno a man who ignited the rebellion while ruling the country. Never mind China’s Cultural Revolution wherein Chairman Mao sought to purify the ideological base of his power; that was an internal struggle.

Israel knocked Egypt, Syria, and Jordan to the canvas in June 1967. Egypt was ruled by Gamel Nasser a client of the Soviet Union bloated with tanks from the USSR. The Yom Kippur War in 1973 was a carryover from the 67 war: Syria wanted the Golan Heights back, Egypt, the Sinai. If the UN hadn’t intervened the map of Israeli controlled territory might have stretched from the Saudi border west to Tunisia.

Now Israel is fighting a proxy opponent in Hezbollah. The guerillas are standing in for Iran. In Lebanon the average person is suffering through a battle they didn’t start because Lebanon doesn’t have a government. Instead it has a fractured coalition of politicians all whom represent something other than Lebanon. Israel’s fight with Iran is so different than the previous wars that it clouds the possibility of an outcome that’s anything more than a prologue to the next one.

Younger readers may not recall the apex of Japanese monster movies in their original black and white, sort of scary, but really more concerning than frightening. This Golden Age reached a pinnacle with the release of Mothra, a monster who went everywhere with tiny twin fairies, early spin doctors in a sense. The fairies explained Mothra’s intent and sang songs in Japanese; the impact of these tunes was apparent from the facial expressions of the people Mothra had spared. Thank you, Mothra.

According to Pynchon’s publisher his new novel will have something to say about Mothra. There was no mention of Godzilla in the release.

Godzilla was a more unreasonable creature who used his fire breath and trumpeting call to wreak havoc while Raymond Burr reported the news from Tokyo. Eventually Godzilla would wade into the surf when sufficient fire power had been mustered. Godzilla would be back, bigger and badder than ever.

Mothra was more about metamorphosis. One of its super powers was the ability to engulf opponents in a web of string, kind of like an encounter with a large angry knitter. Once everyone was all tangled up the fairies would appear, standing in the palm of someone’s hand and they would explain why Mothra was mad. If only Thomas Pynchon novels came so equipped.

If somewhere in the vastness of GRAVITY’S RAINBOW two singing Japanese ladies had appeared to me I might have finished reading the book and possibly understood at least some of what was happening. Instead of owning the book and packing and moving it more times than I can count, I might have grasped the novel’s central thesis. The singing fairies got me through Mothra, why not Pynchon?

I finished THE SOT WEED FACTOR and TREMOR OF INTENT and sort of finished FOCAULT’S PENDULUM and I definitely got through all of Godzilla. Raymond Burr was helpful there doing his version of CNN 50s style with the hat and the microphone. “Godzilla is smashing Tokyo to bits.” Of course he is. He’s Godzilla.

Now that literature’s most eligible is marrying Kid Rock we can wonder why some books and some authors get buzz and some don’t. Pamela Anderson got plenty of attention for her first novel Star, but where’s the second book? The Updike trajectory is wobbling for Pam although I think I read somewhere Robbie Benson has written a novel, which brings up three questions I cannot answer: who is he? why don’t I know who he is? why has he written a novel? Am I as out of it as the umpiring crew at Yankee Stadium? Do I think that Jorge Posada is fast?

Dan Judson is one of the writers who probably does his own work. That’s not a knock on Pam and her ghost writer because I’m in favor of ambition by proxy and if I could, I’d leave the writing to someone else. I’d be poolside even if it is one of those Flintstones plastic pools which, if inflated properly, create an ambience of wealth and mystique. Add a few mixed drinks and a ghost writer and you’re in Hollywood. Write a few notes in the margin of your screenplay…boy, that’s exhausting.

THE DARKEST PLACE is one those books that deserves attention. This reporter will be interviewing Daniel Judson next week and reviewing his novel. In the meanwhile I’ve been contacted by that agent I mentioned a few weeks ago and am revising THE WORKING DEAD. She made a great point in her letter than all the minor characters have names; they don’t need names. I’m excited by her response to the work, and thus you won’t see me poolside with Pina Coladas or Fred and Wilma for that matter. I don’t know if Robbie Benson has an inflatable pool or if Pam is going to produce that sequel, but I’m down for this, my friends.