Jim Thompson, Benjamin Whitmer, Daniel Woodrell, mood-breakers, a question for readers

I wrote earlier this week that Benjamin Whitmer's novel Pike reminded me of Daniel Woodrell with a tougher edge, maybe with a bit of Jim Thompson mixed in. I had never seen those writers mentioned together, so I was pleased when I picked up a copy of Thompson's Pop. 1280 yesterday and found that it came with a foreword by Woodrell.

"Sheriff Nick Corey is Jim Thompson's greatest creation," Woodrell writes. "Pop. 1280, set in Texas, is so directly a southern novel, so clearly from that tradition, that it would stand high on the Southern Lit shelf (which means high on the Lit Shelf, period) if it were not so consistently misidentified as a work with its roots genre, and therefore arbitrarily reduced in stature. ... The vision is dark but the writing bizarrely hilarious, utilizing the strain of downhome joshing I love so well and learned at the knees of my old ones."

Now, I've been to Texas just once in my life, to Houston and Galveston, and, while my charming hostess does like to say, "Y'all, hush!" I can claim only the most cursory acquaintance with the state, the region, and their quirks and folkways. But I have to think Woodrell is right because fourteen chapters in, Pop. 1280 is dark, hilarious, a stunning performance that sustains its mood in every word, far and away the best of the limited amount of Thompson's work that I've read (Savage Night,  The Getaway, part of The Grifters).

I may have more to say on this astonishing book later, but for now some thoughts on why hard, dark writing may the most difficult kind of crime writing to do well. Here's what I mean: I've read plenty of the hard stuff recently, Thompson, Whitmer, Jedidiah Ayres' Fierce Bitches, Crime Factory's Lee Marvin-themed short-story collection Lee, Eric Beetner, and Blood and Tacos. Lots of that writing is good, some better than that, but what interested me were those stories where a not-quite-right word threw the atmosphere off just enough to take me out of the story, if only for a moment. No author wants to do that, but I suspect the stakes may be especially high in noir, hard-boiled, Southern Gothic, or any other genre that depends heavily on mood.

The slip-up need not be large; all it takes is a bit of jargon or psychobabble, a grammatical error ("Lying still, strapped down tight, the hostage's eyes meet his."), or some annoying quirk of contemporary speech creeping in (level, say, as in "his confidence level" rather than "his confidence.")  

That's me; What are your mood-breakers? What lapses will take you out of a story?

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

The Outlaw Album

The Ozarks, and poor white folks, are just as foreign to most crime-fiction readers as Botswana, Cape Town, Shanghai, and Stockholm, so Daniel Woodrell belongs here.

The Outlaw Album is an apt title because its dozen selections are more vignettes than stories, like snap shots in a photo album. (If you forget what a photo album is, look for a picture of one in your "Pictures" folder or on one of the popular search engines.)

The most heartbreaking sentence in the collection so far? This, from "Florianne," about a man whose daughter has disappeared years before:

"At the opening of each deer season I hope this time she’ll be found."

Look what Woodrell does with that sentence. He lets us know that the setting is rural and its people are hunters. He lets us know that the man has been looking for his daughter a long time, and that the futile hope has become as natural and as recurring as the seasons. It's like Beckett's "You must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on," but without the middle step.

(I write about Woodrell's Bayou Trilogy — which I read before Barack Obama let the world know that he had read it — here.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Winners, losers and two more complaints about editing

I'll ease out of Daniel Woodrell country with the observation that none of the characters in the three novels that make up the "Bayou Trilogy" is a winner in anything like the conventional sense.  Call me sentimental, but I call that a refreshing perspective.

***

An excavation into the book pile today turned up a mystery set in contemporary times with a prologue in the fourth century A.D. that had arrows being fired, meaning shot. Flaming arrows were used as early as the ninth century B.C., Wikipedia tells me, but I recall no indication that these arrows were of that variety. I also suspect that to fire as a synonym for to shoot or discharge a weapon did not enter English until after the invention of gunpowder and guns well after the fourth century. That would make its use in this book a distracting anachronism.

The same excavation turned up a book that referred to a man who killed a number of women over more than a decade as a "mass murderer." He was not. He was a serial killer.

Where were the editors of these books?

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Wodehouse on the Bayou

Daniel Woodrell may not remind anyone else of P.G. Wodehouse, but both authors build fictional worlds so convincing that every utterance, every description, no matter how utilitarian its place in the narrative, is extraordinary. The smallest bit contains the seeds of the whole.

In Woodrell's Bayou Trilogy, it's quite a whole, full of "last-call Lotharios from along the Redneck Riviera" and folks who say things like "You ever think maybe you're brain-damaged a little bit, there, Slade?" — wonderful, colorful stuff without, however, mugging for the camera. There are no caricatures here, perhaps because Woodrell has such respect and sometimes heartbreaking compassion for his characters.

No caricatures in the matter of place, either. Woodrell's  slice of the American South is full of variegated human micro-climates, with insiders, outsiders, and all manner of regional differences and rivalries.  It's a much richer and more  dynamic and human depiction than one generally gets of that part of America. 

The Bayou Trilogy (Mulholland Books) packages three of Woodrell's early novels set in the fictional St. Bruno, Louisiana: Under the Bright Lights, Muscle for the Wing and The Ones You Do. They're crime novels, and the first two are in rough outline something like Hammett's Red Harvest: outsiders come to a politically corrupt town, try to muscle in, and stir up trouble that includes larceny and murder. But the storytelling is so rich that it feels entirely new.

My only quibble with the first two novels in the trilogy (I've just begun the third) is that the ending to Under the Bright Lights feels just the tiniest bit forced, as if Woodrell could not quite figure out what to have his protagonist do once the action had been resolved. But that doesn't mean much set against what had gone before. I'm ready to rank these books among the great experiences of my reading life.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Daniel Woodrell's lesson in creating a sense of place

Three of Daniel Woodrell's early novels, released in an omnibus edition as "The Bayou Trilogy," cross a border that is for me as real as that to any foreign country.

That's because passages like this, from early in Under the Bright Lights, give me a vivid feeling of being in a place distinctive and different from my usual surroundings, and that's what crossing borders is all about:

"He had tried to explain that the bar was the center of the neighborhood in which they had grown up, and the regulars were neighbors first and threats to society second. ... Such explanations were regarded as suspiciously metaphysical by his superiors."

The book's early pages remind me of novels about which some readers complain that the characters do nothing but crack wise. Maybe I'll grow weary of this as I read more, but so far the voice is so distinctive, it has such a knack of making amusing even ordinary remarks not intended as jokes, that I'm happy to go along for the ride. Here's one more example, and then a question:

"Duncan smiled at her. She was a drinker with good looks picking up speed downhill, which was his usual game, but she was Pete's woman."

Neither of these two passages includes physical description of Woodrell's fictional city of St. Bruno, but each gives a brief, sharp sense of the novel's human setting. And now, the question: Physical description is one way authors create a sense of place. What are some others?

© Peter Rozovsky 2011