How Dennis Tafoya and Richard S. Prather keep it fresh

Some days the USPS knows just what to do. Monday's delivery brought an advance reading copy of Dennis Tafoya's The Poor Boy's Game and a package from a friend that included Richard S. Prather's Shell Scott novel Gat Heat.

I would not normally associate Tafoya's harrowing urban trips with Prather's light-hearted, action-packed hedonism, but early, brief glimpses suggest that each provides an answer to that favorite Detectives Beyond Borders question, How do authors keep their material fresh?

I've twice heard Tafoya read from The Poor Boy's Game, and this brief exposure suggests that he reinvigorates that old standby in which a character takes a drug- or alcohol-addled, barely-in-control trip through a dangerous urban environment, usually streets, bars, or both. I'll know more once I read the novel, but in the portions he read, Tafoya is emotionally invested in the character taking the trip. And that saves the scene from cliché, that and the sheer weight of the character's dissipation.

In Prather's case, the convention the author reinvigorates and pokes fun at is one he had made his own: that of the over-the-top description of usually pneumatically endowed women. This bit of Always Leave 'em Dying will serve as a fair example:

"...she'd just turned twenty one, but had obviously signaled for the turn a long time ago.... she wore a V-necked white blouse as if she were the gal who'd invented cleavage.”

That's why the opening of Gat Heat is so much fun. The book appeared in 1967, when the Shell Scott franchise had been around for more than fifteen years. Prather, presumably, had to strike a balance among giving the readers what they had come to expect, making each book different enough from what had gone before to keep the readers buying, and maintaining his own interest in a character who had been around a long time.

Readers of Gat Heat who knew their Prather and their Shell Scott must have delighted in such lines as: "You could say she was so thin she had to wear a fat girdle" and "Her complexion was the delicate tint of poisoned limeade."  They could enjoy the lines for their own sake, they could enjoy the fun Prather had at his own expense. And the lines work as references to the author's more familiar descriptions. Prather's usual descriptions are present by their absence.

So much for theorizing. How do your favorite crime writers reinvigorate conventions that in lesser hands might have seemed stale?

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

How do authors keep history fresh? How about bloggers and old posts?

Damn me, but has it really been three years since this post first appeared? Must be; Blogger doesn't lie. Anyhow, I've been thinking so much about fiction and history recently that I thought I'd bring back this post on that stimulating subject.

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 Authors of historical fiction have a problem: Readers know how the story ends, at least the historical part, but the writer still has to keep them reading.

How do they do this?

Here's what John Lawton does in A Little White Death, third of his novels about Frederick Troy. A physician has come to the United States to treat John F. Kennedy for Addison's disease and has met up with a fellow Brit just before returning to England. Here's how the doctor who has just treated Kennedy ends the meeting with his friend:

"`Fine. I understand. Now why don't you hop in a cab. We can have one last drinkie before I dash to Idlewild.'"

That's a powerful little chapter-ender. The speaker of that line carries the weight of the history that the reader already knows about. And he does this without ever ruining the illusion that he exists in a world innocent of that history, which had not yet occurred at the time Lawton portrays. At the very least, that's a neat bit of fun on Lawton's part.

He does something similar in Black Out, the first novel in the series. I won't give that example because it's a bit spoilerish, coming as it does near the end of the book. I will reveal, for those who have not read the novel, that it reinforces the series' status as a social history of mid-twentieth-century England, critical, personal and unsparing.

In other words, you should read the book. Until you do, ponder this question: How do historical novelists get around the annoying fact that the reader knows how the history turns out?

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Bouchercon 2013 panels: Keeping it fresh, the Dana King edition

Here's a recycled post about how one of my Bouchercon 2013 panelists keeps things fresh. Such a question may be especially relevant on a panel that will discuss the tradition-encrusted genres of noir and hard-boiled fiction. The author in question, Dana King, may well have such matters on his mind already; he'll also appear at one of Bouchercon's new Author's Choice sessions, discussing “Is Chandler' s Concept of the Ideal Hero Still Relevant?”

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I write occasionally about how crime writers keep established sub-genres such as P.I. or spy stories fresh (here, here, here).

Dana King's Wild Bill makes a running theme of one such example: FBI organized-crime agents' complaints that their resources are being depleted by another, more headline-grabbing priority:

“Rumor had it he had his eye on moving to an upcoming counterterrorism task force that could be a career maker, organized crime too Twentieth Century for him.”

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“`Frank Ferraro might be the most dangerous criminal in the country. The only reason he’s not on the Most Wanted list is because he shaves and doesn’t wear a rag on his head.'”

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“`About half our resources will be assigned to counterterrorism.'”

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“`Careers are easier to make in counterterrorism than in OC.'”

That's some canny updating by King, a forceful case that gangster stories are still relevant, and another of the pleasures of this impressive book. Now I'll ask you once again: How do your favorite crime writers keep well-established sub-genres fresh, relevant, and contemporary?

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Dana King will be part of my "Goodnight, My Angel: Hard-Boiled, Noir, and the Reader's Love Affair With Both" panel at Bouchercon 2013 in Albany on Friday, Sept. 20, at 10:20 a.m. 

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

William McIlvanney: "Like a suitcase with doors"

When is comes to setting a scene, William McIlvanney has a way of doing what a hundred other crime writers have done worse.

How many crime writers have created single, divorced, or recently split-up police officers or detectives? How many of those writers have given those maritally troubled officers a messy house or apartment as an objective correlative of the character's troubled emotional state? The number is incalculable.

Here's how McIlvanney sets such a scene in The Papers of Tony Veitch, second of his three great Laidlaw novels, now rereleased by Canongate:

"(H)e recognized the inimitable decor of Milligan's poky flat, a kind of waiting room baroque.

"The walls were dun and featureless, the furniture was arranged with all the homeyness of a second-hand sale room and clothes were littered everywhere. It wasn't a room so much as a suitcase with doors."

There's more to McIlvanney than a Chandlerian flair for metaphors, of course, his empathy for all his characters, for one, and his sharp, wry, affectionate portraits of Glasgow life, for another. But the metaphors help. They make McIlvanney's novels into verbal champagne, and they say old things in fresh hew ways. And that's where you come in, readers. What crime or other writers render hoary, obligatory scenes in such fresh and clever ways that they almost make you forget the scenes are hoary and obligatory?

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(Browse some previous McIlvanney posts at Detectives Beyond Borders. Click the link, then scroll down.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

How William McIlvanney beats the stereotypes

The first thing that strikes me on my second reading of William McIlvanney's 1977 novel Laidlaw is how much better the book is than the many crime novels that have followed it in form but fallen short in spirit and execution.

Here's how an outline of Laidlaw might begin:

First chapter: Narrated from killer’s point of view as he flees murder scene.

Second chapter: Crusty police officer sits at his desk, feeling bleak.

Third chapter: Father of missing girl feels frustrated and powerless.

Forget, for a moment, that those tropes may not have been so tired back in 1977. The question on the floor is why McIlvanney's versions seem so fresh now that Canongate books has rereleased Laidlaw in 2013 (along with its follow-ups, The Papers of Tony Veitch and Strange Loyalties), other than that McIlvanney avoids the deadly trap of setting the inside-the-killer's-head chapter in italic type.

Start with compassion and humor. End with such telling detail that one feels one is reading novel observation rather that obligatory place-holders. Here's how the novel opens:

"Running was a strange thing. The sound was your feet slapping the pavement. The lights of passing cars batted your eyeballs. ..."

Find me a better description of alienation than that, of feeling inside one's body and removed from it at the same time. If you do, I bet it won't end on McIlvanney's humorous note:

"A voice with a cap on said. `Where's the fire, son?'"

Yes, quibblers, a voice with a cap on, a convincing subjective description of how the world might appear to a panicked young man fleeing through a crowded city's streets. Subjectivity here translates into empathy, which, in turn makes itself felt in McIlvanney's compassion for his characters, even the most unpleasant. That compassion, perhaps even more than his depictions of hard city (Glasgow), marks out his affinity with Goodis, Guthrie, and other great names in noir.

Then there's McIlvanney understated humor, of which the following bit about a clownish drunk is just one of my favorites (and it gives a nice picture of McIlvanney's Glasgow at the same time):

"He was circulating haphazardly. trying different tables. In Hollywood films it's gypsy fiddlers. In Glasgow pubs it isn't. With that instinct for catastrophe some drunk men have, he settled for a table where three men were sitting. Two of them, Bud Lawson and Airchie Stanley, looked like trouble. The third one looked like much worse trouble."

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Here's an example of McIlvanney's compassion for his characters. Here's another that also exemplifies how McIlvanney gets beyond a crime-fiction trope by digging deeper into it. In this case, the trope is that of the introspective detective.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

How crime writer R.D. Cain avoids cliché

I'm an impatient reader, apt to put a book down if it does not grab me with its first ten words. I also grow weary of crime fiction tropes that I run into over and over, most recently the chapter narrated from inside a killer's head and set in italic type.

At the same time, I'm impressed when a crime writer manages to make a hoary set-up fresh. That's why I think Dark Matter, by the Canadian crime writer R.D. Cain, just might work.

The novel opens with a young woman slowly recovering consciousness to find she has been imprisoned in basement. Now, if the author were Scandinavian, you know what would happen to the young woman, and the only question is whether her demise would be even bloodier than you imagine. And you would never hear her voice except in a scream that seemed to consume her entire being and echo forever. etc, etc.

Such chapters, (lovingly) intent as they are on portraying the victim's agony, never do her the honor of giving her a voice, much less a sense of humor. Cain does both. First the humor:

"The feeling she had was familiar, high and weightless like vapor floating in infinite blue sky. She had tried oxys before and this felt similar. It was a warm, cozy feeling, like being wrapped in a warm blanket and having every inch of her body hugged by someone she loved. This kind of drug didn't appeal to her."

The voice comes when the woman discovers she has two fellow prisoners, also young women. The three talk, and not entirely with teeth-chattering fear. Whatever Cain intends to do with the young victims, they feel like characters for whom a reader might feel empathy. And that's a lot more than one can say for the endless succession of mangled straw men and women thrown up in so many first chapters.

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That's how one author makes something fresh out of a set-up that risked tumbling into cliché. Who else does this? And how do they do it?

(Dark Matter is published by ECW Press, one of the publishers I highlighted in my recent Philadelphia Inquirer article "Eight Crime Writers Worth Tracking Down.")
© Peter Rozovsky 2012

When authors blow their chance to use a cliché

I'm reading a crime novel now whose author passes up a tremendous chance to use a cliché, and I'd like to ask you for examples of crime writers who do the same.

In this case, the novel's narrator offers a passing observation about a supporting character's absence from a given scene, another character explains why that character is missing, and the scene goes on.

I realized as I read that the author had placed the missing character in a situation common for the type of crime novel in which he appears. Except that by relegating the exchange to a minor role, he made the situation seem fresh, like something real people could be doing, rather than like something Characters in a Crime Novel would do. You can bet that when the book is published, I will highlight the scene in question and hail it from the rooftops as an example of writing that revivifies a crime-fiction a convention.

After all, crime fiction is a fiction of conventions. Or is it?

Now, your job: What other crime writers pass up the chance to use clichés? And how do they do it? Do they write novel characters, situations, or scenes? Do they resolve typical situations in surprising fashion? Do they frame a typical scene, situation, or character so cleverly that it seems new?

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Fresh spies

The pace of geopolitical change must make thriller writers tear their hair out. The Soviet Union is gone, and terrorism, as wise commentators point out, is not a country. What does the fight against it mean, and what is a fictional spy to do in this multipolar world?

Lots, according to Olen Steinhauer's The Tourist, in whose world the collapse of the Other Side has given birth to a range of Other Sides: Chinese industrialists, Russian mafias, Islamic insurgents among them.

This fractured geopolitical scorecard is just one of the things that make The Tourist seem new, at least to this infrequent reader of thrillers. Here are a few more:

1) Frequent mention of characters' ages, many of those characters in their twenties or early thirties. This has an internal purpose, but I suspect it's also Steinhauer's way of reminding the reader that the international thriller is alive, well and still a young man's and woman's game two decades after the U.S.S.R.'s collapse.

2) An occasional wryly mocking attitude:

"Milo decided that while his coworkers devoted themselves to finding the Most Famous Muslim in the World somewhere in Afghanistan, he would spend his time on terrorism's more surgical arms."

3) An amusing poke at one of the dumbest songs of the last thirty years:

"`Why `the Tiger'?'

"`Precisely! However, the truth is a disappointment. I have no idea. Someone, somewhere, first used it. Maybe a journalist, I don't know. I guess that, after the Jackal, they needed an animal name.' He shrugged—again it looked painful. `I suppose I should be pleased they didn't choose a vulture—or a hedgehog. And no—before you think to ask, let me assure you I wasn't named after the Survivor song.'"

Do political and spy thrillers have a shorter shelf life thanks to events such as the end of the Soviet Union and the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001? What does it take to keep such a story fresh? What are your favorite classic spy stories?

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Keeping it fresh

Sean Chercover and Howard Shrier, the guest authors for "Noir at the Bar T.O. style" in Toronto on March 10, both face the challenge of keeping an old genre fresh. Each writes novels set in a big city (Toronto, principally, for Shrier, Chicago for Chercover), and each has as his protagonist a private investigator who's male, tough but reasonably sensitive, single and unhappily so.

How do these authors keep that well-worn fictional territory fresh? Yesterday I cited one way Shrier does it. Today is Chercover's turn. For one thing, he'll sharpen a traditional P.I. trait just enough to make it stand out. One such example in Big City, Bad Blood is his protagonist's willingness to use violence when necessary. Chercover's guy goes a bit farther than most. You'll recognize the example I have in mind when you read the book.

This protagonist is also comfortable with technology without compromising his toughness, slipping into geekiness, or getting obtrusive about how much research the author has done. I'd flagged one nice example of this, which I'll share with you as I soon as I can find the page it's on.

Now it's your turn. What are your favorite examples of authors' strategies for keeping a traditional genre fresh?

(Whether intentionally or otherwise, Shrier and Chercover have also given their P.I. heroes resonant names: Jonah — as in the whale guy who bounces back to life after being in a pretty tough situation — Geller in Shrier's case, Ray Dudgeon in Chercover's.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

How Rex Stout kept it fresh

The mystery of how crime writers keep a long-running series fresh has been a great topic of discussion here. Last night, I found a beautifully simple and amusing example in Rex Stout's novella "Counterfeit for Murder," from Homicide Trinity.

Nero Wolfe has ordered Archie Goodwin to summon the trusted stable of freelance detectives whom they often use when extra manpower is called for. Fans will be familiar with the set piece. Goodwin always names the detectives, taking care to point out that Saul Panzer is the best of them. How is an author to keep such a scene, repeated so often, fresh? Here, Stout does it with a little joke:

"He spoke. `Saul and Fred and Orrie. At eight in the morning in my room.'

"My brows went up. Saul Panzer is the best operative south of the North Pole. His rate is ten dollars and hour and he is worth twenty. Fred Durkin's rate is seven dollars and he is worth seven-fifty. Orrie Cather's rate is also seven dollars and he is worth six-fifty."

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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