The good crime writer's guide to self-reference

Circumstances have me reading several books at once,  one of them The Good Thief's Guide to Vegas by Chris Ewan. Since all the reading keeps me from writing, I thought I'd bring back this post I'd made about an earlier book in Ewan's "Good Thief's Guide" series. Ewan also figures in an article by Colin Bateman that sparked one of this blog's longer comment strings.

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I've written with some ambivalence about self-reference and in-jokes in crime fiction. Done well, they can be clever. Done poorly, they can be clever – winking, nudging, back-patting and over the top.

Chris Ewan's The Good Thief's Guide to ... novels, the second of which was the occasion of yesterday's post, are bound to contain some self-reference; Ewan's protagonist is a crime writer/burglar whose novels include The Good Thief's Guide to Amsterdam, the title of Ewan's own first novel.

I like the first big block of self-reference in Ewan's The Good Thief's Guide to Paris. For one thing, its introduction is a bit of a surprise. The good thief in question, protagonist Charlie Howard, introduces the self-referential note when a reader might well expect him to be raising quite another matter. For another the reference is full of good humor that ought to make all thriller and suspense readers smile.

Howard is worried about his current book, whose plot involves Rio de Janeiro, Carnival, a bank vault, and a robbery, all to be carried out by his series character acting alone. He seeks a spot of advice and sympathy from his agent, who replies:

"Honestly, Charlie, I have clients who need their hands held from time to time but you can really push it. You're concerned about credibility in one of your Faulks novels? Next you'll be telling me Ian Fleming made a few things up."

There are multiple in-jokes here, Sebastian Faulks being among the authors who have written James Bond novels as successors to Fleming. In any case, the reference is an affectionate nod to the stories that I suspect Ewan and many of his readers love.
And now, your thoughts, please, on self-reference and genre in-jokes in crime fiction. Do you like them? Dislike them? Does your reaction vary? Feel free to offer examples good, bad, interesting or indifferent.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

***

Chris Ewan will be part of my “CRANKY STREETS: WHAT'S SO FUNNY ABOUT MURDER?” panel on Saturday, Sept. 17, 11:30 a.m.-12:30, at Bouchercon 2011.  

Arthur Penn's night movies, plus a note on the Internet and the decline of factual accuracy

I've finally got around to watching Night Moves and, while it does not move as slowly as one commenter here suggested, it hits the viewer over the head with references to its own antecedents — and then hits them over the head again with references to its own references.

So, we get Gene Hackman's Harry Moseby playing solo chess in his car as he lies in wait for his wife's lover. In case anyone misses the reference to Philip Marlowe, the lover then taunts him thus: "Come on, take a swing at me, Harry, the way Sam Spade would." And yes, Moseby plays a private investigator.

Or Moseby goes to interview a man on a movie set during the filming of a bi-plane flying low over a dusty country road. In case anyone doesn't get the North by Northwest reference, director Arthur Penn then has the stunt flyer buzz Moseby and the guy he's talking to, making them duck. In case anyone still doesn't get it, Hackman then says, "I'd say we saw the same movies."

Night Moves is thirty-five years old, and that sort of thing must have seemed a lot fresher in 1975 than it does today.

OK, that was the movie's first twenty minutes. Now, let's go watch the rest.

***

IMDb.com misquotes the line it singles out under "Quotes" on its main Night Moves page. The line as delivered by Jennifer Warren is

"When we all get liberated like Delly, there's going to be fighting in the streets."

and not, as the Amazon-owned, user-generated IMDb has it,

"When we're all as free as Delly there'll be rioting in the streets."

(By the way, Wikipedia has still not corrected at least one of the errors in its plot summary of Get Carter, errors I noted on Wiki's discussion forum at least six months ago. Factual accuracy is so pre-Wiki, so pre-digital, so pre-democratization-of-information a notion.)

N.B. IMDb has moved the quotation off its main Night Moves page, but it has not corrected its mistake. You now have to go "Quotes," then click "see more" and scroll down to find the inaccurately quoted line in question.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Self-reference from South Africa

For this post, I revisit my old friend self-reference. My guide is Richard Kunzmann's story "If Nothing Else," from the Bad Company anthology of South African crime stories.

Kunzmann is a youngish author, born in 1976. I don't know how much death and violence he has seen, but his story confronts a difficulty that must plague many serious crime writers: How does one write about death without having seen it up close?

"Rarely are we treated to the spectacle of what is guaranteed to one day happen to all of us," muses the first-person narrator, a crime writer named Sam Engels excited to be joining police at a murder scene. "Modern society robs us of a unique experience on a daily basis, and this is why I wanted to relish the moment."

The story is a bit talkier than I'd have liked, but I like Kunzmann's sly use of the difficulty mentioned above. And I like the rhythm of the story's opening even more: "It was a desperate death to look at."

***

Fiction from Africa is bound to have a bit of the allure of the strange and new for North American readers, and that can be a good thing. One Bad Company story's passing reference to an officer's being the only Xhosa on the force is a reminder that the possibility of ethnic tension need not be limited to black vs. white – an especially salutary thought for those of us who live in the United States. (A similar light goes on above my head when Helene Tursten writes about tension between Swedes and ethnic Finns in her Göteborg-based Swedish crime novels.)

Now, let's bring back that other old friend, the question to readers: What kinds of unexpected racial, ethnic or other tensions have you found in crime stories?

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

One more thing about The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

I've just finished The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, and I think things remain to be said about Stieg Larsson's much-discussed first novel. I won't say them now, though, except to note that the last few pages contain two of the most endearingly self-deprecating bits of self-reference in all of crime fiction — unless one regards the bits as self-justification, grimly ironic or not self-referential at all.

I won't give away much if I reveal that the references concern a book written by protagonist Mikael Blomkvist.

(Stieg Larsson's English translator, Steven T. Murray [a.k.a. Reg Keeland], will be a member of my panel on crime fiction and translation at Bouchercon 2009.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Thai anxiety: Timothy Hallinan's Breathing Water

I didn't set out to do so, but I've read a number of crime novels recently that have crime writers as protagonists. Naturally this has had me looking for self-reference, and I found it, whether the authors, Chris Ewan and L.C. Tyler, intended the self-reference or not.

Timothy Hallinan's Poke Rafferty is a different kind of author – a travel writer based in Bangkok – and Breathing Water has him serving rather more demanding editors: a shady, ultra-rich Thai patron of the tarts who grants Rafferty the right to write his life story as the result of a lost poker game, on the one hand, and on the other, competing groups of shady, ultra-rich Thais who have their own ideas of the tack the book should take and who threaten Rafferty and his wife and child if the book does not turn out right – or if he writes it at all.

That's more pressure than authors usually get, and it gives Rafferty occasion for reflections that may strike a chord with writers whether or not they echo Hallinan's own experience:

"[Rafferty] figures he'll grab a table big enough to write on, clear a space, and go back to work on his list. Maybe start playing with scenarios. He's long known that he thinks more clearly when he writes, that the act of waiting for his hand to finish forming the words slows his thought processes in a way that opens them up, allows him to see three or four possible alternative paths rather than just the most obvious one."

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Breathing Water is the third Rafferty novel. Two-thirds of the way in, it's a thriller that's hard to put down. Hallinan knows how to create suspense without resorting to obvious cliffhangers, and he knows how to maintain dual story strands and keep a reader wondering how each will turn out as well as how the two will come together. It says here that he also creates a convincing picture of Thai life among the obscenely rich and the desperately poor and that he does a neat job of injecting narrative movement into a purely expository scene – in this case, a dialogue on some realities of Thai politics.

I'll probably have more to say soon, perhaps about Hallinan's white-knight hero and brief, grim, humorous chapter titles. For background on Poke Rafferty and his creator, read the Detectives Beyond Borders interview with Timothy Hallinan here.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Existential angst in a post-Wodehousian Age: The Herring-Seller's Apprentice

No, really.

Ethelred, protagonist of L.C. Tyler's novel, is a mystery writer, several of whose discarded chapters Tyler interpolates in the final quarter or so of The Herring-Seller's Apprentice.

One of the chapters mocks the brooding nouveau roman of Alain Robbe‐Grillet and his followers, with its intense meditation on random objects. Another pokes fun at the brooding Italian fictional detective, with the loyal assistant, who likes to drink during working hours. A third is a fantasy on P.G. Wodehouse, with that comic genius' characters appearing in the guise of police.

Ethelred's protagonist, Fairfax, is a detective nearing retirement age without the rank his abilities should have earned him. He is without a wife, and he drinks often, without tumbling over into alcoholism. Ethelred has even, for reasons he does not quite understand, given Fairfax an interest in Norman architecture – you know, the strong, solid kind that prevailed before the slender fripperies and gaudy light of Gothic. Others will be more familiar with the details than I, but that moves in Morse/Wexford/Peter Diamond territory, I'd say.

Given that Fairfax begins with a typical English detective from a certain age (say, about 1970 onward) and has him try on then discard a number of other fictional-detective disguises – and given that The Herring-Seller's Apprentice was Tyler's first novel – it's reasonable to guess that Tyler thought about his own direction as a crime writer (and perhaps about the state of British crime writing as well) and decided to have some fun and let his protagonist do the same. One might even say he was exorcising some fictional ghosts.

Oh, yes. This is a mystery story. I don't know if it quite meets all the requirements of a fair-play mystery, but it does have a surprise ending along with a summation that offers a reasonable explanation for red herrings and wrong guesses throughout the story. A reader looking to do so just might be able to figure out the mystery. I did not, and it would be fun to know how many readers did.

(My emphasis on a serious side of Tyler stems from my first meeting with him, at CrimeFest in Bristol. In response to a question about crime writers who inject humor at grim, violent moments, Tyler said he liked Alan Guthrie – unexpected for a self-described author of comic cozy mysteries.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

More self-reference

I wrote recently about a musical reference in L.C. Tyler's novel The Herring-Seller's Apprentice. In addition to citing Berlioz, the passage is self-referential; its narrator is a mystery writer relating a problem he once had writing a mystery.

Here I'll catalogue a few more such references. Along the way, I'll share some thoughts about types of self-reference – without ever using the phrase authorial consciousness.

The novel's first chapter begins: "I have always been a writer. I wrote my first novel at the age of six. It was seven and a half pages long ... " That's clever and endearing.

Chapter Ten begins: "If there's one thing that gets up my sodding nose, it's starting a new chapter and finding that the poxy narrator has changed" – narrated no longer by the author, naturally, but by his coarse-mannered agent. That's pretty funny.

Chapter Four: "Perhaps at no time other than our own could a man reach comfortable middle age without confronting a dead body in the cold flesh." Less directly self-referential, all the funnier for its jab at the tendency of amateur sleuths to find dead bodies in greater numbers than do members of the general population.

Throughout: several musings by the protagonist upon the craft of writing mysteries but, most interesting, the effect that the novel's "real" mystery – the disappearance and apparent murder of the protagonist's former and long-estranged wife – has on his own stalled writing career as the investigation of that "real" mystery deepens:

"(I)n the damp autumn Sussex countryside, I forgot such troubles as I had seemed to have and started to see a picture of a sultry summer's evening in Buckford.

"Fairfax is sitting at his desk. He is once more contemplating retirement. And he is deeply troubled, though it is not yet clear about what. ... What happens next? I don't yet know. But the story has started flowing. And this small trickle may gather pace and become a stream, then a torrent that will carry the story off, who knows where? But that hot summer night would be the starting point."

Now, let's see where the story ends.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

The detective who almost loved Berlioz

I wrote during a recent discussion about Sherlock Holmes and English music that "I'd like see to how a Berlioz-loving consulting detective would go about his job. Berlioz ... might be the composer of choice for any number of hard-working but dissipated fictional detectives of a later time than his own."

"A Berlioz-loving detective would be great!" replied Lauren, who knows a thing or two about crime fiction and a thing or twenty-seven about music. "I can see the parallels between Paganini as Berlioz's benefactor and a glamorous celebrity hiring a private eye."

Lo and behold, here's the mystery-writer protagonist of L.C. Tyler's The Herring-Seller's Apprentice musing about a trait he tried to give one of his own protagonists:

"I once tried to give Fairfax an interest in Berlioz (I must have been reading too much Colin Dexter). Elsie had the blue pencil through that before you could say `Morse'. `Don't bother to develop his character,' she said. `Your readers aren't interested in character.' "

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

How to be literary, self-conscious and readable

Two passages early in Ian Sansom's second Mobile Library mystery, Mr. Dixon Disappears, show that it's possible for an author to exhibit literary self-consciousness and remain readable, even amusing, at the same time.

In one, the seemingly hapless protagonist, the librarian Israel Armstrong, in desperate need of something to read, contemplates the walls of a jail cell in which he has found himself, through no fault of his own:

"He tried reading the graffiti on the walls and on the back of the door. But there wasn't enough, and it was too small, and anyway it was all acronyms defying one another and performing sexual acts on one another, the IRA doing this or that to the UVF, who were doing this or that to the UDA, and PUP versus the SF, and up the INLA, and down the UFF, and RUC this and PSNI that: where were the great wits and aphorists of County Antrim, for goodness sake? Where were the imprisoned scribes? Where was the Chester Himes and the Malcolm X of the jail cells of Northern Ireland? Where were the Gramscis of Tumdrum and District?"

That's clever and amusing, proclaiming the joys of reading while at the same time poking fun at inflated claims that critics sometimes make for it. These reflections also precipitate a crisis of confidence on Armstrong's part (though, to be fair, he has such crises frequently).

The other reference is just plain amusing:

"This was way beyond anything Israel has ever experienced before: being in the back of a car, early in the morning, listening to someone reading out an account of what had happened to you over the past half an hour, but from an entirely different perspective to your own; it was like being on some kind of extreme creative writing course."

So here are two ways to make the delicate tactic of self-reference work: Make it amusing, and make it important to the story.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

Another kind of joke from Jasper Fforde

I posted a comment last week about the entertaining jibes at crime-fiction plot devices in Jasper Fforde's novel The Fourth Bear. But there's more to Fforde's jokes than good-natured, self-referential literary japery.

There are also jabs at political correctness and conspiracy theorists, among other things, and, lest you think these are easy prey, Fforde's humor is always a bit more probing than you might expect from jokes directed at such targets.

And then there is the following, which is just plain funny, no explanation needed:

"`Lovers,' repeated Bartholomew. `Goldilocks and I. For more than a year now.'

"`Wait, wait,' said Jack in a state of some confusion. `You were, to great fanfare, Westminster's first openly gay MP and have remained a vociferous mouthpiece for all kinds of minority-rights issues for the past twenty-five years, and now you're telling me ... you're straight?'

"Bartholomew covered his face with his hands, and his shoulders shook with a silent sob.

"`You don't know what it's like,' he said miserably, `living a lie.'"

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

Self-reference unto death ("Slide," by Ken Bruen and Jason Starr)

Self-reference has been a big topic here lately, and Slide, by Ken Bruen and Jason Starr, is an absolute riot of the practice. The least of it is the epigraph to the novel's fifth chapter, a quotation from Bust, by Ken Bruen and Jason Starr.

In the book proper, the obnoxious, venal but hapless Max Fisher cokes and martinis himself into a belief that his quips belong in a book, "like those Hard Case books with those women on the covers. Max had never picked one up but man, those guys know how to use a pair of tits to sell a book." Guess who publishes Bust and Slide. (This self-reference is especially ironic. Though Bust is named for that particular part of a woman's anatomy, the Bruen and Starrs show far less flesh than most of the gloriously lurid Hard Case covers.)

And, in a jocosely creepy example, Slide fantasizes Bruen's own death. The novel's drug-addled, hysterical psychotic killer/kidnapper of a title character plots to kidnap Keith Richards for ransom, but:

Whoever this guy was, he wasn't Keith Richards. He was in his fifties, thick lips, with a scar to the right of his mouth, a button nose and blue eyes. The guy had to be fooking Irish.
...

The guy went. "Don't you know me? ... I'm a crime writer ... I've won the Macavity for – "

Slide shut him off, roared, "Ary Christ, shut the fook up or I'll remove all your fookin' cavities and your tonsils too! Are you somebody? Anyone give a damn about you?"

The guy looked crestfallen, stammered, "I-I got starred reviews in Publishers Weekly and Booklist ... well, maybe I caught them on an off day b-but– "

Slide gave him a slap on the mouth, said, "I don't want to hear about your bloody career. I want to hear somebody will pay cash, lots of cash to have you back.
...
The thin fook was going, "I wrote a book with another guy. Maybe he can– "

But he never got to finish as Slide lashed the crowbar into his teeth, then took out the bastard's left eye with an almighty swing. ... Slide panicked. He opened the door, kicked the body out, and went, "That should sell some books."

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

Technorati tags:
Ken Bruen
Jason Starr
Irish crime fiction

Disjointed (me, not Colin Cotterill’s book)

I’m reading three or four or five books, including non-crime, so posting may be less cohesive than unusual the next few days. Feel free to respond coherently if you’d like to, though.

First, I may have to retract some of the spleen I vented this week at self-reference in crime fiction. The cause is an exchange from Colin Cotterill’s Anarchy and Old Dogs that includes the following:

“`Very well. In that case, I suspect what we have here is a message written in invisible ink.’

“Phosy raised one eyebrow. `And how would an old bush surgeon know a thing like that?’

“`Inspector Phosy, allow me to reintroduce you to Inspector Maigret of the Palais de Justice. I became very involved in a number of his cases as they were outlined in the pages of l’Oeuvre while I was in France. Unlike ourselves, Inspector Maigret has the very good sense to be fictional, and thus can dispense with such human annoyances as inefficiency and budget restraints… ’

“`I’m impressed. And all this time I thought there was nothing positive to be gained from reading mysteries.’

“`You’d be surprised.’”

Why does it work? The exchange is almost a full page long, which helps. The conversation is believable, and it’s allowed to develop, as a real conversation would; why shouldn’t two colleagues chat about mysteries?

Further, I suspect that many readers are complicit in the sentiment that Cotterill’s Dr. Siri expresses. We indulge his gentle acknowledgment that Maigret is not quite real because it accounts for our love of Maigret. (And that in itself is nice work on Cotterill’s part. Attempts to explain author Georges Simenon’s fantastic popularity are generally far weightier than Cotterill’s sensible observation.)

Third, the exchange is nicely paced, a gentle comedy sketch in miniature, a little story, and not a string of annoyingly self-referential quips.

Fourth, some of the lines are funny – gently so, of course.

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I hinted strongly at incoherence, so here's a non-crime-fiction note: In a possible first in its years-long history, the comic strip Sally Forth was mildly amusing yesterday.

End of note.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

Technorati tags:
Colin Cotterill
Asia crime fiction
Laos

Self-reference that makes you scream (or smile)

I must not be a post-modern type of guy because I don't generally like self-reference, and I hate self-reference that compounds the sin by referring to its own self-referentiality.

I don’t like wiseacre private eyes in detective stories who say things like “What do you think this is, a detective story?” I don’t like it when a character says, “You watch too much television,” and I hated it when a tough quipster of a fictional private eye said to another character, “You don’t watch enough television.” You want to pay tribute to or poke fun at a genre, be my guest. Just don’t hit me over the head with it.

Thus, the following, from Michael Dibdin’s Back to Bologna, made me wince from beginning to end, which probably made it more of a scowl than a wince:

“He knew that he had fired his current girlfriend, but only because he did that to whoever happened to occupy that position on the last day of each month. Private eyes couldn’t have stable, long-term affairs. They were complex, alienated loners who had to walk the mean streets of the big city, men who might be flawed but were neither tarnished not afraid. Above all, they had to suffer.”

The first sentence is funny because it’s unexpected. The second is a warning. The rest is cliché, more grating, not less because the author calls the reader’s attention to his awareness that it’s cliché. “Mean streets.” Heh-heh. Good one, Michael. I get the Chandler joke.

And now, readers, you have the floor: Give some clever examples of self-reference, or some examples that drove you nuts.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007
Technorati tags:
Michael Dibdin
English crime fiction
Italian crime fiction
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Garry Disher and "Meta"-Mysteries

I recently posted a comment about two mystery stories set in the world of mystery writers. The stories' self-referentiality made me squirm, their weird coziness and confidence that everyone would get the in-jokes. But Garry Disher's "My Brother Jack" in The Oxford Book of Detective Stories has forced me to sharpen my thinking on this vital matter. That story is entirely self-referential, a tale of a crime writer and his character teaming up to catch a villain who harasses them for not getting details right in their stories. The difference is that its self-referentiality is about the process of creating a story -- and it's as funny as all hell. Disher muses on, among other things:

-- Raymond Chandler
-- V.I. Warshawski
-- Sue Grafton's Kinsey Milhone
-- Lawrence Block's Matt Scudder
-- the difficulties of naming characters
-- His own work
-- Richard Stark's Parker
-- Inspectors Morse and Wexford
-- the art of creating a convincing private eye
-- Stanley Kubrick's The Killing
-- John D. MacDonald
-- Ross MacDonald
-- the flip tone of American crime writing
-- the gorgeous, formulaic language of crime stories

It's clever, it's an academic exercise (no shock from someone who's been a university writer-in-residence), and it's like a Woody Allen spoof except that it works perfectly as full-fledged fiction. A brief sample:

"It was about 10:30 and I was in bed, reading. There was no wind but those chimes rang out with the kind of abrupt discordancy that made me think prowler ... The love/sex interest in this story flung down her Sisters in Crime newsletter, revealing her small but high, low-slung but pointed, melony but round, sloping but curved, tanned but creamy breasts and said, `What the fuck was that?'"

P.S. This collection also has stories by Pentti Kirstila and Ian Rankin that I've praised elsewhere, along with a lot of good stories from the early days of Western crime fiction almost to today. It's worth looking for.

Technorati tags:
Garry Disher
Australian crime fiction
humorous crime fiction


© Peter Rozovsky 2006

The British are Different

It's a truism that the British take crime fiction more seriously than Americans do. This may be responsible for the curious effect that two stories in The Best British Mysteries 2005 had on this North American reader. The collection has some superb choices, Brian Thompson's "Geezers" and Robert Barnard's "The Cairo Road" chief among them. But two of the stories repelled me, and I'd like to hear how others, especially in the U.K., feel about them.

Edward Marston's "The St. Valentine's Day Massacre" and Anthony Mann's "Esther Gordon Framlingham" are meta-mysteries -- mystery stories set in the world of mystery writers. The former is about a gathering of crime writers, of whom one is especially successful and especially obnoxious. The latter is about a writer who competes to become the new ghostwriter for a looooooooong-running series of historical mysteries. The Mann, especially, has some delicious jabs at the field's penchant for ever-more outlandish sleuths. Here's one snippet of tasty dialogue:

"How about a late seventeenth-century Russian peasant?" I asked.

Across the room, my agent Myra raised an eyebrow. "North or south?"

"South."

"Been done."

"Ah, I meant north," I said quickly.

Myra shook her head. "Sorry, been done," she said. "Sheila Trescotchick's Ivan the Irascible series. Ivan's an irascible Russian peasant, disliked by all and sundry in his small northern Russian village, tolerated only because of his extraordinary ability to solve the most perplexing of crimes."

That's wonderful stuff, a little gem of comic timing. So why did the two stories make me shift uncomfortably in my chair? That's easy: A mystery about a mystery, even one as clever as Mann's, strikes me as arch and excessively self-referential. OK, but why? Is it a matter of taste? Is it some natural British flair for zany and self-deprecating satire that I don't quite get? Or is crime fiction so much more a part of everyday discourse and taken so much more seriously in Britain that it makes a fine target for satire?

There, blog readers, are your essay questions. Discuss.

© Peter Rozovsky 2006