Crime, Revenge and History: A Guest Post by Scott Adlerberg

Today I hand the blog over to Scott Adlerberg, which is something I should know better than to do, as after reading Scott’s description of the primary influences on his new novel (Jack Waters) I’ll now be compelled to up my game. I always enjoy reading Scott’s posts on the Do Some Damage blog, so it’s a treat to have him with us today.

Crime, Revenge, and History

A murder takes place within the first few pages of my new novel, Jack Waters.  The killer, who is the title character, goes on the run from his home in New Orleans.  This crime determines the entire course his life will take from there, so it's fair to say that crime is a central component of the book. Still, when people ask, I don't describe Jack Waters as a crime novel per se.  It's set in 1904, on a Caribbean island where Jack Waters goes after fleeing the United States as a fugitive, and on this island where he starts a new life, he becomes embroiled in a rebellion against a nasty dictator. He takes up with the rebels and has many dangerous adventures with them, all the while pursuing his own secret agenda.  What is this agenda?  I don't want to give everything away.  But the point is that Waters wants to overthrow the dictator for reasons that have little to do with politics and much more to do with personal vengeance.

So Jack Waters, no question about it, is more of a historical adventure tale than a crime novel. Of course, that doesn't mean it isn't soaked in blood.  It also doesn't mean that the books that served as an inspiration for it, though not specifically crime fiction, don't have a lot of tension and violence.  They do.  And I thought it might be interesting to look at a couple of these works, sources I drew upon for my deep dive (if 114 years is deep) into the past.

Michael Kohlhaas by Heinrich von Kleist (1810)

Heinrich von Kleist's novella is one of my favorite stories of any length of all time. If Jack Waters has a primary model, Michael Kohlhaas is it.  Set in the 16th century, in Saxony, the novella is about a horse dealer, Kohlhaas, who suffers a clear but relatively minor wrong at the hands of a nobleman. All Kohlhaas' attempts to get legal redress for the wrong fail, and through a series of escalating events almost surreal in their strangeness, he becomes public enemy number one and winds up leading a full-scale uprising against the region's powers that be.  He's feared by some (a terrorist to them) admired by others (a revolutionary to them), and the 80 or so pages of the narrative are remarkably dense with incident. The story is dark and thrilling, and qualifies as a revenge story for the ages, and perhaps most striking of all is Heinrich von Kleist's tone. Kleist never moralizes, and no matter how odd the events unfolding, no matter how frenzied the action, he maintains an uncannily flat voice.  Sentences are long and complicated, motivations tangled, brutalities extreme, but for the duration, the Kleist narrator remains controlled and dispassionate. It's hard to get a sense of where the author stands in regard to what he's depicting. Years later, another master of the outlandish, Franz Kafka, was a huge admirer of Kleist's stories, and one can understand why.  Kafka learned a lot about "deadpan style" from Herr von Kleist. 

Michael Kohlhaas is also an example of a certain kind of story you don't encounter often - a moral tale without an evident moral.  It's obvious from what goes on in the novella that it's preoccupied with morals and ethics and the quest for justice, the idea of justice as it relates to the idea of vengeance, but the author never lets you come down easily on any one side.  The story reads as if it should have a moral or a point you can put your finger on, and yet, in the end, it conveys a sense of ambivalence.  The story's telling is linear and its style crystal clear, but as a reader, you're not quite sure what you're supposed to take away.  A couple of readers have described Jack Waters as "a dreamy fable" and "a fractured fairy tale", and I have to admit I was happy to see they had this reaction. It's an effect, from the time I started the book, I was consciously shooting for, and to whatever extent I achieved it, I have no qualms about declaring that it's something I learned in large measure from reading Michael Kohlhaas.

Little Apple by Leo Perutz (1928)

Little Apple is another story about revenge and a man obsessed.  It was written by Leo Perutz, a Czech-born Austrian writer who lived from 1882 to 1957.  Perutz is an author who wrote in German and sold well during his lifetime - he wrote 11 novels in all - but who now has become almost unknown here.  It's a pity because a number of his books remain in print, and he's a master of fast-moving, suspenseful novels that often are set in the past and involve adventure and mystery. Jorge Borges, Grahame Greene, Ian Fleming, and Karl Edward Wagner are among his stated admirers, and an Austrian writer contemporary of his once described his work as "the possible result of a little infidelity of Franz Kafka [him again] and Agatha Christie".  That gives you a pretty good idea of what he's like.

Little Apple starts as World War I ends. An Austrian soldier named Vittorin has just been released from captivity in a Russian POW camp.  Though he returns to his family and a fiancé in Vienna, he vows to return quickly to Russia to inflict revenge on the sadistic camp commandant who brutalized him and his fellow prisoners during their captivity.  Nothing can deter him from this quest, nobody can talk him out of it, and he makes his way back to 1919 Russia, now undergoing a massive civil war after the Bolshevik Revolution.  In effect, Vittorin undertakes a manhunt in a Russia in chaos, and he gets buffeted around by all sorts of perils. Despite the dangers and many setbacks, he persists. Not unlike Michael Kohlhass - and Jack Waters - he's a monomaniac, and he has a remarkable ability to maintain his focus despite the threats and shifting political conditions around him.  

Perutz is a model for me in how to tell a historical tale in a compressed fashion. His prose is spare and uncluttered.  By showing you just the details you need to see, he creates a vivid world at the same time as he keeps his narrative moving forward.  He's good at dipping into the dark recesses of his characters' minds while maintaining pace and momentum, and he's able to keep in balance quite well the contrast between the individual pursuing his goal and the larger events going on around that individual.  The reader never loses perspective on either.  These are all things I tried to accomplish in Jack Waters, and again, as with Kleist's novella, I had a great source to study.  

Needless to say, these two works are not the only literary influences on Jack Waters, but they are two prime ones, and if you haven’t read one or the other, I couldn’t recommend them more. In my own mind, at least, single-minded, justice-obsessed, revengeful Jack Waters, a man who knows how to survive in a turbulent world and exploit political conditions for his own ends, is a character Kleist’s Kohlhaas and Perutz’s Vittorin would respect and admire.

(Broken River Books released Scott’s new novel, Jack Waters, on January 12.)

(Eavesdropping on) A Conversation Between Angel Luis Colon and Scott Adlerberg

Among the joys of writing crime fiction is being a member of the crime fiction family. With life events keeping me away from my usual blog duties, friends (and kick-ass writers) Angel Colon and Scott Adlerberg cover me today.

Angel Luis Colón is the Anthony and Derringer Award-nominated author of No Happy Endings and the Blacky Jaguar series of novellas. His newest is a collection of short stories, Meat City on Fire and Other Assorted Debacles), which dropped December 4 from Down & Out Books, the leading independent crime fiction press despite having me in their stable of authors. Angel’s fiction has appeared in multiple web and print publications including Thuglit, Literary Orphans, and Great Jones Street.

Scott Adlerberg has a new book on the horizon (Jack Waters) but we’ll have more on Scott as that date approaches.

Keep up with him on Twitter via @GoshDarnMyLife.

Angel C: Let’s get things rolling with something a little off the beaten path. Let’s talk about lessons we learn from media but I’m not too concerned about what’s inspired/informed you that was of sound quality.

So, garbage media; specifically bad media that taught you what NOT to do. Can you cite anything specific you’ve read/watched/heard that made you say, ‘Oh, yeah, avoid that. That won’t work at all’ (and feel free to avoid names to protect the innocent)?

Scott A: Well, to start with, there are Hallmark movies.  No one needs to be told how terrible these are, but they are instructive in reminding you how ineffective and uninvolving as narrative are stories that are so relentlessly positive and "inspirational".  

But a bit more seriously, there is the flip side of that, miserabilism in storytelling.  There are those writers and filmmakers, etc who seem to believe that a relentless focus on the gloomy and somber, the bitter dregs of life if you will, means that the work has more seriousness and profundity - more "reality". Which is utter nonsense.  A good example to me is True Detective, the HBO show. Forgetting about the obviousness of its influences and all that.  That stuff didn't bother me so much. It had some derivative things, but a lot of good stuff is derivative of stuff even better.  That alone doesn't make something unenjoyable.  But the show, especially during the second season, had a ponderousness and a somberness that was insufferable.  A classic case of a story where the creators confused somberness with seriousness. There's no direct correlation.  You can be as serious as hell, but you don't have to be somber every single moment. In fact, without modulation between the two, the somberness comes off as just pretentious.  There's a line from Muriel Spark in her book Loitering with Intent that I love: she has her narrator, a writer, say that she is treating a certain story with a light and heartless hand, which is her way when she has to give a perfectly serious account of things. Not somber in the telling, but dead serious in intent.  Now Muriel Spark happens to be very witty and funny in her writing, and that doesn't come to everyone, granted, but over time, I've come to admire most works that mix darkness with some form of lightness, even when the overall narratives themselves focus on the darkest things. It's like when I started reading the Russians, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy (though not War and Peace).  I was expecting the heaviest, grimmest writing from what I'd been told by people (and maybe because of the faces on these writers), and you read these guys and they are dark as hell but also often funny. Page after page, they capture the ridiculousness and self-deceptions of human beings, the ironies of everyday life, the misunderstandings.  I use them as examples because when you think heavy, you think someone like a literary Russian.  Kafka? All bleakness? Well, when he read his stories aloud to his friends, they'd laugh a lot. In astonishment probably but also because in the very fiber of the bleakness he describes, there is so much absurdity you can't help but laugh.  Or if you think crime, in direct contrast to True Detective, think of one of its main inspirations, Chinatown, and you have a story where the tone has the nuances of life, back and forth, dark, menacing, yet shot through with moments of humor and, again, the absurd -- all coming to about as dark a conclusion as you can get.  Or David Lynch.  Who is more varied in mood than him?  The new Twin Peaks season was a perfect example - terror, sadness, loss, confusion, total existential horror, it's all there. But also all the moments of levity, connection, forgiveness, optimism, silliness, even love and joy. That's a complete work, a work with the kind of fullness I'm talking about.

But back to crime for a minute.  Most true crime TV shows remind me what not to do. There are so many of these shows now.  Episode after episode you get detailed depictions of abjection, intense cruelty, incredible stupidity.  And yes, a lot of real crime does consist of little more than this.  But as narrative this is not all that interesting, I find.  Nonstop brutality, banality and human idiocy.  Good crime fiction avoids this because, as a matter of fact, it's highly stylized.  Whether it's hardboiled crime or noir-tinged fiction and certainly traditional mystery stories. All of them are quite stylized portraits of crime and/or detection compared to these true crime type shows.   You can get pitch-black in fiction, of course, but by definition, a good work of art can't be "depressing". What happens in the story might be depressing, the story might be depressing, but the experience of the work, if well-done, is not depressing.  I guess it's all connected to that old college lit term, "the fallacy of imitative form".  You see it in a lot of the bad media you asked about.  You don't show boredom in a story by being boring, you don't make something more "real" or "serious" by being unremittingly somber or earnestly glum.   When I watch or read stuff that goes in that direction, I use that stuff as examples of what not to do.

A: We had a chat about voice recently—specifically about how some writers’ works are enhanced when you’ve heard them speak thanks to how distinct their voices are. You’re pretty well known for your voice but do you ever give that any real thought while writing? Do you ever play around with how you’re ‘telling’ the story?

S: A little bit.  I do know - and I've heard you talk about this - that I'm always reading what I wrote aloud.  And when I read it aloud, I suppose I'm reading it in something like the voice I use when reading at a Noir at the Bar.  If there's something funny, I'll read it aloud with what I think is the appropriate comic timing.  You want to hear that and get a sense of how it'll sound to others.  And overall, doing that, reading your story aloud as you're writing it, is an important thing.  That's when you realize the rhythm may not sound quite as it sounds in your head.  In your head, your paragraph sounds perfect. Then when you read it aloud, it sounds far from perfect.  And with dialogue for sure.  I'm sure a lot of writers do this, but it helps to act out the voices and play around with that.  Definitely helps you get a sense of whether a conversation, however long or short, sounds real, sounds alive.

A: What about artistic envy (the healthy kind)? I read Steve Erickson’s Shadowbahn this year and I honestly was at a loss with how angry I was that I am not at that level just yet. Have you read anything this year that made you sort of hate the writer for making you feel that need to step up your game?

S: Tough question.  I'd say the book I read this year that I most wish I could write is a novel from 2001 by Mary Robison called Why Did I Ever.  It's about a woman who has a script writing job in Hollywood and two grown children, boyfriends, ex-boyfriends, non-romantic friends, and she reflects on all of them and her life in 527 short segments. That's how the novel is told.  All these little fragments that over the course of the book come together to form a clear picture of her sometimes harrowing, sometimes disappointing, sometimes laugh out loud amusing existence.  Memories, confrontations, jokes, anxieties, what's happening in her life in the present. Clear, striking language but always using the simplest means.  Nothing fancy or forced about the language, no convoluted sentences.  I love how she doesn't tell a traditional, continuous story and experiments with form but keeps you wanting to read. And how she's able to get so much depth and emotion and humor across with that simple lucid language.  The book's been out of print a long time, but there's apparently going to be a reissue in early 2018.

A: What’s next? Are you writing or researching? Anything else dropping in 2018?

S: In January, I have my 4th book coming out - Jack Waters.  You might call it a historical revenge thriller. It's set in 1904 and about a guy, Jack Waters, who lives in New Orleans. He earns his money by playing poker. Through his gambling skill, he has a comfortable life, but one day he kills a man he catches cheating against him. On the run, he flees Louisiana, and he moves to an island in the Caribbean. It seems he'll be able to resume his poker playing life, but he runs into problems with the island's rich and powerful. Frustrated, he joins a rebellion against the government, but his reason for joining the revolutionaries has nothing to do with politics. He has his own reason for joining the rebellion, based on revenge against someone high up in the country.

I'm excited that's coming out soon, and right now I'm working my way into a new book, just getting into it, about 30 pages in.  It's about a woman whose son has disappeared.  She herself may have killed the 11 year old, her husband may have killed him, or something else may have happened. That's what will come out as the story unfolds, and she's the person telling the story.  At the pace I work, I figure writing the book will take up 2018.

A: There's always the question of what book or movie you've seen or plan on seeing. How about we go with music? What have you been listening to while you write lately? 

S: I never listen to music while actually writing, but there are things I put on beforehand to get in the mood.  I like the group Au Revoir Simone, which I didn't know of till I saw them in the new Twin Peaks (going back to Lynch), and there's this song Track of Time by Anna von Hausswolff that played during the closing credits of the movie, Personal Shopper.  Sounds like I only listen to music I discover in TV series or movies, but that's not true. There's always Philip Glass.  Tangerine Dream and Underworld.  I do listen to a lot of music, going back a ways, with what you might call an electronica sound of some sort, I realize. That gets me in a dreamy mood for writing.  

Bouchercon 2017: Friday

With my panel behind me and a fairly relaxing evening at the bar under my belt, Friday showed great potential. It did not disappoint.

Friday October 13

10:00 Urban Noir: City Settings where, despite the light pollution, there is darkness

Susan Calder did a nice job navigating through a challenge for any moderator: a panelist who rambles and forgets there are four other people up there. The rest of the panel picked their spots well and made it an educational and entertaining hour. To wit:

Tim O’Mara: If you own you call his neighborhood Clinton; it you rent it’s Hell’s Kitchen.

Michael Harvey wondered why most psychological thrillers are set in the suburbs. Gary Dvorkin: The suburbs may have taken over noir as the cities Disney-fied themselves.

Tim O’Mara: The street people who left Times Square had to go somewhere. Many of them wound up in his neighborhood.

Tim O’Mara grew up in Long Island and knew his first black person in college. His daughter grows up amidst far more diversity and has far fewer fears.

Tim O’Mara: In New York, “Writer’s block” means 2 or 3 writers live there.

Michael Harvey: “Urban noir” is the accumulation of individuals’ small evils.

Michael Harvey: When asked what something in his book means, he says that’s up to the readers, who must filter everything through their own experience.

Michael Harvey: There’s great ambiguity in life and people are too interested in putting labels on things, especially in America. You don’t know anything until you understand you know nothing.

This provoked a general back and forth on how impulses we’ve all had are based on potentially misinterpreting situations can inform what our characters do. In a book things can happen you’d wait the extra beat for in real life.

Michael Harvey: Genre labels have gone too far. There’s only good writing and bad. That’s how books should be shelved: “Good Writing” and Shitty Writing.”

11:30 Sweet Revenge: Writers who have used revenge as a motivation for their work.

Well, damn, people. We write crime. Who hasn’t used revenge, both as a character’s motivation and as a way to get back at the jackass who took the last Cinnabon at the airport? Mike McCrary hit a good balance of darkness and wit in leading an excellent panel through more than its share of thought-provoking comments.

Stuart Neville: Revenge is a flawed concept. It never works and just feeds on itself.

Stuart Neville: Plot is the consequence of characters’ desires. Revenge is always a strong motivator and its results always have consequences.

Stuart Neville: Revenge as character motivation is almost always about self-worth. Could just be a matter of someone feeling shamed.

Michael Wiley: The best revenge may be for the person to always have to look over their shoulder. Used The Last Good Kiss as an example.

Stuart Neville: Revenge takes many forms. In Ratlines, it’s the hero telling Otto Skorczeny he knows Skorczeny is a phony.

Stuart Neville: Trading Places is a great revenge story.

Stuart Neville: The IRA now lets the highest-level informants alone because the press would be too bad.

Victoria Helen Stone: It’s easier for a betrayed spouse to project his or her anger and desire for revenge onto the other man/woman instead of onto the spouse, who is the person who actually betrayed them.

Stuart Neville: The Irish exchanged justice for peace and a lot of people were put off because acknowledged killers got away with it and ended up in good positions.

Elizabeth Heiter: A funny revenge story can work. (Especially is the person seeking revenge isn’t very good at it.)

2:00 Mysteries of Toronto: Get to know the blood-soaked streets on Toronto

Okay, so not as blood-soaked as we might have been led to believe. An all-Toronto panel spoke to a mostly Toronto audience about crime in—you guessed it—Toronto. While the panel was fun and informative, most of the comments were of a “you had to be there” nature. One that stuck out came during a discussion of media coverage, from John McFetridge: People involved in newsworthy events always remark on how incomplete the coverage was, yet people form firm opinions based on those accounts.

3:30 Government Agencies: Authors writing about military or other government agencies

Who says people associated with government agencies have no sense of humor? Lots of good insights delivered with tongues often planted firmly in cheeks. Joseph Finder set the tone by admitting he made a gun mistake in a book once.

Gwen Florio: That’s the worst mistake you can make.

Joseph Finder: Second worst. The worst is killing a dog.

J. J. Hensley: Bolt-Action Remedy is the best-selling biathlon mystery in the world. Unless one of you publishes one tonight.

Mike Maden (seconded by JJH): You don’t study counterfeit money to identify it; you study real money. That way you can testify about what’s wrong with the counterfeit, as there a million ways to do it wrong. (Original comment by Maden was intended to show why to read the best fiction in your genre.)

This was a good panel but I had to leave early to make it to

4:20 20 on the 20s: Scott Adlerberg

Scott spoke about his new book, Jack Waters. Scott is one of those guys you’re never quite sure what the next project will be like, and this one is another departure, a historical novel about a man who, quite frankly, doesn’t seem to give a fuck. If you’ve never had the pleasure of seeing Scott speak or read in person, rectify it. You’ll thank me.

4:40 20 on the 20s: Montreal Noir

Akashic continues its series of [Your City Here] Noir anthologies with Montreal, edited by John McFetridge and Jacques Filippi. A mix of stories, half of which written by Anglo authors and half by Francophones intended to capture the multicultural vibe of the city. McFetridge and Filippi know what they’re doing, the authors on hand knew what they were about, so it looks like another success for Akashic.

By then I was exhausted, and the serious drinking was yet to come. More on that later.

Agents? Who Needs Them?

Scott Adlerberg wrote an exceptional piece in the Mystery Writers of America New York Chapter’s blog on whether an author needed an agent in this time of flourishing small presses. I have nothing to add to what Scott said, and he said it better than I could have, anyway. In fact, he summed up my situation almost eerily well. What I’ll do today is share my personal experience in the context of his post.

(First the disclaimer: I am not recommending anyone follow my course. I’m not recommending you shouldn’t, either. It depends on your ambition relative to the industry.)

I can summarize my experience in the fields of agents and publishing succinctly: I have had three agents over the past fifteen years, and received contracts from two publishers. No agent has even gotten a contract for me.

That’s not because they were bad agents; far from it. In fact, it’s hard to imagine I would ever have received a contract if not for the invaluable self-editing tips Pam Strickler taught me. Barbara Braun showed me things about introducing characters I still use, and Bob Mecoy was generous with his insights into how the industry handled—or didn’t handle—writers such as myself. I am grateful to them all.

But neither of my contracts were a result of contacts initiated by them.

The original Stark House deal for Grind Joint came about because Charlie Stella read a draft, thought it would be good for them, and people don’t say “no” to Charlie Stella. To say he’s a force of nature is to make the phrase no longer a cliché, because—listen to me—Charlie Stella is like no other force of nature you’ve ever seen.

The Penns River series found a new home because—much to my surprise—I apparently had a bit of a profile. Maybe even buzz. True, a single bee in a boxcar, but Eric Campbell knew who I was, wanted to talk to me, and the process was pretty informal.

This is right about where those who have yet to land either an agent or a contract say, “See? It’s all about who you know.” To which I politely reply, paraphrasing my friend Jack Getze, “Horseshit.” I’ve been writing with intent to publish for almost twenty years, and got my first agent almost fifteen years ago. I paid my dues. Self-published two books before Grind Joint, then four more between contracts. That’s not how old boy networks operate.

Not to cover ground Scott already went over better than I’m likely to, but, like so many things in life, the answer to the question, “Do I need an agent?” is, “It depends.” No one wants to hear that. No one. We want some kind of direction and it’s not there. “Okay,” you say. “What does it depend on, smart ass?”

It depends.

If you want a foot in the door to a major New York publisher who will wine you and dine you and provide editorial, marketing, and distribution support, then, yes. You need an agent. The big New York operations don’t take unsolicited manuscripts. For them the slush pile may not be dead, but it’s in a hospice. Find an agent who knows how to deal with a big publisher. (This may be the one area where connections come in, as an editor will naturally be more likely to accept a manuscript from an agent with whom he or she has experience and trust.) Then you wait.

One the other hand, if a big New York house isn’t your goal, the agent may not be a big deal, he or she may be a hindrance. It’s no insult to say agents need to make a living, too, and 15% of the kinds of deals an independent publisher offers may not allow the agent to keep the doors open. This means the agent isn’t going to look at those houses for you, and that’s no insult, either. It’s life.

There’s another, more important, decision the author must make before he or she worries too much about an agent: the definition of success. Armed with that, deciding whether to look for an agent is a simple decision. (Not that discovering your personal definition of success is easy.) What’s that? You’ve decided you want to be a bestseller and need to learn how to get an agent who can help that to happen?

How the hell would I know?

(Thanks to Scott Adlerberg for his well-written and thought provoking article.)