Welcome back for the conclusion of my conversation with Shamus Award-winning author James D.F. Hannah. Latecomers can catch up with what happened last week here.
OBAAT: Interesting thing
about your Lee Child “airport reads” comment. People tend to use that term as
dismissive, but there’s a unique skill set to writing that kind of book and
still have it hold the interest of people like us who expect more than a way to
kill time. No less an authority than Leonard Bernstein, possibly the greatest
musician this country ever produced, once said his greatest frustration was
that he never wrote a hit song. He admired those who could crank them out and
had nothing dismissive to say about their work. To me, if pure entertainment is
something Bernstein held such respect for, I’m not going to knock it.
JDFH: What Bernstein did
was obviously high art. It was important, and we assigned a particular value to
it. But it was necessarily of greater value than a Top 40 song? The question
becomes what do you value, doesn't it? Are we creating for the ages or are we
filling the down time in other's lives? We study Shakespeare as a great artist,
but we forget he wrote for the common man of his time, and filled his plays
with not just monumental monologues and imagery, but also with dirty jokes and
double entendres. Cornell Woolrich and Chester Himes were pulp novelists in
their days, but now we discuss the themes and their importance to modern crime
fiction.
As always, it goes back to
Elmore Leonard, who wrote more effortlessly than almost any author. What's his
quote? "If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it."
Leonard is one who straddles
that line between pure entertainment and critical respect. Obviously no one's
ever done this particular thing better than Leonard, though. No less than
Martin Amis called Leonard "a literary genius," and I've always
thought it was because he brought a great joy to the page. He loved
entertaining people. He loved the way words could sing on a page. The rhythm of
patter and the sudden burst of violence. There was never a greater message he
was striving for than to keep you reading to the end of the page.
This could almost roll back to a
conversation we've had, about politics inherent to various novel genres.
There's the apocryphal quote by Samuel Goldwyn about movies and "If you
want to send a message, call Western Union." What are your thoughts on the
role of artistry and "messages"?
OBAAT: Elmore Leonard was
a genius at what he did so I’m going to set him aside here. I believe Goldwyn’s
alleged comment is what someone would say who cared about the bottom line and
nothing else; an MBA comment. We see it all the time in television. I’m old
enough to remember when commercials fell between segments of programs; now it
seems as though they drop in a little programming to fill the void between
commercials. I’m sure it was always this way, but they’ve now dropped any
pretense.
I turned off the movie Maestro
half an hour in, in large part because it too overtly tried to be “artistic” to
the detriment of telling a story. That doesn’t mean I don’t like a little art
in my entertainment, but it needs to be subservient to the story. Clint
Eastwood is a master at this. Unforgiven and Mystic River are
great stories he tells with artistic directorial touches that never interfere
with the enjoyment of those who aren’t interested in them.
Speaking of Mystic River,
Dennis Lehane is the master of telling a story that has a message. In addition
to Mystic River, The Given Day, and especially his newest, Small
Mercies, there are definite messages that the reader can choose to ignore
if all they care about is the story.
That’s the art of it: to send
the message without writing a screed. My early Forte novels are entertainment
built off premises I thought were worth exploring, even if the final product
was different from the original intent; The
Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of was supposed to be about the memorabilia
industry. Once I started writing Penns River I began to feel as though I needed
to speak for towns like those I grew up in. I also knew that if the story alone
wouldn’t hold readers’ attention, any point I wanted to make would be lost, so
I tried to fit that aspect in between the lines as much as possible.
Now I’m more inclined to take a
“message” and find a plot I can craft a story around to describe it. Bad
Samaritan looks into misogyny and men’s rights activists; White
Out deals with white supremacy; The
Spread is built on the corrosive properties of the ever-increasing
gambling culture; the new Forte, Off
the Books, is largely about human trafficking. While not nearly as good
as Lehane at this, I like to think if you asked someone what each of those
books are about, most will describe the story, but some will mention the
underlying message. That’s what I’m shooting for.
You’re no stranger to this. The
Henry Malone books exist in a culture of poverty and institutional neglect that
is often overlooked, and you do a wonderful job of creating imperfect yet
empathetic characters. Is that what you set out to do, or do you find your just
went to write a story and these qualities couldn’t help but come out?
JDFH: Eastwood is such a
great reference point for this, because I've read a lot about his directorial
style—basically keep the camera in focus and trust the actors to do their
job—and his trust begins with the writers to deliver a story and strong
characters. There are several anecdotes where he hired on to direct a movie and
rather than film the script filtered through the notes of various executives,
he went back to the writer's first draft, to the purest form of the vision, and
that's what he made.
As someone who just read Off
the Books, I can see where there's a message in the book, but it never gets
in the way of the story. I think that's important, because when creators in any
medium forget the primary goal is to entertain, then you end up with something
akin to those educational films from our youth, the ones that warned us about
safe driving or the evils of drug use.
When I started work on Midnight
Lullaby back in 2014 (Christ but has it actually been ten years?), what
was important to me was putting on the page an Appalachian experience I
understood. I was a journalist for many years in southern West Virginia, and I
knew it was a complex region that couldn't be defined in broad strokes. Good,
bad, or indifferent, Appalachia isn't just Hillbilly Elegy—a trash book
that oversimplifies economic and cultural struggles in an area that has
suffered at the hands of others while also being its own worst enemy. You're
talking more than a century of complex factors that have played into Appalachia
being what it is today, and I wanted whatever I put on the page to reflect
that. Politics, economics, religion, all of these things have made Appalachia
what it is today, and you have to be able to talk about that if you're going to
talk about the region, the same way writers like S.A. Cosby or Eli Cranor or
Attica Locke talk about the changing face of the rural south.
This said, yes, story is first
and foremost in every book. But I never wanted the characters to be
cookie-cutter; they're influenced by environment, but there's always more to
people. Bobbi Fisher in Midnight Lullaby, the family of marijuana
growers in Complicated
Shadows, Crash in The Righteous
Path and the later Malone books, the pregnant couple in Because
the Night—they're all fighting to exist on their own terms, against a
world that wants them to be nothing more than someone else's expectations.
Talking about not comparing
yourself to other writers, but does anyone do this type of thing better than
Daniel Woodrell? Books like Winter's
Bone or Tomato
Red are filled with heartbreaking characters trapped under generations
of disadvantage, but they remain full-throated individuals with hopes and
dreams and aspirations, who refuse to be explained away by others.
On a side note: If you haven't
seen the movie American Fiction, I can't recommend it enough. It's very
much about the tendency of culture to reduce people to stereotypes, and it
tells this story while also exploring some fascinating family dynamics. Great,
great stuff.
# # #
That was a lot more fun than I
expected, and I expected a lot. Look for more of these in the future.
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