I’m Not Thrilled

I used to love thrillers. Grew up reading them in what I think of as the Golden Age of the genre: Alistair MacLean, Ken Follett, and the master, Frederick Forsythe. To me, the crowning achievement in the history of thrillers is Forsythe’s Day of the Jackal, in which (not really a spoiler alert) the reader is kept on seat’s edge, even though he knows this is not how DeGaulle dies; what the hell happens? (The movie, starring Edward Fox as The Jackal, is just as riveting.)

More than any other genre, thrillers depend on suspension of the reader’s disbelief. Some would say it’s science fiction that carries this burden, but in sci-fi you can create a world with your own rules. So long as you stay within the rules you set up, you’re fine. Need a spacecraft to fly at several times the speed of light and still get radio communications? No problem. Life expectancy of 150 years? Child’s play. Be fair with the reader and you can get away with just about anything. (Play fair, though. Sci-fi fans can be vindictive SOBs.)

Thriller writers have to live in the world we do, with all the limitations of the laws of physics, yet still keep you thinking, “Yeah…yeah, he could do that.” MacLean can have a handful of commandoes who’d never met before parachute into a mountain-top German compound to rescue a captured British general and get him back to England safely, with one spy on the team and another back at headquarters, and the reader thinks, “Damn. These guys are good.” (This is the basic storyline of Where Eagles Dare, another great book and movie combo.)

Not anymore. Modern thriller writers aren’t interested in working around the suspension of disbelief; they’re writing for a public that will believe anything. I was asked to review such a book last week. It hit all the major food groups that make modern thrillers what they are(n’t):

· Protagonists with bizarre backstories. In this, the male lead was raised as a sociology experiment, in a box. Alone. Swear to God. His female partner has a freakish gift for seeing patterns in data and images. And she has a serious martial arts background.

· Of course, they have sex.

· Gruesome levels of detail. No one has a pair of binoculars; they have Nikon Prostaff 12x25 binoculars. Julbo Micropores sunglasses. Two pages are spent describing a character getting out of the car, removing something from the trunk, and walking thirty feet to a motel room. True, she’s taking hi-tech counter-surveillance measures, but Jesus Christ, two pages? Later we’re treated to a page-and-a-half of the hero hitting someone. Once. Yes, with a ruler, but, still.

· The bad guys work for a private company to which much government security and intelligence work has been outsourced. (Okay, I believe that part.) They have an uncanny ability not only to track our heroes, but to get where they’re going first, even when our heroes didn’t know where they were going until they left.

· The scenario is, of course, apocalyptic. The other bad guys—not the ones who are chasing our heroes, who hired them in the first place and are pretending to be good guys—aren’t going to steal a bomb or sabotage a reactor; they stole a reactor.

· The puppetmaster who sets this world-wide operation in motion leaves obscure clues our heroes unfailingly interpret correctly, and in the nick of time. Everyone ends up where he wanted them to go, and does what he wanted them to do, even though the puppetmaster died before the two protags got together.

The end result is a little like The DaVinci Code meets Terminator 2.

To be fair, the author pulls this off pretty well. It is explained why several groups of killers are so easily dispatched. Sure, they’re incompetent, but he tells why such boobs were sent. The writing isn’t nearly so mind-numbingly repetitious as Dan Brown’s. When [author’s name redacted] allows himself to write, and not worry about contemporary conventions of the genre, things zip along nicely.

I’ve tried to be careful not to spoil the plot for anyone who comes across this book; it’s not really a fair review. These kinds of things are not my cup of tea. Anyone who has read the book will recognize it. If you enjoyed it and my grousing harshes your mellow, my apologies.

Thrillers used to be about suspense, and how the story layered it so it built at a pace to hold the audience. Now they blow shit up and kill people, hoping against hope things move so fast, or are so impenetrable to read, there’s no time to realize what’s being described makes no sense.

Maybe this bothers me so much right now because the day I finished reading this book, The Beloved Spouse and I watched the 2011 version of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, with Gary Oldman and Colin Firth. More of a suspense story than a thriller, I still spent more time on the edge of my seat during those two hours than during the entire time reading [book title redacted].

Is it just me being more of a grouch than usual? Does anyone else think we need a new name for the thriller genre? “Horseshit” comes to mind, but I’ve been wrong before.

Enter Nick Forte

The proofread/clean-up/light edit for the PI novel I’ll make available for Kindle at month’s end is complete. Took me six weeks and included removing a chapter, adding a chapter, and cutting almost two thousand words from what I’d thought was a tightly-written 74,000-word manuscript. I take that as a good sign, that something written several years ago and edited at my then-agent’s behest didn’t measure up to my current standards. What that says about my standards will be up to any readers I accumulate.

I’m pushing this story out in advance of the November 21 release of Grind Joint for a reason. My first novels—two that will never see the light of day, and three more currently waiting on my hard drive—were about Chicago private investigator Nick Forte. Forte grew up in Western Pennsylvania and went to Northwestern for a music degree. Became a teacher in the Chicago Public Schools, then a cop when he decided he’d rather be armed and deal with criminals than defenseless in a room full of high school kids. Liked the work more than the discipline and drifted into becoming a PI.

Forte is divorced, with a young daughter he adores. He has separation and guilt issues, which have not led him into a bottle, but have created problems of their own. One way or another, he’s drawn to cases that involve parents and children, which not only rubs his nerve raw, but become increasingly violent. It’s wearing him down.

While drafting the outline for Grind Joint, I realized Forte could be from the same small town where the story takes place. Even better, his mother is the sister of Grind Joint’s main character, and the two cousins are close. Forte then became a secondary, but pivotal, character in Grind Joint. I’m hoping this earlier story will flesh him out a little, even though the events of A Small Sacrifice take place several years before Grind Joint. Anyone who reads both will see how far he’s slipped. Hopefully, they’ll want to read the other Forte novels to see how it happened.

Grind Joint News

The business trip to [location redacted] for [organization redacted] to [purpose redacted] is complete, the jet lag is pretty much over, and it’s time to get back in the saddle again. Let’s start with a good news / bad news combo:

Good news:

Stark House has announced my first physical, you can buy it in stores, it has pages and a cover and everything book, Grind Joint, will be released in November, in time to solve all your Christmas shopping dilemmas. (Unless the intended recipient has issues with bad language and violence, in which case you might want to buy them something else. Just not a cat mystery. I hate cat mysteries. I’d rather buy my mother a large-print copy of The Cold Six Thousand than a book where a [obscenity redacted] cat solves a murder.) I don’t have an actual drop date yet, but I’ll be sure to let you know, which brings us to the

Bad news:

With A Small Sacrifice available for Kindle in August and Grind Joint coming out in November, I’ll be even more insufferable than usual with my blatant and unconscionable self-promotion. The surest way to avoid this is to buy as many copies as you can of each book as quickly as you can, until I’ve made enough to pay for the exorbitantly expensive washer and dryer The Beloved Spouse bought while I was away in [vacation destination redacted]. Then I’ll chill.

Charlie Stella, MFA

By far the best thing to have happened to me as a result of becoming involved in the community of crime writers is the people I have met. More friendly acquaintances than I can name here, and a large handful I hope I am not flattering myself to refer to as friends. I mean no disrespect to any of them when I single out Charlie Stella today.

Those active in the crime fiction community—readers or writers—know about Charlie. Critically acclaimed, not infrequently compared to George V. Higgins, Charlie is the gold standard for organized crime fiction. What those who have not been fortunate enough to get to know him are unaware of is, in a community as close-knit and supportive as crime fiction writers, no one is more supportive and genuinely happy about the success of others as Charlie Stella. His blog (Temporary Knucksline) is filled with political musings, reviews, opera excerpts, rants about the Buffalo Bills and New York Rangers, and tireless encouragement and recognition of other writers, from crime fiction stalwarts to his fellow writers at Southern New Hampshire University’s limited residency MFA program. It is no exaggeration to say I would not have a book contract had it not been for Charlie’s intervention.

It’s the MFA bit that is of interest today. Charlie graduated over the weekend, and was selected by his peers to deliver the graduation address. Middle fifties, with eight critically acclaimed novels under his belt, Charlie Stella went back to school while keeping his day job to get a degree. That, amici, takes stugotts.

Congratulations, mio amico, for having done what few would contemplate; of those who do consider it, far fewer will make the attempt. Your considerable gifts as a writer pale in comparison to your enthusiasm and generosity of spirit. Thanks and congratulations are also in order for the Principessa, Ann Marie, the resident Muse at Casa Stella.

Everyone who knows you is happy today, not just because of what you have done, but who you are. I’d pay money to be a fly on the wall of the first class you teach. I don’t care who they are or what they think they know, they ain’t ready.

To Their Own Selves Be True

The Beloved Spouse and I recently watched the second of Robert Downey’s Sherlock Holmes films, A Game of Shadows. I kind of liked the first Downey/Holmes effort, but this was bad. Transformers bad. Full of frenetic action that served no evident purpose other than to disguise holes in the plot, at its end the movie made no sense. Say what one will about the original stories by Conan Doyle, they made sense in the universe he created.

This got me to wondering about why this film so offended me, and I think I have the answer. The character played by Robert Downey is not Sherlock Holmes. He has a few of the elements Holmes possesses—superior powers of ratiocination, Victorian England, a restless and probing mind—but none of his personality. Doyle’s Holmes is very much a lazy man, who can rarely be roused from his flat unless the game is afoot. He would not kiss a woman on the mouth in public—not even Irene Adler—and invite her to dinner. He is not a raconteur. He is not Chuck Norris, beating half a dozen armed men into submission at a time. Sherlock Holmes lives very much in his mind. The external world exists, to him, as a trough from which he may feed that ever-hungry mind when so inclined.

The major fault here is a death of creativity, and an excess of sloth. Why take a character who has come to be so real in many minds people often ask to be shown 221B Baker Street when touring London (there is no such address) and change him to fit your desire to make a action film? I thought of two options in the car within five minutes, both of which provide space for Sherlock Holmes and Watson to play important roles: the new lead can be Holmes’s cousin; or, even better, the new protagonist is Holmes’s father’s unacknowledged bastard, who has Holmes’s gifts but none of his reserve. Opportunities for crime solving, action, and conflict with Holmes abound, but no. Too much like work, I guess.

(The same weekend we also watched The Other Guys, with Mark Wahlberg and Will Ferrell. This was at least as stupid as A Game of Shadows, but I laughed my ass off. In retrospect, The Other Guys made it clear from the title sequence this was a satire of the kind of movie it purported to be. Everything was established as a caricature of what it represented, and they pulled it off.)

The corruption of the Holmes character reminds me of what I find so distasteful in Robert Altman’s adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s masterpiece, The Long Goodbye. I can live with Altman’s different context, disparaging Chandler’s idea of the hero. Hell, even Marlowe knows he’s a man out of his time. What I can’t forgive is the ending, where Marlowe goes to Mexico, finds Terry Lennox, and kills him. Up till then, Altman and Elliot Gould’s portrayal of Marlowe is a depiction of where someone of Marlowe’s code of ethics often ends up: disillusioned, broke, more or less going through the motions. The ending is a repudiation not just of Chandler’s vision—which is fine; reasonable men may differ—but of Marlowe’s character. The point Altman tried to make is well taken and valid; why not create a different, similar, character to do it?

I understand movies are a different storytelling medium. I’d never consider converting anything I’d written into a screenplay because I don’t understand the mechanics well enough. Still, what successful adaptations do best is capture character. I once spent a weekend watching Get Shorty, then immediately reading the book because I was so taken with how closely Scott Frank followed the novel. Boy howdy, was I surprised. Lots of changes. What he got right were the people: Chili, Harry Zimm, Karen Flores, Ray Barboni, all, dead on. That’s why the movie worked.

If you want to change the character, change the name. Don’t pass him or her off as someone else. Aside from the fact it doesn’t work very well, you owe it to the author as a creative artist yourself. Characters like Holmes and Marlowe (and even Chili Palmer) occupy a unique space, less than real, more than fictional. Respect that. Working around it isn’t that difficult.

(Don’t even get me started on this whole “vampires walking around in broad daylight” business.)

Another Use For Blogs

Readers discover authors all different ways. Word of mouth is always good, as advice from a friend is far more trustworthy than promotional material written by a stranger with a financial interest in getting you to buy the book. Critics may have axes to grind. (They often think of them as crosses to bear, which is just as bad.) The Internet has opened up a new avenue for readers to become familiar with writers: blogs.

Blogs introduce readers to writers two ways: as a reference—not unlike the old word of mouth method—and directly. Let’s look at both.

It’s safe to say this is not the only blog you read. (Christ, I hope not.) If you are a regular reader of any blog, you come to develop a rapport with the writer (or writers, if it’s a collaborative blog.) This doesn’t have to be a one-way street. I’ve developed several acquaintances with blog contributors after becoming known to them through comments I’ve left. Over time, you’ll get to know what they look for in a book, who they read, and which books they recommend. Once you trust them, you’re more likely to have faith in their recommendations. If they read Lee Child, you might like to try him. Whoever. They become a trusted source.

The other way blogs can help you is through direct contact. I’ve lost track of how many writers I read, and enjoyed, because I came across them on a blog. Their blog posts were entertaining and intelligent. They weren’t relentless self-promoters, but supporters of reading and writing in general. I liked how they used the language, what they talked about, how they described their writing and process. Basically, it occurred to me, if I like what they’re writing here so much, I bet I’ll like their book. Rarely have I been wrong.

You’re aware of social media. Pay attention to who writes what, and how. You never know what you’ll find out there.

What about you? Have you discovered writers new to you after reading their posts in a blog?

Opening the Drawer

May was spent on graduations. The Sole Heir graduated from St. Mary’s College of Maryland; Niece the Younger from Green Mountain High School in Colorado. Now it’s June. Coffee break’s over, back on my head.

I’ve taken summers off from writing the past couple of years. It’s a great way to recharge batteries by reading, watching baseball, and letting ideas ferment. The current project (working title: Resurrection Mall) is on hiatus, but I’ll keep my hand in on other projects.

Chicago PI Nick Forte plays a pivotal supporting role in Grind Joint, which comes out next spring from Stark House. Forte was not created for Grind Joint. I’ve written stories featuring him, off and on, for almost twenty years. He is my original character, originally conceived tongue-in-cheek, who gradually took on a life of his own. Four Nick Forte novels have moldered on my hard drive for several years, not counting a couple that qualify as the experimental attempts at novels most writers have and will never allow to see the light of day.

Since Forte makes an appearance in Grind Joint, I thought it would be nice to bring the character back in my next book. I tried after completing Grind Joint, but I’d been away from him too long, and the voice had left me. Still, I wanted something of him to be available when Grind Joint appears in 2014, so I’m spending the summer polishing some of his original stories for Kindle release. The first, A Small Sacrifice, will be out sometime this summer.

Sacrifice received several encouraging rejections when an agent circulated it about five years ago. It’s interesting to see how things have held up in my opinion, some far better than others. The biggest difference—aside from the first person narrator—is in how my current writing is much tighter, even though the books are longer. A Small Sacrifice is close to 76,000 words; I doubt the Kindle version will be 75,000. Things I now trust the reader to understand, minor redundancies, and things I can live without are being excised a word, sentence, or paragraph at a time. It’s a good writing exercise.

I hope to have all four existing Forte manuscripts available by the time I’m ready to start the novel that will follow Resurrection Mall. The current plan is for it to be a Forte story; we’ll see. The next couple of summers getting back into his head should tell me where I want to take the series, even if it’s into retirement. I may not have this summer as off as I usually do, but at least I’ll be efficient enough to kill two birds with one stone.