The Longest Day

One of my proudest achievements as a father was introducing The Sole Heir to The Longest Day. It was Memorial Day weekend, 2003. She was twelve and I’d decided she needed to know a little more of what the holiday was about. She might like it, might not, but I thought it was important.

A year later was the sixtieth anniversary of the Normandy landings, and the American Film Institute Silver Theater showed The Longest Day on a big screen, one show only, Sunday afternoon, June 6. There were fewer than thirty people there. We were two of them; she’d asked me to take her. The ticket taker, an elderly gentleman of probably Korean War vintage, motioned me over when TSH went to the ladies’ room.

“This is a good thing you’re doing, bringing your daughter like this.”

“It’s better than you know, buddy,” I said. “She asked to come.”

HDNet movies is showing The Longest Day in February, so I watched it again. A bittersweet viewing, as I made the mistake of watching it a few days after The Beloved Spouse and I binge watched Band of brothers over the previous weekend. As powerful as it is, The Longest Day doesn’t hold up to a comparison.

Leave aside the special effects, bloodless violence, and sanitary language. Those are the state of what moviemakers could do, and get away with, in 1962, and aren’t the problem, anyway. What doesn’t hold up are the things that could have been done better and had been done better at the time.

The first hour is basically an exposition dump, characters talking to other characters about things both of them already know, or pretending to speak to another character when they’re really speaking to the audience to make damn sure we get it. I could almost understand it today, nearly seventy years after the event, but almost everyone who saw the movie when it came out would have been familiar with the circumstances. It had happened only eighteen years in the past, well within their personal experience. Several of the key characters worked on the filming. This was not ancient history. Even if it had been, it could have been handled in a less ham-handed fashion than to have John Wayne tell a junior officer, “I don't think I have to remind you that this war has been going on for almost 5 years. Over half of Europe has been overrun and occupied. We're comparative newcomers. England's gone through a blitz with a knife at her throat since 1940. I'm quite sure that they, too, are impatient and itching to go. Do I make myself clear?” followed by, “Three million men penned up on this island all over England in staging areas like this. We're on the threshold of the most crucial day of our times. Three million men out there, keyed up, just waiting for that big step-off. We aren't exactly alone.” Please.

The other issue should probably qualify as forgivable under the caveat two paragraphs above—sign of the times—but it’s still jarring to see the upbeat music and spirit at the end. Deaths are shown, but glossed over, forgotten as soon as the camera moves away. Yes, it’s only one day and time is of the essence, but the only sign anyone feels something for a dead comrade is when Robert Mitchum sees Jeffrey Hunter shot while trying to blow up a roadblock. Even then he moves directly on to encouraging the next man. He has to, it’s not a big deal, but at least Mitchum does it with a little melancholy. One can sense his eyes wanting to drift back in the direction of Hunter’s body.

Maybe I would not have noticed these things so much had we not seen Band of Brothers so recently. Next time we’ll examine the differences.

Meet Jim “Evil J.” Winter, creator of Cleveland Detective Nick Kepler

Jim Winter’s newest e-book, The Compleat Kepler, is a compilation of short PI stories he began writing around ten years ago.  It’s nice to see an author make available early work. First, it shows a degree of confidence, as a lot of writers (musicians, actors, politicians) like to walk away from their early accomplishments. It’s also nice to have these stories as reference points to see how the author has evolved and grown—or not—over time. My appreciation of the three most important early influences on me grew greatly after I read their earlier work. (Raymond Chandler’s Collected Stories, Ed McBain’s Learning to Kill, and Elmore Leonard’s The Complete Western Stories.)

The Compleat Kepler is an entertaining anthology, with a hero who finds himself in situations many fictional PIs have confronted, who devises other than expected ways to resolve them. Kepler is not an antihero; neither is he Chandler’s knight errant. The combination is intriguing, and should be enough to whet your appetite for more of Jim’s work. Road Rules made my Best Reads list for 2011; Northcoast Shakedown has been on my TBR list for too long; I need to get to it, as I know I’ll like it. How do I know? I’ve liked everything else Winter has done.

It’s my pleasure to give Jim Winter a little time to introduce himself personally to OBAAT readers.

Dana asked me, “What got you into crime fiction?” I suppose that goes to the heart of The Compleat Kepler, since all the stories served to flesh out the character of Nick Kepler. The earliest published story is “A Walk in the Rain.” The most recent is from 2009, “Love Don’t Mean a Thing.” There is another, a novella, in draft form that I’ll release in a later collection.

The first three stories in this collection were my introduction to crime fiction. I wrote “Race Card” some time in 1999, “Valentine’s Day” about a year later, and “A Walk in the Rain” in mid-2001. As you read them, you can tell I was learning. I’d written before this. What I’d written was science fiction with a fairly large cast. Many who read what I’d written expected that I would go professionally into SF.

But my SF roots are in film: Star Trek and Star Wars, Terminator and Independence Day. I didn’t want to just parrot what I’d seen on television and in the movies. I especially was disappointed with the Star Wars prequels. At the same time, I had this character of Nick Kepler around for several years. Occasionally, I would dust off an old manuscript and play around with him. By the time I decided to get serious about writing, I’d already burned out on SF.

But crime was different. Crime put people at their worst in the most dire circumstances. You don’t need a monster from the depths of the seas of Zanzibar 7. There are plenty of human monsters walking the Earth in your neighborhood today.

Also, one of my earliest influences was Robert B. Parker. Parker gets a lot of criticism leveled at him for his work from the mid-1980’s on, but those first eight or nine novels were a primer on style and plotting. Parker had a way of using minimal language for description, the way a he could find a key word describing a character and hanging it on that person until he or she had a name. From there, I went to The Maltese Falcon, and developed a deeper appreciation of the PI novel.

Even though I cut my teeth on SF, I wondered if I could handle crime fiction. Was this something I wanted a career at? Then, at the tail end of the nineties, someone brought to my attention Blue Murder, an electronic zine and press so pulpy you got splinters just typing in the URL. Blue Murder closed its doors not long after I discovered it, but there was more. There was Thrilling Detective. And there was Plots With Guns. And there was Judas. I saw these as an opportunity. So I began writing. And submitting. When I wrote “A Walk in the Rain” one rainy April night and submitted it later that week, I had no idea Neil Smith would jump on it.

That was almost twelve years ago. It’s been a helluva ride.

(Editor’s note: I agree completely with his assessment of Robert B. Parker. His early books are also on the TBR list, as a combination of pleasure and education.)

For your copies of Jim work cited here, follow the links:

The Compleat Kepler

Road Rules

Northcoast Shakedown

Perfect Hatred

Leighton Gage has carved a nice niche for himself with his Chief Inspector Mario Silva series of mysteries set in Brazil. Gage knows how to use Brazil’s exotic beauty to his benefit, deftly juxtaposing it with extremes of wealth and poverty and corruption at all levels. The public officials and politicians who aren’t corrupt are as venal as their peers anywhere else. Gage’s gift is an ability to expose and explore all Brazil has to offer to a writer of crime fiction, while allowing the love of his adopted country to live in every line.

The United States has no equivalent of the Brazilian Federal Police. Their jurisdiction is nation-wide, and supersedes local authority. This allows them to open investigations on their own initiative, and gives Gage carte blanche with his plots, as there is no crime in Brazil in which the federals may not take an interest.

His newest book, Perfect Hatred, allows Gage to take full advantage of the breadth of the Brazilian federal police, Silva’s skills, and the devotion his team has for each other. The book begins with a horrific terrorist bombing; the bomb in a baby carriage, its intent disguised by the bomber’s use of a real baby to cover the explosive. In a province hundreds of miles away, a popular political candidate is shot to death at a televised campaign appearance, on the eve of defeating the incumbent. Silva’s team is split between the two and he is tasked with focusing on the assassination when his instinct is to concentrate on the bombing, as there is reason to believe this was not an isolated incident.

As if Silva isn’t busy enough, a high-ranking criminal who is about to go away forever has sworn vengeance on the prosecutor and cop who put him there; the cop is Silva.

Laid out like that, the book sounds like a hare-brained modern thriller, where the stakes are continuously raised and bodies pile up. (“Now it’s personal.”) This would likely be the case in the hands of a lesser writer. Gage has bigger plans, and better chops. The situation teeters on the brink of becoming out of control; Silva never does. He may be frustrated, angry, and even scared, but he’s the right man at the right time. He has personal problems and ghosts that affect him, but he’s not the stereotypical tormented series protagonist. He’s a good man under intense pressure from multiple sides, and he handles the situation with grace and as much humanity as he can muster. Not perfect and not always on time to be a savior, he’s the glue that holds everything in Gage’s fictional universe together. If his squad is the Brazilian equivalent of Ed McBain’s 87^th Precinct (the analogy that comes most often to mind), Silva is Gage’s Steve Carella.

The writing is perfect for the story, as it always is. Gage is of the school where the writer’s goal is to be as unobtrusive as possible, where he scored highest marks. Nothing will jump out at a first time reader, though those who have several Silva stories under their belts will start to recognize subtle touches that are Gage’s own. He understands suspense is the building of tension and violence is the release of at least some of it. He also trusts his situation, characters, and talent not to beat you over the head with how bad things are. If you don’t feel it on your own, you’re reading the wrong books.

Perfect Hatred may well be the best of an excellent series that gets better book by book. It is not to be missed.

Wayne Gretzky on Writing

Filmmaker Kevin Smith (Clerks, Dogma, Chasing Amy) doesn’t get a lot of run in the crime fiction community. This makes sense, since Smith doesn’t do crime fiction. His book, Tough Shit: Life Advice from a Fat, Lazy Slob Who Did Good, in addition to being hilarious and wildly inappropriate, shows a level of introspection and self-awareness not expected someone whose most famous written line (after “I’m not even supposed to be here”) may be, “Hey, try not to suck any dick on the way through the parking lot!”

The reason Smith’s book receives mention here is for the advice he gives writers. Well, everybody. It’s highly relevant for writers, and this is a writing blog. (When it’s a blog at all; I really have to get better about this.) So, now it’s writing advice.

First, the seminal bit: The way to happiness is to figure out what you most love to do and find a way to make money at it. By this measurement, Smith is a very happy man. I took his advice before I ever heard of Kevin Smith, but wasn’t able to pull it off, in large part because, when figuring out what it is you most love to do, it really really really helps if you have a talent for it. The principle is sound. It’s what everyone who dreams of making a living as a writer wants to do, or else they wouldn’t be writers. There are easier, and less tenuous, ways to make a living.

How Smith made it work for him is where Tip Number Two comes in. It’s from hockey great Wayne Gretzky. His father taught him from an early age the secret to playing hockey: Don’t go where the puck is. Go where it’s going to be.

This does not require psychic powers. It does require paying attention. (In Gretzy’s case it also involves indescribable amounts of talent.) Writers know this intuitively. You can’t wade through the discussion forum in Crimespace and not trip over people trying to figure out what will be The Next Big Thing™, and how they can get there first.

Here’s the problem: no one knows. Don’t expand the analogy too far. Gretzky’s not talking about where the puck is going to be in half an hour. He’s concerned about when the puck will next be in a place where he can get to it, and goes there. It’s good to be the first one there—especially if you’re not any bigger than Gretzky—and it’s an even bigger help to have freakish peripheral vision, and know what to do with it.

My point is, too many writers try to create success by outguessing public taste and coming up with The Next Big Thing™. It doesn’t work that way. J.K. Rowling didn’t figure to do something no one had done before—essentially create her own niche—and have it lead to unimaginable wealth. She had a series of stories about a fairly dorky kid who’s also a wizard, and this whole shadow world of wizards that intersects with ours without becoming encumbered by it. In retrospect, it was brilliant. At the time, she just hoped to get off the dole.

The trick is to know how quickly you can move, and to know which places you can’t get to in time. Gretzky wasn’t looking to invent a whole new game; he wanted to do the same things everyone else in hockey wanted to do—get the puck in the net—and he had his own unique way of doing it. You don’t have to create a whole new genre like Rowling did; doing what you do well, in your own unique way, through incremental movements, is the way almost all successes are made. (Think of how many times you’ve heard people who seem to burst upon the scene say, “It took me twenty years to become an overnight success.”)

What really set Gretzky apart, and will work in any field, was his willingness to make others better. He scored 894 regular-season goals in his career; Number Two is Gordie Howe, with 801. Think about that: Gretzky scored 10% more goals than the second greatest goal scorer in the history of the game. It’s as if Barry Bonds had hit 831 home runs. (One look at Gretzky should put to rest any thoughts of chemical enhancement.)

With all those goals, it’s in assists where Gretzky made his greatest mark, with 1,963; second is Ron Francis, with 1,249, That’s a 36% difference between Gretzky and the second greatest assist man in history. (Bonds would have had to hit 1,027 homers to surpass Aaron by a similar percentage. His head would have exploded by 900.)

Help other writers. That doesn’t mean to become a selfless mensch who places the promotion of others above his own aspirations. The two are not mutually exclusive; it’s not a zero-sum game. Small kindnesses you do your peers—a favorable write-up in your blog, posting a (sincerely) good review in Amazon or Goodreads, linking to their stuff in Facebook, whatever—builds up goodwill not just with the direct beneficiary, but with those you helped enlighten. You’ll have more fun, learn a lot, and may well be in a position to receive some of the same when your book comes out. Pay it forward. It’s good for the career and it’s good for the soul. Nourish and enjoy others whenever you can, and in so doing you’ll nourish and enjoy yourself more than you expected.

It’s the right, and smart, thing to do. It’s not like you’re going to get rich.

Gaelic Karma

My life has a tendency to balance out, for which I am more often grateful than frustrated. During my tenure at Castle Voldemort, I once received a nice bonus at work. Several years later, during a stint playing in a community band, I decided it was time to buy a new trumpet. Within a few weeks another windfall came to me, almost exactly what the horn would cost. That’s how I roll.

I should have expected as much when The Beloved Spouse and I failed to score any autographs for our copy of Books To Die For at Bouchercon. With thirty-plus authors ready to sign, we waited for the line to thin before queuing up. Little did we know demand for signatures would be so great most of the authors had to leave for other commitments by the time we got within hailing distance of the signing area, and we bailed ourselves. So it goes.

The Sole Heir has somewhat better karma. Things tend to drop right for her. Today’s tale shows how her good fortune balanced things out for me, without her even knowing about it.

Last week was my birthday. (I’m now in what I call my Ketchup Year: 57.) She bought me a book from my Amazon wish list (Down These Green Streets, so there’s a Declan Burke angle here, too), but, as she told me during the unwrapping, there was a story behind it.

She had the choice of buying the book new, or used. Daughter of a fledgling author, she opted for new, thinking new is better for a gift, and the authors get paid. When it arrived, she noticed it lacked the sheen a new trade paperback has, and the edges were less than crisp. The pages had obviously been turned. This was not a new book, and she was not amused. Short on time before my birthday, she was about to send it back, but thumbed through it first.

Turns out someone at Amazon made a mistake: she’d scored an autographed copy. Ten contributors had signed, including Declan Hughes, Colin Bateman, and Ian Ross. (We’re still decoding the others.) She gave it to me as is, with the offer to swap it for a new one if I preferred.

Like hell. They’ll pry this copy from my cold, dead fingers.

This was better than balancing out. Books To Die For is just as good, signed or not. Having the unexpected signed copy of Green Streets, and a story to go with it, puts me well ahead.

And the kid’s only half as Irish as I am. Go figure.

Getting Mad

Let’s begin by extending sincere thanks to Seana Graham for her kind words about Wild Bill on her fine review blog, Not New For Long. (No, it’s not a “fine review blog” because she liked Wild Bill. It’s a fine blog, period. That she liked Wild Bill threatens her reputation almost as much as it enhances mine.) The review ends with Seana saying she would like to have seen “more of Madeline ‘Mad’ Klimak, a strong female protagonist who shows that King has a range beyond the macho trope. Maybe [she’ll] appear in a sequel?”

I worked harder on Mad than on any other character in anything I’ve written. She’s integral to the story in several ways; the book could not have been written without her. That being said, I’d never written a female character with the mix of qualities Mad had to have, and I sweated bullets every time I read a Mad chapter to The Beloved Spouse or my writers group. Seana’s compliment is not the first Mad has received in a review, but it’s the first from a woman, which makes it doubly gratifying.

I’ve looked for opportunities to write Mad again, notably by including her in a PI series set in Chicago I’ve worked on for several years. She’d be a perfect foil for Nick Forte, but they live in different fictional Chicago universes, and the accommodations that would have to be made are too great. (For the dozens of people who’ve read Wild Bill, at least.) Thoughts of giving her a book of her own always break down when I remember the angst of writing her as a supporting character.

Seana’s remark, coupled with Patti Abbott’s comment to my “Best Reads” post, got me to thinking seriously about how much time I spend with female writers and characters. Frankly, it’s not much. Looking back on my list of books read, I thought to have read more female writers than I have. I may have subconsciously shied away from female characters in the two Penns River books I’ve completed because Mad caused me so much agita.

That has to stop.

Not for political correctness. (No one who knows me would think that, but in case some stranger wanders by…) There are woman writers whose work I like a lot. Megan Abbott, Libby Fischer Hellmann, Zoe Sharp, Laura Lippmann (when she’s not writing Tess Monahan) come to mind immediately. My Books Read list goes back to 2006, and has names and books I liked a lot, but somehow never got around to reading the next. I’m cheating myself out of a good time by skipping over them.

As for characters, well, half the people in the world are women. True, most of my characters are either cops or crooks, and those are male-dominated fields. I’m careful not to fall into the crime fiction trap of making women either strippers or hookers or victims—though I have done all three, in conscious moderation—and can only broaden my stories, and my writing, by becoming more inclusive.

I don’t do New Year’s resolutions, and don’t need one here. I’ve already added woman writers to my TBR list, and will find at least one new one from those recommended in John Connolly’s and Declan Burke’s Edgar-nominated compendium Books To Die For. (Congratulations, gents.)

The writing will require only a small course change. I’m nearing the end of the first draft of the next Penns River novel. A change I’d planned for the second draft will suit adding a woman nicely. I hope to spend the summer tidying the first two Nick Forte PI novels for Kindle releases. The series has a couple of strong continuing female characters, and the second book is virtually controlled by women. Maybe revisiting them will remind me of the benefits in writing characters of complementary plumbing to my usual casts, while remembering it’s not the plumbing that makes them relevant. I’m hoping folks like Seana and Patti and others can not only keep me honest, but make sure I do it well.

As for Mad, I’m looking for a good story for her. Maybe I’ll ignore the parallel universe issues and add her to my PI stories. (Or vice versa, depending on the story.) Aren’t reboots all the rage now?

What’s In a Name?

Character names take me right out of a lot of popular crime fiction. I don’t know any women named Taylor or Alexandra or men named Maxim or Baldwin; I don’t think I’d want to. I grew up and tend to hang with people named Andy and Larry and Mary and Linda.

Same with surnames. Popular fiction has so many WASPy names a paper cut could send you into anaphylactic shock. I grew up with people named Rychlinksi and Kurpakis and Policcichio and Dzanaj. Robert Langdon means dick to me.

Character names are important. Elmore Leonard tells a story of a character in a story set in New Orleans. He gave the guy a French name and couldn’t find anything for him to say. Leonard changed the character’s name (something Irish, I think) and said he couldn’t shut him up.

The story of Tim Hallinan’s upcoming Junior bender novel, The Fame Thief, revolves around Wanda Altschuler, from Scranton, Pennsylvania. That’s a good, Scranton-sounding name. She ended up in LA trying to be an actress and changed her name to the far more exotic and celebrity-like Dolores La Marr, which probably conjures up an entirely different image from the woman who was Wanda Altschuler. (Which is, of course, among the reasons actors change their names. That’s why a lot of them become actors, so they won’t have to be who they are.)

I spend a lot of time on names. For some reason, I decided Will Hickox in Wild Bill was from the Scranton area. (Probably why learning about Ms. Altschuler got me to thinking along this line.) When I wanted a genuine sounding Scranton name for Will’s maternal grandfather, I hit Wikipedia for famous people from the Scranton-Wilkes Barre area. “Biden” didn’t have the ring I wanted, but Volodymyr Palahniuk was perfect. I already had the first name—Willard, “Big Will”—but the original surname of actor Jack Palance fit perfectly.

When I needed a shit-ton of Italian names for the mobsters in Wild Bill—preferably Sicilian—I pulled up Google maps and went to Sicily, where towns named Enna and Agrigento and Ragusa and Caccamo served better than anything I could make up.

My current series is set in a small town very similar to where I grew up, so my high school year book and RSS feeds from the local paper provide Western Pennsylvania placesetters like Napierkowski and Neuschwander and Wierzbicki. (I meant to add a pronunciation key to Worst Enemies when I formatted it for Kindle, and will ask Stark House to correct my oversight when Grind Joint comes out next year.) Names like those not only help to personalize and even describe the character, taken as a group they can become part of the setting. I don’t need to spend any time reminding readers where we are when a conversation takes place between Stush Napierkowski and Rick Neuschwander.

What about you? Do names matter in the books you read? In the books you write? Why, or why not? Writers, how do you come up with them?