Theme vs. Meaning in Fiction

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Author, teacher, and literary agent Donald Maass recently wrote a thought-provoking essay in Writer Unboxed in which he makes a distinction between “theme” and “meaning” in a novel. I’ve written about theme before, specifically, whether a writer should set out to create a book around a certain theme and how hard that can be to pull off, because it focuses the writer on an abstract concept, when creating a story is the dominant concern. At least that’s true for novels written for US and UK audiences. Characters in novels translated from other languages often seem to wander in some misty realm without reference to the concrete world of, say, peanut butter sandwiches, and perhaps it’s because they’re written to theme. Just a guess here.

The theme of my mystery/thriller, Architect of Courage, is redemption, which I discovered embarrassingly late in the game. And now that it’s printed and has covers around it, I am still recognizing minor themes. These likely reflect attitudes and beliefs so ingrained that I don’t consciously think about them, but that come out nonetheless.

According to Maass, a novel with a theme “points out something we must heed about ourselves and our world,” whereas a novel focused on meaning aims to “tell us who and how we are.” Or, as he says, it’s descriptive, not prescriptive. Genre novels (mysteries, thrillers, romance) tend to be of the former type, and coming-of-age stories and historical fiction tend toward the latter.

It’s easy to think of examples of both. On one hand, the theme of books like Razorblade Tears (SA Cosby) and many police procedurals is that justice is being done, while the theme of The Water-Knife (Paolo Bacigalupi) and The Cartel (Don Winslow) is the urgent need to put things right before it’s too late. On the other hand, “meaning” books, like The Ones We Keep (Bobbie Jean Huff) and The Great Alone (Kristin Hannah) describe life as it is, sort of, with all its bumps and distortions and wierdnesses.

This distinction is worth thinking about, but as to how it affects the reader, Maass further suggests that the thematic approach is like being told something, and the meaning approach is like sharing something. “Literary” fiction mostly camps out in meaning territory and disdains genre fiction’s tidy endings, whereas genre writers defend their approach, saying that at least their stories have an ending.  

While I’m persuaded Maass has articulated an interesting distinction, perhaps it shouldn’t be interpreted too rigidly, too either-or. For one thing, authors are wholly capable of bait-and-switch. For most of their pages, Where the Crawdads Sing (Delia Owens) and Atonement (Ian McEwan) seems like coming-of-age “meaning” books, and only at the very end do you discover they’ve upended the “justice will be done” theme. Currently, I’m listening to My Heart Is a Chainsaw, by horror-writer Stephen Graham Jones, and I would be hard-pressed to place it in either category. Can’t I choose both?

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July/August EQMM and AHMM

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reading, beach

Is it summer and the competition of outdoor activities that cause attention spans to dwindle and make a good collection of short stories extra appealing? Truthfully, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine are never out of season. Here are some highlights from their summer issues.

In EQMM:
“Serving Process” by Kristine Kathryn Rusch – anyone who’d save a litter of wet, half-starved and mewling kittens is a hero in my book
“The Secret Sharer” by W. Edward Blain – very clever and satisfying tale, and a nice example of how fiction can reflect the realities of covid yet not be about covid
“Powerball” by Jack Bunker – Yes, playing the lottery is a mug’s game, yet some people are just better players than others. In light of last week’s $1.337 billion Mega Millions jackpot IRL, this story should have a big audience!
“Storm Warning” by Dana Haynes is another table-turning tale that makes you feel that, sometimes, bad deeds work out exactly right!

And in AHMM:
“Death Will Take the High Line by Elizabeth Zelvin – Points to her for tackling a story that plunges right into gender identity issues without becoming polemical.
“The Conversation Killer” by Al Tucher – in lushly described Hawa`i, a rookie female police officer makes a big mistake.
“The Man Who Went Down Under” by Alexis Stefanovich-Thomson won the 15th annual Black Orchid Novella Award contest. The search for a missing diamond involves quite a few characters, notably, a young P.I.’s interfering and none-too-impressed mother.

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National Booklovers’ Day

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bookshare, Flannery O'Connor, peacock
Bookshare box outside Flannery O’Connor’s girlhood home
with an adored peacock (photo: Vicki Weisfeld)

Touted as “a day for all those who love to read,” today is National Book Lovers Day! So many ways to celebrate: reading to a child, buying a rare book, reorganizing your bookshelves (might need more than one day for that), making a donation of books to your library, or reading something you wouldn’t ordinarily read (ok, I’m ordering Stephen Graham Jones’s My Heart is a Chainsaw right now!). Maybe I should finally paint the Little Free Library my daughter gave me three Christmases ago. Goodness knows, I could fill it! I took the above picture of the one outside Flannery O’Connor’s home in Savannah. Note the peacock on the side—she raised them.

Celebrate with a new five-star mystery thriller! I have just the book in mind: Architect of Courage by, well, me. Enjoy! Click here to order.

Reading Lessons: Jacked

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A crime fiction short story has to accomplish a lot in a compressed space. It of course has to describe the crime involved in enough detail that it makes sense to readers; it has to create believable characters whose fates you care about, at least enough to arouse your curiosity, if not your admiration; and the narrative has to move along briskly—skirting the law isn’t an occupation for laggards. The twenty-one crime stories in the new anthology Jacked, edited by Vern Smith, manage to do all this and then some.

A lot of the stories are pretty dark indeed, and I was interested in how some of the authors managed nevertheless to produce a few laughs. A bit of humor is a welcome addition to what can be a rather bleak assessment of human frailty. Here’s how the stories in this collection manage it.

In several, the situation itself is innately funny. An example is Eric Beetner’s “First Timers,” in which a pair of inexperienced teenagers steal the wrong person’s car. The laughs end before the story does, you’ll find. 

A long story that closes the book is Ricky Sprague’s “The Gryfters.” Again, there’s a wacky premise. The humor arises because all the characters (who are a motley group) play the situation straight, except the narrator Chris. He sees all the weirdness for what it is. His roommate, a young guy on the fringes of criminality, hits upon the bright idea of developing a ride-share service for criminals who need a fast getaway. You know you’re in for an entertaining ride, when, early on, the roommates discuss possible names for the service. Gryft is the apparent choice.

Chris’s hesitant, stumbling conversation shows how swamped he is by fear and doubt. Still, he can’t escape a rapidly deteriorating situation. He’s doomed to be a passenger in the slowest imaginable trip across Los Angeles in a car so ridiculously crowded you’ll envision a circus clown car. What makes the humor work is Chris’s miserable awareness and the cinematic clarity of Sprague’s descriptions. (No surprise then that he has two stories in the 2021 anthology of humorous mysteries, Die Laughing.)

In Jacqueline Seewald’s “Worst Enemy,” the sister of a man accused of murder convinces a private investigator to try to prove her brother’s innocence. P.I. Bob Harris doesn’t want to take the case, because it looks like the brother is the killer—the police have DNA evidence—and he was too drunk to remember anything that might provide an alibi. In fact, he even concedes he might have done it. Despite his original misgivings, Bob digs in, and his unease provides a few unexpected light moments.

Reading a collection like Jacked is a good way to sample different authors’ styles. Editor Vern Smith, himself an author, is an Arthur Ellis Award finalist. The three stories mentioned aside, the collection falls on the dark end of the spectrum, gritty and uncompromising, with a sense that the characters are teetering on the edge of something and may fly off at any moment. Strap on your seatbelt before reading.

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The Ride-Along

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Frank Zafiro and Colin Conway, two former officers of the Spokane, Washington, Police Department, have collaborated on the important novel, The Ride-Along. One day, at the beginning of his ten-hour overnight shift, experienced officer Lee Salter is asked to have a civilian ride in the patrol car with him. This is not an unusual request in many police departments where ride-alongs are considered part of community relations. In this case, the person who’ll accompany him is a member of a vocal citizens’ Policy Reform Initiative named Melody Weaver. Salter expects a difficult few hours, and so does she.

The authors deserve considerable credit for trying to set aside their biases and present both sides of the police-citizen disconnect. Both parties make their arguments, though the authors’ thumbs seem on the police side of the scale. Weaver is querulous and argumentative, not appearing to want explanations, but rather to criticize. At least at first. Exposure to situations police officers face routinely does get through to her to some extent.

Salter acknowledges missteps by the authorities, particularly in the case of George Floyd’s death. But for the most part, he dismisses the research she cites and she doesn’t come up with specifics, making almost an “everybody knows . . . .” kind of argument. Under pressure, they both tend to retreat to established positions, which not only keeps the dialog from moving forward, but also effectively illustrates how far apart their positions are. Salter’s fallback is “you weren’t there.” That’s an inarguable position.

While the story wasn’t satisfactory in a conventional sense, in that there was no great epiphany by either of them during the ride, it is brilliant in showing how much more dialog is needed to bridge the gap. The book, with its biases (the authors make the point that we all have them), like the ride-along itself, is only a first step. But someone has to take it, and Zafiro and Conway have made a worthy effort. I hope it achieves a wide readership among thoughtful people.

Earlier this week, I wrote about Unexpected Synchronicities. Here’s another one. Recently, I watched the highly regarded 2019 documentary The Human Factor, by Israeli film director Dror Moreh. It chronicles the negotiations undertaken in the Clinton Administration to bring peace to the Middle East. Through photos and video coverage you see the main players—President Clinton; Israeli presidents Yitzhak Rabin and Ehud Barak; Palestine Liberation Army chairman Yasser Arafat; and younger versions of six chief US negotiators: Dennis Ross, Martin Indyk, Gamal Helal, Aaron David Miller, Daniel Kurtzer, and Robert Malley, who gave interviewers unprecedented access for this film.

Like in The Ride-Along, you see two intractable sides, locked in a mutually damaging struggle, in which no resolution seems forthcoming. The two sides’ frames of reference barely overlap. At one point, one of the American negotiators comments that the whole idea of peace meant something different to the Israelis than to Arafat. Then, strategic slips in the last round of negotiations set the stage for 25 additional years of conflict. What had been moving in the right direction slid back into chaos. We need to learn from that on the home front.

Film reviewer Matt Fagerhorn says The Human Factor shows “how much we have to lose when we give into the easy temptation of demonizing those who think differently.” It’s a judgment that applies equally to the conflicts in The Ride-Along.

Further reading and viewing:

Shots Fired: The Misunderstandings, Misconceptions, and Myths about Police Shootings by Joseph K. Loughlin and Kate Clark Flora.

Dror Mohreh’s riveting documentary, The Gatekeepers, consisting of interviews with past heads of Israel’s internal Security service, Shin Bet, about the consequences of failure to find peace.

“The Ring of Truth”

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My short story protagonist Brianna Yamato—newly minted reporter for The Sweetwater Register, the fictional newspaper of Sweetwater, Texas—is on the story once again. Her latest exploit, “The Ring of Truth” is published in the August 2022 Mystery Magazine. Previously, she solved a four-person homicide and the death by rattlesnake bite of a wind-turbine repairman who had the makings of a potential boyfriend, but . . .

In this story, Brianna is a volunteer with the local community theater group putting on the comedy, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. This is a show my family and I have seen on stage a half-dozen times in various-sized productions—from amateur theater to Broadway (Nathan Lane). And the Zero Mostel movie is a perennial favorite when we need a pick-me-up.

Alas, in the Sweetwater production, the high school senior playing the romantic lead dies one night during rehearsal, and Brianna starts to dig into her story.

Because I’ve written four short stories about Brianna (three published), I have to keep in mind certain details about her world. Since I can’t count on my memory, I created a Word document titled “Facts about the Sweetwater Stories,” which lists the stories in chronological order and when they took place. It has bulleted facts about Brianna, not just her physical description but her way of working (“she tends to let interviewees talk” and “she matches their body language and expressions”), that she lives in a house—not an apartment—with her friend Ruth.

Brianna, being Japanese, tiny (and female) has to hold her own in a sea of big and tall Texas men. They’d love to patronize her, if she’d let them. In several of the stories, she gets comments like “you don’t look like a Brianna” and remarks about immigrants. So I established that her family arrived in California, where she was born and raised, in 1880. Similarly, in the current story, she receives an earful from an interviewee, father of the dead girl who wants her to stop her “medding.” Here’s how she sets him straight.

“You people—” He started to walk away.

“We journalists? Or we twenty-somethings?”

He came back and barked in my face. “You Orientals start your wars, let us settle your hash, then leave your crappy countries and move here, to enjoy everything America offers.”

Oh boy. I said, “My granddad and his brothers served in the US Army in World War II. You’ve heard of the Purple Heart battalion? His youngest brother was killed in Korea. And my dad and uncles fought in Vietnam. What was your unit?” I could hear my editor now.

To break off his death-stare, I said, “Kayla’s friends say nice things about her. I just wondered whether you’d noticed any change, anything unusual, before she died.”

“No. You people saw more of her than we did those last weeks.”

“Oh. We thespians.”

I also keep a list of the businesses she visits—the Triple Joe Café next door to the newspaper, the Southside Grill with its homestyle cooking and the names of its friendly servers, the Egg ‘n’ Oink where Brianna likes to track down police chief Hank Childers while he’s having his Sunday brunch.

When I was a kid, I had family who lived in Sweetwater and visited them every year. The picture in my mind of the community is no doubt vastly different from what the town is today. I read the newspaper online when I’m working on a story to bring myself forward a few decades. But the rattlesnakes are the same.

A Case for Books

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Last week, Nora Krug’s article in The Washington Post described how nine best-selling authors organize (some of) their book shelves. A few years ago, I was advised, in a friendly way, to exile to some other place the towering TBR stacks that made walking through our bedroom a risk to toes and shins. How do people solve this problem?

Novelist Elin Hilderbrand has organized her shelves semi-chronologically, based on the era in which she read the books they hold, except for her “favorite books” shelf, pictured in the article. Aha! On it are some of my favorites, too—& Sons (David Gilbert). Also Richard Russo, Jane Smiley, and Margaret Atwood!

Diana Gabaldon has a rather arcane shelf of medical and healing-related reference books in her 3500-volume collection (The Curious Lore of Precious Stones sounds irresistible). Another author heavily into research is Garrett Graff, who writes about politics. His shelf is stuffed with nonfiction books about 9/11.

Vanessa Riley’s shelves display her own colorful books, along with an array of Barbie dolls of prominent black women. I spotted two of my recent faves: The Mirror and the Light (Hilary Mantel) and The Rose Code (Kate Quinn)—books that, as Riley says, “make the past come alive in new, rich ways.

Emma Straub’s collection caught my eye with a shelf from the bookstore she owns containing numerous titles by Michael Chabon (yay!), and Dan Chaon (also yay!). Then Julia Child’s My Life in France. At this point, I realized the shelf is alphabetical. Author Hernan Diaz (just long-listed for the Booker Prize) is another alphabetizer, with solid collections of George Elliot. Henry James, F. Scott Fitzgerald.

In the photo of Jennifer Weiner’s shelves, she’s organized the two shown by color. Yellow above, blue below, like an upside-down Ukrainian flag. This may seem an odd way to arrange books, except to someone like me, who is more likely to remember the color of a book’s jacket than its title. A refitted “gigantic closet” serves as the library for her overspill. To demonstrate that no closet is too small to be repurposed in this way, the picture at the head of this piece is my “TBR Closet.”

Chris Bohjalian’s shelves are a study in wild contrasts: Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad and George Eliot’s Middlemarch. Louise Erdrich and William Faulkner. Two whole shelves of Fitzgerald’s works, including several editions of The Great Gatsby, including one in Armenian, FSF’s letters, and biographies. As in my house, he organizes his history collection chronologically.

On Christopher Buckley’s alphabetized shelves are Ben Macintyre’s nonfiction Operation Mincemeat, recently adapted for film, and several familiar history books, as well as books emblematic of their moment. I vividly remember reading The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Catch-22, and Deliverance. As an aside, perusing these shelves is a lesson in how unreadable a lot of spine copy is!

On your own, I’m sure you can divine the theme of this bookshelf of mine:

Unexpected Synchronicities

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If you’re a frequent reader, sometimes the parallel threads from several books get all tangled up. Characters with the same/similar names in books by different authors. Intersecting plot lines. Or you read one book that gives you interesting background about something (Daughters of Yalta), and soon you read another dealing with the same events (Gods of Deception). You feel like you turned a corner and ran into a mirror.

Two books I’ve read recently were set in Venice—thankfully at totally different time periods (1612 on one hand and 1928, 1938, and 2002 on the other)—but identical geography and modes of transport, and—OK, this is a stretch—the third, a contemporary mystery about life on a canal in England.

The Gallery of Beauties by Nina Wachsman is a new historical mystery featuring an unlikely pair of protagonists—Belladonna, a famous and wealthy courtesan, and Diana, a rabbi’s daughter who lives in the Jewish ghetto. These beautiful women come to the attention of an artist creating portraits for a “Gallery of Beauties.” Intrigue is high in the city’s Council of Ten, whose mistrustful leaders vie with each other for power and prestige, and leading citizens’ fear of poisoning is so great they employ official tasters. Diana must slip out of the ghetto to pose for the artist, but the chance to wear beautiful clothing and mix with the city’s elite, including her new friend Belladonna, convinces her to ignore the curfew imposed on ghetto residents. Out in the city, she could be challenged at any time. When the subjects of the Gallery of Beauties begin to be murdered, the two women must unravel the mystery for their own survival. An indelible portrait of Venice in the 17th century.

The Venice Sketchbook by Rhys Bowen, narrated by Barrie Kreinik, is mostly set during the days leading up to World War II, when English schoolteacher and artist Juliet Browning begins a romance with the wealthy and devastatingly handsome son of a leading Venetian family. As the Nazis close in, Juliet delays her return home until it’s no longer possible to leave. Without papers and out in a city patrolled by fascists, she could be challenged at any time. (!) Sixty years later, when Juliet dies, her niece Caroline inherits her Venice sketchbook and keys to she doesn’t know what. It will be up to her to discover Aunt Lettie’s mysterious past. This book was too formulaic for me, in terms of the plot and the relationships. But again, Venice.

Idiot Wind by Michael Broihier is set on the Oxford Canal, which runs some 70 miles between Oxford and Hawkesbury in central England. The protagonist, Mac McGuire, with his 60-foot narrowboat, Idiot Wind, delivers food and fuel to boat owners up and down a central portion of this canal. The countryside is beautiful, the boat dwellers are quirky devotees to an idiosyncratic way of life, and it’s a peaceful one—that is, until dead bodies turn up in the canal waters. There’s a lot of mechanics involved in opening and closing the canal’s many locks, repetitive actions I actually found quite soothing. It gave a certain controlled rhythm to the story. No wild car chases, just going with the flow. For me, Broihier’s portrayal of life on the canal was a memorable one. But then, any story with boats is OK with me, and this was a dandy.

You Can Help the Authors and Books You Love

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You Can Help the Authors and Books You Love!

Raymond Chandler, Philip Marlowe, Humphrey Bogart
(art: wikimedia.org)

Friends and family members can be incredibly patient when they ask an author in their circle solicitous and innocent-sounding questions—like “How’s the book coming?”—and are met with blank looks, or, worse, groans and sighs.

Most authors today—OK, James Patterson’s an exception, and so’s JK Rowling—find that reaching “The End” is just the beginning of their work. Now they have to let the world know about it.  

If you have a sense of how much time and effort authors invest in their books, maybe you’ve wondered “What can I do? How can I help?” Yes, indeed, there are things you can do that will help! And, whatever you find time to do, you can be sure it will be greatly appreciated!

Ten ways you can help promote an author or book you admire:

  1. Buy the books! The author may have written it with readers like you in mind.
  2. Don’t be too quick to pass around a book; instead, encourage others to buy it. Amazon, or book stores, and the author’s publisher keep most of the price of the book. If a book sells for $16, the author receives $2 to $4.
  3. Remember, books make great gifts! Maybe a friend or family member needs a thank-you or has a special day coming up.
  4. Word of mouth is the most powerful form of book marketing. So, tell people about a book you’ve loved.
  5. What you say about the book in an Amazon or Barnes & Noble review will influence other would-be purchasers. No need for cringy flashbacks to high school book reports. Just say the two or three things you’d tell a good friend who asked, “Read any good books lately?”
  6. Share a few words about what you’re reading on social media—GoodReads, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc.
  7. If you enjoyed a book, your book club might too! Many authors are willing to participate in book club discussions in person or by Zoom, etc.
  8. You can “follow” your favorite authors on Amazon. Search for one of their books, click on the author’s name, and their author page will come up.
  9. If your author has a newsletter, sign up! Author newsletters often include interviews, reviews, and favorites.
  10. An author’s blog and website are another way to keep track of their new releases and to learn more about them.

Many thanks, and happy reading!

Listen To Me

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The popular duo of Boston Police Department detective Jane Rizzoli and forensic pathologist Maura Isles returns in Tess Gerritsen’s latest crime thriller, Listen to Me. Number thirteen in the series, it’s the first I’ve read.

The investigators’ probe into the brutal murder of nurse Sofia Suarez is interleaved with what a little research indicates is a story line unusual for this series, the antics of Jane’s mother Angela. Busybody Angela is a Neighborhood Watch unto herself, and a repeat caller to the suburban Revere police department regarding her suspicions about the shenanigans of her neighbors. Her calls are not only a nuisance—ruffling interdepartmental feathers that Jane has to try to smooth—but you can’t help thinking the calls will come back to hurt her. Maybe she is indeed onto something. Or maybe she will have cried wolf too many times, if a real threat emerges. All you can be sure of is that Jane is fast running out of patience with her.

The investigation into Suarez’s death moves forward at a snail’s pace. The woman was well-respected and generally liked by her neighbors and work colleagues at the Pilgrim Hospital Surgical Intensive Care Unit. There’s nothing in those relationships to suggest any animosity toward her.

Unexpectedly, the best lead comes from Jamal Bird, an African-American teenager living on Suarez’s block who helped her set up her electronics. Suarez’s cell phone and laptop are missing. Finding them, or otherwise getting at their records may hold some actionable information. The first interesting thing Jamal tells them is that Suarez bought the computer for some kind of research. They can’t help wondering whether what she was looking into is what put her in the sights of a killer.

A subtheme of the book is the tricky nature of mother-daughter relationships. The younger generation’s behavior is what usually creates these dilemmas, but in three situations in this book, it’s the reverse.

Ultimately, the plot seems a bit of a stretch. However, fans of Gerritsen’s characters may easily overlook that issue. It’s also possible that most books in this series come down a little harder on the police procedural or medical examiner aspects, whereas this book, in devoting so much real estate to Angela’s meddling, has less room to develop those details. It was a little difficult for me to accept that someone who is both the girlfriend and mother of crackerjack police detectives could be so oblivious to the possible bad outcomes she courted. If you haven’t read Gerritsen before, you might want to start with an earlier book.