Category Archives: First Draft Blog

Nordic Noir – Scandinavian Crime Fiction

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clouds, sky

(photo: wikimedia.org)

Readers and fans of modern crime novels have been aware of the Scandinavian writers’ mafia for some time—long before The Girl Who/With . . . trilogy commandeered airport book stalls. Stieg Larsson was, in fact, only one of the hundred or so crime authors from Norway, Sweden, and Denmark whose books have been translated into English. “The crime tale has become to Scandinavia what the sonnet was to Elizabethan England: its trademark literary form,” says Lee Siegel in “Pure Evil,” a recent New Yorker essay on the rise of Scandinavian crime fiction.

An early signal of the impending invasion may have been the unexpected success of Smilla’s Sense of Snow, by Danish author Peter Hoeg (1992), a book I enjoyed greatly. As did a friend of mine’s mother, luckily only slightly injured when a tractor-trailer jackknifed in front of her on the New Jersey Turnpike and her car slid underneath. As the EMT’s loaded her into the ambulance, she yelled, “My book! Get my book! It’s on the front seat of the car.” Smilla’s Sense of Snow.

A line from Swedish crimewriter Henning Mankell—“every good story has a mystery in it” titles the home page of this website. He’s familiar to American readers and PBS Mystery! watchers for his Inspector Kurt Wallander mysteries. Several of these novels have been dramatized starring Kenneth Branaugh of the tiny mouth and co-starring the unutterably grey-and-gloomy Swedish skies.

From what source did all this high Nordic gloom arise? Siegel’s essay, which features Norway’s popular author Jo Nesbø cites several causes, perhaps most significantly the unsolved 1986 assassination of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme, shot in the back while walking home from a movie theater. “The paranoia engendered by Palme’s killing,” Siegel says, “endowed the Scandinavian crime novel with a horrifying vitality.”

Also, in Norway—the territory of Nesbø’s Inspector Harry Hole novels—the discovery of oil led to a newly privileged class, and the social fears and resentments that ensued became fodder for the crime novelist, Siegel says. You will recall how in 2011, those class differences erupted in real life, when Anders Behring Breivik with bombs and guns killed 77 people, “most of them the young sons and daughters of the country’s liberal political élite” murdered at an island-based Workers’ Youth League camp.

Harry Hole of the Oslo Police Department is the protagonist in ten of Nesbø’s books—works that “stand out for their blackness.” Nesbø himself, on the interesting author-interview website Five Books (which also has interviews about Swedish and Nordic crime fiction), talks about how the mentality of the criminal is “actually very similar to the mentality of the police. And that is true for the main character in my books, Harry Hole. He experiences the same. The people he feels he can most relate to are the criminals that he is hunting.”

Nesbø’s books have sold 23 million copies in 40 languages, and several are on their way to being made into movies, suggesting that social fears and resentments are not themes confined to a single geographic locale, even if they can be presented in bleaker aspect against a lowering sky.

Read more:

Scandinavian Crime Fiction – billed as “your literary portal into Northern deviance,” featuring numerous authors, downloadable books (audio and e), and other resources

A Cold Night’s Death: The Allure of Scandinavian Crime Fiction – a guide from the New York Public Library

No. 1 With an Umlaut – Boris Kachka in New York magazine includes Iceland and Finland in his guide to this “massive iceberg of a genre.”

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History is Personal

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Edwards, Wilson County

Edwards graveyard, Wilson County, Tenn. (photo: author)

A trip to the New York Public Library’s Milstein Division this week with three friends was a chance to catch up on the progress we’re making with our family genealogies. Each of us has made surprising discoveries—a grandfather who, as a baby, was left at the doorstep of a foundling hospital; Tennessee Civil War veterans who lived the agonizing struggle of “brother against brother”; the ancestor who lived next door to the real-life House of the Seven Gables in Salem, Massachusetts, and was a member of the Salem Grand Jury two decades before the witch trials; the family grave markers revealing sons who died within days of each other in the 1918 influenza outbreak. I even know the names and a bit of the history of the ships that brought some of my ancestors to America in 1633 and the early 1900’s (Griffin, Kaiser Wilhelm II, and Amerika).

All writers can find inspiration in history, says a recent blog on the Writer magazine website by Hillary Casavant. From my own experience, looking at lives reduced to a few lines transcribed from some 180-year-old deed book, or the estate inventory that includes not only “a cowe and hoggs,” but also salt, pepper, and a coffee pot makes you think about what was valuable in a person’s life generations ago. (As a measure of changing living standards, my household has four coffee-pots and three tea-pots. No cowe or hoggs, though.)

These shards of insight prompt the thought, “I’d like to know the story behind that.” Just such an impulse set a writing colleague on a path to research one of her ancestors, born in the late 1800’s—the first woman to serve as a probation officer in the London criminal courts. Information is scattered, and she has the challenge of writing a fictionalized history. Another writer friend is compiling a set of essays on her family’s history that is closer to a conventional memoir, but viewed through a psychological lens—a thoughtful analysis of how a father’s treatment of his sons echoes through the family generations later.

Writers use history in many different ways to “make it real.” From my recent reading, additional examples are Robert Harris’s An Officer and A Spy, a novelization of the infamous Dreyfus case, in which all the players are known, and the mystery The Cold, Cold Ground by Adrian McKinty, which uses the hunger strikes in Northern Ireland’s HM Prison Maze not only as a backdrop but weaves it into the actions and motivations of the fictional characters. Movies plow this ground endlessly. I really enjoyed The Monuments Men, which, although it prompted inevitable historical quibbles, stayed closer to real experience than the more highly fictionalized The Train, the 1964 Burt Lancaster/Paul Scofield movie on the same theme, which I saw again on TV last night. (Illustrating how far from real life Hollywood must sometimes stray, Wikipedia reports that Lancaster injured his knee playing golf, and to explain his limp, the movie added a scene in which he is shot while crossing a pedestrian bridge. Also, the executions of a couple of characters occurred because the actors had other “contractual obligations.”)

Casavant provides links to websites that can provide historical inspiration, including the

lists of history facts in Mental Floss, a blog of noteworthy letters, and the Library of Congress’s 14.5 million photo and graphic archive. To her suggestions, I’d add that one’s own family history, the unique combinations of external events and internal dynamics that made them who they were, can also be a rich resource. In a sense, it’s a recasting of the much-abused advice to writers to “write what you know.” Or, as George Packer has said (his ancestors lived adjacent to mine on Hurricane Creek in Wilson County, Tennessee, BTW), “History, any history, confers meaning on a life.”

The Dream of the Great American Novel

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classics, books, Great American Novel, Moby Dick

(picture: upload.wikimedia.org)

I hold out my hand. Take it, and wade with me into the murky waters of literary criticism as we consider the Great American Novel. Or, rather, Lawrence Buell’s 584-page new survey, The Dream of the Great American Novel. I’ve read several lengthy reviews of this book, as well as excerpts, and although I want to warm to the subject, I am feeling the chill of excessive academicism. Yes, there has to be more to literary criticism than “I liked it,” but I’m not ready to sacrifice on the altar of subjectivity my regard for an author’s achievement of beautiful writing or the creation of drama involving believable characters.

The entire concept of a Great American Novel (or G.A.N. as Henry James mockingly dubbed it) has come under repeated waves of skepticism, surviving “more as a dream than a goal,” Adam Gopnik suggests in his review in The New Yorker review (link below). Buell himself suggests that critics have believed the G.A.N. was “a misguided amateurish notion that had long since outlived its usefulness if ever it had any.” By the 1980s and 1990s, Michael Kimmage says in The New Republic, literary scholars “rejected the very notion of an American literature.”

The narrative form of the idealized G.A.N, Buell says in Salon (link below), is expected to “replicate the nation’s vast, sprawling, semichaotic social textures and landscapes from the macro to the minute.” Such an endeavor has been decried by some critics as “documentation for its own sake” and “the great American bore.” Yet, the sweeping realistic novel that would describe all social classes and stations of a particular historical period, that would have a narrative agenda—think Balzac, Thackeray, Dickens, or Zola—has not typically appeared in American literature. As Gopnik suggests, “in a country dedicated to the proposition of the autonomous individual, books about people defined by their place in a social web will never fly.”

Buell believes our greatest novels have splintered into four main subtypes, or “scripts” (and many of his observations apply equally well to American movies): tales of sexual transgression and punishment (e.g., The Scarlet Letter and its multitudinous progeny); the “up from” novel, which follows the protagonist from obscurity to prominence, and often back again; the romance of the divide, which dramatizes racial, cultural, or geographic fissures (all of Faulkner; Gatsby); and the “compendious meganovel,” which is generally not a true societal macrocosm, but more of a microscopic examination of a particular group of people or episode(The Goldfinch, Underworld, possibly).

Buell bases part of his analysis on the democratic notion that bloggers, internet chatters, and Amazon commenters’ views are important, too, thereby eroding the “firmness of the high culture versus mass culture distinction.” That seems admirable in concept, but shaky in execution, having tested my perceptions of various books against those of my fellow-amazonians and found bewildering diversity, with “Brilliant—best book ever!” followed by “Blech. Couldn’t finish it.” And, all-too-clearly, what sells is not the same as what is of lasting value.

For the record, books repeatedly cited as leading G.A.N. candidates by Buell and his reviewers include the schoolroom staples: Moby Dick, The Scarlet Letter, and Huckleberry Finn, along with Philip Roth’s “American Trilogy,” Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man, and Toni Morrison’s Beloved. (By contrast, the aforementioned readers place at the top of their lists of favorite books the works of Ayn Rand and L. Ron Hubbard, To Kill a Mockingbird, and The Lord of the Rings.) More recent G.A.N. candidates include David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest and Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections. I did finish that one, but I didn’t want to.

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Jennifer Egan’s Organic Writing

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Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Good Squad, Pulitzer Prize, writing, novel

Jennifer Egan (photo: upload.wikimedia,org – David Shankbone)

For a long time Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jennifer Egan hadn’t consciously intended to pull together the stories that eventually formed A Visit from the Good Squad into a novel. A recent Glimmer Train interview with talks about the completely organic way of writing she employed in doing so.

The set of stories that form the book’s chapters focus on people who circle the lives of the main characters—Bennie Salazar, an aging punk rocker and recording executive, divorced, and trying to connect with his nine-year old son, and Sasha, a kleptomaniac who has worked for him. Thus, we learn about Bennie’s and Sasha’s past indirectly through these confederates.

Each of these individual stories is told in a unique, technically different way. It wasn’t a matter of just selecting a character and some different approach to telling their story, it was more the challenge of creating stories that actually required different manners of telling. As a result, for example, one is written as a slightly cheesy news story (“Forty-Minute Lunch: Kitty Jackson Opens Up About Love, Fame, and Nixon!”), and another, in the unsettling second-person, begins, “Your friends are pretending to be all kinds of stuff, and your special job is to call them on it.”

Janet Maslin in The New York Times called the book “uncategorizable.” It wasn’t until Egan had the idea of treating the book like a concept album that its ultimate form suggested itself, she says. She had no desire to write a set of linked short stories with “a similarity of mood and tone.” (An example is Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, which won the 2009 Pulitzer for fiction.)

“I wanted them to sound like they were parts of different books,” Egan says. “Because I felt if I could do that and still have them fuse, that it would be a much more complicated, rich experience.” Sticking with the record-industry theme, she says, “You would never want to listen to an album where all the songs had the same mood and tone.” The group Chicago comes to mind.

Chapter 12, structured as a PowerPoint presentation titled “Great Rock and Roll Pauses” (you can read it here), plunges into previously uncharted literary territory. This unlikely format her interviewer calls “destabilizing,” as well as beautiful and haunting. The challenge in using it, says Egan, was that it is basically a discontinuous form being manipulated to create a continuous narrative. In another writer’s hands, such a deviation from the expected might seem gimmicky, but in Egan’s view that particular chapter demanded to be told in a fragmented way, which PowerPoint enabled. Something unlikely to happen again, she says.

While the books experimentation was praised by critics and has baffled readers, Egan believes that the only legitimate way to experiment in writing is to let the content dictate the form. And that’s where the author’s creativity has to come through. Otherwise it’s an intellectual process laid on top of a story, which from the discerning reader’s point of view, never works.

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Backpack Books

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Dickens

Dickens’s writing retreat in Rochester, England (photo: vweisfeld)

Books written in exotic locales have a zing of extra appeal. What would Elizabeth Catton’s The Luminaries be without Hokitika, Graham Greene’s The Quiet American without steamy Saigon, or Dickens’s Oliver Twist without London? If we’ve read these books, we’ve been to these places, at least in our imaginations. And, sometimes, only in our imaginations. The late Gabriel Garcia Márquez created such a detailed portrait of the fictional town of Macondo, every one of us who read One Hundred Years of Solitude feels down in our bones that we’ve been there. And, none of us want to visit the bleak Mexican borderland of Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing or, God save us, Blood Meridian.

When sense of place is absent in a novel, we miss it. When place details are wrong, we notice. A few years ago, I read the thriller Gorky Park and enjoyed the first half a lot. It’s set in Moscow and created a vivid mental picture of the city. Then the action moved to New York, and the details were just . . . off, in ways I don’t remember now. Finally, the picture of New York became so discordant it threatened the credibility of the Moscow scenes.

Brooklyn-based publisher Akashik Books celebrates the importance of setting with its anthologies of place-based noir stories (Brooklyn Noir, Boston Noir, Trinidad Noir, Delhi Noir, Copenhangen Noir, and so on), new original writing set in distinct locales. A requirement for Akashik’s Mondays are Murder flash fiction series—“to get your week off to a dark start”—is that stories “be set in a distinct location of any neighborhood in any city, anywhere in the world, but it should be a story that could only be set in [that] neighborhood.” Such focus is essential for writers and brings their stories to life. Paradoxically, by being specific about places and people, writing becomes more universal, a point made by Donald Maass in his helpful Writing 21st Century Fiction. Generic places and stock, stereotypical characters don’t engage readers.

When I travel I take along books set in the place, hoping to intensify and enrich the travel experience. A time or two, that has backfired. The biography of Vlad the Impaler I carried with me to Romania last fall was I must say too intense and specific in its gruesome details, so that I abandoned it, half-read. Traveling in New Mexico and binge-reading a suitcase full of Tony Hillermans revealed such a repetitive story arc that I never picked up another. This was not something I’d ever noticed reading one or two a year.

An entertaining guidebook for place-based reading, or for armchair travelers wanting to steep themselves in a locale or rekindle memories of past visit is Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust to Go: Recommended Reading for Travelers, Vagabonds, and Dreamers (2010). Pearl recommends both fiction and nonfiction books for territories as wide as Oceana and as focused as her home town, Detroit. Alphabetically, she roams the world from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. It will help me pick books for two trips to Canada this summer!

And, if you’re really into it—check out the Geoff Sawers’s literary maps of the U.S. and U.K., showing who writes where.

Blackfish

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killer whale, Blackfish

Being in the pool with killer whales during performances, as in this photograph, is now banned (photo: farm1.staticflickr.com)

The Northwest Natives call them Blackfish. Tilikum is a Chinook word meaning “friends, tribe, nation”—exactly what Tilikum, the killer whale, has been denied. Finally, last night I watched the Magnolia Pictures documentary Blackfish, aired by CNN last October and November, which tells the story of Tilikum and the three humans he has killed.

Blackfish has sparked renewed questions about the capture, confinement, and training of cetaceans—especially killer whales—for human entertainment. From 1976 to 1997, 77 whales were taken from the wild in Iceland, Japan, and Argentina for aquariums and aquatic theme parks. Some additional number died during attempts at capture. Now about 50 of these animals are on display throughout the world, and a large number of them were born in captivity.

Not surprisingly, SeaWorld Orlando, where Tilikum lives, has many objections to the documentary (and provides only half-answers to the questions it raises), but their ultimate concern boils down to money. This was apparent in comments at an April 8 hearing on California Assemblyman Richard Bloom’s proposal to make it illegal to hold killer whales in captivity and to use them for performance or entertainment. According to NPR coverage, the President of SeaWorld San Diego “reminded committee members that the park is an important part of the regional economy,” with 4.6 million visitors last year and making $14 million in lease payments to the city.

SeaWorld’s lobbyist was even more blunt, saying that “if the bill passes, SeaWorld would just move the 10 killer whales it has in San Diego to other parks.” Such a restriction would cost the park hundreds of millions of collars, and SeaWorld “would expect the state to make restitution.” In short, he said, “if you ban them, you buy them.” The Assembly committee called for further study.

SeaWorld officials label Blackfish as propaganda and unbalanced. If by that, they mean the film is powerfully made, emotionally gripping, and makes a strong point, they certainly are correct. Filmmaker Gabriela Cowperthwaite, however, says she is not an animal rights activist and developed an interest in the story of Dawn Brancheau’s 2010 death by wondering, “How could our entire collective childhood memories of this delightful water park be so morbidly wrong?” Rotten Tomatoes critics rating: 98%.

Cowperthwaite provides background about killer whales in the wild that enables viewers to appreciate why the idea of penning them in pools is inherently flawed. Subspecies of orcas establish matrilineal, multigenerational family groups that are the most stable of any animal species. Throughout their lifetimes, individuals are never away from their family group for more than a few hours. Several related family groups form pods of perhaps 20 animals. They range great distances and are found in every ocean. Each group’s preferred foods, vocalizations (dialect), hunting methods, and behavior is specific to that group and is passed from generation to generation. In other words, the groups have an identifiable culture.

Adults are big (up to 26 feet long and weighing six tons or more), mobile (often traveling 100 miles a day), and fast (swimming nearly 35 miles per hour at top speed). They have big brains, especially well developed and for analyzing their complex environment and identifying prey. In the wild, females can live to age 90, and males to age 60, but their average lifespan is 50 for females and 29 for males. In captivity, they generally live into their 20s, despite the supposed advantages in feeding and veterinary care the parks provide.

Contrast this picture with their life in captivity. Generations are separated. Whales from different groups (culture and language again) are penned together. The environment is not particularly stimulating. And, if they don’t do what their human trainers expect, food is withheld. Killer whales, an apex predator, may find this baffling and unacceptable.

Intelligent, curious, playful, problem-solving–all these positive traits have helped create the friendly, seemingly affectionate Shamu image. In truth, although there are few documented attacks on humans–and no fatalities–by the tens of thousands of killer whales in the wild, the small number of captive killer whales reportedly has made nearly two dozen attacks on humans since the 1970s, four of which have been fatal, and three of which fatalities have involve Tilikum.

Born in 1981, Tilikum is the largest orca in captivity, 22.5 feet long and weighing 12,000 pounds. He was responsible for the drowning and battery deaths of a trainer in British Columbia in 1991, a SeaWorld Orlando intruder in 1999, and SeaWorld Orlando trainer Dawn Brancheau in 2010, when he grabbed her arm and pulled her under the water. The latter death led to new safety procedures at SeaWorld, although the parks have unsuccessfully appealed OSHA safety penalties and are looking to install new technologies that would let trainers return to the orca pools.

Ironically, the sea parks that have fostered public affection for these giant creatures and cultivated interest in their welfare may also have created the environment in which concern over their captivity has again erupted, 20 years after Free Willy.

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A Failed Censorship Attempt

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Afghanistan war, military, Mike Martin, Intimate War

(photo: Hurst Publishers)

The UK Ministry of Defence has been trying to stop publication of a book it requested on the British Army’s 13-year campaign in Afghanistan’s Helmand province. The MoD commissioned captain Mike Martin of the Territorial Army to write the book, entitled An Intimate War – An Oral History of the Helmand Conflict 1978-2012, but does not like its conclusions. It therefore held up publication for almost a year, under a policy governing books and articles by serving military personnel.

The ongoing dispute  prompted captain Martin to resign from the Army, and the book will be published soon. In the U.S., it’s available from Amazon for pre-order, coming Friday, April 18.

According to an account in The Guardian, “the book presents a bleak picture of British and American involvement, claiming that troops failed to grasp that it was primarily a tribal civil war.” As a result, Martin says, the troops “often made the conflict worse, rather than better. This was usually as a result of the Helmandis manipulating our ignorance.” Involvement in Afghanistan has cost the Britain 448 deaths, many of which occurred in Helmand province, a Taliban stronghold and one of the country’s major poppy-growing regions.

Martin’s book argues that the Taliban were not the “main drivers of violence,” but rather that the conflict was driven by the personal motivations of Helmandi individuals, including local politicians  and tribal chiefs. This made the conflict akin to a civil war  between clans, “rather than a clash between the ‘good’ government of Afghanistan and the ‘bad’ Taliban,” says The Daily Mail.

Martin wrote the book as part of his PhD work for Oxford University and was one of a very few British soldiers who speaks Pashtu fluently. The book was the result of six years of research, involving 150 interviews conducted in Pashtu, and it begins with the problems the Soviets faced in Afghanistan in the 1970’s.

The Daily Mail story says “his criticism of intelligence blunders and the failure of commanders to understand the conflict is said to have embarrassed officials.” Although the Ministry opposes the book, Major General Andrew Kennett, who commanded Martin’s unit, said: “I think he has done the Army a great service by writing this,” and General Sir David Richards, the recently retired head of the Armed Forces, who commanded international forces in Afghanistan between 2006-07, said, “I sincerely wish it had been available to me when I was ISAF Commander in Afghanistan.”

Martin plans to donate proceeds from the book to military charities.

Three years ago, the Ministry of Defence bought up and destroyed all copies of a book by Sunday Times journalist Toby Harnden: Dead Men Risen: The Welsh Guards and the Real Story of Britain’s War in Afghanistan. Harnden’s award-winning book also was about the British deployment to Helmand, and after deletion of 50 words, it was reprinted.

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Planner or Pantser?

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pantser, writing, author

(photo: upload.wikimedia.org)

This will make sense to the dwindling number of people who remember taking photographs with a Polaroid camera, when, as Anne Lamott says, “the film emerges from the camera with a grayish green murkiness that gradually becomes clearer and clearer.” She compares writing early drafts to watching a Polaroid develop, an inchoate beginning—often a vague mess, in fact—and an almost imperceptible sharpening, a coming into focus, with the people, the setting, everything as the writer sees it.

The question I’m most often asked about my writing is, do I plan the whole book out or do I let it develop as I go along? In writing circles, this distinction is between a “planner” and a “pantser”—a slightly snide reference to people who write “by the seat of their pants.” Most writers use one approach or the other. I use both, depending.

In the opening chapters of the mystery novel I’m finishing now (Sins of Omission), I throw in a lot of unexpected information—scars on a corpse’s wrists suggesting a serious suicide attempt, a snatch of overheard conversation—thinking it may be useful down the road. I also established the chief emotional conflicts for the main character (pride versus shame; bravery versus cowardice; and success versus fear of failing). I wrote about 20,000 words. I had a soup of messy situations, clues and maybe-clues, and a couple of dead bodies. I was at a stopping place, where the characters and plot needed to be reined in so that my eye was on the prize—the solution to the mystery—some 60,000 words ahead. And it would take that many words to get there and plausibly explain everything, consistent with the characters’ personalities and the difficult situations I’ve put them in.

At that 20,000 word mark, when I wasn’t quite sure where to go next, pantsing along, I took a big sheet of paper, wrote down each character’s name, scattered about, and listed every question I could think of relevant to that person. Mind, at that point, I could not answer these questions. But connections started to appear. Arrows. The next place the plot needed to develop was suddenly obvious. For a while, I unfolded that big sheet every morning and organized the plot around the actions needed to address the key questions. Not in 1, 2, 3 order, but in the order enabled by each new event or piece of information.  Some could be answered with a single toxicology report from the police lab, some required several chapters of set-up and resolution. Ultimately, I had 36 of these questions. Here are a few:

  1. Who was Hawk’s father?
  2. Where did Hawk get the drugs?
  3. Why did he confess to murder?
  4. What is Charleston hiding?
  5. What was Charleston’s relationship with Julia?
  6. Who killed Julia?

Even this sample reveals the extent of what I did not know as I was writing! Julia dies in Chapter 1, but we aren’t positive who killed her until Chapter 47 (of 52). Every 10,000 words or so, I reviewed the list. Is this question answered satisfactorily for the reader? If not, am I on a path to answering it? Is the Polaroid coming into focus?

Lately, I’ve started describing this process as “solving the mystery along with the reader.” That’s what it feels like and why I can get up every morning at 5 a.m. to write.

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Guilty Until Proven Otherwise

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house fire

(photo: Wikimedia.org)

4-28-14 update – New research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences estimates that the number of innocent people on death row is about twice that of previous estimates–or about 120 of the approximately 3,000 people on death row in the United States, as reported by TIME. “Each quest for mathematical clarity only serves to underline the troubling paradox at the heart of the modern death penalty,” says reporter David Von Drehle. “We want the option of execution (every poll confirms this, even as the percentages in favor of capital punishment appear to be trending downward). But we also want certainty.”

The Michigan Innocence Clinic, a project of the U-M Law School, takes on cases of individuals wrongfully convicted in the state’s courts. The Clinic is modeled on Innocence Projects in many other states, with one difference. (Check what’s going on in your state.) It’s the only project in the country that focuses on cases that cannot be solved with DNA evidence.

In most felony convictions, DNA or other biological evidence is simply not available, so investigators must dig for other causes of how a prosecution went awry. Typical flaws in cases are eyewitness misidentification—with the shortcomings of eyewitness testimony repeatedly demonstrated—improper forensic science, false confessions, prosecutorial misconduct, unreliable or coerced police informants, and bad lawyering.

Take as an example the prosecution that sent David Gavitt to prison for 27 years. In 1985, his wife and two young daughters died in an overnight fire at their home, and David was hospitalized with burns and cuts. Police and prosecutors spent their energies attempting to prove a case of arson. Arson science has come a long way in recent decades, and many of the old theories about the burn patterns of fires as they spread have been soundly disproved. The Innocence Clinic brought modern experts into the analysis of Gavitt’s case, which convinced the current county prosecutor to drop the charges and release him from prison. Despite his quarter-century-plus in prison, he was luckier than Cameron Todd Willingham, convicted of arson in Corsicana, Texas, for a fire that took the lives of  his three tiny daughters. The faulty evidence that convicted Willingham also was refuted by subsequent, more scientific investigators, but the State of Texas refused to reexamine the case and executed him.

The Michigan Innocence Clinic has received some 4,000 applications (each 20 pages long) from inmates, and has a more than a dozen active cases. It has succeeded in exonerating eight prisoners so far. For a case that has previously been unsuccessfully appealed to be re-examined, not only must evidence must be strong, it must fit certain legal requirements. A video shows the kinds of holes in the prosecution that the Clinic uncovers.

According to an article by Alice Rhein in the Spring 2014 Michigan Alumnus magazine, a Clinic staff member is creating a documentary about one of its successful cases. He is attempting to crowdfund it, and so far has raised about a third of the projected $25,000 budget.

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A Personal Writing Style

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Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, Jeeves and Wooster, P.G. Wodehouse

Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie as Jeeves and Wooster. (Artwork: hockypocky.deviantart.com)

Michael Lydon, in an entertaining essay for Visual Thesaurus, takes on the elusive question of how a personal writing style develops. Writing styles were something I used to take as they came, part of the background. Some were more old-fashioned, but beyond that, I didn’t think about them. Not until I read the entire two-inch thick volume of John Cheever’s short stories did I think about how a style might be something a writer could strive for. When I turned the last page, I was so marinated in Cheever’s deceptively simple way of putting words together, his choice of subjects, and the kinds of characters who peopled his stories, I felt as if I could sit down and dash one off myself. Of course I couldn’t. That writing style was Cheever’s alone.

Lydon’s essay takes the experience of Pelham Grenville Wodehouse as his model, and how Wodehouse created “a comic world centered on the quintessential featherbrain Bertie Wooster, his unflappable manservant Jeeves,” and the memorable friends and relatives in the Wooster orbit. Over six decades, Wodehouse  produced dozens of best-selling novels and stories about Jeeves and Wooster. And they’ve been adapted for television, movies, and the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, By Jeeves (title song).

Authors can certainly claim literary success when one of their characters enters the language as the only descriptor needed for a particular type of person, a Fagin or a Portnoy. “Jeeves” remains the archetype of the unflappable, ready-for-any-unlikely-eventuality manservant. And Jeeves and Wooster are an instantly recognizable duo, brought to life in Wodehouse’s lively stories.

How is such a distinctive voice and style developed? Distinctive, but not too constraining? Comfortably familiar, but not tiresome? Lydon suggests the answer can be found in  Enter Jeeves, a 15-story collection published in 1997 (Dover) that “opens a crystal clear window on Wodehouse’s work method which may be fairly summed up in four words: unremitting trial and error.” The stories trace a stumbling path in the development of Bertie’s eventual world view and the complex relationship the two men settle into. With each story, Wodehouse’s prose became “sharper, more succinct, and—there’s no other word for it—more Wodehouse-ian.”

The key to making one’s own prose as inimitable as that of Wodehouse or Cheever or any other admired writer is to imitate—not the style—but the work method. Lydon advises writers to “keep honing, polishing, revising, rejecting, and rewriting” until they begin to approach what they want to say, then do it some more. Lather, rinse, repeat.

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