Category Archives: Fiction

Fan Fic Fest

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Sherlock, Freeman, Cumberbatch

Martin Freeman (Watson) & Benedict Cumberbatch (Holmes) in Sherlock

Last night a high-powered panel of experts discussed fan fiction and its uneasy relationship with traditional media, moderated by Anne Jamison, author of Fic, and oft-quoted academic expert on this phenomenon. (She teaches the fan fic class I’m auditing at Princeton.) Fan fiction, in essence, is taking existing characters (from Elizabeth Bennett to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, sometimes both at the same time) and creating new plots and storylines for them. One of its fundamentals is that people write it for love of the characters, not for money. On the panel were New Yorker tv critic Emily Nussbaum, Jamie Broadnax, creator of the website Black Girl Nerds, commentator Elizabeth Minkel of The Millions and The New Statesman, and intellectual property attorney (and fan) Heidi Tandy.

Traditional media often treat the huge and hugely diverse fan fiction universe in what the panelists observed is a mocking way, as if it were made up solely of young women who want to write about male-on-male sex. That trope is called “slash,” it is alive and well, and it really got going with Spock/Kirk fan fic. Now there’s a huge Johnlock (John Watson/Sherlock Holmes) fandom. (Find some well-written Johnlock material here.)

By contrast, the X-Files spawned a lot of het (heterosexual) fic written by people who really thought Scully and Mulder should get together. And, of course, the runaway financial success 50 Shades of Grey began as E.L. James’s fan fic based on the Twilight series.

Though sex is an important component in some fan fiction, and though a lot of it is written by young women, it’s a much more diverse field than commentators typically acknowledge. Meanwhile, there’s something unseemly, panelists agreed, about highly paid stars and showrunners snidely critiquing the writing of people who are doing it for free.

Interestingly, some tv shows are courting the fan fic community, counting on its obsessiveness to uncover Easter eggs in the story and faint clues and parallels and arcane references. Sherlock (though Benedict Cumberbatch has run afoul of the fan fic world for some of his critiques of it) uses many fan fic tropes, and the first episode of Season 3 included a group of fan fic writers as characters, creating their explanations for how Sherlock was not dead, even after the fall witnessed at the close of Season 2. Panelist Minkel has covered these developments nicely.

The Sherlock showrunners draw on many sources—not just the “canon” of Arthur Conan Doyle’s original stories—but all the movies, books, and other derivative works about Holmes that have been created subsequently. Fan fiction, the practice of live-tweeting shows, and other possibilities are cracking open the tv screen, and, in the future, popular programs will likely exist both within and outside their scheduled allotments.

Fan fic is a great big and raucous world, and if you’re at all curious, here are some places to start exploring or toe-dipping: Archive of Our Own (AO3), which reports it contains almost 18,000 fandoms, has more than a half-million users, and 1.6 million works; and the FanFiction Network, which used to be the most popular fan fic site, but is being outrun by AO3.

The tagline of Jamison’s book is the possibly aspirational “Why fanfiction is taking over the world.”

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Capturing the Thrills

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security cameras, street corner

(photo: takomabibelot, creative commons license)

Among the workshops at the Liberty States Fiction Writers’ annual conference last weekend were two directed specifically to writers—and readers—of thrillers, led by highly-rated author Melinda Leigh and featuring Dan Mayland (espionage) and Ben Lieberman (financial thrillers). The first was on “Technical Difficulties”—and the three experts described how the ubiquity of cell phones (especially their GPS capabilities), public and private security cameras, and increasingly sophisticated facial recognition software make it harder and harder for urban bad-guys to evade discovery. (Here’s an example of the many websites and articles focused on defeating facial recognition technology.) While security and cell phone cameras were key to finding the Boston Marathon bombers, they are a black hole for story ideas, if authors want to write an accurate and believable modern-day thriller or crime story.

Similarly, a photo posted on social media may well have embedded geotags that reveal where it was taken—at the crime scene, at the perpetrator’s home, at his/her favorite hangout. This explains, I think, why so many mysteries are set in past decades—even centuries—or in small towns, where such capabilities don’t impose plotting impossibilities for their creators. I’ve had to let a protagonist’s phone battery run out, for example—imperfect, maybe, but we’ve all done it.

Understanding how such technology works, in order to construct a plausible 2015 plot requires research, and, like many authors, I’ve confessed to really loving the research I do for my books. These presenters’ second workshop—“The Thrill of Thrillers”—discussed restraining the impulse to put all that research in the actual book. Technothrillers (of the Tom Clancy/Frederick Forsyth/Michael Crichton variety, to which I am addicted ) are an exception. Too much background research slows readers down, and when they’re skipping over as much as they’re reading, face it, the thrill is gone!

Another advantage of leaving any type of too-detailed information out is, of course, that the reader can imagine a technology (likewise torture) that is more vivid, scary, or powerful (or gruesome) than the author can. You need just enough to jump-start their own creativity.

A side issue: I noticed how Amazon’s author pages for Leigh, Mayland, and Lieberman provide “Customers also bought books by . . .” information, and there is almost 100% gender concordance between the authors’ gender and that of the other authors customers reportedly purchased. Is that true? I like books by men AND women, if they are well done, and most other readers I know are the same. So, do these lists reflect real reader preferences, or just Amazon’s marketing assumption? Signed, Wondering . . . See this related post.

****The Last Island

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dolphin

(photo: wikimedia)

By David Hogan – I can’t remember what circuitous path of weblinks took me to David Hogan’s website, but it looked interesting enough that I ordered his book. Unlike a best-seller or a famous author about whose work the reader starts with a set of assumptions, I knew nada about Hogan or his work.

I feel well rewarded for my curiosity. The story’s narrator is a former Boston fire fighter, attempting to escape a past tragedy, who takes up a bartending job on a remote Greek island and moves to a weatherbeaten one-room shack in an even more isolated cove on the island, near another shack inhabited by the elusive Kerryn. It’s some while before he even sees her, and then skimming magically over the water of the cove in the moonlight.

The island’s small population, which makes its living by fishing, is torn by factions. One group is using new nets that ultimately will destroy the fishing industry and give the islanders no choice but to embrace development and tourism, and the other group wants to keep the community’s simpler, traditional life. The secondary characters who take sides in this conflict are portrayed both convincingly and entertainingly.

It turns out Kerryn is an animal rights activist who has befriended a dolphin, whom she calls Yukon, who symbolizes all that will be lost if development proceeds. The dolphin becomes as much a character and a player as many of the people. The conflicts that ensue are intimate and devastating.

Hogan calls The Last Island “a universal tale of escape, love and redemption.” A screenwriter, his writing is smooth and compelling in this appealing novel.

***The Cut

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marijuana

(photo: fotobias, Creative Commons license)

By George Pelecanos – Washington, D.C.: the Capitol, White House, Smithsonian, The Mall. Forget it. Pelecanos’s Washington exists outside these tourist-trod centers of power and culture, landing squarely in the territory of drug dealers, D.C. Jail, grease-pit restaurants, and sleazy auto shops. His characters aren’t the power-brokers talking endlessly around tables on the evening news. If they make the news, its ten seconds about a corpse found, a conviction, a police gone bad.

Pelecanos, who received an Emmy nomination for his writing on HBO’s gritty cop show The Wire, writes about a Washington, D.C. as authentically as anyone else out there. In this 2011 crime thriller, investigator Spero Lucas is asked to track down who’s behind a series of thefts of marijuana shipments. Lucas is a likeable protagonist, and the book contained none of the (c’mon, really?) believability-stretching plots of many books in this genre.

It was a fun read, but I gave it only three stars because it doesn’t really do anything new, either. In his drive to be current with the tastes of the young black characters, Pelecanos includes too many recitations of long lists of music groups’ names that I, alas, have never heard of, so can’t relate to. A bit of overkill there. Perhaps the people who know all those groups are part of Pelecanos’s target audience.

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** Boy, Snow, Bird

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mirror, image

(painting: “Image” by Lou Hedge)

By Helen Oyeyemi—It’s hard to know what to say about this much-praised novel. It has many elements: two narrators, a passel of symbols drawn from fairy tales (mirrors, rats, evil stepmothers—and mothers), various themes, an epistolary section. Yet, somehow, the book doesn’t cohere into a whole. It’s as if we had all the ingredients, but didn’t end up with the cake.

Many key characters are pretending to be something they are not, so that all the readers assumptions must periodically be reexamined, as Truths emerge. They defend their choices to build a life on lies, and lies—or thoughts about them—are another theme. Boy (who is a girl) is talking about her boyfriend Charlie here: “For my part I was always a little disturbed by him because I’d never heard him tell a lie. That was horrifying to me, like living in a house with every door and window wide open all day long.”

For my part too few of those doors and windows were open in this novel, which kept me from understanding key aspects of the characters’ relationships. While a novel that explains everything is pretty boring, this one tipped the balance too far in the other direction. New York Times reviewer Porochista Khakpour called the novel “gloriously unsettling” and Oyeyemi “a writer of rather enchanting horror stories.” Certainly, horrifying circumstances led the characters to adopt their various pretenses, and while their assumption of false identities may have made a kind of sense in the 1930s and 1940s when they made that choice, what is the continuing relevance to the 21st century reader? Or is there any?

A friend recently remarked that a novel should not be analyzed to death, that the point of it isn’t to dissect, but to enjoy it on a visceral, emotional level. I can think of novels that aren’t fully clear (any of Flannery O’Connor’s writing, for example) that are emotionally powerful. For me, this one never quite connected.

A Cozy Arrangement

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Murder, She Read, is a research report from Nielsen Book Research (a copy will set you back $1,500), on the book-buying preferences and habits of some 6000 nationally representative U.S. mystery/crime readers. The researchers defined “mystery/crime” as

a genre of fiction typically focused on the investigation of a crime. Mystery fiction is often used as a synonym for detective fiction or crime fiction—in other words, a novel or short story in which a detective (either professional or amateur) investigates and solves a crime mystery.

This is a more restrictive definition than most, but a lot of books fit it. Highlights of the study results:

  • cat reading

    (photo: raider of gin, creative commons license)

    Most “mystery” readers (70%) are female

  • The biggest age group of mystery readers (28%) comprises people 65 and older, with almost half of mystery readers 55 and older and
  • Many mystery readers are not actually buying their books; they’re getting them free.

The gender and age concentrations revealed come as no surprise. Month after month, I see lists of the mysteries agents and publishers are signing. Their decisions are creating and reinforcing this important audience, and its dominance is an effect of the choices they make.

I certainly don’t want to suggest there shouldn’t be books geared to the older female demographic, but mysteries that involve clever kitties, cutesy shops, knitting patterns, and recipes not only succeed in appealing to one specific group but also fail to develop new communities of interest.

Authors can—and do—write novels that appeal to both men and women. And many women readers devour books by Michael Connelly, Tana French, Ian Rankin, and Laura Lippman just as much as men do. However, a focus on novels with marketing appeal to only one segment of the population (and a low- or non-paying one at that) may prove counterproductive in the long run. I hope authors and publishers read the Nielsen findings as a call to reach out to tomorrow’s audiences—readers who will be as loyal and enthusiastic as the older woman audience is today.

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***Mortal Prey

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St. Louis arch

(photo: wikipedia.org)

By John Sandford – At a big family celebration last year, I queried my tablemates about the thriller writers they most like to read, and one guest enthusiastically endorsed John Sandford. Since I generally steer clear of Big Type book covers, I was happy to have this recommendation.

In Mortal Prey, Sandford did a strong job establishing the main characters (#13 in a loooooong series)—Lucas Davenport, a Minneapolis deputy police chief, and his primary antagonist, Clara Rinker, a hit-woman Davenport has tangled with previously. Now she’s gunning for some of the lowest lifes in St. Louis, and the FBI wants to stop her. There’s a passel of semi-bumbling FBI agents who’ve apparently spent too much time behind desks. Even more entertaining were the street-smart retired local St. Louis cops Davenport hooks up with. Lots of amusing manly banter.

In a flimsy pretext typical of thrillers that the reader can sail on by, the Minneapolis cop is working out of his jurisdiction and with the feds, which both limits his action and frees him from certain other constraints. Much of the plotting is believable (again, in the thriller context), until near the end, when Sandford abandons the point of view of the sniper, and her actions become increasingly risky to herself and others. Until she becomes a top spinning out of control, she’s a step or two ahead the feebs all the way.

I do wish Sandford had paid more attention to his character names. When Davenport met with agents Mallard and Malone and Mexican police colonel Manuel Martin and the Mejia family, I got kinda lost. No need for that. Thank goodness it wasn’t an audiobook.

Fast-paced, good humor, I’d read another one of these!

The Glass Top-Hat

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NYPD, cops

(photo: Nick Gulotta, Creative Commons license)

Loved this Alexandra Alter article about crime novelist Richard Price and his adoption of a pseudonym, in the hope of producing a quickie novel (and not suffer years over it!). Why not use his skills to dash off a plot-heavy, (shudder) “commercial” novel and reap the proceeds? In fact, he found out he is who he is, and the new book took just as much time and care as ever.

Price, interviewed this week on the PBS New Hour, is the author of the well-crafted and popular novels Freedomland, Lush Life, and Clockers. This pseudonymous endeavor has now emerged as his ninth novel, The Whites, which The New Yorker review by Joyce Carol Oates describes as “a maze of a novel” about a case that haunts NYPD detective Billy Graves. (The ghosts of unsolved cases are a universal occupational hazard for cops, as Price described it for PBS.) The book’s awkward parentage is displayed on the cover as “Richard Price Writing as Harry Brandt.” Even though The Whites came out only about two weeks ago, it’s already a hardcover fiction best-sellers (#5 on the NYT list in it first week).

“You realize you only know one way to write,” Price said during his New York Times interview. In keeping with his stripped-down approach, he did no new research, but instead called upon his extensive experience in ride-alongs with police and their lengthy conversations for his previous novels, as well as in his writing for HBO’s The Wire.

The whole pseudonym exercise was a failure, Price now says. “It seemed like a good idea in the beginning, and now I wish I hadn’t done it.” And, in a line for the ages: “This pen name is like pulling a rabbit out of a glass hat.”

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*** Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

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Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran FoerExtremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer

Thomas Horn as Oskar Schell

By Jonathan Safran Foer, read by Jeff Woodman, Barbara Caruso, and Richard Ferrone – Many people are already familiar with this 2005 book, because of its popularity (despite mixed reviews) and the Tom Hanks movie made from it, and  know the basic plot: nine-year-old Oskar Schell, bereft after the death of his father in the World Trade Center, finds a mysterious key among his father’s possessions and embarks on a one-boy quest to find what the key will unlock. His only clue is the word “Black” on the envelope the key was inside.

Oskar is precocious—an inventor, a scientist, a tambourine-player, a Francophile—and knows so much about so much that the holes in his knowledge gape unfathomably. He’s also full of tics and fears and will pinch himself to make a bruise when something upsets him. Overall, he is an engaging and often funny narrator, getting a bit tiresome only from time to time (this review is of the audio version, so I cannot comment on the circled words, photos, fingerprints, and other marginalia featured in the print version).

Any book about a quest is about what the seeker learns along the way, and Oskar’s brief encounters with the multitudinous New Yorkers surnamed “Black” are well-imagined (especially 103-year-old Mr. A. Black who accompanies him on some of his searches). From them, eventually, he comes to terms with his guilt and grief. Yet the most important understanding he acquires, he finds at home, when he comes to understand there are many ways to respond to the loss of someone you love and not one “right” way.

Parts of the book are told from the point of view of Oskar’s grandmother and his grandfather, his father’s parents. For me, these lengthy flashbacks, told in the form of letters about their past, World War II Dresden, and their difficult relationship with each other, were not as interesting as the present-day story.

Foer has obvious affection for this character, his voice, and his quest to find out how his father really died after the “extremely loud and incredibly close”—and just how loud and how close we don’t find out until near the book’s end—tragedy of 9/11. I cannot help but wonder whether this affinity is related to his own experience, which Foer did not write about until 2010. When he was eight, a summer camp sparkler-making project went awry, and the explosion injured him badly and nearly killed his best friend. Part of that traumatized boy may have become Oskar.

****The Bad News Bible

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Jerusalem

(photo: David Holt, Creative Commons license)

By Anna Blundy – Reading and reviewing classics like The Long Goodbye or best-sellers like Mr. Mercedes and trying to develop my own take on them is fun, but even more rewarding is discovering an author whose books have flown under the radar and bringing them to your attention! In that category, here’s The Bad News Bible (2004), published by Felony and Mayhem Press, a murder mystery set in the heart of Jerusalem, with all the dangers and dislocations thereunto. Ask Brian Williams.

Perhaps because in real life her father was a British war correspondent, killed in El Salvador, Blundy made her protagonist a war correspondent, too. Faith Zanetti is ensconced with a profane, chain-smoking, hard-drinking crowd of journalists with whom she’s spent many dusty hours. Though they work in deadly dangerous places and though gallows humor is one way they stay sane, Faith doesn’t expect murder to invade this close circle of colleagues and competitors. Reviewers have said Faith “is a heroine who was waiting to be created,” the one “we’d love to be.” Faith has been carried along by her courage and her cynical sense of humor into four more books after this one, first in the series.

The book’s title is what Faith’s best friend calls the reams of advice the correspondents are given about staying safe in a war zone, information in stark contrast to the ever-present “Good News Bible” in their hotels’ bedside table drawers. Faith has humor, sharp perceptions, and calls them as she sees them, exactly the traits needed to survive—and Get the Story—in her tricky situation. And Blundy’s writing has the energy to carry it off.

(If you order this book, make sure you buy the one by Anna Blundy. Another has the same title but is a different thing altogether!)