Tag Archives: novel

*** The Director

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Robin Hood

“Robin Hood’s Band Made Merry by Killing the King’s Deer” (photo: c1.staticflickr.com)

By David Ignatius (narrated by George Guidall). This thriller is set in the bowels of the nation’s national security apparatus, at the time a new CIA director is appointed who is not a Beltway insider, but plucked from the corporate world. The new director, Graham Weber, is pitted against the puppeteers of competing security agencies and (this is not a spoiler) a computer wizard inside the Agency who has gone rogue, James Morris.

How much readers like the book seems to depend on how excited they were by the electronic shenanigans of Morris, though there didn’t seem to be a lot new there—not for readers of Wired, anyway. Still, while Morris and his network were entertaining, the old-school-tie boys on Weber’s other flank were palpably less convincing. The women in the story fell into their respective stereotypes. A flimsy seduction scene is best ignored.

But the bigger problem—and where this book diverges from the best writing of, say, Neal Stephenson—is that, while it has the geeky stuff down, it has no social science sense. “Rob from the banks of the rich countries and give to the poor ones?” Really? Which poor countries would that be? Zimbabwe? North Korea? Myanmar? Uganda? Many of the world’s poorest countries stay that way because the leadership class steals everything they can get their hands on. Sending them “free” cash makes no sense. I didn’t want to read a lecture on political science and economics, but needed some acknowledgement that such sophisticated technologists thought deeper than a Robin Hood fantasy. Unfortunately, this gap undercuts their whole motivation for the crime.

If you can ignore that problem, and if you, like me, worry about our growing electronic vulnerabilities, you may like this book! And, you’ll notice the similarities in supposed high-mindedness between Morris and real-life cyber-spy Ed Snowden.

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History, Mystery, or Miss-story?

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4th of July, early America, John Lewis Krimmel, Philadelphia

John Lewis Krimmel, Fourth of July in Centre Square, Philadelphia, 1819 (photo: wikimedia.org)

A panel of six mystery writers explored the elasticity of history at the Deadly Ink 2014 conference this weekend. They were, in chronological order by their topics:

One of the most interesting questions these panelists were asked is how comfortable they are changing facts to suit the fictional purposes of their story, and the division of opinion was striking. Belsky’s point of view seemed to be “It’s fiction—do what you want,” whereas others, including Alfieri and Inglee, especially, believed that if you incorporate real historical individuals, you have to be true to their attitudes and actions.

Belsky pointed out that we may never know the whole story or maybe even the true story of past events—and Irving pointed out that applies to current events as well—freeing the author to fill in the blanks. (My own opinion on this is there’s a big difference between not knowing a fact and making one up.)

When an author must change a fact, a date, or other detail, they can use author’s notes to describe what and why. With that manes, Scott Turow acknowledges some of the liberties he took in several pivotal event in the WWII novel Ordinary Heroes: “There was no ammunition dump at LaSaline Royale, which is actually situated a few miles from the site I describe . . . Heisenberg (Werner Heisenberg, physicist) did run from Hechingen, but not because anyone had attempted to blow up the secret location of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute on Haigerlocherstrasse. FDR’s death was announced near midnight overseas, not in the afternoon of April 12, 1945.” This last detail seems to be one that could have been fictionally accommodated. It was an event, like the Kennedy assassination, that every American alive at the time remembers vividly.

Alfieri created a character drawn from life down to his toenails and gave him his own name, much as real people appear in the novels of E.L. Doctorow, but when her mystery plot required this character to commit a violent act for which there is no evidence, she renamed him. She was able to build the character in the first place because of the strength of her research, and several panelists endorsed immersive research for fiction, which must appeal to many writers’ innate inwardness.

When an author knows enough about a period—how people thought, what they thought about, what they ate, how they made a living, what they feared—new story elements arise organically from that substrate. They fit the story, the story isn’t made to fit them. Such an approach makes for an infinitely richer reader experience, even if most of that research never appears explicitly in the book. The writer moves forward with confidence.

Another reason to get the details right is that readers will be sure to ding them if they don’t. Errors can destroy a book’s credibility and readers’—and reviewers’—interest in it. To avoid mistakes, Kelly and Rubin said they work with historians. Rubin, especially, because he is published by LSU Press, has to meet scholarship standards.

A final difficulty for historical writers is language. The conversations among characters have to read as if they are of the period, yet a precise rendition of old-fashioned language—by writing “forsoothly”—may be unreadable. David Mitchell, discussing the language he used in The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (I loved this book!), described writing dialog for characters who were native speakers of Japanese, who were Dutch and speaking Japanese, Dutch and speaking Dutch, English upper-class sea captains, English lower-class seamen, and so on. Plus, the book begins in 1799, with two hundred-plus years of language evolution in between. Mitchell developed a language he called “bygone-ish,” which had the ring of the old and the clarity of the current, with variants for each nationality and class.

Mitchell’s approach points out an important issue that applies not just for words and phrases. Even if an event actually did happen or a word actually was in use at the time a story is set, writers of historical mysteries may avoid it anyway, because it will sound too modern, out of place. In this way, truth is more powerful than fact. And if this seems like another way of saying, “it’s fiction—do what you want,” it isn’t.

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***The Cobweb

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spider, cobweb

(photo: pixabay.com)

By Neal Stephenson and J. Frederick George (narrated by Marc Vietor)–As a huge Neal Stephenson fan, I was delighted to see this political thriller—co-written with J. Frederick George—in a special Audible 2-for-1 sale. Unfortunately, it lacked the very aspects of Stephenson’s other works that I enjoy most—complexity, humor (ok, there was a bit), challenging ideas, although there was some effective skewering of government bureaucracy.

J. Frederick George is the pen name of historian George Jewsbury, a Russia specialist—whose special expertise is little-used in this tale about the first Gulf War—who is also Stephenson’s uncle. This book was originally published under another pen name for the two of them, Stephen Bury. That’s not quite the most complicated aspect of the plot.

The story takes place in Iowa and Washington, D.C., and the title refers to how people in the nation’s intelligence agencies can protect themselves by keeping anyone who might disturb their world so smothered in procedure and paperwork and investigative committees that they lose their ability to actually accomplish anything. Ample evidence since the book’s publication (1996, reissued in 2005) demonstrates how the different pieces of the nation’s security apparatus have worked at cross-purposes and always to their own presumed advantage and protection. Amazon reviewers familiar with Stephenson’s other work gave it lower ratings (“Neal Stephenson lite,” one said), but overall, four stars.

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***The Killing Floor

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Greyhound bus, Cleveland

(photo: wikimedia.org)

By Lee Child (narrated by Dick Hill) – This is the first Jack Reacher novel (1997), and the first I’ve read. They’re so popular, fans must either get past the flimsy logic behind Reacher’s choice to become a Greyhound-riding drifter or Child at some point strengthens that case. Like Jo Nesbo’s first Harry Hole novel (reviewed here), you know from the get-go that Reacher’s woman will be an endangered species before the plot runs out.

Maybe male writers just have to get that damsel-in-distress-rescue-fantasy-thing out of their system, but I wish they would. It’s too transparent an attempt to give their protagonists some depth via a meaningful, but brief relationship with really good sex. These relationships have to be short, though, so they don’t spill over into sequels and doing the laundry, picking up the kids, and the other minutia that would inevitably follow if the relationship continued.

The plot had a pretty big “huh?” in it, too, though I quite liked the image of homeless Jack Reacher tooling around the Georgia countryside in the borrowed Bentleys. (Spoiler alert: The “huh” was, if the Margrave powers-that-be hired detective Finlay because they mistakenly thought he was slow-witted—because of what Finlay says was the worst job interview in history—wouldn’t their FBI agent confederate, who knows Finlay, have set them straight?) Superb narration by Dick Hill!

Put the Cat Out

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Siamese cat, Grant

Shut out again. (photo: author)

Steven King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft focuses on how he became a writer and the process of becoming and many of his observations about being a writer ring true to me. Like most people who dispense advice to the novice, he emphasizes the virtue of “ass-in-the-chair”—writing every day, which is a groove serious writers finally work their way into, despite the distractions of kids, jobs, and grocery-shopping. Right now, for example, my lawn is shaggy as a pony’s winter coat.

He says if he doesn’t write daily, “the characters begin to stale off in my mind—they begin to seem like characters instead of real people . . . the excitement of spinning something new begins to fade.” Like many other writers, I hit the keyboard early in the morning, and the excitement King talks about is what gets me out of bed at five to grab a cup of coffee and dive into the work.

He also insists that you shut the office door, “your way of telling the world and yourself that you mean business.” Certainly, I shut mine, mostly to keep out Grant, a Siamese cat who thinks sitting in my lap and watching the cursor move across the screen has limited entertainment value and is something to complain about. (I created a monster when I played YouTube cat videos for him.) Eliminate distractions—phones, beeping email alerts, insistent cats—anything that takes you away from the page.

King tries to write 10 pages a day—about 2000 words. That’s his goal, and he thinks every writer should have one, every day. I’m a fan of getting a draft on paper, powering through and getting the story down and fixing all the inevitable issues and lapses and problems in rewrite. After that, I revise, a chapter a day.

Room, door (and the determination to shut it), goal. Adhering to these basics, he believes, makes writing easier over time. The more you do it, the easier it gets. “Don’t wait for the muse to come,” he says, and it’s astonishing how many would-be writers talk to me about their lack of or need for “inspiration,” as if it sprinkles down from the clouds rather than up from the mind’s carefully plowed field. King says, “Your job is make sure the muse knows where you’re going to be every day.”

Everyone who aspires to write has likely read a lot, too. We’ve listened to lots of TV and movie scripts. Lots of other people’s words, many not very good, have passed into our brains, and our subconscious is filled with the stuff. It’s in there. It wants out. When a phrase or scene comes too easily, almost unconsciously, I’ve learned there’s a problem. It’s canned, it’s derivative, it’s not a genuine product.

So now King gets to the hard part. You have to tell the truth. Your story’s truth. The writer cannot just be a pass-through for others’ words, ideas, conversations. “The job of fiction,” he says, “is to find the truth inside the story’s web of lies.” Even when we love the characters in a book and we really, really don’t want it to end, if the book has told the truth, we can feel satisfied when we turn that last page. If not, a squeaky voice starts up somewhere in our brain, Madeline’s Miss Clavel saying, “Something is not right.” As stunning as most of Gone Girl was—a web of lies if ever there was one—I thought the ending fell unexpectedly flat, and King has put his finger on the reason. In working out her denouement, author Gillian Flynn somehow strayed from the truth of her characters.

By contrast, truth-telling pervades the Pinckney Benedict stories I reviewed this week (on the home page for now; eventually the review will end up in “Reading . . .”). One of the best quotes describing the struggle to find the truth nugget is a favorite of my writing coach, Lauren Davis, and it’s from sports columnist Red Smith, who once said, “There’s nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.”

While that’s true, King also says that even the worst three hours he ever spent writing “were still pretty damned good.”

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Research in Fiction

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Since I write both fiction and nonfiction (a woman has to earn a living), people often ask about the differences between the two. It’s happened that on nonfiction projects, when those of us involved are struggling over how to present some complex technical issue, my colleagues will say it must be so much easier to “just make it up.” Oh?

Tarifa, Spain

Tarifa, looking toward Jebel Musa, a setting in one of my novels (photo: Manfred Werner, Creative Commons)

Thoughtful fiction writers put an enormous amount of research into their work. Obviously science fiction and techno-thriller writers do. It’s the grounding in realistic possibility that lets the reader travel alongside them. Writers in other genres do, too, perhaps less obviously. Research is why I joke that the FBI may show up on my doorstep any time now, given the amount of Internet digging I’ve done into terrorism and weapons. General research on these topics provides an endless stream of ideas and themes for plot development.

In last week’s post, I wrote about the importance of “details.” Research is also how the writer develops and manages those details and avoids errors. If I need a tree in the yard of a house in Princeton, I know what grows here (weedy locusts, draped in poison ivy). But if the house is in Rome, I have to find out what kinds of trees I’d find there. Then I can write that the patio was “thickly shaded by a fragrant sweet bay tree,” rather than “there was a tree in the yard.” Such specific details make a story more vivid in the mind of the reader. While it takes a few seconds to read those eight words, it may have taken an hour to do the research and weigh the arboreal options.

I remember reading a thriller set in Washington, D.C., where a character took a cab and checked the meter for the fare. Alas, in that time period, D.C. cabs used a zone system for establishing fares. There were no meters (there are now). Neither the author—nor his editor—had Washington cred, and I don’t want my readers distracted by such slip-ups.

Research provides essential local color. One of my plots takes the protagonist to Tarifa, Spain. I’ve been to Tarifa, but I can’t say I remember it in detail and didn’t take many pictures. So I did photo research, creating a file of streetscape snapshots that helped me envision where the characters walked, the kinds of restaurants they ate in, the weather, and the local youth culture’s kite-surfing obsession. Research on Tarifa hotels gave ideas about room layouts, décor, city views, and the like. So when I write that Archer Landis could look over the rooftops of Tarifa’s low whitewashed buildings across the Mediterranean to the Rif mountains in northern Morocco, I know that is in fact possible.

Research does more than enable accurate and detailed description. It also can uncover details that fuel the plot. In my novel set in Rome, one of the bad guys hides out in Riano, a small town north of Rome. Riano has a public webcam that shows live pictures of its main square. After watching that camera a while, I created a scene in which the Rome police spot Nic and his girlfriend shopping in the open-air market and set the local police on their trail.

A totally different kinds of research I’ve done is to read works in Italian side-by-side with the English translation, to try to get a feel for the language. Whether this has been at all useful, I can’t say, but it was fun. More practical are the discussion forums of WordReference.com where I’ve asked Rome locals about current street slang.

Maps are essential: police precincts, neighborhood boundaries, building layouts, including floorplans I create. Google Maps street-level views and geo-coded photos, ditto.

I am in awe of those who write historical fiction, some of whom have developed encyclopedic period knowledge. Alan Furst (Europe in the run-up to World War II) and Patrick O’Brian (the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars) come to mind. Not only do they have to get the settings and clothing and historical details correct (no war before its time), changes in speech and language have been enormous. A teen character from a hundred years ago cannot convincingly say, “Whatever,” and the author cannot just write whatever, either.

In a recent interview, author Pinckney Benedict describes the research he did for the short story “The World, the Flesh, and the Devil,” which is told from the point of view of a highly trained fighter pilot. Benedict not only read extensively about fighter pilots and how they think, he spent hours debriefing a friend who was a Marine Phantom pilot in Vietnam, and he also cobbled together “a convincing flight simulator” in his basement and spent many hours in it, following the flight path of the character in the story. Research, he told the interviewer, “makes me ecstatic.”

I collect all my research for a novel in a three-ring binder, which includes the photos and maps like those mentioned above. It has a divider for the basics: the calendar for the year the story takes place, the times of sunrise and sunset in the city, and the phases of the moon for the appropriate season. I can’t have a full moon on a Tuesday and another one the following Sunday. I make notes about time zone differences, so I only have to look them up once. It has newspaper or magazine articles generally related to the subject matter of the story and details about clues I’ve planted or weapons used. This notebook is my personal encyclopedia, and I refer to it often. It keeps me consistent. It keeps me from “just making it up.”

****Ordinary Grace

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William Kent Krueger, Ordinary Grace, Edgar Award

farm3.staticflickr.com

By William Kent Krueger (narrated by Rich Orlow) – Ordinary Grace: A Novel
(2013) was on many prize-giving organizations’ 2013 “best of” lists and won the 2014 Edgar Award for Best Novel from Mystery Writers of America. Krueger, known for his Cork O’Connor series, wrote this stand-alone, because he wanted to explore Aeschylus’s seemingly paradoxical notion of God’s “awful grace”—awful in the overworked sense of “awesome,” and started thinking about the characters that would let him do that and the situations they would be in that required the wisdom from that awful grace. The ordinary grace of the title also figures in the story at a key moment.

Because this is not in the tradition of his crime novels and is a coming-of-age story with a crime in it, the novel focuses on a thirteen-year-old boy and his stuttering kid brother. The interactions with the townspeople all seem true, and they are vivid, rounded characters, not necessarily fully admirable. But it’s small-town Minnesota (lots of literary crime in that state in recent years), and nothing about life seems dark or dangerous to these two preacher’s boys until the bodies start showing up, down by the railroad trestle. I felt the rumble of that plot coming a long way down the track, but if the book didn’t offer big surprises, it had a few smaller ones, and was delivered with evident heart. It was refreshing to see boys the reader knows will grow into good men, not deranged serial killers. Narration excellent, especially the characters of Gus and the Sioux, Warren Redstone.

Krueger says he’s a writer “in part because of the scary stories I used to hear around campfires when I was a boy scout.” Readers can thank those dancing flames.

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Getting There Is Half the Fun

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If travel is in your summer plans—whether by plane, boat, foot, auto, imagination, or whatever—NPR has worked up a booklist for you (and your kids)! Only a rather diabolical sense of humor would team up Anna Karenina and The Little Engine that Could. But NPR has faith you’ll get it. Hmmm. Sorry to say I forgot to check that particular list for Murder on the Orient Express. But you get the idea. As NPR says, “This summer, we’re focusing on the journey.”

On our recent trip to Ottawa, I could stay up as late as I wanted and read four books, even had an excuse to go to the bookstore to pick another. It was heaven! I’ve written about the joys of destination reading before, and NPR’s mode-of-transport approach provides an entertaining new wrinkle—“a surprising, serendipitous book discovery experience for the summer months.” Already listeners and NPR online followers are enriching the network’s dozen lists with their own suggestions, and you’re invited to do the same at the NPR website (link above) or to tweet them with the hashtag #bookyourtrip.

Enjoy!

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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The Rum Diary

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The Rum Diary, Johnny Depp, Hunter S. Thompson

(photo: pixabay.com)

Is it that drinking-to-oblivion has exhausted its limited appeal? Is it that we feel we’ve been there before? Is it that I’m just old and crotchety? If you have The Rum Diary (2011) (trailer) on your Netflix list, you’re in for a few good laughs, but a predictable romantic element and a decided downturn in enjoyment when the main character suddenly dons a cloak of sanctimony near the end.

The movie, set in Puerto Rico in the late 1950’s (great cars!) is based on Hunter S. Thompson’s book, and while Johnny Depp, Richard Jenkins, Aaron Eckhart, Michael Rispoli and Giovanni Ribisi (who makes the least likable character in the movie fun to watch) are more than fine in their roles, the material isn’t up to their performances. It might have been better as a straight comedy without hitting viewers with occasional deeply menacing information, then staggering on as if nothing just happened. Rotten Tomatoes critics rating: 50%.

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