Getting Up to Speed: Benjamin Black (John Banville) Writing as Raymond Chandler

But first, a rant.

Peter Mathiessen died recently. He had lived a long, fruitful and interesting life. His work as a nonfiction writer and stint as the founder and editor of The Paris Review places him firmly in the pantheon of literary greatness. Thriller Guy enjoyed all the obits, especially a few weeks ago the one in the New York Times Magazine. In each one they carefully record his many awards, specially his 2008 National Book Award for his trilogy, known collectively as Shadow Country. While Thriller Guy takes no pleasure from speaking ill of the dead, no one else seems willing to do it: has anyone ever actually hacked their way through that fucking book? It’s unreadable. While thousands may take exception to this remark, TG is not a stupid person. He has read many “difficult” books and enjoyed them. He’s been known to go on at length, after a couple of drinks, about what a great read Moby Dick is. (It’s about hunting for a whale, people, forget all that symbolism bullshit.)

And TG is a Mathiessen fan, having loved Snow Leopard and some of the other non-fiction.

TG remembers liking an early novel, Far Tortuga. So lo these many years ago,  in 1990,

when it was announced he had birthed a new novel, Killing Mister Watson, TG was excited and lined up to read it. He tried, TG did, but it was as dense as the mosquito ridden, overgrown biological hell of South Florida that Mathiessen was writing about. TG got about a third of the way in, and gave up. This is extremely rare: TG almost never puts a book down unfinished. (One reason is these days all the books he reads he’s paid to read, so he has no choice to plow through the really bad ones. But that’s another story.) It wasn’t that it was badly written, how could the author of all those excellent non-fiction books be a bad writer? just that it was really, really boring. Really, really, really boring.TG would like to throw down a gauntlet here, has anyone out there read the three books of this trilogy and really liked them? Be honest. Or are these books part of that vast category of books that people pretend to have read and loved because it makes them look smart. TG awaits your comments. And while we’re at it, let’s hear some other titles in this category, there’s a ton of them.

Anatole France... “The books that everybody admires are the books that no one reads.” Not that France had read any by Mathiessen.

Thriller Guy can see already that this blog is going to have to be split up into several entries. Why can’t TG write short? Stray ideas turn into short stories that turn into novellas that end up as novels. Same thing with these blogs. So be warned, if you’re dipping into this one be prepared to stay awhile.

TG has spoken several times about the need for writers to get themselves into the correct voice before beginning the day’s writing. The best way to do this is to read (and edit) several pages of writing that you have done (ideally) the day before. Up to where you left off. By then you’ve got your own voice in your head and banished any extraneous styles that may have insinuated themselves in your brain, from, i.e. the morning newspaper, the Game of Thrones episode you watched on television the night before, any book you’ve been reading before you start your own work, or any other print media that has crept in and made itself at home.

In another post TG talked about actually putting a mood, an emotional tone, into your writer’s mind before beginning the day or more specifically, before tackling a particular scene. In his early days as a thriller novelist, TG used to keep a copy of a Dick Marcinko book near his desk so before writing an action scene he could grab it, open to almost any page, read a quick scene of mayhem and then jump right into his own rampage. (The danger with Marcinko, who TG admires to this day, is that he has a jokey style that is insidious, so if you’re trying this at home, be careful to put his book away once the last body has fallen.) From TG’s mailbag, he has found that many writers do the same thing by putting on specific music to invoke a mood. TG doesn’t like to write to music, but that’s another blog entry.

This is not to say you are stealing, appropriating, another writer’s style, you are just setting the frequency in your mind to the appropriate channel.

Aside:  When TG was in his first year in college, living in a dormitory, the arts of seduction were earnestly debated in late night bull sessions. It was thought that of paramount importance for a successful seduction was the sound track for the romantic encounter. One of the fellows in the dorm had a nice collection of Johnny Mathis albums, and these were thought to be at the very top of the romantic heap for putting the object of one’s attention “in the mood.” So if someone had a date, he would borrow the Mathis albums, lower the lighting and listen in the semi darkness. On looking back now, one has to wonder what the hell that was all about. First of all, this was back in the days when dorms were segregated by gender and there was no hope that you were ever going to get a woman in your room. And what good was it going to do to put yourself in a romantic mood? Everyone, all the males, were in a constant state of arousal on one level or another; we didn’t need anything to amp that up.

Ahem. Anyway, TG has a point, it has, as always, just taken him awhile to get around to it. TG has been thinking along these lines -- putting himself in the correct voice before sitting down to write -- because he is rewriting a short, gritty novel he recently wrote, called, until someone comes up with a better title, The Ford Murders: Delia. This is a novel that TG wasn’t intending to write, it just seized him by the throat and demanded to be written.

The book is set in Detroit in 1910 and it’s written in a first person, semi-noir style. This is not TG’s “normal” voice, but it was interesting to fall into it. So interesting – the noir style -- that many others have picked it up for their own uses. The first and most insidious dangerous of writing noir is that you can easily slide into parody. This can happen without the writer even noticing, but, trust TG, when it happens readers can spot it from five hundred yards offshore and it will ruin the story the writer is so proudly constructing. The noir effect is achieved by multiple methods: structure, character building, scene, place, etc. It’s not just a matter of sitting around and thinking up clever imitations of Raymond Chandler lines.

Another Goddamn aside: TG recently read a thriller written by a person from another country who used this line when describing a character: She was about five feet four, with a figure that might have compelled a priest to kick holes in church windows. Most of TG’s readers will immediately catch this as a steal from the great Raymond Chandler book, Farewell My Lovely. Chandler’s line is, It was a blond. A blond to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window. Note how much better Chandler’s line is, just with the emphasis on a few words. The other guy’s line sounds like it was translated into English by Apu down at the Quicky Mart. TG was outraged when he read this in the guy’s book. The line wasn’t attributed, it wasn’t used in irony, it wasn’t an homage, it was a steal. And botched in the process. This was only one of hundreds of commonplace phrases that this writer thought were cutting edge, and in his country maybe they were. Which leads a furious TG back to the questions he has asked in this blog so many times: Why would a company buy and publish a piece of crap like this? (Answer, for money, the book was a bestseller in its home country.) Where was an editor when the manuscript came across his desk? (Answer: He wasn’t there because he’d been laid off so the publisher could make more money. And if he was there, he’d given his balls away years ago to his bosses to keep his position.) And legacy publishing keeps whining and asking why they are being left back in the 19^th century when the rest of the world has moved on. Pathetic.

OK, TG, calm down.

What was TG talking about? Oh yes, getting into the proper mood when sitting down to write. But that will have to wait, this has gone on far too long. Stay tuned for the rest of the story. In the meantime, TG will leave you with some other gems from Raymond Chandler. Rather than rerun all the great ones from the well known novels, here are some seldom seen examples from various short stories.

Here’s the extended version of the stained glass quote from Farewell:

“It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window. She was wearing street clothes that looked black and white, and a hat to match and she was a little haughty, but not too much. Whatever you needed, wherever you happened to be—she had it.”

"To say she had a face that would have stopped a clock would have been to insult her. It would have stopped a runaway horse."-- The Little Sister

"I felt like an amputated leg." -- Trouble Is My Business

"The corridor which led to it had a smell of old carpet and furniture oil and the drab anonymity of a thousand shabby lives"--The Little Sister

"His smile was as stiff as a frozen fish." -- The Man Who Liked Dogs

"The walls here are as thin as a hoofer's wallet." -- Playback

"The kid's face had as much expression as a cut of round steak and was about the same color."-- Red Wind

"Tasteless as a roadhouse blonde."-- Spanish Blood

"From thirty feet away she looked like a lot of class.  From ten feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from thirty feet away."--The High Window

"I called him from a phone booth. The voice that answered was fat. It wheezed softly, like the voice of a man who had just won a pie-eating contest."-- Trouble Is My Business

Oh, what the hell. TG can’t resist one more from Farewell. This is the entire noir genre in two brilliant sentences.

"I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun." Farewell, My Lovely

For those of you who wrote asking about Thriller Guy's condition after eye surgery, thanks, TG is fine and will undergo surgery on the other eye tomorrow. The following blog was typed using only two fingers and one eye. The things TG does for his loyal readers...

Mrs. Thriller Guy, (MTG) TG’s wife, often complains that TG spends too much time discussing the finer points of the writer’s life and the technical aspects of novel writing. “Too much inside baseball,” she says. Well, these are the things that TG finds interesting, so those of you who have wondered in here looking for sex tips or cat pictures you’ll have to go elsewhere. At least today. But come back later, who knows when TG will slip in a little pornography to up his stats.

TG recently reviewed a thriller, which will remain unnamed because of legal reasons, and was disappointed in both the writing and the fact that he never really engaged with the story. It might not always sound like it in this blog, but TG starts every book with the hope that it will be good or better than good. This one wasn’t. A big flaw in the novel was the conflicted villain, who ricocheted between feeling simply misunderstood and being flat out insane, but the real problem was the author’s incessant attempt to scientifically explain what was essentially an unexplainable science plot. The villain had built a machine that enabled him to not only see into the future in 24-hour increments, but at the same time the same machine could be used to cause earthquakes and tsunamis. It seems to TG that one superpower would have been hard enough to sell, but no, various characters yammered on for pages and pages about how all this was scientifically feasible (though readers with even the slightest scientific knowledge would know that it was not) until TG wanted to throw the author into his time machine where he would be sucked down into a miniature, captive black hole. This got TG thinking about the phrase, “suspension of disbelief.”

TG’s area of criticism, book-wise, is the contemporary thriller. To read these books, one must have a very high tolerance for believing the unbelievable. Heroes get shot, sometimes multiple times, and are quickly patched up and back out on the street. CSI-type lab results are available to detectives within minutes rather than days or weeks. Secret anti-terrorism units headed by the president of the US sanction killings and approve improbable missions with great regularity, ditto government agencies that have the technology to listen in on the phone calls of everyone on the planet. Oops, no need to suspend disbelief for that last one. In other words, many of the hallowed tropes of thriller fiction must automatically come under the suspension of disbelief blanket. TG accepts this as part of the reader/writer deal. So what happened in the aforementioned novel where the villain unleashed his oh-so-versatile time travel machine?

(Side Bar: TG’s alter ego, Allen Appel, writes time travel stories. Years ago his editor/writer pal Bhob gave him some excellent advice, which TG has noted on this blog before, “Never try to explain the unexplainable.” Appel has hewn to this advice through five of the Pastmaster novels. He is now writing the sixth, in which he is flying in the face of this dictum. TG is reserving judgment on whether this tactic will work until the novel is done. It may be a mistake; it may work. We’ll see.)

Wikipedia has an excellent article on the subject of suspension of disbelief. In this article, they discuss the common definitions and explanations. It turns out that the phrase was coined in “1817 by the poet and aesthetic philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who suggested that if a writer could infuse a ‘human interest and a semblance of truth’ into a fantastic tale, the reader would suspend judgment concerning the implausibility of the narrative.”

As time passed, the phrase began to take a slightly different meaning, so that by the 20^th century it was agreed that it was incumbent on the reader (or someone who was watching a movie or a play or video game) to be the one to suspend his or her disbelief before even starting the book; you show up ready to believe whatever the writer is dishing out. So, to ask the question again, why wasn’t TG able to swallow what this particular author was serving up with his time-travel machine? The answer was/is, because he, the author, wasn’t a good enough writer to convince, maybe enthrall is a better word, TG into believing in the fictional world he was crafting. This is a return to Coleridge’s notion that in the earlier understanding of the idea it is incumbent on the writer to make the trick work. This was expanded in an essay that J. R. R. Tolkien wrote in 1939, where he was defending the writing of fairy stories. It’s a long essay and pretty dense in places, but TG found it enlightening. Here’s the crux of Tolkien’s argument, at least for our purposes:   

"Children are capable, of course, of literary belief, when the story-maker's art is good enough to produce it. That state of mind has been called "willing suspension of disbelief." But this does not seem to me a good description of what happens. What really happens is that the story-maker proves a successful "sub-creator." He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is "true": it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside. The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed. You are then out in the Primary World again, looking at the little abortive Secondary World from outside. If you are obliged, by kindliness or circumstance, to stay, then disbelief must be suspended (or stifled), otherwise listening and looking would become intolerable. But this suspension of disbelief is a substitute for the genuine thing, a subterfuge we use when condescending to games or make-believe, or when trying ... to find what virtue we can in the work of an art that has for us failed."

So for TG, the writer whose book he was reading for review failed at creating his Secondary World. And this wasn’t just because his time machine didn’t adhere to the rules of physics, or that the rules of some of the other tropes of fiction were broken, but because the guy simply wasn’t a good enough writer to pull off the trick of writing a successful novel. His villain was inconsistent and unbelievable, some of the other main characters were, again, inconsistent, switching sides back and forth just to create a false illusion of twists and turns, his back story rambled on to little effect, many details of the story were glossed over in unbelievable ways when a little extra work could have made them palatable, his basic structure was often garbled, jumping back and forth between various characters in yet again an attempt to gin up some excitement. And yet, the book was published by a major publisher, where, presumably editors worked at editing books, editors who could have pointed out many of the mistakes the author was making, but who didn’t. Mistakes that could have been easily fixed. And why didn’t they? That’s a topic for a whole ‘nuther blog, one that TG will get to someday when he can convince an editor to come clean on why publishers seem content to publish books that are deeply flawed by mistakes that could have been fixed.

And TG hastens to add, this was not the worst book he has read in the last year. It just happened to have been the one that brought the phrase suspension of disbelief to mind. So what’s the takeaway here?

Don’t expect the reader to do the heavy lifting when it comes to buying whatever premise you’ve based your novel on. It’s the writer’s job to create a world wherein all things are logical and consistent.

It’s not enough to explain the more difficult, high concept aspects of the plot, you need to pay attention to everything else as well. Because if you do, you will have gone a great distance in getting the reader to believe what you want him to believe, what he must believe if the novel is going to be successful.

One good way to do it is to ask your beta readers to tell you if you have succeeded or failed in doing this. And then be man or woman enough to take comments that are given and work on those aspects of the work that they refer to.

Remember one of TG’s dictums: When a reader tells a writer that something strikes him as being wrong, that does not mean the reader is correct. What it does mean is that some aspect of what has been commented on needs work. It needs to be “fixed” so that it fits and works successfully within the Secondary World of the novel.

It’s not enough to have a great concept, a shiny machine, a sexy, superhuman hero and an arch villain of incomparable evilness, you need to craft an entire world where all of these aspects can thrive, and be believed. Within that Secondary World.

The secret? If you’ve created your world so it is consist and, more importantly, interesting, readers will believe anything. Yup, anything. So put your time in on every aspect of your novel. Don’t try to convince us that the machine will work, show us that the machine works.

 In his essay, Tolkien gave this small example that TG thought was funny.

“I once saw a so-called “children's pantomime,” the straight story of Puss-in-Boots, with even the metamorphosis of the ogre into a mouse. Had this been mechanically successful it would either have terrified the spectators or else have been just a turn of high-class conjuring. As it was, though done with some ingenuity of lighting, disbelief had not so much to be suspended as hanged, drawn, and quartered.”

TG knows exactly how Tolkien felt.

But forget the books where you have to hang, draw and quarter disbelief. TG suggests we remember the great ones, where the unbelievable is perfectly believable, where the Secondary World becomes the Primary World, at least while you’re reading them.

Or writing them.

Merry Christmas.

The Glories, and Perils, of Research

What Is Thriller Guy Reading?

Out last month from Tor, Larry Bond and Jim DeFelice teaming up again with Red Dragon Rising: Shadows of War. This is military adventure at its finest. There's little time wasted on complex characterization or scene setting, instead the authors cut straight to the action. It's 2014, gas in the US costs $14.39 a gallon and the recession continues unabated. China decides to invade Vietnam then take over the rest of Asia; the US has to step in to save the world. In no time at all the missiles, bombs and bullets are flying. If you're interested in the genre, these guys are among the best.

AJ Update.

As a reminder or for first-time viewers, TG is shepherding a first-time novelist, AJ, as he begins a thriller. Here's a sliver of his comment on the blog below: “Part of what does slow me down is the tons of research I find myself diving into on every little aspect of the story. There are some procedural things that I needed to find out, which makes other questions come up, which leads to new ideas, etc.”

TG loves doing research for a novel. The subject is always a place, time or concept that he's interested in, so what can beat whiling away hours on the Internet, in bookstores and libraries? Nothing. Certainly not writing, the painful act of putting words on paper. TG's suggestion is to do a small amount of research while you're getting your concept together, making sure things will work, then doing your outline to get the story down, go back and do any specific research you need for your first several chapters and then START WRITING. Everyone's schedule is different, but if you've got all day to write, a solid four hours in the morning, followed by a couple of hours rewriting what you did the day before followed by another couple of hours of research is a good day's work. A ratio of 4:2:2. If you're squeezing the writing in around a day job, try to stick with the ratio, even though your time will be shorter; splitting the various aspects up over several days if need be.

Research will suggest new lines of attack, new plot twists, new characters and sometimes entirely new directions. It is (usually) wise to follow these leads; beware of thinking that because it means going back and rewriting what has already been written to make the new material fit, that it will be too much work and not be worth it. This is a mistake. Plots, characters and concepts grow because they are fed new material, either from your own brain where you make it up or from outside sources. Research, in other words. You will be amazed how your book will grow from what you will come to see as the paltry, spindly little thing it was when it was first conceived, to the big, strong bruiser it will become when it is finished.

Another Useful Book.

At the other end of the spectrum from Zuckerman's, How to Write the Blockbuster Novel is the newly published, Talking About Detective Fiction, By P.D. James. TG has not had the time to read this, but it's obviously going to have some good stuff in it. Everything that P.D. James writes has good stuff in it. Perhaps some kind soul out there might find a copy of this and review it for us on these pages? For a look at the first chapter, go here.