Ed Lynskey's Blog: Cracked Rearview Mirror - Posts Tagged "violence"

As a reader, I generally take my crime fiction with its meat cooked to a rosy glowing pink. Medium rare, I suppose.

As a writer, though, the question of the violent content drives me batty. How much is enough? How much is too much? When do I cut a scene? Do I cut the entire scene? The bottom line always comes into the deliberations. Will the reader throw my book across the room in disgust? Will he or she never want to read another book authored by yours truly?

Violence, of course, has been a part of our stories forever. The Old Testament has some choice moments. The old pulp noirs penned in the 1950s I've read are saturated in blood. John D. MacDonald's early noirs are nasty, at times. Read Cry Hard, Cry Fast from 1955.

When I was in grad school, Harry Crews at the peak of his powers was my favorite writer. His books are hard living, hard drinking grit lit. Try A Feast of Snakes about a rattlesnake round-up that goes south fast. I just finished up reading James Dickey's lyrical backwoods potboiler, Deliverance, and he wrote it in 1970. Dickey taught at my writing school, so the violence in my fiction stems, in part, from my higher education.

Intolerant readers will just skim or skip the lurid paragraphs until the main story picks up again. Does violence, like sex, do little or nothing to propel the plot? Then why include it at all? It builds suspense, I suppose.

One thing I've noticed is the older I grow, the less interest I have in the violent scenes. It's like been there, done that after I've read so many books over the decades.

Ed Lynskey
@edlynskey
Author of Lake Charles and Quiet Anchorage

I wrote my Master Thesis a thousand years ago on Harry Crews. He's a Southern writer noted for, among other things, the heavy violence in his novels (See A Feast of Snakes. Early on, the idea of violence took root in my literary worldview.

Lately I've read more than a few books where the body count keeps rising, but there's no fallout or consequences. Murder and death are still a big deal in civilized society, so this jaded indifference seems strange to me. The violence escalates to the point of turning cartoonish like the Road Runner doing in poor Wile E. Coyote.

I've been taken to task by reviewers of my early books for the rising body count. I didn't believe they were any bloodier than in, say, Macbeth, Sopranos, or Joshua. The upshot is I've grown more attuned to the aftermath of violence, especially beyond the visceral immediate reactions people feel.

In my new Appalachian noir, Lake Charles, I include a Joshua figure in Jeremiah Wheeler who takes my young protagonist Brendan Fishback under his wing. As the dark events roll out, he grows more disenchanted and distrustful of Jeremiah.

Perhaps that's become my own situation. Earlier this year, I published my first small town cozy mystery, Quiet Anchorage. I just wanted to write something that didn't choke and retch on its own gore.

Ed Lynskey
twitter: @edlynskey
Author of Lake Charles

Yeah, sometimes I do. The blow-by-blow accounts of the fights I run across in crime fiction are so often graphic and detailed. Special emphasis is paid to the creative ways blood can spatter and gore can appear. The characters in noir and hardboiled novels have to live up to their tough guy/gal reputations. I've probably written a few of these fight scenes myself.

Sometimes if the fight scene runs on for page after page, I roll my eyes and flip through the unread pages. It's amazing the stamina and endurance our heroes and bad guys have in the extended fight scenes. Do hand-to-hand fights really last that long?

Elmore Leonard's dictum says you've failed as a writer if your reader starts skipping ahead in your novel. That sticks in my mind a lot nowadays. So, my fight scenes are fewer and shorter when they do appear in my narratives. Hey, it's better (and safer) to be a lover than a fighter.

Happy reading to you and yours!

By Ed Lynskey
Twitter: @edlynskey
Author of Ask the Dice, a hit man crime novel set in Washington, D.C.