Bert Robbens's Blog

Motives and Methods of Hardboiled Fiction Part 6:
Concluding Unhardboiled Postscript

To anyone who has checked out the shelves of a book store, it is obvious that works in the hardboiled style I’ve described are almost non-existent. There are a few simple, but compelling, reasons for this: 1) it’s hard - hard to write and hard to read, 2) the stories it can tell may be infinite, but there is also an infinite number of stories it can’t tell, and 3) there are more readers for the infinity of stories that hardboiled can’t tell than there are for for those it can.

Most readers choose their fiction for the story or the author. The style in which the story is presented is rarely a deciding factor, though it is often considered a significant aspect of the author’s work. Most would find the limitations of hardboiled (the prohibitions of speculation, motivation, summarization, mind-reading etc.) puzzling. If there are things you can’t say in the telling of a story, then that limits the content of the story right there. Why would any author want to take on these restrictions in the pursuit of something as nebulous as “style?”

The answer is that most authors would not. Mickey Spillane, John D. MacDonald and Ian Fleming borrowed freely from the mythology of hardboiled but ignored the style. Their novels were immensely popular, and their readers did not miss the restricted hardboiled narration. Those novels may seem hopelessly dated now, but their popularity probably did as much to drive the evolution of the mystery genre as Hammett’s did in his day. I’ve called this hybrid “half-assed hardboiled,” another stupid value judgement, though the “half hardboiled” part is accurate enough. The important point is that this hybrid evolved from elements of hardboiled that Hammett exploited and, in some cases helped to create, and it is possible to see some of the directions taken in that evolution foreshadowed in Hammett’s own body of work.

The Appeal of Hardboiled

In both its style and content, hardboiled celebrates the individual and demonizes the collective. In the wide world, these are considered peculiarly American ideals - our “rugged individualism,” but they have broad appeal to anyone who has ever been the victim of a faceless and unaccountable bureaucracy, any form of prejudice, the economic might of corporations, the will of the majority, the betrayal of a trusted friend, the failure of love, and on and on - a very substantial group, in fact, everyone. On the other hand, hardboiled is not an effective vehicle to express (except by their absence) the values of true love, faithful friendship, political solidarity, productive enterprise, social harmony, effective and efficient administration, etc. And it would be willful ignorance to deny that such values exist. There are clearly two sides to this coin, and no one gets through life without seeing both of them. Hardboiled is not fundamentally false in its worldview, nor is it universally correct. Every expression has its focus and emphasis, the choices made on “what to leave in and what to leave out” (Bob Seger, "Against the Wind"). The focus of hardboiled is dysfunction. It appeals to those who seek a voice for their own frustration and loneliness.

Hardboiled is supposed to be objective, and in its presentation of fact it is. But the selection of objective, perceptible facts presented over the course of a hardboiled novel is certainly capable of conveying theme and tone. Theme and tone are not objective; they are slanted, representative of the author’s and/or narrator’s point of view. Theme and tone are the point at which style and content intersect. Theme might be defined as the conceptual implication of the events that form the story, and tone can be seen as the emotional residue of the words that present it. I’ve suggested that the characteristic tone of hardboiled is the disappointment and bitterness born of our universal struggle to find meaning and human connection, a struggle doomed to failure by the stubbornly intractable nature of man and the vast, yawning indifference of the cosmos. It is in this sense of the human condition that style and content intersect. In hardboiled fiction, the characters and their actions live out this vision, and the words that present them are meant to harmonize with it.

But the same myth, and the themes that arise from it, can be presented from many perspectives, each with its own characteristic tone. Noir, for instance, is a shading of hardboiled bitterness, a shading that edges into horror. The tone of noir reflects the individual’s horror at the discovery of his or her own lonely impotence in the empty universe. The hardboiled myth rejects that horror and escapes into the absurd where the individual constructs his or her own meaning and sense of connection through his or her participation in the struggle to maintain it. Sam Spade is good example. He has constructed his self to function in his world, and he protects that self absurdly but doggedly through his actions and words. The tone of the book echoes that absurdity and Spade’s bitter resignation to it. This is hardly commercial pablum, and it raises the question of how and why the novel became so popular and how that popularity shaped the evolution of American crime fiction.

Entertainment

As with all genre and much of literary fiction, people read crime novels for entertainment. Crime fiction can have many goals, but entertainment will always be one of them, usually at the top of the list and overshadowing all others except money. But entertainment is a very broad goal. It is whatever the reader thinks it is. There is nothing in the hardboiled style, bitter and impersonal as it is, to preclude entertainment. In fact, the style seeks that goal through the satisfactions of a vivid visualization of a fictional reality.

But there are reasons the hardboiled style has rarely appeared in its purest form, reasons why few writers have taken up the discipline that Hammett handed down, reasons for the bastardized versions of John D. MacDonald and Mickey Spillane. The first is that not all readers wish to put in the effort of visualization. Visualization requires concentration, imagination, participation, trust, etc. Some readers at all times and all readers at some times will find those demands tiresome and odious rather than entertaining. The other issue is the work that must be done to produce a feasible story in the hardboiled style. It is much easier to tell a story with narrative insight into any and all things than it is to frame it within the constraints of hardboiled, entirely out of dialogue, action and objective description. It is more work for the author to pound his story into a shining hardboiled nugget and more work for the reader to dig into his own mind and emotions to mine that gold. Half-assed hardboiled is a compromise that reduces the work for both. The question of the last post in this series was: what is the significance of the MacDonald/Spillane formula, which uses the hardboiled myth and ignores the style? Their popularity conclusively demonstrates the entertainment value of the myth served up in a thick sauce of heroic personal reflection – a very non-hardboiled style. But the crime novel did not get from The Maltese Falcon to I, the Jury in a single leap. It evolved through almost two decades and thousands of writers, from hack to Nobel Prize winners. To trace that evolution, it might be useful to start with the directions Hammett’s writing took after The Maltese Falcon. Where did he go with The Glass Key and The Thin Man?

The Progression

The restrictions of hardboiled leave the drama of The Glass Key obscure and unresolved, an opinion that is not inconsistent with much of the critical appraisal of the book. Yet Hammett said he believed it to be his best work. Despite their prominence in the New Yorker, stories that have no resolution generally have limited entertainment value. The Glass Key is an obvious exception. Immediately following its publication, it was even more popular than The Maltese Falcon. Even today, there are readers and critics who agree with Hammett’s assessment that it is his best. Some appreciate its open-ended ambiguity, finding in it a direction that leads to noir and the existentialists.

Hammett experimented with the hardboiled style his entire career. Despite Chandler’s dismissal of his artistic intent, it would be foolish to assume that The Glass Key and The Thin Man are not meaningful steps in that experimentation. Hammett may well have seen The Glass Key as the best representation of his style ideal. The restrictions are adhered to just as strictly, and it is purer than The Maltese Falcon in that it does not contain the explicit rationalization of the events of the story that is provided in Spade’s final explanation to Brigid. But this also means that the self of the protagonist is never revealed.

It seems likely that the ambiguity of Ned Beaumont was at least as apparent to Hammett as it is to his readers. I have no idea if that ambiguity was intended or was simply a by-product of the style, and beyond that, I have no idea if it pleased Hammett or depressed him. It is tempting to speculate that perfecting his style goal in The Glass Key exhausted or frustrated him, turning him toward something new and different – The Thin Man.

The Glass Key

In The Glass Key, the big mystery is what is Ned Beaumont’s problem? Why is he so angry all the time? The fact of his friendship with Paul Madvig is made clear, if not by their truncated fight, then by the dinner with Madvig’s mom. But it isn’t really clear why or how they became friends in the first place and why they’re fighting now. And the trip to New York after Bernie Despain – what’s that about? The novel leaves other questions, but these two are enough to call it confusion, which for most people is not a desirable element of entertainment.

The big difference between Ned Beaumont and Sam Spade is that Spade’s actions don’t require explanation like Beaumont’s do. I’ve noted the “dissonance” between Spade’s actions and his words, but it is background noise that probably goes unnoticed in a casual reading. The questions raised by Ned Beaumont’s actions and words cry out for resolution from the beginning. Spade’s long explanation to Brigid at the end of The Maltese Falcon is doubly satisfying in that it not only raises the dissonance to the reader’s consciousness but resolves it at the same time. That doesn’t happen with Ned Beaumont. The mystery of his anger remains distracting and unsatisfying in the sequence of conversations and events that lead to the story’s resolution, and most importantly, in the “resolution” itself.

Several aspects of Ned Beaumont’s anger are clear: 1) Much of it is directed at Paul and shows in his disdain for Paul’s lack of strategic sense and his awkward attempt to climb into polite society with the Senator’s family. 2) It is complicated by his unshakeable allegiance to Paul. He won’t give Shad O’Rory anything to use on Paul, not for $10,000, not for the promise of a gambling house to run after the election or to stop the endless and brutal beating Jeff seems to enjoy giving him. 3) Another large measure of Ned Beaumont’s anger is directed at himself. There is no way to miss the masochism in his voluntarily walking into Shad’s place knowing the likely outcome or his intentionally provoking a fresh beating every time he regains consciousness. The hardboiled text makes these facts apparent, but does not answer the main question: where does this complex and consuming rage come from? The narrator cannot explain it directly, and Ned Beaumont won’t say. Is this another instance of the distracting question of the Continental Op?

There are differences in the treatment of the Op, Spade and Ned Beaumont. The Op is a first person narrator whose lack of emotional engagement focuses the reader back on the characters and actions of the case but leaves unanswered the distracting question of who he is. This ambiguity seems unintended, since the narrator is not the subject of the book and is in fact meant to disappear. Spade is followed in the third person, and while the pursuit of the falcon is drawing the reader’s attention, Spade’s actions and words are slowly and subliminally accreting to form the question about who he is, which, unlike the Op stories, is the real focus of the book. But, just as the reader is recognizing that this is the fundamental question, it is answered in his explanation to Brigid, an answer that reflects back on all the words and actions of the book dramatizing and enriching them in retrospect. With Ned Beaumont, the question of his motives and thought processes is front and center right from the start, and it is also clear that, like Spade, he is the central focus. If the question is to be answered in the rigidly hardboiled style that Hammett insists upon, it must come (most likely) from the words and deeds of Ned Beaumont himself or (much less likely, and probably less satisfying) from one or more of the characters around him. The big difference between The Glass Key and The Maltese Falcon is the point at which the question is raised and the degree to which it is answered.

The progression from the Continental Op stories to The Maltese Falcon to The Glass Key can be explained as Hammett’s attempt to perfect the application of his style by marrying it to the proper point of view and story. If Hammett was dissatisfied with the distraction of the unintended and unanswered question of the Op stories, then the third person narration of The Maltese Falcon can easily be seen as a remedy. The nature of Spade is the fundamental question of the book, but it is so subtly presented that it does not distract from the intrinsically exciting and entertaining falcon plot as it unfolds and is answered as soon as it rises to the reader’s consciousness. The step from The Maltese Falcon to The Glass Key is a little more speculative. If Hammett was seeking a stricter adherence to the rules of his style, he may have considered Spade’s long and very direct explanation of his thought process, in dialogue with Brigid, to be a violation, if not in law, at least in spirit, and The Glass Key might have been an attempt to purify the narrative of this violation. Ned Beaumont is the focal character, the question of his inner workings is urgently apparent from the start, but as with the Op, the question is never answered.

When Janet Henry visits him in his hospital room, Ned Beaumont tells her that Paul pulled him out of the gutter a year before. It is a small admission of his motivation, but it isn’t entirely clear that it is even true. He is doing his best to explain why he took the beating for Paul, and the reader knows he’s capable of lying or shading the truth to suit his own murky purposes. He also says he went with Whisky to the Dog House to try to trap O’Rory, but it isn’t clear that he ever did or said anything in his visit to pursue that end.

In the course of the story, several subsidiary questions (beyond his contentious relationship with Paul) are raised: 1) why did he go to New York to confront Bernie Despain? 2) Why did he first plan to go back to New York? 3) Why did he go with Whisky? 4) Why did he go to Mathews’ country hideaway? 5) Why does he reject Janet Henry’s friendship? 6) Why did he go to Tim Walker’s place looking for Shad O’Rory? To get beat up again, the “masocrist”? (And is the “crist” part of this mispronunciation a hint of character or thematic significance?) 7) Why does he take Janet Henry with him to New York? 8) Why does he make such a final and complete break with Paul? The answers to these specific questions are wrapped up in some of the mysterious aspects of Ned Beaumont’s character: his relationship with Paul, his talent for intrigue, his taste and/or distaste for it, his anger toward himself and/or self-destructive urge, his feelings, if any, for Janet Henry. It is only with a clearer picture of what makes Ned Beaumont tick that the reader could begin to understand his actions. But that clearer picture never develops.

Hammett’s basic narrative style stays pretty much the same (except for the switch from 1st person to 3rd) from the Op through The Maltese Falcon and The Glass Key but there are some interesting touches that may have significance in The Glass Key. The fact that the narrator always refers to Ned Beaumont as “Ned Beaumont” rather than simply “Ned” or “Beaumont” and Janet Henry as “Janet Henry.” Similarly, there are awkward, even over wordy, constructions that could easily be streamlined. These choices seem intentional, as if they have some concept behind them. One theory might suggest the same motivation as that which took Hammett from the revelation of Spade to the enigma of Ned Beaumont – an attempt to perfect the style or, at least, to make it more apparent. The use of the formal full name to refer to two of the main characters could serve as star billing, explicitly pointing the reader to them as focal characters (although why Janet Henry would be any more important than Paul Madvig, for instance, is not at all clear). At the same time, it serves to distance the narrator from them, suggesting the impersonal relationship that must be maintained in hardboiled. The awkward, often choppy constructions might be intended to remind the reader of their objectivity, like the geometric description of Spade’s face at the beginning of The Maltese Falcon. They are not part of a broad, general impression. They are discrete facts. The reader is free to construct them as he or she chooses. All of this might be read as Hammett’s attempt to take hardboiled to its logical extreme. Hammett seems to push the style into the reader’s face, even when it isn’t necessary and may even be disruptive to the narrative flow. Maybe it is because he does it more insistently and obviously in The Glass Key that he prefers it to his other work. From what I’ve read of him as a person, Hammett appears to have had a very crusty, opinionated and contentious side, a fact that fits nicely with this interpretation.

The two dreams reported by Janet Henry and Ned Beaumont seem intended to fulfill the same function as Spade’s explanation at the end of The Maltese Falcon but with more properly hardboiled indirection. They are a hardboiled method of showing the motivations that the style has hidden among the words and actions of the characters, stories within the broader story that reflect back on and shed light on the meaning of the main story. Unfortunately, the dreams have the same ambiguity that fogs the novel. Their enigmatic and digressive quality might be akin to the Flitcraft parable, but they do not really contribute to the drama and do nothing to illuminate the characters’ characters. For all their symbolism, all they say about the motivations of the pair are that Janet Henry is afraid of the ugliness of the truth, and Ned Beaumont recognizes that he cannot trust her to honestly pursue it. These revelations don’t really answer any of the questions that the novel has raised. They cannot elucidate Ned Beaumont’s character and motivation or his relationship with Paul. In effect, the dreams leave Ned Beaumont just about as unknown as the Op and the question just about as distracting. Unlike the Continental Op, however, The Glass Key is more like The Maltese Falcon in that it is focused squarely on the character of Ned Beaumont. If Hammett considered The Glass Key his best work for its adherence to his stylistic ideals, it must also be considered a failure and a demonstration of the limits of those ideals, since it fails in its primary dramatic goal of revealing the focal character.

Another opportunity to understand Ned Beaumont is through his relationship with Janet Henry, but it is an opportunity that Hammett chooses to ignore. She makes her motivation clear in her efforts to get Paul arrested. She hates him, either for his role as the john to whom her father pimps her out or because she really believes he killed her brother or both. But she has little love for her father – she’s contented to let him pay for his crime when Ned Beaumont demonstrates his guilt – and there is little indication that she was particularly close to her brother. So, the hate is clear, but the source of it is not. She enlists Ned Beaumont’s help going after Paul based on that hate, but then asks him to take her away for reasons that are obscure at best. If the use of her full name is meant to suggest her importance to the dramatic core of the book, her actual role does not fulfill its promise. She is more of a plot device than a fully fleshed out person, capable of engaging with a fully fleshed Ned Beaumont. Their relationship does little to reveal anything of either of them.

It is hard to believe that Hammett saw The Glass Key as a failure. It was, in many ways, the fulfillment of his artistic intent, a perfectly hardboiled crime story. If he felt that Spade’s final explanation to Brigid violated the rules or spirit of the style, he could see The Glass Key as the more perfect exemplar. That it left some of the most important aspects of the story – characters, drama, theme – ambiguous and unresolved, may or may not have troubled him. Readers and critics have both praised (“premodern”) and damned the ambiguity. It seems to fly in the face of the call for clarity, but it’s impossible to say whether, or how much, Hammett valued that objective. What is not ambiguous is the fact that his writing, from that point, took a different direction.

The Thin Man

The Thin Man was possibly even more popular than The Maltese Falcon and The Glass Key. Hammett had established himself as a star of American crime writing, and the public was hungry for whatever he produced, but the proliferation of sequels, spin-offs, movie and radio adaptations clearly shows they were not disappointed with The Thin Man. Whether Hammett felt the same, is less clear.

It seems plausible that the title of The Thin Man, which is often thought to refer to the missing mad inventor, Claude Wynant, may actually refer to Nick Charles, or even Hammett himself. Where The Maltese Falcon and The Glass Key are third person narratives clearly focused on their protagonists, both richly (if ambiguously in the case of Ned Beaumont) characterised, The Thin Man is a first person narration by a protagonist that is thin in the sense that there’s not much to him. Far from seeing his role in solving the mystery as an existential quest, Nick Charles sees it as an annoying and meaningless task, thrust on him by others, that is keeping him from his drinking. As a character, he is very thin (exactly the term Ross Macdonald uses to describe his detective protagonist/narrator, Lew Archer). The role Nick Charles plays in the mystery is clearly more Holmesian than Spadish. But there is no sense in which Nick is a hero. He has quite consciously let his life dwindle down to a somewhat empty retirement consisting of drink, socializing with people he doesn’t much care for, trading wit with Nora, and scratching Asta behind the ears. His portrayal, which many found entertaining, could just as easily be read as satire or even condemnation, the portrait of an appallingly thin man. The drama, if there is one, is within the Wynant/Jorgensen family, and it is not the centerpiece of the book. Nick’s (and Nora’s) witty banter is certainly more important to the book’s appeal than any drama it might contain or even the mystery – hence the appropriate connection with screwball comedy.

What is most interesting is the application of the techniques of hardboiled to the decidedly non-hardboiled content of the story. Many of the specific prohibitions of the hardboiled style are observed. Nick Charles is a first person narrator who, without his wit, would be almost thin enough to disappear. He offers little commentary in narration, keeping most of the speculation, motivation, summarization, etc. in dialogue, where Nora comes in very handy. Where it veers from Hammett’s two preceding novels is in the return to a focus on something other than the personality of the main character. In this, it harks back to the British mystery and the Continental Op. But, even the mystery must take a back seat to the comic wit of the protagonist/narrator. That screwball wit is an adaptation of the witty banter of the tough characters in the previous novels, but to make it the highest value of the novel is far from Hammett’s original concept of hardboiled. It sets the tone as well, a light comic tone that effectively removes The Thin Man from the realm of hardboiled.

At the same time, The Thin Man shows how well Hammett was in tune with his time. Screwball comedy is commonly seen as a response to the dreary atmosphere of the Great Depression, an escape into a light froth of fun. The Thin Man was published in 1934, and the story takes place during a couple weeks around Christmas of 1932. Screwball comedy was just being introduced in this time frame, and it is interesting to speculate on the degree to which Hammett was involved in that introduction and/or the degree to which it influenced him. In any case, it is clear that The Thin Man tapped into the widespread need for escapist entertainment.

That Nick Charles in The Thin Man has some characteristics of Hammett himself, gives the novel a plausible reading as highly fictionalized autobiography. It makes you wonder if Nick’s disdain for the business of detecting and just about everything else except his whiskey and Nora is self-referential. Does Nick’s attitude reflect Hammett’s disdain for his own career doing and writing about detective work, his own love of whiskey and Lillian Hellman. If it does, it might help to explain why this is his last novel.

The Fantastic in Crime

Concerning his style of writing, it has been said that Hammett was looking for the dry objectivity and factualism of a working private investigator’s report. I’m almost certain I read this somewhere, but I’ve looked for the source and can’t find it. Whether it was said by him or about him is another important piece of the background to this observation that I don’t remember. What I’m (almost) certain of is that, although I’d love to take credit for it, it did not originate with me. But in my (not so) humble opinion, it is probably the most important insight into Hammett’s style goals that I’ve ever seen. What he found was a style that achieved that rigorous objectivity and used it to present stories that were far from realistic. To counterbalance this dry, factual method of storytelling, he needed a story that was as wild and implausible as a cartoon.

The Maltese Falcon is that kind of story. It is literally fantastic, and it is appropriate that Hammett called Spade a “dream man.” Nothing like this happens in the real world, though in theory I suppose it could. Such characters as Brigid, Cairo, Wilmer and Gutman are plausible individually, but the collection of all these snakes writhing in one basket seems a stretch. Then there is the relentless inventiveness of their efforts to defeat each other and take what they want, an excellent characterization of the human spirit, but far more single minded than occurs in the real world. And with his consistently clever insights and steadfast commitment to a unique and personal sense of his place in the world, Sam Spade is literally a “dream man”, a comic book hero.

This was the formula that Hammett devised – a narrative as dry, efficient and objective as a detective’s report concerning cases that are at or beyond the farthest fringe of human behavior. The hardboiled objective of realism apparently applies only to style – not content. The style lends realism to the story, and the story lends excitement and imagination to the narrative. Perhaps such a balance is required by the nature of each. A dry, objective, impersonal and understated style needs a story that is not only rich with colorful characters and their equally colorful vernacular but also a set of circumstances and actions that depart fantastically from the mundane world we know. This same point is just as true for the Continental Op stories as it is for The Maltese Falcon. The Op’s narration conforms well to the style parameters of hardboiled, and the circumstances and cases he works are as fanciful as The Maltese Falcon. It was a formula that Hammett consistently honed throughout his writing career right up to The Thin Man.

Moving On

As I see it, Hammett’s writing shows a remarkably consistent effort to develop and perfect hardboiled in both style and content. His audience ate it up, but I don’t think he shared their enthusiasm. With the crime-reading public, The Maltese Falcon was a rousing success, an exciting story told in a near perfect hardboiled style. But, it is possible that Hammett felt the long explanation to Brigid was a violation, of his hardboiled ideal. In this case, it is easy to see The Glass Key as his attempt to correct that mistake and take hardboiled to the limit. That it left Ned Beaumont’s character obscure seems to me a clear weakness of the novel and might have been a source of frustration for Hammett, a failure so demoralizing he effectively gave up on hardboiled. Alternatively he may have felt that The Glass Key was such a complete and perfect expression of his stylistic ideals that he’d done all he could do to fulfill his goals. Or both. In any case, it is easy to think of The Thin Man as an expression of self-reproach for his drinking and his turning away from the serious artistic and philosophical explorations of The Maltese Falcon and The Glass Key in favor of the superficiality of Nick Charles and his screwball wit. In this case, The Thin Man can be seen as Hammett’s bitter farewell to his career-long interest in the hardboiled crime drama, a quest that had sustained his creative fire and left no purpose to his writing when it went out.

Its reception proves that, even if The Thin Man contains a darker undercurrent of self-reproach, it tapped into the popular taste. Hammett’s commercial success with his last three novels drew imitators, and it is fairly easy to see how some of their major characteristics evolved into the hybrid exemplified by Spillane and MacDonald. Hammett’s primary focus on the protagonist heroes of The Maltese Falcon and The Glass Key was clearly carried forward to Mike Hammer and Travis McGee. The half-assed hardboiled hero contending alone, without institutional support, against well organized criminal conspiracies is consistent with Hammett’s recurring hardboiled myth. Though no one would call the tone of the Mike Hammer and Travis McGee novels light, it isn’t serious, either. If anything, it was more akin to the escapist tone of The Thin Man. The witty banter that set the tone of Nick Charles’s narration became the angry hatred of Mike Hammer and the dime store liberal philosophy of Travis McGee. I wouldn’t credit Hammett with starting this evolution, but he is clearly a participant, and an important one at that. What didn’t survive the evolution was the creation that was truly and uncontestably Hammett’s, the rigorous hardboiled style. By the time he wrote his last published novel, even Hammett had given it up. It was up to his imitators and students to take up elements of his work and carry them forward. One of the early students, and probably the most influential, was Raymond Chandler.

This is to announce that War and Fleas, narrated by Adam Blanford, is now available in audiobook form. It is available online at Audible, iTunes, and Amazon. I plan to make the Joe Polito series ( Looking for Art, Into the Fire, and A Kiss Goodbye) available in audible form during the upcoming year.

The Risks of Looking for Art

Every writer takes risks when putting together a work of fiction. Any work that takes no risks (i.e. paint by number) is probably not worth reading. There are several elements of Looking for Art that were calculated risks when I chose to work them in. Here are the ones I think worth talking about:

1. The immediate shock of Joe beating up the Yuppie in the second chapter – the forceful revelation of a nasty aspect of our hero - it flies in the face of the reflex positive expectations of the reader and may delay, or put at risk, the bond between Joe and the reader for the rest of the novel. On the flip side, it is a strong demonstration of Joe’s love of street fighting and his impatience, important characterization. In fact, it is a demonstration that will certainly be memorable, if only for its dashing of expectations and its gratuitous violence.

2. The ambiguous scene with Lisa Landry in chapter 3. Joe uses her social and sexual hunger to get what he wants from her, uses the fact that she’s attracted to him, then teases her most when he kisses her in thanks for the offer and goodbye. Again, Joe is presented in a dubious light. And what does it make Lisa? – a nymphomaniac? - a pathetic loser? Finally, and most damning: isn’t this scene straight out of Mike Hammer (except that she’s not the voluptuous babe that Spillane would have made her)? Seeing her victimized by Chad just compounds this negative view of her character. There is a comparison intended between the reaction of Joe, who awkwardly escapes her lust, and Chad, who uses it and her callously. But it’s only a matter of degree, and they are both guilty of abusing her need. The question here is, does the ambivalence and ambiguity of her presentation become effective characterization? Does it force the reader to look beyond Lisa’s disheveled person and home to see a funny, lonely, hardworking woman, trying to make her way in a world that doesn’t much love her? The reaction of real (not fictional) Somerville people to Lisa – they liked her – suggests the latter, that the characterization did get through. It seems as if readers may go through a progression similar to mine. I started out to lampoon Lisa and ended up with a lot of respect for her. My presentation probably goes through the same progression, but it was a major risk to start her out as a slattern and expect readers to love her in the end.

3. Having Eileen throw herself at Joe is another episode from the Spillane playbook of sexism. It could also be seen as an element of the role reversal that Eileen and Joe present. Eileen is strong and successful in the world and she is the sexual aggressor. Joe is weak and a failure by his own admission, and he is the one who succumbs sexually to the aggressor. What I meant was neither Spillane nor role reversal. The relationship between Joe and Eileen is meant to illustrate their social distance. Unconsciously, Joe, from his blue collar roots in Somerville, accepts the old myths of male/female relations. Eileen has taken on the modern image of the strong, successful woman in business. She has no time to conform to Joe’s sense of propriety. If she wants to have sex with a man, she’ll find a way to ask him, not coarsely or belligerently, but directly. It’s one more thing Joe will have to negotiate with her if he wants the relationship, and a key piece of the story is him making the decision to want the relationship.

4. What may be an equal or even bigger risk around Eileen’s character is her mothering, or lack thereof. More than one reader has remarked that they find her unforgiveable for her neglect of Jake. Clearly that is a problem for the relationship between her and Joe. If she is unappealing due to her bad mothering, the reader cannot take satisfaction in her eventual coming together with Joe on an emotional basis. This was intended as a piece of the critical view of Lexington and the workaholic culture of the techie movers and shakers, but the side effect of indelibly soiling Eileen’s character may, for some readers, invalidate the major story line of the relationship.

5. One of the greatest risks was inserting what I call a suspense story line, starting with chapter 6, focused on Chad Reese. There are about half a dozen of these chapters, and at least one partial chapter, sprinkled through the book. This is a fairly significant departure from the norm of mystery/crime fiction. Normally, the narrative follows a single focal character, the hero/detective/protagonist, in this case Joe, throughout. Throwing in these chapters that focus on the villain is not unheard of, but not common. Their intent is to provide a boost to the suspense, bring plot material into the story that could not otherwise appear and provide a face and identity to a character (Chad) that would otherwise be nearly unknown. I don’t know how well these chapters work. Structurally, they bend the genre, and that is always a risk. Genre readers like to know what they’re getting, and deviations from the norm can be confusing or unsatisfying. I made an arbitrary restriction in these chapters to focus on only one additional character (other than Joe) and restricted them to a relatively small (~15%) portion of the narrative. From the feedback I’ve received, they seem to have slipped by without a problem, and they were very useful to me in framing the story.

6. The ending is very unusual for a crime novel. The major action finishes with the shooting in the Science Museum parking garage, or possibly with the news about Ed Reese. Normally, the novel would end almost immediately after these climactic events, but I let the story go on with Joe’s visit with Rose Sheehan, the regulars at the bar, the deal for Pat’s reputation and Joe’s decision on the relationship. This is consistent with my concept of the crime novel as a form that features character above all else – particularly above the solution of the crime. How the people of the story are affected matters more than knowing whodunit. This structure is idiosyncratic in the crime genre, and as such, it dashes expectations again. People have certainly noticed it, but I’ve had only positive feedback on this decision, and I think it works as intended. Apparently, readers were interested enough in the characters to care what happened to them and found the wrap up on the human side - well after the crime was wrapped - satisfying.

Risks Rewarded (or Not)

1) Joe’s fight with the Yuppie is shocking and emblematic, but it seems overstated, even trite. I’d rank this chapter a loser. The fight is too obviously a device. This could have been a more original demonstration of Joe’s violent streak. I like the idea of a demonstration in this chapter, just not this one.

2) and 3) The key women in the story, Eileen, Lisa and Rose, are all ultimately admired in the novel. Eileen and Lisa are seriously flawed. Eileen is successful in a high-pressure, “man’s” world, and she has a sweet vulnerability that is equal parts natural warmth, fear and confusion, but she is a failure in her marriage and parenting. Lisa, for all her limitations, has endearing wit and spirit that wins the sympathy of those around her (Mrs. Wilkins, Joe, Art, Jerry Lyons). Rose is the only unalloyed good woman. Despite her discomfort with living off Pat Sheehan’s criminal earnings, she does not share any of the flaws of the other two, and really has none of her own. Eileen and Lisa are representatives of their respective social classes. Eileen’s inattention to Jake and Lisa’s chaotic lifestyle are directly tied to the class to which they each belong. Their sexual need is an aspect of their inability to find and keep love. The fact that it is the first and most striking manifestation of that culturally induced loneliness has some unfortunate consequences. With echoes of the chivalric notion of a sexually “pure” and demure ideal woman lurking in their heads, readers have a reflex negative reaction to the sexual aggression these two women exhibit. Whether that reaction is justified or not, a writer should, for the most part, build on those ingrained reader notions even when trying to change them. And so, that aggression is inevitably seen by many readers as anti-woman and anti-feminist, when it is not so intended. It would have been better to show their loneliness in some other, less politically charged way. The sexual need was a lazy shortcut. It is conventional and at least superficially perceived as conventionally regressive. In effect, I accepted this unwanted connotation for a quick and simple way to get across their deeper need for human warmth. Rose represents the other side of the coin. She chose love from the start and elevated it above every other social imperative. It has enveloped her in a protective blanket, keeping her from the loneliness and chaos that eats at the lives of the other two. So, the feminist argument against the sexual hunger of Eileen and Lisa misses the point intended but is inevitable and valid. It would have been better if I had taken the time and effort to identify the roots of their loneliness rather than use the crude, easy representation that I did.

4) The charge of bad mothering against Eileen is both satisfying and troubling to me. The abandonment of children is meant to be a general indictment of the class of socio-economic strivers so common in Lexington. That comes across to the reader with force. Unfortunately, it also comes across as a damning personal characteristic of Eileen. Ideally, I would like the influence of her social circumstance to be seen as victimizing both her and Jake, and I worked hard to make it that but with limited success. The unwillingness of the reader to absolve her of personal responsibility for her abandonment of Jake is a problem that is real and justified. I’m trying to have it both ways. She is both victim and culprit, and Joe has to take on both in his relationship with her. If the reader sees that as unacceptable, it invalidates the social drama I intended, but I don’t really see what more I could have done. To make Eileen an ideal mother would have seriously undercut the social theme of the book.

5) In general, I like the suspense sub-narrative. I think it is a structural technique that can work perfectly well in a crime novel. But I’m not completely satisfied with its particular use in Art. The Chad narrative is, at times, clumsy and transparently a device. It’s hard to see how this story could have been told without it, but I would have liked to make it smoother and better integrated than I did. Chad is a fairly stock sociopath, and the hitman, Trudell, is so one dimensional as to be cartoonish. To some degree, this is a choice of emphasis. I wanted the focus to remain on Joe, Eileen, Pat and Rose. I consciously minimized the interruptions represented by the suspense chapters to emphasize that focus. They do, and they provide some suspense, but, without more nuanced characterization, these chapters are flat, lacking in drama. It might have been a better novel with more attention given to the characters of the suspense line - or not. The choice I made resulted in 15% of the story being essentially an extended plot device, but a plot device that generally works.

6) Working out the people problems after the crime problem is solved is the only one of these major risks that I see as a clear win. It has the effect I wanted and seemed to be well received by readers. Even the execution was alright. It’s not too long and does not call attention to itself as technique. Readers may be aware, when they have finished it that this ending was somewhat different than a normal mystery, or their expectations of a mystery. But none of them have objected. My take from this is that closure of the interpersonal issues in a character driven crime novel is not only acceptable, it is probably a best practice.
In general, then, I would call 1) a solid loser, 2) and 3) more losers than winners, 4) a toss-up, 5) more winner than loser, and 6) a solid winner. This is strictly my take. Every individual reader will probably see it differently. A better writer could probably make winners of all these risks, or at least make them all more winners than losers. I say “probably” because there would almost certainly be trade-offs involved in making 1-5) better. Many of these risks are losers or partial losers because they were easy, quick and clear. Easy is a matter of writer convenience, not relevant to the reader. Quick and clear are relevant to readers, and improvement of 1-5) could impact the pacing and clarity of each of these points. I would hardly call my solution optimal, but I am just as certain that an optimal solution would still involve some of these trade-offs.


The Style of Looking for Art

Looking for Art often violates the rules of hardboiled, often without much justification. One forbidden technique it sometimes uses is the presentation of character in narrative exposition, i.e. description of the character’s personality traits. Such description in narrative exposition is a weak method of establishing a character's mental and emotional habits and states, but, if it fits with the observed character, it may not be obtrusive. Conversely, if a character’s actions do not flow from the description, it will often be perceived as invalid or meaningless, effectively eliminating any dramatic significance in the character's actions. All this is to simply give character primacy over plot. In drama, characters must have a life of their own. If they appear to be manipulated to meet the needs of plot, the drama falls flat, and their narrative descriptions appear unconvincing rationalization.

An example from Art is Joe’s confrontation with the Yuppie in the BMW (chapter 2). Joe shows his impatience and love of violence in his actions and words. At the end, the narrator explains what he is thinking about the incident. For the narrator to dip into Joe’s brain for this tidbit is clearly inconsistent with hardboiled. The narrator is not unveiling anything about Joe that the reader has not already seen in action. It does not change or invalidate the character seen in the action, but, in hardboiled, it is not acceptable and should not be necessary. It represents the author’s admission that Joe’s uncommon and unexpected action begs for some kind of explanation or commentary. It is a weak but common compromise that most readers will hardly notice, accepting it as nothing more than a narrative summation of what has already been shown.

Another example is the description of the run-up in prices Yuppies are paying for the run-down homes of the old townies: “As far as Polito was concerned, that was a trade-off that wasn’t worth it. He didn’t like the people who were moving in.” (chapter 3) The narrator is telling the reader what Polito thinks or feels. This is a clear violation of hardboiled principles on a key point. Joe’s reflex disgust with the Yuppie invasion is an important aspect of his character and part of the main theme of the book. The narrator’s statement is not necessary to maintain pacing, which can, at times, override the prohibition of such statements. In fact, it isn’t necessary at all. The reader has already seen Joe’s reaction to Eileen and the guy who honked at him, and he or she has heard Joe state this attitude at length when he tries to justify his street fight to Paul Shea. The narrative restatement simply reminds the reader of an attitude that has been pretty well established.

These narrative intrusions into Polito’s head probably have little consequence to most readers. Most will see them as interpretive help and will not question or resent it. Some will positively appreciate it for making explicit what, at other points, they have had to infer. It is impossible to know whether a particular intrusion has the generally positive effect of smoothing the transfer of meaning between author and reader or the generally negative effect of undercutting the visualization and drama. In either case, the effect is small, but it is multiplied by the many such intrusions that occur in the rest of the narrative. So, the question remains whether this story would have been more immersive and dramatic if the strict prohibition against such interpretation, speculation, motivation, etc. had been observed.

My subjective and unscientific answer is probably not. There are long passages that follow the rules closely, such that the overall effect is still relatively hardboiled. Most intrusions are short and seem incidental. They tend to give the narrator an attitude that is mildly entertaining but not enough to distract from the drama of the story. These should be classed as misdemeanors under the laws of hardboiled.

There is, however, at least one instance of this type of intrusion in Looking for Art that rises to the level of a felony. In chapter 6, Chad Reese is introduced with a long paragraph describing his personality in completely subjective terms, pigeonholing him before the reader has seen any supporting evidence. The narrator’s attitude is front and center, even when he (the tone of the narration doesn’t sound like a she) tries to deflect it to the other cops of SPD. The effect, as predicted by the theory of hardboiled, is to make Chad a cardboard character. This may be an artifact of my inability to imagine evil, but its effect on the story is surprisingly benign. This presentation does two things: it keeps the villain light (in terms of his personal connection to the reader), and it gets through his characterization quickly, without pulling the reader’s attention from the main line of the story. The alternative, a hardboiled, dramatic characterization of Chad, would make this a very different book, much more serious and dense. The quick, almost dismissive paragraph of subjective characterization allows the suspense subplot to border on the comic. The complications it presents to Joe, Art, Eileen and Pat are not less substantial, but the outcome is foretold and the suspense is artificial. It has the entertainment value of a carnival ride, the titillation of danger with the certainty of safety. It does undercut any potential seriousness of the conflict between Joe and Chad, but in this story, that’s not the drama that matters anyway. The real drama is between Joe and Eileen and the clash of social classes. This is not to say that a serious portrayal of Chad’s evil in contention with Joe and the innocents would not be a good and interesting story. It’s just not this story, and it may not be a story I’m capable of writing. With respect to this particular intrusion, then, there probably is a more “immersive and dramatic” story that could have been created with a hardboiled treatment of Chad and the suspense subplot. But this leads directly to another question, a much broader and more fundamental question about the very nature of the genre.

The first of the basic values of hardboiled in the original definition from Hardboiled Mystery Writers is realism. But the first responsibility of genre fiction is always entertainment, and that imperative sets up the inevitable tension between truth and escapism. Hardboiled crime fiction has never been able to (in the words of Jack Nicholson) “handle the truth.” Hammett certainly shied away from it in The Maltese Falcon. The falcon plot is as fanciful as any of Agatha Christie’s tricks. Yet it is also true that the whole American movement toward hardboiled was motivated by the desire to escape the artificial and implausible triviality of the British school. It is a tension that cannot be resolved, and it is probably a healthy one at that. In the world of crime fiction, it vibrates across a spectrum that spans Mickey Spillane at one end and Ross Macdonald at the other.

On that spectrum, Looking for Art attempts to come down somewhere in the middle. But that is to treat the book as an average that splits the difference between the characterizations in the suspense subplot and those of the mainline plot. The suspense characters - Chad and Ed Reese, Sanders and Trudell – all come from the Spillane end of the spectrum, flat and cartoonish. Mainline characters – Joe, Eileen, Pat, Rose, Lisa, Tommy et al. – are more from the Ross Macdonald end, with deeper personal and social reality to them.

The suspense chapters are clearly meant to jazz up the entertainment value of the story. The use of cartoonish characterizations contributes to that, and the paragraph that introduces Chad contributes to his cartoon. Far from trying to provide a realistic aura to Chad, the paragraph is setting him up as a cardboard target that the reader can confidently expect to see shot down at the proper moment. Realism would imply some measure of empathy for these bad guys, and, right or wrong, in the interest of entertainment Art chose not to go there.

The flippant, comic tone of the paragraph is a clear signal of this intent. It also gives the narrator a chance to express himself and stretch his legs outside the tight confines of hardboiled. It is supposed to be funny and full of attitude – entertaining. The hardboiled violation, the rampant subjectivity of the paragraph and its narrative dip into the personality of Chad, works toward this end. According to hardboiled theory, a hardboiled characterization, accomplished almost exclusively through action and dialogue, yields a deeper, more rounded and real character – not something I wanted for Chad. The subjective narrative description works, as predicted by hardboiled theory, to keep him superficial, flat, and unreal. The hardboiled violation serves the purposes of a subplot whose basic intent, at least in terms of realism, is not that of hardboiled.


Loaded Language

The main intent of hardboiled is to address the reader’s mistrust of the narrator. But it’s clear there is another, much more commonly used approach to solving that problem. Broadly speaking, that approach seeks to establish the persona of the narrator and develop the reader’s personal relationship with him or her. With such a relationship, readers may either trust the objectivity of the narrator or at least feel they understand well enough where he or she is coming from to confidently evaluate the narrative according to their own lights.

For instance, in Looking for Art, take this sentence in the description of the Old Town Tavern: “The Yuppies would have taken over the place and called it ‘shabby chic’ if they hadn’t been stiff-armed by the townies who considered it their turf.” The loaded language here seems to violate one of the basic tenets of hardboiled. It is aggressively subjective. The language of this sentence, and of the narration in general, suggests a particular personality that colors the narrative. In a 3rd person voice, it violates the rule that the narrator should do everything possible to remove him- or herself from the narrative. But a deeper look at how the language is used may show it to be, in fact, a somewhat subtler play for the trust of the reader.

There are 4 loaded words in the sentence: “Yuppies, shabby chic, townies and turf.” These words are associated with particular points of view, strongly stated in terms of class slurs or stereotyping. But it is the balance among these terms that is important. You have the Yuppies and their shabby chic on one side and the townies and their turf on the other. In themselves these words incorporate value judgments, but those judgments are cancelled by their equal weighting, and the sentence does not give a position of dominance to either side (not coincidentally, an important aspect of the overall theme of the novel). The loaded terms function to reinforce the idea of class conflict, but the net result is a blunt and objective statement of fact – that there is a socio-economic gap between the two sides that causes mistrust and alienation. The sentence goes further to suggest that the townies, in the face of the aggressive imperialism of the Yuppies, have retreated, appropriately enough, to the Old Town Tavern and are continuing to hold the territory. It’s a lot of meaning crammed into a single sentence. The terms carry a subjective load in a sentence that tries to make a claim of objectivity and are meant to suggest to the reader that the narrator has a simple and direct point of view that will not abridge the reader’s right to make his or her own judgments. In circular fashion, it works to establish trust with the reader, the trust that accrues to a non-judgmental, balanced point of view. That trust allows the narrator to use such loaded language to convey a great deal of information in the shortest and most direct manner possible. In tough talk, it is the narrator telling the reader: “I’m a no-bullshit, straight-shooter. I’m not pulling any punches and I’m not selling anything. I’m just telling you what happened in my own language. Make of it what you will.” It does not attempt to hide the personality of the narrator (make him disappear), nor does it ask the reader to separately evaluate every attitude expressed by the narrator as it would in an ironic or distanced narration. Instead, it attempts to establish the reader’s trust that this personality will not pervert the objective truth of the story. Or, it gives the reader the sense that he or she can perceive the truth by evaluating the narrative through the lens of the narrator’s persona. It is a different path toward the same end that hardboiled seeks – the reader’s trust in the story.


Overall Effect

Beyond the risks I took with varying levels of success, there are a couple of minor failings in Looking for Art that I have to acknowledge. The first is that the real Somerville gang war took place in the 1960s, not the 1980s. I made this adjustment to better fit the ages of the characters, with the rationalization that a coherent time line was more important than historical accuracy in a work of imaginative fiction. The fact that there actually was a Somerville gang war serves mainly to underline the theme for local readers. The story would be just as “true” if it had never happened. Another related failing is the loose depiction of police procedure. I have no idea if real police and EMTs would approach the scene of Chad’s murder and the wounded Pat Sheehan as I’ve depicted. I hope it’s close enough that it does not distract most readers. Going any deeper into the actual procedure would not add much to the story and might even interrupt it.

A greater general failing may be my tendency to short-change descriptions. For many scenes and characters, I made a concerted effort to avoid this tendency, but there are just as many where scenes and characters are not given enough particularity to support the reader’s visualization. For me, this is a difficult writing habit to break, but I am convinced that fuller, more consistent description could make Looking for Art a more intense and satisfying read than it is.

First and foremost, Looking for Art was intended to be what Graham Greene would call an entertainment, a crime novel. Every reader will make their own judgment on how well that was achieved. My judgement is that it was a reasonable success. A secondary goal was to demonstrate the value of my style concepts. Although many of the concepts did play a role in shaping the book, as a whole, Looking for Art probably did more to demonstrate the limitations of those concepts than to promote them. Instead of teaching others to write in the hardboiled style, the story taught me that different parts of a narrative – the Chad Reese suspense chapters for instance - may have different intents that require different manners of presentation.

Finally, the two choices I most regret in crafting this book are the title and the cover. Art was simply a name I picked at random for a key character. There was no double meaning intended – but it’s there, intended or not. For the cover, I wanted to emphasize the location and the pedestrian/public transportation theme. A map of the neighborhood at the entrance to the Davis Square subway stop seemed to do that. One reader told me that she passed up on the book when she saw it in our local bookstore because she interpreted the title to refer to the art of the special tiles in the walls of the subway station. Back when the Red Line was extended into Somerville, elementary school children were invited to create images on those tiles before they were cemented into the walls. The cover photo and the unfortunate name conspired to completely mislabel the content of the book. Burdened by such misunderstandings, Looking for Art has labored to reach its intended audience – another lesson learned.

A general note on these reviews:
The long essay that is the bulk of this blog called “Motives and Methods of Hardboiled Fiction” is sometimes referred to as, and was intended to be, a guide for my writing. Much of it was conceived before I wrote any of my (six to date) novels, and was important to the style which seemed to develop in them. In looking over those novels now, I’m interested in how this guide influenced their style and their success or failure (as I see it). The effect of the guide, however, is only one of the issues that fall out naturally from this retrospective. These reviews will try to focus on a few of the most crucial of these issues, but they are not worth much if you haven’t read the novel in question. If you have, I hope these notes provide insight into some of the key decisions that went into crafting them.

Ambiguity in War and Fleas:
It wasn’t until I was working on the final rewrite/polishing of War and Fleas that I realized what it was. I’d been calling it a “comic dystopian detective fantasy” to that point, which was true, as far as it went. The novel is funny at times. New Harbor is certainly dystopian in the depth of its corruption and decay. Al Hynde is a detective, more or less working a case. And the aspects of magical realism – the killer clams, the translucent Mutants, the aphrodisiac mud and general implausibility – I would classify as fantastic. But the basic thrust of the novel is satire. The elements of comedy, dystopia, mystery and fantasy are only means in this case. In themselves, they may be entertaining, but they only have meaning in their application to the satire. The tone of the narration, the rampant symbolism and metaphor are unmistakably satirical, and the themes they suggest are so broadly presented, the satiric intent cannot be missed. But if the novel is satire, it raises the question: satire of what? I have no answer to that one. Your guess is as good as mine.

The satire in War and Fleas is ambiguous. Like Bob Dylan, who has always been evasive when asked about the meaning of his more imagistic songs, I can’t explain the meaning of this novel, and I wouldn’t if I could. If I were to weave the threads of meaning into some consistent scheme, I believe it would limit them. With War, I see no reason to set such boundaries around my readers’ imaginations. This is directly contrary to one of Dashiell Hammett’s axioms of writing. He says, “The more competent he [the writer] is, the more stubbornly he wil insist that the idea set down shall be his idea and not merely something like it, and that the effect on the reader shall be the effect the writer desires and not an approximation of that effect.” (Hammett quote from Hardboiled Mystery Writers, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli and Richard Layman, Carroll & Graf Publishers, New York, copyright 1989, p. 101). To this I would say, such coherence of effect and intent is impossible and the attempt to achieve it is often counterproductive. In War, I’m sure many interpretations are supportable, and that’s fine with me, even if Hammett might consider me an incompetent writer.

This thematic ambiguity is analogous to my objective in description. Many writers, particularly in the 19th century, laid down long paragraphs of description to establish a character or scene or practice in such detail that it is often an impediment to the pace of the story. If these exhaustive descriptions are intended to produce uniform pictures in the mind of every reader, I’m fairly certain they fail. Nor are the mental pictures they produce any more vivid than they would be with a brief sketch. In fact, I believe they are less vivid. The reader loses interest in forming the picture and gets muddled in detail. I prefer the brief sketch that leaves much of the visualization to the reader. In the same vein, at least in War I am thrilled if the ambiguous suggestion of a theme causes the reader to formulate their own opinion on it.

War wasn’t written to present a consistent theme. The theme of belittling U.S. militarism and the adolescent male impulse that fuels it is certainly there and probably the most consistent theme in the book. But the attitude toward the Rompamucs, the Mutants and Mad Dog is questionable. Is this a diatribe against the European genocide on the native inhabitants of the Americas? Does the Rompamuc tribe represent the middle class? If so, are they timid and self-satisfied or the heroic repository of a more sustainable social vision? Are the Mutants casual killers, fun-loving teens or heroic saviors of the city? Are not War and Mad Dog as aggressive and militaristic as Kuyper and his DODOS? So, is even the most consistent theme called into question, possibly even contradicted? Yes, absolutely, and I won’t try to resolve these questions for anyone, not even myself.

Al’s storytelling in War and Fleas presents a kind of ambiguity, that is neither common nor unique. He repeats a rumor about Miss Morrissey, Callahan, Jerry and Mayor Malone. He says it’s “probably apocryphal,” but that doesn’t mean it’s meaningless. He tells it because it illustrates a point. About his own storytelling, he admits to embellishing the truth for the same purpose – to make the truth stand out, to make it funnier, more dramatic and more readily appropriated by his audience. He is an untrustworthy, distanced narrator, but it is not for some sick psycho reason, as in The Killer Inside Me, or retrospective regret, as in Hell Hath No Fury, or the innocence of the narrator of The Diamond Bikini. Al simply wants to tell a better story. I want the reader to want that “better story.” The story he tells is obviously guilty of embellishment and outright invention.

This form of dishonesty is a basic method of fantasy. Many examples of that genre are mainly concerned with inventing a new and unique fictional world. For me, the meaning of that world is often lost in the mechanics of building it. The characters are forced to interact with it. It does not come from them. It is an element of scene rather than drama.
On the other hand, when Al employ the fantastic, like the killer clams, the aphrodisiac mud or the translucent bikers, it is to embellish the story, to make it more telling. Who cares about killer clams, unless it makes a better story about the people who interact with them. That is the rule that War tries to follow – use the fantastic only to emphasize the real.

But the real can take off in any direction. In War, I made no effort to channel it into a coherent ideology or theme. My only concern was to tell a better story. The reader can apply their own preconceptions and ideology. The level of involvement that leads them to make that application is what I was looking for and something I think every writer desires. The fantastic is used to spice the story and pull the reader into the thematic questions it presents, but it enhances them as questions, rather than answering them and is probably a better approach to this kind of ambiguity than a more naturalistic presentation. This is the kind of fantasy – more magical realism, if I understand the term – that I aspire to in War. For me, there is no point in world building unless it is used for emphasis within the familiar reality that characters, narrators, readers and authors share.

The fact that readers will interpret these ambiguities differently is not a bug (as they say in the software world); it’s a feature. Lenny Pallor and I sat around for many hours at the end of the sixties discussing the ambiguities and mysteries of Dylan’s lyrics. Among all the programmed opportunities afforded by the first couple of years at a good college, this was an activity that engaged our analytical and imaginative faculties as deeply as any. If I could generate that kind of involvement in my readers, I would be fulfilled.

And to try to explain it would be the last thing I’d want to do, just as it is the last thing Dylan would do. If, as author, I give my endorsement to a particular interpretation, I put an end to all that pleasurable analysis and imagination. By allowing the ambiguity to persist, I am encouraging a much deeper reader involvement and expanding the scope of meaning in my story exponentially.

This is different than my other work. In all of the other novels – The Secrets of Pond Street, The Forest for the Trees and the Polito series – I have taken pains to keep the plot and theme “tight,” which is to say consistent and unambiguous. The plot of War and Fleas is just as tightly connected, but the theme is not. Among all the significant differences of this satirical novel to the others, the ambiguous themes shooting off in many directions represent the greatest departure.

In theory, I like the ambiguous thematic treatment. It gives maximum freedom to the characters to act out their dramatic destiny without being forced into a rigid and explicit system of meaning. This is what the peculiar development of War and Fleas brought me to, almost by accident. This novel was written in two phases: the first 15 years in which intermittent dabbling at a serious mystery became the first 15 chapters of the current satire, and the last year, in which it was completed with another 25 chapters. It happened that the first phase was largely devoted to introducing the ensemble - Al, Randi, War and the Mutants, Mad Dog, Jerry, Jimmy, Dr. Dakota and the Rompamucs, Carol, Miss Morrissey, Kuyper, Annie, Jasper Cornhouse - and putting them in a particular situation that drives their behaviors. The second phase shows them resolving the situation according to the characters and situation set up in the first. When I went back to finish the novel, the characters were drawn, their world was built, and the problem was largely defined. All that remained was for them to act out the resolution. But nothing in the original 15 chapters determined the theme of their story, and the way they moved through the story to resolution let that ambiguity stand.

Here are a few of the most prominent ambiguities in War:
1) The Rompamucs: The name seems disrespectful, almost calling up the old hateful cartoon caricature of the Cleveland Indians. And yet, in War, the Indians are treated with the highest honor. They are the idealized middle class. They came from great poverty and became the middle class in the sudden birth of the reservation casino. But they are idealized in the sense that they are morally better than the real middle class because they have retained some of the values of their tribal culture. They will not engage in lethal warfare. They are very egalitarian among themselves – the chief’s house being exactly the same as, or a mirror image of, every other house in Pleasant Valley. But the tribal exclusiveness, living in a homogeneous suburban enclave with only “token” mucs, is just as wrong and damaging as suburban exclusiveness is in real America. They are heroes in the Battle of the Blade and yet they are pacifists. Their allegiances with the tribe, New Harbor, and all other indigenous Americans are seen in a positive light. In general, their faults stem from inexperience and lack of confidence, a kind of social innocence that Al holds in high esteem. So, the ambiguity is between the rough wordplay of the name and the actual judgement of the book. It’s jarring, but maybe that is a good thing for an issue like this.

2) Miss Morrissey’s School for Girls: The treatment of prostitution in War may be seen as countenancing the degradation of women. Al’s girlfriend, Carol, has made a career of it, and it is big business in New Harbor, not just at the school, but at the Black Hole and the strip – it is part of the economic life of the city. And that is the other reading of it. Prostitution is portrayed as a business and a profession. Whores are treated with respect, and through the good governance and protection of Miss Morrissey, they are shown to have achieved a very civilized life. They are strong; witness the original defeat, capture and humiliation of Kuyper. They are loyal. And they are craftswomen; witness the performance and production of the video of the surrender at the mud lake. The point is that they, like the Indians, are respected in the moral framework of the story. There is never any shame associated with their profession, nor are they seen as victims. Like the Indians, they are treated as heroes both in the (first) capture of Kuyper and in the final victory of the Battle of the Blade. They are women who know what they are doing and take some pride in doing it well. Their view of sex and fetish acts is pragmatic. Even if theirs is a dirty and dangerous job, someone’s got to do it, just like we need coal miners and garbage men. We shouldn’t despise anyone for their job. Instead, we should legislate and police to make prostitution (and coal mining and garbage collection) as clean and safe and fairly treated as any other profession. It seems to me that the ambiguity here is in the contrast between the general perception of prostitution among readers and the actual treatment of it in Al’s attitudes and the events of the story.

3) The Mutants: To me, the most jarring of these mixed messages is the treatment of the Mutants. They are presented as goofy airheads at some times, and as casually cold blooded killers at others. Most of them end up true to their creed. They are road warriors who go off to seek other battles, battles in which their ammunition will probably be live, which is to say deadly, rather than harmless fireworks. They are heroes, maybe the most important warriors, in the coalition that wins The Battle of the Blade. But they also use Al in their betting game, and when they think he has drowned, they simply wander off to bed. They do seem perfectly conscienceless. The Battle is fun for them. They may see winning without bullets and bombs as a little more challenge, more focused on their riding skills than their fighting. But it also seems likely that they would have just as much fun fighting with lethal weapons, killing and dying. They offer some tantalizing questions: Are they translucent because they are teenagers and we can’t really see them? Is their heedlessness caused by their invisibility? Is their sexual freedom something to emulate? Are they necessary cannon fodder for adult conflicts? However you might answer these questions, the Mutants are certainly not proposed as a moral example.

It would be interesting but very daunting to find out what real life Indians, prostitutes and bikers might think of these treatments. I’m afraid that some would be outraged but hopeful that others would be proud and amused. Maybe I’m kidding myself. Third rails are dangerous, and Political Correctness is horribly rigid, without any sense of humor.

Sex in War:
Sex is tough to deal with. If you want it to mean something beyond the simple fact of its accomplishment, an act of hygiene or logistics, it needs to be described in a manner that does not detract from its dramatic intent. What makes that difficult is the culturally induced sensitivity of the reader to any reference to sex. It is too easily distracting. Including it in my stories has always intimidated me, and I don’t think my solutions in The Forest for the Trees and the Polito series are as good as they could be. In War, sex is almost omnipresent. Al’s rape, Miss Morrissey’s School, the mudfuckers, nude Mutants, nude Al, The Black Hole, aphrodisiac mud, Kuyper’s penis and masturbating commandos – it’s a constant drumbeat that would be boring and offensive in most treatments. And it’s a load of sex that I couldn’t have handled in any other manner than the one I discovered in War.

Since the whole novel was shaped by a bunch of pieces that constituted fooling around before and between Polito books, the tone and intent that formed when they were put together was accidental. Once I found how well that tone and intent fit the content and the narrator’s voice, I did consciously use it in rewrite to make it more consistent, concise and clear. Part of the fit was how well it allowed me (almost required me) to use sex. I’m sure some will disagree with me, but I think War manages all this outrageous, “forbidden,” sexual material and sexual reference without falling into pornography, sexism or voyeurism - a neat trick.

In War, the reader’s sensitivities to these acts and terms are lampooned. Al’s blasé and asexual attitude toward the sexual content of his story becomes the attitude of the reader, and the comic and symbolic significance of the acts and references are allowed to be their main impact. It is difficult to see them as anything but ludicrous, and Al’s narration suggests that, if you do, your prurience and/or your rigidity is part of the joke. If you find his narration exciting, he seems to suggest, you must be living in a state of sexual frustration. If you find it offensive, you’re missing the point.

It is because Al insists on his facetious and fanciful attitude from the outset that the reader cannot take the sex seriously. And this allows the comic and symbolic intent to shine through. Al’s rape sets the tone. It is meant to completely undercut any notion of macho in the narrator and protagonist of the story. Not only is he unaroused by the attempt, but he is completely distracted from any sexual or power aspect of the situation by the haunting look of “innocence betrayed”, and he is comfortable, in fact eager, to make himself the butt of the joke. He (and I) wanted to make it clear early on that Alex B. Hynde was no James Bond or Mike Hammer. He is not sexually motivated and not ego driven. He wants to avoid projecting the image of the hero. What he is is clearly demonstrated too. He is crafty, using his humility to win friends and exert his influence from the sidelines, rather than in the lead. He is unapologetically intuitive, making a permanent and unwavering decision about Randi Barnes from something he sees in her eyes for less than a second. He is story driven, and humor driven, more interested that his story be entertaining and consistent with his sense of moral and emotional truth than that it report the objective truth. Without this voice relating the story throughout, there would be no way to do the climactic scene at mud lake that would not be offensive. Of course there will be people for whom it is offensive, but I would be happy if most who read it get it and enjoy it as it was intended, as satire.

Style:
Al is a distanced narrator, one of the possible alternatives for the hardboiled style. But he is distanced by his love of hyperbolic stories and his disregard for pedestrian fact, tendencies that lean more toward comedy than toward the dour tone of hardboiled. In several other important aspects, as well, his narrative style is far from hardboiled. It is neither objective nor impersonal. Al has a very strong point of view and shares it whenever he feels like it. His storytelling is explicitly personal. These aspects of his narrative are not at all distanced. He has no use for realism, which he makes clear from the outset. The tone is light and comic. He lives in a cesspool, but he likes it and likes to joke about it. In general, War and Fleas is far from hardboiled.

And yet, some lessons of the hardboiled style are apparent. In terms of pacing, clarity, simplicity, structure and the unities of time and place, War could easily fit the style, and in many other ways, it’s close. There is some attempt at vernacular speech, and visualization is supported well in the mostly brief descriptions of people, places and things. Without sacrificing pace, the narrative probably could have gone a little heavier on the descriptions for better visualization, but the quick hit visual cues that are included are effective. Al’s position with the reader in terms of trust is complicated. He repeatedly warns the reader that he will embellish or even lie in his storytelling, yet paradoxically, this is part of his method for gaining the reader’s trust. His tactic is to disarm the reader with a candid acknowledgement of his bullshitting ways. In effect, he earns trust by making it irrelevant. The reader is meant to relax his or her skepticism and go along for the ride. It’s a form of trust, but not the form that is typical of hardboiled.

Al manages to avoid most of the narrative sins that hardboiled prohibits. He doesn’t dig into the heads of characters other than himself. He isn’t particularly prone to interpretation, speculation, or summarization. His witty banter (widely, and in my view unfortunately, accepted in hardboiled) is almost invariably in his narrative voice, a violation in terms of humor and tone, but not in terms of realism. His only lapse into truly lyrical prose is in the description of his dream of the sea angel, where it is intended to emphasize the unreality of the experience. In these instances in which Al’s narrative is not completely aligned with hardboiled, the deviation is not major.

Where War clearly does not fit the hardboiled mold is in its treatment of gender, its humor, its tone and resolution. Al is an anti-macho protagonist. Despite his simulated rape by Randi Barnes, he has no sexual response and, in fact, forms a permanent allegiance to her for what he perceives as her character. When he wades through the aphrodisiac mud, his only response is fear of the killer clams. Carol pushes him around, and the actual fighting involved in the capture of Kuyper at Miss Morrissey’s school is done by women, while he stands by. In his gender manifestations and relationships, he is a spoof on the typical hardboiled detective hero. His consistently facetious tone and his love of humor in words and actions are not found in hardboiled. And, in fact the tone of the story in general is far from serious – not hardboiled at all. Nor is the outcome. By mediating among the various inclinations of his allies, Al crafts a battle plan that results in a complete victory. The bad guys are banished from New Harbor, and the city is returned to the people under the benevolent leadership of Randi Barnes. Such a resolution is not conceivable in the worldview of hardboiled.

The insertion of “stories” into the narrative is a peculiar feature of War and clearly part of its style. The first of the stories, “How Manny Soares Collected,” sets the precedent. Like the Flitcraft story in The Maltese Falcon, the events of the Manny Soares story happened long ago and have nothing to do with the events of War. The point is what it says about Al and the larger story he’s about to tell. The telling of Manny’s story at the Tank is the first actual scene of War. In the 3+ pages that precede it, Al is introducing himself, New Harbor and HyndeSight in disembodied narrative exposition. The reader gets a good sense of Al and his environment from this introduction, but it is in the Manny Soares story, that much of what Al has told us is confirmed and demonstrated in practice. The reader learns that Al is a storyteller, and his stories are well received. Before he even starts the story, he confirms our suspicion that he is a gregarious, low-budget guy who enjoys the low life at a decrepit neighborhood bar. Manny is a perfect introduction to Al’s clientele, the long-suffering nobodies of New Harbor, with whom Al identifies and sympathizes. Al’s role as Robin Hood is established. Jerry Prince is introduced and positioned. Even their relationship is established. Al’s method of initiating coalitions to get things done is shown in the meeting of the numbers runners. The moral he draws from the story – “even a totally corrupt economy needs some rules and regulation” - summarizes Al’s attitude toward the social structure of New Harbor and the pride he takes in his contribution to its “rules and regulation.” A lot of characterization (as in Flitcraft) and scene setting is accomplished in this irrelevant two-page story.

This story-within-a-story method of exposition is used frequently in War. Some are long like Manny’s story, the evolution of the killer clams and the Mutants, Miss Morrissey’s School for Girls, Big Dick Masters and the Temple of Broken Promises, The Curse of the Rompamucs, Butch Grimes and the ChoChem conspiracy. Others are shorter, some just a paragraph of introductory description, such as King Kong, the naming of ChoChem, the history of the warehouse district, Miss Morrissey’s diversified business, etc. The heavy use of the technique flavors even the brief, descriptive introductions of new characters and scenes, such as Jimmy, Annie, Chief Callahan, the HyndeSight office, etc.

Story-telling is such a significant means of exposition in War, it raises the question of its impact. One important effect is distancing. As enumerated above, the story of “How Manny Soares Collected” tells a lot about Al, most of which would be awkward, dull and possibly doubted if stated directly. Couching it in a story gives it the authenticity of history, a source outside the questionable view of the narrator. This effect is clearly in the spirit of hardboiled for the way it overcomes the reader’s natural skepticism. Another effect is the opportunity these mini-stories afford for humor, hyperbole and fantasy, as with the killer clams. Still another is the opportunity to advance themes. The chapter devoted to the Curse of the Rompamucs is a striking image of the Native American genocide, but the theme of the white man’s oppression is further developed in the stories of the Temple of Broken Promises and Butch Grimes’ founding of ChoChem. Possibly the most significant impact of these stories, is their effect on pacing. War attempts to maintain a very fast pace. The stories, particularly the longer ones, function as rest stops, diversions from the straight line main plot. The stories are intended to be entertaining in themselves and to leave the reader refreshed and ready to return to the main plot. While the use of stories to carry out these functions is not, strictly speaking, prescribed hardboiled technique, Hammett uses them (in Flitcraft and the history of the falcon) for some of the same purposes in The Maltese Falcon. To me, they seem consistent with the underlying goals of hardboiled, and more importantly, a very good fit for a novel like War and Fleas.

Clearly, the most important element in the style of War is the voice of Al. The method of storytelling is Al’s, and even the events of the story itself, we may suspect, come from his ludicrous imagination. This is very different from the narration of The Maltese Falcon and the Continental Op stories, where the narrators (Hammett and the Op) do their best to disappear. Al’s narration is more closely akin to the third person narrator in Tom Jones, the seven year old narrator of The Diamond Bikini and even Richardson’s Pamela. Like them, he is a big part of the story. His narration is not hardboiled, but the story wouldn’t work without him.

The Failures of War and Fleas
Race:
Besides allowing me to deal with sexual content, Al’s voice also allowed me to dip my toe into the subject of racism with the Rompamucs and Mr. Koan. The joke about Mr. Koan’s ethnic identity sums it perfectly. “He says he’s from Korea; he runs a Chinese restaurant; his name is a Japanese word; and he pronounces it ‘Cohen,’ typical of the confused ethnic identities of the citizens of New Harbor. As he says, ‘you round-eyes can’t tell the difference, anyway’.” The casual batting around of ethnicities and the outright racial slur of “round eyes” certainly carry the possibility of offense, but Al’s aggressive bluntness and his appreciation of the slur on his own ethnicity are enough to defuse it, I hope, for most readers.

But the way War nimbly dances around issues of race is one of its major failings. When I referred to my treatment of racism as a dip of the toe, it was meant as self criticism. I tried to present New Harbor as a kind of racially unconscious society. The social stratification is between the wise guys and their victims. It has nothing to do with race or ethnicity. There is a faint suggestion that the Rompamucs, as middle class, are somewhat tribal and exclusive. At the same time, they are much more inclusive and empathetic than the actual American middle class. They seem to have a broad acceptance of, and solidarity with, the rest of New Harbor’s oppressed. But this is nothing more than background. War never takes on the issue of racism directly. If Native American genocide, prostitution, teenage thoughtlessness, rampant militarism and civic corruption are suitable targets of satire, why not racism? Satire is, after all, a weapon against such persistent evils.

I managed to overcome my fear of sex in fiction with the device of Al’s voice. His formula for Mr. Koan’s name is the same kind of thing, but it should have been expanded, and my failure to do so was cowardice. There are only one or two black people mentioned, and they are bit players. As a member of the white middle class, with very little exposure to Black life, I’ve never felt I had the right to portray black people in any more significant roles. This is obviously inconsistent with my glib and ironic portrayal of Indians, women, prostitutes, bikers, etc. Some would undoubtedly wish my cowardice had extended to these other aggrieved groups, but I wish I could have dived head first into the cesspool of racism that continues to oppress Blacks in America. I hate to admit it, and it may not be true, but it’s possible that a satire of the racism suffered by Blacks can only be written by Black writers. True or not, I still see my failure to include it in my satire as a major weakness.

The other glaring weakness I see in War is the character of Randi Barnes. I wanted to show her growing from her position of subservience to one of independence, strength and leadership. While the plot takes her through this progression, the lack of depth in her character makes it an empty and unsatisfying journey. In a comic novel such as War, many of the other characters can be one-dimensional, cardboard cartoon creations. Not Randi. To fulfill the role I had set for her, she needed to be as real as Al, maybe more so. This raises the question of whether a fully fleshed Randi Barnes could have credibly undergone the transformation I put her through. I’m not at all sure she could have, but that does not excuse the failure to make her real. This was not a failure of nerve, as was my ducking of the racism theme. This was a failure of craft. I simply didn’t know how to make her more real within the context of the plot and Al’s narrative voice. Passing on the issue of racism was a missed opportunity. But no novel can touch all the bases, and this failure does not impact what was included in the final product. The failure to make Randi Barnes a three-dimensional character undercuts the effect of the novel as it stands.

Jack O’Connell is one of my novel-writing heroes. The originality of his plots and characters is remarkable, and his prose style and descriptions are vivid and highly engaging. I like to think that his novels have helped me shape my own. Here is what he said about War and Fleas:

“Bert Robbens’s War and Fleas is a comic tour de force, a slip-stream voyage through a magical real world. Imaginative and daring, the novel is a wild and fun ride. Highly recommended.”

Jack O’Connell, author of:
• Box Nine (Mysterious Press, 1992)
• Wireless (Mysterious Press, 1993)
• The Skin Palace (Mysterious Press, 1996)
• Word Made Flesh (Mysterious Press, 1999)
• The Resurrectionist (Algonquin Books, 2008)

Note: I've been accused of being dark, but I don't think so. These are happy thoughts.

Rap 1

No use for this human race
Can’t take the pace
Flying off in space
Don’t want to face
the end

The time is deepest night
The dying of the light
We never made the fight
Maybe get it right
Next time

It won’t be out of spite
When echoes in the night
And a shower of meteorites
Announce a slight
Adjustment

The place is burning down
But somehow life goes on
Glowing roaches spawn
Someday maybe a new dawn
For something

So the next big thing
Next thing living
No reason for giving
It our dead kind of loving
Is there


Death

Like a dream of the dark,
senseless coming of age,
when the dreams we dreamt
in daylight disappear.

The light of loves we loved in dreams,
the chain of life that binds
to parents, children, wife -
black and broken into nothing.

Package them up, those dreams that were you;
Address them to where you’re going;
Hold each to the sun as you pack it away
For a shadow to haunt the living.


Put Your Lips

Put your lips on mine, babe,
Put your lips on mine.
Ain’t got time for another babe,
So I guess you’ll do just fine.

Down to the tavern, the other day,
Down there to make the scene.
Lucy Landry was sitting there.
Didn’t know what that would mean.

Lucy said
You knock me dead,
And that’s just what I did.

Well, the cops came in
As I finished her off
And shot me in the head.

So put your lips on mine, babe,
Put your lips on mine.
Ain’t got time for another babe.
I guess you’ll do just fine.


Haiku – golden leaf

A golden leaf that once was green
turns to dust in
the cold winter wind.

A gentle satire of my method of literary analysis.


All around the cobbler’s bench
The monkey chased the weasel.
The monkey thought it was all in fun -
Pop goes the weasel.

I was a very analytical child. I remember feeling disturbed by my close reading of some of the common nursery rhymes. I was particularly upset by “Pop Goes the Weasel.”

This story opens with the monkey playing a game with the weasel. Everything’s fine until the weasel misunderstands the monkey’s intentions, something that can happen, especially among children ... and apparently among animals as well. But the consequences of this seemingly insignificant misunderstanding were tragic. The weasel becomes so fearful (?), angry (?) or frustrated (?) that he spontaneously explodes. I’m still haunted by the vision of weasel guts all over the cobbler’s bench and smeared across the surprised face of the monkey. It seems all out of proportion to the problem.

And these are just the objective facts. As a heavy consumer of such nursery rhymes, fairy tales, and other “children’s literature,” I knew the facts were nothing but a vessel to contain the heavy payload of subtext, and that the subtext was almost always dark and dangerous. And so, I dug deeper. What was the moral of the story? What was my mother trying to tell me? What did her singing the rhyme to me imply about our relationship?

On the surface, this appeared to be a cautionary tale about truth and appearances in play. Perhaps my mother was simply suggesting that I should be careful to clearly signal the true meaning of my actions to my playmates in order to prevent such a tragedy. Yes, that was certainly part of the message, but I knew there was more. She must have perceived a flaw in my character to think I would need such admonition. Did she think I was exceptionally frightening or annoying in my interactions with my peers? Or did she see me more as the weasel, capable of over-reacting to harmless horseplay?

Or, at a more deeply personal level, was this a form of unconscious wish fulfillment? I realized that I often chased her around the house. She would be trying to attend to her household chores (the cobbler’s bench?) and I’d be tagging along behind, trying to get her to play with me. Was this her way of telling me that my inability to amuse myself had brought her to the point of self destruction? Or was she maliciously turning the tables? When we settled down to play, she often bounced me on her knee and recited the rhyme, accompanying the climactic “pop” by poking my tubby little tummy with her finger. Was she hoping I’d go the way of the weasel and explode?

Questions such as these tormented my childhood, then gradually slipped into the shadowed pool of my subconscious. It was only through the tireless help of my analyst, over years of therapy, that I was able to dredge up these awful memories and examine them in the clear light of day. Now, we are working on my morbid obsession with meanings, because, even in the clear light of day it seems to me that the dark implications I drew from this simple children’s rhyme were not imagined. They are all there, hidden in those evil words.

I don’t understand poetry. I don’t read it or write it, but sometimes, as a break in writing novels or writing about writing them, I lapse into verse. The forms I seem to favor include philosophical doggerel, blues lyrics and haiku. Here are a few examples. Please take them in the spirit in which they are intended - trivial amusement.


The Devil’s Question

It is the devil’s question
And it will always be:
What is this thing,
This thing that I call me.

It came from nothing,
Lit the sky and filled the earth
With all the things that I could know
And left me with a thirst.

I’m dry as dust,
And in the mirror
I see an empty shell.

The poltergeist
Behind my eyes
Could tease me straight to hell.

But the mirror’s for the fun house,
A way to lose the way,
Reflection of reflection,
A sucker trap to keep me
From the carnival outside.

The light will fade,
And what I know
Will dwindle down to naught.

And still the question
Will remain
To devil other lives.

But I will join the carnival
Where questions are ignored.
The wheel will spin
The lights will flash
And I will be no more.


Haiku - Not!
(a little local humor)

Of Somerville and Somervillens -
Some are vile
And some are villains.

The rest of us are just
As clean and cool as if
We lived in Cambridge.


Talking Like a Fool

Some people say they make things better
With all their running around.
But things don’t get no better
Till we’re six feet under ground.

They say you got to kill your brother
If you want to make your way.
I hear their fear and whining,
And I don’t know what to say.

There’s people selling love, right now.
There’s people selling hate.
But I’m not selling nothing
I’m just talking like a fool.

People talk like fools, oh yeah.
We’re all just talking fools.
If words could save the world, they would,
But they’re just the words of fools.


They send you in a woman
When you’re lying in your bed.
They send you in a woman
Fingers cool upon your head.
She comes in from the cold, dark night
And you know you’ll soon be dead.

The people gonna talk.
That’s what they love to do.
So, let the people talk.
Let them torture, let them kill.
Yeah, let the people talk
Until the dirt has stopped their mouths.

There’s no reason to be here.
There’s no reason to leave.
I don’t want to fight
And I don’t want to grieve.
They say you got to pick one,
If you want to exist.
They must think they’re just
Talking to a fool.

Just talking like the fools we be.
Right now I’m talking like a fool.
Trying to save the world, oh yeah,
I’m talking like a fool.


Haiku

Melting mountain snow
The way of light and water
Endless ocean waits


One Life

Plants and animals live and die
without ever asking why.
The plankton sifts into the gut of the whale
fulfilling its destiny, an end in itself.

We humans alone find nothing in this
endless circle of life.
The vector that made us must be going somewhere.
We study the past, imagine the future
and curse the darkness there.

Rejoice that you live.
Rejoice that you die,
and give it up.
You’ll never know why.

Motives and Methods of Hardboiled Fiction - Part 5:
Concluding Unhardboiled Postscript

Note: This is intended as a continuation and critique of the four posts that make up the style guide I called “Motives and Methods of Hardboiled Fiction.” That piece was written just as I was beginning to try to write. I wouldn’t necessarily consider the guide to be naive, but having spent some years writing fiction, my perspective on the hardboiled style and its place in the craft has changed. I’m writing this “conclusion” now (2016) to add that new perspective.

Stupidities
Those who have read the blog/style guide this far (all 12 of you) have probably already compiled a list of the stupidities it contains. I have too, and the first stupidity on my list is my classification of good readers and bad. I’ll stand by the basic point that some readers want the author to tell them what to think and feel about the story, while others resent that kind of spoon-feeding and want to figure it out and experience it for themselves. The stupidity was in making a value judgement about it. It isn’t an either/or proposition, anyway. Readers fall on a spectrum as far as their tolerance for authorial intrusion. Some readers want the author to tell them everything; others reject and resent anything the author tells them beyond the hardboiled minimum. Most want a comfortable mix of drama and narrative exposition to guide them through the story at a pace that matches the pace and fertility of their imagination. Suggesting that any reader who was not at the proper end of this spectrum was somehow “bad” is ridiculous.

In fact, the level of tolerance for authorial intrusion is only one of many important characterizations of reader preferences. I, for instance, read very slowly, insisting that I absorb and understand every sentence before I move on. The pacing that works best for me (simple, fast and dense) might be annoying to someone who skims. Another categorization on which I am at one of the tails of the bell curve is the how vs. what of a novel. I am critically interested in how a story is told, how it achieves its effect (hence this analysis). Most readers, it seems to me, are more concerned with the subject of the story. Other categorizations - action vs. character. Ideas vs. feeling, etc., etc. - are also critically important to how a work of fiction fits a particular reader. That readers exist at all points of these continuums seems a fairly self-evident proposition, but it is a truth I consistently ignored in constructing my writing guide.

Another truth I somehow overlooked is that the rules for hardboiled are not always internally consistent. Following one rule may require a writer to break another. The guide suggests a simple do or don’t for every situation - another gross stupidity. In fact, trade-offs, whether conscious or not, are made on every page, every paragraph, every sentence, every word. For instance, the guide presents a general prohibition of summarization. But the narrative summarizations that occur in The Maltese Falcon before and during the relation of the Flitcraft parable are excused on the basis of the overriding value of pacing and focus. What the guide does not say is that this exception is just the tip of the iceberg. Pacing and focus are considerations for every word of a novel. In most instances, they don’t conflict with other goals of hardboiled (or any other style), but when they do, they may override those other goals, or they may be sacrificed to them. This is always a judgement call. Trying to reduce it to a simple rule is hopeless. Writing fiction in a coherent style is a process of mediating among a shifting and clashing tangle of such considerations and doing it with a consistent scheme. For the most part, the guide ignores this complexity, rather than providing a basis for the crucial mediation.

These stupidities might be excused as the simplifying assumptions necessary to make sense of the hardboiled style, except that they leave the impression that the style is somehow “right” (at least for crime and mystery fiction) and that it can be expressed as a cookbook. These are the fallacies I hope to address in this conclusion. A guide that posits a monolithic reader and ignores its own internal conflicts is of very little value as a general approach to writing fiction - even crime fiction.

Chandler Was Wrong

Raymond Chandler makes two interesting and contradictory comments about Hammett in his famous essay, The Simple Art of Murder. On the one hand, he says, “I doubt that Hammett had any deliberate artistic aims whatever ...” (Raymond Chandler, The Simple Art of Murder, Ballantine Books, New York, 1972, p. 16). Yet he says of Hammett’s style, “at it’s best, it could say almost anything.” (The Simple Art of Murder, p. 17) I began writing with a strong conviction that Chandler was wrong about Hammett’s artistic intent and the belief that he was absolutely right about the universal effectiveness of Hammett’s hardboiled style. Experience has taught me that Chandler was wrong on both counts.

I have always imagined Hammett holed up in a San Francisco hotel room with a bottle of bourbon and a typewriter, coughing and haggling obsessively with himself over every word, to create the style of The Maltese Falcon. This is probably a highly romanticized image, but it is clear from the consistency of his work to that point, and his own stated goals for it, that he was searching for that style and a vehicle with which to demonstrate its truth and power. If that isn’t an artistic aim, I don’t know what is.

At the same time, I think the style perfected in The Maltese Falcon was never as successful in any of Hammett’s other stories as it was in that one. The hardboiled style is clearly apparent in the Continental Op stories, in which the “distracting question” of the Op’s character undercuts the dramatic potential. That question isn’t nearly as pronounced in Hammett’s first two novels, Red Harvest, and The Dain Curse, but the disappearing first person narrator cannot give these novels anything like the depth of The Maltese Falcon. But the same third person, hardboiled narration that is so perfect for the telling of The Maltese Falcon becomes confusing, opaque, and unsatisfying in The Glass Key, a method of obfuscation rather than illumination. In all of these Hammett stories and novels the style is not significantly different. The reason it works so well in The Maltese Falcon is the perfect coherence of the theme, plot, and characters with the hardboiled style. It may be a chicken-or-egg question whether Hammett devised the story of The Maltese Falcon to fit the hardboiled style or vice versa. But it’s perfectly clear that they were made for each other.

And that is the point. It is the characteristics of the story that determine its fit with the hardboiled style. Looking back at my analysis of the hardboiled style, I see it as a mass of sweeping generalizations. Now, undaunted, I will try to do the same for hardboiled content, on the theory that reconnecting style to content in this way may lead to some useful conclusions.

A Quick and Dirty Characterization of Hardboiled Content

From Puzzle to Mean Streets

Although developed more than half a century earlier by an American - Edgar Allen Poe - by the early 20th century, the dominant form of the mystery was commonly referred to as the British model. It was mystery in the way a puzzle is mysterious, and the drama was chiefly a battle of wits, in which the reader was invited to participate. It was carried out almost exclusively on an intellectual plane. The form was enormously popular, but as a consequence of the burgeoning volume of production, writers were forced to more and more outlandish schemes as the basis for their puzzles. The hardboiled style can be seen as a reaction to this artificiality.

The British mystery takes place in a fundamentally ordered world, in which the characters share common values with their fictional milieu and with their readers. They generally accept and respect social constraints. This basic conformity seems conditioned more on practical and cultural motives rather than any personal morality. At the heart of the mystery is an individual who has transgressed against the social norms. The British mystery is all about the ordered world isolating and punishing the transgressor and bringing the world back into harmony. The fact that the mystery is generally posed as an intellectual problem is clearly an important factor, enabling the nonphysical, nonmoral nature of the British detective to be effective. But the connection is stronger than that. The ordered world actually prefers that the detective be physically weak and squarely, almost unconsciously (that is, without moral angst), within the bounds of the shared social values. His or her nature is intended to highlight the dominance of those values. In the ordered world, no heroic physical stature or exceptional moral strength is required to put things right. The very strength of the social norms is sufficient force. It only requires an exceptional intelligence to shine its light on the iniquity and it will surely shrivel and die, when thus exposed to the stern and united gaze of the public eye.

Hardboiled characters make no such assumptions about generally shared values or respect for laws and custom. They may hope, suspect, or even believe such an order exists in some parts of the wide world, but in the world in which they live, usually an underworld of some sort, they know that dishonesty and corruption are rampant and that anyone, at any time, could be pursuing a hidden course of action to their detriment. Everyone lies, some more viciously than others, some on a grander scale than others, but they all do it. This is the shared expectation: that everyone’s agenda is hidden and that no one will honestly and fully reveal their own except under extreme duress. The source of that duress in the hardboiled mystery is generally a detective (whether police, private, or amateur) whose strength is purely personal, often physical, and almost always moral. The detective cannot depend on the strength of social norms to isolate, or even define, an evil; cannot depend on public institutions (police, government, news media) to stop it. The hardboiled detective is on his own. To combat evil may require superior wits – just as in the British model, but it may require superior physical ability as well, quite unlike the British model, and it will always require a strong, well-defined, and very personal moral commitment to provide some framework and motivation for action in the chaotic world – also largely irrelevant to the British detective.

The typical content of a hardboiled novel springs from the same fundamental world view as its style – the sense of the individual’s isolation and the associated distrust of social interactions and institutions. It sees in the innocent individual a core awareness of truth and justice, and the motivating force of some form of hope. Evil occurs when that innocence either dies or is thwarted by the corruption that is often the result of two or more individuals interacting to project their coordinated force into the world. Man’s social world is generally dishonest and oppressive to the highest values of the individual, and the mythology that is developed in these novels concerns the individual carving out some form of personal justice in a corrupt world.

Justice

The concept of justice is problematic in the hardboiled world. In fact, justice is not even a particularly appropriate term for the outcomes found in most hardboiled novels. Since it is based on the values of an individual, it can take as many forms as there are protagonists. The only defining feature that is constant is the certainty that it has nothing to do with any societal construct. It is totally distinct from, and often at odds with, the law.

Whatever it might be called, hardboiled justice is nothing more than a consolation prize and is generally seen as such. The hardboiled hero must pursue it in whatever form he conceives it, though he wastes little energy wondering why that is so. It is the pursuit of his own particular brand of justice that defines him, but there is little for him in its achievement. It does not bring him love, or belonging, and he has no illusion that it changes anything. Most often, it’s not even a broad-based overthrow of the corrupt world in which he lives. Typically, the best outcome that can be hoped for is a temporary and local victory. The hero’s drive toward love and belonging may remain, but they are often seen as hopelessly out of reach, thwarted by man’s inherent social dysfunction, and the best accommodation that can be reached between the individual and his corrupt world is the kind of adjustment represented by Sam Spade’s acceptance of his San Francisco underworld.

In The Maltese Falcon, Sam Spade solves the crime, but there is no sweetness to his victory. Everywhere he looks he has lost. He’s lost Brigid. He has to give up the $1000 Gutman gave him for his trouble. Dundy hates him more than ever. And Iva is now free to pester him without interference from her nuisance husband. Although he was instrumental in it, Spade has no more than a passing interest in the end of the Gutman gang. From the start, his interest has been to track down and capture his partner’s killer. But that interest seems based on nothing more than the expectations placed on his profession. He feels no personal committment to Miles Archer; he doesn’t like or respect him, doesn’t want to maintain their professional association, and he takes little, if any, personal satisfaction in bringing about the arrest of his killer, certainly no satisfaction commensurate with the personal sacrifice he makes to achieve it. The arc of the story leaves him right where he started. Hammett forcefully undercuts the significance of the falcon intrigue with the worthless bird and the offhand, offstage destruction of the Gutman gang. With Spade’s cold dismissal of his dead partner, that mystery is also severely devalued. The solution of the crimes becomes an anticlimax, and the reader’s satisfaction lies instead in the discovery of the surprising depths of Spade’s character. Spade must take his satisfaction in inhabiting that character in a constant state of striving, the infinite act of becoming himself. For the world he inhabits, the outcome of his striving is of little note, the bursting of a tiny bubble in the festering chaos of life.

The Detective

The common problem that is faced in a British mystery is not the deceit and corruption of man’s social constructs; it is the plodding dullness of the bureaucracy entrusted with enforcing them. The criminal hides his iniquity within a fog of clever deceit, a fog which the police are not sufficiently brilliant to penetrate. Detection is the bright light of reason shining through to bring justice to criminal and victim, restoring the happy social order. Observation, knowledge, logic and, often, an obsession with the puzzle, are the characteristics the detective brings to bear on the crime. The detective may work in close coordination with the police, may even be one of them, but he or she is generally distinguished by an excess of these characteristics beyond the levels to be found among the rank and file of law enforcement.

With the example of Prohibition starkly present in everyday America, the plodding dullness of law enforcement in the British mystery was transmogrified into hypocritical corruption in the hardboiled American crime novel. Official corruption calls into question the meaning and value of the social compact. Crime is organized and powerful, operating openly, and often with the connivance of law enforcement. Whether in its own skin, or in the guise of law, politics, business, or religion; it is crime and corruption – not justice - that are seen as the glue of the social order. The criminal is no longer an aberrant individual. He may be an official or unofficial leader of the corrupt order, or just it’s minion, but he is much more likely to have an organization behind him than he would be in a British mystery. In the hardboiled world, the lone individual is much more likely to be the detective, rather than the criminal.

The motivation for detecting is also somewhat different. Where detection, for the British detective, is something of a civic duty and a stimulating challenge, for the American hardboiled detective, it is an existential act, a fundamental expression of his or her being, and one that often comes at the cost of significant personal sacrifice. Sam Spade lives in a city that is hostile to him (in the person of Lt. Dundy). It fears him as a foreign element, a force outside the control of its social system. But Spade has learned to live there, even to flourish, and to have the limited satisfaction of thumbing his nose at Dundy, showing him his incompetence and impotence. It is the satisfaction of knowing that he is, as Hammett has imagined him, a “hard and shifty fellow, able to take care of himself in any situation, able to get the best of anybody he comes in contact with, whether criminal, innocent by-stander or client.” (Introduction to The Maltese Falcon/, New York: Modern Library, 1934 – HMW p.117) For Spade, the act of detection is integral, he does it to define himself.

One similarity between hardboiled and British detectives is their competitive drive. Both play to win. The biggest difference lies in who they conceive of as their opponents. For the British detective, it is typically a well-defined and singular criminal. For the hardboiled American, it can be just about anyone and everyone. Spade thinks “maybe” he loves Brigid, even admits that he would like to protect her from prosecution for her crimes. “[A]ll of me wants to – wants to say the hell with the consequences and do it.” In a British mystery, she would be the love interest and would be rescued and reconciled to living happily ever after with the detective hero. In The Maltese Falcon, this is not an option. Spade can’t let her off the hook because she is his main competition, the very embodiment of the deceitful world he has mastered, and to do so would be to play the sap for her, to lose that mastery that defines him. It genuinely pains him that he can’t fulfill the love he might feel for Brigid, but, like he says, “that’ll pass.” The implication is clear: if he played the sap, for anyone, for any reason, he could never forgive himself.

But Brigid is not the only competitor. Gutman, Wilmer and Cairo all compete in their own ways, and can even join forces to play as a rather dysfunctional team. Dundy and the DA are another source of competition. Spade has his allies - Effie Perine, Tom Polhaus, Sid Wise - but none of them is in a position to play a pivotal role in the competition. It is very much a case of Sam Spade against the world, and this, in hardboiled, is more typical than not.

Love in a Hardboiled World

In the world of The Maltese Falcon, the first law of survival is: trust no one. Almost all of the characters lie, and if they get caught in one lie, they proceed to the next. Not only do they lie, but lies are what they expect from others. This expectation of deceit is fundamental. Gutman’s crew is a nest of vipers, ready to betray each other at the first opportunity. Spade can help Brigid only so far as she can persuade him to trust her, which isn’t far at all, and in the end, that lack of trust effectively poisons any opportunity there may have been for love between them and sends her to death or prison.

In general, love is vanishingly rare in the hardboiled world. Lust is common, and a one-sided love, often depicted as foolish or dangerous, may motivate the drama. But happy, healthy, mutual love is almost never encountered. In a world in which trust is virtually absent, this should not be surprising.

The Maltese Falcon seems to insist on this point rather strenuously. Spade’s final explanation to Brigid lays out the case against love meticulously and at length, and the book ends with a clear victory of hardboiled realism over the fantasy of romantic love. Effie believed in Brigid and in the love she thought she saw developing between Brigid and her boss. She is shocked and heartbroken when she reads in the newspaper that Spade has turned Brigid over to the police. Her reaction is visceral. “I know - I know you’re right. You’re right. But don’t touch me now - not now.” (The Novels of DH, p. 440)

Of course, another factor responsible for this loveless world is its reflex misogyny. It was not an accident that the emblem for the pervasive deceit in The Maltese Falcon was a woman. And it was probably something more fundamental than an “accident of birth” that made such treatment of women a cliché in hardboiled crime fiction. It was certainly rooted in the general air of mistrust that pervades the hardboiled world, but it may have been exaggerated by the view of women as the object of the male lust that is another component of that world. The male protagonists of hardboiled drama were painfully torn by the presence of beautiful, sexually attractive women. On the glandular level, they were irresistably attracted, while their instincts for survival in the hardboiled world warned of the inevitable disaster of trust and love. This push/pull of love and death may be the source of the highly charged image of women in the hardboiled world, and it is certainly a factor in the barren relationships to be found there.

The thwarted relationship between Harry Madox and the good girl Gloria in Hell Hath No Fury is interesting for its much more convincing depiction of love than Effie Perine’s romantic daydreams. Despite the guilt and shame for her lesbian encounter (which was culturally required and thus real in the 1950s), or perhaps because of it (which would be an interesting subject for analysis), Gloria is an innocent, worthy of trust and love, and Harry falls for her. She is opposed by the archetypal hardboiled femme fatale, his boss’s wife, Dolores Harshaw. Mrs. Harshaw is a supreme object of lust, deceitful and dangerous as hell. Harry is forced to work out the effects of his stupidity and lack of moral compass between the two poles of Gloria and Mrs. Harshaw. Both he and the reader are surprised by his discovery of love with Gloria. Of course, it is doomed. When the Harshaw devil woman wins absolute dominion over him, it is an unequivocal rejection of the possibility of love in the hardboiled world.

Hope and Noir

The hardboiled world is bleak, with its near universal distrust of human interactions, but it is not hopeless. The hardboiled hero believes in the efficacy of his actions and his understanding of the social environment in which they take place. Sam Spade knows himself, knows his world and how to survive in it. He has adjusted his expectations to that world, and the implication is that he will go on, achieving the same kind of limited success he achieves in The Maltese Falcon.

By the end of Hell Hath No Fury, Harry Madox can look forward to no such success. He will live under the control of Dolores Harshaw for the rest of his life. He has not adjusted to this fate, he’s been trapped by it. One of the main motivations driving Sam Spade’s actions in The Maltese Falcon is the need to maintain his independence under the constant threat of legal constraint by Dundy and/or the DA, and, at least in the affair of the falcon, he is successful. The actions of Harry Madox bring about a completely different result. Harry thinks he’s as much the “hard and shifty fellow,” as anyone, but he’s clearly beaten at the hardboiled game by the superior play of Mrs. Harshaw.

Charles Williams used the distanced narration to achieve a style that is in almost all respects hardboiled. But the ending of the story takes it into a different world. When he loses the hardboiled game, Harry loses his capacity for independent action, the individual sovereignty that is possibly the most treasured and most fiercely protected right and self-image of the hardboiled hero. Further, Harry understands that it has been his own actions that have left him trapped and helpless in hell. Mistrust, which in hardboiled extends to everyone but the self, is completed with Harry’s recognition that he cannot even trust himself. When the individual realizes that his or her motives and actions are self-defeating and expects nothing from social relationships and institutions except relentless persecution, there’s nowhere left to turn. The individual is driven by malignant fate into the hopeless chaos of noir.

So, hardboiled can be thought of as bounded on one side by the British mystery and by noir on the other. The main factor that differentiates them is the extent of trust they reflect. In the British mystery, not only the individual, but also social relations, norms and institutions are generally benign and straightforward - trustworthy. In hardboiled the individual can trust only him- or herself. In noir, the individual is, or becomes, aware that his or her own thoughts and desires are leading him or her straight to hell and can never be trusted to do otherwise. Another, and related, differentiating factor is the efficacy of the various actors in the drama. Again, in the British mystery, both the individual and society (relationships, norms, and institutions) are involved in the accomplishment of justice. In hardboiled, it is up to the individual, generally without help, and often in the face of resistance from society. In noir, neither individual nor society can accomplish much of anything in the face of a hostile, or at best random, fate.

Half-assed Hardboiled

There’s a lot more that could be said about the standard hardboiled story, about the sex and violence, the tough guys and their criminal ways, but it’s all been said a thousand times. This is the popular image of hardboiled and the reason practitioners like Mickey Spillane and John D. MacDonald, who wrote in styles that are far from hardboiled, are generally considered hardboiled writers. Mike Hammer and Travis McGee certainly qualify as me-against-the-world hardboiled heros. Their worlds fit the mold, and their love lives tend toward the usual doomed relationships. The justice they achieve through their adventures is defined by their own unique moral code, as is typical of hardboiled fiction. It’s easy to see the legacy of The Maltese Falcon in the plot, characters, and themes of Kiss Me Deadly and The Empty Copper Sea.

But the narrative styles of Travis McGee and Mike Hammer bear very little resemblance to the narration of The Maltese Falcon. They are first person narratives that are neither disappearing nor distanced. They are subjective, personal and often far from understated. Hammer and McGee are loose and expansive, explaining every action, every motivation and random impression in the interest of demonstrating their own heroic persona. This was a very popular style, particularly in the 1950s and 60s, and remains popular today, although examples from the heyday now seem hopelessly dated and sophomoric.

Whether these authors and their works should be considered hardboiled is not a particularly interesting or useful question. In terms of the Hardboiled Mystery Writers definition, they clearly conform in terms of content - violent action, colloquial speech and tough characters; and in others - objective viewpoint, impersonal tone, and realism - they don’t. In the simple classification scheme I’ve used in this blog, there are only two choices - British or hardboiled. So it’s probably sufficient to say that they don’t belong to the British school. A more interesting question is: what are the implications of this hybrid, half-hardboiled varient for the craft of crime fiction, for writers, and for readers?

The crowd on the street flowed around him in jagged lines of color and light. Faces loomed suddenly from the flow, faces with broken threatening features – a crooked nose twisting in on itself, tufted eyebrows growing like mold over black sunken eyes, a swallowed chin that protruded from a scrawny chicken neck. Coats, hats and scarves screamed at him with colors that never came from the streets. The stench that blew in his face was varied and strong, like a thousand different plants and animals decomposing in the city dump, refusing to blend back into earth, each defiantly proclaiming its own unique odor of decay. And the rush and roar of traffic vibrated in his chest, cramping his lungs, infecting the fragile rhythm of his heart.

He walked against the flow with his head down, holding his paper cup before him like a cross to ward off demons. It didn’t help. Shoulders, arms, hips and shopping bags assaulted him. He could feel them through the layers of greasy cloth and insulation that covered him. Their touch was cold. It went right through him, raising the sour bile of fear in his throat.

“Spare change,” he whispered, looking at nothing. “Anything.”

Something rattled in the bottom of his cup. He stopped and looked down. A quarter lay there and even George Washington wouldn’t look up at him. He dumped the quarter into his hand and put it in his pocket.

“Spare change.” Again he shuffled forward against the current.


The street sparkled with colored lights. Holiday decorations brought back happy childhood memories and smiles to the faces of shoppers making the rounds of the downtown stores. She wore a simple brown cloth coat, topped off by a matching hat and scarf of bright red with a pattern of white reindeer, but it could not compete for color with the shiny pastel parkas the kids were wearing. A vendor dipped apples in a bubbling pot of caramel that gave off a warm enticing aroma to the whole street. And the tinkling of holiday music piped from one of the stores.

She was a big woman, tall and stocky, in her mid-thirties, with short bobbed brown hair and a wide pleasant face. She walked with her head up, absorbing all the holiday cheer, a bag of small treasures – gifts for her friends at work - swinging at her side. She saw him from half a block away as she approached in the warm flow of the crowd. His head was down, and she watched him openly as she passed. Half a block on, she turned back and followed him.

It was slow going. It took him almost an hour to shuffle five blocks. She saw him collect from 6 or 7 people. They put their money in his cup, but wouldn’t look at him. He didn’t seem to notice them either.

He went into a liquor store and put his money on the cashier’s counter. The cashier was a tall skinny man with thinning black hair. He had a tremendous beak nose and sharp little dark eyes. He looked at the money, then at his ragged customer, and went around the counter to pick up a bottle of wine. Without going back behind the counter, the cashier handed the bottle to him and stood watching as he shuffled out onto the street.

The bottle was hidden somewhere in his rags and his cup was gone as he made his way to a small park that was across the street on the next block. The park took up only half the block, but the streetlights left much of it in darkness. She saw him glance around furtively before he entered the shadows, and she watched him – nothing but a shadow, himself – watched him go to a bench in the deepest part of the park. She moved closer.

He took the bottle from inside his coat, unscrewed the top, and took a long drink. When he was done, he carefully screwed the top back on and slid the bottle beneath the bench. He sat slumped, his hands lying loose in his lap, staring out into the darkness, his face devoid of expression.

She came out of the darkness and sat at the other end of the bench. Without turning his head, he glanced sharply at her before his eyes as quickly leaped away. His expression never changed.

“Happy Holidays,” she said warmly.

He did not seem to hear. Nothing changed in his face or his posture.

“Lovely night, isn’t it?”

Nothing.

“I’m sorry. I guess it’s a little cold to be outdoors. I wasn’t thinking. Don’t you have anywhere to go?”

She waited, and he finally acknowledged her presence by turning slightly away.

“It’s nothing to be ashamed of. It could as easily have happened to me. There but for fortune, you know.” She laughed, but there was something forced, something hollow in it.

He was no longer slumped. His shoulders and neck were rigid. His hands had turned to claws that clutched his legs.

“You might not think so, but I know what loneliness is, what it can do to you. I came to the city with nothing – no money, no family, no friends. It was very hard, but you can’t give up. You have to keep fighting. And so I did. Then one day, I looked up and saw that things had changed. I had a job where people knew me and … and I think, liked me. I feel very lucky now - lucky and happy. And I believe that all of us who are lucky should try to help others who aren’t. Would you like me to help you?”

“Go away,” he croaked, his voice so low she wasn’t quite sure what he said.

“I could help you get some food and a place to stay. I remember when I first got here. I got off the bus and I needed a place to stay. I went into a hotel and asked the man how much it would be for a room. He said some ridiculous number and I asked if that was for a week or a month. He laughed right in my face. That was what it cost for just one night. So, you see, I know how hard it is to keep a roof over your head in this city. But there are places where it’s not so bad. You could have a nice warm bed and a shower. Wouldn’t you like that?”

He said nothing and did not move.

“Food, too,” she continued. “I’m sure we could find you something good to eat. I saw that bottle. That’s not good. It will only make you sick in the end. You need to eat good nutritious food. Are you hungry?”

He was still turned away from her.

She slid closer on the bench. “Come with me. We’ll get you all fixed up with a nice hot meal and a place to stay. Okay?”

She touched his arm and felt stringy muscles jump under layers of greasy cloth.

The darkness was soft and calm. Beyond it, the street churned with lights and color, people and noise. The trees and bushes blocked it out. He took a drink and stared into the dark. There was warmth in the bottle – peace - and darkness to protect him.

Then she came at him, a broad white face, framed in red, and leering. She took his bench and began to talk. Her voice was loud and solid. It took up all of the bench and shattered the darkness. She pushed so many words at him, words to move him from his spot, words to take away his bottle. She came too close. She touched him.

The knife surfaced among the folds of his clothes and fell into his hand. It flew in a shallow arc across the darkness.

“Get away.” The words shrieked in his head, but came from his lips as an angry hiss.

The knife hit something solid and fell from his hand. “Leave me alone.” He lurched to his feet and stumbled into the bushes.

She stared at the spot where he had disappeared, stunned, gasping. It had happened too fast to even cry out. But the knife hurt. It was stuck in the cloth of her coat at the shoulder. She pulled it out, an ordinary dinner knife, with dull serration near the end. It had cut through the outer shell of her coat, but had not penetrated to her skin. The force of the blow had bruised her. That was what hurt. She looked at the knife, and her brow knitted with worry and confusion. She picked up her bag and walked slowly out of the park. At the corner, she dropped the knife in a trash can and turned to follow the crowd downtown, but she could not shop anymore. At the first station, she went down the stairs and took the subway home.

In the dark, he reached under the bench and retrieved the bottle. He quickly unscrewed the top and drank all that was left. He sat down again, in much the same position in which he had sat before, but his eyes could not stop shifting back and forth, left and right.