Q: Besides manuals, which books do you think make good masterclass material for crime writers?
A: I’m not a big fan of genre and sub-genre. As a reader they limit my exposure, “Oh you like hardboiled, you’ll love book X.” But wait I also love books from other sections, or I might if you ever showed me them. Does bitching about the algorithm sound hopelessly 2019?
As a writer I find genre and sub-genre very useful. We write books that live in a linage of other books. I want to know what came before. What is expected by readers of the genre? I want to know the rules before I toss them out.
When writing Young Americans I needed to know how heist novels worked. I started with Donald E. Westlake’s The Hot Rock. It is a romp full of fun eccentrics and stunning plot twists. Then I read Jim Thompson’s The Getaway. An entirely different take on a heist novel, dark, brooding, and violent. Instead of focusing on the planning, assembling of the team and tools etc., it dealt with the getaway from a robbery gone wrong. Both are amazing books, together they show the breadth possible within this sub-genre.
My crime fiction first love was Hardboiled. It started as it should with Raymond Chandler’s The Long Good Bye. It contains so many recognizable tropes, and he’s a brilliant enough writer that it never feels hokey. They weren’t tropes when he invented them. After that look at Walter Moseley’s Devil in a Red Dress. A modern masterpiece of hardboiled writing. Moseley shows us a Los Angeles seen through a Black janitor and part time detective’s eyes. Where Marlow haunts mansions and high class gambling establishments, Easy hangs out in Jazz clubs and bungalows. POV changes everything. There are very few new stories, but giving us new eyes to witness them through allows us to experience the world anew.
When my first books were published I was categorized as a “Street Writer”. The conference panels I was on always had either “Street” or “Gritty” in the description. Gritty. I hate that term. The first thing it makes me think of is sand in a tunafish sandwich. I realized later that street writer was code for didn’t go to college, and had actual experience in the low level criminal worlds we wrote about. After I met a few of these “street writers” I saw it was badge of honor. Pearce Hansen and Ian Ayris are two the finest practitioners of honest street-level crime writing alive. Hansen’s Stagger Bay is brilliant, haunting, heart breaking and heart healing. Ayris’ John Sissons trilogy (Abide with Me, April Skies, Everybody Hurts) is a massive story about growing up desperate, poor, proud, angry, in love. It is about real humans struggling to be honorable.
Both Pearce Hansen and Ian Ayris deserve to be taught in a master class called “Lies we use to tell our truth.”
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