Be Kind, Rewind by Gabriel Valjan

 

Are there crime fiction books so good you hold on to them and re-read them? Name a few classics and inspirations.

 

Why revisit crime fiction when you already know who committed the crime? I’ve always been cautious about revisiting past reads because memory is beguiling, deceptive, and tinged with fear and apprehension. Nothing sucks more than realizing that something you liked in the past doesn’t hold up. You mumble to yourself, What was I thinking?

 

Certain books are Proustian to me, the feel of the pages and the scent return me to a particular time and place in my life. Movies do the same thing to me, but in a different way, as they remind me of time spent with others. Not the case with books since they were always solitary adventures for me. Me and my thoughts, at a certain age and stage in life.

 

It’s harder for me to enjoy books now because I’ve learned the ‘tricks of the trade.’ My metronome is jaded, if not sensitive to pacing, to the give-and-take of dialogue that either reveals Character or advances Plot. It’s hard for this Writer to be a Reader again. I don’t read Friends of Eddie Coyle for the story anymore. I search for familiar snippets of dialogue, and I analyze How and Why they work.

 

Writers start as Readers and we learn as we go to become Writers, or we remain Readers. There is a Yin and Yang delicacy to a writer’s appreciating another writer because we’ve all worked in the kitchen. There was a saying when I worked as a waiter as teenager, dealing with coked out chefs with sharp knives, ‘Once you’ve worked in the kitchen, you would never eat in the restaurant.’

 

Which is why I say, Be Kind, Rewind.

 

Agatha Christie’s AND THEN THERE WERE NONE (1939).

 

The standing policy in my elementary school was that if you were done with an assignment, you did independent reading. The school had a modest library. I mowed through those shelves, and my teacher loaned me her copy of the Christie title in her purse.

 

Nobody was ‘woke’ back then, and nobody blinked an eye at how wildly ‘problematic’ the book was. If you don’t know the controversies, Google the original title—or, if I may be self-serving, read my afterword to my Shane Cleary novel HUSH HUSH. I was a kid. I was Mikey from the Life cereal commercial. I read everything.

 

Thomas Harris’s SILENCE OF THE LAMBS (1988)

Gillian Flynn’s GONE GIRL (2012)

Donna Tartt, THE SECRET HISTORY (1992)

 

I lump these novels together because they were a revelation in narrative strategies. All three stories deal with unreliable characters. And rather than the crime story being a Whodunit, Howdunit or Whydunit, they were a Howcatchems. I marveled at how hard it was to create and sustain suspense.

 

Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’s DANGEROUS LIASIONS (1782).

Vladimir Nabokov’s LOLITA (1955)

 

It is difficult for me to explain to others why this I found this epistolary French novel both captivating and terrifying. Perhaps, it because it is depicts how both men and women are treacherous when it comes to affairs of the heart. Love. Betrayal. Revenge.

 

As I honed my chops as a writer, I found myself looking outside of my American-slash-Anglo-speaking culture for other approaches and attitudes to crime. French, German, Italian, and Spanish crime writers offer a different perspective on crime, justice, and especially violence. For instance, almost always in American cinema, the good guy has to kill all the bad guys. It’s not enough to leave them wounded. It seems like a weakness to show mercy. In foreign cinema and novels, the damage is done, the threat neutralized, so carry on.

 

Volumes have been written on Humbert Humbert and sexual obsession with Lolita, so I won’t say more.

 

Nabokov intrigues me as a writer because he is a trickster and a Word Nerd par excellence and like Joseph Conrad, English was his third language. Speaking of Conrad, his short story “Point of Honor,” the basis for the Ridley Scott film, The Duellists, is a favorite.

 

Walter Mosley’s DEVIL IN A BLUE DRESS (1990).

 

There was a time when I went on hiatus from reading crime fiction, turning instead to nonfiction because it was ‘real’ —whatever that means. I’d burned through the Brother Cadfael series by Ellis Peters, Lindsey Davis’s Marcus Didius Falco books, and Robert Harris’s Cicero Trilogy. Sense a theme there?

 

Then I discovered Mosley’s Easy Rawlins, and I was hooked. Like early Ellroy, I enjoyed the flip-side to Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles. I enjoyed Chandler, but I could see that he’s a dangerous influence for writers for his overcooked similes and metaphors. Hammett I enjoyed, but his corrupt landscape could be Anywhere, USA. Not the case with Mosley.

 

Dennis Lehane’s MYSTIC RIVER (2001)

 

I live in Boston, so the appeal is obvious. I don’t find many male writers who write women well, but Lehane does. MR is Shakespearean in scale and a chaotic and tragic tour de force. 

 

What books do you like to revisit and rewind?