Genre hopping by Eric Beetner

 If you write in an alternate non-mystery genre, which one - and why? If you don't, which genre would you most like to write in, and what attracts you to it?

I have written several Westerns, some with my name on them and others under pen names. I love a good western. Granted they get segregated as a separate genre, but really 99% of all westerns are just crime novels on horseback. 

I’ll admit to being under-read in Westerns, but I am very well versed in western films. The golden age of Westerns is the 1950s, with classics of the genre appearing in every decade. At one time they were the most popular genre of film in the U.S., and Western stars were the top box office earners for many years in a row. At the same time Western paperbacks were flying off the shelves.

In novels, Westerns are often tight potboilers with action, gunplay, men standing alone with only their moral code to keep them warm at night. Many are cop stories like any police procedural, just with a tin star sheriff instead of a detective. 

I’ve written period pieces, but also contemporary western. The western that we most recognize is a period-set vision of the wild west, those post-Civil War years of westward expansion and lawlessness on the plains and in the rockies.

But all that is window dressing. Westerns can be noir stories, P.I. stories, romances, epic family sagas. Anything and everything goes, so long as you dress it up with ten gallons hats, snakeskin boots, faithful horses and plenty of trail dust.

I’ve written short form horror, to only mild success. I read a lot of horror in my teens and have watched more than my share of horror films. For whatever reason I can’t seem to crack that market, though. Most of my horror short stories have been rejected. I do think it becomes hard when I over-saturated myself in horror at a young age and now little to nothing scares me. I’ll attribute it to that and not the fact that I’m a terrible writer.

I don’t think I ever have a sci-fi novel in me. I just don’t think that way. Same with romance. But I hope to keep doing westerns now and then. And I’ve been reading more. Many contemporary westerns like John Larison’s Whiskey When We’re Dry or Patrick DeWitt’s The Sisters Brothers have been some of my favorite books in recent years. And I’ve long been a huge fan of Steve Hockensmith’s Holmes On The Range series which are overtly mystery novels set in a classic western milieu. You could also do a lot worse than the collected Western stories of Elmore Leonard, a massive volume that entertains over and over. 

As for me, I wrote three books in the Lawyer series for Beat to a Pulp. I’ve written under a pen name in the Gunslinger series, the Black Rose series and most recently, the Concho series of contemporary westerns. It’s a welcome break from a straight crime novel for me, and one I know I’ll return to.

            

     

Same Theme Different Lyrics

 

If you write in an alternate non-mystery genre, which one—and why? If you don’t, which genre would you most like to write in, and what attracts you to it?

 

For readers unfamiliar with my writing, I am known for crime fiction, although I’ve written flash, historical, horror and literary fiction. What readers don’t know is I started out as a poet. My first publication was a poem entitled “Pagan’s Creed” in USC’s Vanguard Magazine in 1989.

 

Since these genres mean different things to readers, I’ll offer brief definitions and touchstones before I discuss my writing.

 

Flash fiction is a story under 200 words.

 

Historical is pre-1960, which also defines eligibility for the Agatha Award.

 

Horror, for me, leans into unheimlich, which means uncanny or unsettling in German. It’s a sensation associated with Kafka, and I enjoy it Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio, Horacio Quiroga’s Jungle Tales, and anything by Yōko Ogawa.

 

Literary fiction is a slice of life, where conflicts are often quiet seismic tremblors of revelation. Examples are legion, but I point to anything by Richard Russo, Anne Tyler, and a personal favorite, Dino Buzzati’s The Tartar Steppe.

 

Poetry is, to me, lyrical, rhythmic, and compressed. Too many poets to list, but I return to Neruda, Mallarmé, and Rimbaud.

 

My Why

 

Poetry taught me distillation, to compress imagery and language, and render what is absolutely essential. I apply this technique to both dialogue and exposition. Essence is important, especially in writing mysteries because if you throw too much information at readers, they don’t know what it is important for clues. I equate information overload to a form of gaslighting or a writer too in love with their own voice.

 

When you read me, you will see I use many poetic techniques, such as alliteration, assonance and consonance. I edit for the Chandler Curse aka the promiscuous overuse of similes and metaphors, but both are present in my writing.

 

Believe it or not, poetry helps with dialogue, in that characters can establish a rhythmic exchange, a call and response. As for the lyrical, I’ve been told I have a gift for a turn of phrase, but I don’t consciously do it. The irony in all this talk about poetry is that I am profoundly hard of hearing. I have to do a lot of work to hear and understand people. Then again, it should be no surprise that most writers are keen observers and amateur psychologists.

 

My Gallery

 

Flash fiction. Winner of the inaugural ZOUCH Lit Bit Contest 2011, my “Dead of Night” is one sentence of 111 words:

 

Because it’s cold, travel’s by train, traveling over haggard steel, over wooden ties across the unarmed country, traveling through starless nights and forward days, moving from arrival to confirmation, moving from the uncertainty of doubt to the finality of a telegram, arriving calmly without disturbance, sliding into place at the platform silently under steam, sliding next to the obscene graffiti on the yellow-brick walls at the station when nobody can see or know, where the first-class ticket is taken, the hat tipped and the door blinks brightly open so I can come out as I had come in when I was cold, for I am one of the war dead home.

 

 

Poetry. I wrote this prose poem EXILE, after my father’s third heart attack.

 

Historical. I try to evoke an era with small details and nuanced allusions.

Like every other place in the country, winter visited Los Angeles in December. If the temperature dipped to sixty degrees, people shivered in the sunlight and if it dropped to fifty or lower and drizzled, people forgot how to drive in the rain. On this dark winter morning, the streets were wet, and everybody was cold and moody about something, whether it was not enough green in the bank, enough love at home, or enough of everything else because the country was at war.

The piece of paper between the blade and glass was red, a homicide, and a victim nobody cared about. It was a signal to make the phone call. I went inside the joint, my back to 9th and Figueroa.

I closed the accordion door, put my copy of the Times down on the small shelf below the phone. I read the motto in the upper left corner, while I fished for coins. ALL THE NEWS ALL THE TIME described the city and its people. Nobody had time for a comma. I gave the operator the exchange and she named the price.

Agatha-nominated and Macavity Award winning short story, “Elysian Fields” in California Schemin’: The Bouchercon 2020 Anthology.

Horror. I’ve written several horror short stories. A fun one was “Zombees” in which I wrote about a species of parasitical fly named Apocephalus borealis that turns bees into ‘zombees.’

 

Literary. I strive for economy with elegance, which is to say the most with the least words. To paraphrase Jean Luc Godard, Imagery or Tone in my writing is a truth told in 24 frames-per-second.

 

Sheldon decided enough was enough and that it was time to call on the address. He put the suitcase in the car.

As he drove up Roosevelt Highway, a large cloud shaped like a horse raced his Chrysler. A breeze whooshed in as a continuous stream down the left side of the car and on the right, sage and brush undulated in a blur of browns and some green. Seagulls wheeled and cried in the air.

Novel, The Good Man. Company Files 1.

 

Words are my trade, and I try not to think about genre too much. Sure, there are rules within any genre, but they are there to set the reader’s expectations. Whatever the genre, these rules are a code of conduct, but I’d like to think every writer strives to tell the best story possible, and do it with integrity and imagination.

 

Whatever I write are often variations on a recurring theme and the words are different lyrics.

Writing What I Love

 CM for July 1

 

Q: If you write in an alternate non-mystery genre, which one - and why? If you don't, which genre would you most like to write in, and what attracts you to it?

 

-from Susan

 

In my previous careers, I wrote a lot, sometimes editorial work and sometimes public relations/public affairs. Everything from covering local news and bland TV celebrity profiles to ghost-writing op-ed pieces and making the case for large capital campaigns. Delicate CEO memos, annual reports, donor and programs profiles. A few national magazine stories. Writing, writing, writing, lots of strategy and purpose to it all. Would I like to do any of that again? No, I enjoyed much of it at the time, but once I gave myself permission to turn to crime fiction as the last career, I was happy to turn my back on all of that. 

 

I’m satisfied to stick with crime fiction now, although I have thought about a novel based in some part on the story of my mother’s life during and after the war, first plunged into the heady world of radio production, then dismissed when the men came home to reclaim their old jobs. In her case, it was a seriously unhappy after-life. Beautiful, glamorous, smart, and intellectual, she wasn’t equipped to be a normal suburban housewife and mother, and her life went badly in the years that followed. I should know. I was there for the whole unhappy arc. But will I? As a novel? As a memoir? Women’s fiction? I’m not sure. Perhaps I don’t want to look hard at something so close to my life.

 

Crime fiction is fun. I like the scaffolding we all employ in one shape or another. I like the creative juices, the stories, the playing with what ifs and whys. I like trying different voices and settings and weaving in things that intrigue me – the dark side of the art world, the comical aspects of an insular village, French food and culture, the sometimes peculiar behaviors of the rich. I’m genuinely curious about people and wish I could get inside their heads at times, not to envy them, but just to poke around and find out what makes them tick.

 

So, no, no other genres beckon me convincingly right now. I think I’m happy in my little corner of the writing universe.

My first mystery, originally published in 2010, the one that set me on this path (available on Amazon in this bright new edition).