Books That Kill, by Josh Stallings

 

Q: Have there been recent novels which had you laughing, crying, clinging to the edge of your seat?

A: That is a tall order, there are very few books I’ve read with that wide a swath of emotions. And seeing as Criminal Minds has the word Criminal in the title, it seems like the book's being crime fiction is implied. Also “recent” so the masters are out. Tall but not impossible.

First up is Charlie Huston’s CATCHPENNY. It is a quintessential LA novel. A young man follows his rock star dreams to LA. He has the looks and voice to make it, but the town being what it is chews him up, takes his love and leaves him broken and that is just the back story. When we meet Sidney Catchpenny he is a jaded sneak thief working for very dangerous people. It’s a crime novel. 

There is a missing 16 year-old girl who is needed to save human kind. It’s a thriller. 

And in his world magic is real. Sid can travel through mirrors, but pays highly every time he uses magic. It’s a fantasy novel or maybe urban-fantasy. 

It’s actually all of those things and more, and this points to the problem with rigid definitions in genre fiction. At its core it is about over coming the bleak world view that traumatic loss creates inside us.

“The whole internet is like a giant mirror. A swampy reflecting pool for the world. Viscous and unclean, mottled, distorting.” — Charlie Huston, CATCHPENNY.

It is about the power of hope to bring us together. For readers of Huston this may sound out of character, but trust me it’s not. It is a tough world that he never shies away from. His earlier works showed brilliantly how and why people could be broken, in CATCHPENNY he suggests a way we can heal. 

“I let myself imagine that it mattered, my voice. Vanity again. But also this. Imagine this. I let myself dream that my voice had a place in this that nothing else could have filled.” — Charlie Huston, CATCHPENNY.

For the last year I have been dipping in and out of an ever darkening depression. Reading CATCHPENNY something shifted. I saw a way to climb out. It is a brilliantly written thrill ride. The final chapters kept me reading all night. Charlie Huston has never been better.

"I absolutely loved it. Catchpenny is a brilliant book, full of heart and the language is pitch-perfect. If Elmore Leonard had ever written a fantasy novel, this would be it.” —Stephen King

Tana French’s, THE HUNTER is the follow up to THE SEARCHER. Cal Hooper, is back as the blown-in retired Chicago Detective living in a small village in the West of Ireland. French captures the claustrophobic feeling and real danger of living in a community where everybody knows your business and rumors spread fast and have real consequences. Trey Reddy, the half-feral teenager Cal is training in life and carpentry has her life torn up when her criminal father comes home spreading dreams of a gold rush coming to town. It all goes to hell and town folk look for whom to give to the Garda.

In Cal and his woman friend Lena, Tana French gives us a portrait of flawed but truly moral people whose behavior we can all aspire to. THE HUNTER is scary and funny and poignant. Tana French is a writer who just keeps getting better.

Gary Phillips’, ASH DARK AS NIGHT follows Harry Ingram in Los Angeles 1965 as he documents and tries to make sense of the Watts uprising or riot depending on your neighborhood and political bent. On one level it is a pitch perfect detective novel. A photo journalist hired to find a man who disappeared in mayhem is beaten down by dirty cops and cruel gagsters. Zooming back you see it is also a social novel, looking at what was happing in 1965 and how it affected communities of color. Watts is not seen as a monolith. Phillips shows a wide palette of people and opinions. True believing Communists, a bank robbing activist, conservative business owners, and free thinking artists. Phillips’ love for them all creates a world I want to hang out in. It is also a scary world where LAPD can grab and beat you with no fear of repercussions. It is factually right on, and that makes it even more frightening.

“For thirty years Phillips has been a must-read writer, and One-Shot Harry is probably his best ever—tense and suspenseful, of course, but also deep, resonant and intelligent. It's a story that needed to be told, and therefore a book that needs to be read.” —Lee Child

ASH AS DARK AS NIGHT is the second in the A Harry Ingram Mystery series and should be mandatory reading for lovers of crime fiction and everyone else. Gary Phillips paints a more truthful picture of LA in the 60’s than any history book I’ve read. 

Phillips does all this with his trademark humor, heart, and unrelenting action. You will find yourself laughing, crying, and clinging to the edge of your seat, I know I did.

“In the tradition of Dashiell Hammett . . . Makes us feel that the war he’s waging is for our own salvation.” —Walter Mosley

Here are a few others that I’ve read in the last year and continue to reverberate in my head.

THE HEAVEN & EARTH GROCERY STORE, by James McBride.

PEDRO PARĀMO, by Juan Rulfo.

DEATH IN THE ANDES, by Mario Vargas Llosa.

What books tick all your boxes? How do you feel about genre and sub-genre definitions, helpful, hurtful, or ya don’t even think about them?

                                                 *******

What I’m reading now, THE FITH SEASON, by N.K. Jemisin. 

On deck to read next, THE FLAMETHROWERS, by Rachel Kushner.

Everybody’s Talking at Me, The Art of Dialogue, by Josh Stallings

Q:  Share your tips for writing believable dialogue. What separates good dialogue from poor, and how do you strike a balance between too much and too little in a scene/book?

A: David Mamet said he always carries a pad and pen with him so when he overheard good dialogue he wrote it down. When I steal words from a chainsaw sculptor, it isn’t theft, it’s an homage. I try and always have a Moleskine notebook and a Fisher Bullet Space Pen with me to capture story ideas and snippets of dialogue that I either hear in my head or in the world around me.

In the early stages of writing a new character they tend to sound wooden. It takes me getting to know them well enough to dial in how they think and feel. Cisco in TRICKY was easy to start with because he was based on my son Dylan. I’ve listened to Dylan his whole life, his rhythm, word choice, and humor all came through. As I got deeper into the writing, Cisco’s life growing up in East LA added its own flavor to the dialogue.

Grandpa Hem in the same novel grew up in Deaf Smith Texas. My friend Amy loves a good turn of phrase. She was raised in Texas and she had a relative who used to say, “It’s hotter than two rats fucking in a wool sock.” That became a touchstone to Hem’s dialogue. I made the mistake of googling Texas Slang. Every phrase I found came out corny. I’ve spent time in Texas so it is best to draw on what I’ve heard than to trust Google. A little regionalism goes a long way. Planting a line like rats fucking early on tunes the reader’s ear so that they will hear all that character's dialogue with the tone or accent. Little things help remind them. “Git.” instead of “Time for you to leave.” Lets you know it’s Hem talking.

I write until I know a character and then go back and revise early dialogue. I also have a file about every character and as I discover more about them I add to their bio description. I note if they are frivolous with their words or miserly. Do they want to sound better educated than they are because they feel insecure? Do they front with street slang to sound tough and cover fear? By building this file I can refer to it a hundred pages later when they reappear and I’ve forgotten what color their eyes were or that they spoke in broken Spanglish in chapter two.

I have been told by enough women to believe them that I write wonderful female characters. I’ve been asked how I do it. Simple. I have never written a woman character. I have written many characters that are women. Gender identity, affectional orientation, cultural, or racial backgrounds are not characters. They are monolithic generalizations and of very little value when writing a character’s dialogue. 

A good place to study dialogue is by reading plays. David Mamet’s American Buffalo is a master class in rhythm. Sam Shepard’s True West delivers complete fully rounded flawed characters using only dialogue. I love films, but a screenplay relies on knowing it is a visual medium. So much can be said with a close up on an actor, that the dialogue doesn’t need to carry the work. When reading a play I was taught to only read the dialogue. Stage directions of any kind are almost always written by the stage manager after the play has been mounted and might not reflect what the writer was thinking at all.

Find writers whose dialogue speaks to you. Reread their books and ask yourself “Why do I like this? How does it work?” Take it apart and look at the lines. Steal freely.     

 Here are a couple of books with dialogue I dig… 

Set in LA 1963 Gary Phillips’ One-Shot Harry subtly uses dialogue to remind the reader of the era and place without ever clubbing you over the head with it. He writes about Black characters that come from every educational level and social strata.

Jordan Harper’s Everybody Knows covers characters from multiple levels of LA’s social classes. Actors, film makers, petty thieves, executives, cops, each with their own coded language. He captures but never mocks his characters. 

In Lou Berney’s Dark Ride he writes with love and respect about a stoner slacker thrown into a situation that calls forth his need to be a hero or as close to an approximation of a hero as he can pull off. It vibes a Hitchcockian everyman for our times. Written in first person even the descriptions read like dialogue. 

“I’m the kid in the back row, moving his lips and just pretending to sing. I’m the dude with a fake badge and a toy gun. The dumbest thing you can do, if you’re someone like me, is believe you can be more than you are.” — Dark Ride: A Thriller by Lou Berney  

I haven’t answered the last two parts of this question. How do I know good dialogue? It’s like the court’s take on pornography vs art, I know good dialogue when I read it. It’s one of those intuitive things that ultimately inform what becomes our individual voices. 

How much is too much or too little dialogue? Same answer as above. Tana French’s Murder Squad books all come down to these incredibly long dialogue driven interrogations. They read almost like transcriptions of an interview. It gives a level of authenticity that’s hard to achieve. I haven’t ever used that much dialogue, but I’m damn glad she does. Her books sing a brutal tune that I love to read. As a writer or a reader there are NO RULES… Okay, there is one rule, everything is possible if you can pull it off. I’m not Tana French, I love what she does but I’ll leave real time interrogations to her.

Last thought - I have been lucky enough to work with editors I trust to guide me when I stray too far off the map. And editors who push me when I stay too safely inside the known lines.

Blind Date With a Book

Books make wonderful gifts. What are your recommendations this year?

by Amy Marks and Paul D. Marks

I thought I’d do something a little different this time. Instead of me recommending books I’m turning it over to my wife, Amy, and some books she’s read and enjoyed. And I’ll have some non-fiction recommendations at the end. So take it away, Amy:


Picking books as gifts is kind of like setting up a friend for a blind date. You never know if they’re going to hit if off or have a miserable time. But, as they say, it’s the thought that counts. So, with that disclaimer, here are my recommendations for mystery/suspense books to gift. I like them and there’s gotta be someone else out there who will like them too.

In The Woods by Tana French

A twelve year old girl is found murdered in the woods near a suburb of Dublin, Ireland. The detectives assigned to the case, Rob Ryan and Cassie Maddox, are cop-buddies who have each other’s backs and share a secret from the past. Twenty years earlier, three children went missing in the very same woods. One was found with his shirt torn and his shoes filled with blood, but with no memory of what happened. The two missing children are never found. What Rob and Cassie know is that Rob was that third child, the one who was found. His family had moved away after the incident in order to escape the accusations from the locals. And Adam (Rob) was sent to a boarding school in England where he started using his middle name, Rob. He returned to Dublin as an adult to join the murder squad. Cassie knows Rob’s secret and agrees to keep silent when he convinces her that they are the only detectives who can really investigate this murder. But the demons of the past cling and threaten to tear Rob and Cassie apart. Tana French writes with an intimacy that makes you feel that you know these characters personally. You can imagine throwing back a few pints with them at the pub. And you can feel the darkness surround you as you enter the woods with them.


The Snowman by Jo Nesbo

Oslo police officer Harry Hole investigates the disappearance of a woman. Her young son wakes up to find his mother gone and a mysterious snowman constructed outside their home facing the house, as if looking inside, and wearing the scarf he gave her as a present. Harry discovers a pattern of similar disappearances and murders and the hunt for a serial killer begins. Harry Hole is like the Dirty Harry of Norway. He breaks the rules and stops at nothing to find the killer. The murders are grisly and shocking, so this not for the faint of heart. But what makes this a great thriller are the intriguing plot twists and Harry’s tortured, alcoholic personality.


By Gaslight by Steven Price

William Pinkerton, son of the famous Allan Pinkerton, who created the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, and famous in his own right, travels to Victorian London in search of the con man, Edward Shade, who eluded and haunted his father for decades. At the same time we follow the story of Adam Foole, who Pinkerton suspects knows the whereabouts of Edward Shade. If you know someone who loves Victorian London, the fog, the mysterious atmosphere and the whole steampunk thing, they will enjoy this book.


This Body of Death by Elizabeth George

This is book 16 in the Inspector Thomas Lynley series, but it was the first Elizabeth George book I read and I loved it. You can easily pick up any book in the series and don’t have to start at the beginning (although I am going back now and reading her books from the beginning after reading a few out of order). A woman who has recently relocated from Hampshire to London is found murdered in a London cemetery. The story is interwoven with the description of a shocking child murder that happened several years in the past. Don’t let the description of Thomas Lynley as an aristocratic Scotland Yard detective fool you. This is not one of your cozy British crime mysteries where they solve murders in between playing croquette and sipping tea. They are very gritty and meticulously plotted. And the characters are complex and realistic.


The Death of Mrs. Westaway by Ruth Ware

Harriet “Hal” Westaway receives a letter from a lawyer saying her grandmother has died and the family is gathering for her funeral and the reading of her will at her estate. There’s just one problem, Hal’s grandmother died years ago and this is just a case of mistaken identity. But Hal, whose mother died a year ago, is in trouble with a loan shark and is desperate for money. She decides to take a chance on trying to impersonate Mrs. Westaway’s granddaughter in hopes of maybe getting a little bit of cash to get her out of her situation. What happens after that is pure gothic mystery complete with ill-tempered, mysterious housekeeper. This book is one of those guilty pleasures. If you analyze the plot too much, you’ll say “this couldn’t happen, it’s not realistic,” but you just have to go with the flow on this one and enjoy it.


Still Life by Louise Penny

Is it a cozy or isn’t it? It has the small cozy village of Three Pines, the bistro where the characters are always eating freshly baked croissants, the bookstore where everyone knows everyone, and snow is always falling in beautiful sparkly drifts. But the plots and characters are so much deeper and more interesting than most cozies I’ve read. I’m not putting down cozies, I love a good cozy as much as anyone else, but face it, some of them are the equivalent of Hallmark Christmas movies. Louise Penny’s Inspector Gamache books are both warm and cozy, but also deep, mysterious and haunting. In this one the body of an elderly woman is found in the woods, the apparent victim of a hunting accident, but Gamache suspects foul play. You could probably pick any book in the series, but I like starting with the first one in this case.


Christine Falls by Benjamin Black

This is the first book in the Quirke series. Set in Dublin (yes, I have a thing for novels set in Dublin) in the 1950s, it deals with Quirke, an alcoholic pathologist, who begins to suspect his brother-in-law when he finds him tampering with the death records of the corpse of a young woman brought into the morgue. He begins to investigate the woman’s death and it leads to uncovering a conspiracy that takes him to Boston and back to Dublin again. Benjamin Black is the pseudonym for Man Booker prize winner, John Banville. Banville’s writing is wonderful. His descriptions, insights and voice are almost like reading poetry. I started by reading the Silver Swan, which is the second book in the series, and do think it’s best with this series to read from the beginning as many things that happen in this book influence what happens in the next.

Oh, and two other books I’d recommend are White Heat and Broken Windows by Paul D. Marks. These crime thrillers follow PI Duke Rogers and his un-PC sidekick Jack Riggs through 1990’s Los Angeles and deal with real-life issues that continue to be in the news today: racism and immigration. I know you won’t believe me if I say I’m totally unbiased, so I just won’t say that. But give them a read and see what you think.

So maybe you’ll hate the blind date I picked out for you and you’ll take me off your gift list next year. Or, maybe it will be a match and you’ll be reading happily ever after with your new favorite writer. Happy Holidays and happy reading!

***

Thank you, Amy!

And just for good measure, I’m (Paul) tossing three non-fiction books into the mix:

The Annotated Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler, Owen Hill, Pamela Jackson, Anthony Dean Rizzuto, Foreward by Jonathan Lethem

I think on this the list of authors is longer than my comment. One of the classics of American crime literature and really all literature. And this book gives the context of the times and the place to The Big Sleep. It helps lead to a greater understanding and thus enjoyment of a great novel.


Pulp According to David Goodis by Jay A. Gertzman, Forward by Richard Godwin

As I’ve mentioned many times and in many places, David Goodis is one of my favorite crime writers. Geoffrey O'Brien called him the “poet of the losers”. And though he had some success as both a novelist/short story writer and a screenwriter, he definitely had some personality quirks. But until recently it’s been hard to come by much good biographical writing on him. There was Goodis: A Life in Black and White Paperback by Philippe Garnier, with an introduction by Eddie Muller. For years that book only appeared in French so it was wonderful when the English translation finally came out. And there was Difficult Lives: Jim Thompson, David Goodis, Chester Himes by James Sallis. And good as it is it’s relatively short and covers three writers. So now, with all three of these books, David Goodis fans can finally dive deep into Goodis, his life and his writing.


High Noon: The Hollywood Blacklist and the Making of an American Classic Hardcover by Glenn Frankel

A look at the Hollywood Blacklist via the making of High Noon, which starred Gary Cooper, definitely not a left-winger. But the movie was made by many people on the left. A fascinating look at the blacklist and the Red Scare era through the prism of the making of one classic movie.

Thanks for stopping by. And Happy Holidays! See you next year.

~.~.~

And now for the usual BSP:

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Deeper and Deeper

Paul here:

This week I’m thrilled to have Dennis Palumbo guest blog here. Dennis is a screenwriter (My Favorite Year, Welcome Back Kotter, and more), psychotherapist and the author of the Daniel Rinaldi series. His mystery fiction has appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, The Strand and elsewhere, and is collected in From Crime to Crime (Tallfellow Press).

Dr. Daniel Rinaldi is a psychologist and trauma expert, who consults with the Pittsburgh Police Department and specializes in treating the victims of violent crime. And that’s something he knows about personally: Rinaldi’s wife was murdered in a mugging and he was shot. He struggles with survivor’s guilt. Now he’s on a mission to help others deal with their traumas, while at the same time getting involved in cases and helping to solve the crimes.

Head Wounds is the fifth Rinaldi story, preceded by Mirror Image, Fever Dream, Night Terrors, Phantom Limb. For more info, visit www.dennispalumbo.com .

Take it away, Dennis.

***

This week’s question: What difference do you notice between the prose in crime novels that were written twenty years ago and current ones? Do you think the writing has gotten better? Are the subjects different?

by Dennis Palumbo

The question is a tricky one, because no one regards the prose of such authors as Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Patricia Highsmith, Ruth Rendell or Ross Macdonald more highly than I do. These brilliant stylists could craft starkly beautiful sentences while still retaining both the suspense and the mystery that their novels promise.

That said, there’s little question in my mind that, in general, today’s crime fiction has broadened in its subject matter and deepened in its exploration of those areas. As good as the above-mentioned authors were, both their own prejudices and the social or moral constraints of their respective eras prevented them from addressing (except in the most covert way) issues of sexual orientation, racism and child abuse.

Twenty years ago, most readers expected little more than action, suspense and a cluster of red herrings in their mystery stories. It was also fairly customary to treat characters who strayed outside conventional norms (in terms of gender, race, moral dictates, substance use, etc.) in somewhat stereotypic fashion. They were still presented, even if occasionally with sympathy, as the “other.”

Moreover, the point of most crime fiction of decades past, even at the hands of such famous masters of the form, was to solve the mystery and reveal the killer. The whodunit still reigned supreme.

But times change, and so has crime fiction. From Richard Price to Gillian Flynn to Megan Abbott, the themes---and even the very goals---of these novels have expanded. Today’s crime fiction addresses and explores a much wider and more inclusive variety of characters and situations, from sexual identity to immigration to child abuse. These issues are now frequently tackled head on, and with a more empathetic and knowledgeable approach. Such “outlier” issues---and characters---are no longer the exception to the norm; they are the norm.

As a therapist, I can’t help but think that some of these narrative shifts in tone, theme and characterization are due to a more mature understanding on the readers’ part of the complexity of the human condition. Moreover, as psychological terms and disorders are more commonly (though often erroneously) talked about, readers expect today’s authors to have a more frank, thoughtful view of life today.

(I could make the argument, for example, that Gone Girl is as much a sly, snarky commentary of the state of contemporary marriage as it is a crime novel. It was as if Phillip Roth or John Cheever had turned their talents to psychological suspense.)

In my own novels, featuring psychologist and trauma expert Daniel Rinaldi, the narrative itself is usually informed by the emotional issues (often birthed by the trauma of violence, abuse, etc.) of the characters. As a consultant to the Pittsburgh Police, and in his role treating victims of violent crime, my protagonist’s clinical acumen can help shed some light on what might be going on. (Except those times when he’s wrong.)

The point is, I believe my readers expect that the psychological underpinnings of character, motive and general plot conform to what most of us understand as how real humans behave in the real world. 

Maybe, twenty or thirty years ago, most readers didn’t expect a crime novel to take such a deep dive into character, nor expect the narrative context to reflect so accurately the current state of affairs, either personally or politically. But nowadays, crafting a mystery (even a cozy) without at least a glancing nod at the realities of contemporary life seems antiquated, almost deliberately opaque.

I’m reminded of a comment made about the work of P.G. Wodehouse: as wonderful as he was, he wrote as though neither Freud nor Marx had ever existed.

I think the same sentiment holds true for today’s authors. We live in a rapidly-changing, media-drenched world whose mores and behavioral expectations are in turmoil; a time of global pandemics, terrorism, economic inequality, gender fluidity, sexual predation, and other social and political concerns. For crime fiction to stay relevant, I believe it has to, at least tangentially, acknowledge these issues.

Which, I’m happy to report, it appears to be doing. The best of today’s mystery fiction authors, from Dennis Lehane to Tana French, Scott Turow to Denise Mina, George Pelicanos to Louise Penny, deliver prose that is both beautifully crafted and cannily relevant to the times.

Of course, there will always be readers who enjoy the simple pleasures of earlier mystery fiction, whether the comfortable world of Agatha Christie or that of tough-guy Mickey Spillane.

But, if today’s best-seller lists are anything to go by, crime fiction is continuing to evolve and change, as is the society it inevitably mirrors.

Besides, as the author John Fowles soberly reminds us, “All pasts are like poems; you can derive a thousand things, but you can’t live in them.”

***

Thanks, Dennis. And be sure to check out Dennis’s books and find out more about him, and them, at his website (above).

~.~.~

And now for the usual BSP:

Broken Windows releases on September 10th and is available for pre-order now at Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Down & Out Books.

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