Truth, Justice and the Crime Writing Way!

What prompted you to become a writer of crime fiction?

by Paul D. Marks

Uh, time to delve into that whole Pandora’s Box of psychopathology that makes me, uh, me. And that made me want to become a writer of crime fiction. But we won’t delve too deep. You never know what you might find down in the depths.

So, what prompted me to write crime fiction: I write it so I can kill people...on the page that I can't kill in real life...........

Related to that is the desire to see justice served as it so often isn’t in real life. That said, in much of what I write there are no neat bow-tied endings. And even when parts of the stories are tied up other parts are left open-ended. Kind of like life. So, justice is often served on some level, but maybe not neatly and maybe not legal justice, but some kind of street justice. Unless it’s a totally noir tale where there truly might not be justice, at least not in terms of how we normally think of it.

Writing crime fiction also gives me a way to comment on things that I want to comment on. Also to explore different points of view about those things, via various characters, including those that might not necessarily jibe with my own thoughts. Kind of like when you did debates in school and you had to take the other side of the issue, whether you agreed with it or not.

And, as RM said earlier in the week, “With crime fiction I get to write about people in trouble, not just criminals and victims, but the people who happen to be police officers as well.” It's so true, and crime fiction is about so much more than whodunit. It's about all the people affected by the crime. As such, it gives us a vehicle to explore the human condition (now that sounds pretty hifalutin) but in a structured story with a plot that keeps us interested (hopefully) and moving forward.

But ultimately I want to entertain. I’ve talked about this before, and I don’t want to beat on a dead Sturges, but the Preston Sturges movie Sullivan’s Travels makes the point very well about entertaining. It’s the story of a film director who makes movies like Ants in Your Plants of 1939. But he thinks it’s light and silly junk. He wants to make the ponderous message movie Oh Brother Where Art Thou. But through his adventures he learns that what people really want is to laugh – and to be entertained.

White Heat on Amazon

Now, there’s not generally a lot of yucks in crime fiction, though there are some exceptions. But the best crime fiction is entertaining first. Sam Goldwyn famously might have said, if I want to send a message I’ll call Western Union. Which is not to say that crime writing can’t have a message, just to say that it shouldn’t hit you over the head. The best writing makes you think, but it doesn’t tell you what to think. A crime writer can illuminate aspects of society, good and bad, without being preachy or moralistic. My novel White Heat deals with race and racism in the form of a fast-paced, intense mystery thriller. And while I hope I make some points about those subjects, my first goal is to entertain. The sequel to White Heat, which may actually see the light of day one of these days, does the same thing about another pressing issue of life today.

And, of course, I enjoy reading crime fiction and watching crime-related movies. As I’ve stated here before, I’m a “movie guy,” and I came to a lot of crime fiction via the movies. Anyone who knows me knows I love film noir and in that genre there are few heroes, at least of the conventional variety. I’ve done a lot of different types of writing, mainstream, humorous/satire, screenplays of various genres. But crime writing/fiction and noir allow me to explore what good and evil are and where the boundaries between them are sometimes blurred.

So there you have it, now I can stuff the bats back into the belfry and close the lid to Pandora’s Box. Why do you write crime fiction?

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And now for some refreshingly new BSP:

My story Twelve Angry Days is coming out in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magaine, on sale at newsstands starting April 25th. Or click here to buy online.

And I’m thrilled to announce that my short story, “Ghosts of Bunker Hill,” was voted #1 in the 2016 Ellery Queen Readers Poll. If you’d like to read it (and maybe consider it for other awards) you can read it free on my website: http://pauldmarks.com/stories/

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If You Want to Send a Message – Call Western Union

Tell us which conferences are your favorites and why you like to attend them.

by Paul D. Marks

Well, since I’ve pretty much answered this week’s question before, let me put up a link to the previous post on that: http://7criminalminds.blogspot.com/2015/04/the-egg-and-i.html . Everything’s pretty much the same as I talk about there, except that I’ve been to an additional Bouchercon in Raleigh, which was great fun. And, we loved the local food.

So instead, I’d like to answer the question from two weeks ago instead. That question was:

Is there a message in your book that you want readers to grasp?

Well, there’s messages and there’s messages. Sam Goldwyn—the G in M-G-M/Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer— is famously rumored to have said “Pictures are entertainment, messages should be delivered by Western Union” or, depending on where you find it, “If you want to send a message, call Western Union.”

That said, of course there’s some themes and/or underlying messages that come across in my work.  And though my novels are noir-thriller-mysteries there’s usually something of an underlying theme. And some of those themes I’ve revisited in several projects.

One of those recurring themes is people out of time. And I don’t mean in a sci-fi way. But “dinosaurs,” people that time has passed by one way or another and who would be better living in an earlier era. While Jack, the sidekick in White Heat, is in some ways a modern man, he also has some very unPC attitudes that might have served him better in previous eras. I was a little concerned about him before the book came out, but people seem to really like him. He says things that other people think but are afraid to say. On the other hand, he always does the right thing, even when he’s saying the wrong thing. And, as I say, more people have told me they like him than I ever could have imagined, people from all walks of life and backgrounds. Another character who’s living in the wrong era is Tom Holland in the story Angels Flight. He’s something of an old-fashioned cop, not quite ready to partner up with a black, female woman from the mayor’s office and her unusual crime-solving techniques.

Another theme I seem to go back to a lot is that of broken dreams, people whose aspirations are greater than their achievements.  Along with this is the theme of Los Angeles as the last stop on the West Coast before everything tumbles into the Pacific—after all, Route 66 ends right about where the Santa Monica Pier is. And L.A. is both a theme and character in my writing in the sense that it is the last stop for many. In the short story Free Fall Rick comes to L.A., finding himself at the end of Route 66, hoping for a new start on life…and he gets it. In fact, he gets much more than he bargained for when he meets Gloria, who asks a favor of him that causes him to go into a tailspinning free fall.

In another story, Endless Vacation, a young woman comes to L.A. with stars in her eyes, expecting to find the streets of Hollywood paved with gold. Instead she finds that Hollywood is the Boulevard of Broken Dreams, paved with heroin instead of gold.

Howling at the Moon is a story about honoring the past and paying attention to tradition. It’s also about a returning war vet who reconnects with his American Indian roots in a dangerous way.

But with all that, my number one goal in all of these, and others, is to entertain. To bring the reader on a roller coaster ride that’s thrilling and fun. And I have to go back to Sam Goldwyn’s line about Western Union. At the very least, messages shouldn’t be heavy handed. And the prime purpose for your story should be to entertain. Which brings me to the great Preston Sturges movie Sullivan’s Travels, with Joel McCrea and Veronica Lake. McCrea plays a movie director who makes trifles like Ants in Your Plants of 1939, but he wants to make a serious, ponderous movie called Oh Brother Where Art Thou that the studio is against. He sets out to see what life is like for the down and out, getting much more than he bargained for. But ultimately what he finds is that those who are really down and out don’t want stories about that, they want to laugh—to be entertained. And that’s our number one job to entertain.

When I was judging for a short story award a while back I read every story word for word to the end because I wanted to be fair to the writers. But there was one exception. And why did I stop reading that one a few pages in: because it was nothing but a preachy didactic political diatribe. What happened to the story, what happened to the characters? This was just the author ranting on in the voice of the character or narrator. It brought the story to a dead halt and I halted with it.

So if we’re going to have a “message,” keep it low. Let the characters be who they are and not some cardboard fill in for your rants. And most of all be entertaining.

And that’s my 9 cents (increased for inflation) on the subject.

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