by Donna Leon
There is, as well, the question of how the narrator will address the reader. Some writers address the reader directly as “you,” while others, the major part, maintain a wider distance and never suggest the existence of a reader. Few epistolary crime novels are written; the e-mail crime novel is rich in possibility.
Once the business of narrative voice is decided, the writer then has to decide upon the central crime involved. In what is referred to as the Golden Age of the crime novel, the murders were usually committed for personal reasons, and the detective, either private or police, had the job of discovering who killed Lord Farnsworthy in the library with the Malayan kris. Though these books are still being written, no one much cares anymore who killed his Lordship, and so the scope of the crime novel has been expanded to encompass larger social ills or crimes. Popular topics at the moment are: child abuse, pollution, political corruption, drugs, the Mafia, or any and all of them in various cocktail mixes. Each of these, unlike his Lordship’s where the author had to worry about little more than putting the carotid artery in the correct place, demands that the writer do a fair bit of research in order to get the facts right. He should be careful that cocaine comes from the right country, that toxic waste be shipped by the proper route, or that the components of the latest designer drug be correct.
Once the writer has determined gender, point of view, and the crime to be solved, he must get the protagonist involved in whatever is going on. If the hero is a member of the police, then it’s easy: he investigates the case. If he’s a private detective, a bounty hunter, a lawyer, any of those people who cluster around the world of crime, the same happens: it’s the job. If, however, the protagonist is to be drawn in accidentally, then the writer has to invent a motive for the character’s interest in the crime and a means that will allow him to obtain the information that will lead to the solution of the mystery. And there should be a mystery.
Ruth Rendell’s early masterpiece A Judgement in Stone begins, “Eunice Parchman killed the Coverdale family because she could not read or write.” Apparently, then, there is no mystery because we know from the very beginning who done it and why they done it. But the book, as it unfolds, causes in the reader the same gap-mouthed horror as does Oedipus Rex, as he sees nemesis winging ever closer to its victims, sees them ask the questions and make the discoveries that will lead to their destruction, while the reader is forced to remain silent on the other side of the page, unable to save these good and generous people from the evil that has entered their lives. But she’s another genius, and we still are not, so the writer needs a mystery.
Many contemporary crime novels present a world filled with political and institutional corruption, and just as many seem obsessed with serial killers. This is in stark contrast to the books of the Golden Age, most of which dealt with crime as an aberration in a generally peaceful and orderly world. Many of the newer novels have a theme, by which term I mean some statement about the condition of the world. It can be the abuse of power by those in various positions of authority or the inevitable corruption that comes with the acquisition of power. Agatha Christie didn’t have themes; she had mysteries.
Before beginning, the writer should determine just how wide the scope of the novel is to be: theme or mystery. Will the resolution implicate one guilty party or will a larger social or political group be implicated in the crime?And will there be a resolution or will the guilty party or parties escape justice?
When I teach writing, I tell the students that most of what I have to say is offered in the way of suggestion, that I’ve written these books, read them for four decades, and have given a great deal of thought to what goes into them. But writing a book is not like making a chemical experiment. There are no rules, and so I warn them, as well, that when I slip into saying “you should” or “the writer should,” that is meant to translate to “most writers do” or “this has worked successfully in many novels.” But with young writers it is difficult to stop being prescriptive, difficult to quell the instinct to tell them what to do. So I tell them, though I’ve yet to write one for a novel, they should have an outline that will tell them what happens in each part of the book. Though I never know, when I begin, exactly what is going to happen in a book, I tell them they must, absolutely must, plan the whole thing through and have the ending settled before they write the beginning. It seems to help beginning writers to impose this discipline upon themselves. Today’s students have grown up in the tradition of plot scenarios, though most of the plots they’ve been exposed to come from film rather than books. The patterns are pretty much the same, and so they are generally quite skilled at thinking through an entire plot before they begin to write. I envy them that skill.
One thing I haven’t discussed, probably because it is such an intangible, is the absolute need to control the reader’s feelings toward you as a writer, and toward your characters. The reader has got to feel sympathy for someone in the book. It can be the victim so that the protagonist’s quest to find the person who has killed or harmed that person becomes urgent and meaningful. Or it can be the protagonist him- or herself so that the reader wants him to succeed in whatever it is he has set out to do. Beyond this, it is essential that the reader like the narrator, and this is done, I think, by the general weight of the book, those thousand intangibles that add up, as in real life, to whether people respond positively to one another or not. So the narrator must not condescend and must not patronize the reader; instead, he must manage to convince the reader of his worth and decency. If the narrator is going to be arrogant, the arrogance must be directed at people who are even more so. If the narrator is going to pass a moral judgment, either implicitly or explicitly, then it must be one in which the reader shares. I would suggest that the narrator avoid zeal of any sort—ecology, religion, jogging—simply because sentiments of this sort will surely alienate any reader who doesn’t share the enthusiasm. A good example of how vital this is can be found, again, in Highsmith. Ripley is a murderer; one might even go so far as to say he is a monster. Yet he is dangerously likable, which fact his victims discover to their cost. Were he not so likable, were the reader not led so successfully to share in his opinions and understand his choices, then the books would fail, dragged down by the moral squalor at the heart of the main character. As it is, his great charm, his humor and wit, so seduce readers that many of them are perfectly willing to overlook a little murder here, a bit of violence there.
Another modern trend in the writing of crime fiction is the novel that centers itself in a particular world: sports, cooking, art, the theater, ancient Rome, Victorian England—the list is seemingly endless. Earlier I remarked that the readers of crime fiction are often intelligent and well educated. Because of this, many of them feel a niggling sense of guilt when they read murder mysteries (no one seems to feel it about watching reality television) much in the manner of the Victorian women who hid their copies of Vanity Fair within the pages of The Pilgrim’s Progress. By setting their books in one of the above worlds and then providing the reader with a great deal of factual information about that world, the writer supplies them not only the fiction of the plot but also the face-saving fiction that they are reading something informative and thus worthwhile.
A writer who plans to do this, use some specialized milieu in which to place the novel, had best be a master of that world. My favorite example of what can happen is found in a recent novel set in the Rome of the emperor Vespasian, which had the heroine wearing a toga (the garment that symbolized male citizenship) and receiving letters written on paper, which didn’t come into use in Europe for at least another thousand years.
About the business of rewriting, editing, rethinking, well, I have very little to say, for it would seem that these decisions are entirely dependent upon the peculiarities and writing inclinations of the individual writer. Offhand advice would be to suggest that the writer talk about the book with someone she judges to be smarter than herself. I
find that talking the plot through, actually giving voice to motive, coincidence, consequence, forces me to see the holes and illogicalities implicit in the story as I’ve planned it, for I seldom realize the errors I’ve made until I hear myself saying them to someone else.
It’s a good idea to get someone else to read the manuscript, and here the decision results from what sort of book the writer intends to create. If it’s a plain old murder mystery, then it should be read by someone who has read a lot of them. If, however, the writer has a more serious goal, then the manuscript should be given to someone who doesn’t read murder mysteries but who does read what I shall go to my grave calling “real books.” The writer is, of course, free to accept or reject whatever comments the readers make on the manuscript. One thing that helps a writer accept negative criticism is to distance himself from the text entirely and think of it as a book written by someone else. That way, criticism, which often has the same burning force as lightning, strikes far from home and is less painful. It is always difficult for me to persuade students that my affection or regard for them is in no way compromised by what I might say about what they’ve written. One is a person whom I like to a certain degree and upon whom I have neither the right nor the desire to pass judgment of any sort. The text, however, is what I am trained to evaluate, and no feeling I might have for the writer affects my opinion of what I read, nor does it improve what is written. This is hard for them to believe but no less true for that.
Years ago, Elizabeth Bishop, the American poet, disguised behind the nom de guerre “Mr. Margolis,” taught creative writing for something called “the U.S.A. School of Writing.” She had this to say of her experiences.
Most of my pathetic applicants seemed never to have read anything in their lives, except perhaps a single, memorable story of the “True Confessions” type. The discrepancies between the odd, colorless, disjointed little pages they sent me and what they saw in print just didn’t occur to them. Or perhaps they thought that Mr. Margolis would wave his magic wand and the little heaps of melancholy word bones, like chicken bones or fish bones, would put on flesh and vitality and be transmuted into gripping, compelling, thrilling, full-length stories and novels.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t work like that.
On Dinner with
an American Physician
A few weeks ago I had dinner with an old friend, an American physician who is a specialist in rehabilitative medicine and now practicing in Miami. During the meal, we talked in the manner of old friends, about common friends, where they were and what they were doing, about our own work and our plans for the future. At one point, a woman with a limp walked past our table and my friend remarked, quite casually, “She should get that hip fixed,” and then returned his attention to his pasta.
Always one for the elegant phrase, I asked, “Huh?” and forced him to explain that he could tell, from the way she walked, shifting her weight in a particular fashion, that she had a serious problem with her left hip, one that could probably be fixed by surgery. That was enough for me and, as we walked back to his hotel after dinner, I asked him to comment on the people who passed us in the street. And so he did, pointing out bad backs, foot problems, and the results of neglected injuries.
One of the discarded scraps of quotation floating in the back reaches of my memory is the Frenchman who once expressed his surprise at discovering that he was speaking prose. I felt a similar surprise at discovering that these people walking by me in what I’d always taken to be a very ordinary way were in fact giving evidence of what in buildings would be called structural problems. My friend, possessed of the expert’s eye, saw through the superficial appearance of the gait to the medical cause; beyond that, he frequently saw the way to correct the problem, very often by surgery, though not always.
On my way home from the hotel, I began to reflect upon the expert’s eye. Those of us who have worked with language for decades have, in a way, acquired a similar skill at diagnosis, though I suspect many of us don’t even realize we possess it.
Just as everyone walks so, too, does everyone write, and in order to do that they’ve got to use language. In so doing, they let slip a great deal that they are unconscious of revealing and often give evidence of deep structural problems. Two examples spring to mind, both of them from papers submitted to me by students.
One man, writing about the birth of his son, had this to say: “After my wife had been in labor for seventeen hours, I got tired of listening to her complain.” Another, after a tedious, badly written description of his wife’s miscarriage, wrote, “In the end, it really wasn’t so bad because it was only a girl.”
Where to begin? Shall we save time and agree from the beginning that both are despicable remarks, the sort of slight tremor that, if the wives in question are to have any luck in life, will lead to the earthquake of divorce? That given, what seemed remarkable to me is the cavalier unconcern with which the writers wrote these things, their apparent belief that no one would or could find them in any way remarkable, beliefs that could result only from a total insensitivity to language and its function. To make no mention of their wives and human life in general.
In an age where meaning has been tossed out in favor of rhetoric, in a time when films are mere concatenations of loud noises and the shedding of human blood, it is to be expected that language should no longer be considered the chief means by which we reveal ourselves, our thoughts, and our feelings. When meaning disappears so, too, must the ability to perceive it.
And thus many people limp along through their verbal lives, entirely unconscious of what they reveal by what they write or say, leaving those with the skilled diagnostic ear to perceive injury or deep structural weakness where they hear or read it. Different from the physician, however, we can do no more than diagnose: we have no power to cure.
