The Crime of Our Lives

by Lawrence Block

  In crime fiction, though, we tend to like one another, and to say nice things about one another. Most of us realize, I think, that we’re not really in competition with each other, that we all gain whenever one of our number succeeds. While we might grin at La Rochefoucauld’s observation that it is not enough to succeed, it is also necessary that one’s friends fail, I don’t know many of us who really feel that way.

  When one of us does succeed in a colossal way, we do look for reasons. This writer, we’ll tell ourselves, has managed to plug into the zeitgeist in a big way. (If nothing else, that gives us the opportunity to use the word “zeitgeist”.) Another was in the right place at the right time. This one got a really strong push from a publisher who had just lost a major writer and needed to create a new one. That one has an uncanny commercial sense. And Whatsisname, who, God love him, sells like crazy for no discernible reason, well, do you suppose he may, in a past life, have removed a thorn from the paw of the Head Librarian at the great library of Alexandria—and now he’s getting his reward?

  Mary’s success is dazzling, and of course one casts about for an explanation. Any number suggest themselves—her ability to tell a story, to create sympathetic characters, and, certainly, to come up consistently with the kind of dramatic situations that capture the imagination of the reading public. All of these are true, certainly, and all have a good deal to do with the depth and breadth of her appeal, but there’s one more that may have more than a little to do with it.

  People love her.

  It’s impossible not to. One cannot but enjoy her presence and respond to her warmth and inherent goodness. That’s true in a private gathering, and every bit as true when she’s in front of an audience, as she so often is.

  I don’t know how many times I’ve heard Mary speak—about her life, about her early years as a writer. It’s essentially the same speech every time. (Everybody learns, sooner or later, that it’s not only okay to say the same thing over and over, but that it’s best that way. Writers tend to think we have to be original each time, but eventually we get over it.)

  I’ve heard Mary’s basic talk at least a dozen times, and probably twice that. And here’s the thing—I always hang on every word. I’m interested in spite of myself. I pay close attention, and so does everybody else in the room.

  There’s something about Mary, all right, and I don’t think I’m any closer to defining it than I was when I started out. And, really, does it matter? The gal’s a sweetheart, and her success is towering, and she deserves—and cherishes—every single one of her millions of readers.

  Joseph Conrad

  * * *

  A few years ago an editor at Dutton asked me if I could write an introduction to The Secret Agent, Joseph Conrad’s novel on which the Alfred Hitchcock film Sabotage was based. Thinking back, it strikes me that I was an unlikely choice, being not that much of a film buff and no fan at all of Conrad’s. Now she couldn’t have known that, but I certainly did, and I suppose my acceptance of the assignment represents, not for the first time, the joint triumph of ego and avarice over clear thinking.

  I wrote my introduction and turned it in, and avarice was satisfied though ego was not; I got paid, but the publisher dropped the project, for reasons I no longer recall. Thus the following was never printed anywhere—and while that’s no great loss to the world of letters, it’s nevertheless my pleasure to provide it here:

  “A work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line . . . . But the artist appeals to that part of our being which is not dependent on wisdom; to that in us which is a gift and not an acquisition—and, therefore, more permanently enduring. He speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives: to our sense of pity, and beauty, and pain.”

  —Joseph Conrad

  Preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus

  In the spring of 1998 my wife and I had the good fortune to sail on the Star Flyer from the Thai resort island of Phuket across the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean, then transiting the Red Sea and the Suez Canal and disembarking finally in Greece at Piraeus, the port for Athens. The ship was a three-masted barkentine, and while she ran her engines most of the time in the interest of maintaining her schedule, she was a thing of beauty with her sails catching the wind. She had spent the winter in the seas around Singapore, and would summer in the Mediterranean, and we were on what they call a five-week repositioning cruise, with the primary object of getting her from Point A to Point B. That made it a bargain, and the ship itself and its itinerary made it a joy. We loved every minute of it.

  The Star Flyer was registered in and flew the flag of Luxembourg—which is, you will note, a landlocked nation. The crew was the United Nations in microcosm, the dining room staff and cabin attendants largely Filipino, the ship’s officers mostly German. The captain, whose name I seem to have forgotten, was German, but fluent as well in several languages, English among them. Like most sea captains I’ve known, he was a great reader, and his clear favorite among authors—now do you see where this is going?—was Joseph Conrad.

  It was a passion he was more than willing to share. The ship’s daily newspaper (an 11 x 17 sheet of paper, folded once, with a few columns of wire-service news and some data specific to the ship, like the times of sunrise and sunset, the scheduled activities, and, perhaps most important, the Cocktail of the Day) often included a quote from Conrad just below the masthead, and the captain’s evening announcement, piped over the public address system, was apt to contain a pearl of wisdom from the great man.

  It’s not much of a stretch for a sea captain to show a fondness for this particular author, who after all made his name as a writer of sea stories, and who knew whereof he wrote, having put in many long years at sea before undertaking a second career as a novelist. Consider, too, how our captain, who grew up speaking German, and Conrad, who grew up speaking Polish, met on the common ground of the English language; Conrad of course had chosen to write in it, and the captain chose to read the man’s books (and reread them, and read them again) not in German translation but in the original English.

  These considerations may have played a role early on. But our skipper’s enduring passion for the books ultimately had little to do with the sea, and less to do with their author’s ethnic and linguistic background. It was the stories Conrad told and the way he told them, and not least of all the truths to be found therein, that made that German captain the most ardent Joseph Conrad fan I’ve yet encountered. Conrad spoke, it would seem, to his capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding his life, to his sense of pity and beauty and pain.

  “What all men are after is some form, or perhaps only some formula, of peace.”

  —Joseph Conrad

  Under Western Eyes

  He was born December 3, 1857, in the Polish town of Berdyczów, and was christened Jósef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski. His father, Apollo Korzeniowski, was a writer and translator, and when the boy was three his father was arrested for anti-Czarist political activity and exiled with his wife and son to a remote region of Russia. The mother died there; the father developed tuberculosis, was allowed to return to Poland in 1867, and died two years later.

  Five years later young Jósef, set on a life at sea, traveled to Marseille to learn the ropes. He secured berths on a few ships, made a few voyages, ran guns in Spain, and raised general hell on the Marseille waterfront, which was by all accounts the right place for that sort of thing. He got into debt, and tried to get out of it by the time-honored expedient of shooting himself. The bullet missed his heart, though not by much, and he survived. The uncle who raised him helped him settle his debts, and he shipped out of Marseille in a British freighter, intending to join the British merchant navy. But he jumped ship in London and resumed behaving badly, until his uncle straightened him out again.

  This time it took. He worked for sixteen years on British ships, learning the language and
the craft of seamanship simultaneously. In 1886 he both qualified for his Master’s Certificate and became a British subject.

  While the ideas of writing may have occurred to him earlier, it was sometime in the late ’80s that Conrad began work on a novel inspired by a trader he’d met in Borneo. A four-month stay in the Congo (where he contracted the malaria from which he suffered for the rest of his life) interrupted his work, but he finished the book in due course and saw it published as Almayer’s Folly. The following year he got married, and published a second book, An Outcast of the Islands, and left the sea for the dubious security of freelance writing. He spent the rest of his life in England, but moved around a good deal, perhaps with the restlessness of a longtime sailor, perhaps out of a general dissatisfaction with the world and his place in it.

  While he found writing difficult and its rewards uncertain and elusive, he did win critical favor early on, and enjoyed his friendships with prominent British and American writers of his day, among them Ford Madox Ford, H. G. Wells, Henry James, and John Galsworthy. He was typed as a writer of sea stories, of course, and naturally he found this annoying, but most of his output in one way or another grew out of his maritime adventures.

  The Secret Agent has been described as the sort of book Conrad would have written had he never gone to sea. It is, to be sure, a novel which owes nothing obvious to the years on open water. It is in fact an intensely urban book, a novel considerably closer in tone and spirit to Charles Dickens than Two Years Before the Mast.

  But one could argue, I think, that, had Conrad not gone to sea, he’d very likely never have written anything at all. Had he lingered in Marseille, the next bullet, whether from his own or another’s gun, would have nipped his career in the bud; had he taken some clerical job, in London or at home in Poland, how would he have found anything to write about, or developed the insight to write about anything? The sea formed him, as the war formed James Jones, and as the Mississippi formed Mark Twain.

  Conrad didn’t have to go to sea to write The Secret Agent. But he may have had to go to sea to become the man capable of writing it.

  “The origin of The Secret Agent: subject, treatment, artistic purpose, and every other motive that may induce an author to take up his pen, can, I believe, be traced to a period of mental and emotional reaction . . . . I began this book impulsively and wrote it continuously. When in due course it was bound and delivered to the public gaze I found myself reproved for having written it at all . . . .

  “The inception of The Secret Agent followed immediately on a two years’ period of intense absorption in the task of writing that remote novel, Nostromo, with its far-off Latin-American atmosphere; and the profoundly personal Mirror of the Sea. The first an intense creative effort on what I suppose will always remain my largest canvas, the second an unreserved attempt to unveil for a moment the profounder intimacies of the sea and the formative influences of nearly half my lifetime. It was a period, too, in which my sense of the truth of things was attended by a very intense imaginative and emotional readiness which, all genuine and faithful to facts as it was, yet made me feel (the task once done) as if I were left behind, aimless amongst mere hunks of sensations and lost in a world of other, of inferior values.

  “I don’t know whether I really felt that I wanted a change, change in my imagination, in my vision, and in my mental attitude. I rather think that a change in the fundamental mood had already stolen over me unawares. I don’t remember anything definite happening. With The Mirror of the Sea finished in the full consciousness that I had dealt honestly with myself and my readers in every line of that book, I gave myself up to a not unhappy pause. Then, while I was yet standing still, as it were, and certainly not going out of my way to look for anything ugly, the subject of The Secret Agent—I mean the tale—came to me in the shape of a few words uttered by a friend in a casual conversation about anarchists or rather anarchist activities: how brought about I don’t remember now.”

  —Joseph Conrad

  Author’s Note, The Secret Agent

  Well, maybe.

  Conrad always insisted that he was at best dimly aware of the Greenwich Bomb outrage of 1894, but evidence places him in London at the time, and it would have had to have impact on him. It was unquestionably the direct inspiration for The Secret Agent, involving as it did a bomber attempting to destroy the Greenwich Observatory and quite literally hoist on his own petard when his weapon discharged prematurely.

  Still, the mind of the fictioneer is a curious thing, and I’ve chosen to quote as much as I have above because of the insight it provides into the creative process in general and Conrad’s process in particular. Whatever the incident’s initial impact on his consciousness, it had had a decade and more to fade from his memory, until it had morphed from fresh news to a chunk of ore ready to be smelted into the stuff of fiction.

  It is the role of the author’s imagination to take every sort of experience—his own and others’—and make stories of it. Where do you get your ideas? ask no end of people who’ve never had an idea, and wouldn’t know what to do with one if they did. Ideas are all over the place, no harder to come by (and no more like the finished product) than sand for a maker of silicon chips. It is what one does with an idea that is the telling thing, and that is where imagination comes in.

  “Only in men’s imagination,” Conrad wrote in A Personal Record, “does every truth find an effective and undeniable existence. Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life.”

  Alfred Hitchcock’s film, Sabotage, is based directly on Conrad’s The Secret Agent. That seems simple enough, but it’s rendered confusing by the fact that in the same year (1936) that he directed Sabotage, Hitchcock also directed another film called The Secret Agent, based not on Conrad’s novel but on Somerset Maugham’s novel Ashenden, or The British Agent. (An interesting book, incidentally, based directly on Maugham’s own wartime adventures.) To complicate things further, Sabotage was given another title, A Woman Alone, when it was initially released in the United States.

  I saw it recently, and found it at once a beautiful film and a silly one. The black and white composition is almost enough to make one regret the invention of Technicolor, and Hitchcock’s London, like Conrad’s, is loud with echoes of the London of Charles Dickens.

  That’s the beautiful part. There’s plenty of silliness to offset it, with the love story of Sylvia Sydney and John Loder (the Scotland Yard agent, this an invention of Hitchcock’s with no counterpart in the book) about as silly as it gets.

  Suspense, of course, is Hitchcock’s trademark, and the sequence in Sabotage helped make his reputation in this area. He shows us the bomb, cuts away, cuts back, cuts away, cuts back. It’s a brilliant montage, revolutionary in its day, and no less effective in ours, and every time we see the damned package we’re waiting for it to explode.

  When it did, he damn well lost his audience. Years later, Hitchcock had this to say to Francois Truffault: “I made a serious mistake in having the little boy carry the bomb. He was involved in a situation that got him too much sympathy from the audience, so that when the bomb exploded and he was killed, the public was resentful. The way to handle it would have been for [Oscar] Homolka to kill the boy deliberately, but without showing that on the screen, and then for the wife to avenge her young brother by killing Homolka.”

  For all that, the film is no darker than the book, and Hitchcock peppers the script with bits of comic relief that we don’t get from Conrad. There are funny moments in the book—the anarchists, for whom the dour and brooding writer had surprisingly little empathy, are a peculiar lot, and not without their amusing side. But Conrad is at heart a writer with a decidedly dark view of the world and the people inhabiting it, and this is one of the darker specimens of his oeuvre.

  Hitchcock, I should note, was by no means the only person to see dramatic possibilities in The Secret Agent. Joseph Conrad himself turned out a stage version of the book in 1919-20, hoping to squeeze
some new wine out of an old bottle. His experience as a dramatist was minimal, and the play seems not to have been much good, but it was in fact presented on the London stage in 1922. It got weak reviews, and closed after a short run. Conrad, deeply disappointed, did the right thing: he blamed the critics.

  Christopher Hampton wrote and directed what everyone seems to agree was an excellent film (I haven’t been able to get hold of it to judge for myself) in 1996, called Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, a title which should at least let people know what they’re looking at. Bob Hoskins got good notices for his portrayal of Verloc, and he seems a perfect choice, echoing Oscar Homolka in his capacity for brooding intensity and, indeed, resembling him physically. Patricia Arquette is Winnie and Gerard Depardieu plays Ossipon.

  Read the books, see the movies. Enjoy. And, as I’m sure the captain of the Star Flyer would approve, I’ll give the last word to his favorite author:

  “Most of us, if you will pardon me for betraying the universal secret, have, at some time or other, discovered in ourselves a readiness to stray far, ever so far, on the wrong road.”

  —Joseph Conrad

  Notes on Life and Letters

  Introducing Ed Gorman

  * * *

  I was asked to provide an introduction for one of the two volumes of Pete Crowther’s collection of Ed Gorman’s work, and was happy to oblige. Beyond my fondness for Ed and his work, I owed him one—or two or three. It was as a result of his prodding that Cinderella Sims was reprinted by Subterranean Press, and he provided that volume with a warm and thoughtful introduction himself. Here’s what I came up with: