Sleuth, page 6
In Julian Barnes’s novel The Sense of an Ending, the protagonist relates what he believed about literature when he was a young man. “Literature,” he says, “was all about: love, sex, morality, friendship, happiness, suffering, betrayal, adultery, good and evil, heroes and villains, guilt and innocence, ambition, power, justice, revolution, war, fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, the individual against society, success and failure, murder, suicide, death, God.”
Interviewers regularly ask me if the fact that I set my novels in Saskatchewan limits their sales. Of course, I have no way of knowing, but I do know that, like every hamlet, village, town, or city where human beings live, Regina has enough of what Barnes’s protagonist notes to fill a good-sized library with books.
Even more significantly, Regina has allowed me to say what I believe is true about the human condition. I believe we are all part of a community, and for that reason, among many, we should be quick to empathize and slow to judge. I believe social issues such as poverty, racism, child prostitution, alienation, hopelessness, and spousal violence are issues that we, as a community, must address. As a province with a long tradition of social activism, Saskatchewan was a good fit for my protagonist, Joanne Kilbourn Shreve.
She is not by occupation or inclination a risk taker or windmill tilter. She is acutely aware, however, of the world around her, and she sees many things in her community that worry her. There are just over 1 million people in our province, so we are accustomed to working together to do what needs to be done. Joanne’s life, like the lives of many people in Saskatchewan, is informed by the belief that, when ordinary people are confronted by inequity or injustice, they must roll up their sleeves and do what they can to right the wrong. There is plenty to be done, but Joanne’s ethos, like my own, can be stated simply: in a flawed but basically decent society, a person of ordinary intelligence and common sense can work within the system and bring about change.
Regina offers me the perfect canvas on which to work. What about you? Look again at those five crime fiction novels you selected earlier as among your favourites. What are their respective writers saying about the complex business of being alive? Why have they selected their particular settings ? Do their selections work for them? Now think about your choice. What world can you create that will allow you to best say what you believe is true about the human condition?
Writing about Weather
Never open a book with weather.—Elmore Leonard
Three rules for mystery writing. Put weather in. Put weather in. Put weather in.—Joseph Hansen, author of the Dave Brandstetter mysteries
When it comes to admiration for Elmore Leonard, I am second to none, but I’m with Joseph Hansen on the question of weather in crime fiction. Check out the opening of Raymond Chandler’s 1938 short story “Red Wind” to see how, by selecting brief but telling details about weather and its effect on character, a writer can establish a world and a mood that draw the reader into the work:
There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge.
It’s a brilliant opening, one that I’ve used in creative writing classes to encourage students to establish the mood of a piece by showing the effect weather can have on people.
I once asked a writers’ group in Calgary to use Chandler’s opening as a model for opening a story about events that take place in their city during a chinook, that warm, dry wind in winter that comes down from the eastern slopes of the Rockies and causes a rapid rise in temperature. I’ve never experienced a chinook, but whenever I’ve heard on the news about a chinook passing through Calgary I’ve assumed the sudden influx of mild weather in the midst of frigid winter would be a welcome gift. Not so. Apparently, during a chinook, there’s a sharp rise in aberrant behaviour. Migraine sufferers are hit hard, psychiatric wards are filled, and police are run ragged. My students’ riveting descriptions of the effects of a chinook drew me into their stories and kept me reading. That, of course, is exactly what a story opening is supposed to do.
Saskatchewan licence plates carry the motto “Land of the Living Skies.” The words capture both the beauty and the uncertainty of living on the open prairie with its constant reminder that human beings are very small and the sky is very large.
The following passage from The Wandering Soul Murders, the third Joanne Kilbourn novel, describes a northern Saskatchewan lake so huge it creates its own weather. In order to rescue her young daughter from a sexual predator, Joanne is forced to enlist an unlikely ally, a man named Jackie Desjarlais. The strange and menacing setting terrifies her, and all five senses are on full alert. The first voice we hear in this scene is that of Desjarlais.
“Let’s go,” he said. “My boat’s down at the dock. You got money for gas? I drank my last five bucks.”
“I’ve got money,” I said, and I handed what I had to him.
When he came back, Jackie had a gas can and a bottle of rye. His boat was a new one. Fiberglass, with a fifty-horsepower outboard motor. It looked sturdy. Then I looked out at Havre Lake, and suddenly the boat seemed very small. Jackie reached under the bow and pulled out a khaki slicker.
“Put this on,” he said. He opened the rye. “Take a slug.” I did. The whiskey burned my throat, but it warmed and calmed me.
It took us forty-five minutes to get to the island, forty-five minutes of being pounded by the storm and my own fear. We were heading into the wind, and the rain was blinding. Every time Jackie’s boat slapped against the whitecaps, it shuddered as if it was about to split in two. My panic hit in waves, overwhelming me. At one point, I looked out and I couldn’t see anything: no island, no shoreline, no line dividing earth from heaven. In that moment I felt a stab of existential terror. I was alone in a frail boat with a stranger. It was a metaphor the psalmist would have understood.
I don’t have to describe Joanne’s fear; I can show it by noting her reaction to the situation with all five senses—sight, hearing, taste, touch, and smell.
Showing your character’s sensory reactions to a scene allows your readers not simply to “see” the setting but also to feel it in their bones. Think for a moment of that scene in the morgue that my police officer friend told me about. The reader’s eyes can see that the pathologist in charge is performing an autopsy on a very young child. The reader’s eyes can see that the off-duty pathologist, who came in simply to be with the little boy during his last moments on earth, is standing by the table stroking the child’s leg. The picture is poignant.
Now add the responses of the other senses to the scene. The meat-locker cold air. The faint smell of formaldehyde evoking memories of lab dissections of frogs in university biology. The memory of the rough humour of the university labs—a sharp contrast to the reverent silence with which the pathologists approach the child on the autopsy table. The low, comforting murmur of the off-duty pathologist and the unbearable rasp of a surgical instrument sawing through a child’s rib cage. The sight of the sign, standard in spaces where autopsies are performed: “This the place where death rejoices to help those who live.”
Whether the setting you’re describing is a hospital laboratory used for postmortems or the inside of a jalopy where a young man and a young woman are both about to lose their virginity, the judicious use of sensory detail will make the moment come alive.
A final note on setting. At the heart of many long-running mystery series is the home where the protagonist and often his partner in detection work and live. The dwelling can be an elegant brownstone, an apartment, a loft, a Georgian townhouse, or a pleasantly proportioned single-storey house overlooking a pretty creek. For both the protagonist and the reader, this place is the still point in the storm: an oasis for reflection, deduction, and renewal. It is home—a reminder that, after the case has been solved and justice meted out, order will once again prevail, and life will continue.
Think carefully before you choose your fictional world. Not only will the right choice allow you to say what you believe is true about the human condition, but also it will become a place that has real meaning for readers. The following two passages about homes of famous fictional detectives underscore the point.
On a partly sunny Saturday in June, 1996, some 35 members of The Wolfe Pack descended on 454 West 35th Street to put to rest forever the controversy over exactly where Mr. Wolfe drank beer, raised orchids, ate breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and—oh, yes!—occasionally solved a murder. Commissioner Henry Stern, Department of Parks and Recreation, City of New York dedicated the site.
The plaque reads:
“On this site stood the elegant brownstone of the corpulent fictional private detective Nero Wolfe. With his able assistant Archie Goodwin, Mr. Wolfe raised orchids and dined well, while solving over seventy cases as recorded by Rex Stout from 1934–1975.”
The Sherlock Holmes Museum is a privately run museum in London, England, dedicated to the famous fictional detective Sherlock Holmes. It opened in 1990 and is situated in Baker Street, bearing the number 221B by permission of the City of Westminster, although it lies between numbers 237 and 241, near the north end of Baker Street in central London close to Regent’s Park.
The Georgian town house which the museum occupies as “221B Baker Street” was formerly used as a boarding house from 1860 to 1936, and covers the period of 1881 to 1904 when Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson were reported to have resided there as tenants of Mrs Hudson.
As someone who left her office—an exact replica of the study where Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote the Sherlock Holmes mysteries—at the Toronto Reference Library every afternoon while I was the writer-in-residence there, I can attest to the loyalty of readers of crime fiction. Every day at 1 p.m. Sherlockians from all over the world waited patiently to visit the replica of the room where Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson came into being. The fans didn’t seem to mind the fact that the Conan Doyle study at the Toronto Reference Library wasn’t the real thing. They were there to honour Sherlock Holmes.
Mystery aficionados are both the most forgiving and the least forgiving of readers. They will excuse the occasional thin characterization, sketchy setting, improbability or even impossibility, but heaven help the writer who kills off his hero. After Holmes’s apparent death at Moriarty’s hands in “The Final Problem,” public pressure forced Conan Doyle to bring back his sleuth and explain his miraculous survival. Writers planning a long-running series should take note.
Chapter 7
Characterization
I didn’t care whether the mystery was fairly obvious, but I cared about the people, about this strange corrupt world we live in.—Raymond Chandler
Good characterization is good characterization, no matter the genre. A satisfying fictional character has dimension, believability, passions, strengths, weaknesses, a degree of self-knowledge, and curiosity about the world around him or her.
Recently, Michael Connelly, author of the Harry Bosch crime novel series, wrote about the changing face of the crime novel:
The crime novel, in its most serious form, has always been used to reflect trends and lament losses and clang the bell of warning to the ills of society. In a good-versus-evil world the painstaking and dangerous steps of the undaunted investigator were the things that riveted the reader while the clever author slipped the message in with the prose. Raymond Chandler said, “Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.”
Untarnished and unafraid is easy. But where are those mean streets today? Detective work has changed dramatically in the past quarter-century as science has seemingly replaced shoe leather. Investigators are more likely to solve a case with a walk to the forensics lab than down the mean streets where a murder has occurred. Greatly improved collection of fingerprint and ballistic evidence and their attendant and ever-growing databases routinely ferret out the guilty—or at least the accused.
And then there is dna. . . . dna has become the magic bullet, the slam dunk used by prosecutors to leverage the guilty plea that avoids the trial.
Technology has transformed the methods of crime detection, but later in the review Connelly notes that “The steady beating heart of the novel is provided by the criminal psychologist Trajan Jones, late of the New York City Police Department.”
Despite all of the changes in the genre, a mystery novel will always require a “steady beating heart” at its centre, and such a heart will always be found in “rounded” characters who engage our interest because of their words, their actions, and their attitudes toward everything from poutine to Puccini.
The sleuth, professional or reluctant, will be surrounded by a gallery of characters, good and bad, different in almost every respect but linked by the fact that, like every other human being, each of them wants something, and the pursuit of that nebulous something drives their actions.
In addition to writing fiction, I write plays, and in theatre at the first rehearsal we identify what each character wants more than anything—his or her super-objective. If the writing is solid, then the super-objective will be apparent. The super-objective can change in the course of the play or novel, but the reasons for the change must be apparent to the audience. As Michael Connelly says, “All persons are defined by their wants and needs. Their desires. Attaining the things we want creates conflict within ourselves and in our relations to the world. This natural human condition must be embedded in the people you write about. It helps define their characters. It makes them real.” Ray Bradbury puts it more simply: “Find out what your hero wants. Then just follow him.” The Bible’s insight into this aspect of human nature is both pointed and poetic: “For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also” (Matthew 6:21). Identifying where the “treasure” of each of your characters lies gives you a quick and reliable insight into a character’s ambitions and vulnerabilities—a powerful tool when it comes to deciding his or her role in furthering the plot.
One salient point about characters in crime novels: we see them at their worst. Their treasure will be either threatened or taken from them. Their lives will be torn apart. They will suffer actual and existential loss. They will be frightened, bereaved, confused, desperate, and stripped of their masks and their pride. The person they believed themselves to be will be shattered. How they will rebuild their lives and themselves is one of the enduring fascinations of crime fiction.
Interest in the process will be deepened if readers have come to know the characters who will be most affected by the tragedy well before the murder takes place. In fiction as in poker, the higher the stakes, the bigger the payoff.
I’ll use What’s Left Behind to illustrate how spending time with the characters early in the novel pays dividends later. Joanne Kilbourn Shreve’s son, Angus Kilbourn, discovers Lee Crawford’s body on page 70, about one-fifth of the way into the novel. By this point, we have learned a number of facts about Lee that will become significant plot points later and produce provocative suspects.
Lee had a former lover against whom she recently had to take out a restraining order. When the order was issued, her ex had a breakdown and checked himself into a private psychiatric hospital. On the morning of the Crawford-Kilbourn wedding, he checked himself out of the facility. He spent five hours in a canoe on the lake watching in clear view of Lee and the others in front of the gazebo where the wedding was taking place. After the reception ended, the ex disappeared.
Lee’s activism in support of the referendum that would put strict limits on the development of farmland has angered many, including a megadeveloper whose ceo has declared she will do whatever is necessary to stop Lee.
By taking the time to develop “secondary” characters, I was able to introduce several intriguing suspects with motives for murder. Equally significantly, readers have the chance to see Lee as a person of principle, determined to be a responsible steward of the land she inherited from her guardian, and as a warm, smart, generous, loving woman who shares a relationship with her twin that is life-enhancing for both.
Lee sparks intense emotions in people, and by the time she dies the reader is aware of the fact that to know her is not necessarily to love her. So in seventy pages I’ve dropped a number of hooks into the creek, and the reader has the rest of the book to see how the fishing expedition ends.
If a character isn’t alive for you, he will never live for your readers.—Margaret Maron, author of the Deborah Knott mystery series
Building Your Characters
Prewrite. None of these little exercises will take much time at all, but they will give you a base for your character, and if you’re lucky you will start to “hear” your character’s voice.
Note what novelist Robertson Davies called “the police court facts” about your character: age, height, weight, colour of eyes, hair, and skin, distinguishing characteristics, place of birth, parents, siblings, education, occupation.
Do a Proustian questionnaire for each character. I’ve done a number of them for interviews, and they are revealing. The idea is that you’re asked a question that’s somewhat off-base and that you have to answer it without pausing to think. Some examples. “What’s your biggest regret?” “What’s your guilty pleasure?” “If you could be someone in history, who would you be?” “Would you rather be able to travel through time or be invisible?” Your characters’ answers to these unconventional questions might give you intriguing glimpses into their inner lives.
