He's all Hart

John Hart's Iron House is his fourth novel and seems to be a culmination of the stylistic tics he developed in the previous three.

Hart specializes in people under pressure, at the limits of their ability to cope with the rough stuff life has thrown at them. The stories usually play out in a sub-Tennessee Williams environment, where close family relationships are fundamental and nothing must be allowed to cast them asunder. In his first best-seller, The King of Lies the lead character has to discover who murdered his father and to protect his sister from accusations or murdering him. Similarly in Down River and The Last Child, the heroes struggle to protect their families or to find out 'The Truth' about what happened in the past. We're in the same territory in Iron House, with all kinds of family secrets being hidden and exposed, hidden and exposed, hidden and ... well, you get the picture.

Elmore Leonard on writing

The Great Elmore Leonard describes how he developed his writing style. With extracts from Get Shorty, with John Travolta. It's a shortened version of his famous 10 Rules, but it's good to see him talking about the origins of some of his methods. I think it dates from 2006. Sorry the video is a bit choppy.

A sweet mystery - Sandford's Stolen Prey

Stolen Prey is John Sandford's 22nd book about Lucas Davenport, an investigator with Minnesota's Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. All of the books have 'Prey' in the title, which distinguishes them from his other series about Kidd, a software expert and thief, and about Virgil Flowers, an investigator who actually works for Lucas Davenport but largely operates on his own.

The Prey books are masterly expositions of how crimes get solved through police procedure. Davenport is extremely bright and intuitive, but Sandford shows time and again how he uses police resources to find the bad guys. He has a researcher, he has street-level snitches, he has friends in High Places. And he uses all of these to provide him with information that he synthesizes to arrive at his deductions and leaps of imagination. What's more, Sandford shows how cops talk to each other - exchanging information, building up their view of the case, sniping at each other or just bantering.

A plot with a Hole in it

Jo Nesbo's Phantom continues the adventures of rogue Norwegian policeman Harry Hole.

Returning from Bangkok to Norway, Hole is intent on proving that Oleg, the son of his former girlfriend, Rakel, is not guilty of the murder with which he's being charged. As usual, the plot involves corrupt policemen, underworld Mr Bigs, and a twisty, turny plot that Nesbo uses to manipulate our sympathies.

Translated from Norwegian by the author's usual translator, the prose has its typical clunky effect. The problem with translating - I speak from a little experience - is that when you come across a phrase in the original that, when translated into English, seems a little odd, it's often difficult to know whether that was the author's intention or not. So for example:

But when he went back to the front door the boy had hopped it.

The phrase 'hopped it' reeks of the 1950s, and is given to us as representing the thought of a policeman in 2011. Does Nesbo want this slightly dated turn of phrase to represent this policeman? Or is it an attempt by the translator to be a bit casual and different, rather than using a simple expression like 'run off' or even 'legged it'? If nothing else, if I were Nesbo, I'd wonder whether my American readers would understand the usage ...

In it for the long Hole ...

Long time since I posted ... trying to get through Jo Nesbo's latest, Phantom.

I think the word to describe Nesbo is 'dogged' - he tells you all there is to know about his hero, Harry Hole, and the numerous bad guys, too. In fact, more than you need to know.

What's striking me about this book - and in retrospect, the previous Harry Hole books - is that it's the structure of his plots that build the suspense. He has several sub-plots going on at once and you need to keep reading in order to see how they all come together. He's very detailed about giving you facts - what music is playing in a bar, for instance - but his prose is a bit leaden. Of course it's translated into English from the original Norwegian, so that probably doesn't help, but even so ...

On another topic, how good is Justified, the US TV series based on an Elmore Leonard short story?
Very good, is the answer you were looking for. Witty dialogue, fast-moving plot, dispensing with characters at will (usually with a gunshot blast) - the show gets better and better. And in Raylan Givens, it has a hero who is smart, funny, good with a gun and brave. But like all good heroes, he has a flaw ... for him, the job takes over his life to the extent that his relationships suffer.

And let's not forget the great Walton Goggins, so good in The Shield, who is now excelling as Boyd Crowder - charismatic, cunning, violent when necessary and inspirational to his troops (when he's not shooting them, that is ... ) If you're not already watching it, do so!

Unbroken Excellence

Some crime writers are very obvious: there's a crime, an investigator, a criminal and finally a solution that includes a resolution. The prose takes you along briskly with perhaps some incidental commentary on society or the immediate environment in which the story is taking place. The investigator is brave, wry, cynical.

Then there are crime writers who are not obvious, but tangential: the originating crime is perhaps minor, the criminal is unclear, the solution doesn't really offer a resolution. And the investigator is uncertain, not brave, and not particularly cynical. The story emerges piece by piece, because the investigator is dogged and shrewd and is good at pattern recognition. Martin Cruz Smith with his Arkady Renko books has been, for me, the chief architect of this type of crime novel. But there are times, as in Wolves Eat Dogs, when it's hard to know exactly what has happened - the storytelling is so tangential as to be obscure. You have the sense that you're reading something good, even excellent, but you also think you must have missed something and have to go back to check up.

Peter Temple's The Broken Shore is another first-rate entrant into this sub-genre, with a style that is also tangential in the way it accumulates detail but is crystal clear in its use of imagery, character and dialogue.

Truth and fiction

I was surprised to read a report in The Guardian that mirrors almost exactly a key plot development in Peter Temple's The Broken Shore.

In the book an Australian police unit try to arrest some youngsters in a car, but it goes wrong ... I won't add any spoilers here. The story in The Guardian echoes not just the event but the placating noises made by the police commissioners and the calls for police sanctions from prominent members of the Aboriginal community. Were the book not four years old you'd think Temple had read the headline and just copied it out ...

I guess this happens more often than one thinks. I know from my own experience that I've written something and a while later I've seen a similar incident on the news (or a similar plot development in something I've read or seen) ... and the feeling is one of both smugness and bitterness. Smug because in a sense you've 'predicted' the event; bitter because your moment of insight has been stolen by someone else (to include, possibly, God ... )

They say (or at least Christopher Booker does) that there are seven basic plots. Appallingly, maybe that's true in life, too.

Defending the Indefensible

William Landay's Defending Jacob is a very odd book. Narrated in the first person, it tells the story of an Assistant District Attorney whose son, Jacob, is accused of murdering a fellow pupil at school. The form of the book is that the narrator, Andy Barber, is providing some kind of deposition before a Grand Jury. The narration moves from him answering questions in making the deposition, to a straightforward first-person voice.

This sets up an odd situation for the reader - there are stretches of prose where this first-person voice is telling us the story ... and this is suddenly interrupted as we're whisked back into the courtroom:

The cop hesitated, appealing to Duffy with his eyes. Why waste time?
"We do it again,” Duffy repeated. “Like the man says.”

Mr. Logiudice: They never got the chance, did they? The detectives never got back into the interrogation room with Leonard Patz that day.
Witness: No, they did not. Not that day or any other day.
Mr. Logiudice: How did you feel about that?
Witness: I thought it was a mistake...

New Bond alert

Good news that William Boyd is to write the next James Bond book. The last one, Carte Blanche, by Jeffrey Deaver was a disaster. The villains were not particularly villainous, the action perfunctory and often just plain silly. What's more, it was sometimes hard to work out exactly what was going on. And it was all told in Deaver's lifeless, clerical prose.

Boyd, on the other hand, can tell a good story, has an interesting prose style and knows how to build surprises into his plots. I particularly liked Brazzaville Beach.

Also, I think I sat opposite him once on the Dockland Light Railway to Greenwich.

Suburban Angst

There seems to be a sub-genre of crime fiction developing that I'll call Suburban Angst. This genre of books is marked by the creation of a milieu that is white, middle-class, professional and populated by characters who still hark back to their glory days as jocks or cheerleaders. Harlan Coben in his non-Myron Bolitar books is an exponent of this sub-genre, as is Greg Iles, Linwood Barclay and the writer whose book I'm currently reading, William Landay.

The titles of these books are usually commonplace phrases - Fear The Worst, Tell No One - and they focus on commonplace people caught up in events beyond their experience. Often they involve children going missing, or husbands/wives finding something out about their spouse's past. Typically they don't involve private eyes or the police (except in a tangential way) and it's down to the resourceful ex-jock-now-lawyer or ex-jock-now-journalist to find out Exactly What the Hell is Going On.

If nothing else, these books offer a fascinating view of what middle America thinks is 'ordinary' or 'typical', because it's these ordinary worlds that are threatened by the disastrous events of the book, and therefore these worlds that the main characters struggle to reassert. And of course what the books also show is that beneath any display of the 'ordinary' there is usually a dark secret place that has always lay beneath the norm - a place where addiction, passion and violence lie dormant but are only waiting for the opportunity to rise again.

Most crime novels are based on the premise that the criminal act undercuts or questions the current status quo, and it's the role of the detective or policeman to weed out the criminal and therefore restore the world to its harmonious balance, where everyone knows their place. The difference perhaps in the Suburban Angst novels is that the disruption of the status quo is laid out so clearly - we don't need to use any literary critical faculties to infer that the world has been disrupted: we're told as much in so many words. This makes them rather naked in their ideological position and sometimes makes them difficult to read because we're expected to identify with characters who are leading such 'perfect' lives. Perhaps that makes them peculiarly American, and why I'm struggling to think of any parallels amongst UK crime writers.

Greeneland

Graham Greene's The Ministry of Fear (1943) was written in the middle of World War II and is filled with very specific detail of what it was like to be living through the blitz. The central character, Arthur Rowe, finds himself accidentally caught up in some kind of (ill-defined) Nazi plot and spends most of the book trying to find out exactly what is going on around him. His confusion is compounded after a bomb explodes close to him, producing several weeks of amnesia, a period during which he is spoken to and treated as though he were someone else.

Greene is celebrated for his creation of what people have punningly called 'Greeneland', an odd melange of real geography and an unknown spiritual terrain. His characters travel not only through real places, accurately described, but through memories, dreams and psychological habitats. In The Ministry of Fear these journeys are evident and almost crude, as Greene is here writing one of his 'entertainments', books intended to garner sales rather than critical kudos. As a result, the internal journeys are externalised - Rowe's voyage to discover himself, and the hero he wants to be, is rendered through action as well as internal dialogue. His passage is physical as well as psychological.

What you learn from reading

I've recently returned to writing my third novel after a gap of some months. In the interim I've been reading assiduously for this blog and reading in a different way - reading to learn instead of just reading for pleasure. Now of course writers say - and beginning writers are told, endlessly - to read and read and read. That's fine, but you have to read differently, critically, if you're to learn from what you read.

For example, you must try to keep an eye out for how the plot is working. When you're reading for pleasure (RFP) you get caught up in What Happens Next. When you're reading to learn (RTL), you might be saying, 'Right, I see what you did there ... you led us up to a revelation at the end of the chapter. Then in the next chapter you cleverly took us to the sub-plot.'

Here are some more differences: