The Right Thing Happens

I've been working on a new novel that is much more "noir" than previous novels I've written. I know what Noir is, but I can't quite make myself have everything go to hell in the end. Iv been writing traditional mystery stories too long.

 Years ago, my husband brought home from the library a copy of Carl Jung’s Man and His Symbols. He writes poetry, and symbology is important to him.  I borrowed it from him, and as I read, it dawned on me that one of the defining traits of the mystery story is that it is basically a hero quest, an archetypical tale, a medieval myth in modern clothing.

Evil is done

The hero goes on a quest to right the wrong.

The hero finds the villain, confronts him, and they do battle.

The hero triumphs, and balance is restored.

All right, you’re saying, I can think of seventeen mystery novels where the hero didn’t triumph, the villain didn’t lose, yadda yadda yadda.  

First of all, quit trying to mess up my theme.  Second, I realize that there are plenty of mysteries in which things don’t quite work out that the killer is caught by the law and punished for his deed.  But that doesn’t mean that there was no justice.  In a mystery novel, a satisfying ending occurs when the right thing happens.

Consider Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express. Poirot finds out who murdered the victim, all right.  But when was justice done?  As far as our hero is concerned, justice was done when the victim was done in by those he had horribly wronged.  And so, he contrives to convince the police that the murder was committed by a phantom train conductor who has disappeared forever through the snow.

Even in the blackest of noir mysteries, where even the hero comes to a bad end, he brings it upon himself.  He has a fatal flaw.  Perhaps he sacrifices himself because he’s done a bad thing and this is how he atones.  The dragon is slain, even if St. George goes down with him.

Letting the reader see right prevail - whatever that may entail - is what gives a mystery novel its satisfyingly mythic ending

Weekend Guest Poster: K.A. Laity

I'm delighted to welcome K.A. Laity, a fellow member of the Upper Hudson (Mavens of Mayhem) chapter of Sisters in Crime as our welcome guest.

K. A. Laity is the award-winning author of White Rabbit, A Cut-Throat Business, Lush Situation, Owl Stretching, Unquiet Dreams, À la Mort Subite, The Claddagh Icon, Chastity Flame, Pelzmantel and Other Medieval Tales of Magic and Unikirja, as well as editor of Weird Noir, Noir Carnival and Drag Noir. Her bibliography is chock full of short stories, humor pieces, plays and essays, both scholarly and popular. She spent the 2011-2012 academic year in Galway, Ireland where she was a Fulbright Fellow in digital humanities at NUIG. Dr. Laity teaches medieval literature, film, gender studies, New Media and popular culture at the College of Saint Rose. She divides her time between upstate New York and Dundee.

Simplify

by K. A. Laity

I used to have Thoreau’s mantra posted on the wall of my Cambridge apartment. I had illusions that somehow my huge piles of books and papers would magically disappear or tidy or somehow look less cluttered. Living in three countries in the last three years, I have managed to unload a good deal of belongings, but I’m a writer. There’s only so many books you can manage to pry from your hands.

I’ve been more successful in trying to employ it in my writing. The reminders keep coming at me lately. The other day Bish’s Beat posted a reflection on a conversation with a best selling writer who went on about simplifying everything: “Cut exposition to an absolute minimum.” Maybe you don’t want to write a bestseller, but as my pal Saranna DeWylde posted, classic authors also tend to write more simply than you think.

“The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter.” ― Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon

I’m in the midst of teaching a noir fiction course and re-reading Hammett, Chandler, Sanxay-Holding and Hughes has reminded me how lean their prose is. As usual I teach to learn and I am excited by the re-discovery of why I love these books so much. There are so few wasted words. So much is left to the reader to fill in.

Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York: they assume you know the cities or will take their word for it about how they are. Specific locations we need to know practical things about get just the important details: Sam Spade’s apartment, the Sternwood family estate, the Holley’s boathouse. We know Effie Perine’s boyish face—and we know that no romance will happen between her and Sam because of that description. She’s able and attractive, but no femme fatale. Carmen Sternwood doesn’t just suck her thumb, her thumb is weirdly formed, another finger, so the image becomes an indelible part of her character and her wrongness. And after our introduction to Dix Steele imagining himself flying in the midst of the fog then following the girl even though he “didn’t intend” to do so, there are no more direct words than “She was afraid.” You learn all you need to know about him from his pleasure at that knowledge.

“Simplicity is the most difficult thing to secure in this world; it is the last limit of experience and the last effort of genius.” ― George Sand

I’m changing my own writing. In the midst of a new novel, I am taking the unusual step of backtracking. I like to burn through a first draft without looking back and then edit afterward. But I feel bloat creeping in and I want to snuff it out at the start and go on the same way. It’s the same way with teaching. You can see on their faces when you lose them. I stop and go back, try other words, find out where we parted company. You can do that in a class room. In a novel, a reader’s patience only lasts so long. As a reader, I’m rather ruthless when it comes to giving up on a book. There are so many books to read after all.

So I cut the words that are unnecessary. I cut the passages where my joy in describing a scene goes beyond what the reader needs to know into my pleasure at throwing words on the page. I cut to the best words, the specific ones, because the right word is more indelible than a whole paragraph of prose. I cut until it bleeds.