McFet turns 60

By John McFetridge
About the same time I started with Do Some Damage I became a participant in the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging. At the time I felt far too young, but the participants chosen were between the ages of 45 and 85 when recruited and were to stay with the study for at least 20 years or until death. I was within the age range.

But I didn't feel like I should really be taking part in an aging study because my writing career was just starting and that made me feel young. Okay, I had been trying to start a writing career for about thirty years at that point but it was just starting and I thought it would go on for a long, long time so I felt young.

The aging study is a long questionnaire with some memory tests thrown in, done on the phone every couple of years. A lot of the questions are about my general health and some are about what medications do I take and some are about how active am I and that kind of thing. When I first started the study the interview was a lot of fun, I felt great being in good health, not taking any meds and being active. And I did pretty well at the memory tests.

Some of the questions were about personal independence, could I dress myself and wash myself and make my own meals. Good questions for an aging study and a reminder about what's coming if I'm lucky enough to make it that far.

And some of the questions are about mental health; depression, loneliness, feelings of failure and regret. I take longer to answer those than I did ten years ago.

Luckily I can still answer yes to, "Do you have more than 22 of tour own teeth," but it worries me about where this is headed.

Many of the questions are yes or no, or are the kind where a statement is made and you answer that you a) strongly agree, b) agree, c) disagree, or d) strongly disagree. Some of them are tough to answer that way. One that trips me up "I am optimistic about the future." To answer honestly I would have to say I agree I am optimistic about my future but I disagree that I'm optimistic about the overall future.

Another one that's a little tough is; People are generally good. Lately I've been saying what I think is wrong with the world is that people are generally awful. I don't really mean it, but I have started to question if always saying that we believe people are essentially good has been the best way to look at the world. People can certainly be good but, wow, can they also be really awful.

This time when I was asked if I was retired, partly retired, working part-time, or working full-time and I answered that I was partly retired. When we started Do Some Damage I was on an almost book-a-year pace which I'd planned to keep going for a lot longer than I did. The follow-up questions about why I was still working were a little tough for me to answer because the truth is, the truth I like to avoid is, that I'm not as good at it anymore. It takes me a lot longer to write a page and more and more often struggle to remember common words.

Well, that's okay, a big vocabulary was never what my writing was about anyway.

I'm pretty sure the next questionnaire I do for the study I won't do nearly as well on the memory test sections.

Between the time I started in the study, and we started Do Some Damage, I wrote three novels that are set in the 1970s, when I was between 10 and 20 years old. There's a lot of nostalgia in those books (probably too much) and I was feeling nostalgic at the time but for the most part that's passed now. That may be part of aging, too.

Getting to the end of my fifties (I turn 60 this year) I have been surprised that it's been my best decade. I certainly didn't expect that going into it. And now I expect my sixties will be even better and I really never expected that.

I think taking the aging survey has helped me realize that aging, at least this far, doesn't have to be as bad as Hollywood makes it out to be.

It's not so much the questions themselves, it's the process of answering them. This aging study looks like it will result in some very useful data for future policy-makers, but it's also just a good idea to stop and take an accounting of things once in a while. Which isn't exactly an original idea, but I think it's worth repeating.

And so are anniversaries. So, Happy Tenth Anniversary to Do Some Damage, it's a good time to stop and take a look back and a good time to look forward. I'm only partly-retired, I have a new novel coming out next year and it may be the first in a new private eye series, I'm not sure. I'm working on the second one now but I keep forgetting words like "suspect" and "case" and "client."

If you're interested in the aging study you can find information here:
https://www.clsa-elcv.ca/

Real Detective and True Crime TV w/John McFetridge

I sat down with John McFetridge - novelist, screenwriter, and one of the writers behind Investigation Discovery's Real Detective to talk about true crime TV and the ways it's evolving and changing - and the way it has helped him evolve and change, too. He started by kindly explaining to me how TV writing works, as that's a topic that's always been interesting to me (writing with other people?!) and how Real Detective was a different experience - since they were working off police reports and interviews with, well... real detectives, and not in a traditional writer's room.

At the beginning of these shows, before they start, it says “Hey, some of this stuff has been changed.” When you’re writing these is there a certain amount of pressure to change certain details if they don’t necessarily fit a clean narrative or do you have a little bit more leeway to put the facts out and just make them make sense? 

The writer is part of the crew. So a writer gets hired the way a grip gets hired and you’re told “we're gonna lay some dollies on a track right here, make it level” and the writer is told “we’re gonna make the scene between these two people – write it.” So you’re clearly the first of many people who are going to go through this material by the time it gets onto TV. You know going in, I don’t really have a lot of say in how this is going to work out in the end. But you do at least get to have your say. This is how I think it should go, this is how I think it should be. The claim is always that we want to get as true to the spirit of it.

For example, in one of the episodes that I wrote one of the things that was just left out was that – the crime happened in Van Nuys, CA in the early 90s and it was at a time when there was a lot of murders. One of the things that kept coming up in the interview with the detective, and it even came up in some of the reports, was that these detectives would get three or four murders a week – usually on the weekends – and then they’d clear them in about a week, and usually either have enough evidence to hand it over to the lawyers and have a charge or they hit a roadblock where they probably weren’t going to get any further. The one that got pulled out was one where a detective felt that they weren’t going to get anymore and they probably weren’t going to get any further, but he just didn’t want to let it go because the victim was a nineteen or twenty-year old woman who had been homeless and a drug addict, and she was working as a prostitute, and he really just thought that for the end part of her life – nobody cared. And he didn’t want it to go out like that. When it came time to write the episode, one of the notes was: don’t mention prostitution. And then one of the notes was: Don’t mention the drug addiction.

And I said “well that’s kind of a big part of the story,” but in the heat of the moment you get talked into the idea that it’s really not the most characteristic thing about her. There’s was an awful lot more to her life then the way it ended and the last couple years of it. I thought, well that’s true. Because at first I though, “No, no, you gotta put that in because it’s important!” But the network didn’t want that in. I kind of came around to it, to be honest with you. I kind of came around to the idea that it’s maybe not the aspect of her life that we should dwell on so much.

I agree that you don’t want to focus on maybe the worst parts of a victim’s life but it’s interesting that it would be “don’t mention it at all.” Do you think that comes from a certain amount of – they know who the audience is, they know that the victims have to be sympathetic and certain elements will take away from that sympathy for the casual viewer?
 
Probably. One of the other things though, is the time constraint. The episodes are pretty short. It’s not a lot of time to get in there. When you start to raise things like that, and you don’t have enough time to really deal with them, they can kind of take over.

The network itself is pretty conscious of who it’s audience is, and they definitely pick, of all the true stories out there to dramatize, they pick ones that they really feel their audience will be interested in. I have to say, they know more about that than I do.

A follow on to that: When you’re sitting down to write this story – the people are real, the names for the most part are real – do you feel any responsibility or weight when you’re doing that, knowing that the majority of people who see this episode are people who never knew the victim, never knew the killer, never knew these people in real life – and what you’re putting out there is going to be everything they get. 

Yes. I certainly do. I think that it is a responsibility. Of course, I couldn’t help it, after the episode aired I went online to see what people were saying about it. A lot of the comments I saw on the webpage about the show – I thought “gee I’d like to jump in there and explain to them more of the backstory that they didn’t get.” They are just using the information that was in the show as the basis to have this big conversation. A lot of the conversation would be different if they saw more of what was going on.

One of the things I found interesting about Real Detective was the interviews with the detectives. Most of them were retired so they were able to talk about the cases fairly openly. And the cases were all closed and from a while ago, usually. But they also felt a real responsibity to the victims, to the families, to the people who were actually involved. It was just nice to have just one more layer of care on it.

Recently the numbers came out that Investigation Discovery, specifically, the vast majority of viewers are women, and people were really surprised by that. A lot of these stories revolve around women, whether they’re the victims or they’re the women who discover their husbands are horrible criminals. Women play a central role in all these stories. But when you watch, say Law & Order, the woman is there for the first five minutes and then she only exists in commentary from other people. 

From the ones that I looked at for Real Detective – because I went through a whole bunch of possible ones – one of the things that came up, and it wasn’t a directive from the network – one of the things that came up was that these crimes are mostly family dramas. They’re people who know each other and they’re people who are often intimate with one another. So on these crime shows one of the things is the motives – you know they couldn’t do twenty four episodes of Law & Order where every single motive was infidelity. Just because the writers’ room – someone’s gotta be embezzling or somebody’s gotta be doing all this other stuff. In reality, most of these kinds of murders are people who know one another quite well.

You have to really feel strongly about somebody to want to see them dead.
 
(Laughs) Yeah. A lot of times it is an accident though! But certainly to plan it, and to think about it. To think about it more than one day. But what I mean is, in these stories, they aren’t stories about hit men or like a lot of what we see in the current noir/crime trends are – I mean, the network didn’t come out and say it but they didn’t really want gang stories, and they didn’t really want drug deals gone bad, they didn’t want that kind of stuff.

But essentially, the way they really got weeded out, what they wanted was the case that was the most meaningful for the detective that worked it. The show is called Real Detective, so when we’re interviewing detectives – they weren’t that interested in the gang ones either. They weren’t that interested in the, you know, a couple of drug dealers have a big fight and one of them kills the other one. That didn’t change their lives. But one that disrupted a family. One that was really involved in the intimate family moments. That was the one, for most of the detectives we saw on the show, those were the cases that were the most significant for them.

For a homicide detective, it’s gotta be hard to care about the seventh bad drug deal of the month.
 
Yeah, and don’t get me wrong, the detective we were talking to in Van Nuys, who worked a lot of those, he was affected by them. He had a fairly lengthy lecture on the waste of human life that goes on because of bigger factors and all that kind of stuff. He did see it repeated many, many times, and that did seem to have an effect as well. But again, even in those cases, if he wanted to, he could have picked almost any one of those other murders, and if we were willing to lay the backstory down, and we were willing to do the research into the family, they’re all that kind of tragedy. As bad as whatever else is going on. It’s somebody, the family is still devastated.

One of the things that came up interviewing James Queally was how the families are effected and how that’s what stuck with him through the years. While what you’re saying makes perfect sense – you want the stories with the familial drama – there is a story behind every life that’s lost. Somebody cared about that person.
 
Right. The network definitely wanted to hit that “that could happen to me” and most of their viewers are not involved in a lot of drug deals. But anybody could date someone who is not what they think they are.

I think it does play into a certain fear that a lot of women are raised with. That if you get in the car with the wrong person, or you fall in love with the wrong person, or you’re not on your guard – that you could end up dead. Or you could end up an accomplice or living with somebody you don’t really know who they are. That’s something I don’t think a lot of men understand until it’s laid out for them. Do you feel like you have a better understanding for that kind of cloud that hangs over the experience of women having looked at all these stories?
 
Over the time that I’ve been writing I’d say that has happened, yes. And it’s ongoing. In some ways it feels like we’ve only recently come to this point where we should have been here a long time ago. Now that it is in the conversation. I was just talking to somebody – I don’t know if you know The Tragically Hip, they’re a pretty big Canadian band, they have a song called “Thirty-Eight Years Old” and it takes place in 1973 and it goes back 18 years before that. It’s about a rape and of course it’s one that never got reported. I was thinking about it the other day and I made a joke, “Oh I’d like to write a a screenplay based on that song” and the reason I thought of it is because that story is still relevant. The line in the song is “My sister got raped so a man got killed.” But the story is still the same that – she was the victim but that got lost in the fifties. But also in the seventies and also today! So it is, you’re right, going through all this stuff makes you more aware, but still, it feels to me like we’re just at the very beginning of that.

Well, I agree. I mean, it’s funny to me because this is a topic that I’m very interested in and very passionate about. Intellectually, I think if you ask somebody, “If a woman gets raped is that bad?” they’re going to say “Yeah, that’s terrible.” But there’s that line that you have to cross with empathy and understanding of how these things happen and what the circumstances are and why a woman might choose not to report it. I think you’re right, we’re just starting to get to the line and start crossing it. 

It still seems like the issue around reporting and the issue around the most very basic right and wrong is that it couldn’t go that way. It couldn’t get reported the way a burglary got reported. It couldn’t get reported the way any other crime got reported. It’s different.

We just had this really huge media event in Canada where there was a sexual assault trial for a guy who was really famous and one of the things that came up in trial was the actions of the women before and after the assaults. I thought, twice in my life I’ve been mugged and nobody ever said to me “yeah before you were mugged what were you like?” It just never came up. I got out of the subway, I was walking to my house, a guy jumped out, hit me over the head with a club and took my money. When I reported it no one said “well what were you doing to make him take your money?” It just never came up! My apartment got broken into and no one ever said to me “Yeah but two weeks ago you left the door unlocked.”

...And you know one of the things I didn’t realize, I gotta admit, I thought I was just naïve. I had no idea how many men live in fear of the false accusation. I just didn’t think it would ever come up.

I don’t think we have enough time to get into the layers of that particular one. I’d say 95% of the men I know have no fear whatsoever of being falsely accused of rape, and I think that’s probably due in large part to the fact that they don’t do things that could be “misinterpreted” as rape. I don’t think the line is really so fine. I worry about men who think the line is so fine that they have to worry all the time that some girl is going to accuse them of rape.
 
I do too. I’m glad to hear, 95 is a pretty good percentage there. That’s good to hear.

Well I’m really picky about the people I associate with, I guess.
 
So, a lot of what I’ve been doing is really critical of the true crime genre, but it’s interesting, and enlightening to actually have this conversation with you and think, “Well of course this is why women watch these shows” and “this is what the people working on these shows maybe learn.”
 
And the other thing to keep in mind, and I wonder about this myself, is the stories that become the most famous… when we were going through the possible crimes, one of the things that came up was that, something unusual often times in itself makes it interesting. So what you end up with are a bunch of the stuff that gets dramatized or gets reported is atypical. But I think in some ways, and I don’t watch an awful lot of true crime, but I am interested in the way that they portray the characters. I do think because the network is looking for the “it could happen to me” I think we’re getting a little bit less atypical ones and a little more…

You know that whole, “dog bites man - that’s not a story. But man bites dog – that’s something!” So for quite awhile we had true crime that was all man bites dog. They were after ones that looked out of the ordinary. Now I think there is a trend toward ones that are a little more in the ordinary. In a way that can be good because it can get us a little deeper into things, if the superficial of it isn’t “Oh wow look at that!”

I see what you’re saying. On Investigation Discovery, a lot of these shows are about ordinary families where something extraordinary happens. But when you’re watching the news, they’re still going for the super sensational, crazy, “Oh it comes out that they were into weird sex stuff! It comes out that he had a mistress!” They’re still really leaning on that extraordinary crime, which is interesting because you would think that the entertainment channels would be more focused on the sensational and the news channels would be more focused on the stuff that actually happens every day and affects people.

Yeah. I did think about this a little when I read the interview that you did with the crime reporter last week. One of the things I realized was, for the reporting, it’s really immediate, and it’s ongoing, and it’s as the information comes out. I really got that when he was saying you get the call and you race down and you get there at the same time as the police and there’s a dead body there and you’re writing about it and that goes out to the news. And I thought, that’s really interesting – that speed. Because when we’re looking at these stories – one took place in 1991 or 92, so there’s been a long time to reflect on that.

That’s one of the things about it, it’s just the time difference. The reporter is really after the accuracy of facts and realty the immediacy. They’ve gotta, they’re getting it out fast. And it’s good because what gets out first is often what stays around. I’m glad they’re interested in getting it accurate and getting it out quickly.

Then the line between entertainment and news that really crosses on this, I mean everybody is pretty much accepting the idea that “based on a true story” is based and reality TV’s not really real. But it is a whole separate genre on it’s own where it’s not – it’s not a grey area – but we understand that it’s not raw footage. It’s been edited and it’s been put together. So there is an entertainment aspect of it.
And that was one of the things about working on the show that was a bit of a conflict – a bit of a push and pull between the writer and the producers was the network is still a TV network. So it still has the show divided into acts and it still has breaks in the 48 minutes. So the most common note that I discovered you get in straight ahead fictional TV and in Real Detective was “stronger act out.”

Just before we go to commercial, we want there to be some bump. So this kind of naturally turns the show into a bit of a whodunit because just before we go to commercial, theres a new piece of information. In a way that kind of skews the story telling. In that case it’s clearly entertainment because now we’re trying to do that cliffhanger, suspenseful moment that is more in the entertainment world than in the documentary world. So, everything we worked on had four pieces of new information that came to make for an act-out. So there was a lot of discussion about what was suspenseful and what will keep people watching… It was interesting to me to see that as more of these shows get produced, there’s more variants on that kind of thing. It used to always be “We find out there’s a mistress! Dun-DUN” But now it can be, it’s getting a little bit more subtle. It’s a little bit more character than a piece of evidence. So there’s potential for this kind of story telling, but it’s still a little bit – it’s not really new, it’s been going for awhile – but it’s still getting worked out.

Read John's fiction HERE and look out for Real Detective on Investigation Discovery.

There Is No Such Thing As Appropriation of Voice

Back in the dark ages (1980s) when I was at Concordia University studying English Lit and Creative Writing there was a lot of debate about “Cultural Appropriation” or “Appropriation of Voice.” It seemed like a silly discussion to me – a writer creates fictional characters. Every kind of character; men, women, old, young, aliens, talking dogs, whatever.
And yet.
At the time one of the main drivers of the debate was W.P. Kinsella.* For many years Kinsella published short stories written in the first person narrated by Silas Ermineskin, about life on a First Nations reserve in Alberta, Canada. I thought many of the stories were really good, really funny and tragic and very human. I liked Silas and his friend Frank Fencepost was often hilarious. It was fun hanging out with them.
But after many of these story collections (and a few national awards) there were a few complaints of cultural appropriation. Kinsella rejected the criticism on the grounds that a writer has the license to create anything he chooses and called the term "cultural appropriation" the nonsense of Eastern Canadian academics. And I agreed with him.
And yet.
As this article points out, even though the non-natives writing native stories were “doing this to foster and promote a greater understanding of Aboriginal people and their histories. They can't do that forever and ever because it [becomes] the same old missionary situation.” 
And we didn’t even have the term “white privilege” back then.
Still, I don’t believe in appropriation of voice, I believe writers create fictional characters of all kinds. Lots of non-native writers in Canada have Native characters in their writing.
I think the reason the issue has died out, in this case, is because there are now many more Native writers being published in Canada than there were when Kinsella was publishing his stories so it’s less of a “missionary situation.”
And yet.
There is one kind of book which seems to be popular these days which I realized I have a personal prejudice against, my own appropriation of voice issue. I suppose it’s my own problem and I need to overcome it, but when I see a book written by a middle-aged man and the story is told from the point of view of a young woman I’m very reluctant to pick it up.
It’s my own baggage, I get that. But it kind of feels like the Native issue. It kind of feels like a missionary situation. Literature was dominated by men for a long time. At a literary conference I was at recently one of the panels addressed the question, “Is the default voice in literature male?” It could have been “still male.” If you go by how many more books by men are reviewed then books by women (the VIDA count keeps track) then the answer seems to be yes. And now there are all these young “kick-ass” women created by men. Maybe we need a literary equivalent of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl.
And in Canadian crime fiction we have what seems to be an odd situation. There are a number of bestselling women writers who write from a male point of view and a bunch of bestselling male writers who write from a young female point of view.
But there aren’t many Canadian women writing bestsellers with female protagonists.
So, thank goodness for Hilary Davidson and I hope soon Robin Spano is a bestseller.
And although it’s not really being marketed as crime fiction, Elizabeth de Mariaffi’s debut novel, The Devil You Know is a fantastic story with a young female protagonist.
The story follows twenty-one year old Evie Jones, a reporter for a newspaper in Toronto in the early 1990s. As she says, when you read an article and in addition to the reporter’s byline there is the line, “with additional files from,” that’s her.
This is a novel that uses many real, horrific events in the story and it could easily have become exploitive. One of the reasons it doesn’t, I think, is because of how feminine it is. The way the narrator talks about the silences and the darknesses in her daily life and the way she identifies with the victims, slipping in a casual, “I could so easily be those girls,” that it feels so natural.
This isn’t a book about justice or the search for justice or some detective trying to find the guilty man.
The Quill and Quire review said, “In her engaging, witty debut novel, Elisabeth de Mariaffi challenges the mainstream tropes of the detective and suspense genres by placing sexual violence along the spectrum of intimidation, harassment, and fear that women experience on a daily basis.” And that’s true. Sort of. I really liked how the novel did place the sexual violence along that spectrum but I think it may only be a Canadian review that would see this book as challenging the mainstream tropes. Those tropes have been challenged so much by Megan Abbott and Denise Mina and Tana French and Gillian Flynn and Hilary Davidson and Krist Belcamino and so many more that they’re no longer mainstream tropes.
While I still feel that there’s no such thing as appropriation of voice and writers certainly have the license to create anything from any point of view they want I’m still unlikely to pick up a book with a young female narrator written by a middle-aged man. It kind of feels like a missionary situation these days.
* Kinsella is probably best known outside of Canada for writing the novel, Shoeless Joe Jackson Comes to Iowa which was turned into the movie Field of Dreams.

Cover Stories

By Russel D McLean

I’ve talked about this before on me main blog, but again I’m thinking about covers. Following my reading recently of Barry Eisler’s “open letter” to his French publishers (and all publishers) I’ve found myself thinking about covers. And its true that covers affect the way I think about a book.

One of my favourite series of covers, as anyone whose heard me wax lyrical on the subject will know, was the sequence of covers that Serpent’s Tail did the early books of George Pelecanos. Indeed, it was the cover of the sublime King Suckerman that persuaded me to get into Pelecanos in the first place.

The immediately recognisable reminded me just a little of the old Elmore Leonard covers I used to buy my dad when I was a kid. They were two tone, simple designs, and absolutely striking. Strange as it sounds, one of my main memories is me and mum trying to decide which Leonard to buy him based on the colours of the covers (we couldn’t have told you the titles – I was too young and mum, well, she wasn’t a Leonard reader). I’ll be honest with you, much as I love Leonard’s books, the covers have never really been as striking since.

I love the idea of branding in that sense. Not every Leonard book is the same inside, but outside you knew you were getting a Leonard. Same with Pelecanos – an author who, despite some hiccups, has generally had his own branding from the brilliance of Serpent’s Tail through to the simple “crime tape” tagging of a couple of years back to the stark white and blue covers that predominate his current incarnation. And I couldn’t go without mentioning the old Richard Stark covers – the ones with the bullet hole in the front and the tagline: “A novel of violence”. Everything you need to know, believe me.

I also love the whole-series branding that is happening in the Hard Case Crime Line-up. Not every cover painting stands equal (some I like less than others), but again you are hard pressed* to mistake them for anything else.

Interesting aside note – I managed to grab an early copy of one of HCC’s first books – Allan Guthrie’s excellent Two Way Split – which was actually part of print run that was somehow damaged. The cover wore easily, cracked and peeled. But the strange thing is that given the nature of the HCC design, this really looked right and the edition now stands proud among the real old pulps that clutter my bookshelf, looking like it belongs, like it was truly part of the era it is echoing.

But I digress. And to return to covers, let’s boil it down like this: I like strong images. I like an uncluttered feel. I like something original. Something that says: this is what’s going on. So in one sense, myself and Mr Eisler agree on that: a cover should not only be strong, it should vibe what’s inside the book.

Where we disagree of course, is over his choice of cover preference. While Eisler prefers his UK covers, I find them overly busy and muddy. The French cover – while, perhaps, not capturing the mis-en-scene of an Eisler novel, is less cluttered and more clear to my eyes. Which goes to show that sometimes, cover art is in the eye of the beholder.

So how would one convey an action cover well?

I do like the cover to Sean Black’s recent thriller, Lock Down. The cover is busy and explosive, but the focus is on the title and the central explosion, unlike the Eisler covers where the eye is not drawn to any one thing in particular (other than the title, but beyond that? I just see a morass of colours).

One of the best covers I’ve seen in ages plopped its way into my inbox recently – the cover for the upcoming Busted Flush anthology, Damn Near Dead 2. It’s an absolute doozy, and conveys precisely the tone of the anthology while managing to stand out from the crowd effectively. In fact, I’d say that as BF are continuing, their covers are getting better and better. Simple, clear and effective. Not branded in an HCC sense but perfectly adapted to their authors.

And I think that’s the key – so many covers fail to create a proper sense of the book inside through sloppy design or inappropriate imagery. There is more to cover design than you might believe, even if so many houses seem to believe that copying another author’s style may be the key (step forward the Da Vinci Code Rip Offs and the Lee Child Alikes, please). Those that get it right create mini masterpieces. Does it tell you anything that I have a collection of old paperbacks collected not for the stories inside, but for the love of the covers, of the moods and ideas they represent?

And, of course, inkeeping with this week’s theme, I give unto you the cover of a book by a guy who’s a hell of a writer… oh, yes, we warned you it was McFetridge week here at DSD…

*was that a pun? It was nearly a pun.

Dirty Sweet Words

By Jay Stringer

(Pulled a bit of a switch on you again this week, eh? What can I say. We’re sneaky like that.)

So, you’ve heard McFet’s latest book SWAP was released -after being processed through the babel fish for those of us who don’t speak Canadian- as LET IT RIDE in all good U.S. bookstores yesterday (that’s me making with the funny again) and to the online outlets such as the amazons.

If only there were some way you could link to things on a website.

With the new book hitting shelves, I thought I’d continue the theme and take a look back at his first two, Dirty Sweet and Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere. There are song references in both of those titles, for those keeping score at home.

I’ve been trying to think of the best way to start for the past week, and failing each time. Then Joelle gave me the answer with her debut DSD post on Sunday; voice.

John’s books have plots. Very good ones. And I’ll get to them in a minute. But the plots are not what made me pick up another of his books as soon as I’d finished my first one. It was that vital element, the thing that separates your favorite authors from the rest; voice.

Voice is a tricky sell in fiction. Especially if your tastes match mine, and you want your author to be as close to invisible as possible. You don’t want their opinions their sarcasm or their accent getting in the way. You don’t want their worldview beating you round the head, even if it’s a view you agree with. What you’ll find in a John McFetridge book is that perfect balance. The characters do the talking, the plot does the moving and the book does the reading. You’re never in doubt who the author is, but he never steps in to talk to you.

I know the easy trick is to mention Elmore Leonard, but I don’t really see it the way the other reviews do. It’s not really there in the dialogue, and, okay, it’s urban crime so yes there are crossovers. But where it does hold true for me is in the same way it holds true of any number of top writers; The work is addictive. So I could also reference folks like Lawrence Block, Scott Phillips or Charles Willeford. You wouldn’t really say these guys write alike, but they all have that same power in their writing, that same Laid back confidence. When you start reading the first line, you won’t be aware of time passing until you’re a few chapters in, and by that point you know this is a book you want to finish.

And I better mention the dialogue. This is probably something that’ll make one of Dave White’s hit lists one day. Every reviewer wants to tell you how their guy has the sharpest, crispest, most believable dialogue. There was a meeting about it somewhere, I think, and it was made into law. I don’t know, DSD don’t get invited to those meetings.

So all that aside, what am I going to tell you about the dialogue in these books? Well, I wasn’t aware of reading ‘dialogue’. I wasn’t hit with crispness, sharpness, or realism. All I noticed was that these characters could talk, and I never for a moment doubted that they would say those things. It just flows, and never waves at you to look how cool it is. That set a new standard for me to try and aim for. In fact, it was one that stopped me writing for a little while. I started a couple of projects straight after finishing Everybody Knows.. and found myself writing in McFets voice and not mine.

Now that was a good trick.

Okay, the books themselves. First up is Dirty Sweet. If William Goldman had written a Toronto crime script instead of a western, it may have been something like this. It’s got a Russian criminal who secretly wants to be a businessman. A Canadian businesswoman who secretly wants to be a criminal, and a guy who makes porn who…well…he doesn’t really know what he wants to be.

It’s not giving away anything that has been mentioned on this site before to say that the story starts when the woman, Roxanne Keyes, witnesses a major crime that involves the Russian, Boris. And rather than report him to the cops, she decides to see how she can make money out of it. This has been a running theme in the books so far, and one true of all cities; everyone’s just looking for ways to make a buck. To try and find an angle, she hooks up with Vince, who runs an Internet porn company. He might not know what he wants to be, but he thinks maybe he’ll find the answer somewhere beneath Roxanne’s skirt. So the three of them enter into the game, circling each other, and being circled by the cops, waiting for one of them to figure out the perfect scam.

The following book isn’t a direct sequel. But what it does to is expand the same world. All of these stories are taking place in the same city, the characters move round each other; they probably drink at some of the same places. It reminds me of the old school marvel universe, in the days before publishers wanted to take money from you through crossovers, they just let the characters all hang out in the same space.

So Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere both expands on the first book and also ignores it, in all the right ways. Many of the cops who were supporting characters in the first book step up here to carry the book. A gang war that was bubbling away in the background of Dirty Sweet picks up apace, and a major investigation by the RCMP bridges the two. But none of that is important to reading the book, they’re just fun easter eggs. The book starts with a dead body –to say anymore than that would ruin one of the best openings I’ve read in ages- and the follows both the cops and the criminals as they plot coups, murder and profit.

There is the same sort of game as in the first book, with a bunch of people circling each other waiting to find the right way to make some money, but it plays out in a fresh way. I’ve seen a few comparisons to The Wire and, though they’re doing different things, I think I can see that comparison. This is a crime novel that’s not so much telling you a single story as it is giving you a bit of a city, showing how things work and how the pieces are put into place. You come out of it not wanting to know more about a couple of characters, but wanting to know more about everyone, about the whole city and where all of the political maneuvering leads to next.

Let It Ride I’ll be with me in a couple of days, and I’m looking forward to it.

Flash, Holmes, Podcast

By Steve Weddle

Jay Stringer and I just hung up -- or 'clicked off' (What do we say anymore? And why do we still say 'dial' a phone number when we just press buttons in the post-rotary days?) -- from the Skypes for our second DSD podcast.

The iTunes shoppe page for the podcast is here. You can download individual episodes or subscribe to the whole run. The second show will be up mid-week after Jay works his evil magic to make me sound like an over-caffeinated lemur.

Future episodes will include publishing news of the week, interviews, reviews, and audio stories.

In this second episode, John McFetridge reads his short story "Santa in a Red Dress."

Jay and I discuss blogs worth reading, the Sherlock Holmes movie (along with a review from Scott D. Parker), and flash fiction. I have a few thoughts about flash fiction and I'd like to know what you think.

1. Flash Fiction owes its popularity to the fact that most people can't follow a single thought for more than thirty seconds. Or eight seconds. Like in that movie where the dude is a rodeo rider and rapper. Or maybe that was EIGHT MILES. Something. Eight something. Eight Days a Week. Beatles. Rock Band. Hey, the Wii is open. Time for a quick bike ride around Wii island.

2. Flash Fiction works much better on the Innerwebs than it does in print. As Jay and I were discussing on the podcast, when his grandpa and I were growing up, we read ink-on-paper magazines. You might have heard about a shepherd boy who threw a rock and cracked open jars full of old copies of LIFE and US WEEKLY. Now flash fiction challenges such as this one and this one and this one allow readers and writers to get glimpses of talent they didn't know existed. When we relied on print mags for our fiction, the flash fiction might have gotten lost between stories, if you could find it at all. A 400-page collection of 200 flash pieces? Not likely.

3. Flash Fiction is much easier to find now. I remember some collections of flash fiction that I used when I taught literature. You could give it to the college students and start a good discussion on character and setting and so forth. Very helpful, since you could read the piece in class and not have to rely on college students actually having done the work. We only had a few choices back when I was teaching. The monks took a long time to illustrate the scrolls scrolls we used. Now, using the community I mentioned above in Idiotic Point The First, finding flash fiction is easier.

4. OK. Let's think about this one for a second. You put a story up on the Innerwebs, chances are you aren't going to get paid $10,000 for it. I remember reading something Garrison Keillor wrote about a story he'd done in The New Yorker, a story had gotten him $10,000 or so. Most online magazines now are run by folks who love what they do and love the stories they work with. They're not doing this for the money, because, well, there ain't none. And the print mags? Did another one die today? I didn't check. So we rely on the online magazines to provide us with great fiction. The writers don't get paid. The editors don't get paid. So, from a writer's point of view, if you're trying to get noticed and share some of your work, does it make sense to spend your time writing a 7,000-word story for one magazine or writing 10 stories of 700 words for various sites? Personally, it depends on what the story is. I've got longer stuff out there because that what it takes to tell the story. I've got shorter stuff out there because I wanted to have fun with something and maybe try out something new. A new character. A wacky idea. Take a chance, you know? But do you think writers are spending more time writing flash because they don't want to spend their "free time" -- time off from paid jobs, doing something for which they don't get paid -- writing for free? Dunno. Maybe some folks work like this.

5. Flash Fiction is great for writers because you can focus on a particular scene or character in something under 1,000 words. You get that done, maybe it's a chapter in a novel. Maybe it's a character study for a novella. Flash Fiction helps writers test out a new voice or fresh idea, as I mentioned a second ago (I remind you because the TV news tells me you have a short attention span. Remember? I already mentioned that.) and, wait, where was I? Oh, yeah. So you take this little, tight piece you've worked on and build it into something more, something bigger. Like you've made an appetizer and want to work it into a larger meal. Or you've painted your study and now want to carry that color scheme throughout the rest of the house.

So what do you think about Flash Fiction? What purpose does it serve? Do you think writers waste their time on these smaller pieces? Or do you think this helps readers and writers?

Hey, who said that?

By Steve Weddle

I was almost to the grocery story when she called.
“Danny?”
“Yeah.”
“Hey, what’s up? You OK? Where are you?”
“Yeah, I’m fine. Tony got arrested for killing a stripper.”
“You sure know how to party without me.”
“No. Really. He did. I just got him a lawyer.”
“Oh. You’re serious? Tony’s charged with murder?”
“Yeah.”
“Damn.”
“Yeah.”
“You feel like going into details now?”
“I’m on my way to the store for liquor and pizza. Tomorrow I’m gonna look around for who really killed her.”
“So that’s a ‘no’?”
“What?” I asked.
“You don’t want to go into details now?”
“I thought those were the details.”
“OK.”
“What OK?”
“Nothing.”
Neither of us said anything. Great.
“You want to call me later?”
“Yeah.”
“Be careful,” she said.
“Yeah. Hey, Kate.”
“Yeah?”
“Uh, I’m sorry.”
“About what?”
“I don’t know. Just, you know. Us. Whatever us is.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Me, too.”
We hung up. I went inside the store and couldn’t find anything I wanted.
---------------------
A situation. Two people talking. Dialogue. Does the reader need more? How much more? Should the reader see the inner monologue of one of the characters? Both? How much detail of the scene does the reader need? Should you use details here to slow down the dialogue? To carry meaning? To build symbols?

These are the sorts of questions every writer deals with. To quote or paraphrase. To provide summary.

That dialogue is from a scene I’m writing. Probably near the end things need to slow down a bit as the emotion settles in. Start quickly to get the reader into the story. Then slow down when you want to make an impact. Writers follow this with action all the time.

A novelist might set something up – the killer is just about to enter the room where the main character is passed out drunk. Once the writer sets that up, then the writer can shift the point of view or spend a couple of paragraphs detailing the scene. Or showing inner monologue. All to build tension.

That’s in the action scenes. We slow things down to build tension. We have many ways to play with the action scenes, to work with the reader’s expectations in telling the story. But how many options do we have for dialogue? For running the inner monologue with the dialogue?

I’ve been reading John McFetridge’s SWAP and have been fascinated with his developing technique.
Here, let me show you something from the opening pages when Sgt. Vernard “Get” McGetty is at a border crossing.

“What is the purpose of your trip?”
Get said it was a vacation. “I’m going to the film festival.”
The guy said, oh yeah, and it’s not business?
Vernard said, yeah, “I’m Jamie Foxx.”



What I really like about this (and I’ll give a fuller review of the book at some point) is that, as a reader, I feel like somebody is telling me a story. The indirect quote and direct quote work together to provide a seamless stream of storytelling.

You lose yourself in the story, but never lose the story.

There’s none of the he said, he said, he asked, she said building up. Is that needed? In the opening example, most of scenic details and the “he said” tags are gone. They’re mostly ditched in John McFetridge’s SWAP dialogue, as well. How much of that does the reader need?

How much of the technique, the rules, the framing do we need to get the dialogue across? Do we need to have “The words” followed by the “he said” in each line, alternating with the “she said” tags?

In a recent PARIS REVIEW interview that’s working around the innerwebs, James Ellroy spoke of another author’s dialogue. "I tried to read a Cormac McCarthy book and thought, Why doesn’t this cocksucker use quotation marks?"

Why didn’t James Joyce or John William Corrington use quotation marks?

We all know that writers do everything they can to try to keep the reader “in the story.”

I think the scenery can get in the way of good dialogue. I’ve read writers who try to slow down the talking by throwing in weather reports. And I’ve also read writers who go back and forth with dialogue for a page or two, like some epic baseline volley in tennis. And, well, I get lost sometimes. I have to look a few lines up, figure out who said what, and then follow down slowly so that I know who the writer meant to say, “And that’s when I shot him.” Because that shooting stuff can get to be kinda important. I imagine there’s a rulebook somewhere (that we’ve lost, a la GREATEST AMERICAN HERO) that says only go so many lines of dialogue deep before you reindentify the speakers.

Is anyone else bothered by too much or too little scenery in dialogue? Too many or too few identifiers in who is saying what? Too many direct quotes and too few indirect? Are some writers just better at pacing dialogue than others? What makes good dialogue?