The Author, in the Publishing House, with the Estate

By Russel D McLean

Note - This article was originally written when Sophie Hannah was announced as the author of a new Poirot novel. The intended publication, for a variety of reasons, never actually published the piece. But now seems like a good time to resurrect it, with a new Marlowe novel written by John Banville due to appear in the next few weeks. Advance word is, of course, mixed. I do think that only a handful of authors – and maybe not even those – would be able to successfully replicate the unique atmosphere of Chandler and Marlowe, but at the same time I think that readers cannot get too upset when their favourite author’s creations are touched upon by others. As with film adaptations, the originals are still there to be devoured and re-read and discovered by new readers that may be brought to them by the fresh and new interpretation.

So let’s jump in the way-back machine and go back to 2013, just a few days after Hannah was announced as the author of the new Poirot novel…

Scroll down the internet comment pages and you’ll come across a number of opinions regarding the recent news that Sophie Hannah has been chosen to write a new Poirot novel, the first time that anyone except Christie has dared to touch the Belgian Detective – in print – aside from Agatha Christie. The majority of these opinions, being that this is the internet after all, are overwhelmingly negative. I can understand that people might be worried. Hannah is a safe pair of hands, but the idea of Poirot being written by someone other than his creator seems, at first glance, counter intuitive. It might seem to some like a mere money grabbing scheme (but then, I always wonder, what author wouldn’t really appreciate something that brings money to them or their estate? Anyone who claims they wouldn’t is merely posturing - - selling out is absolutely not the worst thing that can happen to an author; being ignored is). But the whole idea of a literary estate passing onto another writer is not new. It has been done before – and will be done again – with varying degrees of success. And in the field of crime and thriller fiction, it seems almost mandatory to have your series character continue after your death. Here are but a few examples:

Sherlock Holmes (created by Arthur Conan Doyle) – Holmes has of course entered into the public domain which means that anyone who’s everyone has written a “new adventure” for Holmes, ranging from the bloody terrible to the surprisingly good. He’s appeared in a Doctor Who novel, fighting the ancient creatures of HP Lovecraft’s imagination, and even on the Titanic. There was a raft of “New Sherlock Holmes” which have recently been re-released by Titan books and which are of varying quality depending on the author tackling the subject. But the only “official” new Holmes adventure was written by Anthony Horowitz a few years back. Consensus of House of Silk was that it wasn’t quite Conan Doyle, but was nevertheless a diverting and fun read. Which perhaps shows more than Holmes has outgrown his creator with the passing of time; it’s not Conan Doyle people care about so much as the character at the centre of the novels.

James Bond (created by Ian Fleming) – There were a fair few Bond novels written after Fleming’s death by the likes of John Gardner and even Martin Amis, but they never really achieved the success of the original novels. In recent years, Sebastian Faulks gave the series a shot in the arm but more for the media hoopla surrounding the release of Devil May Care than the actual quality of the book. Jeffery Deaver came along next, and now William Boyd will be tackling 007. But while the books often get a lot of coverage, there’s a sense that its more because of the names being attracted to the series than the quality of the novels. Besides, Bond has become a media creation now, the movies overshadowing the literary works in terms of public knowledge.

Jason Bourne (created by Robert Ludlum) – The amnesiac secret agent was originally created by doorstop thriller writer Ludlum and featured in three novels that were mercifully streamlined for a series of blockbuster movies. After Ludlum’s death, his estate authorised a number of authors to continue his various series, but the most successful has been Eric Van Lustbader’s continuation of Bourne’s adventures that continue to appear regularly to satiate fans eager for more espionage.

Sam Spade (created by Dashiell Hammett) – With a face made of V’s and a tough demeanour, Spade is the most natural equal to Chandler’s Marlowe. Hammett brought a tough style to his fiction gained from his own years as a detective, although he only ever wrote one novel with Sam Spade at the centre. That book was the Maltese Falcon. The man hired to write the prequel a few years ago was Joe Gorres, who had made his name with a book called Hammett that put the creator of Spade as the lead in a brilliantly executed period thriller. He seemed to have the chops, and certainly his effort, titled Spade and Archer was one of the most authentic attempt to recapture the feel of a novelist who had passed on decades earlier. A book that if you haven’t read, you really should seek out.

Mike Hammer (created by Mickey Spillane) – After Spillane’s death, his friend, Max Allan Collins, has continued to rework old books for re-release by a variety of publishers including unpublished Hammer novels. The tough guy private eye lives on, it seems, even after his equally tough creator is gone. Collins seems to have been well place to continue Spillane’s legacy, and the books have been very well received.

Philip Marlowe (created by Raymond Chandler) – Marlowe was the archetype for the wisecracking first person PI, and Chandler imbued him with a unique voice that has brought real pleasure to millions of readers. He died having only written a chapter of The Poodle Springs Novel (later titled just Poodle Springs), starting with the near impossible task of seeing Marlowe married off. The book was finished by acclaimed PI writer Robert B Parker, but it lacked the spark of an original Chandler or even an original Parker and is perhaps best regarded as a curiosity for completists. Parker also wrote an original Marlowe novel (which is perhaps even more obscure), and now Benjamin Black has been tasked with writing a new Marlowe adventure by the Chandler estate.

We can add to this list a number of other strange attempts from other genres, including Emma Tennant’s addition to the world of Jane Eyre (The French Dancer’s Bastard), and PD James’s slightly bizarre attempt to put a murder mystery into Austen with Death Comes to Pemberley. But it’s clear that despite the outrage from certain camps of Christie-ites, the tradition of the posthumous novel – particularly in crime fiction – is one that has been, ironically, alive and kicking for a long time.

One in the Eye

By Russel D Mclean

I still can’t say when it will be published (for a number of reasons) but the other day I put to bed the latest draft of the fourth McNee novel. If you don’t know the books, McNee is a private investigator from Dundee, Scotland. When I started writing the books, I remember the author Steven Torres asking if there were any other Scottish PIs. At the time I couldn’t think of any. Today, I still can’t. I sometimes wonder if that’s because the UK is so in thrall to the police procedural (and especially Scotland, where the admittedly excellent Laidlaw series kickstarted the modern movement so hard, we find it hard to escape the Inspector’s long shadow). But when people ask me why I chose to write about a PI, I have to point them towards my influences. So here are the five most influential (to me) PI novels that I have read:

   

           1) WHEN THE SACRED GINMILL CLOSES by Lawrence Block – It was my dad who introduced me to crime writers, and one of the biggies at the time was Lawrence Block. As Dad said, Block wasn’t just writing about colving crimes, he was writing both about New York and about alcoholism. This particular book changes everything for Matt Scudder. His alcoholism is final properly acknowledged, and the closing of the novel is a stunner. The mystery and crime elements are very well handled, but really this book shows how the PI novel is about so much more than just solving a crime and how the detective can be affected much more deeply than a cop, who is assigned a case rather than actively choosing to pursue it. Block and Scudder were my introduction to PI fiction (as an adult) and I haven’t looked back.

      2)  THE GOODBYE LOOK by Ross MacDonald – You could probably blame Ross MacDonald for the family theme that runs through the McNee novels. MacDonald’s Lew Archer novels were obsessed with family secrets, which is perhaps no surprise given his focus on psychological motivations; who else can affect you more deeply than family? The Goodbye Look was the first MacDonald I read (and it was far from the last), and it blew me away. This one finds Archer employed to discover why a son would be involved in a burglary perpetrated against his own parents. But Archer soon uncovers decades worth of secrets and lies linked to an old kidnapping. MacDonald really added a psychological depth to the pulp template, and deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as Hammett and Chandler, which is why it was a terrible shame he was so hard to find in the UK for a long time (although Penguin Classics have now re-released the books).

       3)  THE BIG SLEEP by Raymond Chandler – Anyone who says they don’t like or appreciate Chandler is lying or trying to hard to find a reason to disparage him. Yes, Chandler’s plots are often a little unclear (he tended to move from set piece to set piece, each scene more important than its place in the whole) but by God, its all about the writing. And no one has bettered Chandler. He is the reason for all the wisecracking heroes, all the glib humour in crime fiction. And with The Big Sleep he instantly creates a hero who would become something of an archetype. Encoded in every PI (and many cops) following Chandler is the DNA of Philip Marlowe.

It was about eleven o'clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved, and sober, and I didn't care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars…

      4) The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett – Hammett’s own experiences as private eye served to inform his fiction, and with the Maltese Falcon his hard edged experiences clearly inform the character of Sam Spade. It’s a tough novel on many levels, and its interesting on re-read to see how Hammett doesn’t really let us too deep inside the character’s heads, preferring instead to let their actions do the talking. He’s a tougher read than Chandler in some ways (he’s a lot less warm) but he’s every bit as rewarding. As with Marlowe, Spade would go on to influence generations of PI characters.

  

5)   Hammett by Joe Gores – this 1975 novel took the tricksy task of blending real life and fiction by making Hammett the central investigator. It’s a brilliant novel from Gores (who would later write the official prequel to the Maltese Falcon, authorised by the Hammett Estate, and one of the few novels of its nature that really invoked the atmosphere of the works on which it was based) and his fictional recreation of a real life figure feels absolutely real. Its become a kind of forgotten gem, and I’m not sure if its still in print, but if you can get a hold of it, you really should: it’s a great novel about crime and crime fiction and works both as a thriller and as a kind of meta-commentary on the history of the genre.

Are there modern writers you should be reading, I hear you ask? Oh, yes, there have been some great eye novels past the 90s, but the books mentioned are the ones that really influenced me before I was published. So if you’re looking for more modern eyes, check out Sean Chercover’s Ray Dudgeon books, Reed Farrell Coleman’s Moe Prager novels, Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Milhone novels and Laura Lippman’s Tess Monaghan series. And while I bemoan the lack of Scots eyes, check out an Irish eye in Jen Bruen’s Jack Taylor novels, an ex-con who thinks he’s an eye in Ray Banks’s Cal Innes series and our own Jay Stringer’s brilliant Eoin Miller books.

 

Passage Work

By Russel D McLean

“The emotional basis of the standard detective story was and had always been that murder will out and justice will be done. Its technical basis was the relative insignificance of everything except the final denouement. What led up to that was more or less passage work.” – Raymond Chandler, Trouble is my Business (1950)

Let me start out by saying I love crime fiction. I adore the genre completely. I think it capable of great things and some of the loveliest people I know are crime writers. Some of the most amazing books I’ve ever read are crime novels, but then they’re the ones that do exactly what I’m just about to talk about here…

I do a little bit of reading work here and there, freelance, for various people who send me unpublished manuscripts for appraisal*. This one I was reading, like many I get sent, contained a promise from the writer that it would send me into a state of shock and awe with its unique take on the tired detective genre.

It didn’t.

In fact, it trotted out a lot of the same-old, same-old, simply biding its time until it could try to pull the rug out from under the reader in a climax it clearly believed was going to shock everyone.

The curse of the twist ending.

Where all that matters is the twist. Everything that comes before the twist fails to matter because all the writer (and by extension the reader) is interested in is the twist.

The preceding was all “passage work”. None of it mattered if you didn’t have the ending.

Some people can do the twist well. Some writers can build to a twist and still have the work before feel less like passage work and more of interest in and of itself. But it’s a rare skill to be able to do this.

The end of the Chandler quote is this:

“The ideal mystery was one you would read if the end was missing”

And its true. A mystery, or a crime novel (I view mystery as a subset of crime, so deal with it), is so much more than its twist ending or its dramatic reveal. While these are important (a good ending is a climax; an inevitable outcome that is shocking not in the unexpected but in the emotional sense), the journey to the end should not be dull or uninteresting or merely filling time. And too often in crime fiction it is. Endless scenes of procedure pad out pages with no emotional connection, or else there’s a pretence that something of deep import is happening that is actually of no relevance because the twist or the reveal is so all consuming that nothing else matters.

Every scene matters.

Every scene should be of interest in and of itself.

Every scene should be interesting.

To return to Chandler, there should be fireworks on every page. Whether that’s literary fireworks or emotional ones. Whether its just one good line or a sequence that leaves the reader literally breathless. Too often, I find pages filled with filler. Scenes that take too long to end, scenes that sometimes contain their own twist at the end after a mini-sequence of passage work to lead there, that would have been better eliminating the preceding and merely giving us the twist.

Not to say that one should eliminate foregrounding and set up. But rather that a writer should also make the foregrounding and setup interesting in and of themselves.

An impossible task?

Maybe.

When I was young and starting out with this thing called writing, my dad said something to me that stuck, that as a reader he didn’t mind the destination being a bit dull as long as the journey was worthwhile.

Took me a long time to figure what meant. But I get it, now. A novel is ninety-nine percent journey and one-percent destination (as, on a micro level, is any scene)* and that journey has to be interesting. At least as interesting as the destination, maybe more so.

Fireworks, people.

Make people remember scenes. Make them remember moments. Make them talk about dialogue and character with joy and the memory not of finishing the book, of reaching the climax, but of the actual reading of it.

*note – don’t send me manuscripts unbidden. I only take them through sources I know (and sources who know my work), on a pre-agreed chargeable freelance basis. I never know who the authors of these manuscripts are,  and I won’t open an unpublished manuscript that arrives unbidden in my mail box. 

**Although I do remember one novel where the explanation of the twist was as long as the set up. I read with my jaw on the floor as the climax turned out to be roughly sixty pages of exposition and re-explanation of things previously seen

Books Like People.

 By Russel D McLean

Last week I spoke at a school as part of their Book Week, being held right before National Book Day hits here in the UK. National Book Day is all about getting kids reading, because we should all be concerned about literacy rates.

One of the things I talked to them about (and I covered a massive variety of topics, so all of the stuff that follows is an expansion or exploration of some off the cuff comments) was the fact that we don't have to read books to "better" ourselves. Yes, we should talk about books. We should talk about issues raised in books. But in the same way that we do that with movies and computer games and other forms of narrative entertainment. Books are always being touted as being somehow "better" than other narrative forms, but I sometimes think this translates into books not working as hard as they could, as though by the very nature of being prose they've earned some slack.

Not true.

Look, books (we're talking fiction here) are about entertainment. Like movies, they can be about deep, provoking entertainment or they can be about relaxing us in some way, helping us escape reality. Sometimes, on rare occasions, they can do both. One of the reasons I love crime fiction is that I can at once thrill to the excitment of what I'm reading, but I can also talk about issues raised, whether its about the nature of crime, the culpability of criminals, the society that creates certain types of crime, or whatever. But the fact is that I seek out books I enjoy and that speak to me.

I see no shame in not enjoying a book.

And just because I don't enjoy it doesn't mean its bad. This was one of my other points: that we should not be afraid to say we didn't enjoy a book. It just means that, as with people, we suffer from a kind of personality clash. There are some people out there who are perfectly nice that we just don't get along with. And its the same with books.

Me and Agatha Christie don't get along too well. I appreciate her intelligence, her influence and the way she so cleverly creates these perfect little plots where the guilty are caught, but the fact is that we don't have anything in common. Me and Raymond Chandler on the other hand, have a little magic on every page and care about atmosphere and character over plot, which is why we get on so well (and why neither of us really care who killed the Sternwood Chauffeur).

You shouldn't be afraid to dislike a book. But you should be able to say why that is beyond "I didn't like it." By examining the reasons certain books don't appeal to you, you start to discover more about yourself and who you are.


I think we need to talk about books. But not just about how they better us. We need to talk about them on the same level as movies and other narratives. We need to talk about them not as special objects but simply as things that are. They're another delivery method for stories and fictions both good and bad. They're not innately special compared to these other methods, but they are different and unique in their own way, capable of delivering a certain kind of experience in a way that movies cannot in the same way that movies deliver a certain experience books cannot.

A good story is a good story.

A bad story is a bad story.

And there are millions of good stories between paper covers or glowing out at us from the screens of our e-readers.

Let's talk about them.

Let's agree about them.

Let's disagree about them.

Let's discover them.

Let's read them.

Who Killed the Chauffeur (and who cares?)

Russel D McLean

Check out Russel's new website (and blog) at www.russeldmcleanbooks.com

In The Big Sleep, there’s a great moment when Marlowe is called out to the murder of the Sternwood family Chauffeur. It’s a great scene and one that serves to move the story forward, but rumour has it that when Howard Hawks was filming the movie, he called Chandler and asked,

Who killed the Chauffeur?

 
And it’s a fair question. No one really knows. And the rumour is that Chandler himself responded quite blithely that he didn’t either, making it just another instance of his maxim that when the plot slows down you have a man walk through the door with a gun*

It’s a massive plot hole, or at least certain readers may consider it as such. But you know, I like it. I like it a lot because it makes me think of life.

In life nobody knows everything.

And nobody gets to know everything.

I like to leave a few loose ends in my novels. Of course, given that I’m writing a sequence in the McNee books, one or two of those get picked up later. A few questions from The Lost Sister will be answered in Father Confessor (but yet a few more might be raised), but sometimes there are things that you don’t need to know. It doesn’t matter if you don’t know them. And its more fun if you can argue or conjecture about what really happened.

Moving up to the modern age (ish), one of my favourite ever episodes of the Sopranos (me and ten million others) was the one where Paulie and Christopher take a Russian out to the woods to kill him. He escapes, they think they shoot him in the head, but then they can’t find the body. They get lost in the woods. They go through real bad times. But they don’t find the Russian. They don’t know if he’s dead or alive. But the point of the story is not the Russian, but how they cope with being lost in the cold and alone with each other. Oh, and by the way, if you have never watched the Sopranos here is your spoiler alert.





 Lots of people spent the rest of the series conjecturing whether the Russian was really dead, and what might happen if he returned. But he never did. And nothing ever came of the fact they killed this guy. Because it didn’t matter. And because, well, why would anything have come of that? It’s a fine dramatic line between thematic webs and daft coincidence. And the fact that we never really did know about the Russian was brilliant. Because it felt real. Because sometimes in life, you do things, or you see things, and they don’t come back to haunt you in some ironic way or have any real impact on anything again even if, in a made-up, all-the-dots-connect-world they surely should have.

Now I’m not saying I do anything as well as either of these examples, or that I use such extremes, but I do believe that sometimes you don’t have to know everything for a story to work. In fact I’d rather not be told everything and be able to imagine a world that continues beyond the confines of what I’ve seen of it.

And, really, I don’t care who killed the Chauffeur, but I do care that it got Marlowe to the right place at the right time to answer the bigger questions. And that while we never found out who did it, it didn’t feel forced or unnatural. In fact, it felt real.

*metaphorically speaking

The Ian Fleming - Raymond Chandler Podcast

by
John McFetridge

Okay, so it wasn't a podcast it was Ian Fleming interviewing Raymond Chandler on the BBC, but it sounds just like a podcast today - a couple of writers sitting around bitching. What is genre? Can it be literature? How long does it take you to write a book?

Fleming even asks Chandler, "Where do you get your ideas?"

The interview took plce in 1958. There's about a five minute intro here giving some background and then the interview starts. It's really worth listening to the whole thing.

Here's Part One:



Part Two:



Part Three:



Part Four:




I think it's interesting when Chandler says there are no California novelists worth talking about no one mentions John Steinbeck.