Location, Location, Location

By Russel D McLean

Scudder was so drunk. he thought that 'tache was cool

Are some characters wedded to their surroundings?

I watched the 1986 screen adaptation of Lawrence Block’s superb Matt Scudder novel 8 Million Ways to Die the other week. I knew from people who had seen it that there would be problems, but the idea of adaptations intrigues me and I love to see the way film-makers approach novels, often finding that those who have a strong vision produce the most interesting works that don’t always have to be note-perfect adaptations.

However, it always intrigues me when they move characters out of their natural surroundings.

And that’s exactly what they did here with Scudder.

The plot of the film is fairly inconsequential in many ways. It marries together a few different elements from the Scudder books and very quickly sets up his alcoholism after softening (just a touch) the mistake that got Matt fired from the police. Now, what the film has in its favour is Jeff Bridges. Even now he’d be my first choice for Scudder (although the recent announcement that Liam Neeson is to take on the role is not one that I’m opposed to), and here he does a fine job of playing the asshole with the unshakeable sense of responsibility. He’s great struggling with the bottle and acting against his better instincts. But something feels off.

And I realised that its nothing to do with Bridges or the character of Scudder.

It’s the fact they moved him to LA.

LA, the town that has so many personalities it never feels entirely cohesive. LA, where the sun shines and the city sprawls.

Matt Scudder does not belong there. Even the way the script portrays, you know that he is New York man, that he belongs in the crowded, occasionally dirty, always edgy city that is New York. Matt Scudder does not belong near the beach or the houses of the Hollywood stars. He is dirty, grungy, hard-bitten. He is New York. And New York is not LA.

And that’s where everything falls apart. Matt is so out of place in this new location that everything else begins to feel wrong. No matter how good Bridges’ performance is, it never feels right. And let’s not even talk about some of the odd narrative jumps or the strange, hallucinogenic way he gets involved in his “case”. It often feels like we’re missing half the narrative that was meant to explain some of the characters’ motivations here.

Oh, and Andy Garcia’s little pony tail is hilarious. As is his weird accent “Hello, Mr Scooder,” he drawls, pretending to be all Latin American and sleazy.

Following this, I watched SLAYGROUND, an adaptation of the Richard Stark novel of the same name. His character, Parker, is something of a drifter. He does where there’s a job. He’s not wedded to one place, but he is wedded to a country. Which is why it strikes me as odd that they took a book whose sole purpose is to trap Parker in one location (an abandoned fairground) and then move him all the way across America before – for no good reason – suddenly sending him to England where he gets to team up with Mel Smith in a finale that seems almost an afterthought to that great title.

It was bad enough watching this poorly made, poorly conceived adaptation while Parker… sorry, Stone… blundered across America displaying none of the professionalism that we had come to expect from the character in the novels. But when they moved him to the UK, suddenly everything felt deeply, sickly, wrong. The entire mis-en-scene was screwed. The character and his story did not belong there. And there was no strong reason to move either there, other than the script seemed to say it happened.

Location can make a massive difference to character. But not always. Take the adaptation of Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, which does not suffer in the slightest from moving to the states after the novel was set in the UK. Why? Because Hornby did not wed his characters to place. He did not create them to be English so much as he created them to be geeks.

Its just something that struck me, especially with these two movies, that some characters are integral and part of the place they come from. They become unstuck when moved, somehow lesser. And the more I think about it, the more we do associate certain characters, especially in crime fiction, with place. Marlowe with LA, Hammet with SF, Rebus with Edinburgh (and look what happened when he moved to London – it really didn’t work), Holmes with London… I guess what I’m saying is, a movie needs a strong reason to move narrative location and has to work twice as hard to make us believe in the change, especially when its characters are not part of that location but come and are a product of somewhere else entirely.

LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION

By Russel D McLean

The landlord of a local pub waved at me the other day. I was on my way to the launch, driving with my dad who was helping us take the stock from bookshop to the bar where we were going to do the actual event. The guy waved at us from across the street, so we wound down the window to shout hello.

He yelled, “Them twice! Us once!” and laughed.

Talking about another pub mentioned in the novels. How they’d appeared in more scenes than his own establishment. He was joking, of course, but it did get me thinking about the locations I chose to focus on in the books (and the short stories).

Dundee is a real city with a real history. When I chose it as the setting for my crime novels, I knew I was setting myself a challenge. You always do when you let your fiction impinge upon the real world.

It’s part of the reason why I use real bars (but create fake ones where bad things happen) and namecheck streets on occasion – I want the city I write about to be filtered through the perceptions of myself and my characters, but still recognisable to anyone who’s ever visited the place. But the city is a background on a canvas, not the focus. As a background, it must therefore serve to bring the focus of what I am writing about into sharp relief.

So while my fictional Dundee resembles the real thing – right down to some of the bars, even those mentioned with less frequency than others – I do not think it will ever actually be the real thing. This would be an impossibility on my part and, I believe, actually very dull for the reader.

Look at this way: as true to life as much of George Pelecanos’s DC may be, you bet your ass it is filtered through his perceptions. Same with Block’s NYC, Burke’s Lousiana and so forth. They are filtered so as to fit the world view of the novels in which they are used.

Taking the Scottish capital of Edinburgh, think about how different the city becomes filtered through the procedural eyes of Iain Rankin, the genteel mind of Alexander McCall Smith and the screwed up psychopathy of Allan Guthrie. All of them write about the same city – sometimes even the same places – but they all create such markedly different worlds.

When writing about real places in fiction, a writer rarely does simple reportage. They are always twisting the facts and the reality to fit their worldview. Sometimes they will talk about real places within the city, sometimes they will create fictional locations that seem plausible additions to the real world because they need to make a point, dramatic or thematic (and often both).

I chose Dundee deliberately as a setting not simply because I knew the place, but because I felt the city had something in it that reflected the kinds of stories I wanted to write. And, yes, I had to filter the city to do so, but my hope is that I have captured something of the city that is not simply recognisable to locals, but that feels real even to those who have never been here.