Thoughts on Two Killings

THE KILLING

My taste for British and European TV mysteries predisposed me to like The Killing, the cable mini-series that finally ended its run this last weekend on AMC. That’s “finally” with a sigh of relief.

The Killing is a series that most viewers seem to absolutely love or totally hate, no Mister In-betweeners. As I maybe do too much for some, I stand somewhere in the middle, though, in the end, I think the series a failure. I watched it from first to last and while I enjoyed much of it—the acting and direction, the rainy, Gothic-noir atmosphere—the sins washed away the virtues.

The Killing is an American adaptation of a Danish series called Forbrydelsen (The Crime), reconfigured over here by Veena Sud (an American of Canadian, Filipino and Indian Hindu descent). The Danish version’s first season followed one case for 20 episodes, one day per episode, in one season. It was a huge hit, especially in England where it beat Mad Men in viewer ratings. A third season with a new case is now in production. It’s even ignited a fashion craze.

The American version won’t be welcomed back. It takes the same mystery plot, the murder of a young girl, but strings it out over the course of 26 days and 26 episodes, then splits that into two seasons. A lot needs to happen, but, in the end, as finely made as the show was, its scripting let it down. Not much in the way of surprises did happen and some of them stretched credibility to the snapping point. So many red herrings were flying around, it started smelling like a fish market.

While I didn’t feel as burnt by the reversal at the end of season one as many others, I wondered if they’d run out of rabbits to pull from their hats during season two. And they just about did. Toward the end, we were squirming with irritation and, when the far-fetched reveal came, we shrugged with relief.

I’m all for realistic depictions of flawed detectives who make errors of judgment and who war against the corruption within and without (as in Prime Suspect and The Wire). I can even get with the bad guys escaping justice. But detectives Sarah Linden and Stephen Holder (played by Mirielle Enos and Swedish actor Joel Kinnaman, both excellent in difficult roles) break down so many wrong doors, run out so many wrong threads, and have soooo many personal problems that I wanted to give them both a big big hug before taking away their badges away for good.

I felt almost as intensely against them as I did toward Kenneth Branagh’s mind-blowing, absurd portrayal of the Swedish cop Wallander (the BBC version, guaranteed must-miss TV)—I don’t want these two anywhere near my murder. The Seattle police department is portrayed as being so muddle-headed, I’d much prefer the Baltimore cops in The Wire to be the ones picking over my bullet-ridden corpse.

Much has been made about The Killing’s similarity to David Lynch’s surreal Twin Peaks, but I sensed its real ambition lay in the realist direction of The Wire. If true, then this show really misses the end of the dock. Focusing its lens on a single murder keeps The Killing from taking a wider view of its Seattle setting than it seems to yearn for. It never weaves a genuinely absorbing Dickensian tapestry, a goal The Wire achieved and then some. It never achieves true verisimilitude and instead settles for gloomy attitude. It’s not nearly as deep as it wants to be.

Its attempts to draw connections between Rosie Larsen’s murder, Seattle politics, and back to her family feel poorly contrived—the plotline involving the mayoral campaign seems more irritating than illuminating. Finally, the story of how Rosie Larsen meets her end is unbelievable. I’ve never seen a fictional murder victim go so far out of the way to get killed.

KILLING YOURSELF TO SURVIVE

The excellent contemporary noir writer David Corbett has recently published his first short story collection, Killing Yourself to Survive (in e-book editions only). This collection lives right up to its title with seven vivid and twisting tales of desperation and homicide.

Here, all crime is grubby pathos and suffering is its soil. Illness and disease are often the major villains. (Only one classical shark-eyed psychopath reaches from murky corners here.) Each of the seven stories portrays criminals as desperadoes in the original, unromantic sense of the word: desperate souls trying to free themselves from their hand-to-mouth struggle for existence, bring about the awful fates they’re trying to escape.

As most anyone—including me--who’s worked in and around law enforcement knows, criminals are human beings. Corbett’s stories draw them with grim, sometimes blackly comic, pathos. His characters are sunk in miasmas of sickness, cruel circumstances, low expectations, and plain old bad luck. No one, but no one, is ever as clever and hip as they think they are. Reality always has a joker up its sleeve. Whatever your scheme, there’s always another one being played under the table, or in a back room.

This is noir at its blackest, so there’s no hope here, not even for wisdom. This leads to certain blunt determinism after awhile, where you can feel doom tugging your sleeve from the first page.

So, if you’ve got a good spine and strong stomach there’s some excellent vividly written work here. One of my favorites was “Axiom of Choice,” a Hitchcockian fable about a melancholy math professor who encourages his wife to have an affair with a student.

I also got a nasty kick out of “It Can Happen”, a James Cain-type tale set in San Francisco about a wheelchair-bound husband, his scheming wife, loyal daughter, lurking crooks and hoodlums, and an insurance scheme that backfires grandly.

“Bobby the Prop Buys In” paints a colorful, gripping portrait of Bay Area gambling life, as a lowball card player schemes to rob one of the many card rooms that populate the area, a bad idea, especially when he tries to betray the man he trusts the most.

Probably my favorite story is a nifty noir procedural, “Dead by Christmas.” A Phoenix-area homicide detective, grieving over the death of his young son and dissolution of his marriage, pursues a pair of restaurant owners who moonlight as restaurant robbers, but finds they’re getting help from a surprising source.

The title story, the most ambitious of the volume, fell short for me. “Killing Yourself to Survive” is the most doom-shadowed story of all, as an Iraq War vet and special ops contractor working in Guatemala City gets involved with both a blacks ops scheme to kidnap a major Central American drug runner and a beautiful human rights activist. (I may have told too much right there.) It’s beautifully written, full of exact, pungent details that gives you feeling of being right on the ground in one the world’s bad places, a world where “given the impatience of powerful men, the short run always held the cards.” Even so, I saw the ending coming from too far away.

(Re-edited 6/24/12; Veena Sud did NOT create the  original Danish version, as stated earlier.

Copyright 2012 by Thomas Burchfield

Thomas Burchfield has recently completed his 1920s gangster thriller Butchertown. He can be friended on Facebook, followed on Twitter, and read at Goodreads. You can also join his e-mail list via tbdeluxe [at] sbcglobal [dot] net. He lives in Northern California with his wife, Elizabeth.

A Pause in the Madness

[SPOILERS AHEAD!]

As you may know, the fifth season of the AMC series Mad Men has ended on one of those summarizing, meditative melodies often played on these programs. I sighed with mild relief, as I do at the end of every episode.

I resisted Mad Men at first, not adding it to our Netflix cue until 2009. First, I thought it might be one of those hip fashionista things, all pretty surfaces, nothing underneath.

Also, there’s the fact that it’s on AMC (Just “Another Movie Channel: We Know You Don’t Really Care About Movies, You Just Want Them As Background Noise While You Vacuum”; All-week Dirty Harry festivals? Yikes . . . .)

I also feared Mad Men might be one of those static, domestic melodramas I’ve haven’t been a fan of since my Eugene O’Neill days in college. I mostly prefer my stories adventurous, outward looking and risk taking, where mortal violent danger shadows every corner. If I didn’t see KGB agents infiltrating Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce or George Smiley or Don Vito Corleone walking through the door with avuncular but sinister smiles, I doubted l would stick with it.

But stuck with it I have, through all five seasons, hot, cold, and lukewarm. Of all the cable series I’ve watched during this unmistakably golden age of television series, it’s the show about which I have the most mixed feelings. I only go “Wow!” from time to time. Sometimes I fidget and check the DVD clock.

But I’ve still been wrong in most of my attitudes. Mad Men is a much more interesting show than I expected. It’s commitment to its art is unshakeable and admirable. Most of the criticism I read—especially the astute comments on Slate’s TV Club—focuses on its lustrous polish and shine, sharp, nuanced performances, tart characterizations, interior set design, costumes, the undercurrents of its weaving plots and the window it opens on its era.

Because many of its viewers are young (unlike me), the show’s noble antecedents are often missed (though they’re not by the show’s creators, as the excellent DVD extras show). Mad Men, for all the fuss about its “radicalism” is a throwback to the early “golden” days of television, of high-minded dramas like The Defenders, Naked City, and East Side/West Side. Sober-minded and as realistic as possible, these dramas were themselves rooted in the serious live theatre of that era.

Many of the same issues which Mad Men dramatizes were dramatized on these shows: both Naked City and The Defenders dealt with themes like abortion, drug addiction, class, and even race and gender, though censorship often forced them to be very circumspect. Both shows delivered stark, powerful episodes on capital punishment, an issue still much with us.

The old shows, however, never gleamed with wit, as Mad Men does generously. In those days, comedy and drama were as strictly segregated as the genders and races were. Earnestness and realism was all.

Sometimes Mad Men stumbles in its sense of time and place fails when it goes outdoors. I lived in Westchester County up the Hudson River from Don Draper and Co. at the exact same time, and let me tell ya, I had no idea New York State was as arid and dusty as Southern California, where the series is filmed in its entirety. Oh well, can’t do everything. . . .

The exterior city scenes fare worse. A scene where Joan Harris and Roger Sterling are mugged and later get it on—I think that’s how it happens--looks like it was filmed hurriedly on a hollow, hastily built soundstage. If you want what 1960s New York truly looked like, I strongly recommend a DVD of Naked City.

Mad Men often goes down a little dry with me. After five seasons, some of the characters remain weirdly static—Pete Campbell will forever remain TV’s favorite punching bag: I’d take a crosstown bus to watch someone bend his nose. I find it incredible that, after two heart attacks, Roger Sterling, SCDP’s resident Peter Pan, is still alive, smoking like a chimney, drinking like a fish and, at the end of this season, dropping acid (twice!).

Since I’m not a big fan of domestic drama, whenever we ride the commuter train home with these folks, my eyes flicker at the clock. Betty Smith (nee Draper) will forever remain an empty dress, as will Trudy Campbell. Kiernan Shipka as Sally Draper is wonderful—and, if truth be known, I rather identify with her--but Sally seems less relevant to the show as time goes on. Nor do I care whether Don’s marriage to Megan works out, though I guess it won’t. (Don’s previous “secret” marriage was clumsily handled from the start. I never it found it credible.)

Still, what really keeps me watching most of all is Jon Hamm as Don Draper. From the first, I found Hamm to be a real star and Don Draper a beautifully conceived and compelling character, a creative, brilliant man both caddish and sensitive, insightful and obtuse, swinging between the poles of ruthlessness and anguish. I find tremendous mismatch between his inner soul and outer world fascinating. So many of his actions are well intentioned, but he still finds himself on the jerk end of the stick and deserving it.

So what truth will Don Draper finally chose? That’s what I keep asking. The life of the artistic soul, or the life of easy comfort promised by modern capitalism. By the end of this season, he seems compromised and settling in to the safe life as a Mad Man, acting more and more like a bully as his soul dries to a pile of sand. But don’t think that’s that: with two seasons left and that yawning, unrepaired elevator, the turn of his soul remains unsettled.

[BIG SPOILER HERE!]

Now, about that elevator (which I’ve been obsessing about).

Death was snooping around SCDP all of season 5. After Don almost fell down the elevator shaft in episode 8, it became clear that, in true Chekovian fashion, someone was going take that worst first step.

I quickly laid bets on Lane Pryce, SDCP’s CFO and the show’s most decent, doom-haunted, and conscience-stricken soul. I imagined Lane at the end of an exhausting day, his bedeviled mind awhirl, blindly taking the wrong door.

I turned out to be half-right. I was wrong about his actual exit Lane [joke], but my suggestion on Slate that someone would get the shaft this season was actually met with one of those absurd bursts of indignation endemic on the Internet: How could I be so lame as to suggest that that the writers would be so CHEAP as to employ Chekovian foreshadowing tactics!

Never mind that all good dramatists everywhere, including me, have used foreshadowing since Sophocles. Without it, your TV drama, play, movie, novel, becomes nothing but disconnected balls of mud thrown arbitrarily against the wall. Whether it’s the pistol on the mantel or a yawning elevator, those “cheap stunts” weave together your drama, themes, and character into a whole.

Remember that Peggy Olson almost stepped into the maw herself as she left SDCP for the last time. That it didn’t happen this season does not mean it will not happen in the seasons remaining. Believe me, unless we see Don Draper call maintenance (like he should have; yet another sign of his often glib sensibility), you can count that someone will take the Big Sleep Express to the first floor. The only questions are who and when? (Hell, they might even hold that elevator until the very last shot.)

No, that howling beast still lurks; that and the never-ending, unfolding dilemmas of Don Draper. And so, I’ll keep watching.

(re-edited 6/17/12)
 

Thomas Burchfield has recently completed his 1920s gangster thriller Butchertown. He can be friended on Facebook, followed on Twitter, and read at Goodreads. You can also join his e-mail list via tbdeluxe [at] sbcglobal [dot] net. He lives in Northern California with his wife, Elizabeth.

Thoughts on "Pnin" by Vladimir Nabokov

When the Red Room web page invited Red Roomers to write about a lesser-known novel by a great writer this week, I first thought of Laughter in the Dark by Vladimir Nabokov (the author of Lolita and Pale Fire, two constantly blinking buoys on those ever-roiling lists of greatest novels ever written).

But it’s been a few years since I experienced the hair-raising magic of Laughter, its whirls of whimsy and thrilling, heartbreaking turns.

It so happens that, a week ago, I closed the covers on another lesser-known Nabokov, his short and funny gem Pnin, a novel written after Lolita, but often overlooked in Nabokov discussions. It’s a novel that readers who may feel too intimidated—or disturbed—by other Nabokov classics, are much more likely to take into their hearts.

Timofey Pnin (pronounced p-neen) is an emigrant Russian scholar and lecturer at Waindell, a small university in New York state (modeled on Cornell University where Nabokov taught in the 1950s).

There’s no plot per se in Pnin, but a series of picaresque incidents. We meet Pnin as he’s traveling to deliver a lecture at a far off town and learn early on that he’s on the wrong train. Clearly, we have a man adrift, a homely and homeless exile. Nabokov describes him as:

 “Ideally bald . . . with that great brown dome of his, his tortoise-shell glasses (masking an infantile absence of eyebrows), apish upper lip, thick neck and strong man torso in a tightish tweed coat . . . ”

He almost sounds like a space alien. Or an odd, misshapen species captured in a distant jungle and then set loose to fend for himself.

But Pnin is very human and very much alone: his ex-wife dumped him on the boat over from Europe (as surely as if she’d thrown him overboard). He doesn’t understand his son; he comprehends the English language barely better than the strange inhospitable land he so wants to call his new home, America. On campus, he’s a figure of fun, an object of contempt, his intelligence and sensitivity obscured and ignored. Still, though he’s lost so much, he seems imbued with indomitable innocence and hope.

Pnin’s world is always crumpling like thin ice under his “frail-looking, almost feminine feet.” It’s like he’s seeing through two glasses darkly, with each glass set at a different angle, fracturing his vision and leading to a long chain of misunderstandings and near-calamities.

It’s not that Pnin gets off on the wrong foot wherever he goes. For him, there is no right foot to start from, not in America. It’s only when he returns to the Russia of his memories, or the one he finds in the stacks at the school library, and, in one beautiful episode, during a weekend he spends with some fellow Russian expats, that he finds comfort in his own skin. But these moments slip away, becoming like memories laid over memories. Soon Pnin is back to flailing in his alien adopted land, a place sometimes friendly and generous, sometimes mean and threatening.

Nabokov has been sometimes called a cold, unfeeling writer, but after five years or so of reading through his work, book-by-book, I cannot agree (though cruelties do lurk about, like snakes under a bright flowerbed.) For one, Bend Sinister, his version on the world portrayed in1984, may not be as artistically successful as Orwell’s book, but it nevertheless lifted tears in me more than once.

I find Pnin to be the most touching and kindly of his stories that I’ve read so far. Despite Pnin’s near-constant mishaps, some of his own making, Nabokov’s astounding lyricism captures Pnin’s experience and blossoms into a rare and amazing empathy.

It’s often a big mistake to impute autobiographical intent to a writer’s work—especially Nabokov’s. The author steers the reader away from seeing Pnin as a Nabokov self-portrait with the surprising emergence of a familiar character from Pnin’s Russian past, another exile, one who, instead being overwhelmed and consumed by this new land, has embraced it in his own way.

If there’s a “message” at the center of this bittersweet novel, it’s there but for the grace of God goes Nabokov.

As for the writing, it’s Nabokov prose as it always is--lovely. Delightful imagery and amusing insights alight in the mind’s eye like a butterfly. Pnin’s voice is described as “a slow, monotonous baritone that seemed to climb one of those interminable flights of stairs used by people who dread elevators.” At one point, he becomes enchanted by his landlady’s washing machine “. . . watching through that porthole what looked like an endless tumble of dolphins with the staggers.”  

This isn’t merely the joy of writing. This is the joy of seeing things in a unique way, the way Nabokov sees them.

While Pnin may not strike a major chord like Lolita and other Nabokov books, its bright, charming lyricism and tender regard for the hapless soul at its center, has a way of sticking with you.

Thomas Burchfield has recently completed his 1920s gangster thriller Butchertown. He can be friended on Facebook, followed on Twitter, and read at Goodreads. You can also join his e-mail list via tbdeluxe [at] sbcglobal [dot] net. He lives in Northern California with his wife, Elizabeth.

Not in New York

It’s Monday, June 4, not a good day to not be in New York.

My old college girlfriend just this last week moved into a lovely house in Connecticut, an hour or so drive through the rich subtropical-green sward from where I was born and brought up in Westchester County, news that turns over in me a rich loam of homesickness.

Further, the Film Forum in NewYork is screening a week’s supply of that boisterous nutty film genre known as the spaghetti western. Maybe only one of them casts a shadow like Citizen Kane’s, but the real fun for me would be seeing my favorite film villain (and a good actor) Lee Van Cleef starring in several of them, including the apparently restored The Big Gundown, the best non-Leone spaghetti.

Most frustrating of all, is that tonight, June 4, is the night of the Independent Publisher Book Awards Ceremony, where my novel Dragon’s Ark will officially be awarded its bronze medal.

Sure, it’s third place, not first, and none of the winners will get to pontificate, but I truly miss the chance to be in there. And for possibly meeting and congratulating some of my IPPY co-winners, such as the two novelists who beat me out in the horror category: John G. Rees (second place silver for Black Tide) and Ronald Malfi (first place gold for Floating Staircase); and also a certain Paul Russell, silver medal winner in the literary category for a most-unusual sounding book, The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov.

I don’t know if they’ll be there—like me, they may be stuck at home—but if they are, hello to you! Congratulations and hoist one for me.

As I go about my business on this unusually rain day in Oakland, one eye flickers watchfully out the corner window, looking the post-person, while my ear hangs by the door listening for the flop of a package on the Mediterranean parquet stoop—the arrival of my awards package from “IPPY,” official proof that I have not been lying to myself, my wife, my various friends and readers, plus numerous book stores—see, told you so!

As stated earlier, I’ve been doing plenty of work, buy advertising online, each payment click cutting a great gouge in the part of body where I store all my money. It sometimes feels more like real blood than red ink.

The previous weekend, a fellow imbiber at Cato’s, the beer hall on Piedmont Avenue, where I can be found on most Saturday evenings, alighted on my shoulder to tell me that his book club had adopted Dragon’s Ark as their next project, and would I like to come by and talk?

Just this last Saturday, I popped by Spectator Books, also on Piedmont:  there upfront with the new books, two copies of Dragon’s Ark.

Money gushes out. Success drips down—Ah! There’s that !kerchunk!

Wow . . . it’s a real medal . . . .

Photo by author

Copyright 2012 by Thomas Burchfield

Thomas Burchfield is the author of the 2012 IPPY Award winning contemporary Dracula novel Dragon's Ark, and the original screenplays Whackers and The Uglies (e-book editions only). Published by Ambler House Publishing, all are available at Amazon in various editions. You can also find his work at Barnes and Noble,  Powell's Books, Scribed and at the Red Room bookstore. He also “friends” on Facebook, tweets on Twitter, and reads at Goodreads. You can also join his e-mail list via tbdeluxe [at] sbcglobal [dot] net. He lives in Northern California with his wife, Elizabeth.

The 50 Percent Theory

 (Spoilers Ahead)

During last week's rant against the ubiquity of crap fiction in the world of e-books, I mentioned a “50 percent theory” that I recall encountering in The New Yorker awhile ago: That when we say we love an author’s books, what we really mean is that we love, say, around half of them.

This week, in true hyper-textual fashion, I thought I’d explore that idea by reviewing a less-than-excellent book by a favorite writer of mine, one of those listed-and-linked on the side of this page.

My hapless victim is the fine and highly regarded historical spy writer, Alan Furst, the author of the splendid Night Soldiers, the first volume in his continuing saga about World War II, anti-Nazi resistance movements. Furst is considered, rightly I think, a successor to genre pioneer Eric Ambler, along with Graham Greene and John le Carrê (though I think less so in le Carrê’s case).

I’ve been reading the Night Soldiers series in order and Kingdom of Shadows, which I’ve just finished, is his sixth, published in 2000. Of the six, I think this one counts as one of that other 50 percent of his, along with Dark Star and World at Night.

Furst lays out the story of the European resistance in clever fashion by portraying, novel-by-novel, resistance movements in individual nations (starting from Bulgaria in Night Soldiers, though he allowed that narrative to sprawl, quite wonderfully I thought).

Since I read Night Soldiers, I’ve found Furst’s work follows the outlines of the 50 percent theory, in checkerboard fashion. Night Soldiers was followed by the forgettable Dark Star, which was followed by the eye-opening and stirring The Polish Officer. (The Poles fought the Nazis a lot harder than you think, even as they were being crushed and betrayed 360).

The Polish Officer in turn was followed by World at Night, a frustrating, desultory story of Jean Casson, a Parisian film producer who is tugged back and forth by various subterranean factions before and during the early days of Nazi occupation.

Despite its elegant, indirect and painterly evocation of Parisian alleyways and cafes, its lackadaisical character’s dance with espionage made for a lackadaisical book. Things aren’t helped by Jean’s sudden melodramatic dive overboard into the English Channel, fully dressed; the kind of stroke works fine in a movie like Casablanca, but seems arbitrary in a novel.

Casson’s heart remains as elusive as the secretive world he spends much of the book trying to avoid, but not as intriguing. Jean Casson is the callow, reluctant hero, struggling with the decision whether or not to join the Resistance. Good enough, but the impacts of outside events on him never seemed to come to life. I never felt touched by the war raging inside Jean. He seems to be dressed a in a finely tailored but hollow suit.

However, I’m glad to say, Casson filled out that empty suit in Furst’s next adventure, Red Gold, a breakneck, harrowing thriller of Casson’s adventures after he commits himself body and soul to the Resistance. Here, Casson comes live as a dashing though still-ambivalent hero, thanks to relentless, hair-raising, sometimes horrific, encounters with both German occupiers and treachery from other Frenchmen. I closed that book with an admiring shudder and admiration for the bravery it must have taken to stand up to the Nazis. Like the best war stories, it gave me to feelings of both excited admiration for its heroes and gratitude that I didn’t have to live through it.

But now I come to Kingdom of Shadows. Here, the 50 Percent Theory again seems useful. This time, we’re with the Hungarian segment of the Resistance, starting in March 1938, when Hitler’s evil forces—with some assist from Stalin--were gathering and the whole world seemed willing to give way before his stew of manipulation, deceit, and proud-faced bullying.

We experience this world through the eyes of Nicholas Morath, handsome Hungarian nobleman, sometime playboy, and patriot who’s living in exile in Paris. Morath is resolutely anti-Nazi, willing to do his utmost to serve his country. Unlike Jean Masson, Morath feels no doubt about joining the good fight. Unfortunately though, thanks to Hungary's fraught internal politics, he’s never sure whose side he’s working for, pro- or anti-Fascist.

Morath rapidly finds himself wandering that mirrored hall so often found in the house of spies. Even his boss (and close uncle) Count Polanyi, has no idea if their high-minded actions are helping their side or playing into the hands of the crypto-fascist Hungarians. One hand never knows what cards the other holds and everyone is at dangerous cross purposes, except, unfortunately, the bad guys. No one seems able to tease out the tangled threads of espionage.

By itself, this is an exciting, emotional scenario about the dilemmas people can encounter in trying to do the right thing in a baffling world. And there are bursts of excitement and suspense.

But Kingdom of Night feels like a cold, distant book. Its fog obfuscates more than it beckons. Furst writes in a style that evokes place and time, filled with lovely details and pithy observations that feel poetically right: At one point he mentions a Paris café located “between a butcher that sold halal meat to Arabs and kosher meat to Jews” while, at another point, an old man describes life as being like “licking honey off a thorn.” Wonderful!

Unfortunately, the telegraphic style Furst employs--short punchy sentence fragments meant to flash like lightning, to stab and reveal--often conceals more than reveals, pushes away more than pulls in. Its jabs and hints seldom illuminate, piling into muddled shards of mirror glass.

And, like Jean Casson in World at Night, Morath is a remote man, his inner world out of reach, thanks in part I think, to Furth’s narrative style. His fragmentary sentences add up to a fragmentary mosaic of the hero.

It’s in this aspect, I think, that John le Carrê may be a better writer than Furst. While le Carrê’s people sometimes become entangled in winding sentence webs, they eventually knit together and come alive in their nuances, in their torment and ambivalence about the grim business they’re engaged in and the impact it has on their souls (and le Carrê’s people do have souls, as rounded and fully seen as anywhere). They are bound strongly to each other and the world they work in.

Furst’s characters sometimes seem like collections of attributes that only unify under the kind of duress they face in his best works. When they’re at rest, when the world is only impinging on them or confusing them, they’re less interesting, and so are novels like Kingdom of Shadows.

But don’t let that stop you from delving into the world of Alan Furst. Just don’t start with Kingdom of Shadows. Start with Night Soldiers. Believe me, after that, you’ll want more, and you won't mind that other "50 percent."

As for my own work,  I know I'll be behind the critical 8 ball myself someday; that moment when I realize that my efforts have fallen short and that I've not delivered the book I wanted to deliver. But like any other successful writer, I can't let that dread stop me.


(Re-edited 5/27/12)

Copyright 2012 by Thomas Burchfield

Photo by author.

Thomas Burchfield has recently completed his 1920s gangster thriller Butchertown. He can be friended on Facebook, followed on Twitter, and read at Goodreads. You can also join his e-mail list via tbdeluxe [at] sbcglobal [dot] net. He lives in Northern California with his wife, Elizabeth.

Strong Opinion

I guess I won’t be moving into that chateau on Lake Como next door to George Clooney anytime soon.

I mean, I’d sure love to have genre writer James Patterson’s money. But I doubt I’d enjoy having to keep up his fertility rate. When I think about his huge output, I hearken back to my early years spent lugging fifty-pound boxes of paper around San Francisco law firms. O simple joys of youth!

Those of you who read The New York Times may have seen the article last week describing the new paradigm for ultra-super-bestselling genre authors like Patterson. Nowadays, writers are now being pressed to produce—I might not call it writing, precisely—two books a year. Plus short stories.

“The culture is a great big hungry maw,” said Lisa Scottoline, another mega-best-selling thriller writer, “and you have to feed it.”

(Full disclosure: I haven’t read either Mr. Patterson’s or Ms. Scottoline’s work.)

This requirement is said to be a feature of the e-book era. With readers now able to download anything, anytime they want, it’s believed that an author has to stay in the reading public’s pupil 24/7. This is based on the theory of signal-to-noise ratio, which, in a certain frame, makes a good deal of sense, at least economically.

This has led me to think again about what kind of readers I want to reach.

Most habitual genre fiction readers want escape, clean and simple. Perhaps they’ll tolerate a thematic nod to their value systems, whether “conservative” or “liberal,” and some pop-psychobabble, but beyond that, the vast majority of genre fiction readers want nothing thematically challenging, innovative, or overly offbeat, no matter how entertaining it might otherwise be.

Then, there is an apparent minority of picky readers, like me. As someone said to me, there’s reading to escape and there’s reading to grow. And while I prefer novels that take me into other worlds, I like it when the journey not only alters my sight and gives me new perspectives, it illuminates the world I’m in now, that touches on the “human condition.” I read to both grow and be entertained.

Most genre novels and stories aren’t nearly so ambitious as to bridge those two landfalls, but a remarkable number can. I count John le Carrê, Peter Straub, among others, as examples. It takes time to write books like these. That’s the table I want to sit at as a writer. And so, I can’t hope to write two books a year. At least good ones, as I understand them.

Back in the old days, of paperback originals and hardcover novels that would made their real big score in paperback editions, genre masters like Rex Stout and Luke Short would craft a book a year, maybe two if they were feeling frisky or the butcher was giving them the hairy eyeball. Maybe they weren’t Hammett-level innovators, but they were unmistakably talented, gifted writers, who nevertheless, must have grown bored churning out the same book with the same formula or characters year after year.

Believe me, at times, I can hear Rex Stout’s fingers falling like a lead hammer on the typewriter keys and his heavy sighs as he types “The doorbell rang” for the one-thousandth time; I can sense when the champagne rapport between Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin loses its fizz; or I’m almost sure that Stout used almost the exact same mystery plot ten books ago, except the murder weapon was a pitchfork instead of a harpoon and . . .  well . . . .

After a while, an understanding develops. No writer—literary or genre--writes only good books. All my favorite writers have written novels that fall short for me.

One critic—I think a New Yorker writer--recently wrote that when we say we love a writer, what we mean is that we love, at most, fifty percent of his work. So long as you sense an author’s always striving to be his Best Self, that other fifty percent--well, no one’s a genius all the time and those valleys can make the peaks look all the grander. And if that fifty percent dross starts drifting toward ninety, you gently close the door and search elsewhere.

Snobby as I am, I’m also a literary anarchist. By this I mean, I can like anything . . . so long as it’s good, whether it’s the best Luke Short western or the eye of Vladimir Nabokov’s young poet opening to the world while gazing out over 1930s Berlin. The reality is that there are more good books than I will ever be able to read.

So, I’m wondering, just what is it that fans of Mr. Patterson and Ms. Scottoline expect to get with their high productivity demands? I’m not talking about literature, either. Having to grind out two full novels a year, means there’s hardly enough time or space for craft or professionalism. Whether you’re Lee Child or Thomas Pynchon, it takes time to write a decent book. Followed by a nice vacation.

Remember the hubbub over the length of time George R.R. Martin took to finish his latest Song of Ice and Fire epic, Dance of Thrones? Some of Martin’s “fans” were--no “upset” is too mild a word—pissed off with scalding, flaming vomit that the next book had failed to be completed by their timetable. “We demand that you pander to us! We demand a stinking, unreadable tower of shit!”

Neil Gaiman was right: “George Martin is not your bitch!” I second that motion, as do most of us writers. The only sin is writing lazily, writing badly (and releasing it), writing like you don’t care, writing to keep your “fans” from condemning you on Facebook.

Now, James Patterson fanboy, come sit on my knee so ol’ Grandpa can dispense some advice: You know, while waiting a year or so for Mr. Patterson to write and publish another novel, why don’t you take a breath, broaden the ol’ horizons and read some other genre writers?

There are plenty of worthwhile books worth your time. I will even boldly suggest you read my (IPPY prizewinning) Dragon’s Ark, while you wait for Mr. Patterson to write a good book. I mean that’s what you really want, isn’t it? A good James Patterson book?

I know I don’t want, for example, a bad Peter Straub book. I know that if I start sleeping on the doorstep of his Manhattan brownstone and fire-bombing his Twitter account with demands for Ghost Story XXII, he’d be well within his right to tell me to go have airborne relations with rolling holed pastry.

I don’t say this because I worship the dust around Mr. Straub’s feet. I say this because I do what he does. And it’s hard to do well. I can do it badly, I can publish a napkin a day, but I don’t want to and the kind of readers I want—those fussy readers--don’t want me to either. They’ll want the best I have to give and that’s what I’ll try to do, even though I fully know I won’t always be able to.

I took four years to write (IPPY Award Winning) Dragon’s Ark. I’m first to admit that’s too much time for such a book. Happily, I’ve absorbed the lessons I learned so that my next book Butchertown, started in August of last year, is galloping like a thoroughbred and should be out by the end of this year—a little more than a year and, even more importantly, done with my very best effort.

While you’re waiting, look at that long list of writers on the side of this page. They’re good writers, all of them. Some of them are Olympian highbrows, some of them first-rate entertainers, writing artful, sophisticated tales of adventure, suspense, and hair-raising horror and thrills. New or old, they deserve your valuable reading time. There’s no hurry. You’ll never read all their work and you don’t need to.

As for James Patterson and Lisa Scottoline, I hope they have time to enjoy their chateaus, wherever they are.

Copyright 2012 by Thomas Burchfield

Thomas Burchfield has recently completed his 1920s gangster thriller Butchertown. He can be friended on Facebook, followed on Twitter, and read at Goodreads. You can also join his e-mail list via tbdeluxe [at] sbcglobal [dot] net. He lives in Northern California with his wife, Elizabeth.