As it has for most booklovers, both readers and writers, this week has been a sad one for me. We lost Elmore Leonard at 87 this week, for my money the greatest crime novelist of our time. Beyond his greatness as a writer, Dutch was a good man and a good friend. I had not seen him in a few years, and I certainly would not claim any special bond or connection. Many others were much closer to Elmore. But there is also a sense in which he was a special friend to all writers, with his terrific 10 Rules of Writing and, perhaps even more so, as a model of the devoted, unpretentious and wonderfully productive artist and craftsman.

Actually, I had thought about getting in touch recently, especially after a reviewer, whose taste and judgment I admire, wrote this about The Car Bomb and Admission of Guilt, the first two novels in my new trilogy set in Detroit: “If you like Elmore Leonard, you’ll love these books.” Of course, the words came as an unexpected gift, even though I didn’t believe for a second in the validity of any such comparison.

But I held off calling or putting a note in the mail when I heard through his long-time researcher and assistant Greg Sutter that Dutch, who would have been 88 in October, was intensely focused on finishing the current novel in progress. There was no way I was going to intrude or lay even a small, social burden on his precious time.

Now he’s gone. And like so many others, I have a pain in my heart thinking about Elmore falling to that stroke before he could put the finishing touches to what was going to be novel number 47.

My history with Dutch was limited to only a handful of small events and exchanges, but I thought I’d briefly recount them here for whatever interest they might hold for others and perhaps to make myself feel just a little better by adding a tiny bit to the marvelous collective memory that envelops him now.

So twice he gave me an intro to his agent-at-the-time. The first, back in the early ’90s, was an old guy in Hollywood, the one who followed H. N. Swanson, the legendary “Swanie,” who helped make Elmore Leonard both rich and famous. I worked with that fellow for a while, until I sent him part of an early version of The Car Bomb, and he told me he couldn’t sell anything featuring a local TV anchor.

And then some 20 years later Dutch kindly suggested his big time guy in NYC. That second agent and I never got anything going after he expressed no interest in dealing with the novel I ended up publishing last year, The Obsession.

I also worked with Dutch on a couple of occasions when I was making TV specials. Two decades ago I wrote and produced a one-hour documentary on Detroit’s main artery, Woodward Avenue, it’s heartline running north from the river 25 miles all the way to Pontiac. Arrayed along the way was “every reason for hope and despair in urban America,” if I remember the tagline correctly.

It was Dutch’s favorite avenue, featured in more than one of his Detroit-based novels, and he readily agreed to play a role in the story I was telling. First, we recorded him reading a passage from one of those novels, and then as darkness fell in the city’s New Center area, we shot as he walked the empty sidewalk past chained and boarded up storefronts. Finally, the shot pulled back wide to show how deserted the whole place was, and there at the top of the shot was the illuminated General Motors sign atop the giant company’s headquarters a few blocks away.

Later, after the shoot, when I got back to my car parked on Woodward, I found a window smashed and the radio gone. Of course, we shot the looted car, and that image made the perfect capstone to the sequence that married Elmore’s read and his walk.

Then five years ago I finally got the chance to do a piece I had been wanting to produce for decades, a TV bio sketch of the “Dickens of Detroit.” This time we shot for a couple of days with Dutch, including a lengthy interview at his home in Bloomfield Township, about 15 minutes from where I live. Heading for his 82nd birthday, he was thin and a bit frail but still very lively and as sharp as ever. He could not have been more forthcoming and generous with us.

That video bio sketch is the one on this website. The show was part of a series called “World Class Detroiters,” and, of course, Dutch was the most appropriate subject we ever presented. Minus the commercials, the piece was about 22 minutes, and so I struggled mightily to cram in as much of Elmore, his life and story, as possible. In doing so, I could only use brief snippets from an interview that went on for almost an hour and a half. It was conducted by the show’s on-camera host and my good friend, Emery King, a former NBC White House correspondent, working from a long list of my questions.

A few days ago, after Elmore’s passing, I dug out of my computer a transcript of the full interview, something only a handful of folks have ever seen. I read through it and marveled again at how much Dutch had given us. And I quickly decided to see if I could present it in a fashion that would give others the pleasure of an expansive Elmore talking about his life and work. What follows is just a small portion of the interview. If you find interest and value in it, I’ll include more here on my blog and perhaps also find a place to present the whole thing.

So here’s Elmore Leonard talking about why he used two of his favorite settings, the appeal and essence of his stories, and how to rob a bank.

Emery: Two of your favorite settings are Detroit and the Atlantic coast of Florida. Why those two settings and is there a connection?

Elmore: Because I’ve lived in both. Because I’ve lived in Detroit since 1934 and remember a lot about Detroit. And that Atlantic coast of Florida because we have a place there. I bought a motel for my mother back in I guess the ’70s. It only had three units in it, but it gave her something to do. And then we would go down and stay with her. Now we’ve got a place in North Palm Beach, but we don’t stay there that long, never more than two weeks, once or twice a year, because I’d rather be here. I mean, even in the winter. I like the winter. I like the seasons.

Emery: Why do you think your readers are so interested and drawn into these two worlds of cops and criminals, worlds that most people wouldn’t want to be a part of?

Elmore: No, I think they’re drawn into crime and mysteries because these stories always have a beginning, a middle, and an end, and the endings are always satisfying to the readers. They know that the good guys are going to win in the end. I think that’s the main reason. Because you look down the New York Times list, and they’re all crime or mysteries.

Emery: Your major characters are usually trying to outthink each other one way or another, or outwit each other. Do you see your stories essentially as a battle between good and evil?

Elmore: I suppose, when you get right down to it, if I were to analyze my stories. But for that matter, all stories are about good and evil. I mean, there are degrees of evil and good, but I think all stories are asking, what’s the opposition? What are we dealing with here?

Emery: Do you analyze your stories?

Elmore: No, never.

Emery: Why?

Elmore: Because I’m not interested in analyzing them. I don’t know what the theme is, for example. When the screenwriter, Scott Frank, who has written two of mine—Get Shorty and Out of Sight—takes on the job, he’ll ask me, he says, “Well, what’s the theme?” I said, “I don’t know. I have no idea.” So, he’ll read the book, and then he tells me what the theme is, which is always impressive. “Really?” So he feels he needs to know what the theme is in order to write a screenplay.

Emery: About your bad guys, you’ve said this: “I don’t think of them as bad guys. I just think of them as normal people who get up in the morning and wonder what they’re going to have for breakfast. And they sneeze and they wonder if they should call their mother and then they rob a bank.”

Elmore: Yeah. That’s really most of them. I mean, that’s the way it is, you know. There’s a guy in the paper this morning who robbed a bank. He had been let go from his job, and he robbed a bank. And the prosecutor was going to give him less than a year. Now he’s got a job offer, and people feel sorry for him. Bank robbery is attractive to people. Willy Sutton said, “That’s where the money is.” That’s why he robbed banks. But all you’ve got to do is ask for the money, and the teller will give you the money, and then you walk out. They’ll give you the money if you’re convincing enough. There was one guy, the FBI called him, ah, who is that comedian who never got any respect?

Emery: Rodney Dangerfield.

Elmore: Rodney Dangerfield. They called him “the Rodney Dangerfield bank robber,” because he would go in and ask for the money, and they wouldn’t give it to him. Until, finally, he got a gun and went in. But if you go in with a gun, then you’re facing a lot of time, if you’re arrested. So it’s best just to be nice and hand the teller a note and hope that she’s frightened enough to give you the money. Most of them get $2,000 or less. They’ll get whatever is on the top of the open drawer, there in those little sections—tens, twenties, fifties, and one hundreds. But you don’t want to get handed the dye pack. When I first began researching bank robberies, I had a time getting a bank to show me a dye pack. Finally, one of them did, and it is triggered, the mechanism goes off, as you’re going out the door, and there’s something in the door frame that triggers the dye pack and then, phew, you’re covered with red or whatever color dye. And there’s just money on the outside of the pack. You know, inside is what makes it erupt. I had a friend in Florida, a judge, who had a guy who was up for breaking his probation by robbing a bank. So, he did four years, and then he came out and he hoped that having done the four years would suffice for breaking the probation. And the judge said, “Yeah. It’s okay. But how much did you get in the bank robbery?” And the guy said, “$2600.” He said, “But I’m going out and the dye pack went off. And so I had all this red dye, and then I went home, and I tried to wash the money. And I was trying to pass these pink twenties, and they caught up with me.”

So there you have just a taste. If you’d like more of this great writer and wonderful man talking about his life and his craft, just let me know.

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Recently a reader friend, a woman I’ve never met, but with whom I’ve exchanged emails, left a review of my new novel The Car Bomb on the book’s Amazon page. Previously she had read and reviewed my two non-fiction books, Murder in the Synagogue and Squelched. That’s her preferred type of book, or genre, True Crime, and so I was a little surprised when she decided to read The Car Bomb. But, of course, I was pleased when she filed this kind review:

“I am not usually a reader of fictional mystery/thriller type book, but this one was a riot. Something new happens on every page and it keeps you reading, wanting to know what happens next. Really good story. My only quibble with this book is that we spent almost the entire story inside the head of the protagonist, who is the best-known news anchor in Detroit, so as a Detroiter myself I kept picturing Bill Bonds, and that was just weird.”

When I dropped her a note of thanks for the review, she wrote back quickly with a question: Was my main character Frank DeFauw based on famed TV anchor Bill Bonds, who had a long, at times controversial career in Detroit?

And I responded with this: “Asked like a true fan of true crime!” After which I answered her question in some detail.

Now for you non-Detroiters a little context might be helpful. First, here’s my standard 400 character summary of The Car Bomb:

“Detroit Nielson king Frank DeFauw hunts down the story of a judge who may be corrupt—and is one of his best friends. Booze, drugs, womanizing and a passion for the news are all part of what makes this brilliant, erratic TV anchor a major player in this deeply troubled city. Finally, Frank decides if digging out the truth about his pal the judge is worth risking his own career, family and life.”

Starting in the ‘60s and for nearly four decades, Bill Bonds was Detroit’s dominant news presenter and commentator, working for most of that time at WXYZ-TV, Channel 7. Now my story in The Car Bomb is set in Detroit in the early ‘90s, so it’s understandable that anyone familiar with Bonds’ history might wonder if I was channeling Bill when I came up with my character Frank DeFauw.

But, of course, the making of fiction is something akin to that famous line from von Bismark about how laws are like sausages: “…it is better not to see them being made.”

Yes, fashioning fiction can be a messy, off-putting business. A writer takes whatever is in his/her head—every kind of experience and knowledge of every stripe, honest and true perceptions and stolen snippets of dubious hearsay, indelible memories and mis-remembered crap, sweet longings and impure thoughts, hard evidence and flights of fancy—rolls it all around in his/her imagination for a while, and if he/she has any talent, something good might come out.

For several years I worked with Bonds at Channel 7. I was never employed in the newsroom there, but I produced many documentaries and TV specials with him. I truly liked and admired Bill, and we always got along great.

Frank is not Bonds. He is like Bonds only in the same way he is like any number of somewhat larger-than-life big city TV anchors who came to fame back in the now long-lost Golden Age of local TV, including George Clooney’s dad in Cincinnati.

The genesis of The Car Bomb was a simple question: What if someone like that, someone with that kind of voice, visibility and power, suspected that one of his closest friends was corrupt? What would he do? And what would happen? From there I made everything up. And as far as I can recall, I didn’t use a single detail from anything I knew about Bonds’ personal life or his behind-the-scenes professional life, because none of that fit with the story that was unfolding in my head.

Oh, wait. I just thought of something. Both Frank and Bill like to play golf, and I gave Frank a membership at the Oakland Hills Country Club where I hope Bill continues to play. Actually, while I still consider him a good friend, I haven’t seen Bill in several years, not since we had a great time together over breakfast one morning at Birmingham’s Townsend Hotel. I’d love for us to do that again, and maybe if Bill reads The Car Bomb, he’ll remind me of something else I stole from him to make my fiction.

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Last time I spent most of a lengthy post on John Grisham’s hot new one, The Racketeer and promised a comparison of sorts with Gillian Flynn’s super bestseller, Gone Girl. (If you want to catch up first, please click here.) One of the things these books have in common is the timeless power of good storytelling.

Yes, I guess by now we’ve all read about the Flynn book’s inventive plotting, fascinating (and unreliable) narrators, rich themes and savvy style. And let me say up front, I liked much of it and for those very traits that so many others have noted.

Also, and this may only be my own strange predilection, I liked the novel for what it lacks. Yes, it’s a crime thriller, but there’s no CIA, no FBI to speak of, no Navy Seals, no black ops crew buried in some super-secret government agency, not a single terrorist foreign or home-grown, no physical torture, little blood and gore, no bible-obsessed serial killer and no deviant genius with an imminent plot to destroy half of mankind. Really, bored and annoyed is what I am with most thrillers these days, with incredible plots running rampant and predictable characters laying bloody awful things on each other.

In Gone Girl we’ve got just a nicely terrifying domestic crime drama featuring a 30-something married couple with complex issues and two seemingly stumbling small-town cops. Well, anyway, that’s the one-sentence version.

Now as you may have already guessed, I have a thing about plausibility. But at first, I found only an occasional unlikely note. Early on in the back story there’s a strange time lapse between Nick and Amy’s dreamy first meeting at a party, where they already seem half in love, and their chance encounter on a Manhattan street eight months later. Nick says he was going to call, but the slip of paper with Amy’s phone number got ruined in the wash. Patently ridiculous: each of them could easily have found the other through the party’s host.

Yet Amy acts as if this is no big deal and is simply delighted to have him back in her life. But the Amy we will come to know would certainly have punished Nick for being such a dolt. So why the time lapse? Does it tell us something about each of them? Perhaps how desperate Amy really is, how careless and incompetent Nick is? Maybe, but as we learn much later, an important plot point happened during those eight months. Amy started dating Tommy who didn’t pay her enough attention and got himself accused of rape.

Both Nick and Amy are laid-off magazine writers in NYC, and his decision to move them back to his hometown, North Carthage, Missouri, and to buy a bar with what’s left of Amy’s inheritance seems a bit unlikely. But he is close to his twin sister Go, loves his dying mother and hates his demented father, and these connections make the decision more credible. Actually, one of the things I liked most about the novel was its convincing treatment of the deep impact of money issues and the financial crisis on these individual lives. It cuts them off from potential and possibility in ways that feel, at least for a while, terribly true.

When Amy goes missing after two years in North Carthage with signs of a struggle in the living room, the front door of the house is left wide open. Whether Nick is the culprit (he is soon a suspect) or someone else is, this detail seems odd, since it means the disappearance will be almost immediately discovered.

And why does the woman detective wait until they’re back at the station in a sit-down interrogation to ask Nick if he and Amy have kids? Of course she had already gone through every room in his house, and one of her first questions to him on the scene would have been about children. (Note: the issue of offspring will surface again near the end.)

Still Flynn’s sense of timing is solid. Just as I was getting annoyed at the way Nick was so obviously playing the reader, repeatedly mentioning phone calls to his “disposable” that he won’t tell us about, his young mistress Andie shows up at his door. Soon Nick tells us, unnecessarily: “I’m a big fan of the lie of omission.”

And just when the story clearly needs a jolt, we get the news that Amy had gone to an abandoned mall trying to buy a gun from Lonnie, one of the homeless folks squatting there. She feared someone, she said. He can’t get her one, but later, in retrospect, all this seems hard to believe. Amy wanted to leave a trail that will incriminate Nick, so why not just go to Wal-mart and buy a gun. Do it on the record—it’ll be easier to trace, which should have been the whole point.

Then half-way in, about the time that alternating Nick’s current adventures with Amy’s diary back story has begun to seem mechanical, manipulative and contrived, Flynn pivots and starts giving Amy a chance to report her adventures directly. And we soon learn that all those diary entries, covering their first five years together, have been concocted by Amy after the fact. They were all part of framing Nick for her own murder.

About the same time, all the economic realism I had previously admired just begins to fall away. They were struggling to make ends meet, but Amy secretly ran up credit card charges of $212,000 in Nick’s name. Did he never pick up the mail? Did she do it all online? Then why didn’t the cops find a trace of it on her computer?

After a week or two on the run she’s hiding out at some rundown Ozark cabin resort and still has about 9 grand in cash. She nonetheless decides she needs the 50 bucks oddball Jeff offers to help him steal somebody’s catfish. She stupidly lets Jeff and another obvious grifter, Greta, see her money belt stuffed with her entire stash, and so, surprise, the next day she’s dead broke. And now the hard-to-swallow stuff is really beginning to pile up.

Plan A had been to send Nick to the chair and then kill herself, since, I guess, she’d be fully satisfied with her life.

Plan B involves looking up her old high school flame Desi, a multi-millionaire living just an hour away with his mother in one of his mansions. For decades from afar Desi has been crazy in love with Amy, so first he rescues her, then he imprisons her in another of his mansions, then he makes love to her, after which she slits his throat and escapes in his vintage Jaguar.

Now believing Nick’s TV pleadings that he adores his wife and desperately wants her back, Amy returns with a cracked story that Desi was the one who abducted her from North Carthage and had been raping her morning, noon and night. Except for his mother (who looks exactly like an older Amy and whose vagina seems to smell—it’s mentioned twice), no one cares that Desi’s dead, maybe since he was such a hopelessly flat cartoon man.

Nick’s twin sister Go is also strangely flat. Other than running the bar and worrying about her brother, she seems to have no life at all. In fact most of the secondary characters have no more than two dimensions, although Amy’s parents, Rand and Marybeth, have some interesting heft. A lesson in how to raise a monster, they are a clueless, selfish pair of psychologists who gave their own daughter’s name to the always perfect little girl at the center of their wildly successful “Amazing Amy” series of children’s books.

Look, there’s other ridiculous stuff, but Flynn moves her story along so quickly and engagingly that I suspect most readers don’t have time to notice or dwell on those less-than-credible moments. They’re too busy turning pages and wondering what’s next in this cleverly devised chess match between two always sharp and often nasty people. Yes, it partakes of the gothic at times, but it’s also full of witty, insightful commentary on various aspects of American life—the media and its obsessions, the impact of a crashing economy on personal lives, and most of all the cracks and fissures of identity produced by hyper self-consciousness in a society that seems both pressure cooker and fishbowl.

Flynn’s treatment of the media cluster-effing this bizarre crime tale is one of the best things about Gone Girl. Using well her stint at Entertainment Weekly, she gets just about everything right, from the Nancy-Grace type doing her crazed-crusader thing, to the TV gladiator/attorney Tanner Bolt doing media training with Nick. You wonder perhaps how wiped-out Nick can afford Bolt’s $100,000 retainer, but then money is never mentioned again, so not to worry.

Of course, when you resort so often to the implausible, what you end up with is a fantasy masquerading as realism. That’s what this novel is, and so the ultimate question is, why has this fantasy become such a huge hit? Unlike The Racketeer, which seems to have lots of male enthusiasts, women especially have flocked to Gone Girl, many seeming to find it a kind of feminist cry. Do they see in Amy aspects of themselves? Is there some kind of strange liberation here? It is certainly the end of artifice, of pretending to be the Cool Girl, an end to worries about what men want women to be. This is from one of the book’s most quoted graphs:

Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl.

What nerve has been struck here? What deep need filled? My two cents: We live in a time of unprecedented competition between women and men. I know, we have always and forever lived with “the battle of the sexes.” It’s eternal, everlasting. But it has also never, ever seemed so consuming, so constantly present in every corner of our personal, social, economic and political lives.

Equality? It’s only common sense, but benighted forces are still arrayed against it, and so the cries ring everywhere. Gender equality! Equal pay for equal work! Abortion rights! Legitimate rape! The Old White Guy Party’s war on women! Control your own vagina! How many vaginas in the House and Senate? In ’08 Hillary almost made it to that last Glass Ceiling, and 2016 may be hers for the taking. These issues and questions will only gain intensity.

In relationships it’s always been there, and even the male/female cop duo is competing to nab Nick. Not surprisingly the smarter, more competent cop is (maybe just to rub it in) the unattractive woman with the ugly name, Det. Boney.

Heroines (and now anti-heroines) are all the rage these days. No one seems to blink when a wily slip of a girl beats the crap out of a strapping man or two or three. Homeland’s Carrie, despite being bipolar, is more than a match for just about any man in the show. She is smarter, quicker, more intuitive, perceptive and courageous. Saul’s line is definitive: “You were right.” And now we’re hearing that she may have been based on the real life CIA gal (the object of bitter envy at the Agency) who played a major role in getting Osama.

Here’s the fantasy: The woman, Amy, is ridiculously beautiful and smart, but also every man’s worst nightmare. Sensationally desirable, but ultimately despicable, moving somewhere between sociopath and psychopath (more properly the former, although she does seem to swerve from reality at times). She is in fact incapable of genuine warmth for others, condemning her husband to death for cheating and executing in cold blood a man hopelessly in love with her. She, not Nick, has the balls to murder and also that one exclusive natural asset the “weaker sex” has always used to tame the male.

So this story’s baddest badass is not the man but the woman, so super-smart and devious that she can defeat, subdue and control a man who knows her every rotten proclivity because she has confessed it all in the shower, where no tape recorder can nail her.

But now Nick can’t just walk away: Amy has his baby boy in her belly. (She duped him into thinking the fertility clinic they had gone to years ago had destroyed his frozen sperm, then returned there recently to get herself pregnant.) And soon she’ll deliver the unfortunate little tike into a world in which his mother is a monster.

In the book’s final pages we learn that she has carried the baby to term, with submissive Nick there smearing on the cocoa butter and rubbing her feet. And on the marrow she will both give birth and see her new book published, the one that tells her self-serving version of the whole sordid saga.

So she has triumphed. She has won this epic gender war.

Or has she? In their final exchange Amy wonders aloud why Nick is being so good to her. She wants him to say he loves her and she deserves it. Instead he says he just feels sorry for her: “Because every morning you have to wake up and be you.”

At the end Amy tells us she can’t stop thinking about that line from Nick. And so we know without question the war is still on. And, yes, there will be a sequel.

Here’s a final thought from that friend I mentioned in Part 1: About the gender appeal of these two popular novels she says: “Maybe the thrill for women right now is in being bad and getting away with it, while the comfort for men is that being bad does not prevent them from still being good.”

The post EPIC PRISON SCAM VS. EPIC GENDER WAR, Part 2 appeared first on TVLOCICERO.COM.

Sorry, if you’ve dropped by here at all this year, you’ve found the same damn self-serving post day after day, week after week, month after month. And so you probably concluded that I was either dead or too busy to blog. Fortunately it was the latter.

I’ve been putting the finishing touches (always a treacherous trap for me ) to a couple of new crime novels, in what I’m calling The detroit im dyin Trilogy. So more about these new books later.

Right now I’d like to offer some thoughts on two novels that have battled lately for those coveted top spots on the NY Times hardcover bestseller list: John Grisham’s recently released legal thriller The Racketeer and Gillian Flynn’s still wildly popular gender thriller, Gone Girl. And I’ll do this in two parts

First, two obvious questions: What do these two have that so many other novels lack? And what, if anything (beside their lodging in Thrillerland) might they share with each other? Because the second is easier than the first, I’ll start there.

So both novels have unreliable first-person narrators. The Racketeer has one, the disgraced attorney Malcolm Bannister. In a minimum security prison as the story opens, he is half-way through a stiff 10-year sentence for a crime of fraud he says he did not commit. Gone Girl has two narrators, the warring married protagonists Nick and Amy Dunne, both clearly not to be trusted, Amy so much so that her diary entries, which carry forward her side of things for the first half of the book, are subsequently revealed to be false and calculated to legally ensnare her husband.

Now while Bannister is also less-than-reliable, he is so in ways more subtle. And it is not his claim of innocence that makes the defrocked lawyer untrustworthy. In fact, we end up buying his story that he was unfortunately caught up in a criminal conspiracy in which he was not actually culpable. No, rather it’s a variety of lies about other stuff that make Bannister unreliable. Lies sprinkled here and there in the narrative, lies of both omission and commission.

To be clear, we’re not talking about the lies he tells FBI agents, prosecutors and others. Those fibs are often transparent and used, along with the information he withholds from law enforcement, to further the intricate plot he has hatched during all those long months and years in prison. See, Bannister, who manages the prison library and has earned a rep as an effective jailhouse lawyer by securing more than one inmate’s freedom, has a plan to win his own release. And once initiated it works like a charm.

Bannister convinces authorities that he knows the identity of the killer of a recently murdered federal judge and gives them the name of Quinn Rucker, the head of a major drug gang “with contacts up and down the East Coast.” Quinn, he says, was his best friend in prison until the guy walked away from the camp a few months back.

So Bannister orchestrates his own move out of prison and into the government’s witness protection program, with a $150,000 reward, a brand new identity complete with the requisite documents to go wherever he pleases, a pleasant beachside apartment in Florida and a job if he wants it. He soon changes his name to Max Baldwin, and after a plastic surgeon also changes his face, he goes rogue.

At first it appears that that he’s been freaked that his cover has been blown, that Quinn Rucker has somehow learned his new name and whereabouts. And so he’s off running, here and there, to Jamaica and Antigua, Virginia and even back briefly to his Florida apartment.

He’s always one jump ahead of his former FBI handlers and presumably the Rucker gang, but it’s never clear exactly what he’s doing. Only much later will we learn that it’s all part of an ingenious plot.

At this point I should tell you that The Racketeer also has another narrator, third person, not first, the more or less classic omniscient third, which the crafty Grisham slips into on occasion for a few paragraphs, pages or chapters. He does this whenever he wants to present information that is beyond the ken of his almost full-time narrator, Bannister/Baldwin, and this shift allows the imparting of data that moves the story along more effectively, making it richer and more compelling.

Now while these narrative shifts can at times be jarring and certainly break some classic rules of fiction, after a while the reader gets used to them and the payoff—a stronger, more detailed story—makes them seem worthwhile. Not for nothing has the perennially best-selling Grisham been repeatedly called a “master storyteller.” And to be honest, I detected no lies or intentional misleading in these third person passages.

So what are the lies that make Bannister/Baldwin a truly untrustworthy narrator? They are the ones he tells the reader. Yes, along the way the scheming lawyer drops occasional bits of info and brief comments tinged with untruth, the real nature and purpose of which we will learn only in the latter stages of the story. So why would the main narrator of this book want to fool the folks who’ve chosen to read his story? For a definitive answer you’ll have to ask his creator, Mr. Grisham.

But my guess is that Grisham’s intention was to let his narrator mislead and mystify his readers for their own good, to make the experience of reading this novel ever more enthralling as we try to figure out what the hell his protagonist is up to. Naturally he wants this to last as long as possible, until the reader finally reaches that remarkably satisfying conclusion in which all the myriad loose ends are tied up neatly and all the characters get their more or less just deserts.

Yes, The Racketeer is a legal thriller—with few exceptions that’s what Grisham writes. But in this one the author goes to considerable lengths to disguise the true nature of his book’s sub-genre. It’s also a caper novel, and to put off full disclosure for as long as possible, Grisham has his first-person narrator lie, mislead and fool the reader every once in a while.

So what if this scheming ex-attorney is just a naturally talented story spinner? A fellow who instinctively knows that to tell a good page-turning tale, there are moments when you need to withhold information, to keep it unspoken until the time to disclose is right?

Well, withholding is one thing; it’s what many a good storyteller often chooses to do. But lying, or deliberately misleading is quite something else. It’s also called cheating, and the problem with cheating is that when it’s finally exposed, it tends to spoil the experience the book provides. Here are a few examples of Grisham’s cheating.

On page 139, while watching on TV as a dull and unimpressive U.S. Attorney named Stanley Mumphrey announces the indictment of Quinn Rucker, Bannister/Baldwin says, “The thought crosses my mind that, with Stanley in charge, Quinn may have a fighting chance after all.”

But, no, that particular thought would not have occurred to Bannister/Baldwin, because the narrator knows something we don’t know at that point: exactly what will happen to his old friend Quinn.

Fifteen pages later Bannister/Baldwin tells us about a comely gal for whom he’s carrying a torch. He met Vanessa Young at the prison when she was visiting her brother, another inmate, and then exchanged letters with her. But, he says, “it became painfully obvious, at least to me, that my infatuation with Vanessa was not exactly a two-way street.”

This passage about Vanessa lasts just a few brief paragraphs, but they withhold a good deal of information and, more importantly, they mislead: as we eventually learn, she is every bit into him as he is into her, and there is way more to their connection than lustful romance.

And finally, Chapter 26 begins, “I sleep with a gun…” Well, now Bannister/Baldwin may be sleeping with that Beretta he mentions, but it is not, as he clearly implies, because the Rucker clan is hot on his heels. As we learn later, he knows there is no one to fear.

There are many more examples to site, but you get the idea.

In books like this one, there is always a battle of wits going on. More than one, in fact, between characters in the story itself, but also one between the author and the reader. The reader is always trying to figure where the author is heading with his story, and the author is trying to keep the reader guessing for as long as possible.

Now there are accepted rules for this kind of match, the most basic and important of which is that, while withholding info is generally okay, prevaricating and misleading are not. And in The Racketeer Grisham breaks this rule several times. And of course it matters not at all that his unreliable narrator is the one doing the lying and the cheating. As we are reminded every time the narrative slides into the omniscient third, from start to finish this is Grisham’s concoction.

So why is The Racketeer parked solidly at or near the top of the bestseller lists? Surely, first of all because Grisham books are almost always there. For decades he’s enjoyed enormous success and by now has a mass of dedicated readers who, with little or no encouragement, will read almost anything he publishes.

But this book in particular? Certainly, as with many a caper story, there is the lure of a huge pot of untraceable ill-gotten gain at the conclusion. That always seems irresistible, but especially so with our current fascination, in a time of global financial flux and perhaps calamity.

Then there’s that trusty old standby: the deeply satisfying comeuppance of corporate greed and corruption. Grisham seems to be a genuinely good sort who cares about the right things and generally writes stories that expose the bad and support the good.

And how about this gender-tinged thought from one of my most insightful female friends: “I wonder if there isn’t something intrinsically masculine going on. I know I’m not supposed to say such things! But there is a comforting fantasy in Grisham, I think, of men doing the wrong thing and yet still being good guys, worthy of love and intrinsically right.”

Finally, and perhaps most telling: despite its flaws, this book offers the timeless power of good storytelling. That’s something else it shares with Flynn’s Gone Girl. And next time I’ll take a close look at that sensationally successful novel.

The post EPIC PRISON SCAM VS. EPIC GENDER WAR, Part 1 appeared first on TVLOCICERO.COM.

In my last post…

I offered some thoughts on the currently heated discussion of genre versus literary fiction and said I’d look at the experience of constructing my own novels.

So I did not begin with any such intentions, but it turns out that my novel The Obsession is a kind of hybrid, a cross between a psychological and a literary thriller, with elements of crime, mystery and suspense.  I simply set out to tell the story in my head, and this is the way it came out. To my mind there is nothing particularly innovative, groundbreaking or original about its methods, shape or purpose. Again, it was just the story I wanted to tell.

The three main characters all interested me enough that I gave each of them a point of view, in more or less alternating chapters and using what’s called the close third person. I wanted to dig deep into each, to present something of where they come from, how they think and see the world, and of course at least a little of what causes them to do what they do.

Sometimes accomplishing this, presenting information about each of these three people, may slow the action down and force the reader to wait a bit longer to learn about what happens next. But many writers, setting out on the more or less crazy endeavor of penning a novel, struggle with and worry over the tension between depth of character and narrative pace. Finally, you make your choices and live with the result.

And by the way, I also had no intention of writing a trilogy. One of the first people to read The Obsession, an old lit prof of mine, said he wanted to know what happened to certain characters after the story ended. So I started thinking about that and soon came up with outlines for two more novels, one of which, The Dissappearance, I’ve written and published. The third, The Tryst, I’m about to start.

Beyond the classic novelists we all read in school…

Dostoyevsky was the one who grabbed me most often. But it’s been a long time since I’ve read anything by the old Russian giant. In the decades since school, I have returned most often to Vonnegut, Bellow, Malamud, Roth, Le Carre, Simenon, Highsmith, Oates, Leonard, Furst, Rendell, Grisham, McEwan, and Amis.

An eclectic bunch, each read for his/her particular passions, pleasures and perspectives, astonishing skills, charm and wisdom, but it would be presumptuous to claim even that I’ve learned from any of them.

All I can say is that I have flat out loved books by each of them, and that what I do when I’m writing is to keep working and re-working, polishing and polishing again, until I at least like, and on rare occasions, love what I have written.

Readers have a basic hunger for knowing how the world works…

And I suspect that’s true even for those who say they read mostly to escape their troubled or hackneyed corner of the universe. We’re all looking for insight and meaning in all of life’s infinite variety. Sooner or later we decide if a writer has a clear and penetrating gaze, with a view as narrow as a laser or as broad as a flood light, and finally whether reading this book provides a special kind of pleasure.

Does the novelist give us that wonderful sense that she will miss nothing, that he possesses a mind so knowing that it comprehends in a flash and cuts to the essence in an instant? How about an ear so acute that it will capture, recall and make good use of the subtle, revealing nuances of everyday speech?

Does the author have a keen, knowing wit?

A deft way with language that will often please and surprise us with just the right word or phrase, a combination that provides not only delight but helps us see something common in our everyday life in a new way, thus giving it a new meaning?

In short, we ultimately ask ourselves, is she or he a writer who can help us discover a little bit more about what’s important in life and give us a resonating joy in the process?

The question of what genre we might be reading at that moment may well seem beside the point.

The post FLIRTING WITH GENRE (Part 2) appeared first on TVLOCICERO.COM.

In two recent posts titled Why Crime?…

I’ve talked about why we’re so taken with crime books and why crimes usually happen in my own books. One more (rather stray) thought occurred, and I decided to drop it in here:

It may be a good thing at times to remind ourselves that the most efficient, ruthless and, to my mind, disgusting criminals in our midst usually dress well. Those who deliver the most damage to the greatest number of lives around them often favor a well-tailored suit (occasionally one that includes a skirt) or an impressive military uniform, or, with some in the Middle-East, the kind of sparkling white robe we often like to picture Jesus wearing. They come with names like Madoff, Stanford, Mugabe, Gaddafi and Assad. Bin Laden, of course, favored the spotless robe but sometimes accessorized with a camo jacket over it.

Now some of those responsible for the most generous, good-doing activities on the planet also wear similar garb, so let’s not rush to judge a book by its cover, as they used to say back when books really did have covers and not some little jpeg image stuck to a web page.

And speaking of books…

I think it may also be risky to judge a book by its genre.

Not to waste your time, I don’t write fantasy, sci-fi, romance or horror. You could put a gun to my head, and I doubt I would write about zombies, werewolves, vampires or any variety of the undead. I have nothing against those creature or the genres they live in, and maybe if I had actually met one of those folks with the oversized incisors, I might have written in a different direction. But for the most part I don’t read in those genres either.

The comparative value of genre fiction versus literary fiction?

The topic has been hot lately, with interesting pieces by Gary Gutting in the NY Times, Arthur Krystal in The New Yorker, and Dwight Allen in the Los Angeles Review of Books. The term “guilty pleasure” is much bandied about in the discussion of genre novels, but I don’t set much store on it. I rarely feel guilty when I’m reading. It doesn’t matter what subject, style or genre, if I’m not getting some kind of value or pleasure from the collection of words in front of me—and that payoff can come in a multitude of ways—I usually stop reading and try something else.

Is Crime and Punishment genre?

A crime novel? The word is, of course, right there in the title, and can you imagine that powerfully compelling story without the murder at it’s core? But is it a genre construction? Well, no, few would say that, since it’s a world classic, unquestionably one of our great literary masterpieces.

Actually, the most helpful piece I’ve read on genre vs. literary is a recent blog/manifesto from the great Ursala K. Le Guin:

Literature is the extant body of written art. All novels belong to it.

The value judgment concealed in distinguishing one novel as literature and another as genre vanishes with the distinction.

Every readable novel can give true pleasure. Every novel read by choice is read because it gives true pleasure.

Literature consists of many genres, including mystery, science fiction, fantasy, naturalism, realism, magical realism, graphic, erotic, experimental, psychological, social, political, historical, bildungsroman, romance, western, army life, young adult, thriller, etc., etc…. and the proliferating cross-species and subgenres such as erotic Regency, noir police procedural, or historical thriller with zombies.

Some of these categories are descriptive, some are maintained largely as marketing devices. Some are old, some new, some ephemeral.

Genres exist, forms and types and kinds of fiction exist and need to be understood: but no genre is inherently, categorically superior or inferior.

For the whole piece, go to Book View Cafe. 

Let’s face it…

What we’re really talking about here is that unfathomable dance each novelist performs with each reader. Every one of us brings a unique consciousness to each novel we read. But that doesn’t mean we cannot share the experience with others in a deep and detailed way, while exchanging our personal preferences and judgments.

Sheer numbers, the test of time, the estimate of those who’ve made the study of literature their life’s work, the power of their arguments, the tenor of the times and the predilections and tastes of the moment—all these and more will play into a novel’s public valuation. But I find it hard to argue with Ms. Le Guin’s point that a novel’s genre should not be a determining factor. To me, her perspective seems not just democratic but practical and wise. How about you?

Next time I’ll go at this genre business with my own fiction in mind.

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