Why write?

Tim Hallinan for Michael - Thursday

When you read this, I should be in the heart of the Okavango Delta in Botswana, a place of my heart. And a place with no internet. So I asked Tim if I could repost this piece which addresses a question all writers and would be writers ask themselves, and should if they don't. Why do we write? Over to you Tim.

Why do I write?
Writing is the best way I know to look inward.  It's more fun than therapy, more effective, and it has the additional virtue of being free.  In fact, sometimes -- in extraordinary circumstances -- people pay you to do it.

I started writing because I heard a constant babble of voices in my head, loud enough and varied enough to make me wonder whether I had multiple personality disorder.  After writing for a few years, I discovered that multiple personality disorder is something to be cherished, to be watered regularly and taken for the occasional walk on the lawn.

Multiple personality disorder is the short cut to characters, and characters, in addition to being indispensable to fiction, are all slivers of the self.  They may not be especially pleasant slivers, and it may be disconcerting to know that you're harboring a small crowd of Mr. Hydes and Dr. Mengeles, but there are angels in there too.  We all of us contain the bruisers, the bruised, and the healers.  We should buy them cupcakes from time to time.  It's important to know they're all there.

So writing is one way to circle the mystery of who we are.  We bring our warring cloud of inner children to the tips of our fingers and let them do their stuff.  And then, sometimes, something very interesting and slightly mysterious happens.  They create a story, and that story arrives wrapped in its own world, and that world has its own weather and landscape and rules.  And if you nurse it along for an extended period and let the characters have their say and do what they would in the circumstances you've imagined, you have a novel.

A novel, whatever else it may be, is a projection of the person who wrote it.  It's been said frequently that a writer can't create a character more intelligent than than the writer is.  I'm not sure about that, but there's no question that writers can create characters braver, more cowardly, more evil, more saintly, more almostanything than the writer is -- because the writer as a functioning personality is a carefully assembled presentation of the good/bad/beautiful/ugly/wise/immature inner voices in his or her skull.  Part of growing up is to learn to manage our conflicting impulses, to organize them, like a good photographer faced with a motley crowd and somehow creating a relatively attractive group shot.  Sooner or later, we begin to believe (at times, anyway) that that carefully assembled jigsaw puzzle is really who we are.  Writing lets us pick that apart and speak to each of those little imps and angels individually and let them stretch their legs.

I've been horrified by what some of my characters do, while others have (embarrassing confession ahead) moved me to tears with their goodness.  I have rarely moved myself to tears with my own goodness, but it tells me something when I create a world that contains such a character.  It's reassuring.  And for some reason (maybe self-protection) it doesn't negate that reassurance that I also created the Madame Wings and Captain Teeth who move my stories along with their badness.

So far, I've said nothing about writing well, nothing about art or even competence.  I write as well as I can because it gives me pleasure, and I'd do it even if I wrote much less well than I do.  I think that writing well is the last thing writers should think about.  The first joy is letting the story take shape, living through the characters and exploring the world they inhabit.  The second thing is bringing it to some sort of completion that's organic and unforced.  If you do all of that -- and if you don't censor or bully the slivers of you that appear on the page -- you'll produce something interesting.  If you write it simply, trying to keep the prose out of the way so the pages are windows through which the reader sees the action, you'll have a working first draft.  Then, if you want to, you can worry about  making it better.

Or you can put it aside as a learning experience, a mountain you've climbed.  If you've decided to climb several mountains, you might not want to go back to the first or the second and try to climb them more elegantly.  Or, if you're me, you might.  But I make it better for the same reason I wrote it in the first place -- I enjoy it.

So the real reason I write is that I can't think of an answer to the question, Why shouldn't I write?

Tim Hallinan is the author of the award-winning Poke Rafferty thrillers set in Thailand, and the hilarious Junior Bender mysteries set wherever he likes. If you ask why you should read his books, rather look for an answer to why shouldn't you.

Guest Blogger--Tim Hallinan: Noises in the Attic

Jeff—Saturday

Who among us does not know Tim Hallinan?  He’s among MIE’s distinguished alumni and founders, and an all around, multi-award honored writer of three drop-dead (in all senses of the idiom) series.  He’s posted some great blogs for us in recent weeks and as this week marks the release of his latest Junior Bender novel, “Nighttown,” we’re pleased to have his inside take on one of the hottest new books out there.  But don’t take my word on that, here’s what Marilyn Stasio had to say about “Nighttown” in her most recent The New York Times column:

“Some people welcome the night: hotel managers, nightclub pianists, “Saturday Night Live” interns. Also burglars like Junior Bender, the personable protagonist of Timothy Hallinan’s comic mysteries….Hallinan is exceedingly funny when describing colorful crooks like Louie the Lost, a getaway driver with no sense of direction, and Stinky Tetweil, a grossly fat fence who surrounds himself with exquisite objets d’art. Hallinan’s eclectic narrative also extends to insights about 19th-century spirit photography (“It would be kitsch if it weren’t so callous”) and a Native American legend about human shadows. This one’s good for what ails you.”

One of the great things about writing novels is that they're roomy. Unlike more concentrated forms, such as short stories or (God forbid) haiku, a novel gives a writer the opportunity to have some fun, to ransack through what is undoubtedly an untidy frame of reference and, you know, get things off his or her chest.

You want to write a hilarious exchange between a couple of oysters? An intricate pun on the word bivalve that you've been saving since you thought of it five minutes too late 20 years ago, going down the stairs from seafood dinner at which it would have killed? Well, use it. You've got 90-100,000 words to get through, and if you can't fit an oyster joke in somewhere, you should probably be writing advertising copy.

This is an aspect of novel-writing that has special appeal for people like me. Someone once said of Victor Hugo that his knowledge was “as wide as all the seas and half an inch deep.” I'm not claiming the width, but I have no hesitation about the depth. I've been reading incessantly ever since second grade, and most of what I've read has trailed along with me. If, like Francois Villon, you've been asking yourself, Where are the snows of yesteryear? well, I've got them right here. Somewhere. Filed, like everything else, under “miscellaneous” in a vast mental attic. And you know what? When you've got all that stuff tucked away, it wants to get out.

My mental attic

 So, for me, one of the joys of writing a novel is that I get to trot out my forgotten pets, all the little factoids, punch lines, passing interests, and, um, obsessions that have been tucked away in the dark for so long. Since I know almost nothing about a book before I begin to write it, the gates are wide open. As I work I'm constantly aware that there's a part of me- a little bent-backed, balding guy in gray coveralls-who's ransacking the overstuffed attic of my consciousness. Once in a while he pulls something out and holds it up to the light, and when he does I almost always pay attention.

 

He was running himself ragged during the time I was writing the new Junior Bender mystery, Nighttown. Rarely have I worked with more cooperative material, a story that, largely uncritically, accepted pretty much everything the little guy held up. Some of them are things I've worried about for years.

For example.

Are you aware that God's first line in the King James Bible is “Let there be light?” Well, okay, so you're aware of it, but you might not have thought much about this primal, deck-stacking bias in favor of light – not the nice, restful rhythm of alternating periods of light and dark, but an absolute and exclusive preference for light in all its glaring, squint-provoking conspicuousness.

God's first line was the beginning of this book for me. Junior, as a burglar, likes darkness, a taste I share and refined over a decade of sleeping much of the day and inhabiting largely the world of night. (I was in a band at the time, and it was a natural rhythm.) This book gave me an opportunity to get in a word for nighttime, which I think is long overdue. As Junior says in the book:

It's not that light is useless. I'm as fond of a sunny day as anyone who isn't prone to melanoma, but I can't help thinking that giving the sun the night off is one of creation's better ideas. It rests the eyes, it allows plants a chance to take a break from making sugar. It clears the landscape for a lot of very interesting animal life. Most love is made at night, at least by people older than, say, seventeen. Many of the world's most fragrant flowers bloom at night. In place of the monochrome blue of the daytime sky, night offers us the moon's waxing and waning face, set against the infinite jewelry of the stars.

If it seems to you that I've given this a lot of thought, you're right. Nighttime, in a manner of speaking, is my zip code. It's an undiscriminating neighborhood, one I share with disk jockeys, cops, ambulance drivers, insomniacs, air traffic controllers, French bakers, peeping toms, recovering drunks, speed freaks, the terrified, the bereaved, the guilt-ridden, and those with the medical condition photophobia. Sure, it's a mixed batch, but night also evens the odds for the blind and extends a hand of mercy to the odd-looking, the ones who draw stares in the glare of noon. It softens the edges of even our ugliest cities.

So there. Take that, Book of Genesis.

But, of course, you can't just choose a personal preference and make kissy-face with it for 350 pages, and expect to hold your readers' attention, unless you're Ayn Rand. (And if you are, it'll be 700 pages.) One must push the boundaries from time to time. Since I was committed to darkness in various forms as a theme of this book, and since it couldn't be a prolonged fantasy on the theme “Hello darkness, my old friend,” I had to come up with someplace that was too dark even for Junior. And out of that quest came Horton House, a creaking 120-year-old mansion that hums with malice and is scheduled for demolition three or four days after the book begins. But, of course, before the place could be demolished, I had to write it, and where would I find a template for that?

Viola! -- a mansion

Tucked away in my mental attic was the goose-bumped memory of having read Benighted, a largely forgotten novel by a now-largely forgotten (but great) writer named J. B. Priestley. The book, his second, was published in 1927 and went largely unnoticed until his next one, The Good Companions, became a global sensation, topping virtually every best-seller chart in the world. In the Priestley rage, Benighted was dusted off by its publishers and, within months, was adapted as a film called “The Old Dark House,” which essentially gave rise to a whole genre, including, ultimately, quite a bit of Horton House in a book called Nighttown.    

 

And in a spooky house, what could be more fitting than a spooky picture? Before I even got the question out, the guy in the attic yawned and said, “Spirit photography.”

Spirit photography was a heartless 19th-century hoax that came out of the rise to prominence of Spiritualism, a belief system that said that our dead remained with us, sort of invisible fish in the aquarium of life, and that through the rigorous practice of Spiritualism and the intercession of mediums, we could exchange hello-how-are-you and other small talk with them. (The first mediums were the Fox sisters, two young women from Hydesville, a now-vanished town in upstate New York. They called the spirits to the table around which they and the customer-sorry, the seeker-were gathered, and the seeker's questions were answered by a volley of noises from beneath the table, which the Fox sisters “interpreted.” Decades later the sisters confessed that they had double-jointed toes that they could “pop,”which they employed as a sort of spiritual percussion section.)

Spiritualism arose in both the Unites States and England and earned a respectable following but spread like wildfire after the mass bereavements of World War I and the Spanish flu, which killed tens of millions. The time was ripe for a belief system that blunted the edge of loss, and that belief was heightened by spirit photography, which took advantage of widespread ignorance about the mechanics of the camera and was essentially a carefully composed double exposure. For example:

The bereaved is in the foreground, the grumpy-looking and oddly posed departed is behind him

The pictures look stagy and obvious to us now, but back then they inspired belief and awe.

One of the final links in the chain that ultimately formed the story of Nighttown is that the person who was probably most responsible for the spread of Spiritualism, its global spokesperson, to use a modern term, was Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of the most relentlessly logical detective in the history of crime fiction. Conan Doyle's connection to Spiritualism was the last tidbit to emerge from the attic; after this, the characters took over as they always do, surprising me with the way they react to all these things and to each other.

So: darkness, an old house, spiritualism, a bunch of somewhat odd characters, and the most famous of all literary sleuths: All of this gave me permission to write about the night: Outside, it was definitely nighttown. The world felt abandoned and thick with sleep, and the gleam of my headlights shifted the colors in front of me toward the yellowish area of the spectrum, the colors I associate with bruising and decay. The clouds had cleared but the moon was mostly a memory, an icy curl as thin as an eyelash, far, far to the West as it lowered itself toward the Pacific. The stars are never much in Los Angeles, but with the moon on its way out they stippled the sky in an orderly, domesticated fashion as though they weren't all lethal, perpetual atomic meltdowns burning their way toward us across billions of miles. They disappeared deferentially near the horizon, where the city lights absorbed their glow.

It was a treat for me to write it. Hope you like the book.

Tim—in for Jeff

Guest Blogger Tim Hallinan: Who Cares Whodunnit? (Part Two)

Jeff—Saturday

 I feel as if I’m playing second fiddle to Jascha Heifetz and Itzhak Perlman, which I guess isn’t a bad thing when you come right down to it. Perhaps even a bit propitious, since Heifetz once lived on Mykonos not far from where I live today.  But the bottom line truth is that my fiddler analogy is a guilt-ridden effort on my part to justify my shameless piggybacking on the hard work of two other maestros, purely for the purpose of giving me more time to pack for my return to the States tomorrow after five months away. 

The guy in the photo at the top of this post goes by the name Tim Hallinan, and he’s written a seminal two-part dissertation on the timeless Hatfield and McCoy-like feud obtaining between arbiters of all things literary and the crime writing community.  Each of us has our stories of run-ins on that subject, but Tim ties it all together.  Then there’s maestro Stanley Trollip of Michael Stanley fame, who posted Part One of Tim’s work here on Thursday, together with a introduction that I dare not attempt to duplicate. Instead, I wholeheartedly recommend that if you haven’t yet read Part One and Stan’s introduction you do so now, before reading any further.

Don’t worry, we’ll be here patiently waiting for you to get back…though Tim might be tapping his foot a bit until you return.

Welcome back.  Here’s Tim.

Tim's new Junior Bender, coming in November

As the title suggests, this post is sort of a sequel. If you haven’t read Part One and think you might like to, it’s back there somewhere.

When I ran out of steam last time, I was getting into two of the things I blame for the low esteem with which some people regard mysteries and thrillers. One was the universal human need to find someone or something to look down on The other is the term “whodunnit” and what it implies.

The problem, on a platter

“Whodunnit?” when you think about it, isn’t a very complicated question. It can usually be answered with a single character’s name, unless you’re reading Agatha Christie’s “Murder on the Orient Express,” in which case the answer is, “everybody.” (Sorry about the spoiler.

And I’ll go out on a limb here and say that I think “Murder on the Orient Express” is a perfect book of its kind, and that I don’t actually like books of its kind. And by that, I mean books in which “whodunnit” is actually the most important thing in the story. Books in which a puzzle, rather than people, is what matters.

The usual suspects

A murder―any act of violence―needs to be taken seriously. These deeds affect people – obviously not just the victim, but those who loved the victim, who hated the victim, who envied the victim, who had his or her hopes pinned on the victim. Ultimately, since such acts have a ripple effect, people who never heard of the victim.

Add captionA world-changer

An act of violence is an interruption of everything we planned for, all the assumptions we depended on. It disrupts the world. It makes it apparent that our hopes are predicated on expectations that may not be fulfilled, on rules that some people don’t follow, on an instinctive belief in a prevailing underlying justice that may not actually exist. An act of violence, a murder, creates a crisis. And what happens in a crisis is that character reveals itself.

I would argue that the revelation of character, of holding a human being up to the light to see how he or she works – where she is strong or weak or admirable or loathsome or flexible or rigid or holy or profane – is the primary function of fiction.

What’s most interesting to me about all this is that murder and violence – physical or emotional violence – have been used to reveal character and propel events forward in literature all over the world, from the very beginning. What’s Homer writing about? War and survival. The Book of Genesis takes us straight to a murder, Cain’s killing of Abel, and its repercussions. The greatest of Sophocles’ plays, “Oedipus Rex,” is a detective story with a twist, which is that the central character turns out to be the murderer. When Agatha Christie did precisely that in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd in 1926, it caused a minor sensation even though Sophocles had already pulled it off almost 2400 years earlier. To look at the Middle Ages, Beowulf is a straight-ahead thriller, a portrait of a society suspended, being held for ransom by violence until someone—some hero—will step forward and take action.

A classic example of serious literature using murder as the microscope for character is “Hamlet.”

A boy and his skull

“Hamlet” presents a classic setup: a man has been killed, and the job of finding the murderer and punishing him falls to the victim’s son. In fact, this situation has been used so often that it’s become a trope, one modern definition of which is “a story concept that the audience will recognize and understand instantly.”

But in Shakespeare’s hands, the murder investigation leads us into all sorts of issues: the primacy of kings, the relationship between mother and son, the betrayal of friendship, the immeasurable value of honest friendship, the fragility of young love, the soul-sickness of the murderer, the eternal question of what sometimes keeps us from doing what we need to do even when the path seems clear.

At two points, Claudius’s failed prayer and the “To be or not to be” soliloquy, it takes us into regions like the silence of God, the relationship between God and the human soul, and the uncertainty of the afterlife. Big stuff. And all of it arises naturally from fascinating, deeply felt characters who are responding to the old-testament blunt weapon of murder.

And after Shakespeare has put us inside these characters’ hearts and souls for hours―so deeply that Elsinore Castle becomes―the whole universe, at the end, when everyone is dead or dying, he brings in someone new and untouched by the mystery, Fortinbras, to survey the dead, frown at the disorderly throne room, assert a shaky claim to authority, and order that the word of these terrible events be spread far and wide, and now let’s get to work. We’ve got a country to run.

Fortinbras rolls up his sleeves and dusts off his crown

.At that precise moment the bodies on the stage – Hamlet, Gertrude, Claudius, the others – who have been our world for hours, are just litter to be cleared away to make room for the new orde

We’re witnessing the restoration of order, which was Shakespeare’s great theme, whether the play is a comedy, tragedy, history, or one of the very complex late works that scholars, for lack of a better term, call “problem plays.” Whatever genre (there’s that word again) the play represents, in the first act we learn what’s wrong with the world it depicts, and the end of the fifth act, order has been restored

And that is absolutely what happens in a crime novel, whether it’s a thriller or a mystery. The reader enters a world that’s about to be broken or has just been broken. It’s out of kilter. It’s stopped working the way we believe our world should work. The characters of the people on the page are being stretched thin enough to become transparent; motives and enmities and love are suddenly made visible. The primary course of action of a mystery or a thriller is repairing that broken world and exploring those exposed characters, restoring both to some kind of acceptable balance. It may be retribution, it may be the revelation of the truth. The denouement may be thrilling or comic or tragic. Depends on the book. But at the end of the story – unless it’s noir – there will be some form of restoration.

Question mark or fish hook?

The reason that kind of exploration and illumination work so well in the whodunnit and the thriller is that each of them plants a question mark at the very beginning – in “Hamlet,” the opening words are “Who’s there?” called out by a terrified guard who’s asking the question that’s really being asked throughout the play. Who’s behind that mask? Who’s beneath that crown? Who’s wearing that smile? Who is that man who was pretending to love me?

The whodunnit and the thriller take that question mark and plant it right there in the first act. It may or may not be a coincidence that a question mark looks like a fish hook, because what the question mark does is hook the reader and pull him or her across 100,000 words or so to see what the answer is, and—more important—what happens as we get closer to it.

And that fish hook has to drag the reader upstream because as he or she sits there, nose to the type, the real world is flowing by. People take a break from their lives to read, and writers should never forget that. A reader with the book open is like a rock in a stream: life is flowing past, carrying with it lots of things that compete for the reader’s attention, and some of them will only go by once. I think we owe the reader something in our book that makes that commitment of time and energy and attention worthwhile.

So that means the books have to be about something that goes beyond whodunnit. On a purely personal note and from a writer’s perspective, I can testify that there’s probably not a theme in the world that can’t be explored in a thriller or a whodunit, not a society, not a culture, not a business.

 These are essentially investigative forms – there’s almost always a character whose primary function is to ask questions, and in such a story there’s pretty much nothing you can’t open up and put a microscope to. In a modest way, when I attempt to frame such a story I feel that I’m following in the tracks of hundreds and hundreds of talented writers who sat down day after day to write the best book they possibly could – to make the reading experience worthwhile for the people who open the book – in both literary fiction and genre fiction. Detective fiction and thrillers have deepened and broadened to include characters who are deeper than the page, predicaments that are more than puzzles, revelations that reflect our own lives. I believe that some of the best writers of the past century have worked and are working in what’s still called genre fiction, and they know that the question is not, and never really has been, “whodunnit?” It’s “what happened?” and “to whom?” and “what does this show me about my world?”

Far as I’m concerned, those are real books.

So there.

Tim—in for Jeff

Who Cares Whodunnit? (Part One)

Stanley - Thursday

It is a great pleasure to welcome back Tim Hallinan - a past Murder is Everywhere blogger, a great writer, and an insightful and prolific Facebook commentator. He needs no introduction to long-time readers of our blog, but for those who are new here, a brief introduction is necessary.

It was through The Queen of Patpong, the fourth of the Poke Rafferty series, that I started following Tim. I was immediately struck by how well he had woven social commentary into an entertaining story using an interesting protagonist, Poke Rafferty, and his not-to-be-forgotten family. The eighth in the series, Fool's River, came out in November 2017.

Totally different, but equally appealing, is the Junior Bender series. As Tim writes on his website:

"Junior Bender is a Los Angeles burglar deluxe-a thief's thief. But he also has a sideline: he works as a private eye. For crooks. When someone commits a crime against a crook, odds area that the crook isn't going to the cops. He or she is going to Junior Bender."

The seventh Junior Bender book, Nighttown, will be released next month.

And then there's the Simeon Grist series, which Tim had relegated to limbo many years ago. Until Simeon, the protagonist, realises he is in limbo, that he is a fictitious character written by someone else. The series came alive again with Pulped.

Today Tim gives us the first in a two-part blog on a topic that gets under the skin of every mystery writer.

Please welcome back Tim Hallinan.

______________________________________________

I’m here today to air a grievance. And to do it at some length. In fact, in two parts.

I write whodunnits. I work hard at it. I do the best I can every single day and usually wind up tossing half of my work. I am perpetually faced with something I have no idea in the world how to write, and I write it anyway. Once in a while, I think, I do it reasonably well.

But, like everyone who writes crime fiction, I know that there are those who look down upon me. As far as these folks are concerned, I’m a “genre” writer. I practice my craft in a downscale literary ZIP code where people park on the lawn and the houses lean a little and the children usually have stuff on their upper lip. And―despite the fact that I wash my car and park it over at the Walmart―my stories, even the best of them, according to certain people, are not . . . actually . . . books.

The crime fiction ZIP code. You can’t see our beat-up cars because the banks foreclosed on our lawns.

Some of the people who write, edit, publish, and criticize so-called “literary fiction” regard themselves as members of a different species than people like me. We’re not quite real writers. They see themselves atop the high, white marble towers of literature in which they and their readers live, raising knowing eyebrows at each other and tossing off quips while we genre mutts drag ourselves around in the mud on our elbows, grunting at each other and squabbling over chicken bones and the occasional shiny bead.

If you’re a reader of crime fiction, you’ve probably encountered this attitude, too. There are people in my life (and probably in yours) who, when they ask what you’re reading and learn that it’s a “whodunnit,” pause for a second, make a sort of Downton Abbey vowel like, “Euhhh,” and then ask, “Is it interesting?” As though (a) it would be a waste of time to come up with a better question for someone on your reading level, and (b) it can’t possibly actually be interesting. In any serious way, that is. For a serious person.

A seriously stupid question

These people try to build literary fences around us, as though our books might somehow cohabit with their books and accidentally make them, you know, interesting. Nonfiction and literary fiction receive serious and relatively frequent newsprint, but genre fiction is reviewed in a modest little column that appears on odd-numbered Thursdays in months without an “R” in their name.

They restrict our books to their own little ghettos in bookstores, too – the aisles of which I’m happy to say, often have more customers in them than some other aisles I could name. Because that’s the dirty little secret. A medium-selling mystery outsells a medium-selling lit-fic novel, and genre fiction has a really uncomfortable way of taking out longterm leases on the top rungs of the bestseller lists. But you, know, that’s because ordinary people buy them.

Defiantly ordinary reader

Those of us who write thrillers and whodunnits can get a little . . . defensive about being classified as literary invertebrates. For one thing, we write an awfully broad and complex spectrum of books to be crammed into a one or two-word description. We write, for example, the kind of classic puzzles, dependent on clues and timetables, that marked the so-called “Golden Age.”

We write hard-boiled private eyes. We write cooking mysteries like Murder In the YeastorChili Con Carnage. Or craft mysteries like The Dropped Stitch of Death. Or elaborate, amazingly literate mysteries set in the Louisiana bayous, like those of James Lee Burke. Or character-steeped police procedurals like Henning Mankell’s. Or flawed half-villains and their sometimes treacherous friends, like Patricia Highsmith’s characters. We write night-black noir, like Jim Thompson and Ken Bruen. We cover much of the known world, like the writers on this very blog.

The House of Crime

It this genre were a single house, it would need rooms for Sherlock Holmes, Philip Marlowe, Mike Hammer, Harry Bosch, Nero Wolfe, Miss Marple, Father Brown, Kinsey Millhone, Commissario Brunetti, Arkady Renko, Sam Spade, Easy Rawlins, Jack Reacher, Lew Archer, Lydia Chin, Flavia de Luce, Precious Ramotswe, V.I Warshawski, Inspector Maigret, Lord Peter Wimsey, Dave Robicheau, Rabbi David Small, Brother Cadfael, Father Brown, and literally thousands of others. The house would need a lot of bedrooms, and it’s hard to imagine the conversation at the dinner table, because these people don’t really have much in common. (In the interest of maintaining some threadbare semblance of neutrality I've omitted the varied and fully rounded characters created by the writers on this forum.)

I’ve barely scraped the surface, and I could go on all day. If this is a “genre” it’s so broad and varied that the people who chose the word need to go back and come up with another.

And if you doubt that the word is pejorative, a few years ago J.A. Jance, a writer who has sold more than twenty million books, called the college from which she graduated and volunteered to put in a month working (for free) in their writing program. She was told, and this is a quote, “Oh, no, we don’t do anything with GENRE fiction; we only do LITERARY fiction.”

Why the negative judgment? What is it about so-called genre books, including whodunnits, that gets the literary highbrows’ knickers so twisted?

Untwisted knickers

My first theory is that it’s just another manifestation of the eternal human fact that everybody needs someone to look down on. Obviously, this thought isn’t original with me, but I defy anyone to make the case that this isn’t a universal and instinctive desire. It’s why the few all-first-class airlines, like MGM Grand, all went broke. The problem wasn’t that there weren’t enough people who could afford the tickets. The problem was that there was no tourist class for the people in the front of the plane to feel superior to. What’s the joy of stretching out in first class with your foie grasif there aren’t a bunch of grunts in back, folded up like paper clips, eating K-rations and envying you? What’s the fun of boarding the plane first, if no one is boarding second?

So here’s my second theory.

The term whodunnit.

I’ll get to that in Part Two, which will appear on Saturday in Jeff Siger's spot..

Tim Hallinan is Back: Notes from Exile

An apparition.

Our dear Tim has come back to visit. He’s gotten tons of accolades for his Junior Bender series and now his latest Poke set in Bangkok is out —FOR THE DEAD—and of it is said:  “A wondrous work, emotionally complex and stirring, with an excellent plot and perfect characterization. I don’t know how Hallinan channeled this from his inner self, but this book is superb. In fact, the whole series is extraordinary.”—Maddy van Hartbruggen, For Mystery Addicts

Thanks for joining us Tim and welcome ‘home’!

Cara 

It's soooooo nice to be back on MIE, and thanks to the ever-generous Cara Black for suggesting that I take her weekly spot to weigh in and tell you what's up in my world, now that I no longer pester you here once every week.

First in my heart, of course, are the Los Angeles Dodgers. Biggest payroll in major league baseball, talent at every position, and incapable of getting a runner home from second base. They hold the most melancholy baseball record I can think of at the moment: they're the team who, in a single season, most often got the bases loaded without scoring anyone. It was so bad that one writer suggested to opposing teams that the best way to beat the Dodgers was to let them get three men on base every inning.

Dodger center fielder, Yasiel Puig, 0 for 12 in post-season 

On the other hand, there was some good baseball news, and her name was Mo'ne Davis. What a lift she gave to my spirits.

Mo'ne, bringing it.

There is a world outside of baseball, and in it there's been yet another military coup in Thailand, the twelfth since 1932, when the constitutional monarchy was put in place. This one is especially heinous (in my mind) because it was, in essence, a coup against the nation's voters. The Democratic Party, the major party of the traditional Thai elite, has not attained power by, you know, winning an election since 2000, and it was becoming evident that they never would, so the Army (which is commanded by the elite) took over, and the head of the Army retired his uniform and proclaimed himself prime minister.  (See, a general isn't supposed to be prime minister, so this change of clothes avoided a violation of the constitution.  Wouldn't want to violate the constitution after illegally seizing power, would we?)

Coup troops restoring order. See all the disorder?

In a country with a long tradition of free speech, the coup outlawed protest of any kind. There was a brief rash of individuals sitting around eating sandwiches and reading Orwell's 1984, but they got arrested. So people left 1984 home and just sat around pointedly eating a sandwich, and they got arrested. Now the rule is (honest) no group of people numbering more five or more can just sit or stand around, with or without sandwiches.

Enemy of the State.  This guy was dragged away moments after this picture was taken. Honest. 

Oh, and the coup's motto is "Be Happy."

Junior's Latest Adventure

A bit closer to home, my Junior Bender series has been bought for NBC television by my favorite comic in the world, Eddie Izzard.  The deal for a weekly series was announced about a month ago. As happy as I am about this, the thing I probably like best is that I sat all by myself in Santa Monica, laughing as I wrote about Junior, and in London. God only knows how many thousand miles away, Eddie Izzard read it, and he laughed, too.  When I finally reach those pearly gates (fingers crossed) and I'm asked, "So?  What did you do?" I'll be able to say, "I made Eddie Izzard laugh."

Eddie, not laughing.

Last and certainly not least (the Dodgers can claim that honor), the sixth Poke Rafferty book, For the Dead, comes out today, November 4. This is Miaow's book, and I can (and will) say that I have a special feeling for it. Reviews have been phenomenal, and William Kent Krueger said, “For the Dead is not only a fast-paced, compelling tale, but also, on every level, a fine literary read.・And Edgar-winner Wendy Hornsby described it as, "Beautiful, scary, and heartbreaking all at once. Read it and weep."

Miaow's book.

When and if I ever stop writing the Poke novels, the character I'll miss most is Miaow.  She's been my favorite character to write, ever. I put whatever I had (and then some) into this particular book, and I hope it pays off in enjoyment on the reader's end of this long equation. Please let me know whether you like it.

Thanks to Cara, Jeffrey, et, al. for letting me hang my sign here this week.  See you all again, I hope.

Tim for Cara—Tuesday