Keith Dixon - Crime Writing Confidential: What Crime Writers Do, and How Theyve Done It

CRIME WRITING CONFIDENTIAL

What Crime Writers Do, And How Theyve Done It

KEITH DIXON

Semiologic Ltd

Crime Writing Confidential - What Crime Writers Do, And How Theyve Done It

Keith Dixon

Copyright 2013 Keith Dixon

First published by Semiologic Ltd at Smashwords in 2013

ISBN: 9781301897094

Keith Dixon has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved

This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by mimeograph, photocopy, or any other means, electronic or physical, without express written permission of the author.

For information, contact:

Semiologic Ltd, 133 Sandbach Road, Rode Heath,

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Set in Palatino Linotype

Oh boy, is the world of publishing changing. You dont need me to tell you that, as youre reading this on your Kindle, your tablet, your smart phone, your PC or Mac screen.

When I first started publishing six years ago, the thing was to make your book available at least in paperback and for the sake of vanity if nothing else in a hardback edition too.

But the work youre holding in your hands (or looking at on your desk) may never see the inside of covers, paper or otherwise. It was created online, as a series of blog posts, and it will likely be consumed online.

What doesnt change, however, is quality. Of course the advent of Print on Demand and Amazons direct publishing system means that more books are published every year than ever before. Authors like me are cutting out the middle-men those who have been perceived as the gatekeepers, preventing us getting our work out there to a possibly mythical starving readership.

But much as we hate to admit it, those gatekeepers do or did provide a level of quality control. It was hard to get published for a reason the books had to be good enough to earn the publisher some money. And they werent going to publish bad books, lose their reputation, lose their authors as a consequence and go out of business. Quality was at least a potential hedge against failure.

Its still hard to get published but, it seems to me, for a different reason: the economics have got worse. When I was a young up-and-comer and had an agent, he said to me once that he couldnt understand why I wasnt finding a publisher. But I understood my books werent good enough. These days I think, I hope, they probably are but the environment has changed. Publishers are using agents, basically, to read their slush piles for them. Agents have taken the place of the young graduates whod read through the reams of material publishers would receive every week. Many publishers dont even have slush piles any more, and wont accept unagented work.

Moreover, publishers are outsourcing many of the functions that they once provided in-house editing, marketing, design. The publisher seems to be developing into more of a central resource that binds these various disciplines together, then stamps their name on the title page.

As a result, they have become even more particular about who they publish. Which of course means that in the new digital age, many authors have either given up on them (if theyre new to writing) or are abandoning them. One reads more and more stories of well-established and successful authors like Lawrence Block and Barry Eisler taking their work into their own hands and publishing their own work themselves. If nothing else, they earn a higher percentage of the take. Which is what publishers always did.

This book, however, is Old School. While practically all of the works referred to have been read by me in ebook form, all of them have been commercially published. My goal as a reader of crime fiction as well as simple enjoyment is to learn as much as I can about the practice of writing. So by and large I try to read those writers who I know are going to teach me something.

This book, therefore, is part of an ongoing personal project to squeeze learning from the best authors I can find, and to avoid the traps demonstrated in those books which, for me, simply dont work. Some of the writers are popular, some are less well-known. All of them, I hope, can teach writers new to the craft something about how to write prose so that it both entertains and inspires.

Walter Mosley's When the Thrill is Gone is the third of his series featuring black private-eye L.T. McGill. Mosley is probably best known for his series about Easy Rawlins, the first of which Devil in a Blue Dress was made into a film starring Denzel Washington.

Mosley is interesting because his style is both sophisticated and crude at the same time. It's sophisticated in that his characters are all individuated clearly and seem to have lives outside of the stories that Mosley tells about them. His style is crude to the extent that he uses dialogue tags very oddly. Take the following few examples:

Itll be eleven years before I put him in the ring, the brightskinned young thief opined ... "

I hailed a cab and we piled in. Tally gave the driver his address after we both closed our doors.

I dont go to Brooklyn, the foreign white man told us.

A message? this middle-aged woman from the middle of Middle America said.

Hi, Dad, the dark-olive-skinned Asian girl said.

At one level you can read these as adding more information so that the reader gets a clearer picture of the individual in question. But on the other hand, when reading, these descriptions get in the way of your progress. Many if not most manuals on writing suggest that you use a straightforward 'he said', 'she said', the reason being that the reader glosses over the tags very quickly, simply taking orientation from them as to who is speaking.

By adding the adjectival descriptions Mosley complicates the reading process, often to no purpose. Early in the current book, for example, McGill, writing in the first person, describes a character he's interviewing as 'the retiree', 'the father' and 'the Merchant Marine', all in the space of a page and a half. If they were used ironically it might be different for example, if the line was, "'I hate boats,' the Merchant Marine said."

But usually that's not the case.

So as you read these tags you're having to work harder than usual, without gaining that much benefit from the work. Would it have hurt that much if the line above had read:

"I don't go to Brooklyn," the cabbie told us.

This throws the emphasis on the dialogue itself, which is strong enough to take the weight. Adding 'the foreign white man told us' provides more detail, but doesn't qualify the fact that he doesn't go to Brooklyn in any meaningful way.

Of course Mosley's books have a lot going for them despite this to me odd tic. McGill is a strong, principled character and the family he's made for himself is constantly interesting and problematic. The plot itself is not exactly serpentine, but Mosley tells it in such a way that it seems more complex: there are sub-plots, for example, involving his sons and an old family friend that interfere with the resolution of the main storyline. They provide a richness and depth to the milieu that Mosley creates.

In the end, personally, I think I prefer the Easy Rawlins series because Rawlins himself is more engaging and straightforward, and there's a social history in the books as they take place over a period of years in Los Angeles, allowing Mosley to capture the changes in society happening during the last forty years or so.