Jay Stringer's Blog, page 9

Crime Fiction In Comics

This post is a few years old, and so misses some of the more recent titles, but I wanted to take a look at crime in comics. The subject of crime in European comics would deserve a post all of it’s own, so this one is mostly limited to the mainstream U.S. titles.

Crime fiction in comic books has been resurgent lately, with some of the highest profile creators turning to noir and hardboiled tales. Later I’ll be taking a look at the classics of modern crime comics. But first up, I want to take a look backwards. Have you noticed how many of the reviews for the new Sherlock Holmes movies have mentioned that Holmes was one of the first superheroes? Y’see, capes and cowls might seem a million miles away from hardboiled fiction, but they’re both part of the same twisted pulp family. Blood brothers, in fact.

There was already a long tradition of serialised crime fiction before the explosion of pulp in the 1920’s. The dime novels of America and penny dreadfuls of Britain had been full of detectives and villains, from Nick Carter to Fu Manchu. Two other key characters to appear at this point were The Shadow and Doc Savage. These two characters helped shape what would eventually become super hero comics, but it didn’t happen straight away.

The hardboiled adventures still reigned supreme at this point, with Dick Tracey appearing hot on the heels of The Maltese Falcon. The two regular titles, Action Comics and Detective Comics, were anthology titles that depicted the four colour adventures of Slam Bradley and Speed Saunders. Self contained detective stories that were largely derivative of Chandler and Hammett.

The real change came right at the end of the 1930’s. In the space of 18 months, with the debuet’s of Superman in Action Comics and Batman in Detective Comics. They both owed debts to Doc Savage, and Batman was a direct descended of The Shadow. The industry was turned on its head and has never looked back, almost straight away the two new super heroes had taken over the anthology titles they had appeared in, and the detective stories were relegated to backup material. More and more costumed superheroes followed, and the pulps were being replaced by a new medium.

Crime still had a strong hold in the medium, but it was second fiddle to the brighter and bolder hero comics. Even Batman’s dark pulp world was giving way to bright colours and rocket ships. Key hold outs for crime fans were Crime Doesn’t Pay (1942-1955) and Crime Suspenstories (1950-1955.) The stories became increasingly lurid, and a key difference emerged between comics and prose; It’s one thing to describe a dark deed in prose fiction, but comics had the ability to show the event happening. Parents started to show concern.

The genre was driven further from the mainstream in the 1950’s, when Dr Frederic Wertham released a damning report called ‘the seduction of the innocent’. As well as stating that Superman made children feel inferior, and that Batman and Robin promoted homosexuality, Wertham spared his true wrath for crime and horror comics. Following the senate subcommittee that followed, crime comics were pushed almost underground, and any realistic portrayal of crime vanished from mainstream books for a generation. We might like to think that the report was purely the product of the McCarthy era, and that such ideas would get laughed out of court today. But look at the press given to video games and violent films, and musicians getting blamed for the acts of every maladjusted teenager.

There were sporadic attempts to bring crime fiction back to the forefront of the comic book medium through the 1960’s and early seventies, when Warren (home of Vampirella) started publishing Creepy in 1964. The title would hold a massive influence on mainstream superhero books, after breaking in talents such as Archie Goodwin, Doug Moench, Neal Adams, Steve Ditko and Frank Frazetta. Many of these stories are collected now in the Creepy Archives, and I recommend them for a great mix of horror and crime.

At the same time, even in these titles there was a lack of real urban hardboiled crime. Artists and publishers still shied away from anything to realistic or gritty, and certainly didn’t want to be accused of telling anything from the criminals point of view.

Second chances can come from the strangest places. America had been through Vietnam and Watergate. The world didn’t look quite the same, and it was the superhero books that started to open the door to crime. Writer Denny O’Neil teamed with artist Neal Adams to bring Batman back to the shadows. The streets were mean enough for a generation of readers who were getting Chinatown and The French Connection. Cinema trends in blaxploitation and Kung Fu movies were bleeding through; characters like Blade, Iron Fist and Power Man, while not especially gritty at the time, were showing a new breed of street level character could make it into the four colour world. Frank Miller took the influence of crime fiction and film noir, and ran a hundred miles with it when he started his run on Daredevil. Hidden away on a low selling book with a minor character, he crafted true superhero noir. If you want to see the perfect marriage between capes and crime, I recommend you find this run. It’s available in omnibus editions direct from Marvel Comics. After decades of dancing around each other, it was getting harder to ignore the obvious; that the hero books and the crime books were kin.

Batman: Year One was Frank Miller’s revision of the batman’s origin. Bringing the costumed hero crashing down into the slums and dirt of mid 80’s urban life, it’s seedy and dark and brilliant. Batman is dark and driven, but unlike Miller’s other stories he still gave Bruce Wayne enough humanity and humour to keep him sane. The real achievement of Year One was Jim Gordon. Previously a one note supporting character, friendly and honest in the comics and bumbling in the TV show, the Jim Gordon of the 80’s was going to be a whole new breed. He arrives in Gotham at the start of the story as a disgraced Chicago cop, hired by the most corrupt city in America because he can be bribed and controlled. But, in the last place you should ever choose to make a stand, he refuses to be bought. His journey is the human core of the story, as he finds redemption for himself in the shape of a man who dresses like a bat. In many ways, this version of Gordon was the last time Miller would show any restraint or subtlety in his writing.

A while different breed of hero came in the form of Ms. Tree, from Max Allan Collins. A feminist take on the hardboiled private eye, she was gun-toting and hard as nails. The issues were topical, dealing with rape, incest and drugs, and the main character was as unforgiving as Mike Hammer ever was. Collins recently gave the character a prose reboot through Hard Case Crime, but her comic book routes don’t get the attention they deserve. I’d say a decent retrospective collection is long overdue.

Since then crime has spread like a wonderful addiction back into the mainstream. Frank Miller’s Sin City series was a pastiche of Mickey Spillane, full of dames, bullets and huge guns. It’s (almost) all black and white, and if you’ve seen the film you have an idea what you’re in for. The first story (now retitled The hard Goodbye) saw Marv, a thug with a heart of gold, on a trail of revenge for the one woman good enough to sleep with him. As Marv himself says, she was “Worth dying for. Worth killing for. Worth going to hell for.” Each subsequent book in the series overlapped slightly, there are enough connections to build a bigger story if you’re looking for them, but you can enjoy each book on its own.

An unknown cartoonist by the name of Brian Michael Bendis spent the best part of a decade working away on crime comics. These days he pretty much is Marvel, writing for spidey and the avengers, but once upon a time he was working full time and using his spare hours to write (and photocopy) Jinx, the tale of a female bounty hunter who falls for the wrong guy. As well as a great crime tale, it was paying homage to Sergio Leone, which adds another branch to the family tree.

Then something funny started to happen. Crime fiction authors started to cross over into comics. Charlie Huston wrote Moon Knight, Greg Rucka produced the snow bound crime drama Whiteout before writing just about every important character on the DC roster, and (friend of the site) Duane Swierczynski jumped head first into characters like Iron Fist and Cable. Rucka has just started a brand new PI comic called Stumptown, a homage to Rockford and Magnum.

In truth, there are just too many top people out there in the field right now –and too many quality titles- for me to provide an indepth look at them. There are a few notable absences from the last two weeks, 100 BULLETS, THE HUNTER and Will Eisner will all be returned to in more detail at a later date. Whilst I haven’t get my eyed around the new crime series from Vertigo comics yet, but I will. And i’ve not gone into any detail at all about the careers of writers like Ed Brubaker. But i’ve written plenty about his work elsewhere. What I really wanted to achieve was to give you a list of modern titles to check out, all of which are readily available and come with the Stringerville seal of approval.

SCALPED by Jason Aaron and R.M. Guerra (vertigo)

If I had to come out and decide on the best comic book on the stands right now, It would be impossible to look beyond SCALPED. In fact, it’s already been the subject of some love on this blog. To reveal too much about the plot would be to ruin the twist of the first issue, but it’s a book that centres of the seedy, vice and alcohol fuelled world of an Indian reservation in the Unites States.

THE ROBERTS by Justin Shady, Wayne Chinsang and Erik Rose (Image)

Sometimes you come across an idea so perfect, and so simple, that you want to break down in tears if you didn’t think of it. THE ROBERTS is one of those cases. Two of America’s most famous serial killers are residents in the same retirement home. There, genius. What follows is dark, unsettling and deeply funny.

TORSO by Brian Michael Bendis and Marc Andreyko (Image)

A true crime period piece. It wouldn’t be to far off to call this the James Ellroy of comics. Following Elliot Ness as he hunts for the ‘torso’ serial killer. Bendis is known for his dialogue, but challenges himself here by trying to give the characters a realistic 1930’s voice. The artwork is an interesting mix of black and white drawings mixed in with crime scene photographs, and overall its one of the most interesting reads I’ve come across.

CRIMINAL by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips (Icon)

Criminal is the most instantly accessible hardboiled crime book on the stands. It’s also ideal for jumping on, because it takes regular breaks between story arcs giving time for people to catch up. So far the whole series has taken place in and around the same town, with the same supporting cast. Each story arc has a different lead character, and follows them as they become slowly trapped by the world around them or by their own humanity. So far we’ve had heists, drugs, organised crime and lots of people in over their heads. With some of the best writing in comics, and the incredible noir art of Sean Phillips, this is a book worth reading, right now.

 

Scott Phillips Interview

Here’s a chat I had with Scott Phillips back in 2010 over at Do Some Damage. It was an interesting conversation, so I wanted to give it another airing. 

JS-What’s your favorite swear word?

Hobotaint! Or Hobo Taint, if you prefer

JS-Lets go back to the beginning. What started you off reading crime fiction?

I got interested in crime movies long before I started reading crime fiction. I used to work at a revival theater where we were always showing Bogart movies–”Maltese Falcon,” “Sierra Madre,” Big Sleep”–but for some reason I wasn’t motivated to seek out the books. The first one I remember reading was Jim Crumley’s “The Wrong Case,” which I took with me one summer on a working trip to Europe. That’s the one that got me started. I also remember reading Jim Burke’s first Robicheaux novels before I was really heavily into the genre, mainly because I knew him. I had him for Freshman comp at Wichita State, and his very serious attitude toward writing made a big impression on me. Then I discovered the original Black Lizard series, back before Random House bought the name, and started on Thompson, Helen Neilsen, Harry Whittington and that group. I got to be friends with Crumley about twenty years ago and he turned me on to a lot of good writers–Kent Anderson, Jon Jackson, Rick DeMarinis Robert Sims Reid and that whole Missoula crowd. I also met Dennis McMillan and Chas Hansen around that time and they got me reading Willeford.

JS-Any particular favorites?

Too many to name, though Willeford was obviously major influence, as was Crumley. I just did three excellent books in a row by friends of mine: “Last Known Address,” by Theresa Schwegel, a cop novelist worthy of Anderson or Price; Ken Bruen’s “Once Were Cops,” which is maybe the darkest thing he’s written; and “Bury Me Deep,” by Megan Abbot, which is the best of her four so far, and that’s saying something. Lots of others, though. I’m reading a lot of short stories by writers like Jedidiah Ayres, who I’m writing screenplays with, and Frank Bill and Tom Franklin. I could go on for days in that vein.

 JS-Interesting that you were a fan of the movies before the books. You have a very lean and economic writing style, would you say this was influenced by films at all?

I don’t think so. I do tend to imagine scenes visually as I write them. I worry sometimes that screenwriting affected my style by stripping it down. Typically I write spare prose and then go back and liven it up. Cottonwood was written in a more florid, 19th-century style than the others.

JS-Cottonwood is the one I haven’t read yet. I look forward to it. When did you start writing?

As a child. I used to write short stories and plays in school. My first real attempt at a novel came in my late twenties, an un-publishable piece of shit that nonetheless proved to me that I could write a big stack of finished pages.

JS -Did you go straight from that unpublished novel to THE ICE HARVEST?

No, I stopped writing fiction for a while, though I made some attempts. Wrote the beginning of a science fiction novel then abandoned it. Mostly I was writing scripts at the urging of an actor friend who was quite well known in France at the time and wanted us to make a movie together. That didn’t happen, but I ended up in LA where I co-wrote a movie called Crosscut. I found the finished product dispiriting and decided to go back to fiction for a while, which is when I wrote Ice Harvest.

JS-What took you to France, and did it change the way you see or write about your home country?

I went over as a teenager as part of a sister cities program and ended up going back year after year working for various University exchange programs. In my twenties I moved there full time. I suppose it gave me the luxury of seeing the place I grew up from a distance, culturally, but it also instilled a sense of foreignness in me. I don’t really feel completely at home in either place.

JS-The first Chapter of ICE HARVEST has an almost short story feel, which I think helps suck the reader into the book.

That was an incident I’d seen one afternoon, a drunk getting his hair caught on fire and the bartender taking away his cigarettes and lighter and then pouring him another drink. I wrote it and rewrote it, always intending it to b the start of a novel, but it didn’t gel until I put it into the third person. In first person it sounded like a poor imitation of Crumley, which of course it was.

JS-The setting is interesting. Firstly it’s not set in the present, but then it also doesn’t go back to the 30′s-50′s era that period Noir so often does. And it’s also set in Wichita. What was it about the story that lead you to 1979 in Wichita, and did this make it a harder sell to publishers?

1979 was just a very vivid year for me. It was the year I turned eighteen, the first time I really fell in love, two of my grandparents died, I made my first trip to France. It was also the year I started going to strip clubs with my pals, so I had a good feel for the era. As far as it being Wichita, that was never a problem. I also wanted to have a lot of snow and ice on the ground, not for any sort of metaphoric reasons but because it presents so many interesting problems and offers up so many ways to describe the look and feel of things. It only became metaphor after my good friend Chas Hansen suggested the title. Actually, Wichita’s winters tend to be mild, but in ’78-’79 (rather than ’79-’80, as in the novel) we had a really cold wet winter with snow constantly on the ground and ice constantly on the road.

JS- The book has a real lack of moralizing, there’s never a moment when you as the author appear to be judging anybody. Is this in there right from the first draft, or do you remove your own voice during the editing?

That’s interesting. If I write a character who’s nasty I often find myself getting fond of him or her. I’m very sorry I killed off Wayne Ogden in the Walkaway, because I’ve now gone back and written about him three times, and each time I had to go back into his past, since he dies in 1952. I intended him to be a character Willeford might have written, but I think he’s also got some kinship to Ken Bruen’s Brant. That said, I’m not there to judge, just describe.

JS-Along the same lines, the book is very trusting of the reader. You never stop the story to explain characters motives, and you don’t give an explanation of the crime that Charlie and Vic committed just before chapter one. Was this an approach you learned as you went along?

I hate obvious exposition. Drives me nuts. And sometimes I don’t know the answer myself. I have to keep myself curious or I lose interest. Jim Crumley once told me that he’d written the beginnings of any number of novels that he abandoned after a hundred pages or so because he realized he knew the ending and just wasn’t interested any more.

JS -I’d like to ask a couple of questions about the film. Did you learn anything from watching the adaptation process that you’ve taken with you into your own writing?

It affected my screenwriting more than my fiction writing. Just adapted William Gay’s book the Long Home along with Jedidiah Ayres, and I always felt I was betraying the author when I made even the most necessary changes. That’s a strictly visceral reaction, though, not a realistic one.

JS-Were there elements of the story that would work on paper but not on film, or vice versa?

Not necessarily. In retrospect I think we all agree that the change in the ending was a mistake, but the test audiences hated the original ending so much we all–myself included–at the time thought it was the thing to do. And of course it was shot in May, so the snowstorm was out. We settled for some fake snow on the ground in patches and a cold, nasty rain.

JS-I think the only choice that I had to stop and think about was Charlie himself. In the film there is more of an attempt to portray him with the dreaded word ‘sympathy’, and to lessen his culpability in what happens. Do you think this was necessary to make the film work as a 90-minute story?

I think it’s purely and simply the fact that John Cusack is a likeable onscreen presence. I always found Charlie likeable; in fact my theory was that Charlie skated by on his charm.

JS-It was ICE HARVEST that secured you an agent, right?

It was indeed.

JS-There are people reading DoSomeDamage who are still looking for that magic person. Do you have any advice for them?

My advice right now would be to get published on one of the better-known internet sites–Plots with Guns, Thuglit, etc.–and then start approaching agents. It’s a really good way to raise your profile, and before long others know your name and work, and soon enough the agents will, too.

JS- THE WALKAWAY blew me away. Where did this story start for you, had you got a scene or a plot you’d been carrying around for awhile?

I thought I might write about Charlie Arglist’s kids, ten or fifteen years on, but that didn’t gel. Then I thought about writing about Dot and Gunther from the end of the Ice Harvest, which would allow me to bring back many of the characters in the first book. And then I remembered a day when I was driving up the inramp onto the 405 freeway in Los Angeles and saw a man, eighty years old or more, in a suit, hitchhiking. It struck me as odd, and then later I wondered if he hadn’t just escaped from the Veteran’s Hospital just up the road (where, incidentally, my grandfather used to work as a barber).

JS-Gunther was just a cameo character in THE ICE HARVEST and I honestly wasn’t expecting to like him as much as I did. By the end of the book I just wanted to keep reading about him. He seems like a real throwback to the stoic good guy which plays off well against the charm of Wayne Ogden, did you intend for them to work that way?

I didn’t expect to like him that much either. I knew from the end of the Ice Harvest that he was kind of a taciturn, grumpy guy, but as I wrote it, and as his fragmentary memories came back to him it occurred to me that he might just be one of those guys who’s not very good at showing his emotions. Wayne, on the other hand, was pure id. The clash of personalities between him and Wayne wasn’t thought out from the beginning, in fact Wayne was going to be an offstage presence, someone from the past whose actions would have been alluded to and remembered, but not experienced firsthand.

JS- I’ve seen you blog about a project called Smut Sarge, is this a Wayne story?

It’s “Supply Sarge,” actually, but I like “Smut Sarge.” Yeah, I had written two short stories about Wayne as a teenager, and he really stuck with me. My agent at the time I started it was having trouble selling a novel I’d written and told me that editors kept telling her they wanted another one just like the Ice Harvest, short and pulpy. So I thought I’d write about the year Wayne came home from WWII and tried to be a civilian and failed, utterly.

(JS- The book was released as THE ADJUSTMENT)

JS-Part of the structure of THE WALKAWAY seems to play with the conventions of a mystery novel, except that instead of a detective we have an old man and the puzzle he’s trying to solve is his own memory. Am I reading too much into that?

I think that’s right, though again it wasn’t conscious on my part. There are characters who know quite a bit–Dot, for one, and Sally. But there’s no mystery in the traditional sense. My editor at the time, Dan Smetanka, called it “more of a ‘novel novel.’”

JS-Another element that slowly reveals itself through the book is just how much this is a simple love story, and has an emotional core to it that I don’t often see in Noir or crime. Was it hard to get the balance right between the darkness and the love story?

For Gunther the love story–mostly for his wife, but also for his unacknowledged son and grandchildren–is what makes the darkness he’s seen worth living through.

JS-Again I’m curious about the process. The story takes place over two different time periods, and they seem to be written in different voices. Did you write them separately?

I was a third or so of the way through the novel, set entirely in the late eighties, when I started worrying about all the people who were going to be buying it expecting another Ice Harvest. And around that time I realized that the 1952 story was getting short shrift, getting mentioned in that cursory “he remembered the time he….” or “she thought back to that night at the cabin” manner. It wasn’t reading very well. So just for the hell of it I started writing that second chapter in Wayne’s voice, starting with his arrival at the train station, and I thought, yeah, that’s what this needs. So I shoehorned that in as the second chapter and set every second chapter in 1952, in the first person, and tried to get a good Fawcett Gold Medal, Lion Books feel to it. In fact you can read those even-numbered chapters separately, and they make perfect sense as a really short novel (the odd chapters, set in the eighties, require their other half to be intelligible, however.) “Supply Sarge” is very much in the vein of the Wayne chapters of the Walkaway.

JS-What drew you to the 1950′s for THE WALKAWAY? And why does crime fiction still fit so well in that era?

That whole postwar period works well for crime fiction, whether in the US, Europe or Japan, because things had been turned on their heads for a while and suddenly there was this other upheaval of returning vets, occupation, etc. It was a great time to be crooked, I imagine.

JS-Lets pretend, for a second, that I was the sort of idiot who would interview you without having read COTTONWOOD. How would you describe the book to me?

It’s the story of the first few violent years of a Kansas town as seen through the eyes of a randy photographer/saloonkeeper. It works in the story of the Bloody Benders, a family of killers who lived in Kansas in 1872-73 and killed upwards of fifteen travelers, drained their blood and buried them in their orchard.

JS-I noticed a lot of references to the town Cottonwood in THE WALKAWAY. I’ve also heard you mention somewhere that Wayne made passing references to classical literature because his grandfather was a scholar, but you didn’t write about his grandfather until later on. Do characters come to you fully formed, or do you go back and work in little details like that later?

They don’t come fully formed, generally. Usually I’ll come up with a detail like that and go back. And it’s Wayne’s father he’s thinking of as a scholar, but it’s passed on from the grandfather. It doesn’t last, though–neither Wayne’s daughter nor his grandson follow in the tradition.

JS-I’d like to take another look at your writing process. You’ve written stories set in a number of different time periods now. Do you approach the writing differently for each era?

Not really, except when I’m writing a period piece I try and immerse myself in the culture of the era as much as I can. I read a lot of old newspapers.

JS-What’s your technique to writing and editing dialogue, do you read it aloud? Do you steal from real conversations ? I often lift whole conversations from my work commute.

I just make it up, mostly, but if I hear something that’s too good not to use I’ll put it in. I just heard a story from my Mom about a guy who was in trouble wit his wife for sleeping around, and he said, “Honey, if I could un-fuck her I would.” You’d better believe that’s going in there somewhere. And I’m a great believer in reading aloud, though I often do it sotto voce, just to see if the rhythm’s right. One thing I learned early on from James Lee Burke was that it has to scan, just like a poem.

JS-Had any problems with writers block, or any tips for readers of our site who might have?

I’ve had periods where I was just writing badly. I’m a great believer in Charles Willeford’s formula: Just write something down, anything, and then you have something to revise, and if you revise enough you can conquer anything.

JS-I think one of the things I notice most about your work is a sense of mundanity, but I mean that in a good way. It’s as if you look for the normal element buried away in a lewd story, and the lewd element buried away in something normal. Do you set out to do that?

I do. It’s when the everyday cracks open and a little bit of weirdness spills out that I find my stories. Or vice versa, where the mundane flows into the bizarre, like when Bill Gerard in “Ice Harvest” says he’d rather be home in Kansas City watching his grandchildren open presents instead of torturing information out of Renata the strip club owner. I really did think that that was a believable motivation for him: Goddamnit, this really fucks up my nice Christmas I had planned.

JS-Okay, we’re into the home stretch now and then we can let you out of the DoSomeDamage basement. James Ellroy recently said that writing was going to be ‘survival of the fittest’ and down to ‘how bad do you want it?’ What are your thoughts on the state of the publishing industry?

It’s a huge fucking disaster, so much worse now than when I started off. I no longer count on making a living writing books, but books have given me enough exposure that I get a little action with comic books and TV and movies. I now look at writing books the way I used to look at writing short stories: something I do for pleasure and exposure and if I make some money at the same time, great.

JS-If you could change one thing about the whole industry, what would it be?

Demolish the big chain bookstores and the blockbuster mentality that they bring with them.

JS-I’ve always found there’s very little transparency, and a lot of people not getting credit for the work they do. Is there anyone you’d like to mention or thank from behind the scenes?

My agents, past and present, including David Hale Smith, Nicole Aragi, Sylvie Rabineau, Abner Stein, and the late Paul Marsh; my editors, especially Dan Smetanka, Maria Rejt, Dennis McMillan and Patrick Raynal; and any number of anthology and magazine editors, not to mention the people working with and for all the above. I owe each of them more than I can say.

JS-Who would win in a fight between Daredevil and Spiderman?

I’d have to know why they were fighting. Did Spiderman find out about Foggy Nelson fucking Aunt May?

 

 

Since the interview Scott has also released a novel called RAKE, which is set in Paris. Amazon sells it thusly;

 

Rake is the latest noir classic from the author of The Ice Harvest. It features a charming, despicable anti-hero and a funny, satiric take on modern entertainment culture. Phillips turns his gimlet eye on the lush life of an actor who, on his destructive tour through Paris, crosses the line from garden variety narcissism into full-fledged psycopathy.

 

 

The Simple Art Of Truth

 

 

“..things being equal, which they never are, a more powerful theme will provoke a more powerful performance. Yet some very dull books have been written about God, and some very fine ones about how to make a living and stay fairly honest.”

-Raymond chandler

I have to think about writing all the time; the craft, the approach, the groupies. Okay, not the groupies.

I’ve been thinking out loud on various blogs and interviews about social fiction and my need for work that feels true. It keeps me returning to the old Chandler essay “The Simple Art of Murder.” In all honesty much of what he wrote in the piece seems outdated. It’s a large generalisation on writing, and ignores that a great writer can make just about any approach work. Even so, there is a grain in it that I just can’t shake, the simple art of truth, if you will.

I used to spend a lot of time trying to decide what kind of a writer I am; whether I’m a realist or a fantasist. The answer was that there shouldn’t be a difference between the two. Whether it’s a real world or a fake one, it’s the job of the writer to make that world feel real.

Chandler seems to have taken a back seat over the last few years. Hammett gets more and more praise, which is great. But there seems to be a need in all walks of fandom to praise one thing by slapping another. You can only like band A if you hate band B. And so it is with crime. You can like Chandler or Hammett. But you can’t like both. That’s not really my style though. I don’t see the need to choose one over the other. They’re very different writers. If I had to come up with some simplistic explanation, I’d say the reader in me prefers Chandler and the writer in me prefers Hammett.

In Chandler’s essay, he makes certain statements that can be questioned when taken out of context. He starts with the assertion that ‘fiction in any form has always intended to be realistic.’ That’s an easy statement to shoot down if taken only at face value. If we take it to mean that fiction should only be some worthy social drama based on real people and real lives, then we could argue that Chandler was being a snob, and ignoring the great potential of escapism. I would argue that Chandler means something different. What we’re talking about here is the job of the writer to ‘sell’ the reality of the story. It can be a hardboiled crime novel set in a real city, or it can be a fantasy novel in which Dragons play video games on Mars; the writer still has to make it feel real. The realism that Chandler is talking about is referred to by film students as verisimilitude. It’s French for feeling of truth, and basically amounts to the simple principle; be true to your audience, your characters, and the world they each live in.

Dwarves? Magic? Star Ships? Knock yourselves out. But the story takes place in a world. That world has to seem real. It has to have rules, walls and consequences. No cheap tricks. No characters doing things for no reason, or things that don’t make sense. When Chandler said that Hammett ‘gave murder back to people who did it for a reason’ , he was touching a truth greater than crime fiction. We live in a world that has rules. We may not like or understand the rules, but we recognise them. The world these two writers lived in is markedly different from ours. The basic day to day facts of our lives would be the things of speculative fiction to them. But there are things that haven’t changed, and will never change, and they are the things that are truest to his essay, to fiction, and to life.

Chandler took issue with a certain style of crime writing. One where the sole function of the characters and the plot was to revolve around the crime. Some bizarre, meticulously planned, and overly detailed theft or murder. Something that is only believable because the story exists to make it believable. This style of mystery fiction is great for showing off how clever and witty the writer is, but it rarely feels real. I aim for the reality. All of my published novels so far are mysteries, and yet in each one the mystery itself takes a backseat to other elements. I often hear feedback that the reader figured out the puzzle long before my protagonist, and that’s good, that’s almost the point. The mystery isn’t the point of any of the books. I would argue that, in real life, the kinds of mysteries we write about in fiction aren’t all that mysterious. Often people know who the murderer is, they just maybe don’t have the proof. And most crimes are committed over money, sex, love or jealousy; they are not intricately thought out schemes by someone who reads textbooks on how to cover their tracks. I’m more interested in the human cost of crime than with the oiling of a large and tight machine. Crime fiction should contain characters. That should be the starting point as it should be with every fiction. The crime should grow naturally out them, out of what it is they want to achieve and the simplest way to achieve it.

“There are no vital and significant forms of art; there is only art, and precious little of that.”

 

Art -in the basic and simple way that I understand it- is about the truth. It’s finding creative and exciting ways to reflect that truth back at us. Even a totally fictional world needs to feel like one in which we could plant our feet on solid ground. And the people in it -be they humans or small furry things from the planet Thangar- need to feel like people we can understand, people who have motives and ideas and blood running through them.

Without that feeling of truth, that ‘realism’, what is the point? And where is the art?

Changes…..

It’s time for a revamp.

Time for a few changes.

Watch this space.

 

 

Why I Write

The backseat writer’s guide to going On The lam.

From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer.

-George Orwell

Why do I write? Hell, why do you write? It seems to be a question that comes up a lot when writers talk to readers. It doesn’t seem to come up so much amongst writers. I’m not a fan of putting up those kinds of barriers, between one group or another, but I’m doing it here for a reason. I’ll come back to it.

There’s a story I’ve told a few times, sometimes people believe me, sometimes they don’t. When I was somewhere around five years old, the teacher of my class asked us all what we wanted to be when we grew up. Let’s ignore how stupid and offensive a question that is to ask a room full of five-year-old children. I didn’t hesitate in my answer. I said I wanted to be a “book maker.” And it was a long time before I learned why the teacher laughed.

It was longer still before I ever managed to deliver on that dream. I can’t help but admire something in that young idiot. He didn’t know it at the time, but he was dyslexic. He didn’t understand that nobody else in the class was having that problem with the words coming in and out of focus, and he didn’t understand that making books wouldn’t mean that he could randomly switch between words and pictures mid-sentence. He simply didn’t understand that reading and writing was going to be a daily battle. But he set his stall out.

Why the long ramble? Well, just to say this; If I knew why I wrote, I probably wouldn’t be doing it. It’s certainly never been the easy choice for me. But fuck it, who wants easy?

The reason I drew the distinction between writers and readers at the start is because of this very question. I often get asked, by friends, family and well-meaning readers, why I write. And -as with most questions about writing- I never have a particularly well thought out answer. I think about my craft and my characters, but most of the rest of it is a case of playing it by ear. I just do what feels right, then worry about claiming to be a genius later on.

I spent last weekend in the company of some mighty fine writers, and the question of why we write never came up. Although, oddly, it was a weekend that must have had us all thinking about it. We were staying in Seattle thanks to the hospitality of our publisher Thomas & Mercer. There were boat tours, walking tours, free booze, lot’s of great food, and -most importantly- a lot of time spent talking about books, publishing, mexicutioners and fart jokes. You know- all the high brow stuff.

I’m sure that as each of took in our surroundings, our company, and the passion on display from our publisher, we each had a moment to think is this why we write? To have weekends like this? It would be a mighty fine reason. But probably a foolish one -those times are few and far between.

Maybe we write for choice? The choice of when to get up, when to go to bed, who to let shout at us, and where our brains are going to be all day. Maybe. That would also be a fine reason.

I’m three books into my career. I’m still figuring out what kind of writer I want to be. At On The Lam I got to talk to many different kinds of writer. Some have forged successful careers mixing their own work with work-for-hire, some like to sit and slowly work through their own books, one at a time, and supplement their income elsewhere. Some have long-term deals, some only worry about one contract at a time. Each of them took time to talk to me about their careers, their paths, and to help me along in deciding on mine.

All told, it was a pretty inspiring weekend. Maybe that’s why we write, to be inspired. As I sat on the plane back -all nine hours of it- I could feel the fire that had been lit under my ass. Playing it by ear has been fine. It’s gotten me to this point. But I spent a few days surrounded by people who know what they’re doing, why they’re doing it, and what they’ll be doing next. And if they didn’t know those things, they knew how to fake it. It’s time for me to go all in.

So, to the readers who’ve stuck with me so far, thank you, and you ain’t seen nothing yet (Lost City, the third Eoin Miller book, lands in January, by the way.) To the writers, editors, marketing people, and to the crazy evil genius who organised the weekend, thank you for each giving me a little inspiration.

And to anyone who has stuck with it through this post, hoping to get to the end and find an answer as to why I write, well, sorry. I’m not answering it. I can’t because I don’t know.

I figure that I write in order to figure out why I write.

Silent Protest?

 

“Dickens is one of those writers who are well worth stealing.”

-George Orwell.

I have a few thoughts. I’m going to try to unpack them and organise them without making a mess. You won’t need me to tell you of the protest going on over at Twitter today. People going silent for 24 hours over the trolling, the abuses, and the lack of support that people face for speaking up. Let’s be honest, it’s the abuse that women face.

Yes, guys, we can all point to abuse that we take. Or bad anonymous book reviews. Or people picking fights with us on Facebook for no reason. We can each define ‘trolling’ in a way that allows us to show that ‘we get it to.’ But let’s not. We don’t get threatened with rape just for speaking our opinions online. Our presence on a stage, or in a band, or on twitter doesn’t make it open season for people to own our sexuality, or to have expectations that they can talk about our sex lives or google for personal details.  We also don’t have to contend with the very idea that other people will throw threats of sexual abuse at us as a way of control, a way of shutting us up or scaring us away. *

I go back and forth on whether to describe myself as a feminist. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t. When I don’t it’s more to do with my beliefs on not wanting to belong to a title or an organised belief. When I do it’s because, well, I have a conscience and I believe in common sense and social justice. During both times I always have to remind myself that, firstly, there are certain branches of feminism who wouldn’t want me to self identify as one anyway, and secondly, I’m a man. I can agree with a feminist argument, I can disagree with a feminist argument, but I’m always a man. It’s a fact that I don’t take too kindly to someone pointing out to me in the midst of an argument, because it’s hardly likely I’m going to forget that I have genitalia hanging between my legs, and I find the assumption that I lack that much self-awareness to be insulting and reductive. However, that annoyance is not to dismiss the basic point that I’m not a woman.  And if you’re reading this, and you are a man with opinions on feminism, always let that fact sit in the back of your mind before deciding on where your opinion is honestly coming from.

I’m also a freedom of speech absolutist. I’ve grown into that in ways that I wasn’t when I was younger. I’ve grown far more liberal as I’ve gotten older, ad believe far less in interventionism and laws than when I was a lefty campaigner and a shouty young man. This belief doesn’t always put me on the same side as feminism (let’s pretend for a moment that it’s one big unified thing, just because I don’t want to fill the page with clauses) when it comes to what jokes are acceptable, to what people should be allowed to say or think, and to what actions a government can take to control any of these things.  As twitter (and all the social media sites) are challenged more and more to crack down on hate speech and vile threats, you will see the conversation formed along these lines. People will shout freedom of speech. They’ll say that cracking down on what people can say on a website is a violation of that basic freedom of speech.

Well, you know what? Bollocks.

You can go and say your vile thing somewhere else, if you have a real burning need to say it. And hell, I’ll even defend your right to say those vile things, unless they take the form of a threat to someones freedom, health, or individual agency.

But this isn’t really a freedom of speech issue. Twitter is a website. It’s a company. We may forget this because it’s on all of our phones, on all of our laptops, because we may never need to actually visit the website. But it’s a place. It’s a house. And people who own a house can set rules about what goes on within those walls.

I love swearing. Love it. I think it is vital, and a valid form of artistic expression. I argue it’s the zen mastery of language. But my father-in-law doesn’t agree. He has a strong dislike of swearing, one that I’ve debated with him. So when I’m in his house? I play fair. I don’t swear. My freedom of speech is in no way being repressed by that fact that I’ll respect someone’s spoken or unspoken rules when I’m in their space.

If a website or a company wants to make rules about what you can or can’t say under their ‘roof’ then you can choose to play by their rules or you can choose to go somewhere else. You can even make your own website, if you have any brains about you. But don’t stay under that roof and complain that your freedom of speech is being taken away.

So, anyway, this twitter silence thing.

I don’t really get it. If the idea behind trolling and hate speech is to shut someone down and control them, I’m not really sure that giving ‘them’ what they want is the answer. But that could just be the way I’m wired. I’m a writer. I know how to protest through words and speech, I don’t know how to do it through silence.

Something else is going on, which is people taking the chance today to tweet about great and inspirational women. A lot of historic figures are being mentioned. I would be inclined to join in with this, except for another of my own little ethical quirks holding me back.

There’s a quote at the top of this post from George Orwell. He said that Charles Dickens was a writer “well worth stealing.” This was on observation on the battles fought over the legacy of Charlie-boy. People on the right and left, people in government, people in schools and the media, everyone want to claim Dickens as one of theirs. When you co-opt an artist to your cause you co-opt their body of work. Their art suddenly becomes the expression of your world view. That’s one of the reasons I shudder whenever an actor or musician jumps on a stage with a presidential candidate. There’s a choice there that I’m not comfortable with.

And for similar reasons I’m hesitant to co-opt people into this day of protest. I know a number of brilliant female crime writers who are sick of having the fact that they are women used to frame the conversations about them. Every couple of years there will be some patronising article in the press about a new wave of ‘women writers’ who are proving that they are ‘as good as men,’ and occasionally this article will be about crime writers. And why should these authors accept being co-opted into someone else’s opinion piece? They just want to write. Chances are, everything they have to say on these topics are already in their books. Let them get on with it and stop stealing them.

So all I can really do is tell a story about a woman from my own family.  And I apologise that it is -at root-  a story about how a woman affected the life of a man, but it’s an important story to me and it feels like my story is the only one I really have the right to bring to this discussion.  And because it touches slightly on class, and my views on feminism are inextricably tied to my views on class (I may return to that for a post at a later date.)

I come from an industrial area. I’d say ‘Post-Industrial’ would be more accurate now, but that implies some form of progress and closure. Really it’s probably best to say ‘Post-Employment.’ It used to be one of those places where every town had one or two employers, and everyone who left school was going to one of those places. When my Grandad finished school he walked the couple of miles down the road to F.H.Lloyds, the foundry that was pretty much the only game in town. It’s an IKEA now.  He asked for a job and was told to come back at daybreak the following day to start as an apprentice at the furnace. And so, with that one decision made, a lifetime of options narrowed down to one specific path.

He went home full of pride and told him Mum, my Great-Grandmother, Lilly, who died just before I was born. She shouted at my Grandad, called him a fool, and told him her son was going to have better than she’d had. She marched the two miles down the road to the factory and told them that her son would not, in fact, be starting the next day. Or ever. She then travelled farther to a company that had a few nice-looking offices and no furnaces, and she asked if there were any jobs for a teenaged boy. They offered him a position as an office junior, as long as he could turn up in a shirt and tie.  And so a life spend travelling on one specific path opened up again to a lifetime of options.

And so much of what came since, so much of what was available to me as a boy, seems to stem from that moment. I watched a Mark Thomas show last year (which was about his father, because if there’s one thing us men do well, it’s write blood and guts epics about our fathers) where he said the difference between working-class and middle-class parents, was that working-class parents want their children to have better than them, whereas middle-class parents want their children to have the chances they’ve had. There are loaded issues here that I can’t unpack with one blog post, but all I know is that almost every chance I’ve had in life, everything I’ve been in a position to achieve or waste, has been down to the selfless hard-work, the love and the fighting spirit of the women in my life.  All they’ve ever wanted for me is to be able to make my own mistakes, to not have a life chosen for me by where I was born or into which class, and to be able to do things my way.  That sounds like class-based rhetoric, and it is, but it wouldn’t take much to change that into a feminist argument. Those lines are blurred for a reason.

And sure, I have the luxury of being able to pick and choose when I get to call myself a feminist, but I’ll never be able to forget those people.

The Criminality Of Mental Health

I saw the last episode of THE FALL this week. The question about the treatment of women is something I’ve touched on before, and no doubt is an issue I’ll talk about again. The finale left me with a different question.

I’ve been talking to people about mental health a lot this week. I won’t go into details, because those people’s stories are not mine to tell. Suffice to say I’ve had conversations with people who you could describe as being engaging and functional people, whilst struggling with serious personal health issues. People who are only ever one bad day away from not coming back.

Stephen Fry recently spoke out about an attempt to end his own life. He speaks the bleak truth that for many, it’s not an issue of choice and not a matter of reason. To lift a quote from this Guardian piece, Fry said;

“There is no ‘why,’ It’s not the right question. There’s no reason. If there were a reason for it, you could reason someone out of it, and you could tell them why they shouldn’t take their own life.”

That’s bleak, and honest, and important.

And we’re not just talking about suicide attempts here.  I believe I’m right in saying that 1 in 3 of us -the wider ‘us’, the population- suffers from mental health conditions, either long term or short term. We’re talking about depression, about bi-polar disorder, about anxiety, about stress. We’re talking about schizophrenia. We’re talking about everyone. We’re talking about people who get up, get dressed and go to work, all the while coping with pain, despair and hopelessness that they work hard to keep from the rest of us. Some people want to go through it alone, some people are desperate for help.

In watching THE FALL I thought again of my disdain for serial killer fiction. A kind of fetish of the impossible. I can’t speak to the quality of HANNIBAL, and I know it’s been getting strong reviews, but the subject matter stopped me from developing any interest.

We read and write about mental health issues in very narrow terms in our field. It’s a gimmick. An excuse. We want some death and some interesting mayhem, and a way to get there is with these impossible magical characters that we create, and then we throw in a suggestion of childhood trauma as if that is “paying the taxes” of examining cause and effect.

We like sociopaths as long as they serve plots, we like addicts as short-hand for failure, and people with extreme temper problems are good for sudden bursts of action. We like the moody protagonist with a fractured psyche. We like the killer who can live double lives. We like the self-loathing copper who is trying hard to self destruct.

But do we ever put these simple toys to one side to have a serious conversation about mental health? It would seem to me that crime fiction is the place to do it. We write about poverty and despair. We write about loss, we write about violence and identity.

In writing about mental health in the form of the “crazy,” and in the form of the magical plot devices, we tell ourselves we’re pushing boundaries. We say we’re holding up a mirror, and we’re telling uncomfortable truths. I wonder if crime fiction is ignoring a larger uncomfortable truth. That we are ignoring the real stories, the real people.

The mean streets we pretend to walk down are ones filled with people who are struggling to hold on, day to day. Every third person, everyone who manages to be functional while still suffering. People whose stories deserve to be told and people who maybe need to occasionally be told they’re not alone.

Do we do enough?

 

Do Better

Today I mostly want to point you in the direction of a great post from Chuck Wendig, which in turn was a response to this thought provoking piece. I don’t have much to add to the conversation today, and sometimes it’s best not to; anything I add will be repeating what’s been said. A few weeks ago Weddle questioned whether we think about these issues enough in the crime fiction community. I followed it the next day with my own thoughts, which basically boiled down to what Chuck also says; We need to try harder.

So here we are. The conversation is still there to be had and expanded on. It still feels that other genres and communities have these conversations far more than we do in crime fiction. Please take a few moments to read Chuck and Kameron’s posts. Agree, disagree, debate, keep the conversation going.

 ***

 To continue to riff on one particular aspect of the theme, and to build on something I’ve been blogging about quite a lot lately, I wanted to take a moment to comment on the BBC drama THE FALL. In my post last week I said;

 

 ”I hate serial killers in fiction. But in using that phrase we really tend to mean a specific thing; we mean those magical walking plot devices who do crazy things for the sake of moving a story forward. They kill people in ways and for reasons that people tend not to kill people. And they often kill attractive young women, or housewives, or schoolgirls, or other forms of victim that help sell books and films to men.”

 

But clearly I don’t pay attention to what I write, because I’ve made it two episodes into THE FALL. I should firstly admit that I am only two episodes in. There is the risk in criticising a show part-way through it’s run that you are criticising a book halfway through. In doing so, you run the risk of leaping to conclusions. It could be that the second half of the story shows that they are really attacking the tropes they use in the first half. Hell, I try to do that myself in my fiction, So I’ll keep my criticism brief and will come back and own up if later episodes show me up.

The show so far has featured a moody male serial killer and and the (female) detective who is working to track him down. At the end of the second episode we are left with the clear notion that he is about to kill another helpless women who is silenced of voice and wide of eye. The camera lingered just enough that we can see the pure fear in the victims eyes. The camera looks down on the victim, but up at the killer. We are clearly shown our place, and the place of the victim.

The second episode then starts by contrasting the female detectives cold and controlling sexual encounter against the killer’s toying with the dead body. We see him manipulate, wash, pose and decorate the corpse of the woman in loving detail. The only contribution of that women to the story is to be the subject of a fetish. Later we get a brief scene of someone discovering the corpse, before we then get longer scenes of the forensic examiner looking at the body. We get a more researched and detailed look at the process of examining a dead body than we do of how it feels to find one, or how someone who has never encountered death before can tell if someone is dead simply by touching them. We certainly don’t get any time examining the thoughts, feelings or emotions of the victim.

Later on the killer is alone in a room with a fifteen year old girl. The girl steals something from the killer before dancing for him, teasing him, leaning in for a kiss, and then being attacked because of what she had stolen. The meaning here is also clear. She is the seducer, she is the thief. The fact that she is a fifteen year old girl alone in a room with a killer? Doesn’t seem important.

Look, maybe I’m judging it too early, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the show will brilliantly spring a trap on us in the next episode and show that the whole point was to use such tropes in order to then expose and attack them. But if that doesn’t happen….what’s the point? To quote Chuck again, “Do better.”

I’ll leave you with a transcription of comments made by Alan Moore. If this interview was published online I would link to it. If the recording was commercially available I would point you towards it. It’s from an interview he did on BBC radio with Stewart Lee, and I hope he’d forgive me quoting it. When he was asked about why he wanted to write FROM HELL, and how he was frustrated by the film version, he said this;

 

“There have been innumerable films about Jack the Ripper. And I got a bit sick of the way Jack the Ripper- it’s a kind of pornography. And I don’t mean that in a good way. It was a pornography of violence. It was the standard set up where you’ve got the unrealistically attractive Whitechapel prostitute who’s obviously got a great wardrobe manager, great skin care specialist, and she’s walking home, she’s perhaps singing some sort of song, and then she’ll turn down an alleyway and you’ll see this shadow follow her, the shadow of the top hat, the Gladstone bag. Her footsteps start to get faster and you see the fear in her eyes, and then it’s a dead end, she turns round, she starts to scream and you see the raised knife and then it cuts to a policeman saying “oh my gawd.” And that’s a pornography. That’s not exciting. That’s just horrible. And when the film came out, inevitably they make it a whodunit. Inevitably the prostitutes are all implausibly attractive again. To a large degree I think that murder, which is a horrible human event, has kind of been turned into a middle class parlour game.”

 

Twelve Gangly Men

 

 

Last weekend Matt Smith announced he was leaving the longest running Sci-Fi show in the world after three seasons and untold heroism. It’s not bad as a career goes. He has big plans for his future and his directorial debut is getting good reviews. Maybe we’ll see him directing OLD GOLD someday, who knows?  I look forward to seeing whatever he does next, but today is more about looking backwards.

 ”Do you know what I keep in here? Absolutely everything.”

A few months back Russel wrote a great piece about his love of the show. I enjoy talking WHO with Russel. We’re the same age, and we have a few of the same show-defining memories from the McCoy era. Broadly speaking we agree in our vision of the show and the character, but we also have our own ways of looking at it. Dave White joined in the conversation around the time Smith stepped into the role, and it’s also been great fun talking to someone new to the property, someone diving headfirst into the mythology. That healthy mix represents a large part of what is so great about the show. The same and different. New and old. Common ground and alien worlds.

For my part -as the obligatory qualification portion of the post- there were a lot of DOCTOR WHO and STAR TREK fans in my family, especially my Grandfather, my parents and my uncles, so I can remember it from an early age. It was always on, whether I was paying attention or not. My earliest memory is of Davison, but the memory is also tainted by the fact that all of the adults around me didn’t like him. Then he seemed to vanish and there was a curly haired shouty man, and I didn’t see very much of it. Then there was a short Scotsman with a hat. And he was The Doctor. But where was the blonde guy I remembered from years before? That was when I learned about the whole regeneration thing, and that the shouty man had also been The Doctor. And that someday there would be another one. But MY Doctor was Scottish. And he had a great companion. I’d go so far as to say she was an ACE companion. At that young age, I didn’t want to be The doctor, I wanted to be Ace.

And then, just as with Russel’s experience, one day he was gone.

That could have been the end of it. Maybe it should have been the end of it. But then in the early 90′s a channel on satellite TV started re-running the show in it’s entirety (well, as much as was possible for a show that had so many lost episodes) and my Dad spent money we really didn’t have on subscribing to the service so that he could sit and watch it every week. And my brother and I would take it in turns to watch with him. That’s where my education started in earnest.

Why does any of this matter?

I have no urge to be an elitist in these things. It doesn’t matter when you came to the show. Maybe you’ve been watching since the first broadcast, maybe you’ve started with the most recent episode. All aboard. All welcome. Part of the spirit of the show is to embrace both change and newcomers. Fandom can get quite cliquey, but as far as I’m concerned if you’re any kind of fan of the show you’re a Whovian.

But with that said, there is one observation I’d like to make. In the wake of Smith’s announcement I’ve seen quite a lot of comments online saying “well, he was great, but he had some bad scripts.” And It strikes me this is something you say maybe if you came onboard with the relaunch, because some more recent fans maybe don’t understand that ‘twas ever thus. The longer the history you have with the show, the more you realise these things are business as usual.

I think it was Paul Montgomery on the fuzzy Typerwriter podcast who said DOCTOR WHO was like a comic book. And he’s right. Its a sprawling 50 year adventure. Continuity is made up on the run, themes come and go, plot lines are planted and forgotten, and writers have good streaks and bad spots. Every actor to take on the role has had to take the rough with the smooth. Each has had some high points, each has had some real lows. If we only judge each Doctor by the strength of the writing then we do them a disservice. If we only judge them by the best-written episodes we give little credit to their acting. We don’t judge Matt Smith by those “Eleventh Hour” or “Doctors Wife” moments when the magic has lit up the screen, we judge him by the whole run, and by whether he breathed life into bad scripts.

Something many Whovians like to point out is that Colin Baker’s era was ruined by things that were beyond his control. Bad writing, bad producing, bad budgeting, terrible costuming. All of these things are true. And if he had been allowed to to things his way, then he would have lasted a lot longer. But to my mind he also didn’t do near enough to elevate the material he had. Sylvester McCoy’s era was damaged by many of the same problems. In fact we could argue that he suffered from them even more so. And yet, he dug in, he found the character, and he elevated the material. We can look back on his era now and find some truly great moments. Paul McGann’s only moments on screen in the role were in an awful TV movie made as a joint production of American, Canadian and British companies. The script was bad. The story was bad. McGann excelled. He found something in the role that couldn’t be buried by any amount of crap being shovelled onto him.

A message to all actors, past present and future, is that your time as The Doctor is what you make it.

So what did Smith make of it?

I’ll make a bold statement here. Smith’s debut performance was the strongest of any Doctor. None of the previous incarnations have bounded on screen and, within 45 minutes, owned the role so completely. I was ready straight away to declare him once and for all to be my Doctor. But from there he had to take the rough with the smooth. For every “Eleventh Hour” or “The Pandorica Opens” he also had to contend with “The Curse Of The Black Spot.”

Christopher Eccleston was perhaps canny is this regard. Although there are weak episodes in that first season, the show stayed on course. He got in, he did a great job, and then he got out again a year later. There was no chance for a diminishing return, and he escaped from having to carry the show through some of the directionless plotting that was to follow.

Something else Eccleston did very well was to play an alien. David Tennant, John Pertwee and Peter Davison played very likeable, decent, human Doctors. They just happened to be aliens with two hearts. Eccleston played a flat-out alien. He looked like us. He sounded like us. Deep down he loved us. But he was also very capable of completely failing to understand us. Patrick Troughton played an alien. Tom Baker and Sylvester McCoy both played aliens. Matt Smith realised this, and played to the same idea. My only caveat is that he played an alien with a somewhat human libido. That’s my only criticism of him overall.

Season Five (Smith’s first season) rivals Season One (Eccleston’s) for me as the finest of the modern era. There were a couple of very weak episodes, but Smith was amazing in them. From “The Eleventh Hour” right up until we learned what the ‘Pandorica’ was, we were treated to a finely plotted and cohesive story. The excitement that I felt each week during that season has never quite been replicated by the two that have followed. The same happened under the previous showrunner.

Russel T Davies had spent a decade trying to get WHO back on screen. By the time the BBC gave him the greenlight, he had years worth of ideas ready to roll. He told his story and gave us a Doctor for the modern age. The season built up to a moral dilemma, with the Doctor having to decide whether it was okay to become a monster for the right reasons. It was a perfect summation of the character. But then the show was a hit, and Davies had to go back to the well to keep producing 12 to 13 episodes a year whether or not he had a story ready to tell. What happens then? Well, you start to make things up on the fly. You throw ideas up in the air and see what lands. Things all get a bit loud and a bit silly. I was ready for the change when Davies announced he was stepping down, and I was thrilled at the choice of writer to replace him.

Steven Moffat had written the best episodes of the Davies era, and his take on the character seemed to sit very well with me. He had a long time to prepare, with over a year between the announcement and the fifth season. It was fun, it was fresh, it was intelligent and it was bloody exciting. Everything built to a finale that was even more epic, moving and intelligent than season one.

But then, as with Davies, he was expected to repeat the trick. And he didn’t have a year to prepare. And from there, he, too starts making things up on the fly and seeing what works. Added to this was the problem that he was also running the BBC’s other main genre show; SHERLOCK. Moffat was starting to stretch too far, and I do think the show has suffered a little because of it. When he’s on form, he’s still one of the best writers to have written for WHO in any era, but that form has gotten a little rarer of late.

There’s been another problem common to both showrunners.

Women. 

The problem of the female companion is not new to “Nu-Who.” The criticisms and the attempts to change have been as constant as the presence of the TARDIS. For their part, both Moffat and Davies have  introduced us to quirky, interesting and self-reliant female characters. The problem seems to be in keeping them that way. Rose Tyler started off as a wonderfully realised modern character, but during the second season she faded away. Martha Jones had a great first few episodes before it became clear the writers simply didn’t know what to do with her. Donna Noble stayed true to herself throughout her run, which is more a testament to the portrayal than the writing, but was then written out via a horrible invasion of her mind and her identity. River Song was fun and interesting at first, but perhaps suffers from “Wolverine Syndrome” in that the more you learn, the less the character works. Amy Pond burst onto the screen at the same time as Matt Smith, but after season 5 she seemed to slowly be relegated to the role of plot device, while her husband Rory grew as a rounded and believable character. The current companion, Clara, has yet to really be given life. The actress is clearly capable, and in the odd moment she sparkles with wit and charm, but the character has yet to be allowed to rise above being a plot device.

Are these issues enough for me to scream misogyny like many fans on the internet seem to like doing? No. I agree with the frustrations, and I want to see a show that is truly inclusive and embraces all comers. But what I see when I look at modern WHO is a show that tries to do the right thing, but then makes clumsy errors. Whilst it’s fair to point out the errors, I think we’re in danger of picking an easy target sometimes. This show tries. There’s a world full of shows that don’t. They’re not hard to find. There are crime procedurals on primetime TV, and daytime soaps, and medical dramas, that all display far less effort to be inclusive. They objectify, they ridicule, they exclude and ignore. Perhaps that lack of effort is what saves them. They’re never seen to fail because they’re never seen to try.

I find that we can sometimes see a problem and look at the wrong source. The show’s modern format doesn’t allow for much development. They have 45 minutes to tell a story. In WHO, that can mean 45 minutes to set up an alien world and culture from scratch, to set up a threat and some goals, to deliver a narrative that gets us from A to B to C and then get out with a satisfying story told. This format affects the writing, it affects the depth of the story and, yes, it affects the ability to develop the supporting cast. Davies perhaps realised this early on, as a lot of the episodes were earthbound (which also helps with budget.) With less time needed to sell the audience on things with which they were already familiar -earth- the writers could focus more on Rose’s human reactions to travelling with an alien. The problem is that you can’t keep doing the same thing. With a box that can travel through time and space, the show demands that we see that travelling. The fading away that I mentioned of Rose’s character came as the show tried to move on and travel, and give the audience new things. Something had to give. Quite a lot of things had to give. Perhaps a solution is to gave a female showrunner for the next era. We may see a different focus and format, or we may see the same problems all over again, but either way it would be a step in the right direction.

Though quite where that female showrunner would come from, when female writers aren’t being given the chance to write on the show, would be a fair question and one of the most valid criticisms.

Perhaps some of the criticism comes because we have a sense of ownership. DOCTOR WHO has grown into a British cultural institution in the same way that STAR TREK and SUPERMAN are a part of American culture. There’s a sense in which these properties and stories are bigger than any one TV network or publishing company. Generations of families have watched these stories unfold. We all own DOCTOR WHO, in a sense, and that maybe means we hold it to a more personal standard than some primetime BBC2 crime drama that objectifies and victimises the female form. I’d still argue that the double standard is wrong, and that we should be more balanced in where we aim our criticism, but perhaps it’s more understandable if it comes from that cultural ownership. It also seems that some (not all) of the people who throw the criticism at WHO are people who will defend a fantasy show that presents women as whores, schemers and people to be sexually assaulted a lot. Again, there’s a double standard there that confuses my poor little brain, but I’ll save that for another time.

I would love the chance to put my money where my mouth is. I’d love to write for this show. I’d love the chance to soar or fail with a Doctor. Maybe one day people will get to judge my failings as a writer the way we judge Davies and Moffat.

But to bring all of this back to the point of today’s post. Matt Smith. Season Five was (overall) fantastic. Season Six was very flawed -and made some big mistakes with key characters- but contained a couple of classic episodes. Season Seven has lacked a cohesive feel, and most of the episodes have felt like they needed ten more minutes, but we’ve still had great episodes like HIDE. And key to all of them, both as the leading light in the great episodes and the saving grace in the bad ones, has been Matt Smith.

I’ve loved every minute of his Doctor. He doesn’t need to act to the back row, he can act to the camera. He can sell heartbreak and pain with a twitch of his jaw. He can go from anger to joy in a heartbeat, and he can play both the hero and the killer of worlds.

I don’t think I can ever have one favourite Doctor. There are too many greats. But Smith has put himself onto that list. Troughton, Baker, Eccleston, Smith. With McCoy coming in somewhere just below that.

Who next?

I’d like to see something different. The Britain of 2013 is a very different place to the Britain of 1963. And though the show has always tried to reflect the times by changing the themes, the tone and the supporting cast, I’d argue the time is right to change The Doctor. I’d like a female Doctor. Or a black Doctor. Or an Asian Doctor. But you know what? Whoever get’s it, whatever his or her background, all that matters is that they will be The Doctor. And, for a while at least, for a brief few moments in the first episode, he or she will be my Doctor.

What Are We For?

I’ve spent a couple of days holding back from this post. People close to me already know my thoughts and everybody else can probably live comfortably without knowing. But there are a few things I feel the need to say. I wrote a piece a couple of years ago about my changing engagement with politics. I touched on something which has become extremely relevant this week;

Here’s the thing; I dislike Thatcher. As I’ve made clear again and again, I grew up in one of the regions that caught the brunt of her policies. As an adult I live in another. I have no regard for her life, and I don’t plan on feeling much when it deserts her. However, there is a huge difference between feeling anger towards a person, and between thinking that gives me licence to talk of “dancing on her grave.”

I need no lectures on the destructiveness of Margaret Thatcher and her politics. I also feel little need to presume to lecture others on those issues. My brain is simply not wired in a way to understand how anyone can not see that her legacy is one of ruination and contempt.  I cannot imagine a time when my words will not drip with venom when I discuss her.

But I saw something exceptionally nasty on Monday, something that has continued to fester and grow in the days that have followed. I saw fireworks being let off on Monday evening. I’ve seen people talking of parties, and dancing. I’ve seen the celebration of the death of an old lady.

At a time when I was far more active in party politics than I am now -a time when I was raised to be a firebrand lefty- I believed that “my” side believed that people matter. That life matters. I believed that was what separated “us” from “them.” The same “them” who would pick and choose who mattered. The same “them” that believed in creating divides and tearing communities apart. I’m reminded occasionally of a brilliant speech by Stephen Fry. In a televised debate on religion, Fry said;

“The Church is very loose on moral evils, because although they try to accuse people like me, who believe in the enlightenment, of somehow what they call ‘moral relativism,’ as if it’s some appalling sin, where what it actually means is ‘thought,’ they for example thought that slavery was perfectly fine. Absolutely okay. And then they didn’t. And what is the point of the Catholic church if they say,’oh well we couldn’t know better because nobody else did…THEN WHAT ARE YOU FOR?”

And to borrow from one of my favourite Fry speeches, I have to ask; If liberals -a title I have proudly given to myself even after becoming disenchanted with party politics and many other labels- feel we can in fact pick and choose when life matters and when it doesn’t, if we can dance on graves, and if we can  indulge in division and anger with as much venom as “them,” then WHAT ARE WE FOR?

A frail old lady has died. And at some point over the next few days, her loved ones are going to gather together to put her into the ground. I don’t know the details of her family, but we have a very real chance that children and grand-children will be stood saying a final goodbye to a family member knowing that the country has put “Ding Dong, The Wicked Witch is dead,” into the music charts to celebrate the death.

Is this what we are for? Is this the best we can do?

The phrase that keeps getting thrown around is “speaking ill of the dead.” It’s a stupid concept. I won’t link to the most-shared piece on this, because it’s author is also of the very loud opinion that rape is a lesser crime than a cock-eyed conspiracy theory about extradition, and that a man accused of the former should be granted asylum from facing those charges because of the latter.  But as a general principle, “speaking ill of the dead,” needs to be retired. A figures deeds and legacy should be discussed as strongly in death as in life.

We should never feel the need -and should never be asked-  to curb an open and honest discussion about the damage done by Thatcherism. I’m sat watching the parliamentary debate right now where any attempt  by Labour politicians to voice discontent is coming as a welcome relief against the eulogizing that is taking place. But each of them is pitching it right, they’re talking about what she stood for in life, they are not celebrating the fact that she no longer has it.

And whilst I don’t believe in the general principle that we shouldn’t “speak ill of the dead,” there is something in that phrase that we should give far more thought to than we do. Let’s be clear and blunt; Margaret Thatcher doesn’t care if we speak ill of her, because she is dead. She’s not here. She is not part of the conversation. We need to spare thought for the living.

I don’t see that any of my contempt for that woman gives me any rights, any decent imperative, to cause hurt to her loved ones. There’s something a bit to Old Testament about that, to me. I don’t want to celebrate death, I don’t want to dance on a grave and I don’t want to betray the very ideals that I thought made me ‘liberal.’ We are on the verge of crossing that line.

You’re angry about what she did? Great. That means you have eyes. That means you have  a social conscience. But use that anger the right way. Debate her legacy. Raise awareness of the issues. Help people. Donate to charities that fight against that legacy. Organise.

Don’t revel. Don’t celebrate. Don’t set out to cause pain and hurt. Margaret Thatcher attempted to rob millions of people of their dignity and humanity. And if we let her win, what are we for?