Matt Rees's Blog, page 13

Right Now, You're Gibernau

(This continues my series of autobiographical vignettes, intended to demonstrate the neuroses, ambition, talent, chance, mischance, place, alcohol and attitude that go toward the creation of a writer. The tales may be instructive or proscriptive. This one concerns identity.)

In a communal-style dining room in the Sicilian town of Siracuse, my wife noticed that I was being ogled by a bashful fellow in a white apron. Before I could figure out why a twenty-year-old, chubby Italian would be smiling, wistful and excited, in my direction, the owner of the joint approached my end of the long bench where a hundred or more diners were enjoying lunch.

From behind his drooping brown mustache, he spoke to me in Spanish. I shook my head and told him, in Italian, that I didn’t understand. He switched to Italian. “You’re Gibernau.”

“I still don’t understand,” I said.

He put aside his cigarette (for the artwork in his establishment suggested Communist-Anarchist tendencies and the EU ban on tobacco in restaurants was being ignored) and reached out a finger. Poking me in the chest, he said: “You’re Gibernau.”

I shrugged, helplessly. “What does that mean?”

He mimed the act of revving up a motorcycle. “The rider, Gibernau.”

“Ah,” I said, miming the act of revving up a motorcycle and trying not to look fearful (which is how I feel when I even think of riding a motorcycle.)

“Yes.” He nodded, very happily.

“No,” I said, sadly, shaking my head. “Motorcyles are very dangerous. I don’t like them.”

The patron glanced over his shoulder. The cook was bouncing from foot to foot in excitement. The patron leaned in close enough that I could smell the smoke on his breath and see the broken veins around his baggy eyes. “Right now, you’re Gibernau.”

“Okay. It will be my pleasure.” (I’m even more polite in foreign languages than I am in English.)

He left the table and went behind the bar. I shrugged at my wife. “Is this a joke of some sort?” I asked her. “Does ‘Gibernau’ mean foreign asshole in Sicilian slang?”

I asked one of the youngsters across the table from us. “Yes,” one of them agreed. “It’s a joke.”

Before she could explain why it was funny, the clamor of loud Italian voices was silenced by the ringing sound of a spoon banging against a wine glass. The owner stood at the bar with the cook. A moment of silence, and he spoke:

“Today is a great day. Here, in our bar, we have il grande pilotti –– Gibernau.”

He lifted his hands in applause. The room joined him. The cook beamed.

I rose from the bench, raised my hand in modest acknowledgement, and resumed my seat.

The owner came over again. He brought an autograph book. The cook's, no doubt. “You’re Gibernau.” He was telling me this time, not asking me. I signed something that looked like a signature for someone whose name might’ve sounded like Gibernau.

“And Senora Gibernau, too,” he said.

My wife wrote: “Nothing’s finer than eating in your diner. Senora Gibernau.”

“A line from Seinfeld?” I said. “That’s how you’re signing for them.”

She laughed, as I imagine Senora Gibernau (who was a supermodel of some sort, it turns out) would have done.

On our return to our hotel, we searched the internet for “Gibernau” and came up with an extraordinarily famous Spanish rider who, at the time, was the only one who could challenge the great Italian Valentino Rossi. Extraordinarily famous among those who aren’t scared witless by bikes. He bore something of a resemblance to me, though I should add that I’m four inches taller and I don’t have titanium plates in my collar bones from falling off a Ducati at 200 miles per hour.

My wife and I became committed fans of Sete (Gibernau’s first name). We watched all his races from then on. Sadly he didn’t win any of them and retired a couple of years ago. So he reaped no benefit from my being mistaken for him.

Neither did I. When I eventually departed the restaurant to another round of applause, the owner insisted that I pay him the five Euros I owed for our spaghetti.

Episodes in the Literary Life 2: Get Me to Fucking Manhattan

(This continues my series of autobiographical vignettes, intended to demonstrate the neuroses, ambition, talent, chance, mischance, place, and alcohol that go toward the creation of a writer. The tales may be instructive or proscriptive. This one, at least, is mainly about the alcohol part.)

I quit drinking the day after I turned 27. On my birthday, my girlfriend threw me a surprise drinking party. I certainly surprised her. I ruined our relationship with my behavior and nearly fell off the roof of a twelve-story apartment block on New York’s Upper West Side. Still I remain amazed that I waited so long to hang up my beer mug.

After all, in the preceding few months I had blacked out on the Subway a number of times late at night and come around in what can only be described as some of the nastiest neighborhoods in the city.

The first blackout was disconcerting. I was on my way home from Greenwich Village. I nodded out on the A-Train and found myself at the end of the line, at Manhattan’s northernmost tip, way above Harlem. I checked my pockets, wondering how I had slept through 200 city blocks after midnight without being robbed. I immediately traversed the station and made my way to the Downtown platform, wondering when one of the African-Americans (for all the other passengers in the station appeared to be of that ethnicity) was going to jump me.

When the train eventually got rolling, I found myself seated across the aisle from the only other white guy on the train. He, too, had reached Washington Heights because he was too drunk to find his stop. Unfortunately he wasn’t sobering up nearly as fast as me.

Swaying with the train, he engaged me in slurred conversation about the former mayor, David Dinkins, who he described repeatedly as “a Jew nigger.” I made a tactical error, when I demonstratively attempted to correct him by saying that Dinkins was not a Jew. “Or….the other thing, either,” I added, with haste.

The drunk became irascible on the issue, then fell asleep.

As did I the following weekend on the 2-Train. I awoke at 110th Street Station in Harlem. But I didn’t know it.

This time, you see, I was so drunk that not even fear of a mugging could sober me up. In fact, I was like the fighting drunk who aggressively seeks out the very fists against which he could have no possible defense.

I stormed up to the token booth (probably I weaved on shaky legs, but I felt as though I was storming) and handed over the pittance that was then required to ride the Subway. I inquired of the African-American token clerk which platform would take me back to Manhattan. You see, I assumed I had slept right to the end of the line once more. All the way to the Bronx.

“You in Manhattan, man,” he replied.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” I raged, impatient to be in my bed, where I wouldn’t be able to fall over. “I want to get out of the Bronx. Which way is Manhattan?”

“You in Manhattan,” he said, with some exasperation.

“I want to get to fucking Manhattan. Get me to fucking Manhattan.”

The clerk shook his head and gestured for the stairs leading to the Downtown line. He had evidently translated my drunken rant as “Get me to where the white people are.”

Surprisingly, once more I was subject to no violence or rapine. In fact, I feel a lot more threat on the streets of my hometown in Wales on a Saturday night than I ever did in the so-called slums of New York. Moreover these incidents convinced me that the nastiest people in New York all congregate downtown and earn millions of dollars a year. But that’s for another episode…

(By the way, Robert Burton wrote that “Diogenes struck the father when the son swore.” So if anyone doesn’t like the use of the f-word in this post, I suggest you get in touch with David Rees of Newport, Monmouthshire. He’s on fucking Facebook.)

Episodes in the Literary Life 1: My Part in Salman Rushdie's Peril

(Readers often write to ask me how I came to be an author. Over the coming weeks, I shall be writing a series of autobiographical vignettes which shall, I believe, demonstrate the mélange of neuroses, ambition, talent, chance, mischance, place, and alcohol that goes toward the creation of a writer. This one, at least. The tales may be instructive or proscriptive.)

Writers ought not to think identically with most of the people around them.
It usually comes quite easily to me. For example, when Ayatollah Khomeini
announced his fatwa on Salman Rushdie, I thought: “Serves you right for
looking down your nose at me, you smug sod.”

Ordinarily I’d have very little in common with the unlamented (by me, anyway) Ayatollah. However, in this case, he happened to catch me at the
right time. The previous night I had experienced Rushdie’s disdain. I wouldn’t blame Salman, because I was drunk at the time and a bit rude. Except that I was at an age when I blamed other people for everything. So, yes, I blamed him.

It was February 1989 and I was in my first reporting job at United Press
International, a once-mighty newswire which now has considerably less
influence than even a dead Khomeini. I had written a few stories about the
growing controversy around Rushdie’s novel “The Satanic Verses.” British
Muslims had burned the book for its supposedly blasphemous portrayal of
Muhammad. The novel was up for the Whitbread Book Award, one of Britain’s
premier prizes. My bureau chief suggested I attend the awards dinner.

Having written a story in which Rushdie won (as everyone expected) and left
it at the newsdesk, I went off to the Barbican for the dinner. I needed only to gather a couple of quotes from Rushdie when he won, so that I might phone them in and have an editor plug them into my story. So I decided I was free to otherwise enjoy the evening.

Imagine a 22-year-old youth from a less than sumptuously endowed background who finds himself placed at a press-table laden with better food than his mother cooks for him and free red wine. He is seated between two lovely and solicitous public relations ladies who laugh at his jokes, wear low-cut evening dresses, and who, he imagines, appear to find him sexually
irresistible. What would you have done?

Well, I acted unprofessionally. I became quite drunk and raucous. This failed to impress the BBC correspondent across the table, or the other bored hacks waiting to file their “Rushdie triumphs in face of controversy” stories.

Late in the evening when the judges arose to pronounce the winner, I was
giggling into the neck of one of the patient p.r. girls.

“And the winner is…”

I nuzzled. She giggled. Patiently.

“…Paul Sayer, for ‘The Comforts of Madness.’”

“Oh, fuck!” The applause was rapturous, so people more than two tables away probably didn’t hear me curse.

Paul Sayer spoke engagingly of his joy at winning. At least I gather he did. I was occupied, telling the p.r. ladies I couldn’t believe “fucking Rushdie didn’t fucking win.” As Sayer left the podium, I leaned across to the BBC man and said, “What did that fucker say?” He recited a quick quote for me.

I stumbled down the stairs to the press room. (Why would you serve journalists free wine and then put the press room down two flights of stairs?) I phoned my bureau chief. “Karin, fucking Rushdie didn’t fucking win. Fuck it.” She inquired, with considerable amusement in her voice, if I had obtained a quote from “fucking Rushdie” or from the judges.

I labored up the stairs to the hall and barreled to the front tables, where I ignored the ebullient Paul Sayer and headed for Rushdie. He lingered beside his table, standing with his second wife, an author whose work I had not then read, Marianne Wiggins. (I still haven’t read it.)

Rushdie was otherwise alone. I assume all the sober or less drunk hacks had
by now obtained their quotes and were filing their stories. As I reached
Rushdie, I noted that I appeared to be unable to stand straight. Or to talk.

I managed to ask him, “Are you happy about the fuss over your book, because it’ll help sales?” (I was 22. If you weren’t crass at 22, then I pity you.)

Rushdie looked at me with amused contempt –– amused, because he saw that he would be afforded an opportunity for a bon mot. I didn’t manage to write down the bon mot and I don’t remember what it was. It amounted to: “I’d prefer to have lower sales and not to have the controversy.” He turned to his wife and gave her a little hiccup of smug amusement which went like this: “Hah-hnh.” I remember that. Word for word.

“Hah-hnh-hnh,” said Marianne Wiggins. (From what I know of her novels, she
sometimes writes like that, too.)

In that moment I conceived a great hatred of Rushdie. An unwarranted
hatred, much like my mother’s aversion to mustachioed men. But a hatred
nonetheless.

I shuffled to the next table. Two of the judges stood there. I approached them. They were both Conservative cabinet members. Douglas Hurd was Foreign Secretary (He later became Lord Westwall, which sounds to me like a frozen foods conglomerate). Kenneth Baker was Education Minister (He’s now Baron Baker of Dorking, which is surely a title concocted by unimaginative satirists). Both appeared to be extremely tall. Or I was getting closer to the ground as Rushdie’s “hah-hnh” rang in my ears.

“Why’d you vote for Rushdie to win?” I slurred.

The two ministers shared a look they must have picked up from studying Mrs.
Thatcher in a bad mood. “Actually I rather preferred the Tolstoy book,” said Hurd. (A.N. Wilson’s excellent biography of Tolstoy was also shortlisted for the prize.)

I tripped to the press room. By the time I had managed to decipher my meager notes and dictate them to the newsdesk, the Underground had stopped running. I spent the night on a bench outside the Barbican tube station. Without a coat. My shirt sweaty from the alcohol and the humiliation. In London. In February.

The next day, as I sat at the newsdesk, a story came through about Khomeini’s fatwa. Grimacing through my hangover at the ticking newswire, I pondered the notion of karma, developed in Rushdie’s ancestral land. It had struck. “Don’t mess with me,” I thought. “Hah-hnh.”

In Crime Fiction, Be Not Afraid

I just wrote an article for The Jerusalem Report about “What Israelis Fear Most.” Surprisingly, I found that Israelis didn’t fear being murdered by a psychopath or caught up in a case of mistaken identity which leads to them getting into car chases with the FBI on their tails.

Surprisingly, that is, if you read thrillers or crime fiction.

What DO people fear? Israelis fear internal divisions within their society. They fear the nuclear threat of Iran. They fear Palestinian terrorism. They fear war. Americans fear public speaking and clowns. (Check out the polls. It’s true.) Yet 8 of the current top 10 New York Times bestsellers are crime novels or thrillers.

Crime novels don’t hinge on the same fears as people confront in everyday life. Why do all these people read so many crime novels, then?

This question gives the lie to the typical argument about crime fiction: that our innate conservatism enjoys seeing order disturbed (by murder) and then restored (by fingering the bad guy.) If it were so simple, wouldn’t Israelis be reading novels in which Iran launches a nuke only for Tehran to get obliterated? Or surely Americans would be reading novels in which a guy is forced to address a conference of clowns, only to come through with a great rhetorical swell?

We need to reconsider what it is that makes people read crime fiction.Clearly it’s not fear. After all, how many crime novels end with the bad guy doing his worst and prospering? That happens in some post-modern books, sure. But for the most part there’s nothing to fear in crime fiction. Everything’s just fine.

(I plead an exemption for my Palestinian crime novels, in which almost everyone ends up guilty and the society is definitely headed for the rapids in a barrel. They’re certainly not Jo Nesbo, where everything ends up dourly dusted in true Scandinavian fashion.)

Maybe that’s the appeal of crime fiction. Not for a moment would a crime writer have you believe that murderers get away with it and go on to become Secretary of State (see Vince Foster/Whitewater internet conspiracy stuff – though just because I write “conspiracy” doesn’t mean I don’t believe Hillary had him whacked…). Or that the world’s most evil businessman ever can become vice president, survive a couple of heart attacks, shoot a business associate, and nothing bad happens to him – in fact, he even loses a lot of weight. (Which is pretty un-American really, losing weight. Why haven’t Democrats picked up on that?) Of course if it were fiction, no writer would call the bad guy “Dick.” It’s too obvious.

I have a theory. I should add that it’s statistically untested – when I was in grad school I had to study how to figure out statistically meaningful correlations, but it’s a long time since I even knew what Chi-squared looked like. I prefer, as Spalding Gray said, musing and speculating, rather than real research.

So here’s the theory: People know the difference between fiction and reality, and so they recognize the difference between fictional fear and real fear. Romance readers don’t want to be raped in chapter one and marry their rapist in the final chapter. “Literary fiction” readers aren’t all magazine editors who’re worried their wife will find out they’re boning a literary agent — and some of them aren’t even Jewish. Neither are crime fiction readers “fearful” of the events that take place in the books they read. They’re readers, not method actors. They know it’s a story, and that’s that.

Why did Marlowe go into the bar?

Mrs. Rees has given me two lovely kids. She has enjoyed the presence of my parents. She even visited Wales with me. But I was never quite sure of her. Because she had only read one Raymond Chandler novel.

In an effort to make our marriage complete, I suggested this week she augment her reading of “The Big Sleep” by going through the remainder of Big Ray’s oeuvre. I tossed “Farewell, My Lovely” at her and she got going.

As I did so, I was just finishing a draft of my next novel. Part of writing, let us be frank, is anticipating what editors will say about it when it’s done. I decided to look at Chandler’s work in the light of the comments I get from agents and editors about my manuscripts – and from readers about the finished book. I wonder how he’d have responded?

For example, “Farewell, My Lovely” begins, as you may recall, with Marlowe outside a bar, watching a very large fellow. The large man enters and tosses another man out of the door. Then Marlowe says: “I walked along to the double doors [of the bar] and stood in front of them. They were motionless now. It wasn’t any of my business. So I pushed them open and looked in.”

There’s no way a contemporary editor or agent would go for that. “What?” they’d say. “Marlowe has no stake here. He needs to have a compelling reason to go through those doors.”

Of course, the reason Marlowe goes through those doors isn’t that Chandler didn’t do plots (as some allege.) It’s that Marlowe is somewhat comically interested in random things around him. He isn’t looking for trouble, but he’s attracted to places where he might encounter it – out of curiosity. He’s an anthropologist of low-life.

Now an anthropologist might work as a “series character” in today’s fiction. But he’d have to be a real anthropologist. Everyone has to have a reason for what they do. Their family must be at risk. Someone must want to kill them. Their identity has been mistaken and they must clear their names. You know what I mean.

No character is allowed to be interested in what’s happening around them and nothing more.

Partially that’s the result of the James Patterson-ization of the thriller/crime genre. Every chapter must have the clock ticking down to the dread event our hero has to prevent.

But it’s also because we’ve grown accustomed to being able to nail everything down in life in general. If you don’t know the answer to a question, look it up on the web and instantly you’ll have someone else’s answer, right or wrong.

A New York Times article this morning noted that Americans increasingly are employing two or even three computer screens on one desk to hold all the different web windows they want to have open before them. One poor monkey-minded lady (it’s a yoga/meditation reference, before you get offended, and it refers to the inability to focus on one thing) told the Times that when her third screen malfunctioned, she felt like she was missing out on the news (because she keeps news feeds on that screen.) Sounds like information-overload, rather than so-called “multi-tasking”? As for the proliferation of data before her on her desk: “I can handle it,” she said. Like any other addict.

But the best example of the changes in our society and the way they’re reflected in our fiction is this: in “The Big Sleep,” one of the characters is fished out of the sea, having been driven off a pier in a car. Chandler was later asked who killed that character. He replied, “I never figured that out.”

Try telling that to an editor or an agent or a reader today. It’d be a badge of incompetence.

But Chandler didn’t need to know. Neither do we.

There should be ambiguity and lacunae in our knowledge. We should learn only what we can focus on. That means looking at a single computer screen and not worrying about missing information as it zips meaninglessly across the web. It also means allowing our plots to maintain a focus on what’s important, and leaving the occasional loose end untied.

Why did Marlowe go into the bar?

Mrs. Rees has given me two lovely kids. She has enjoyed the presence of my parents. She even visited Wales with me. But I was never quite sure of her. Because she had only read one Raymond Chandler novel.

In an effort to make our marriage complete, I suggested this week she augment her reading of “The Big Sleep” by going through the remainder of Big Ray’s oeuvre. I tossed “Farewell, My Lovely” at her and she got going.

As I did so, I was just finishing a draft of my next novel. Part of writing, let us be frank, is anticipating what editors will say about it when it’s done. I decided to look at Chandler’s work in the light of the comments I get from agents and editors about my manuscripts – and from readers about the finished book. I wonder how he’d have responded?

For example, “Farewell, My Lovely” begins, as you may recall, with Marlowe outside a bar, watching a very large fellow. The large man enters and tosses another man out of the door. Then Marlowe says: “I walked along to the double doors [of the bar] and stood in front of them. They were motionless now. It wasn’t any of my business. So I pushed them open and looked in.”

There’s no way a contemporary editor or agent would go for that. “What?” they’d say. “Marlowe has no stake here. He needs to have a compelling reason to go through those doors.”

Of course, the reason Marlowe goes through those doors isn’t that Chandler didn’t do plots (as some allege.) It’s that Marlowe is somewhat comically interested in random things around him. He isn’t looking for trouble, but he’s attracted to places where he might encounter it – out of curiosity. He’s an anthropologist of low-life.

Now an anthropologist might work as a “series character” in today’s fiction. But he’d have to be a real anthropologist. Everyone has to have a reason for what they do. Their family must be at risk. Someone must want to kill them. Their identity has been mistaken and they must clear their names. You know what I mean.

No character is allowed to be interested in what’s happening around them and nothing more.

Partially that’s the result of the James Patterson-ization of the thriller/crime genre. Every chapter must have the clock ticking down to the dread event our hero has to prevent.

But it’s also because we’ve grown accustomed to being able to nail everything down in life in general. If you don’t know the answer to a question, look it up on the web and instantly you’ll have someone else’s answer, right or wrong.

A New York Times article this morning noted that Americans increasingly are employing two or even three computer screens on one desk to hold all the different web windows they want to have open before them. One poor monkey-minded lady (it’s a yoga/meditation reference, before you get offended, and it refers to the inability to focus on one thing) told the Times that when her third screen malfunctioned, she felt like she was missing out on the news (because she keeps news feeds on that screen.) Sounds like information-overload, rather than so-called “multi-tasking”? As for the proliferation of data before her on her desk: “I can handle it,” she said. Like any other addict.

But the best example of the changes in our society and the way they’re reflected in our fiction is this: in “The Big Sleep,” one of the characters is fished out of the sea, having been driven off a pier in a car. Chandler was later asked who killed that character. He replied, “I never figured that out.”

Try telling that to an editor or an agent or a reader today. It’d be a badge of incompetence.

But Chandler didn’t need to know. Neither do we.

There should be ambiguity and lacunae in our knowledge. We should learn only what we can focus on. That means looking at a single computer screen and not worrying about missing information as it zips meaninglessly across the web. It also means allowing our plots to maintain a focus on what’s important, and leaving the occasional loose end untied.

Daniel Silva's Funny Buggers

Any writer knows that things can go wrong sometimes. Characters start to get wooden. Scenes won’t come alive. But the slipperiest dilemma of all –– because it’s the one least likely to be obvious when you’re re-reading the manuscript –– is when certain words turn out to have unintended consequences.

A fine example of this cropped up just now as I was reading “The Defector,” an excellent spy novel by Daniel Silva. Silva is describing the people who work in the Mossad’s Special Ops department: “Its operatives were executioners and kidnappers; buggers and blackmailers; men of intellect and ingenuity…”

Now it could be that Silva paired the word to which –– as I’m sure you’ve guessed –– I refer with “blackmailers” for a reason. Perhaps the dark arts of the Mossad, whose main office is a modest drive from where I live (though unmarked on maps, of course), include buggering people and then blackmailing them. They’re known to have used female agents as a “honey trap,” after all. Why not add to their repertoire the “chocolate come-on”? Or the “bronze bait”?

More likely, I’d concede, is that bugging someone qualifies one, in spy parlance, as a bugger. And I’d certainly agree that maybe this jumped off the page only because of the little bit of Benny Hill that lives on in me…

But it highlighted to me how a writer can be ambushed by words in many different ways.

Needless to add, for those who know Silva’s work, it didn’t put me off “The Defector,” which is a superb example of classy writing and thrilling pace.

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Break Elmore's Rules

Elmore Leonard has 10 rules for writing. They don’t cover most of the important points of writing. They could really be called: Ten Rules for Writing That Isn’t So Bad, Even if You’re Not Much of Writer.

Still the rules have been turned into a book and are quoted with something a little more mystical than simple reverence by crime writers when I go to crime conferences.

Some of the rules are pretty silly. No adverbs? Well, if you’re a crappy writer who dumps adverbs all over the place, then you ought to get rid of adverbs. But someone who writes well ought to be able to use all the tools of language. Would you tell a great composer not to write in B minor? Or not to use C sharp?

When I mentioned this on stage with a couple of other writers earlier this year (just after the pro-Elmore symphony had been sounded) I registered a degree of hostility on the part of at least one of the others on the panel rather akin to my having told a bunch of Orthodox Jews that they ought to expand their palate to include pork.

When Elmore goes deeper into his rules, he usually says something like “Don’t do X unless you’re Margaret Atwood [or some other writer], who can do it without sounding like shit.” In other words, if you’re a good writer, don’t follow Elmore’s rules for writing.

Read the rest of this post on my blog The Man of Twists and Turns.

Crime Fiction's Best First Paragraphs: 3

Georges Simenon wrote “L’Affaire Saint Fiacre” (“Maigret Goes Home”) in 1932. It’s one of the first of the 103 novels involved Inspector Jules Maigret. You can tell from books like this that the writer was a bit of a bastard. And we ought to be grateful for that.

The opening of “Saint Fiacre” (I’m going to look at the opening, rather than the opening paragraph, because the paragraphs are short, staccato) is laden with the strangeness of waking up in an unaccustomed place, and most of all the dismal return to a place whence one has fled. Here it is:

A timid scratching at the door; the sound of an object being put on the floor; a furtive voice:

“It’s half past five. The first bell for Mass has just been rung…”

Maigret raised himself on his elbows, making the mattress creak, and while he was looking in astonishment at the skylight cut in the sloping roof, the voice went on:

“Are you taking communion?”

All this is a re-creation of the small village atmosphere Maigret believed he had left behind him when he went to Paris as a young man to become a police officer. It’s a very meaningful atmosphere for me. For a couple of decades now, I’ve lived around the world as a journalist and writer. It’s been 22 years since I quit the backwater where I grew up. If I’d been a happy kid, I’d probably never have left. So whenever I go back for a visit, I become quiet, silenced by a bitter nostalgia and regret. Maybe that’s why I love this somber, atmospheric early episode featuring “le Commissaire” going back to his childhood village.

Maigret appeared in so many movies and television adaptations–for Saint-Fiacre alone there are a 1959 French-language movie with Jean Gabin and two British TV versions–that it’s easy to think of him with the familiarity we often ascribe to endlessly reproduced old-timers like Miss Marple. But Simenon had a lot more in common with his great U.S. crime-writing contemporaries. In Saint-Fiacre, he makes the lugubrious Raymond Chandler look like a breezy teenager skipping down a sunny small-town street in her bobby socks. Imagine that.

Simenon’s first editor wrote to him: “Your books aren’t real police novels. They aren’t scientific. They don’t play by the rules. There’s no love story in them. There’re no sympathetic characters. You won’t have a thousand readers.” Well, 550 million copies printed shows what that guy knew about potential sales. But he was right about the way the Belgian writer’s books worked. No real good guys and nothing–certainly not love–untainted by the grasping desire to escape a society of dying traditions and internal immigration.

The Saint-Fiacre Affair begins, then, with Maigret waking up in the inn of the village of Saint-Fiacre. At first he doesn’t recognize where he is. As it dawns upon him, he’s flooded with a heavy sense of darkness. He has returned to the village where he grew up to investigate a crime which is about to happen. (His office in the Paris police headquarters received a note saying that “A crime will be committed at the Saint-Fiacre Church during the first mass of the days of the dead.”)

Read the rest of this post on my blog The Man of Twists and Turns.

Best First Paragraphs in Crime Fiction: Part 2

I’m writing this in a plain office in the corner of a building that was described by the realtor as “exclusive,” though it doesn’t exclude despondent ultra-Orthodox Jews panhandling for cash, plumbers who break all the pipes you hadn’t called them to fix, or the cheerful lady who lets her dog pee in the elevator. There’s the hum of heavy traffic from the road below and a view across the valley of brake lights on a highway where no one ever seems to move. The air is clear enough up here that I usually only smell me, sweating through the desert heat, except when the garbage truck empties the trashcans and sends up a rotten fruit ripeness, or when the khamsin blows and I can smell the dirt on the hot wind. There’s a mosquito in here, but the bastard isn’t friendly enough to show himself. When he does, I’ll do what people in the Middle East do best. There are already spots of my blood across the whitewash where his brothers and sisters felt the thick side of my fist.

If that sounds like a spoof, you surely know who I’m caricaturing. We decided last week that you couldn’t do much better than the opening paragraph of Hammett’s “Red Harvest” for an introduction to the narrative voice, narrator, place and tone of the entire novel. But if anyone could beat it, we’d have to look at Raymond Chandler.

The grumpy god of the gumshoe genre claimed not to have much time for the
idea of a classic in crime writing. In one of his essays, he wrote that contemporary writers who aimed for historical fiction, social vignette, or broad canvas would never surpass “Henry Esmond”, “Madame Bovary”, or “War and Peace”. Crime writers, on the other hand, would easily be able to
devise a better mystery than the ones detailed in “The Hound of the
Baskervilles” or “The Purloined Letter”. “It would be rather more difficult
not to,” he wrote.

Still, the poet with the pipe (okay, no more quirky names for Ray) proved
himself wrong. Or rather he proved that he was right not to focus so much
on the mystery element and, instead, to build a mysterious atmosphere and a sardonic sense of humor. From the opening paragraph.

This is how he starts a long 1950 short story called “Red Wind”:

There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry
Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair
and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every
booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving
knife and study their husbands’ necks. Anything can happen. You can even
get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge.

Like the opening paragraph of “Red Harvest,” this gives us all the elements
we’d expect. It also tells you a lot about the narrator and his lifestyle.
The booze parties, and the sense of being gypped at the cocktail lounge.

But the opening paragraph which might be said to define an entire genre ––
and the sub-genres of attempts to copy the true representatives of the
genre, and also to parody it –– starts Chandler’s 1949 novel “The Little
Sister”:

Read the rest of this post on my blog The Man of Twists and Turns.