Five Writing Inspirations
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The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
Philip Marlowe is called to the wealthy General Sternwood’s home to help with sorting out a blackmailer. This simple opening leads the private detective through a labyrinthine plot involving pornography, gambling and murder in Los Angeles, with Marlowe battling gangsters, jealous lovers , and avoiding cops who seem bent on getting his licence from him. It also brings him closer to not only Sternwood but also the General’s two daughters – the clinical, calculating Vivian and the wild, unpredictable Carmen.
Chandler’s hero (or anti-hero) is the perfect template for the Noir detective – not dirty enough to give into temptation, but also battling against authority. The writer’s focus on style and atmosphere brought us one of the greatest detectives of all time in Philip Marlowe along with a 1930s version of the Tarantino puzzler ‘Who killed Nice Guy Eddie?’ in ‘Who killed General Sternwood’s chauffeur’? But it isn’t even as much about the plot – although the denouement is typically satisfying – as it is the protagonist and the tawdry universe that he inhabits; he’s never a villain, but not clean enough to be one of the angels.
The Secret History by Donna Tartt
Richard Papen is even more an outsider than any noir detective. Where the detective is a loner by choice, Richard craves friendship and to be part of something. Where the detective is full of wisecracks and confidence, Richard struggles to have even normal conversations and is almost constantly excluded. He can’t fit in at school, is a disappointment to his father at home and initially struggles in the cloistered world of the upper-class Vermont College to which he’s escaped.
This lonely narrator thrills at being brought into the social circle of the Classics professor Julian Morrow and his ephemeral, other-worldly students. Yet he never seems that more accepted by the group than the much reviled and intellectually inferior Bunny Corcoran. With nods to Greek Tragedy and Fredrich Nietzsche, there are also echoes of the murderers Leopold and Leob’s obsession with the perfect murder. Tartt’s story has the narrator Richard tell us the ‘what’ within the first pages. It’s the ‘why’ – and that oh-so terrible conclusion – that are so important.
Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami
Told in two divergent universes, Hard-boiled Wonderland’s narrator is a carrier and encryptor of information who finds himself helping an ageing scientist experimenting with sound removal devices in a laboratory hidden beneath Tokyo. At the same time, the narrator of ‘The End of the World’ finds himself trying to get permission to remain in a city. This means giving up on his shadow, which is cut away from him and banished to an area outside the city.
The focus switches between chapters with the narrator in ‘Hard-boiled’ encountering a selection of femme fatales, old authority figures and two thugs named Junior and Big Boy that wouldn’t be out of place in any pulp thriller. At the same time, ‘The End of the World’ is a dream-like world with the narrator existing in a walled-in city and jumping to the tune of the Gatekeeper. Between these two worlds, the central character(s) must find a way to survive, with the clock ticking inexorably towards his demise. Part, noir, part cyber-punk, part fantasy, Murakami’s 1985 novel wears its influences on its sleeve, with favourites like Raymond Chandler and William Gibson front and centre.
The Redbreast by Jo Nesbo
Nesbo’s Harry Hole series of novels has become hugely successful in recent years with the hard-living, harder-working misanthrope battling his way through a range of cases, corrupt fellow cops and unsympathetic authority figures. The Redbreast was the first book by Nesbo that I read but the plot – where Harry has to work a case with its roots back in Norway’s involvement in World War II – really spoke to me. The comparison between modern day neo-Nazis and people from Norway’s past who were sympathetic to the German cause not only hits upon my interest in history, but also on how some political groups will take any opportunity to spread discord. Add in an interesting sub-plot about police corruption and a possible political assassination and you’ve got a stirring mix of mayhem and murder to keep the readers as on-their-toes as Hole himself .
And one non-fiction:
On Writing by Stephen King
I remember discovering that an acquaintance of mine (later good friend) was interested in writing. We chatted for a few minutes about different authors, stuff we were interested in, and then he leaned in and asked me – ‘So, have you read Stephen King’s On Writing?’ King is one of the undisputed masters of genre fiction; his story of making the luxury purchase of a hairdryer for his wife once he sold the paperback rights to Carrie has gone down in writing folklore, but the part-autobiography / part writing manual is one of the first books any aspiring writer can read.
The road to hell may not exactly be paved with adverbs, but there is a lot of golden advice as well as some heartening stories in here as King describes the battles he went through to make it a published author. Then there is the advice. Read a lot. Write a lot. Don’t overdo the descriptions. I’ve bought a ton of writing books over the years, many with nuggets of wisdom in them, but none that offers as much as King’s memoir does.
