Crime, Punishment, and Self-Discovery
For the longest time I told people the reason I wrote crime fiction was because of my extensive (i.e. forty year) career in customer service. Obviously, you can’t kill or harm a customer, client, or purchaser of goods or services. However, you can use their name (or a reasonable facsimile thereof) as a character, more likely a victim, in a crime novel. Hey, it works for me. (There are also some former co-workers who can claim the same type of “fame.”)
My first venture into crime fiction, the now out-of-print Swan Song, was described as a neo-noir hardboiled mystery. There was a snazzy imitation of Hammett and Chandler, a lot of action, even more violence, and a twist at the end, unless, of course, you saw it miles ahead. The second, also out of print, was The .9MM Solution. It was primarily a Dirty Harry-type vigilante story, with a gimmick regarding names of victims, and an early attempt to show the world of profilers (which I knew nothing about).
I moved in the direction of historical crime fiction. Over the course of the four book series, the Ark City Confidential Chronicles, I introduced a main character who was a facially scarred World War I veteran. From the beginning in Ark City Confidential, there was the element of a search for identity. Over the next three books, Secrets of the Righteous, Lost in the Plains, and From Somewhere in a Dream, this notion was woven in among the various crimes being investigated and solved. They evolved away from neo-noir (by virtue of their time setting) and not nearly as hardboiled as Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe. This character aged over time (twenty years to be precise) and came to learn more about himself.
Now, I’m on to a new series in which the main character is seeking missing persons while at the same time seeking the Truth, or something reasonably approaching it. As a former police officer, World War II veteran, and a Jew, the Laws of God and the Laws of Man pull at him in his struggle to understand the world he inhabits. While there are elements of a procedural within, the moral conflict as well as the constant drive toward self discovery are the primary elements.
There are paramount concerns regarding historical accuracy, logic in the structure of the crime and the resolution, and a strong desire to avoid the tropes created by Hammett and Chandler. Yet, there is an underlying motivation to comprehend Good and Evil as something that is not always resolved by law and not as clear cut as indicated in scripture.
Though he was one of the premiere writer of crime fiction, Raymond Chandler had greater aspirations regarding his writing. While he may not have always been successful, he enunciates the type of main character he is creating:
“Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. He is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor—by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.“He will take no man’s money dishonestly and no man’s insolence without a due and dispassionate revenge. He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him.
“The story is this man’s adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure. If there were enough like him, the world would be a very safe place to live in, without becoming too dull to be worth living in.”
I have a conscious desire to imbue my tales of crime and punishment with something further that makes my main character someone who is coming to terms with the realities of life above and beyond $25 a day and expenses. We’ll see where we wind up.
