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 In all honesty much of what he wrote in the piece seems outdated.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?
