Invisible Ink by Tim Hallinan

 

Timothy Hallinan is the Edgar- and Macavity-nominated author of the traditionally-published Poke Rafferty Bangkok thrillers (most recently THE QUEEN OF PATPONG), and the Junior Bender mysteries, which are ebook originals. The newest Junior book is LITTLE ELVISES. Earlier this year, Hallinan conceived and edited a volume of original short stories by twenty first-rate mystery writers, SHAKEN: STORIES FOR JAPAN, which is available for the Kindle at $3.99, with every penny of the price going to the 2011 Japan Relief Fund. (Please buy it.) He lives in Santa Monica and Southeast Asia, and he is lucky enough to be married to Munyin Choy. His website is www.timothyhallinan.com.
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Jean asked for a short piece on “the craft of writing,” and the first thing I did was summon up the questions people ask most often at fan events and bookstores.  And then I thought, no, let's write about the thing nobody asks about: prose style.

Much of the time, I think people confuse fine writing with fancy writing.  (I know I do.)  The phrase that stops the reader in her tracks, the perfectly structured paragraph, the word used in such a striking way the reader thinks, “I want to remember that.”

Well, I'm a contrarian.  I don't like that stuff very much.  I think the ideal prose is pretty much invisible; it's a clean, transparent window through which the reader sees the characters and the action.  Enjoying a book, I believe, is a one-on-one relationship: reader and book.  When the prose calls attention to itself, I think it reminds the reader that there's a third person present, a writer, and that reminds the reader that this world she's caught up in is actually something that someone, probably caffeinated to the gills, sat down and made up for hours and hours.

In other words, these people are just marks on paper.

This was brought home forcefully to me when I heard someone—a professional actor—read the audiobook of my first Poke Rafferty thriller, A NAIL THROUGH THE HEART.  In the first chapter, just as all heck breaks loose on a crowded Bangkok sidewalk and and Rafferty realizes his adopted daughter has disappeared after bolting across the street, he pauses and takes stock, and this is what I wrote.

“When in doubt, Rafferty thinks, stop.

“The sky is low enough to scrape a nail against, that peculiar sullen gray that usually precedes one of Bangkok’s frequent rainstorms.”

When the actor got to the line about the sky, he became Orson Welles:  “The sky is low enough to scrape-a-nail-against . . .” and I winced with shame.  The sky was gray and low, okay?  It was gonna rain.  The rest of it is all showing off.

This kind of stuff comes easily to me.  I'm Irish.  I can turn anything into greeting-card poetry, and I do, if I'm not careful.

That's not to say that writing should read like assembly instructions for a barbecue.  It needs to have energy, I think, and personality—but it should be the characters' personality, not the writer's.  When I'm reading something in third person and there's a really snappy description in the narrative, I always think, “Who said that?”  And you know what?  It's not that difficult for the writer to attribute the thought to a character:  “The sky looked to Rafferty as though it were low enough to scrape a nail against.”  It's still not good, but at least we know where it comes from, and the perspective tells us something about Rafferty.

I'm not going to beat this to death.  I think the best prose in fiction is prose that stays out of the way.  The author may be able to turn handstands, but I'm actually interested in the characters, not the author, and the last thing I want when I'm enjoying a book is some five-year-old with an inferiority complex continually yelling, “Look at me.”

When I want to look at you, Mr. or Ms. Author, I'll check out your photo on the back of the book.

 

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I'm appearing today at Mike Orenduff's site: http://thepotthief.blogspot.com/

I'm appearing

A Guest Blog by Timothy Hallinan

I once knew a woman who translated hieroglyphics, and one of the texts she rendered into English was one of the oldest poems known to man, dating from about 3000 BC.  And what was it about?

It was about how things were better before.  It was a lament for having missed the Golden Age.

It seems to be human nature to think in terms of lost Golden Ages.  The operative word is “lost.” It's not even fashionable to suggest that we're living in a golden age.

But I think we are.  I think this is a golden age for mysteries and thrillers.

Sure, some of the great ones are gone: Christie, Hammett, Chandler, Sayers, Tey, Highsmith, Stout, McDonald, Parker, and many others.  But we have an enormous number of exceptional writers working now, and more titles to choose from than at any time in history.  I'd put the best writers working today up against the best working at any time since Poe kicked things off.  Who's better than James Lee Burke, Sue Grafton, Louise Penney, Laura Lippman, SJ Rozan, Lee Child, John LeCarre, Donna Leon – I could go on for pages – all writing right now?

Golden.

I think this Golden Age has come about for three reasons:
First, the ubiquity of relatively inexpensive books; until just a few years ago, despite all their moans and groans, the world's publishers put out, in editions of varying costs, more books than at any other time in history.  And with all those books being published, good writing usually found a champion.
Second, the durability of the genre.  The mystery or thriller is the one of the oldest genres (what is “Oedipus Rex” but a mystery?) and one of the most universal.  Mysteries and thrillers help readers work through some of the most difficult aspects of human existence.  They present a world in which order, even though it's been temporarily broken down, can be restored.  They ignore the fashion of nihilism and despair that mars so much supposedly “literary” fiction.

Third, women have come full circle.  Once the royalty of the genre, they faded during the heyday of the pulps. the hard-boiled noir, and the five-testicle PI fiction of the 40s through the 60s.  And then, starting in the 70s, the entire genre tilted; women re-emerged with a vengeance, no longer confined to the classic and/or cozy end of the spectrum, but ranging straight across, from one extreme to another.  And in one of the most remarkable shifts in modern marketing history, women became the driving force in mystery writing.

So now we have women writing all kinds of books and also some of the best male writers who have ever worked in the genre.  Jackpot.  We've also seen a loosening (pretty much an abandonment) of the old restrictions on what people can write about, which has produced some terrible books but also some really serious explorations of the darkest corners of human behavior.

And now we're seeing things open up even more widely.  The ebook has broken New York's stranglehold on what we can read—and what we can write, too.  Once again, we're seeing a lot of books that should have remained in people's desk drawers, but we're also seeing some tremendous stuff.
It's certainly opened things up for me.  Like most writers, I've been restricted in what I could write because publishers would only buy a certain kind of book from me.  But now I can write literally anything I want and put it out there to sink or swim.

I've always had an ambition to write a series in which the thrills were real but there were also a lot of laughs.  And now, thanks to ebooks, I am.  I just put out LITTLE ELVISES, the second in a series starring a Los Angeles burglar named Junior Bender who moonlights as a private eye for crooks.  It's got some rough stuff in it, but it's also pretty funny, or so people tell me. 

I believe it's a uniquely human experience to be frightened and amused at the same time, and I love writing books that attempt to put the reader in that position.  Junior's first outing was CRASHED, and it did well enough that I had offers from traditional publishers to buy the series, but I decided to stay with the e-book channel, direct from me to the reader.

Do I think LITTLE ELVISES is golden age material?  I doubt it—I can't take myself that seriously.  But they're the product of a writer doing what he wants instead of what a corporation wants him to do, and in the long run that has to be good for everyone.  When people look back on this particular golden age, I think they'll say the emergence of the ebook both broadened and prolonged it.