Moments In Crime

That's All, Folks

Thanks, all, for enduring my rants.  Hope they were at least entertaining.

Thanks to Minotaur for this opportunity to share my ideas/insanity.

Thanks to Cheryl for the comments.

And thanks to Schwegel for listening to me for the other 51 weeks of the year.

Be safe, be happy, and support your local bookseller.

Yo,

Dan

Rain

It's Saturday and it's raining in my part of Connecticut. 

This morning felt to me like a Monday morning.  Not a little like a Monday morning, a lot like a Monday morning.  Not yet raining when I got up, it was nonetheless pretty gloomy -- overcast and humid, not a promising start to any day.  Feeling like a Monday (a lot like a Monday -- did I mention that?) and gloomy on top of it -- well, ouch.  Finished up my work for the day, went for a quick ride (in my trusty rain suit, of course, and on the Buell because that thing will go through anything), and am now back home and clear-headed (or as clear-headed as I'm going to get) and ready to blog.  Sitting down, though, I realized that another Monday -- an actual Monday, the actual Monday -- is only a day and a half away. 

Frick. 

I lose track of time a lot.  My bank pays nearly all my bills automatically, and if I go a few days without watching TV, I sometimes don't know if it's a Tuesday or a Wednesday or a Thursday.  I mean, I can figure it out, it will just take me a few seconds.  Sundays are weird for me -- something about a Sunday makes me vulnerable to good ole existential angst.  I can find myself wandering around on a Sunday, purposeless, which is probably why Monday mornings are so tough for me.  Time to snap out of it, get to work, start the week off right, and put words -- the right words, and in the right order -- "down on paper".  Time to forget about all that existential angst stuff.  So you can see why the idea of a Saturday that feels like a Monday can freak me out a little.  A "Monday" followed by a Sunday followed by an actual Monday -- damn, this is going to hurt.

I make use of weather a lot in my books.  Some people praise me for it, others can't stand it.  I think weather is a great way to set a mood, and it more often than not provides an opportunity to play a little bit with symbolism.  The Water's Edge takes place durning 24 hours of fog and rain.  (Hank Wagner called it in Mystery Scene Magazine "an atmospheric masterpiece."  God bless him.)  The way that each of the three main characters -- Bechet, Miller, and Barton -- react to the banks of fog is an indication of their respective psychological states.  (Read it and see!)  I used an arctic cold snap in The Darkest Place to enhance the feeling of isolation and fear, but the indications of the states of mind of the three heroes in that book (Miller, Kane, and Clay) is seen in how each reacts to darkness.  My new book is set on Halloween, and in the opening scene I have the hero being shoved by a gust of chilly air, foreshadowing how over the next few days he will be pushed into becoming the kind of man his father and brother were, the kind of man he swore he'd never be.  His transformation is, of course, necessary to save the woman he secretly loves ...

Fitzgerald in Gatsby and Hemingway in A Farewell to Arms played with weather and mood a lot.  So did Camus in The Stranger and Harper Lee in To Kill A Mockingbird.  I love those books, reread them frequently.  I think, though, it was James Lee Burke's Dave Robicheaux novels that made me so weather-happy.  He opens Dixie City Jam with a thrunderstorm coming up over the Gulf, then moving on.  I swear I could feel it, smell it, taste it!

So, it's Saturday and it's raining here in my part of Connecticut.

Grist for the mill, as it were.

D

 

Stuff

Again, sorry for the lateness of today's blog -- I have no excuse to offer other than the day got away from me, which happens now and again, even for those of us who sit in front of a computer all day, moving words around and around and around ...

Taking a break from my somewhat didactic lectures today to write about what I do when I'm not working.  I, simply, ride.  As much as I can, as far as I can, for as long as I can.  I average about 20,000 miles a year, splitting that between two motorcycles:  a Buell XB12 SuperTT and a Ducati S2R 1000 Monster.  (The Buell is the black one.)  Why, Dan, two motorcycles?  Well, when you have an actual addiction to riding, as I do, it's nice to have a backup for when the other bike is in the shop.  Seriously, I need to ride, man, every day.  And when you ride year-round -- as long as it's above forty, I'm out -- it's good to have one bike that is never exposed to the winter elements. 

The Buell is my year-round bike.  The Sherman tank of motorcycles, it's also my long-haul bike -- say, for a trip that's longer than four hours.  It has a more comfortable riding position, is more durable (thanks to its time-proven Harley V-twin engine), and also sports a bigger gas tank.  The Ducati, due to it's more aggressive riding position, is a bit more of a labor of love too ride, and as for durability, it is, well, sorry, Italian-made.  In late October the Ducati gets tucked away in the garage and doesn't come out again till April.  That way it sees no road-salt or grime and will retain its value longer.

I'm lucky to live in Connecticut because there are so many winding back roads here.  Happiness is, after all, seeing an S-turn up ahead.  I'm a corner-leaner, have the worn-down boots to show for it, and am proud to say I have never gotten either bike above 90 mph (about half of what each can do).  That's not to say I haven't gone from 0 to 60 quickly.  I'm big on safety, always wear a helmet, padded gloves, and a leather jacket with armor in the elbows and shoulders.  I even have jeans with Kevlar-reinforced knees and butt, to prevent "road-rash" in a slide.  I "went down" once, on the Buell -- hit some spilled anti-freeze on an already damp road, and the next thing I knew, I was on my back and sliding along the pavement with my bike spinning like a top ahead of me.  I don't even remember hitting the ground, it happened that fast.  Thanks to my gear I wasn't injured in the least -- and don't worry, that spill figures prominently in the book I'm working on now.

Whenever I need to go into Manhattan (to bother my lovely and patient editor or whine to my wise and faithful agent), I take one of the bikes -- weather permitting, of course.  My all-time favorite ride is a nighttime ride around Manhattan.  You haven't seen or heard or felt the city till you've been down its streets on a motorcycle.  The wind in your face, the sound of the exhaust echoing off the buildings, beating every single cab off the line when the light turns green.  It really is electric.

Okay, that's about all for today.  Tomorrow I am taking the Ducati up to New Hampshire for July 4th, leaving at dawn and won't have my computer with me, so it's unlikely I'll be able to blog.  But I will be back on the fifth of July -- that's a great play by Landford Wilson, by the way.  The Fifth of July.   It's available on DVD and stars a teenage Cynthia Nixon from Sex and the City.  Check it out if you can!

Have a safe holiday.

Yo,

Dan

      

Beginnings, Part 3

Hello, and sorry for the delay in posting today -- I woke up inspired and had to get some work done first. 

I am at the stage in my new book where I'm introducing the characters -- friends of the hero who help, friends of the hero who betray, the friend whose death propels the hero forward, the friend who turns out to be the one whose Deal with the Devil, as I call it, set the whole story in motion.  Tricky stuff, all of this revealing and setting up and hiding in plain sight.  It's the hiding-in-plain-sight part that I find the most challenging -- and the most rewarding.  There is nothing better -- for an author and a reader -- when it is revealed that the bad guy has been right there all along, at the hero's side during the most critical of times, seemingly helping him out but really serving his own nefarious needs.  I now outline my books before I write them, letting the process take as long as it needs -- months, if necessary.  I often end up with a hundred page outline (all in single-space) with everything little detail planned out.  This allows me to be very deliberate in how I introduce characters -- what they wear, their habits, all the things that make as much sense when you don't know a certain character is the killer as it does when you realize said character is the killer after all.  There are a number of tricks I use that I don't want to give away because that will make spotting my bad guy way too easy, so instead I'll talk now about casting any story's most important supporting characters.

Every hero has a mentor.  (If he doesn't have a mentor, like Jake Gittes in Chinatown, he has an inner code he won't ever betray, a code he more than likely picked up from a mentor in his backstory.)  Luke Skywalker had Obi-Wan, Frodo had Gandalf, Rocky had his trainer Mickey, Conrad in Ordinary People had his shrink.  In The Darkest Place, I made a point of giving every character a mentor.  Even the mentors had mentors.  It is important to note that a mentor doesn't always have to be good, and doesn't always have to be a father-figure who prepares the hero for his task ahead.  In The Water's Edge, Bechet has dark-mentors in Castello and LeCur, and Miller's dead father was a dark-mentor.  As the story moves forward, Gabrielle takes the role of mentor for Bechet and Kay Barton takes the role of mentor for Miller.  And there are times when Miller is Barton's mentor, and Bechet, in the backstory, was the mentor to Miller's ex-lover, Abby.  Mentors, mentors, everywhere you look!

The hero also has a villain he must defeat.  Carl Jung named this archetype the Shadow because a good villain is a reflection of the hero.  If Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs wants to make himself into a woman, then it makes sense that Clarice, the hero, is a woman trying to make her way in a decidedly man's world.  (Take note of all the men who glare longingly at her in the film version.  Talk about making your point!)  And, of course, Clarice has mentors in Crawford and Lechter -- one a classic mentor and one a dark mentor.  Note, though, how many times Crawford betrays Clarice and how it's Lechter who actually comes through for her in the end.  Now that's freaking cool.

So, we have the hero, the mentor, and the villain.  This makes for a great and exciting story -- hero learns from his mentor the exact skills that will help the hero defeat the villain.  And the mentor almost always dies before the final confrontation (either actually or metaphorically), requiring the hero to rise up and complete his task alone.  Now, man, that's drama.  But I realized a while ago that it's more than this guarantee of conflict and life-and-death stakes that draws us into a story.  There is a hidden level going on, something that represents a struggle we all undergo in our lives, no matter who we are.

Calling Dr. Freud.

Our path to adulthood, according to Freud, is the struggle of the ego to develop and intergrate the superego in an attempt to control the id.  Not only is that the path to adulthood, it is also the struggle many of us continue for the rest of our lives.  Story is very crucial our culture -- it always has been (see prehistoric cave drawings in France), and it always will be (let's take bets on how much Will Smith's new movie takes in at the box office this holiday weekend).  We humans NEED story, and I believe it's because each story is an example of the internal struggle in all of us -- hero/ego intergrates mentor/superego to defeat villain/id.  A lesson, as it were, of the choices we should make.

But it doesn't end there.  Notice that when a hero develops a "hero team", there's always the wise one and the reckless one, with the hero often caught in the middle.  Look at Luke, Leia, and Han in Star Wars.  Leia is always bossing them around, and Han is always running off impulsively.  Sounds like superego and id to me, with poor Luke, the ego of the story, torn between them.  It's the same thing for The Lord of The Rings -- Frodo, Sam-wise, and Gollum make up one hero team, Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimley make up another.  So not only is there the overall hero/mentor/villain dynamic in Frodo, Gandalf, and the Ever-Seeing Eye, but there are smaller representations of that dynamic in the respective hero teams.  In Ordinary People, the chief dynamic is Conrad, his mother, and his shrink.  But there is also his devoted friend/team mate and the obnoxious teammate, with Conrad caught in the middle.  There are even a dark mentors in Conrad's swim coach and grandparents.  Man, I don't know who had it worse, Frodo or Conrad Jarrett.

Anyway, that's today rant.  For fun, pick a movie or book -- any story -- and keep an eye out for the mentor and the id.  Some stories even have the mentor as the id.  I love those because they guarantee the poor hero is in for a helluva time.

Yo,

Dan

   

   

    

This actually brings me to the subject of today's rant:  casting the supporting characters. 

Beginnings, Part 2

"An empty shell of a man."

Good ole Mad Max, wandering the wasteland of Australia in his super-charged 1973 XB GT Ford Falcon Coupe, determined to mind his own business at all costs as he, with his faithful dog (aptly named "Dog") by his side, scrounges for "gazoline" so that he can stay on the move and maybe even one day outrun his own deep and crippling inner pain.

Ah, the archetype of the loner hero. 

I first saw Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior in college, and it began my fascination with both the rat-ta-tat-tat of a V8 engine and the archetype of the wounded loner hero.  (It is also to blame, no doubt, for my ongoing search for the perfect leather jacket, but that's another blog altogether.)   I was, I think, 20, living with my then-girlfriend (an artist, the source of yet another favorite character archetype of mine) in the woods of Noyac, LI, which, while not the post-apocalyptic outback, was pretty much a no-man's land in its own right.  I had just finished my first novel, a rip-off of The Great Gatsby, and was racking up rejection letters (which it, and I, most decidedly deserved) left and right.  I knew nothing about archetypes back then -- probably had yet to even come across the word -- but something about the story of Max Rokatanski, a one-time cop and husband and father turned amoral drifter, really struck a chord in me. 

I began to realize that I'd always been drawn to stories that were about, or had in their casts, characters who were outsiders.  I remember being haunted by Shane -- that poor guy, can't get a freaking break -- and identifying with James Dean's Cal in East of Eden -- "Is it because you're bad?" Julie Harris asks him at one point.  I saw On The Waterfront in high school and couldn't get Marlon Brando's Terry out of my head for months.  (To this day, in every book I write, the hero loses his jacket -- got that from On The Waterfront.)  I grew up watching The Big Valley -- a silly "horse opera", yes, but Lee Major's Heath, the bastard son and outsider (and, by far, coolest of the Barkely boys) was the one I tuned-in for.

Max, though, was the one who brought all this from the darkness of my subconscious mind (or is that my unconscious mind, I can never get the two straight) to the front and center of my conscious mind.  I immediately began working on novels that were about the loner hero, a man running from his wound but not realizing that every step he took was actually bringing him closer and closer to a turning point where he would have to face his wound and either heal it once and for all or be finally destroyed by it.  As with every loner hero, it is through a trial of violence that he finally purges himself. (It is perhaps interesting to note that Mel Gibson has made a career of playing this same character over and over again.  Max, the Lethal Weapon movies, Braveheart, et al.  And Apocalypto, an amazing movie, is a pretty good indication that he is nowhere near done exploring this archetype.)

I wrote nine more novels before I finally sold one, each an attempt to nail down that theme.  It took me 18 years to get a book deal, and my first novel to be published came out just weeks before the 20th anniversary of the day I had begun the first novel I would actually complete and send out to publishers.  (May 11th, 1982.  Not sure why I remember that day, but I do.  I was 19, ending my sophomore year in college by skipping classes to read and reread and reread again Gatsby.)  All my characters -- Mac, Augie Hartsell and his daughter Tina, Kane, Reggie Clay, Tommy Miller, Jake "Pay Day" Bechet, Kay Barton -- have been wounded outsiders who are forced into violent confrontations through which they fall or are redeemed.  My new book, for now entitled The Violet Hour, is yet another variation on that theme -- an innocent, the only surviving member of a family of neer-do-wells, comes face to face with his destiny when he rushes to the aid of his closest friend, who, of course, it turns out, is not who he says he is.  The variation here is that my hero is too young to have a deep and crippling wound.  Bechet, the hero of The Water's Edge was a breakthrough character for me because he's the first character of mine who has a wound but is not crippled by it.  In fact, he is quite capable, and is capable because of his wound.  The fun part of staking out a very specific territory is exploring all the ways to to mix it up and come up with something fresh.

So, speaking of the new book, I need to get to it.  I think tomorrow I will talk about how I come up with supporting characters.

Stay safe.

Dan     

 

Beginnings, Part 1

"Where do you get your ideas?"

This is the question, I believe, that authors -- crime authors in particular -- most frequently hear.  It's a more than fair question, but it is also, to say the least, a loaded one because crime novels can be made of some pretty dark stuff, and to admit coming up with an idea is akin to admitting, in some way, to owning it.  How did I tap into Dean Kowsakowski perverse longings in The Darkest Place?  Or, for that matter, Colette Auster's blind ambition?  Or Deacon Kane's pain and buried rage?  To answer, "Oh, it's a simple matter of extending empathy" just doesn't seem to cut it, and probably is, at best, only a partial truth -- partial not because something is purposely left out but because the process of creating a story and the characters who move it forward is far too complicated to sum up in a sentence or two.

The Great William Goldman wrote in his foreward to Marathon Man that when planning a thriller, he comes up with the villain first.  To me that makes perfect sense because the villain is the hero's shadow, so knowing who the villain is would help guide an author to who the hero needs to be.  I certainly do this, but it's not the place where I start.  I've talked to enough authors -- and seen the looks on their faces when I share my method with them -- to know that my approach is a bit, well, strange.  But it works for me, gets me more often than not started in the right direction, so I guess I'll stick with it, at least till it stops working.  (Oh, God, please don't let it stop working.)

I start with the location.  Not the town -- all my novels are set in Southampton, on the East End of New York's Long Island -- but rather the place of the murder, or if not the murder, then where the bodies are found.  For The Darkest Place it was the image of a body adrift in a bay.  From there I asked myself all the expected questions:  How did it get there?  Who was it?  Why was this person killed?  Basic stuff.  To answer those questions I need to come up with a hero, and I need something to connect the hero to the killings -- both physcially and emotionally.  Since the victim drowned, then how about a hero who is symbolically drowning, a man who has lost something and can't seem to recover from that loss?  How about a man who is "drowning his sorrows" in booze and an illicit affair with a married woman?  How about a failed writer who has come back to his old college to teach?  Well, then, the victim of course has to have been one of his students, which gives me the physical and emotional connections I need.  Make the loss from which he can't recover the accidental drowing death of his only son, and suddenly Southampton, surrounded by several different bodies of water, becomes a very dangerous place for this failed writer to be living.  (Basic equation for drama:  put your hero exactly where he doesn't want to be.) 

To bookend the whole process and lock it down I need to come up with where the hero lives -- another location that is, for me, crucial.  So I placed this college instructo named Deacon Kane in a small apartment above, of all places, a secondhand clothing store.  (I prefer, whenever possible, to use places that actually exist.) It was then and only then that I realized I had on my hands a story about possible redemption.  I mean, why else did I put the hero above a store called Second Chance?

It goes on from there, link by link.  With the hero in place, I can then cast his shadow -- or, in Kane's case, shadows.  That poor guy gets it from so many different directions.  Kowsakowki's perversion is a reflection of Kane's sexual misconduct, Colette's blind ambition is a reflection of Kane's lack of will, and so on.

For The Water's Edge it was the idea of someone being hanged off the Shinnecock Bridge.  I had that image in my head for a long time -- I think it came from a news report I heard years ago about some banker with Vatican connections being found hanged from a bridge in London.  The Shinnecock Canal was a prominent location from TDP, so I had spent a lot of time there just snooping around, getting the details right.  One rather gothic night I looked up at the bridge and imagined just how scary it would be to see a dead body hanging from it, swaying in the wind.  And if one body would be scary, then two would be twice as a scary, right?

The basic questions led me to a pair of heroes -- Jake "Pay Day" Bechet and Tommy Miller, both of whom are hiding from their respective troubled pasts.  The past quickly became a big theme -- even the method of killing is something that isn't seen anymore but was once, not too long ago, really, all too common.  This archaic method of murder -- and one that is for many a symbol of hate -- added for me an element of real danger, signaling early on that everyone in this story was about to be thrown back to a less than civilized time.  Bechet and Miller both need to revert to their old ways in order to save the women they love.  And since so many of the characters are in hiding or concealing something, I of course decided that the story had to be set during a period of heavy fog and rain -- fog to conceal, rain to wash away all traces.  The choice of where each man lives -- Bechet in a secluded cottage with his lover Gabrielle, Miller by the train station on Elm Street, a reference to my early "Mac" novels, where Miller was first introduced -- told me instantly what was most important to these men.  The minute I knew what was important to them, I was then able to cast their respective shadows and come up with an appropriate villain for each to battle.

This, then, is how I get with my ideas.  A long and involved and maybe overly complicated process, yes, but, really, I wouldn't have it any other way.

Tomorrow, in Beginnings Part 2, I will tackle how I "cast" a story.  If anyone has any questions or suggestions for topics, please let me know.

Okay, time now to work.

        

Blogging This Week: Daniel Judson

Daniel Judson’s three novels, including The Darkest Place, have all garnered Shamus Award nominations, and one Shamus prize. He attended Southhampton College, and his time in the Hamptons (particularly the parts you don’t find in the society pages) was the inspiration for the setting and characters in The Water’s Edge. He now lives in Connecticut.

When Jake "Payday" Bechet hears that two men have been murdered a few miles from where he lives in the Hamptons---hanged from the Shinnecock Bridge, their hands severed---he knows that trouble is coming. Trouble for him, for everyone, because it means that someone has betrayed the Castello crime family. Whether it’s someone trying to move in on their drug operation or the cops making their own statement, he doesn’t know, but he wants to stay far away from it all.
     After all, years ago Bechet himself walked away from the Castellos with enough inside information to hold over their heads and to keep himself safe, then went underground. He doesn’t want to get anywhere near them now but soon discovers that he can’t remain indifferent---first it seems one of his friends has gotten involved in the fringes of this battle, and then the larger picture becomes clear: Jorge Castello himself wants Bechet to find out who’s behind the killings, claiming there’s a traitor in the family. The last thing Bechet wants to do is work for the Castellos again, but he knows he has to find a way to finish it somehow.
     Between Bechet and Tommy Miller, a retired P.I. whose ex-girlfriend has also gotten too close to the Castellos and whose father was one of their casualties a few years back, all the loose ends will be tied up---one way or another---before the end of twenty-four hours.
     Once again Daniel Judson shines an unforgiving light on the darkest parts of the and delivers a powerful, unforgettable read paced at breakneck speed.