Moments In Crime

Sunday: Tradition and genre-bending

Tiny Little Troubles started life as a mere tickling, far back in my head. It was like a generalized hunger that gradually becomes a craving for something very specific. Once you realize what it is, you’ve just gotta have it.

What I came to crave was a caper novel, that subgenre of crime novel about robbing from difficult or improbable places: a racetrack, a casino, Fort Knox.

The thing that really fetched me about this subgenre was the guy with the big idea, the criminal mastermind who figures out a way to steal something that no one has ever thought of or dared try before.

This inspired guy--and I only mean to praise him here, really--is like a poet, someone who sees things others miss, and hears the song of the language.

Only, of course, to this guy the thing everyone has missed is how to steal something, and the song is the sound of money, coins falling on a stone floor.

But my problem was that I wanted to write a novel that had already been written. Now I have been known to struggle with the urge to buy books I know I already own, just because I liked them so well. Not new or more attractive editions, the very same books. I don’t let myself do this, but the feeling is there and has to be dealt with.

But writing a novel that had already been written was, aside from the daunting legal issues, just too Borgesian to contemplate.

Plus  there was the part where no one would read it.

So I tried to think of a way to update the caper novel. I needed a new Fort Knox, and a new stack of gold ingots. That’s what I needed: a new McGuffin.

I found it in nanotechnology (as faithful readers of this blogweek already know). But I found that once I had my nanobots, I had a lot of trouble keeping them in the box. I wanted to write a crime novel, not a science fiction novel. I was interested in theft, the means and motivations of. But once I had introduced the science-fiction McGuffin of nanoscale robots, the whole novel began to be pushed out of shape. The bots, like movie stars everywhere, wanted the whole book to be about them. They were ready for their close-up, and kept demanding more camera time than I wanted to give them.

This raised some interesting questions about genre boundaries, and how far you can go in crossing them before you pop through entirely into another genre. After setting up what I hoped were the minimum plausibility requirements for the technology, I backed off. I meant to keep things criminal; I wasn’t especially interested in how the things worked, or what effect (besides total and absolute destruction) they would have on the society around them.

The bots were just a bag of pearls to me. But they kept wanting to be more, and dragged the novel off in other directions I then had to prune back. It was exhausting.

Finally I got fed up and sent them off to destroy a small but very corrupt dictatorship (fictional) in southeast Asia. This made everybody happy. The bots got to show off their superior destructive capacities, and (since most of the destruction took place off screen as it were) I got to keep the focus on the criminals and their victims.

It was a close call, though.

I’d like to thank Courtney Fischer and all the folks at St. Martin’s for allowing me a whole week to blather on about my novel at a length and a level of detail that would get me 86’d from most bars and cafes. It’s been a blast.

Wednesday: The Scientist Guy

Tiny Little Troubles is about a nanotechnology start-up that is taken over by a gang of criminals and sold to the highest bidder.

AARON ROGELL is the scientist and inventor who has developed the process that Pablo Clench wants to steal. Rogell is a brilliant, creative mind, a bit narcissistic, maybe, but there are worse character flaws, and Rogell has them too.

Rogell has a beautiful wife--Amanda--and a brand-new baby daughter. Amanda has given up her career to have a child and help Rogell midwife his new business.

The world seems to be aligning itself with Aaron Rogell. His inventions are making him money and his new business promises to make him even more. Even his shaky management skills can’t keep the start-up from succeeding.

The only fly in the ointment is his unconquerable need for nearly constant sex, which has meant frequent visits to prostitutes and upmarket call girls. This hobby puts him in contact with former pole dancer and current mistress to mobsters Aphrodite Anderson, and brings him to the attention of Pablo Clench. It also distracts him from his business, so that when weird things begin to float to the surface at work, he doesn’t even notice.

As for Amanda, he thinks she is safely tucked away in the minimansion, fooled into complacency, and unaware of his nightside rambles.

That’s not exactly the case. Aaron Rogell is about to be presented with the bill for his radical inattention  to business and his serial infidelity.

Tomorrow: Amanda gets angry

Tuesday: Meet the new boss

For the next few days I plan to introduce the main characters from Tiny Little Troubles. By turning my characters loose on an unsuspecting blogoverse, I'm passing up the opportunity to blog about myself. But trust me: they’re more interesting than I am. I’ve been hanging out with them for the last year or so; I know what they’re capable of.

First up is head bad guy and genuine piece of work PABLO CLENCH. I could tell you a lot about Pablo, things you won’t find even in the book. I know his darkest secrets, and believe me, they’re plenty dark.

I can tell you, for instance, that Pablo didn’t start out to be a strip club floor manager and part-time extortionist and drug dealer in San Francisco’s North Beach. He grew up wanting to be a surfer, and after attending high school in Santa Monica for a while he decided that all he wanted to do was hang out at the beach. He discovered that he wasn’t a very good surfer, however,  and he hated being wet and cold all the time. He also discovered that surfers when they’re busy catching waves often leave all sorts of things in their cars, really interesting, and valuable things.

He did pretty good at first but after a few serious beatings decided to relocate to San Francisco.

By the time we meet Pablo he’s drifted into the sex industry, after having tried his hand at security work--beating the crap out of people--and freelance photography. (He must have been pretty good at this: The subjects of Pablo’s photos were always glad to pay whatever he asked for the negatives.)

But he’s beginning to feel that managing a strip club, while it keeps his truly superior managerial skills sharp, lacks scope. His abilities are just not being tested. Plus he wants to make more money--don’t we all.

Just when he is thinking of relocating yet again, he discovers that an old love interest has begun to date a scientist. and according to her this scientist is rolling in it. Or will be, once his new company really begins to pay off.

Clench is intrigued. Payoff is something he knows a lot about. He decides to meet the  new boyfriend and learn about his business. Pablo is certain there will be something in it for him.

Still to come: Meet Mr. Scientist

Somewhere someone is reading my lost notebooks

Hi, Marc Lecard here. St. Martin’s Minotaur has rashly agreed to let me take over this blogspace for the next week and write about anything I want--which will probably mean relentless and detailed talking about my new novel, Tiny Little Troubles, which came out July 22.

No one has ever asked me where the idea for this book  came from, but they’ll probably get around to it sooner or later. I know how that is, putting things off all the time.  You end up feeling bad about yourself.  So just to help out, I plan to talk at length about the book's  birth and first tentative steps.

Now I lug around a notebook wherever I go, to write down brilliant story ideas as they occur to me. Usually I get to write one or at most two brilliant ideas in this notebook before it gets left behind on a bus or a park bench. When I get home I try to remember the brilliant idea in all its brilliancy, and scribble down a significantly garbled, non-brilliant version in the notebook that still exists because it never leaves the house.

In this notebook I had scribbled down a scene that occurred to me without context or explanation in which a gangster is suddenly turned into a pile of underwear. I didn’t know why. I didn’t understand it, and I didn’t think I’d ever be able to use the scene. It was just too strange (though pretty funny).

Now, this idea--or hallucination--came back to me when I was looking for something to energize the book I was working on--a book that wanted to be some kind of caper novel.

What could have turned the bad guy into  a pile of lingerie?

I brooded about it for while, rejecting the obvious choices--death rays from alien spaceships, genetically engineered disease germs--before I hit on the right answer.

Nanotechnology. Had to be. Little robots you couldn’t even see, made to manufacture things (like lingerie), somehow got turned loose on career criminals.

But what would career criminals--gangsters, lowlifes--be doing interacting with nanotechnology, I wondered.

Trying to answer my own questions, I wrote Tiny Little Troubles, the story of what happens when a brilliant scientist and inventor begins to hang out with the wrong people, and gets his nanotechnology start-up taken over by extortionists. Eventually everyone is sorry they ever heard of nanotechnology, but by then it’s much too late. Just when it looks like every character in the book is about to be eaten by invisible robots or else end up in  a freshly cement-covered burial site, the scientist’s wife gets fed up and decides to sort everyone out. Things, as they so often do, go rapidly downhill from there.

Tomorrow: Meet the gang.

Blogging This Week: Marc Lecard

Aaron Rogell is a brilliant San Francisco scientist with a nanotech start-up, a beautiful wife, and a brand-new baby. But Aaron has an ugly little problem; he just can’t keep it in his pants. And since his wife got pregnant, his problem has gotten worse. Now he spends his quality time with an upscale call girl named Aphrodite, a toothless street hooker, and some even less presentable companions. Once one of Aphrodite’s lowlife acquaintances—the fearsome Pablo Clench--learns that her new boyfriend has invented a miraculous technology that may be worth fabulous sums, he goes to work. His plan: to infiltrate Aaron's company, get the secret of his invention and sell it for cash to the highest bidder. But things don’t go as anyone had planned, and Pablo, Aphrodite, Aaron and just about everyone they know end up with lots of tiny little troubles.

MARC LECARD was born and raised on Long Island, New York. He now lives in Oakland, California with his wife, 3,000 books, and a growing collection of obsolete computers.  He is also the author of

Vinnie's Head.