Moments In Crime

ANOTHER DETECTIVE?

Alessandra Martillo, the protagonist from The Last Gig, is my first private investigator.  I have avoided her for years.  There must be thousands of PI’s in crime fiction, cops and ex-cops, alcoholics both recovering and recalcitrant, Belgian poufs, wizards, little old ladies, rabbis, cats…  Why would I want to invent one more?  But the PI has been promoted to iconic status in literature, the genre seems to fascinate us, and I must admit I’ve read plenty of them myself.

 

Somewhere towards the end of writing my previous book I began to wonder what I was going to work on next.  For me, that is not a process of considering logically what might be profitable or sensible.  Instead, really, what I do is I begin to pay more attention to some of the random stuff that seems to wash up on the beach with each incoming tide, and I wait until something grabs me.  I had already decided I wanted to try a series character, mostly since I have enjoyed a few of them so thoroughly over the years.  I didn’t want to write about an ex-cop, there are too many guys who do that already and I didn’t want to add my voice to the din.  Some of those guys are terrific, like Robert Crais and Reed Farrell Coleman and Ed Dee.  Plus, I don’t know that much about cops and I don’t particularly want to learn anything more.

 

It seemed to me that our fictional PI’s have gotten pretty far afield from what the real guys actually do.  Maybe that’s always been true.  After all, our cinematic notions of the cowboy life arrived eventually at something that seemed to have little or nothing to do with real cows.  I suppose that constitutes a good reason not to write cowboy stories, because my knowledge of cows begins and ends with those nice clean red T-bones I occasionally buy from Stop & Shop, and I sincerely hope to retain my blissful ignorance.

 

As it happens, however, my mother-in-law once worked for a real-life, honest-to-god private investigator.  Now, she was not a detective, she was a typist, but as such she got a pretty good look at what those guys did in their normal everyday jobs, and being a talkative soul, she passed along much of that to me.  I can’t honestly say I was listening, but it’s all coming back to me now.

Of course, there’s only so much you can do with that kind of stuff.  It might be real, but so is what plumbers do and you probably don’t want to read about that, but it is a starting point.  So my private investigator will be someone doing, at least at first, those mundane things, tracking bail jumpers, serving divorce papers, repossessing cars.  Struggling, in other words, with the same stuff most of us do, so much of the time, suiting up, showing up, doing the job.  I’m starting with this because I like to think Clark Kent is a much more interesting guy than Superman.

Okay, that’s my beginning.  So who is this guy?  How can I make him, ahhh…

 

Why does it have to be a guy?

 

Well, I’m a guy.  But so what?  I have written all sorts of characters, I have crawled into the minds of businessmen and thieves, mobsters and mechanics, whores, virgins, assassins.  Isn’t that what novelists do?

 

Okay, that’s my second step, this character will be female.  There have been plenty of female detectives.  Ex-cops, alkies, coroners, moms and the aforementioned little old ladies…

 

Wait, I got it.

 

I decided to take this female character all the way back to the beginning.  That was my third step, after that I was up and running.  I gave Al Martillo some of the traits I remembered from the PI’s I read as a child.  She would be someone with issues, with a murky past, a certain taste for confrontation, something of a predator.  She’s not superman, or even superwoman.  She’s human.

 

She’s got flaws.  Her life is a mess.

 

Shit, I can write about that, I’ve already done all the research.

 

I had a great time in the company of Alessandra Martillo.  As a matter of fact, I’m working on the sequel now, although it hardly seems like work.  Anyhow, I hope you’ll check her out, and I hope you can identify with her. 

 

It's all right, I won't tell anyone.

.

You can't make this stuff up

You ever notice, the malapropisms written for Yogi Berra in the AFLAC commercial are not as funny as the ones he comes up with by himself?  I think it is impossible to compete with what arises spontaneously out of Berra’s unique mental wiring harness.  Theirs are slightly forced, his are slightly magical.  ‘It gets late early out there’ makes a certain cracked sort of sense if you know that the corner of Yankee stadium he was talking about got dark sooner than the rest of the field.  Who could think that up on their own?  Certainly not me.  I am better off simply paying attention to the everyday madness that seems to flow all around me.

An old junkie standing on a Brooklyn street corner, almost nodded out, Fire Department ambulance stops by to pick up a customer.  The junkie comes out of it, toddles over, asks the fireman, ‘Where you taking him?’  ‘Wood-Hull,’ says the fireman.  Junkie goes over, leans down so his face is about an inch from the dude on the gurney.  ‘You are gonna diiiiiiiiie,’ he says emphatically.  From that I found out that A: firemen do have a sense of humor, and B, Wood-Hull Hospital has a horrible reputation.  I talked to a few nurses, got some more particulars.  I used what I learned as part of the story in my first book, Shooting Dr. Jack, and I think it added another drop or two of Brooklyn flava.

I do wish, sometimes, that writing was something I could do cooped up all alone in my basement office, but only a part of the process happens there.  A lot of it, and maybe the most important parts, happens out in the world.  No doubt there are writers who can lock themselves away somewhere and spin their imaginary worlds completely out of what’s up in their heads, but I ain’t one of those.  I can’t tell you how many times I have bemoaned my fate, wishing I did not have to journey into some of the inner city neighborhoods where I have worked, but without those experiences I never would have met the guy who had a cat who thought its name was ‘Getthefuckoutahere,’ or witnessed the courage and determination of the woman with the frozen hip who walked to work every day, summer, winter, rain, snow, whatever.  I never would have seen the terrible price crack cocaine extracts from its users, or seen addicts fight their way back to life, seemingly all the way from death’s doorstep.  The list is not endless, but it is a very long list, and I suppose what it amounts to is raw material.  I could never imagine characters as vital or as interesting as the ones I continue to meet, nearly every day.

One of my goals as a writer used to be to do well enough to be able to quit my day job and just write.  I have been able to do that a time or two, and I would say that the results have been decidedly mixed.  I wonder, if I ever have the opportunity again, if I would make the same choice.  From my current vantage point, I think probably not.  Of course, everyone is different, and if my job kept me locked up in an office somewhere I would probably write mostly about a guy who wanted to hang himself, but I have the extreme good fortune to bump up against a lot of ordinary New Yorkers just about every day.  You can say what you like about New York, but one thing is beyond dispute, there are people from Arabia to Zimbabwe in this city.  They have all brought with them their native culture and attitude and they all murder the English language in their own unique way.  And a lot of them are funny as hell.  If you are a writer, they all have something to give you.

They say unsolicited advice is only worth what you pay for it, and if you take vocational guidance from me you are an idiot, but I will say this: my best stuff comes right off the streets of New York City.

I love my job.

Reading

Reading was my first escape.  From the time I was very small, even before first grade (no kindergarten for this kid), I was fascinated by anything in print.  My old man used to bitch, ‘send him for a tool, if an old newspaper blows across his path, he’s lost.’  Zane Grey, Robert Louis Stevenson, Kenneth Roberts, John D. MacDonald, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Time-Life books, the Harvard Classics (I can’t believe I plowed through that stuff), it didn’t much matter.  Looking back on it now, I think maybe reading saved me, because when I was a kid in the sixties, there were compulsions that were worse, by far.

 

The addiction comes and goes these days.  When I discovered Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin series they were all written but for one or two, and I submerged myself into that world until I had run through them all.  My God, O’Brian could show you a character with all of his cracks and shiny places…  And not just a character but an entire world brought to life with such color and force that it made you want to kiss the ground when you finally came up for air and found that you were living here after all, not there, and you had access to a modicum of health care and a facsimile of justice.  I had a similar experience reading Harry Potter: I saw the first movie on network television, by that time all of the books were written except for the last one.  I was firmly hooked after the opening fifteen minutes of that movie and I couldn’t stop reading until I had finished them all.  The only book I actually had to wait for was The Deathly Hallows, and to all of you who were on that train from the beginning, I don’t know how you did it, the wait for that book drove me nuts.

 

I remember having the same sensation as a kid.  Every year John D. MacDonald published another volume of his Travis McGee series, and every year I had to make the same decision: do I wait, can I wait for the paperback or do I spring for the hardcover?  It was not a question of saving my allowance, there was no such thing where I came from, I worked from the age of twelve.  Not only that, but I had other expenses, which we don’t need to go into here.  But the question remained, could I hold out?  And more often the question became, what would I sacrifice to get what I needed?

 

For a while I was into Robert Parker’s Spenser series, I guess I contributed to at least one of Parker’s Mercedes payments, but I don’t know what happened to Spenser.  He got fat, maybe, or he lost his moral compass, as often happens when one reaches middle age and achieves a measure of material success.  And then there’s Tony Hillerman, who gave us Jim Chee and Joe Leaphorn.  I was blown away by the power of the sense of place that Hillerman gave to Chee, and I continue to envy that fictional character his knowledge of who and what he is and where he belongs.  Sadly, Hillerman got old and his eyesight dimmed.  Maybe he could no longer see his tribal policemen and their world so clearly.  I mourned his passing long before he actually died.

 

What it comes down to, I guess, is contact.  Intimacy.  ‘One man sharpens the face of another,’ so said Solomon, and he was right.  I learned something, I think, from just about everything I read, whether it was Travis McGee battling crooked real estate developers or Ben Franklin struggling with the circumstances of his life (not all the Harvard Classics suck).  To be sure, most of what I read was fiction, and the good guys tend to win a bit more often in fiction, but isn’t that the kind of world we want?

 

In my own work I tend to write mostly about people from humble beginnings, people under pressure of one sort or another, characters who have been forced by time or chance to look hard at what they have become and to decide if that is something they can live with.  I am fascinated by characters who, by force of personality or by necessity, lift their sights and aim at something higher.  And while my stories may take you to some of the seedier parts of town, I like to think that I, and my stories, too, are basically optimistic, that we have not yet gotten to the top of the hill, and that with hope, we continue to climb.

SLEEPING POLICEMEN

Years ago I visited some friends in Cali, Colombia.  They lived in a neighborhood that was, for Cali, a quiet middle-class kind of place.  The main problem with it was that the thoroughfare running through it was a favorite short-cut and a great many of the popular bus lines ran down that street.  (I wish I'd had the foresight to take a picture of the sign on the bus that said 'don't throw your trash on the bus, throw it out the window.)  Most of the bus drivers went as fast as their ancient steeds would move, and the unfortunate result was that it was sadly common for children to die on that street.

Justice is probably a meaningless abstraction to a parent who has lost a child, and the parents in Cali were not usually afforded even that dubious comfort.  Long story short, one Sunday the fathers of that neighborhood got together after the buses had stopped running for the night and they built a couple of 'sleeping policemen' right across the width of the road.

A sleeping policeman is one of those bumps that forces you to slow down so that you don't destroy your car.  Monday morning, the first bus roared down that street, hit the first bump, and went airborne.  By about ten that same morning, all the bus lines had changed their routes.

All of them.

Sleeping policemen are amazingly effective, they jerk you awake, they snap you out of that hypnotic state you sometimes lapse into when you are driving streets so familiar that you can do it on autopilot.

They break the spell.

How many sleeping policemen have you written into your story?

Think about it: you have carefully crafted that all-important opening sentence, you have grabbed your reader's attention, you have woven your spell, drawn him in, submerged him into your fictional world, and then...

Boink!

'Hey!  That's not how you spell nymphomaniac!'

Yes, I know, the copy editor will catch it, but yes, it still matters, because agents and editors do not like sleeping policemen any more than the rest of us.  And it doesn't have to be anything as simple as a misspelled word, either.  I once had a character ride a bus into the bowels of New York City's Grand Central Station, which would have been a neat trick, considering it's a TRAIN station.

Boink!

Oh, you say, how many of your readers are gonna catch that?  Not all of them, certainly, but some, and what if one of the ones who does happens to be a reviewer?

You can also build them into dialog.  If you're a writer I'm sure you've noticed how few people really speak in high school teacher English.  Apart from high school English teachers, that is.  But how often have you read dialog that a writer put into a character's mouth which that character would never say?  'Don't be alarmed,' says Shady Sal from Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn, 'but this is a robbery.  Raise your hands up over your head, remain calm and no one will be harmed.'

Boink!

You know what Sal would say, he'd say something like 'Hands up, lady, and keep your trap shut or I'll drill ya.'  The problem is, if you have spent years sitting in English classes being indoctrinated by teachers instead of more productively staring out the window like students such as myself, writing dialog as though it were to be spoken by Dudley Do-Right can be a hard habit to break.  And indulge me, please, in a minor pet peeve: if your character is in a situation where you know he would lose his temper and shout 'fuck!', have a little courage.  Please do not have him say 'What the...' or something similar.  Your mother will forgive you.

Or suppose your story deals with something weighty or controversial .  Your characters are going to confront one another's attitudes about evils such as sexism, war, or the Internal Revenue Service.  'You know, Sheila,' your protagonist says, 'discrimination is harmful.  It doesn't simply hurt the one being discriminated against, it's also destructive to society as a whole...'

Boink!

It's a cheap trick.  You took the easy way out.  Your mother will forgive you, but your readers will not.  If you want to write about, say, racism, don't have a character make a speech about it.  Construct a real situation where a real character suffers real harm.  I know it's harder to do, but no one said this was gonna be easy.

As a fiction writer, you need to be a spell-binder.  You work hard to build your imaginary universe and lure us inside, and it is a testament to your skill that you've got us turning the pages.  Just remember, every time you write in a sleeping policeman, you break the spell, and some of us close your book and put it down.

When it FEELS right

“In the beginning…”

 

Man, what a great opening.

 

“Call me Ishmael.”

 

I love it.  ‘It’s a name,’ the writer is telling you.  ‘Maybe not the one I was born with, but it’ll do for now.’  Talk about economy of words, in his first sentence, Melville pulls you in, he energizes your imagination, he even lets you do the heavy lifting.  Who is this guy, really?  What’s he running from?  What has he done?  Your mind is working, you’re intrigued…

 

Admit it.  You’re buying the book.

 

I don’t know if they had book signings or author appearances or any of that back in Melville’s day.  I do know that Moby Dick was not a critical success, not at first, and it wasn’t until Melville was dead and buried that Moby Dick was proclaimed as the Great American Novel.  Too bad, really.  You have to wonder if Melville knew how good he was, if the lousy reviews and the lack of material success made him doubt himself.  I’d like to think that he knew as soon as he wrote it, that the first time he saw that sentence at the top of a sheet of paper, he knew he’d nailed it, the same way Willie Mays knew when his bat hit the ball that he could put his head down and trot around the bases because he didn’t need anybody to tell him that it was going out.

 

Vincent Van Gogh’s only customer was his brother Theo.  Did Vinnie know how good he was?  He had to, man, forget Starry Night, forget the Paris cafés by streetlight, take a look at Avenue Of Poplars.  Go ahead, Google it if you’ve never seen it, I’ll wait.  You see?  Was I right?  Holy crap, with nothing more than a pencil and a sheet of blank paper Van Gogh totally blows away every artist I’ve ever seen before or since.  The first time I saw that drawing it stopped me dead in my tracks, I was there, man, I’ve been that guy, I’ve felt that…  But then he probably found out that Theo had all of his stuff crammed into a spare bedroom or something so he cut off his ear and gave it to his girlfriend and finally when he couldn’t take it any more he pulled the plug. 

Okay, forget Van Gogh, he’s probably not a great example.

 

But is commercial success the real reward?  Because Van Gogh was a genius and he never got there.  Acclaim?  By the time Melville got any, he was on the wrong side of the dirt/air interface.  Or is it that feeling you get when you know you’ve nailed it?  If I ever get to meet Willie Mays, I’ll ask him.

 

The thing is, writers tend to be lousy salesmen.  I tried it for a while, I couldn’t sell water to a guy with his hair on fire.  And Van Gogh couldn’t sell, either.  Dude could paint, though.  But I think great salesmen tend to be lousy writers.

 

You’ve got to be satisfied with your own judgment.

 

Colossal ego?

 

Maybe.  But I’m not sure.

 

The biggest rush I ever got in my life (and that is a tough category, believe me) was before my first novel was published.  I’d sent the manuscript of Shooting Dr. Jack to a couple of literary agents, and I walked into my house one afternoon and the guy who was to become my agent, Brian DeFiore, was on the answering machine.  ‘I’ve read the first half,’ he said, ‘and unless you totally screw up the second half, we’re going to be working together.’

 

Woof.

 

But it wasn’t a ‘hit the lottery’ sort of feeling, it was more of a vindication.

 

I wasn’t nuts.

 

Well, okay, maybe I was, but that feeling I’d had back when I wrote the first page of Shooting Dr. Jack, that had been real.  Funny, when I look at that book now, mostly I see what I would change.

 

With this new one, it’s like my kid is starting first grade, she’s standing by the front window waiting for the bus.  She’s ready to go, she’s not paying any attention to me at all any more, and it’s time for me to let her go.  I hope she does okay, I hope people like her, I hope somebody gets her…

Timing is Everything...

Talk about anti-climactic…

 

Tomorrow, 1/20/09, the day after Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, the United States of America inaugurates Barack Obama as the next President.  And oh, yeah, my fifth novel, The Last Gig, gets released.

What are you gonna do?

 

Well, I know what I’m gonna do, I’m gonna listen to the speeches, I’m gonna pray that Mr. Obama gets through this unscathed, and that he gets a full opportunity to do the job for which he was elected.  And I truly hope to God that we are turning one of history’s pages.  Better days, one of my old friends from Brooklyn tells me, better days comin’.

But it seems to me that it’s never a slow news day when one of my novels comes out.  My first book, Shooting Dr. Jack, came out three days before 9/11.  I was scheduled for a radio tour that weekend, that’s where you get interviewed, over and over again, by radio stations all over the country.  What do you think we talked about?  You get three guesses, and the first two don’t count.  What I remember about that particular occasion is how surprised every one of the interviewers seemed to be that average New Yorkers could exhibit grace under pressure, courage, self-sacrifice and outright heroism.

 

Didn’t surprise me a bit.

 

I mean, people love to hate New York, I don’t know why, but when I hit Brooklyn in 1973 I was young, ignorant, broke, desperate and afraid to cop to any of it.  I survived, mostly due to the kindness of a bunch of New Yorkers who took pity on my sorry ass and helped me get by.  I remember one time in particular I got lost on the subway, I wound up out in the Bronx somewhere, hopelessly confused, and this Hispanic guy got off his train, walked me through a train station, stood me up on the edge of the correct platform and told me which train to wait for, and then he went back through the station to wait for the next train to wherever he was going.

I’m not saying that’s what’ll happen to you if you visit New York City, but that’s what happened to me, and believe me, I ain’t that good-looking.

 

I guess the point I’m trying to make is that people are people, at least now that the election is over, and I think most of us, regardless of our politics or beliefs, most of us truly get it.  One to one, we seem more willing to put aside our differences and get things done.  And if you get lost in the Bronx, I will get off the train and try to get you pointed in the direction of where you want to go, if it’s in my power to do that.  I choose to believe that most of you would do the same for me.  I make that choice, not from faith or wishful thinking, but from experience, and to all of you guys who picked me up, dusted me off and set me going in the right direction, everywhere along the way from Brooklyn, New York to Stockton, California, thanks, man.

Truly.

 

And so now, without further ado, allow me to introduce you to the heroine of The Last Gig, Alessandra Martillo.  She is a New Yorker of Puerto Rican persuasion, she grew up in the Brooklyn projects, and she now works for an ex-cop named Marty Stiles.  She can re-po a car, track a bail jumper, serve papers on a wayward spouse and shoot a mean game of pool.  She's not so different from you, my brother, she's just trying to get through the day, pay the rent, maybe find a friendly face along the way.  Catch her on a good day, she'll point you in the right direction.

Catch her on a bad day, well, shit happens.

 

You won't be bored, I promise.

Blogging This Week: Norman Green

Blogging this week is Norman Green, author of THE LAST GIG. Norman is the talented and much-admired author of four crime novels, most recently Dead Cat Bounce. Born in Massachusetts, he now lives in New Jersey with his wife.

In THE LAST GIG...

A teenage runaway from the Brownsville projects, Alessandra Martillo lived with an indifferent aunt who had taken her in when her mother killed herself, and later, after more than a year on the streets, a caring uncle found her, took her in, and showed her she had a chance. That was many years ago, and now Alessandra’s all grown up, working for a sleazy P.I., repossessing cars, and trolling for waitstaff on the take.  The cases aren’t glamorous, or interesting, but the work pays the bills.  And she’s good at it---if there’s one thing she’s learned since leaving the streets, it’s how to take care of herself around life’s shadier elements.

When an Irish mobster named Daniel “Mickey” Caughlan thinks someone on the inside of his shipping operation is trying to set him up for a fall, it’s Al he wants on the job.  She’s to find the traitor and report back.  But just a little digging shows it’s more complicated than a simple turncoat inside the family; Al’s barely started on the case when she runs into a few tough guys trying to warn her away.  Fools.  As if a little confrontation wouldn’t make her even more determined.

Norman Green, critically acclaimed author of four crime novels, debuts a fresh, edgy character in the streetwise Alessandra Martillo, a female take on the P.I.s of yesteryear.  Tough as nails and sometimes heartless, smart and altogether too brave for her own good, Al is one of the most interesting lead characters to hit crime fiction in years.