Laurie R. King

Award-winning, bestselling, thought-provoking mysteries

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Tender is the Prose

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As part of my general research on the next Russell & Holmes novel, I re-read the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel Tender is the Night.

And frankly, I found it very hard going.  Meandering plot, puzzling metaphors, characters distorted to fit into the roles he needs for them.

Start with his take on women.  The book is supposed to be about them—the girl who falls in love, the woman who goes insane—but even for a 1930s writer, he has a completely tin ear when it comes to how women actually work.  For example, here about the young (17 when we meet her) actress who falls in love with a married man:

Rosemary was from the middle of the middle class, catapulted by her mother onto the uncharted heights of Hollywood. Their point of resemblance to each other and their difference from so many American women, lay in the fact that they were all happy to exist in a man’s world—they preserved their individuality through men and not by opposition to them. They would all three have made alternatively good courtesans or good wives not by the accident of birth but through the greater accident of finding their man or not finding him.

Where does one start with such a statement? Were American women in fact unhappy about existing in a man’s world, or did they just shrug and get on with things? Is a good wife like a good courtesan? How does a person preserve her individuality through another person?
And later:

They came out of the neat restored trench, and faced a memorial to the Newfoundland dead. Reading the inscription Rosemary burst into sudden tears. Like most women she liked to be told how she should feel, and she liked Dick’s telling her which things were ludicrous and which things were sad.

Really?  So, girls—do we like to be told how to feel?  Or do most men like to believe we’re so childlike, we need to be led into such realization?

Then there are the sentences—dozens and dozens of them—that sound clever, and feel as if the author is proud of them, but are actually baffling.  Such as this, about Rosemary’s mother / stage manager:

One of her husbands had been a cavalry officer and one an army doctor, and they both left something to her that she tried to present intact to Rosemary. By not sparing Rosemary she had made her hard—by not sparing her own labor and devotion she had cultivated an idealism in Rosemary, which at present was directed toward herself and saw the world through her eyes.

Huh?  Or when the man Rosemary wants to seduce first kisses her in a taxi, then turns her down:

Her face drooped with dismay and disappointment and Dick said automatically, “We’ll have to simply—” He stopped himself, followed her to the bed, sat down beside her while she wept. He was suddenly confused, not about the ethics of the matter, for the impossibility of it was sheerly indicated from all angles but simply confused, and for a moment his usual grace, the tensile strength of his balance, was absent.

“I knew you wouldn’t,” she sobbed. “It was just a forlorn hope.”

Should I know what the tensile strength of his balance means?  Would any young woman actually say forlorn hope?  Did he think it clever to insert, after a long interruption, the blithe phrase “To resume Rosemary’s point of view…”  Is there some reason why Rosemary is sitting on the beach trying to avoid talking to one group of people while admiring another, and then suddenly she’s out in the water with one of the swimmers? “Nicole” goes from the most stable person on the page to a complete raving lunatic.  Some characters we find sympathetic, then they turn loathsome—and vice versa with others.

I do realize that literary fiction tends to have different rules from genre storytelling, but please.

Anyone else out there have problems with some of the classics?

 

Write and rewrite

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[Sorry all, the rewrite workshop is the 29th, not the 22nd. Brain fever…]

Today I hit the (theoretical) 2/3 mark in the new Russell & Holmes novel!  Not that 201 pages is a novel–even 301 pages isn’t–but there’s a rhythm to a book that I get to know, and 200 is a good, solid mark.

I also want to let you know that there are still some seats left in the workshop I’m teaching on the rewrite process on June 22. I’ll be using sections of my own work, including this very Work In Progress.  If you or someone you know are interested in the rewrite stage, I’m in San Francisco on June 22—signup is here.

Halfway to a Russell…

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The last couple years of my writing life have been a bit like having my laptop set up in front of one of those machines that spits balls down the length of a cage at a person holding a bat.

It’s not impossible, to dodge, hit, or field the missiles and toss them back while trying to create a story, but it can be somewhat distracting. And I do find that  I can handle two or three interruptions in a morning and still go back to the words–although when it comes to four or five, eventually my brain says Hey, look, can we go do something else?

Which makes milestones (if you’ll pardon the confusion of metaphors here) all the more important, either when they’re off on the horizon, or when they’re reached, and falling behind.

Yesterday I hit one of those nice, round, if meaningless and deceptive milestones: the more or less halfway point of a theoretical first draft. My first drafts are a kind of expanded outline, whose purpose is to set up the machinery of the plot and to sketch in the characters.  A first draft is not a novel. Mine are rubbish, utterly unreadable for anyone but an experienced editor.  For this stage, I aim at 300 pages.  Since the final manuscript will be over 400 pages, it gives an idea of how very skeletal the story is in its early form.

(And incidentally, that doubling up of metaphorical imagery–baseballs and mile markers–is not a bad illustration of the difference between a clumsy first draft and a hammered-down final one.)

But: I now have 150 pages that I didn’t have at the beginning of March. Better yet, there are no conferences, Mystery Writers of America workshops, book festivals, or trips to New York coming at me from down the other end of the batting cage. Which means that with a touch of luck, I may be able to keep my head down and write.

Here’s hoping I don’t get knocked off my seat by anything thrown at me by the pitching machine of life.

Beginnings: a Kate Martinelli story

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Only five weeks after I’d hoped to finish it, I now have this:

Beginnings

A Kate Martinelli story by

Laurie R. King

Please note: story, not novel.  See the thickness of that stack of pages? This is a 115 page novella, not a full-sized book. I don’t have a pub date for it yet. But this is how it opens–yes, in Kate’s first person voice:

All stories begin.  A newborn’s wail, a doctor’s news, the scream of brakes on the road outside—with most stories, there’s a place where you can look back and say, that’swhere it started: where I met the guy, where I decided the life, where I took one turn and not the other.

And I heard once (probably from Lee, she tells me most of those things that stick in my brain) that a good story loops together its end with its opening.

I’ve been a homicide cop most of my life.  I know all about stories that are both an end and a beginning, because someone else’s end is where I generally come in.  For the victim’s family, that chapter of their lives opens with a 3 am ring on their phone or doorbell.  But this one I’m telling you about is my life, not my job—which means that I was on the receiving end of one of those moments, too.

Writing retreat

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So, day one of a very brief writing retreat: the good is that it’s gray and cool enough that I’m interested in staying indoors summoning words, at least until the sun comes out this afternoon.

The bad is that the house doesn’t seem to have a coffeemaker.

A writer’s hideaway

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I need to write. I have two short pieces and a lot of thinking to do, and it’s hard to put words on the screen or thoughts in order when life is its usual chaotic self. So I’ve come to the coast for a few days, to write, here:

I’ll let you know how it turns out…

 

Lockdown & New Guinea

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One of the earliest sections written in what eventually became Lockdown was a story set in Papua New Guinea. I spent some months there in late 1970s, on my honeymoon (because yes, what else do academics do for a honeymoon than go visit a Stone Age community?) which makes for one of those illustrations that a writer never knows what odd elements of her past will find their way into a book.

For example, the sing-sing

and the pig kill to celebrate a bride price ceremony

and the salt ponds, where logs are soaked in a saline pond in order to harvest the salty ash, and where a waitpela comes to grief in the story.

As proof of my travel, here I am in a motorized dugout canoe on the Sepik River

and admiring a Bird of Paradise in a sanctuary:

I had a Pidgin teacher named Yasmin—that’s my husband in a shirt my mother made him, a rainbow embroidered across the back.

Later, that same cottage, with a rainbow of its own.

And although this isn’t an Air Niugini flight, it is very like the tiny airplane Linda met when she flew up into there mission in the highlands.

Yep: a person never knows what from her past will come back when a story begins.

Which, come to think of it, is pretty much what Lockdown is all about.

***

You can get Lockdown in paper now from your local Independent bookshop; Barnes & Noble; or Amazon.

 

Cole Porter & Sherlock Holmes, Misbehaving

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Whenever I set out to write one of my 1920s novels, I first choose the location, then rummage around to see who was there at the time. I’ve come across some fascinating characters that way–characters in both senses of the word: Sabine Baring-Gould in Dartmoor; Dashiell Hammett in San Francisco; Marshal Lyautey in Morocco—real life, all of them. People I probably couldn’t have made up.

Not that I don’t create characters from scratch. These are novels, not thinly fictionalized histories—but stirring in well-known places and faces can ground a story, giving (as Gilbert & Sullivan admitted) artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative.

Then sometimes, one of those actual people elbows aside my own created ones to seize center stage.

Such as Cole Porter. When I started writing Island of the Mad…

[read the rest on Dear Reader, here.]

*  *  *

Order information:

US edition—signed, from Poisoned Pen Books; signed, from Bookshop Santa Cruz;signed (as tip-in pages) from Barnes & Noble.

Unsigned from your local Indie;from Amazon/Kindle;from Barnes & Noble/Nook.

UK edition—from Allison & Busby;from Heffer’s.

Or download the audiohere.

Historicals: escape, or…?

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[A piece I wrote for Crime Reads, an excellent daily blog, about writing Island of the Mad and historical mysteries in general…]

Cole Porter (2nd from right) in the Piazza San Marco, Venice

The historical mystery is a curious thing.  Why worry about a crime that took place decades—centuries—ago?  Surely it’s been long solved, with both victim and villain moldering in their graves.  The past, after all, is a foreign country, one we may not have a visa for.

But as the writer of historicals, I find it’s not always that clear-cut.  Instead, off I’ll set for my own little corner of the Twentieth century—the 1920s—looking forward to a nice long escape from reality as I immerse myself in the mores and customs, fashions and foibles, dusty technology and quaintly simple lives of that sepia-toned world… only to discover the modern age has come along, too, and now stands behind my shoulder, snarling in my ear.

Take the book I wrote last year.  I anticipated…

[To read the rest, pop over to Crime Reads.]

Setting as Character

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I’ll be doing a workshop on Setting for the good folk at Litquake next Saturday (assuming my voice returns–I have to say, conferences like Left Coast are just super for sharing: favorite writers; plot ideas; viruses…) so I’ve been mulling over the settings I use in my books. I haven’t used New York (yet…) even though I’ve been there a bunch–

 

but I no sooner set foot in Fez than I knew this was a place for a story:

And I have to wonder, how would a character’s story change if it took place in a London mews

or in the southern reaches of London

or even the warm, crowded, watery city of Venice?

So I’m asking, what setting in my books resonates with you? Russell’s Japan, or Kate Martinelli’s visit to the central valley? Harris Stuyvesant’s Paris, the Fool’s Berkeley, or…? What place/character interaction most appealed to you?

(Oh, and if you’re interested in the Litquake workshop, there may be one or two places left, here.)