We writers, as we work our way deeper into our craft, learn to drop more and more personal clues. Like burglars who secretly wish to be caught, we leave our fingerprints on broken locks, our voiceprints in bugged rooms, our footprints in the wet concrete. –Ross MacDonald
PJ Parrish
I ran across a fascinating essay the other day written by one of my favorite writers Ross Macdonald. Its title was intriguing enough — The Writer As Hero. I mean, shoot, who doesn’t like to think of themselves as hero at one time of another?
Most of us will never be called on for true heroics. We won’t go to war. We won’t run into a burning building. Our names won’t be etched in history books like Harriet Tubman or Miep Gies. The best we can aspire to is a series of small but constant kindnesses.
Ross Macdonald was speaking of different sort of heroism, which we as writers can perhaps examine and absorb. Let me try to set this up properly.
Macdonald was having a meeting with a producer was toying with the idea of making Macdonald’s detective Lew Archer into a television series. He asked if Archer was based on a real person
“Yes,” Macdonald said. “Myself.”
The guy gave him “a semi-pitying Hollywood look.” Macdonald tried to explain that he knew some excellent detectives and had watched them work.
“Archer was created from the inside out. I wasn’t Archer, exactly, but Archer was me,” Macdonald told the producer. From the essay:
The conversation went downhill from there, as if I had made a damaging admission. But I believe most detective-story writers would give the same answer. A close paternal or fraternal relationship between writer and detective is a marked peculiarity of the form. Throughout its history, from Poe to Chandler and beyond, the detective hero has represented his creator and carried his values into action in society.
That really got my mental hamster wheel going. My series protagonist Louis Kincaid, damaged as he might have been, has a strong core of values. It, more than anything, is the connecting thread in my books. Where did this code come from? Where did his ethics, his way of seeing the world, emerge from? There was only one answer — me.
The more I thought about this, the more sense it made. Even in my stand alones — two very distinct and difference charcters — the way those characters look at the world is filtered through my moral prism. Even though their lives bear no resemblance to mine, they are me.
I’m having trouble making my point there. Let’s allow Macdonald to try, starting with Edgar Allan Poe and his detective Dupin:
Poe’s was a first-rate but guilt-haunted mind painfully at odds with the realities of pre-Civil-War America. Dupin is a declassed aristocrat, as Poe’s heroes tend to be, an obvious equivalent for the artist-intellectual who has lost his place in society and his foothold in tradition. Dupin has no social life, only one friend. He is set apart from other people by his superiority of mind.
In his creation of Dupin, Poe was surely compensating for his failure to become what his extraordinary mental powers seemed to fit him for. He had dreamed of an intellectual hierarchy governing the cultural life of the nation, himself at its head. Dupin’s outwitting of an unscrupulous politician in “The Purloined Letter,” his “solution” of an actual New York case in “Marie Roget,” his repeated trumping of the cards held by the Prefect of Police, are Poe’s vicarious demonstrations of superiority to an indifferent society and its officials.
Poe’s detective stories, Macdonald says, “gave the writer, and give the reader, something deeper than obvious satisfactions. He devised them as a means of exorcising or controlling guilt and horror.”
Macdonald then moves on to Chandler and Hammitt and their creations — Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade. He says both writers were working in opposition to the old cliches and tropes. In 1944, Chandler wrote, in a dedication to the editor of Black Mask:
“For Joseph Thompson Shaw with affection and respect, and in memory of the time when we were trying to get murder away from the upper classes, the weekend house party and the vicar’s rose-garden, and back to the people who are really good at it.”
It was a revolution. As Macdonald notes, “From it emerged a new kind of detective hero, the classless, restless man of American democracy, who spoke the language of the street.”
Hammett had been a PI. Spade wasn’t a complete projection of himself but he knew him inside and out and gave him a sort of bleak compassion. But his narrow code of conduct makes him turn his murderous lover over to the police.
Chandler’s vision is disenchanted, too, but Macdonald suggests Chandler had a self-awareness and, like his hero, wore two masks — the hardboiled one concealing a poetic and satiric mind. And that our pleasure, as readers, comes from figuring out the interplay between the mind of Chandler and the voice of Marlowe. He gives as an example the marvelous opening of The Big Sleep.
It was about eleven o’clock in the morning, mid-October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.
Here’s the key quote from Macdonald about that opening:
“Marlowe is making fun of himself, and of Chandler in the role of brash young detective. There is pathos, too, in the idea that a man who can write like a fallen angel should be a mere private eye. The gifted writer conceals himself behind Marlowe’s cheerful mindlessness. At the same time the retiring, middle-aged, scholarly author acquires a durable mask, forever 38, which allows him to face the dangers of society high and low.”
That’s the part that really got me thinking about my own books. What am I revealing of myself when I put those thoughts about childhood in Louis Kincaid’s head? What am I mourning from my past when I make my character a failed dancer who’s struggling to find an authentic life? Who are these people I’ve created? Who am I?
I think that’s it. Yes, I write for pleasure. But it goes so much deeper than that. I write to find out things about myself, to untangle old yarn skeins, to reorient myself on the path. They say we dream to make sense out of what happens in our real lives. What is writing, if not a kind of dream state?
Like Ross Macdonald, we’re all searching for heros.
Here’s the link to the Macdonald essay in full. Be patient. It sometimes doesn’t load quickly. http://www.thestacksreader.com/the-writer-as-detective-hero/?fbclid=IwAR30zE0Fr2ci7kNRD45aAFixOp8EhvK7kTe609Dqp5xoCKwzRUfZjcXE_BE
Every word is so true in this post. Writing is certainly a ‘dream state’. I also project a large part of my own personality into the main protagonist in all my fiction work, though unconsciously. I have not yet written a detective story, but even so, in both my romance and other stories, there is a large part of me that is in the main character.
I agree, Hasan. Truely, I hadn’t given this idea much thought until recently. Maybe it comes with age? Thinking back to my romance novels, however, I can’t clearly see such a connection. Odd. If you try crime fiction, let us know how it goes.
Interesting you mention trying crime fiction. I am currently attempting to submit a crime fiction story I wrote sometime last year, though the protagonist has very little of my personality. (The story is focused on the antagonist).
Having said that, I have prepared an outline of a (dystopian) crime fiction novel where the lead character (Protagonist) has an almost identical viewpoint to mine concerning the issue of crime, and hence unconsciously or otherwise there is a lot of ‘me’ in his character.
Isn’t it good to stretch your wings? Keep us posted.
To keep you posted to some degree, I did already write the first draft of the above mentioned novel. After a delay of some months, I now have an outline, and just earlier on today I began the second draft of the dystopian novel. If all goes well I hope to complete this 2nd draft by Easter next year, if not earlier.
Good thoughts, Kris. Early on in my writing, I was afraid to put too much “me” into my characters for fear that readers might be seeing more than I wanted to reveal about myself. (Especially when I was writing romantic suspense, and yes, there were sex scenes on the page.) My characters still walk the same moral ground as I do, but I don’t fret about it anymore.
Ha! Sex scenes…now that you mention it, I do recall getting a little squishy about that.
My mom asked if I was writing from research or experience. My kids were ‘upset’ because I got things right.
Your post today and Ross MacDonald’s essay gives us so much food for thought, Kris.
Like Terry, I used to be afraid to put too much of myself into my writing, but in the end, that’s exactly what each of us offers–our own unique personality and perspective. So, here I am now, writing a 1980s library mystery series about a young librarian struggling to balance working at the library which draws her and following another path, that of a scholar. Meg Booker is not me, but my experience is reflected in her, Readers ask me if characters in the books are based on actual people. No, they’re not. Instead they spring from aspects of who I am and what I saw with the multitudes of people, both library staff and patrons, I was privileged to work with and for.
We writers work to get out of our own heads to look at our characters from without, and that’s useful. But who each of us is inside matters as well, and that is reflected in our work, as MacDonald indicates.
I can’t recall who said it — Hemingway? That you have to be willing to open a vein to write good fiction. I have a published friend, whose books I really admire, but I could never warm up to his series character for some reason. I realized finally it was because he held his (and his protag’s) emotions in too much control. He held us, his readers, at arm’s length.
I met Ross Macdonald (Kenneth Millar) with a small group of fellow college students, at his home in Santa Barbara. He was, like his essay, a quiet, intellectual sort. Archer is like that, too, esp. when compared to Spade and Marlowe.
Millar’s vision (as he indicates) was essentially tragic. Chandler’s was chivalric. Millar thought his vision closer to “real life” and therefore of greater literary merit than mere “detective novels.” I guess whom you prefer in the genre is also a reflection of yourself….I lean toward ironic amusement at the clown show of life (Marlowe) and a recognition that you cannot avoid a fight for very long or you’ll get squashed by very bad people (Hammer). That’s why I never warmed to Archer. A hero has to get bloody, not just take notes.
I put all that in my series hero, Mike Romeo. So yeah, Writer and Hero/Detective very close in this instance.
And I lean to Macdonald. The best compliment I ever got from a reviewer was to compare our voice to his. Plus, I’ve always loved Macdonald’s emphasis on familial drama.
It is posts like this that makes me read the Kill Zone Blog. Thank you so much.
Thanks Brian. You made my day.
Kris, Thanks for this insightful post.
“But it goes so much deeper than that. I write to find out things about myself, to untangle old yarn skeins, to reorient myself on the path.”
That sums it up for me. I think writing not only teaches me about myself, but refines my understanding of the world I live in.
Indeedy. And we need fiction as readers to help us cope. Crime fiction, especially, fills this need because it, and its hero, USUALLY puts the world back on its axis.
An interesting article. Popular genre can trace its roots back to the Medieval morality tale. I wrote a short article on the moral core of genre. Here it is.
One of the primary hallmarks of genre fiction is its moral core. The characters and their choices may be morally gray rather than the white and black of good and evil, but the reader expects that good will eventually triumph. The good guys will gain some victory, and the darkness will be banished.
If the author fails to deliver on this promise of light over darkness, she fails a fundamental promise to the reader.
In the same way, the major character or characters must have a moral core that helps them recognize the right choices and gives them the strength to follow through, whatever the cost, to reach that triumph over darkness.
Happiness can never be gained without a struggle against the forces of darkness. The darkness may be a black-hearted villain, but its most important manifestation is within the main character who must fight her inner darkness with that moral core.
Sometimes, if the main character is an antihero or shallow chick-lit heroine, the struggle will involve a great deal of protests, whining, and foot-dragging to reach that point, but that point is reached.
Betsy, the Queen of the Vampires, in the MaryJanice Davidson series, is a perfect example of this kind of character. Shallow, shoe-absorbed, and selfish, she whines her way through each book, but her inner moral core always leads her to do the right thing in the end.
If Betsy never did the right thing, this series wouldn’t have been the success it is because shallowness won’t hold a reader’s attention or their emotions for very long.
Sometimes, in a series, a character will change from evil to good, or good to evil, but that change must be foreshadowed in earlier choices and decisions. Bart the Bad may be up to no good through the early novels, but the reader should see that he chooses not to ambush the hero because a child is nearby. This not only adds moral complexity to Bart, but also makes his move toward the light more believable.
In the same way, a good guy’s pragmatic or selfish choices will foreshadow the coming darkness.
Good article. I especially relate to this line you wrote: “Happiness can never be gained without a struggle against the forces of darkness.”
I think that is partly why I switched from romance to crime fiction.
Another top-notch blog. Yes, my characters of parts of me, and they have many of my beliefs. Since we are as many-faceted as a diamond, I hope there are more characters in me.
I know. We’ve had this talk before! Usually over drinks at that Chinese restaurant on Sunrise Blvd. 🙂
FYI. Ross Macdonald died in Santa Barbara this week in 1983.
Lovely post, Kris.
The MC in No Tomorrows is a lot of me. How do I know?
She learns a lesson I’ve learned (and still have to re-learn every darned day), which is:
You never know when you’re having the last conversation with someone you love.
Thanks for writing this…it resonates with me like a gong in a small cave.