by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell
Monty’s Steakhouse, photo courtesy of JSB Studios
The other night Mrs. B and I did something we hadn’t in over a year—went out to eat inside a real restaurant with real friends! This may not sound like much to you in your neck of the woods, but we live in the lockiest of lockdown states, frustratingly trying to claw our way toward a sense of normalcy. Well, as the man who was digging to the center of the earth was heard to say, “I’m closer than I was yesterday.”
So we went to one of L.A.’s classic steakhouses, Monty’s. Technically, their “inside” also includes a large tent with acrylic windows, which was where we were seated. We had an early reservation and by the time we were finished the place was packed. Grand it was to hear chatter, laughter, and clinking silverware in a full venue once again.
Making it all the nicer was a young server, about twenty-five-years old, who had a sense of humor and, I would guess, a lovely smile whenever she got out from behind the face mask.
The friends were from our theater days, and it was so much fun to share memories face-to-face—of shows we were in, and favorite performances we’d seen. I talked about being front-row-center for the original Chicago in New York (featuring the legendary Gwen Verdon, Chita Rivera and Jerry Orbach). That got us onto the subject of musicals, and Guys and Dolls came up. I told them about my recent discovery that the character Sky Masterson was named for Damon Runyon’s friend Bat Masterson, the gunslinger-turned-New York sports reporter.
We then debated whether Marlon Brando was right for that role in the movie (Frank Sinatra wanted it, but Brando was the bigger star, leaving Sinatra with the part of Nathan Detroit). I was offering the pro side of the argument when our server checked on us.
Feeling cheery, I looked at her and said, “What do you think of Marlon Brando?”
She blinked. “Who?”
Thinking she hadn’t heard me right, I said, “Marlon Brando, the actor.”
She shook her head.
Friend Cris said, “He was the old godfather in The Godfather.”
“I haven’t seen that,” the server said.
I bent over and recovered my chin from the floor.
When the server left us I asked the table, “How in the heck does a twenty-five-year old not know who Marlon Brando was?” Even though he died in 2004 and his best acting days were over around 1980, still…I mean, come on…it’s Brando! He changed the face of acting in America. He was the biggest onscreen star of the 1950s. And even twenty-five-year olds have access to TCM!
But then again, when Brando was big, we only had three TV networks. There was no Google, YouTube, social media. Today you have to digitally sprint every day just to keep up with what’s current. And what’s current will probably be dated in a month. Anything older than five years is ancient history.
Which brings up the question of using pop culture references in your fiction. Should you use them if a future reader won’t know what—or who—in blue blazes you’re talking about?
Here are my thoughts:
1. A pop culture reference is usually more realistic than something generic.
She plopped in a chair and watched TV.
Is not as effective as:
She plopped in a chair and watched Wheel of Fortune.
2. Using a pop culture reference is no different than using some current technology.
Remember when flip phones with cameras hit the market? Several thriller writers hopped on that. Now it seems so quaint. But that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t have been used at the time.
3. Most readers will subliminally appreciate the specificity even if they don’t know the reference.
4. If a reader wants to know a reference, they can look it up just by going to CompuServe….I mean AskJeeves…I mean AltaVista…I mean Dogpile…I mean…
5. Consider using one or two pop references in a character’s backstory.
I like letting someone know that as a little girl the character was a devoted fan of Animaniacs and could rock The Macarena.
6. As with anything, you can overdo it.
How much is too much? It’s entirely up to you. If you feel a reference is valid, put it in. Reassess during the editing phase. Ask your beta readers about it.
I have but one last comment: Marlon Brando! I mean, come on!
So how do you feel about pop culture references in fiction? Like or dislike? Use or don’t use? How do you make the decision?
by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell
Paul Revere statue in Boston, MA, by sculptor Cyrus Edwin Dallin (1861–1944)
My dad loved poetry. Not the flowery kind; he preferred the kind that tells a story. Among his favorites were “The Shooting of Dan McGrew,” “The Face on the Barroom Floor,” and “The Betrothed.”
Another, which he would often recite, is “Paul Revere’s Ride” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. I remember sitting in front of our fireplace as Dad began…
Listen, my children, and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five;
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year.
Did you catch the date? It’s today, April 18.
He said to his friend, “If the British march
By land or sea from the town to-night,
Hang a lantern aloft in the belfry arch
Of the North Church tower as a signal light, —
One, if by land, and two, if by sea;
And I on the opposite shore will be,
Ready to ride and spread the alarm
Through every Middlesex village and farm,
For the country folk to be up and to arm.”
And on we go. Now here’s some trivia for you. On April 18, exactly eight years after Paul Revere’s ride, George Washington issued his Proclamation for the Cessation of Hostilities, which effectively ended the war!
Although the proclamation before alluded to, extends only to the prohibition of Hostilities, and not of the annunciation, of a general peace; yet it must afford the most rational, and sincere satisfaction, to every benevolent mind. As it puts a period, to a long and doubtful test, stops the effusion of human blood, opens the prospect to a more splendid scene; and like another morning Star; promises the approach of a brighter day, than hath hitherto illuminated the Western Hemisphere—On such a happy day, a day which is the harbinger of peace, a day which completes the eighth year of the War, it would be ingratitude not to rejoice! it would be insensibility not to participate in the general felicity.
Well, it is April 18 once again, and we all know we’re living in a whirlwind right now. How should that affect how we write? I think the vast majority of the reading public desires fiction that “opens the prospect to a more splendid scene.” No matter the genre, is there hope at the end of your book? Hope that maybe we can stop an “effusion of human blood” and at least discern the “approach of a brighter day”?
Even apocalyptic fiction operates as a warning of what can come about if we don’t right the ship. And that’s a form of hopefulness.
I recall reading somewhere that Flannery O’Connor’s brutal fiction was really about “grace being offered.” When such grace is rejected, it is tragic. But the true tragic in literature is always the flip side of hope, and that’s the point. Or should be. Tragedy without the offer of grace is the pits.
So I ask this question today: do you have hope in your fiction? Does the concept occur to you as your write? Do you think it is a valid concern in our increasingly nihilistic age? Is it worth pursuing? Leave your thoughts in the comments!
And now here is JSB’s alternative version of the Longfellow poem, called “The Midnight Write of Paul Revere.”
Listen, my children, and you shall hear
Of the midnight write of Paul Revere,
On the eighteenth of April, in Twenty-one;
To follow his dream and get it done
He determined to write, and write without fear.He said to his friend, “If the publishers fail
To take my book and give me some dough,
I’ll go and do indie and thus prevail
With ebooks, and print, and audio.
A stand-alone here, and a series there
And I at my keyboard pounding with flair
Ready to write and money collect
Through wide distribution or Kindle Select
And take all that jack by deposit direct!”
Comments are open!
by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell
Last week I wrote about hardboiled fiction and the pedigree that began with a writer named Carroll John Daly. I focused on the First-Person PI narrator.
But a hardboiled series can be told in Third Person, too. Frederick Nebel wrote a hugely popular series for Black Mask featuring police captain Steve MacBride and a reporter named Kennedy. These were done in Third-Person POV. More currently there’s a fellow named Gilstrap who writes about a guy named Grave in Third Person. Likewise Coletta’s Sheriff Niko Quintano, Langley-Hawthorne’s Ursula Marlow, Odell’s Chief of Police Gordon Hepler, Viets’s Helen Hawthorne, and Burke’s Tawny Lindholm
We’ll get to P. J. Parrish in a bit.
So what POV did I choose for my series about a crime-fighting nun, Sister Justicia Marie of the Sisters of Perpetual Justice?
I’ve written here before about the genesis of this character. How my son, who loves plays on words, said I should write about a nun who fights crime with martial arts skills. “You could call it Force of Habit.”
He smiled. I smiled. And then I said, “I think I’ll do it.”
“I was only kidding,” my son said.
“It’s a great concept,” I said. “Original, great title, and I think I can do something with it.”
That was back in 2012. Since that first novelette (about 16k words), four more followed, and quite to my delight has built a loyal following.
Now I’ve put the whole series in one collection, and added a sixth, never-before-published novelette. FORCE OF HABIT: THE COMPLETE SERIES is up for pre-pub. If you reserve your copy now you’ll lock in the $2.99 deal price (and this puppy is 90k words worth of action) before it goes to the regular price of $4.99. The titles are:
FORCE OF HABIT
FORCE OF HABIT 2: AND THEN THERE WERE NUNS
FORCE OF HABIT 3: NUN THE WISER
FORCE OF HABIT 4: THE NUN ALSO RISES
FORCE OF HABIT 5: HOT CROSS NUNS
And for the first time anywhere: FORCE OF HABIT 6: NUN TOO SOON
Allow me just a few horn toots from verified reviews:
“This first book was so good that within minutes of reading it, I downloaded book two.”
“Action packed with both internal and external conflict, I was riveted the whole way through.”
“Sister Justicia is kicking butt and taking names! She knows how to clean up L.A. but good!”
“James Scott Bell seems to be able to put more events in a 50 page novella than you’re likely to find in some 300 page novels.”
“Highest possible recommendation! Five Stars!”
“Honestly, they need to make a TV series about Sister J.”
Now, back to the choice of POV. Having never been a nun…or a woman…I gravitated toward Third Person from the jump. That does not mean I couldn’t take a stab at First Person. Unlike some of the “wisdom” of the age, I say let a writer do what he or she will and let the market decide. I just felt more comfortable in Third.
So what about the nun-woman part? Well, friends, there’s a little thing I like to call RESEARCH. It really works! I have a friend who is a former nun, who helped me tremendously with this series. I also made contact with some Benedictine nuns online for further insight.
As for the woman part, I have the greatest research assistant of all—Mrs. B. She reads all my stuff before anyone else, and offers me invaluable editorial advice.
[And if I may be allowed a side note: Today marks the 40th anniversary of the best decision I ever made. It involved the lovely Cindy, a minister, a packed church, and me.]
Once again, here’s the link for the deal pre-order.
For those of you outside Amazon U.S., you can open to your Amazon site and plug this into the search box: B091DRDWRJ
I will note that Michael Connelly is currently writing a series from a female Pacific Islander POV. And our own Mr. Gilstrap’s new series stars a U.S. Congresswoman who is also a single mom, both of which (if my research is accurate) John has never been.
And leave us not forget the sisters P. J. Parrish writing from the POV of one Louis Kincaid.
It can be done!
Do you agree?
by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell
Would there be a Mike Romeo without Race Williams?
Scholars are pretty much in agreement that the first—and for a couple of decades the most popular—hardboiled series character came from the typewriter of the prolific pulp writer Carroll John Daly. His PI, Race Williams, appeared in over 70 stories and 8 novels, up until Daly’s death in 1958.
Today Race and Daly are all but forgotten, having been overshadowed by writers like Hammett, Chandler, Spillane, Ross Macdonald, and John D. MacDonald. I think this is a mistake. The Race Williams stories, though not on par with Chandler’s Philip Marlowe or Hammett’s Continental Op, are still a fun, juicy read—exactly what America was hankering for during the Roaring Twenties and the Great Depression.
Race Williams made his debut in the December 1922 issue of Black Mask. He became the prototype of the hardboiled private eye, with these features:
It’s clear that Daly’s style and popularity influenced Chandler, who took the PI story to its heights. And because of Chandler we’ve had a long line of popular PIs, including Robert B. Parker’s Spenser and Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone.
Mickey Spillane, creator of arguably the hardest of the hardboileds (Mike Hammer), and at one time the bestselling author in the world, said Race Williams was his inspiration. In fact, in the mid 1950s he wrote a fan letter to Daly, who was living in obscurity in California. The letter said, in part:
Right now I’m sitting on the top of the heap with my Mike Hammer series, but though the character is original, his personality certainly isn’t. Sometimes I wonder if you’ve ever read some of the statements I’ve released when they ask me who I model my writing after. Maybe you know already. Mike and the Race Williams of the middle thirties could be twins.
Yours was the first and only style of writing that ever influenced me in any way. Race was the model for Mike; and I can’t say more in this case than imitation being the most sincere form of flattery. The public in accepting my books were in reality accepting the kind of work you have done.
Side note: this effusive praise got into the hands of Daly’s agent, who began a lawsuit against Spillane for plagiarism! When Daly found out he was incensed, and fired her. He was actually delighted with Spillane’s letter because it was the first fan letter he’d had in 25 years.
Speaking of Spillane, and his lifetime sales of around 225 million books, what explains the popularity of Mike Hammer? According to Prof. David Schmid in The Secrets of Great Mystery and Suspense Fiction, the factors are:
Most of these factors are baked into my own Mike Romeo series. To them I’ve added some unique elements, which is a key to writing any current hardboiled hero. You want to pay homage to the past, but you also have to make it feel new and fresh.
I look back and see a clear line of influence:
Carroll John Daly >> Raymond Chandler >> Mickey Spillane >> John D. MacDonald >> Mike Romeo
So the question of the day is: can you discern a line of influence in your own writing? How far back does it go?
by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell
Here at TKZ we love to talk about the nuances of the craft. These take the form of both things to do and things not to do. As Brother Gilstrap likes to remind us, these aren’t “rules.” They are, however, basics that work every time, and if you choose to ignore them, that’s your business. But if your business is also to make dough with your writing—which means connecting with a large slice of the reading public—you would be wise to attend to the fundamentals.
On the not side, there are what I call “speed bumps.” (Have a look at my post on that subject). These are the little things you can easily overlook, but which cause a jolt to what should be a smooth and emotive fictive ride. Too many of these bumps ruins the whole experience, and does not leave the reader anxious to purchase another of your books.
On the positive side, there are things you can do to help a reader feel more fully immersed in your story. And one of those things is the use of sensory description.
You’ll see a lot written about the sense of sight and sound. The visual and the audible. These are the twin pillars of show, don’t tell.
There’s also the underused but valuable sense of smell.
The other day it occurred to me that not much has been written about the sense of taste. I had that thought as I was reading a noir story by Joyce Carol Oates, “Faithless,” included in the collection The Best American Noir of the Century (eds. James Ellroy and Otto Penzler, 2010). Here’s the opening:
The last time my mother Cornelia Nissenbaum and her sister Constance saw their mother was the day before she vanished from their lives forever, April 11, 1923.
It was a rainy-misty morning. They’d been searching for their mother because something was wrong in the household; she hadn’t come downstairs to prepare breakfast so there wasn’t anything for them except what their father gave them, glutinous oatmeal from the previous morning hastily reheated on the stove, sticking to the bottom of the pan and tasting of scorch.
That word scorch jumped right into my mouth. Most of us think of that word as a verb. Here it’s used as a noun and as such packs a nice, unexpected punch. It deepens the tone of the scene and thrusts us into the experience of these girls. And as I mentioned in a recent post, putting the most expressive word at the end of a sentence can make all the difference. A lesser writer might have put: hastily reheated on the stove, sticking to the bottom of the pan and giving it a scorched taste.
So that’s one good use of taste—to set a tone consistent with the mood of the story.
Another use of taste is to intensify an emotional feeling. In Jodi Picoult’s The Book of Two Ways, the narrator tells us of the first kiss from a long, lost love. Earlier in the book, we are told this about Wyatt, the lover, an archeologist working in Egypt:
I remember how he smelled like the sun baked into his clothes and also butterscotch. How, weeks later I would learn that he kept sweets in his pocket, for himself and to give to the barefoot children who waited for him in the blistering heat at the entrance to the wadi as we left for the day.
Then, some 75 pages later, after sharing a bottle of champagne:
“This,” Wyatt said, and he leaned forward and kissed me.
The night tightened around us, a noose. Wyatt’s hand slipped under my braid, curving around the nape of my neck. I tasted champagne and butterscotch and shock. Somehow, Wyatt was just as surprised as I was.
We recall the butterscotch, and we’ve just seen the champagne. But tasting shock? What an arresting way to work in this element of the experience (and, once again, at the end of the sentence).
In Hemingway’s story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” we are in the POV of a dying man, a writer on safari in Africa. He’s got gangrene in his leg and a rescue plane hasn’t shown up. He goes in and out of memories of his past, including the killing of Greek troops, shot by their own officers as they ran from Turkish soldiers:
That was the day he’d first seen dead men wearing white ballet skirts and upturned shoes with pompons on them. The Turks had come steadily and lumpily and he had seen the skirted men running and the officers shooting into them and running then themselves and he and the British observer had run too until his lungs ached and his mouth was full of the taste of pennies and they stopped behind some rocks and there were the Turks coming as lumpily as ever.
A coppery taste in the mouth is associated with fear. You’ll often see it put this way in stories: His mouth tasted like copper or The coppery taste of fear flooded his mouth. But Hemingway wrote it as the taste of pennies. Specific and vivid.
So:
Okay, I’ve said a mouthful. Over to you:
Have you thought much about the sense of taste in your writing? Any examples you’d like to share?
“Most people think they have a book inside them. That’s usually the best place to keep it.” – James Scott Bell
