Character Counts

by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) with Brigid O’Shaughnessy (Mary Astor) in The Maltese Falcon (1941)

I’m a sports guy, so use a lot of athletic comparisons and analogies vis-à-vis writing. Learning the craft, for example, is like learning golf. You’ve got to master certain fundamentals if you want to prevent, as Twain put it, “a good walk spoiled.” You study, practice, get coaching, drill. But when you play, you just play. After a round you think about things you need to improve, and practice some more.

When you write, just write. Then get feedback and work on improving your craft.

In this regard, a certain sports story caught my attention recently. Out of civility, I won’t mention names because I don’t want to kick somebody when they’re down. There’s always a chance for redemption. I hope it happens, because I love redemption stories.

Anyway, a certain NFL team drafted a quarterback in the first round. He signed a $35 million fully guaranteed contract, to go with a $23 million signing bonus. Most of us could probably live on that.

But what dominated the news and social media was a rumor that this kid had bedded his mother’s best friend.

Hoo boy.

His performance over two seasons has been less than inspiring, though not without occasional flashes of promise.

Then came a recent game where the kid stunk up the field. The defense put up a mighty effort in the loss. At the post-game press conference the kid was asked if he felt he’d let the defense down. His answer: “No.”

That one word, as they say, “lost the locker room.” His teammates heard him throwing them under the bus. He later apologized to the team, but the damage was done. He was benched for the next game. The backup QB took over and played great. The kid, instead of standing on the sideline rooting for the starter, sulked on the bench. His future with the team is thus in doubt.

This issue here is character. As defined by the greatest dictionary of all time, Webster’s New Collegiate 2d, “character” is moral vigor or firmness, esp. as acquired through self-discipline.

Character doesn’t come naturally. It has to be taught. It has to be personalized by internal effort. And if you’re going to succeed in sports and in life, you gotta have it.

So does your protagonist.

The heroes I respond to most have flaws that are overcome through a vein of moral rightness. Mike Hammer, Philip Marlowe, Sam Spade—flawed all, but saved in the end because they have a code they stick with.

When Spade, surrounded by rogues and liars (and not above some roguishness of his own), is tempted to go away with the femme fatale, Brigid O’Shaughnessy, he instead turns her over to the cops. Why? He tries to explain it to her:

“Listen. This isn’t a damned bit of good. You’ll never understand me, but I’ll try once more and then we’ll give it up. Listen. When a man’s partner is killed he’s supposed to do something about it. It doesn’t make any difference what you thought of him. He was your partner and you’re supposed to do something about it.”

In Kiss Me, Deadly, Mike Hammer is sapped by some guys, and the women in his car is murdered. He’s told by the Feds to lay off finding out who it was. His friend, the police captain Pat Chambers, tells him the same. Of course, Hammer says he won’t, and explains, “Maybe I have too much pride, but I don’t let anybody get away with that kind of stuff. I’m going to knock he crap out of somebody…”

You will find a similar code embedded in Robert B. Parker’s Spenser. It is lifted from the mythos of the Old West, as in the gunslinger hired to clean up a town. This is not surprising; Parker received his Ph.D. in English literature from Boston University, where the title of his dissertation was The Violent Hero, Wilderness Heritage and Urban Reality: A Study of the Private Eye in the Novels of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Ross Macdonald.

I’d like to read that sometime. (A copy is available for $1,000 at Abe Books. Dear Santa, I’ve been extra good this year…)

When I do my Story Grinder workshop, I have the students answer some questions about their Lead:

  • What is one thing they’d die for?
  • What would they have tattooed on their arm?
  • Who do they care about before the story begins? Why do they care?
  • What duty will they perform, even if they don’t want to?

On the other hand, there are memorable Leads who are brought down by lack of character at crucial moments. Their just desserts are also a moral lesson.

  • King Lear with his daughters.
  • Michael Corleone with his vengeance.
  • Gatsby’s obsession with Daisy.
  • Scarlett’s obsession with Ashley.

Character and flaws, that’s what a memorable Lead is made of. Give them passion and heat, cooled when it counts for a greater good. Or left alone for a tragic end.

Whatever your choice, go big on character in your characters.

The Pulp Writer’s Insurance Policy

by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

People want stories. I would argue people need stories. That’s how the great pulp writers made their living—providing fast-moving tales for readers who longed for escapism, especially during the Great Depression.

Pulp fiction, like jazz, is an American phenomenon. Pulp refers to the cheaper paper (wood pulp) that these magazines used to save money. The mags came out every month, stuffed with new stories for a voracious reading public. The golden age was between the World Wars. Dozens of magazines offered crime, detective, fantasy, action, sports, and Western fiction, with eye-catching and often lurid covers to tantalize the harried businessman as he walked by the newsstand.

To make a living in the pulps, which paid on average a penny a word, you had to be prolific. That meant several stories flying through the postal system, and when one came back rejected, slapped in another envelope and sent off to another editor.

The best of the pulpsters quickly figured out that a great series character was, in the words of Erle Stanley Gardner, the “pulp writer’s insurance policy.” When a character caught on, subsequent issues of the magazine could advertise “a new Doc Savage story” thus guaranteeing sales.

After trying out several series characters in Black Mask, Gardner hit on Perry Mason, who became not just his insurance policy but his lifetime annuity as well.

As you may know, I run my own personal pulp fiction “magazine.” It was here I developed a series character in classic pulp style—a troubleshooter for a Hollywood studio in 1940s Hollywood named William “Wild Bill” Armbrewster.

Armbrewster solves problems for National-Consolidated Pictures. That means getting leading men out of the drunk tank … or a murder rap. It means keeping wolves away from starlets and dancers away from temptation. Once it even means helping Bette Davis out of a jam.

His beat is trouble and his fists are ready.

He’s got some Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe in him, and a bit of Bill Lennox, the character created by W. T. Ballard for Black Mask. My collection of six Bill Armbrewster novelettes is up for pre-sale at the deal price of $2.99 (it goes up to $4.99 after launch week). You can snag your copy here. Outside the U.S., go to your Amazon store and search for: B09V1RLXDM

There will be a print version, too.

As an added feature, I’ve put together an extensive glossary of 1940s pulp slang. This will be a good education for the kids who want to read and understand classic crime fiction, and enjoy film noir to the full.

So how about a quiz? Here are a few terms from the glossary. How many can you translate? (Keep score, then see my answers in the comments section. No peeking!)

Adam and Eve on a Raft
Ameche
Bunk, The
Chicago overcoat
Clip joint
Educated puppies
Palooka
Pan
Roscoe
Sawbuck
T’aint funny, McGee

Thanks for letting me toot my own horn today. Enjoy the book. After all, entertainment is my beat.

Thrillers Bring the Light

by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

 As if things weren’t bad enough.

We’re struggling through this national shutdown and all the dire consequences thereof, and along comes exactly what we don’t need: The murder hornet!

Yes, this unsightly wasp with its ugly orange head and relatively large body mass, has arrived on our shores intent on killing innocent little honey bees and, indeed, the occasional human.

But just when we think we are in the midst of a Stephen King nightmare, along comes a hero, a savior, a defender of all that is good and decent and pure: the praying mantis!

How appropriate that the vanquisher of a grotesque insect villain should turn out to be an insect of another sort—one that humbly supplicates to the Creator before chomping the brains of its adversary.

That’s entomological justice!

Which is what mystery, suspense, and thrillers are all about. They take us through the valley of the shadow of death, toward the light on the other side.

At least, the best ones do.

That’s been the secret of the popularity of this kind of fiction since it took off in the nineteenth century. Most scholars agree that the modern mystery story can be traced to Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841). Here is the invention of the sleuth who, through the powers of observation and deduction, solves a seemingly inexplicable crime.

Which offers hope to a population that must believe, “Crime doesn’t pay.”

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle took it to the next level with the invention of Sherlock Holmes. Holmes endures, even today, not simply because of his brainpower, but because of his eccentricities. He’s entertaining as well as brilliant. He’s flawed, too, just like us. But again we see the hope that deduction brings—justice will be done.

Back here in America we took the simple mystery and transformed it through the hardboiled school of the pulps. The quintessential detective hero of this type issued from the typewriter of Dashiell Hammett: Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon (1930). This hero is not refined or dainty or a tea drinker. He is tough, cynical, sometimes brutal. But in the end he still gets justice. The mystery of the black bird is solved, but more importantly each of the nefarious characters Spade has dealt with get their comeuppance, including the femme fatale Spade has fallen in love with, Brigid O’Shaughnessy. Spade “sends her over” because, after all, she killed his partner. Spade tries to explain it to her: “When a man’s partner is killed he’s supposed to do something about it. It doesn’t make any difference what you thought of him. He was your partner and you’re supposed to do something about it.”

Underneath his contradictions, Sam Spade is still guided by a moral code.

In the detective pantheon, Spade was followed by Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe. Marlowe, like Spade, is tough and cynical (but a lot more fun to listen to) and has a code based on honor. Indeed, in Chandler’s world, Marlowe is something of knight errant in a fedora. Chandler made this plain in his 1944 essay, “The Simple Art of Murder.” Here is the famous passage:

But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and; a good enough man for any world.

As Professor David Schmid puts it in his course on mystery and suspense fiction:

Chandler’s essay helps us understand that hard-boiled mysteries appeal to the reader both because of their unvarnished, realistic cynicism and also because their private-eye protagonists embody an alternative to that cynicism, an oasis of personal responsibility and integrity in a world that is sorely in need of both.

The world is always in need of the heroic vision. The best thriller, mystery, and suspense novels offer that to us. No matter how mean the streets, or dark the night, justice, even if rough, somehow prevails through the strength and courage of the hero.

Yes, there is a type of novel that begins and ends in the darkness—noir. For example, the world of Jim Thompson (e.g., The Killer Inside Me; Savage Night) is not your grandmother’s cozy little village. Yet even as his grifters and psychopaths meet their ends, there is a rough noir-justice being doled out. While it isn’t a hero who “solves” things, there is a price to pay for the criminal choices made.This type of novel provides what Aristotle called catharsis. We see the consequences of an immoral life and thus are instructed not to go there. Thus, even dark noir can have a candlelight’s flame of moral illumination.

All this to say that the lasting popularity of mystery, suspense, and thrillers is based primarily on a hero bringing us justice, re-enforcing our belief that good will prevail and that light will shine again. As Dr. Schmid says at the end of his course:

Although experimental examples of mystery and suspense fiction may be well respected as aesthetic objects, they aren’t popular with wide audiences. In the final analysis, it seems that we can tolerate only so much experimentation and frustration. Perhaps the ultimate secret to great mystery and suspense fiction is that, in one way or another, it satisfies a deep-seated desire we all have for the world around us to make sense.

Isn’t that why you continue to read this kind of fiction? In a world that increasingly isn’t making sense, don’t we need these books more than ever?