Comments on: Really real fiction

By: Review: The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets’ Nest by Stieg Larsson « Reactions to Reading

Thu, 08 Oct 2009 09:36:51 +0000

[...] story. Earlier this year another journalist turned fiction writer, Matt Rees, blogged that writing his fictional tales set in Palestine allowed him to be far more truthful about the realities… and I wonder if Larsson didn’t experience this same phenomenon. He demonstrates the myriad [...]

By: Matt Beynon Rees

Matt Beynon Rees — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 15:38:43 +0000

Very post-structuralist of you, Kevin. “Il n’y a pas de hors texte,” as old Jacques Derrida used to say. …If you’d ever read some of the total crap written by otherwise fine writers about Jerusalem after their relatively brief jaunt here, you might temper your disdain for authorial experience. If I’d written my Palestinian crime novels when I’d been here for only a couple of years, they’d surely embarrass me now. Not because they wouldn’t be written well or because I wouldn’t have been empathetic enough. But because I would’ve been focused on a surface level of understanding and emotion. I’ve managed since to go deeper. As for Hammett, I’d suggest that it wasn’t merely that he was an Op which makes him interesting. Rather it was that, for example, he took part in Pinkerton’s union busting operations and later became a Communist. The gray areas of his trade let him find the empathy that you’re talking about. For me it was a similar experience. I wrote a lot of stories as a journalist about the Middle East peace process. But it didn’t let me get into the emotions that were evoked by the situation — in the people I met, or in me. Crime fiction did.
As for author bios being the least read part of a book, I’d suggest it’s not because readers aren’t interested in an author’s experience. It’s because author bios are often stuffed with two elements:
a) The author has worked in a string of pointless and irrelevant jobs like hand double or taxi driver which he includes so that we’ll think he’s a likeable self-effacing chap.
b) The author has won a bunch of prizes listed here which you’ve anyway never heard of. Philip Roth’s bio, on the last book of his I at least read, included nothing but prizes and awards. As if Philip Roth existed only as a recipient of prizes.
If the author bio has something relevant to the book, then I’d say it’s one of the things readers turn too either first or as soon as they’ve looked at the first paragraph of the book.

By: Christopher G. Moore

Christopher G. Moore — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 03:50:54 +0000

Kevin,

I agree entirely that the writer’s resume is not relevant. But an understanding of place, history, language, and culture can deliver insight and that makes for a stronger book. Chandler lived for many years in LA; this gave him an understanding of the LA culture. Like Hammett, he knew his city and sub-cultures. You don’t have to be a professional boxer to write about prize fighting culture. Nelsen Algren proved that in The Man with the Golden Arm. There is a larger point. More than one author has set books in countries that they know little about, but that doesn’t stop them from making all kinds of assumptions about the culture, history and language. A two week holiday or couple of months visit is unlikely to give such a writer than a superficial knowledge and for those who live in that place, it isn’t believable. If I spent a week with the police in Montreal and tried to set a police procedural or detective novel in that city, didn’t speak French, had the Montreal cops speaking like someone from Venice Beach, and getting the details of neighborhoods, food, transportation, names and slang wrong, I suspect you wouldn’t find the characters credible. If Algren had spent a couple of weeks in Chicago but was educated, reared and lived in Paris, I suspect his Chicago based fiction would have had a very different reception. I’ll grant you that Tarzan fiction can pay less attention to the host primate culture and none of the apes misrepresented as a result have to our knowledge complained.

By: Kevin Burton Smith

Kevin Burton Smith — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 22:52:59 +0000

Oh, please! I’m sooooo tired of hearing of Hammett’s background (much romanticized) as a Pinkerton.

Yeah, he was an Op. But that’s not why we’re still reading him. It’s because he could write. No disrespect intended here, but there are plenty of private eyes, cops, crooks and whatever else that turns your crank who couldn’t write their way out of a paper bag. Real-life experience is nice, but empathy and understanding of the human condition coupled with imagination and roll-up-the-sleeves research trump mere experience every time. Chandler was NEVER a private eye, Stephen Crane was NEVER a soldier, Ed McBain was NEVER a cop and I have it on pretty good authority that Edgar Rice Burroughs was NOT raised by apes. but they created fictional “truth” every bit as credible as anything Hammett came up with.

Writers can toot their horn all they want, but an author’s bio is the least important — and least read –part of a novel for a reason.

By: Matt Beynon Rees

Matt Beynon Rees — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 14:29:58 +0000

Thanks, Craig. I hope you’ll enjoy the new blog. It was Chris’s idea and one that we’re all very excited about. Keep in touch.

By: Craig

Craig — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 04:31:12 +0000

Excellent post Matt. And excellent points/insight too. It’s the first time I’ve visited the Internationalcrimeauthors.com site, but if this is the standard of writing and insight, it certainly won’t be the last.