Really real fiction
Writers have it all wrong. They think they need to learn about
other writers. I studied English literature at Oxford University
and I read all I could find of the sort of literary criticism that
makes a novel seem like a piece of East German economic analysis.
Three years later, I hadn’t learned a thing — except that it was
fine to have a room you could take a girl to without having to
sneak past your mother, Guinness isn’t good for you, and the
deputy bank manager at Lloyd’s on Broad Street with the goatee and
the bald head didn’t just /look/ like Ming the Merciless.
Then I read Dashiell Hammett. Before he published novels, Hammett
was a Pinkerton detective. What he wrote was real. I could smell
the places he’d been for the Pinkertons, feel the punches he’d
taken, think the way he’d had to think to outwit true criminals.
I’d been reading Marxist critical theorists on Daniel Defoe and
French deconstructionists whose scribblings about the
“stereographic plurality of significances” were intended to tell
me that whatever I thought a book was about was, indeed, what it
was about–except that it wasn’t, was it. Or was it?
It was the kind of stuff only a pretentious 20-year-old ought to
like. It wasn’t going to take me far in life, and it didn’t help
me figure out what I wanted to write about.
“The Maltese Falcon” gave me the sense of how real experiences
lead a writer to the soul of his subject, and to the soul of
himself. Anything but that soul isn’t worth reading about, because
it’s just lies.
University is where you go for other people’s lies. Novels are
where you go for their confessions.
The best novelists are the ones who don’t care if you like them,
because if you can’t handle who they are, you belong back in
school where you can pretend to understand subjects that aren’t
worth knowing about.
When I began to work on the Omar Yussef Mystery series, I knew
that I wanted to use real events I had covered as a journalist
among the Palestinians for the previous decade. I took my
characters from people I had known, and known well.
I set the first book in Bethlehem, which I can see from the window
of my apartment in Jerusalem. I weaved together a series of
stories I had uncovered as a journalist. Everyone in the book is
based on someone who stood before me and talked to me, willingly
or grudgingly or with outright hostility, to tell me what they
thought about the killing and corruption that tainted their town.
The result isn’t journalism. It’s a novel.
What’s the difference? Journalism is fiction.
Don’t believe me? Open a newsmagazine and you’ll be expected to
believe that a given Hollywood star is actually a nice man, that
you can drive everywhere and not get fat provided you lay off
fruit, and that the latest development in the Middle East gives
hope that things there will get better: well, of course, he isn’t,
you can’t, and it won’t.
That is to say, it’s fiction. We don’t necessarily think of it as
fiction, because fiction’s supposed to be interesting, and that’s
more than can be said for most journalism.
So why did I turn from journalism to mystery fiction with the Omar
Yussef series?
Because I wanted to write the truth.
My experience as a journalist taught me that there are serious
limits on what a journalist can convey to his readers. That’s
somewhat because of libel laws. It’s also because a journalist has
to counter the expectations of his editors, trying to bring them
along with him to reach the same conclusions and then watching to
see that someone else’s ideas don’t overtake the story during the
editing process. But mostly it’s because journalism even at its
most worthy skirts around the essence of man.
It was only rarely during a decade as a foreign correspondent that
I was able to write about what happens inside the head of a
Palestinian. Mainly I had to say what the latest incident of
bloodshed meant for the “peace process,” even when there had
clearly ceased to be peace and such process as remained was
entirely orchestrated for politicians to play to their domestic
supporters.
Journalism took me to places I’d otherwise never have visited, or
even known existed. It gave me an understanding of people I’d
never have known and at the same time let me understand myself far
more deeply than I would have done had I not met them, had I
stayed at home in the world to which I was born.
I wrote the first Omar Yussef novel with a sense of liberation.
Not liberation from the truth. Rather it was a freedom from the
strictures of journalism. I had found the best way to tell the truth.
Not everyone can see the places I saw and meet the people I met as
a journalist. But now at least they can read about them in my novels.
July 17th, 2009 at 11:31 am
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.
July 22nd, 2009 at 9:29 pm
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.
July 29th, 2009 at 5:52 am
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.
July 29th, 2009 at 10:50 am
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.
July 30th, 2009 at 10:38 pm
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.
October 8th, 2009 at 4:36 pm
[...] 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 [...]