As it has for most booklovers, both readers and writers, this week has been a sad one for me. We lost Elmore Leonard at 87 this week, for my money the greatest crime novelist of our time. Beyond his greatness as a writer, Dutch was a good man and a good friend. I had not seen him in a few years, and I certainly would not claim any special bond or connection. Many others were much closer to Elmore. But there is also a sense in which he was a special friend to all writers, with his terrific 10 Rules of Writing and, perhaps even more so, as a model of the devoted, unpretentious and wonderfully productive artist and craftsman.

Actually, I had thought about getting in touch recently, especially after a reviewer, whose taste and judgment I admire, wrote this about The Car Bomb and Admission of Guilt, the first two novels in my new trilogy set in Detroit: “If you like Elmore Leonard, you’ll love these books.” Of course, the words came as an unexpected gift, even though I didn’t believe for a second in the validity of any such comparison.

But I held off calling or putting a note in the mail when I heard through his long-time researcher and assistant Greg Sutter that Dutch, who would have been 88 in October, was intensely focused on finishing the current novel in progress. There was no way I was going to intrude or lay even a small, social burden on his precious time.

Now he’s gone. And like so many others, I have a pain in my heart thinking about Elmore falling to that stroke before he could put the finishing touches to what was going to be novel number 47.

My history with Dutch was limited to only a handful of small events and exchanges, but I thought I’d briefly recount them here for whatever interest they might hold for others and perhaps to make myself feel just a little better by adding a tiny bit to the marvelous collective memory that envelops him now.

So twice he gave me an intro to his agent-at-the-time. The first, back in the early ’90s, was an old guy in Hollywood, the one who followed H. N. Swanson, the legendary “Swanie,” who helped make Elmore Leonard both rich and famous. I worked with that fellow for a while, until I sent him part of an early version of The Car Bomb, and he told me he couldn’t sell anything featuring a local TV anchor.

And then some 20 years later Dutch kindly suggested his big time guy in NYC. That second agent and I never got anything going after he expressed no interest in dealing with the novel I ended up publishing last year, The Obsession.

I also worked with Dutch on a couple of occasions when I was making TV specials. Two decades ago I wrote and produced a one-hour documentary on Detroit’s main artery, Woodward Avenue, it’s heartline running north from the river 25 miles all the way to Pontiac. Arrayed along the way was “every reason for hope and despair in urban America,” if I remember the tagline correctly.

It was Dutch’s favorite avenue, featured in more than one of his Detroit-based novels, and he readily agreed to play a role in the story I was telling. First, we recorded him reading a passage from one of those novels, and then as darkness fell in the city’s New Center area, we shot as he walked the empty sidewalk past chained and boarded up storefronts. Finally, the shot pulled back wide to show how deserted the whole place was, and there at the top of the shot was the illuminated General Motors sign atop the giant company’s headquarters a few blocks away.

Later, after the shoot, when I got back to my car parked on Woodward, I found a window smashed and the radio gone. Of course, we shot the looted car, and that image made the perfect capstone to the sequence that married Elmore’s read and his walk.

Then five years ago I finally got the chance to do a piece I had been wanting to produce for decades, a TV bio sketch of the “Dickens of Detroit.” This time we shot for a couple of days with Dutch, including a lengthy interview at his home in Bloomfield Township, about 15 minutes from where I live. Heading for his 82nd birthday, he was thin and a bit frail but still very lively and as sharp as ever. He could not have been more forthcoming and generous with us.

That video bio sketch is the one on this website. The show was part of a series called “World Class Detroiters,” and, of course, Dutch was the most appropriate subject we ever presented. Minus the commercials, the piece was about 22 minutes, and so I struggled mightily to cram in as much of Elmore, his life and story, as possible. In doing so, I could only use brief snippets from an interview that went on for almost an hour and a half. It was conducted by the show’s on-camera host and my good friend, Emery King, a former NBC White House correspondent, working from a long list of my questions.

A few days ago, after Elmore’s passing, I dug out of my computer a transcript of the full interview, something only a handful of folks have ever seen. I read through it and marveled again at how much Dutch had given us. And I quickly decided to see if I could present it in a fashion that would give others the pleasure of an expansive Elmore talking about his life and work. What follows is just a small portion of the interview. If you find interest and value in it, I’ll include more here on my blog and perhaps also find a place to present the whole thing.

So here’s Elmore Leonard talking about why he used two of his favorite settings, the appeal and essence of his stories, and how to rob a bank.

Emery: Two of your favorite settings are Detroit and the Atlantic coast of Florida. Why those two settings and is there a connection?

Elmore: Because I’ve lived in both. Because I’ve lived in Detroit since 1934 and remember a lot about Detroit. And that Atlantic coast of Florida because we have a place there. I bought a motel for my mother back in I guess the ’70s. It only had three units in it, but it gave her something to do. And then we would go down and stay with her. Now we’ve got a place in North Palm Beach, but we don’t stay there that long, never more than two weeks, once or twice a year, because I’d rather be here. I mean, even in the winter. I like the winter. I like the seasons.

Emery: Why do you think your readers are so interested and drawn into these two worlds of cops and criminals, worlds that most people wouldn’t want to be a part of?

Elmore: No, I think they’re drawn into crime and mysteries because these stories always have a beginning, a middle, and an end, and the endings are always satisfying to the readers. They know that the good guys are going to win in the end. I think that’s the main reason. Because you look down the New York Times list, and they’re all crime or mysteries.

Emery: Your major characters are usually trying to outthink each other one way or another, or outwit each other. Do you see your stories essentially as a battle between good and evil?

Elmore: I suppose, when you get right down to it, if I were to analyze my stories. But for that matter, all stories are about good and evil. I mean, there are degrees of evil and good, but I think all stories are asking, what’s the opposition? What are we dealing with here?

Emery: Do you analyze your stories?

Elmore: No, never.

Emery: Why?

Elmore: Because I’m not interested in analyzing them. I don’t know what the theme is, for example. When the screenwriter, Scott Frank, who has written two of mine—Get Shorty and Out of Sight—takes on the job, he’ll ask me, he says, “Well, what’s the theme?” I said, “I don’t know. I have no idea.” So, he’ll read the book, and then he tells me what the theme is, which is always impressive. “Really?” So he feels he needs to know what the theme is in order to write a screenplay.

Emery: About your bad guys, you’ve said this: “I don’t think of them as bad guys. I just think of them as normal people who get up in the morning and wonder what they’re going to have for breakfast. And they sneeze and they wonder if they should call their mother and then they rob a bank.”

Elmore: Yeah. That’s really most of them. I mean, that’s the way it is, you know. There’s a guy in the paper this morning who robbed a bank. He had been let go from his job, and he robbed a bank. And the prosecutor was going to give him less than a year. Now he’s got a job offer, and people feel sorry for him. Bank robbery is attractive to people. Willy Sutton said, “That’s where the money is.” That’s why he robbed banks. But all you’ve got to do is ask for the money, and the teller will give you the money, and then you walk out. They’ll give you the money if you’re convincing enough. There was one guy, the FBI called him, ah, who is that comedian who never got any respect?

Emery: Rodney Dangerfield.

Elmore: Rodney Dangerfield. They called him “the Rodney Dangerfield bank robber,” because he would go in and ask for the money, and they wouldn’t give it to him. Until, finally, he got a gun and went in. But if you go in with a gun, then you’re facing a lot of time, if you’re arrested. So it’s best just to be nice and hand the teller a note and hope that she’s frightened enough to give you the money. Most of them get $2,000 or less. They’ll get whatever is on the top of the open drawer, there in those little sections—tens, twenties, fifties, and one hundreds. But you don’t want to get handed the dye pack. When I first began researching bank robberies, I had a time getting a bank to show me a dye pack. Finally, one of them did, and it is triggered, the mechanism goes off, as you’re going out the door, and there’s something in the door frame that triggers the dye pack and then, phew, you’re covered with red or whatever color dye. And there’s just money on the outside of the pack. You know, inside is what makes it erupt. I had a friend in Florida, a judge, who had a guy who was up for breaking his probation by robbing a bank. So, he did four years, and then he came out and he hoped that having done the four years would suffice for breaking the probation. And the judge said, “Yeah. It’s okay. But how much did you get in the bank robbery?” And the guy said, “$2600.” He said, “But I’m going out and the dye pack went off. And so I had all this red dye, and then I went home, and I tried to wash the money. And I was trying to pass these pink twenties, and they caught up with me.”

So there you have just a taste. If you’d like more of this great writer and wonderful man talking about his life and his craft, just let me know.

The post MY FRIEND ELMORE LEONARD appeared first on TVLOCICERO.COM.

Recently a reader friend, a woman I’ve never met, but with whom I’ve exchanged emails, left a review of my new novel The Car Bomb on the book’s Amazon page. Previously she had read and reviewed my two non-fiction books, Murder in the Synagogue and Squelched. That’s her preferred type of book, or genre, True Crime, and so I was a little surprised when she decided to read The Car Bomb. But, of course, I was pleased when she filed this kind review:

“I am not usually a reader of fictional mystery/thriller type book, but this one was a riot. Something new happens on every page and it keeps you reading, wanting to know what happens next. Really good story. My only quibble with this book is that we spent almost the entire story inside the head of the protagonist, who is the best-known news anchor in Detroit, so as a Detroiter myself I kept picturing Bill Bonds, and that was just weird.”

When I dropped her a note of thanks for the review, she wrote back quickly with a question: Was my main character Frank DeFauw based on famed TV anchor Bill Bonds, who had a long, at times controversial career in Detroit?

And I responded with this: “Asked like a true fan of true crime!” After which I answered her question in some detail.

Now for you non-Detroiters a little context might be helpful. First, here’s my standard 400 character summary of The Car Bomb:

“Detroit Nielson king Frank DeFauw hunts down the story of a judge who may be corrupt—and is one of his best friends. Booze, drugs, womanizing and a passion for the news are all part of what makes this brilliant, erratic TV anchor a major player in this deeply troubled city. Finally, Frank decides if digging out the truth about his pal the judge is worth risking his own career, family and life.”

Starting in the ‘60s and for nearly four decades, Bill Bonds was Detroit’s dominant news presenter and commentator, working for most of that time at WXYZ-TV, Channel 7. Now my story in The Car Bomb is set in Detroit in the early ‘90s, so it’s understandable that anyone familiar with Bonds’ history might wonder if I was channeling Bill when I came up with my character Frank DeFauw.

But, of course, the making of fiction is something akin to that famous line from von Bismark about how laws are like sausages: “…it is better not to see them being made.”

Yes, fashioning fiction can be a messy, off-putting business. A writer takes whatever is in his/her head—every kind of experience and knowledge of every stripe, honest and true perceptions and stolen snippets of dubious hearsay, indelible memories and mis-remembered crap, sweet longings and impure thoughts, hard evidence and flights of fancy—rolls it all around in his/her imagination for a while, and if he/she has any talent, something good might come out.

For several years I worked with Bonds at Channel 7. I was never employed in the newsroom there, but I produced many documentaries and TV specials with him. I truly liked and admired Bill, and we always got along great.

Frank is not Bonds. He is like Bonds only in the same way he is like any number of somewhat larger-than-life big city TV anchors who came to fame back in the now long-lost Golden Age of local TV, including George Clooney’s dad in Cincinnati.

The genesis of The Car Bomb was a simple question: What if someone like that, someone with that kind of voice, visibility and power, suspected that one of his closest friends was corrupt? What would he do? And what would happen? From there I made everything up. And as far as I can recall, I didn’t use a single detail from anything I knew about Bonds’ personal life or his behind-the-scenes professional life, because none of that fit with the story that was unfolding in my head.

Oh, wait. I just thought of something. Both Frank and Bill like to play golf, and I gave Frank a membership at the Oakland Hills Country Club where I hope Bill continues to play. Actually, while I still consider him a good friend, I haven’t seen Bill in several years, not since we had a great time together over breakfast one morning at Birmingham’s Townsend Hotel. I’d love for us to do that again, and maybe if Bill reads The Car Bomb, he’ll remind me of something else I stole from him to make my fiction.

The post THE MAKING OF FICTION appeared first on TVLOCICERO.COM.

There’s been lots of chatter lately about the importance of populating a novel with sympathetic characters.

We’ve had advice from agents about what will entice a traditional publisher.

Editors have warned about what is or is not acceptable these days if you want to sell books.

Reviewers complain and readers fulminate about how they just couldn’t get into a particular piece of fiction, because they didn’t really care about the characters who people it. They didn’t like them, thought they were too off-putting, found them to be distasteful creatures for one reason or another.

Now no one is saying that every character in a novel needs to be a positive role model, or a hero, or have some redeeming value. Stories, after all, still seem to benefit from villains.

But the idea appears to be that unless there is at least one main character with sterling moral qualities, someone basically good, comely, admirable and in some way worthy of love, despite any little quirks or foibles, for the reader to feel attached to and to root for, there’s just no way a story is going to work, or hold the average reader’s attention.

Would-be novelists are often told to keep their readers firmly in mind, to consider carefully how their audience will think or feel about this or that. And to make it easy for writers to monitor what readers think of their concoctions, the fact is, today any reader can be a reviewer. On Amazon and many other sites, just pick the number of stars you feel like giving and jot a few words, and there you are, a published reviewer and one whose opinion can matter.

Here’s how one of my favorite book bloggers, Ms. Litlove at Tales from the Reading Room, set up the discussion recently:

“Going online to have a mooch around the reviews of a book I’d just read, I was confronted with the stark judgement that ‘the characters in this novel were not worthy of depiction’. Now it was true that these characters were not heroic, or instantly sympathetic in that button-pressing write-by-numbers sort of way. They were people who struggled with their situations and never managed to resolve them, they were people who made mistakes and who were flawed, they were people who either couldn’t shake off unhealthy obsessions or ran away from conventional happiness – but what’s all this about being ‘worthy’? Since when have we decided that characters in novels need to be moral paragons? And yet I do see this more and more in reviews I read, the endless cry for characters to be wholly, engagingly and consistently sympathetic.”

The full post with comments is here.

Now I found Ms. Litlove’s thoughts on sympathetic characters to be, as usual, shrewd, helpful and…sympathetic. And her visitors and commenters, a marvelous collection of thoughtful folks who regularly stop by her site, also had a number of interesting things to say on the subject.

But in my typically simple-minded way, I found myself wanting to reverse some terms and go at the argument from a different, perhaps more perverse angle.

First of all, the kinds of characters I invariably judge unsympathetic can be smart or stupid, sweet or sour, ugly or lovely, essentially good or often evil…well, you get the idea. What they all have in common and why I find them unsympathetic, or “not worthy of depiction” (yes, I think I’ve found a use for that strange phrase!) is this: they’re flat and unconvincing, without credible motivation or plausible action; they’re simple when they need to be complex, they’re dull and uninteresting because they don’t appear to be genuinely alive. In short, they’re not compelling because they don’t match up well with everything life has taught us about the myriad manifestations of the human animal.

A while back I mentioned somewhere that I continued writing the story in my novel The Obsession into a second book (The Disappearance) because the characters had lodged themselves in my heart. I did not mean that I loved those characters in the sense that I was sympathetic to them and their plight.

No, what makes me love the characters I create are those magical moments when they come alive and go their own way, when they surprise, puzzle and confound me. At those special times they’re full of verve and contradiction, and they’re exciting to me because they often feel so damn real. Yes, I think we need to be concerned about the commercial influence of agents, editors and readers in this new, hyper-connected world of publishing.

But to me, and I expect to any serious novelist, all that matters is not how likeable our characters are, but whether they truly live and breathe.

The post UNSYMPATHETIC CHARACTERS appeared first on TVLOCICERO.COM.

Is fiction dying? Or, in this early flowering of the ebook age, is it resurgent? You can find advocates for each position, but what continues to fascinate me are questions surrounding what each kind of narration, fiction and non-fiction, can do best.

If you’ve glanced around this site, you know I’ve written and published both fiction and non-fiction, true crime reportage, memoir, short stories and novels. So which kind of writing do I think can have the most impact on a reader’s heart and mind? What form or type has the best chance of delivering what great writing of any sort always offers: an enthralling experience—intellectual, emotional, aesthetic—that somehow imparts a new sense of how life works, the details and dimensions of the human condition, and perhaps even the secrets we keep from ourselves?

Actually, beyond these broad questions, what I’d like to try to get at here is what I’ll call the essence of fiction. What truly sets it apart from other kinds of writing, and how does story-telling in fiction differ essentially from the story-telling of narrative non-fiction? Obviously sci-fi, fantasy, etc., involve imaginative leaps that are beyond non-fiction, but if we put aside questions of genre, which fictional forms do what only fiction can do?

Let’s start with an example from fiction and one from non-fiction that might at first blush seem quite similar: a story or novel told in the first person and a memoir. In fact, if each were not identified as such, the reader might well have a difficult time deciding which was which, even though the memoir is the real life account of actual events, and first-person fiction is more or less the product of the author’s imagination.

(For the sake of moving this discussion along, let’s stick with traditional definitions and  look past my oversimplifications here: obviously the fiction writer may make liberal use of actual fact, and the memoirist, as we’ve seen too often recently, may fabricate.)

While fiction using a first person narrator might look like a memoir, it may also contain a complication all its own: that narrator just might be unreliable. No matter how much truth is being told, s/he might at any moment start coloring or stretching the “facts,” or telling outright lies.

Now, of course, the success and value of the memoir will always be measured in part by an estimation of how truthful and candid the memoirist is finally perceived to be. And the memoir can have the unassailable power of factual truth on its side. But first-person fiction with an unreliable voice can manipulate that truth, trash or splinter it, just as so often happens in the complex reality of our everyday lives, and the result can be both engrossing and enlightening.

Still, in both the memoir and first-person fiction, the reader is allowed directly inside only one character…the narrator. Yes, both fiction and non-fiction writers often come up with various devices, tricks and stunts—diaries, letters, communications of all sorts—to offer other points-of-view and give us a window on the thoughts and feelings of other characters. But none of them necessarily has the power and authority of that first-person voice.

What about fiction with a third-person narrator? There are, of course, varieties of such narrators. Some remain at a distance from their characters, looking at them only from the outside and simply reporting on the action taking place in the story. They appear to want the cloak of objectivity and neutrality, and in doing so they are more or less presenting an experience that can seem very similar to that of a piece of narrative non-fiction.

Then there is the narrator who is omniscient. Yes, all third-person narrators can be seen as all-knowing (it’s their story, after all), but there are varying degrees of omniscience, depending on how much their authors choose to go inside their characters and how readily they offer commentary and perspective as opposed to strict objectivity.

Certainly a full-blown omniscient narrator sets fiction apart, the real difference-maker being the ability to present with a special fullness and detail both the outside and the inside of the world being depicted. The outside includes the locations, settings and events that the characters find themselves in and respond to while they’re acting out their lives. And the inside refers to the interior life of those characters, their thoughts, feelings, hopes, dreams and secret urges, as they confront life’s challenges and interact with each other.

Now this kind of fiction, taking the reader inside more than one character, can be most adept at offering a glimpse of the enormous complexity of the human drama. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons why short stories and novels with a shifting POV have become so prevalent over the past several decades. Maybe the purveyors of fiction have turned to it in part because they have felt themselves under attack from those touting the power of the true, the undeniably gripping nature of the real.

The most intense and, to my mind, effective use of this shifting POV approach is what’s been called the close, or tight third person, in which the writer moves his narrator’s voice right up against a character, whose sensibility, vocabulary, intelligence and perception can then bleed right into the story. The writer/narrator might stay with that character for a few paragraphs, a few pages or a chapter or two. Then it’s on to another character for a while. Writers as diverse as Nobel laureate Saul Bellow and my favorite crime writer and friend Elmore Leonard have employed it with wit, finesse and brilliance.

With the close third method of story-telling, the narrator’s voice blends with that of the POV character, making for often subtle shifts of hue, temper and style. So in effect, the authority of the narrator is joined with the persona of the character in a narrative technique some contemporary lit scholars refer to as the “free indirect style.” This is an often loose-feeling style that lets readers inhabit two or more mind-sets at a time, thus playing to our natural fascination with the secret thoughts and motivations of others.

Something similar can be achieved with a series of first person narrators. But then the writer is mostly limited by the qualities of each narrator: his/her intelligence, memory, knowledge base, vocabulary, acuity of perception, and again, of course, reliability. Whereas, with a close third shifting POV, the reader is normally certain of reliability, and the narrator can take the story anywhere s/he pleases in time and place.

What I’ve learned in writing fiction with a close third narrator and multiple, shifting POVs (and what I hope is evident in my novels The Obsession and The Disappearance) is that there are also great opportunities to play with plot and experiment with time frame and sequence and, in doing so, to create suspense, mystery, momentary confusion and surprise—all of which, if done effectively, can be features of a compelling, page-turning narrative.

With a true crime book like Murder in the Synagogue, my treatment of what happened and when were entirely determined by the factual reality I was reporting. But in writing fiction I create the plot, and how I do it really depends on what I decide will be most revealing and most effective in telling “the truth” about my characters and my story.

Another vital factor in all of the many decisions a writer makes in the construction of every novel is how best to promote the reader’s willing suspension of disbelief, which is at the heart of every piece of successful fiction. But that’s a rich and fascinating topic for another day.

Let me finish with a quick critique of what I’ve just written: it lacks examples! As a way of rectifying this situation and keeping the discussion going, maybe some of you would like to take on the task of supplying titles that illustrate some of the different approaches to story-telling I’ve outlined here. I’ll look forward to hearing from you.

The post THE CLOSE THIRD AND THE ESSENCE OF FICTION appeared first on TVLOCICERO.COM.