> To answer your question, I wasn't crazy about the
multiple viewpoints in
Cassandra in Red. I prefer a straightforward single point of
view throughout a novel. However, the book was very well
structured, with Dan Fortune's narrative interrupted by
alternate chapters giving background on the various
characters. I can see that this technique, which I understand
was your innovation, served the very useful purpose of
presenting information and developing characters to an extent
that wouldn't have been possible (in the same space) had
Fortune had to go dig it all up.
What I was after were ways to make
the characters both deeper and broader than is possible in
the standard detective novel, point up the theme more
forcefully, and especially avoid the mind-numbing endless
series of interviews that constitute most detective novels. I
tried to use techniques that are more common in more cutting
edge mainstream fiction. In most of these set pieces the
intention is to turn the wordy and passive interview into an
action story all its own that reveals both facts and
character without showing the detective doing the tedious
interviews to gather all the information revealed in the set
piece. If you look carefully you'll realize that most of
these scenes are actually stand-alone short stories. My
design was to suggest these scenes were Dan himself speaking,
and if you take a close look at them you'll find they are
very much in Dan's voice. A few in other novels are Dan
telling a seemingly unrelated story that emphasizes the theme
of the book and the attitudes of various characters, again in
Dan's voice. In Cassandra In Red there is one section that is
purely in Dan's imagination, and one reader particularly
liked that section. Anyway, I can't remain static in my
writing, and I felt and still freel the average mystery novel
is in paralytic rut. (Oddly, experiment began with the
invention of the hardboiled form---Hammett's extremely
distant third person narration in Maltese Falcon, almost a
camera-eye narration---but seems to have been lost with the
exception of a writer here and there such as Jim
Ellroy.)
> One of the things I found interesting about Cadillac
Cowboy was the way
the heavy turned out to be a rather sympathetic character,
and the fairly colourless woman with whom Morgan was
instantly infatuated wound up the opposite of the way she
started.
That's what writing is all about,
isn't it? Doing the unexpected, making you think. The
colorless woman is that way because she has a colorless life
she is struggling to escape without actually knowing it. It
takes Dan and the cowboy to make her realize she wants and
needs "life" in her life. That it is better to "live" than
exist, no matter how briefly.
>
> My question about protagonists wasn't very clear. I
really just meant,
when you first come up with a certain storyline or theme, do
you immediately think of it as best suited to a particular
one of your established characters? On rereading your answer,
I see you generally start with the need to write a book
featuring a certain character and go from there. So I guess I
wonder whether you sometimes have to save ideas for the next
instalment in another series because they just don't seem to
fit the series you're working on. Having only read one book
in each of two series, I don't know how all your series are
distinguished thematically.
>
> Yes, I have saved stories for specific protagonists,
especially in the
Buena Costa County series. As for thematic differences in my
various series, there is some, but probably not a lot. They
are all my books, so my themes occur in all.
Dennis-Michael
>
>
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