.... especially if you don't know crap.
This somehow got sidetracked during Gores Month, but I think
it might still be relevant. Anyway, here goes:
I'm as big an admirer of Joe Gores as the next guy in the
line-up, but the fact remains that we care about Gores
because he's a damn good writer. Not because he was once a
P.I.
A writer's former occupational experience is vastly
over-rated, if you ask me, and certainly no guarantee of a
good -- or even authentic -- read. I've read too many novels
by real-life cops, lawyers, P.I.s and even criminals that
plain out sucked -- and often bore no more relationship to
reality than a rerun of CHARLIE'S ANGELS.
Whatever sense of "reality" Gores (or Hammett or whomever)
bestows on their fiction could just as easily be done by any
good writer with a bit of research, a dash of imagination and
empathy in spades.
Yep, those are all the qualities a good detective should have
too, but you don't have to be a detective to have them. Now,
life experience -- knowing how people think and feel and act
-- that's important. And of course professional experience is
a part of one's life experience. Still, Stephen Crane never
went to war, yet he managed to write a pretty damn good book
about it, I hear.
Simply having done a job doesn't necessarily mean you
understand it. It's why a writer's professional experience
(and the ensuing puffery so beloved of publicists) is a big
yawn to me. "Write what you know" is an odious piece of
advice, and offensively limiting. It's fine, as far as it
goes, but "Write not just what you know, but what you can
feel, think and imagine" would be far better advice.
Alas, too many would-be writers can't feel, think or imagine
worth a damn. It's why so much "literary" fiction centers on
self-centered writers and their mountains-out-of-molehills
creative angst and petty mid-life crises. Oh, gee, a
struggling writer has an affair with a sexy young co-ed and
an existentialist crisis?
Gee, I never read that one before...and they call mysteries
"genre" fiction.
Kevin Burton Smith The Thrilling Detective Web Site 1998-2008
10 Years of P.I. Thrills
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 28 Feb 2008 EST