The LadyKillers

Too Dark? Too Light?

By Margaret Lucke

I read a wide range of crime fiction, and usually I love a dark story. Yet recently I reached the halfway point in a suspense novel I was reading and decided I'd had enough (though I confess that I peeked at the ending).

This book was an Edgar nominee for the year it came out and it had come recommended by a friend whose judgment I trust. The story involved a family being held hostage in their home by two intruders, who were unknown to the family members but clearly had some connection to events in their past. Who were they? Why were they there? What did they want? How would the family escape from this dire situation?

The plot was intriguing, the characters well drawn, and the writing style smooth and engaging. The problem for me was that while I was reading, the words "torture porn" kept looping through my head. The agony being inflicted on the family members was described in detail. More than that -- it was lovingly depicted in excruciating, unnecessary detail.

When I read a novel, I like to share the experience of the characters. To me, that's the point of reading fiction, and it's a goal I try to accomplish for my readers in the books that I write. But this was not an experience I wanted or needed to endure.

Can a book be too dark? That one was, at least for me.

I've also put aside books that were too light. I recall a cozy whose opening scene had the protagonist walking through a park. She stumbles on the body of a young woman, someone she knows. She calls the police, who talk to our heroine and begin their investigation. That night, in chapter two, our heroine tells her husband what happened. "Just think," she says, clapping her hands with excitement, "we have our very own murder mystery right here in our little town." (I'm paraphrasing here.)

No. To me, that reaction was all wrong. The day you come across a dead body is not a good day. Rather than respond with glee at the chance to solve a real-life mystery, someone who isn't professionally involved in law enforcement is likely to go to bed, pull the covers over her head, and quiver. She might well have a strong desire to find the killer, but she wouldn't think of the quest as entertainment.

I didn't get past that second chapter, and I've not been tempted to read anything else in that particular series.

I've realized that what matters to me as a reader, and as a writer, is getting the emotions right. This applies to both characters and authors.

How would this character feel when confronted with this situation? How would those feelings drive his or her actions?  

Does this author understand and respect the gravity of the impact that violence has on people? Or is he or she using violence to shock and titillate?

Too often, books at both the darkest and lightest ends of the spectrum of crime fiction get the emotions wrong. At least they seem wrong to me. And that's when I quit reading.

How Dark is too Dark?

I’m not sure what makes a book dark, but it does seem to vary with trends. Right now it appears to be warfare, like The Hunger Games. How about To Kill a Mockingbird (cruelty and kindness) or Macbeth (self destruction)? Is it the purpose of books to explore life and death, vampires, or suicide and self-mutilation? This is dark, dark stuff. So dark that kidnapping, incest, and brutal beatings are now just part of things in novels, even for children from the ages of 12 to about 18.

Forty or so years ago, the darker than dark subjects were cautiously outlined but are now spelled out in stomach-clenching detail. Profanity that would get a song or movie branded with a parental warning is, in young-adult novels, so commonplace that most reviewers do not even remark upon it. The 1960s changed everything. Dark topics, like drug addiction, rape, prostitution, and a fatal overdose surged onto children's bookshelves.

I wonder if teens are drawn into the darker stuff because they are statistically more likely to come into harm’s way and witness harm among their peers. They would be more likely to gravitate to books about what they are experiencing. Books can help show a way out of difficult times and find the help they need . . .  or save a life.

 

Into the dark and back into the light

Ann Parker here, flying in late on her Tuesday (it's Tuesday already??? Really???) on the topic of "how dark is too dark?" regarding fiction.

I don't know if I can add much to Michael Black's very thoughtful post of yesterday. As a police officer, he's seen the dark and violent side of reality way more than most of us.

Looked through a certain (dark) glass, the world is an unjust, violent place, full of cruelty and just downright depressing. Perusing dark fiction might help a reader "tame" this viewpoint: When put on the printed page, cruelty and violence is distanced from the real thing and safely contained within ink and paper (or, if on an ereader, in e-ink and a screen). Too, most crime fiction provides some kind of closure and justice (not all stories do this, but most do).

As for myself, I can't read too dark. I don't mind stories with morally-ambiguous protagonists, and in fact find them interesting. Thus, traditional noir, with its dark views of life, I can handle. However, story-telling that involves enthusiastic descriptions of deep violence and details of torture are enough for me to do a little violence myself by tossing said books to the ground or swiping the electronic files straight into the electronic trash or into my e-file labelled "Yuck" on my ereader.

Walking down those dark, mean streets. From the 1955 noir film, "The Big Combo."

But to each their own. Obviously there is a need, an appetite for this kind of crime fiction, just as there is an equally voracious appetite for crime fiction featuring fluffy cats, doughnuts, cozy coffee klatches, and crimes tucked safely off-screen and only referred to obliquely, as well as everything between the two ends of the spectrum.

So, dark, light, or grey... there is something for every reader to read and something that every writer can write.

How lucky we are!

--> NOTE: LOOKING FOR RECOMMENDATIONS OF NOIR (AND OTHER) FILMS

My Netflix queue is empty! The horror of it all! If you have suggestions for some good crime fiction films (old, new, noir or not), please leave a comment and I'll add it to my list. Thank you!

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How Dark Is Too Dark? by Michael A. Black

How dark is too dark? Good question.

I guess it depends on your point of view. Having seen way too much of the dark side of real life, I tend to be more attracted to the light. Some writers unfortunately go for the shock effect by depicting what they think is a dark, violent scene, or by portraying some totally dark protagonist in a new and innovative way. To me, this is unfortunate because it often sets a bad and unrealistic example, and portrays violence and cruelty in an almost attractive manner. The real truth is a lot uglier than the things they depict in their writing, and there are real consequences that they seldom, if ever, touch upon. Thus, people get the idea that violence and killers aren’t really so bad after all. Take it from me, they are.

I’ve often been asked if I use any of my real life experiences or cases that I’ve worked in my writing. I’m quick to tell people that while I try to make my writing realistic, I have too much respect for the victims and their families to ever take something and directly put it as part of a work of fiction. While I do base my writing on things that I have experienced, I’m extremely careful to thoroughly change and fictionalize any similar situations I might put in my fiction. For me, using real life stuff is too dark.

That’s one reason why I could never write a true crime book. Describing a real crime, in which a person was brutally killed, has got to be disturbing for the loved ones of that victim. Our society seems to be preoccupied with focusing on the accused, at the expense of the victims and their families. Even putting fictionalized instances into my novels can sometimes be problematic.

Years ago, I completed the first draft a novel, Hostile Takeovers, in which an ex-partner of one of my main police characters takes his own life. At the time, I thought it touched upon a real dilemma for those of us in police work. To be brutally honest, it also added more conflict and drama to my novel, and was satisfied with the way I handled it. Then reality reared its ugly head. My ex-partner on the PD committed suicide. It came out of the blue, and hit me like a wrecking ball out of nowhere. I later realized I was most likely the last person to talk to him. It was midnight shift, and I’d gone down to the locker room to see how he was doing. I knew he was going through a rough time, but he seemed almost upbeat, and assured me that everything was all right. I left to go out on the street. When I returned to the station about an hour later, I found his leather jacket lying in the stairwell, his badge still attached. I picked it up and put it in the sergeant’s office, thinking it was strange. I was worried, and made a mental note to check on him. Later, I got the news. I did some research on suicide, and realized I’d missed some of the signals. I thought long and hard about taking out that section about the police officer’s suicide in my yet unpublished novel. I reread it and ultimately decided to leave it in, thinking that maybe it would help point out the dark side of this often unmentioned problem. I also wrote an article about suicide prevention for a police magazine.

That said, I try to stay away from glorifying violence and portraying evil in an attractive way. Now I do write action-filled thrillers in the Executioner series under the name Don Pendleton. The protagonist, Mack Bolan, started out as an urban vigilante, and morphed into the American James Bond over the years. He has no compunction about killing the bad guys, and the books do feature a lot of violent encounters. Bolan does operate under a code of behavior, however, and is never cruel or sadistic. The bad guys in my books are sometimes very bad, and a few are unredeemable, but they’re never portrayed in a positive light. In other words, even though I try to make the villains three dimensional and not totally depraved, they are hardly portrayed as heroic or deserving of emulation. That isn’t always the case in the quest to create a trendy bestseller.

A few years ago an author hit the jackpot with a series of novels with a serial killer protagonist, which subsequently became a successful television series. For me, this was stepping over way over the line in the most despicable manner. Serial killers are sociopathic individuals and certainly not heroic in any sense of the world. I’ve dealt with this type of evil in real life, and believe me, these killers are not worthy of adulation. They’re anything but heroic. I suppose the lionization of these heinous miscreants is in keeping with the long continuum of amelioration that seems to be prevalent in our society. I don’t think fiction should ever seek to glorify violence, and the consequences of this violence should be shown. All too often, the effect on the victims is never portrayed. Try watching the taped interviews with convicted serial killer, Henry Lee Lucas, who describes killing a woman for no reason other than she was there. Take a look at Ted Bundy’s mischievous grin as the jury comes back before delivering their verdict. Notice how he tried to escape his date with the executioner by offering to lead the authorities to the bodies of several young women he’d killed and buried. These two creeps didn’t look so heroic.

So, if anything could be considered “too dark” for me, it would be the unrealistic depiction of gratuitous violence, and the positive portrayal or glorification of reprehensible individuals, like serial killers.

News and Next Week: How Dark is Too Dark?

• Michael A. Black appeared at the Printers Row Lit Fest in Chicago on Saturday. 
• Priscilla Royal joined other San Francisco Bay Area writers at Copperfields Book Store in Santa Rosa on Saturday. She read from her latest work, Land of Shadows, in the Sisters in Crime Author Showcase.

 

Alum Rita Lakin (left) and Priscilla Royal at the reading

Next Week: How Dark is Too Dark?

The question of dark vs. light is important to readers and writers alike. Does each generation go farther into the darkness, or does the dark/light pendulum swing back and forth? Why does a person prefer one over the other, and does that preference stay across the course of one's life? Join us next week as we explore the question, how dark is too dark?
 

 

 

A Good Book is a Good Book

I really have no preference when it comes to reading a standalone book or one in a series. If a book is good, I’ll want to read it. And if an author is good, I’ll read all their books, even if there are no recurring characters in them. Frankly, I just like to read.

As for whether or not I read a series from the very first book, it depends. If someone raves about a series and I’ve never read anything by that author, I’ll make a point of seeking out the first book, as I did with Elizabeth Peters and her Amelia Peabody series. If, however, I happen to be at the bookstore and a book catches my eye, I’ll buy it right then and there, regardless of whether it’s the first in the series or the tenth. That’s what happened with Janet Evanovich and her Stephanie Plum series. I liked the one I found in a bookstore (I think it was the fourth or fifth in the series), so I went back and read the others. And if I don’t like a book that is part of a series, then I know I can skip the rest.

As I’ve already mentioned, I’m also happy reading standalone books. I’m always thrilled when I enjoy a book and discover the author has several others already out. Stephen King is a great example. He’s written dozens of books with very few containing repeat characters, but I still read them. And knowing that when I finish one, there are still plenty more left to read makes me downright giddy.

I hate that feeling when I’ve read every book by an author I enjoy and there are no new books on the horizon. I have to remind myself that with so many great books out there, I’m bound to find another author I like soon. And with any luck, they’ll have plenty of books already published, just waiting for me to discover.

Series and Standalones, and Math

I suffer from a horrible case of the literals. I'd like to blame my day job as a software technical writer, but I'm pretty sure it's in my DNA. So when the question arises "do you read more series or standalones," the obvious answer is series. If I find one author I love, and he or she has written a series, they likely have more books than an author who writes only standalones. So there will be more for me to read.

Just as it takes an author a long time to create a whole world, characters who are unique and uniquely fascinating, and dilemmas that pull us to the edge of our seats as we read, it takes a reader a long time to sort through the hundreds of thousands of books published every year to find a style and voice that speaks to him or her. For example, the movie Mystic River led me to the book, better even than the movie. That standalone led me to look for Dennis Lehane's other books. He wrote a detective series which I loved. For some reason, his other stand alone books haven't called to me as strongly. 

On the other hand, as a youngster I breathed in each standalone novel by Dashiell Hammett, and still feel the heartbreak of discovering there were no more. (Do the Continental Op stories count as series?)

So, statistically speaking, given an author, I've likely read more of his or her series works than standalones, because there probably are more to read (Hammett notwithstanding). But I don't go looking only for series or standalone. The merits of the book, author, or series stand...alone.

Do You Read More Series or Standalones?

I’m primarily a series person.

A series isn’t always chronological or intended to go on ad infinitum. The Georges Simenon Maigret mysteries were not written in any kind of chronological order, and his fans never cared. Per Wahloo and Maj Sjowall wrote their Martin Beck series (properly called The Story of a Crime) with each book functioning like a chapter in the overall, limited length work. But one of the major pleasures of a series can be found in both, as well as those like Donna Leon’s Brunetti books that are now on their 25^th outing or Peter Robinson’s Banks in his 23^rd swimming slowly across the pond to the US in October.

Character rules.

But it rules in different ways.

The Simenon books represent a satisfying series for its time. The novels are really one-offs with the unifying character of Maigret. Each book is populated by a chaotic hodgepodge of people from every social class and many vocations. The appeal, apart from amazing craft, is the detective’s steadfast, absolutely unchanging character. Simenon’s world began with the horror of trench warfare in WWI and was bisected by WWII where rampant insanity took power and almost destroyed the western world. In that environment, and in perhaps our turbulent era as well, it is soothing to read how the unswervingly decent Maigret overcomes chaos and restores order. Simenon wrote 75 Maigret novels and 28 short stories. I have yet to find one that bored me.

In the Robinson series, character becomes important in a different way. Growth in the main characters, and principle secondary ones, is taken slowly. They become friends to us and, like friends, we enjoy growing older with them. We care about Banks’ former lovers, especially Annie, and the lives/careers of his children. We worry along with him about the inevitability of retirement and how he will cope. What music is he listening to now and why? This kind of lengthy series is hard to pace. Most die long after author, and thus reader, boredom dictates a decent burial should take place. Vitality requires, in part, publisher permission to inch along over time, a concept not currently trendy and hard to achieve. Robinson manages, and his methods are worth studying.

So if series are so varied, why do I usually choose them over standalones? Because I find the stubborn whack-a-mole Maigret soothing in a world where the barbarians seem to be constantly at the gate. And I love long series with evolving characters because good friends, fictional and otherwise, are just special.

The Book Stands Alone

 

The photograph illustrates my theory: Every book is a standalone.

I've never understood the need to read book one of a "series" first, and then in order. I imagine these readers at a party, being introduced to someone new, hitting it off.

"Let's be friends," the new person says.

"Sorry," says the in-order reader. "We can't be friends because I didn't know you as an infant."

The way it usually works in real-life friendship is that you can start a friendship at any age, with people of any age. As the relationship grows, each person's backstory is revealed, not necessary in chronological order. It's the same for me with characters in a book. If I happen upon book four of a series and it looks interesting, I'll read it, then decide if I want to know more about the protagonist, in which case, I'll pick up either earlier or later books, depending on what's available.

Of course, it's different for a trilogy or other format where the story is set up in a certain order.

It's also different for tv shows, where it's sometimes impossible to understand an episode unless you've seen the "previously on"s.

But each book in a mystery series should stand on its own, with understandable characters and a story that has a satisfying conclusion. If you've started with book five of a series and have no idea about the motivation of a character, or if you feel you're missing something, it's the author's fault. Every book should be a standalone.

News and Next Week: What Do You Read More Often: Series or Standalone?

NEWS

Ann Parker is in NYC with family, indulging in ice cream for dinner and occasional pilgrimages to the venerable NYPL on 42nd Street--- all hail Patience and Fortitude!

 

There's one whole day left at the Bay Area Book Festival in Berkeley. You can find at least a few LadyKillers, current and alum, wandering around the MWA and Sisters in Crime booths. To check it all out, head for downtown Berkeley and look for Writers Row. 

Next Week: Which Do You Read More Often: Series or Standalone?

Series and standalone stories each offer their own unique pleasures and sorrows. You might fall in love with a series character just when the author has sent her over the modern day equivalent of Reichenbach Falls, or taken her in a direction you never signed up for. And what about those beloved sidekicks, killed for drama? Or maybe you hoped that hero would marry/never marry, have kids/stay childless adopt a pet, or quit drinking. Meanwhile, standalone books give you that delicious sense of a journey completed--but what if you hate the next story premise the author concocts.

For writers, series problems can be many: tracking all the data related to ten books (how many gigabytes does Sue Grafton need?), keeping characters fresh and interesting, finding new ways to thwart and challenge a series hero whose skin might be a mass of scar tissue by book seven.  Standalones require a whole new world be created every time--and there's no telling if your audience will pivot to the new world!

Join us next week as chat as readers and writers about the choice between series and standalone books--and in the end, which we prefer. If you can in fact choose between champagne and chocolate.