Crime Plus Music

LUCY BURDETTE: If you love music, and you love the dark side of crime fiction, you will love today's post from Red friend Naomi Rand. She's introducing a new anthology called CRIME PLUS MUSIC. I'll let her tell it...welcome Naomi!

 NAOMI RAND: People love to say that modern life comes complete with its own soundtrack.  The same goes for the twenty stories in a new collection, CRIME PLUS MUSIC out this week from Three Rooms Press. The book, edited by mystery writer and Wall Street Journal music reviewer Jim Fusilli has gotten great pre-pub reviews. We talked to Jim and four of the twenty contributors, David Liss, Naomi Rand, Alison Gaylin and Gary Phillips.

Why the mix of music and crime, Jim? 

JIM FUSILLI: I had been thinking about doing a short-story collection of my own on the theme.  I’ve done a few stories for other anthologies, and I had the sections on the “Sinatra” character in my novel “Narrows Gate,” which was set in the war years, so I thought I could cover a lot of ground and a lot of different kinds of music.  But I realized it would be a fun project if I asked writers who I knew loved music to participate.  I knew it would be a more diverse collection than if I did it on my own.  It would be more fun for readers.

LUCY: Naomi, your story is about sexual assault. Is there a reason you chose this theme?   

NAOMI: Growing up in New York City when I did, you had to learn pretty early to deal with the way strange men interacted with you. Catcalls were really the least of it. I developed a definite attitude in order to defend myself from harassment. Not that it always worked. It’s a theme that resonates with me. So much so, in fact, that it’s central to my new stand-alone mystery, Girl Out of Time. As for the story I wrote, The Misfits, when Jim asked me to be part of the collection I thought of an excellent piece by Jason Cherkis that was written for HuffPost. It’s about Jackie Fox who was in the Runaways. She was sexually assaulted by their manager, raped in public and then had to leave the band. There were all sorts of stories told about it at the time, but now the truth has finally come out. I took that as the jumping off point. I will say that the beauty of writing it as fiction is that I got to write the ending my way.

NAOMI: David, your main character gains surprising strength from listening to music. It’s a bit of a Jekyll and Hyde story. Is that what you see music doing, changing the listener in some basic way?

DAVID LISS: I'd say that our identification with music can sharpen our emotions or resolve.  I think this is especially true for younger people, who often feel like songs are directly "speaking" to them, but to some degree, that capacity to identify with a song or songs never really goes away.  Of course, you can argue that the same can be said for books, film, the visual arts, but unlike other media, music is both external and deeply personal.   The ambiguity of lyrics and the unquantifiable emotional impact of tune and instrumentation and arrangement all allow for much more interpretation.  So, in my story, I don't think that the music pushes my character in any direction, so much as he draws strength and determination from a song that he feels mirrors his psychological state.

NAOMI: Gary, your story is a surreal trip down memory lane that features a reckoning with your main character’s past. You chose to write from the point of view of a musician, can you talk about that, and what led you to take him on that particular journey? 

GARY PHILLIPS: The musician in my story, Church Gibson, is inspired by the late Rick James, the King of Funk. Here was a cat who started out to be the next Hendrix and had finger-popping songs topping the charts and headlining arenas. As is too often the case in such lives, he couldn’t escape his demons, his excesses.  Not only did he have a stroke, not helped by the copious amounts of cocaine he abused, but he’d also done time for, a la Misery, imprisoning and beating a woman in his Hollywood Hills pad.  Who better then to model a very flawed individual with regrets and this soundtrack he’s been hired to compose is a way for him to redeem himself?

NAOMI: Allison, your story features the punk scene, specifically the band X which was/is fronted by a strong woman lead singer. Considering the theme of the story, it definitely resonates. Tell us a little more about that.

ALISON GAYLIN: I've been a fan of X ever since I was a teenager, and one of the big things that resonated with me about the band back then was Exene Cervenka -- she was so tough and cool in a way that many female 80s pop stars weren't. She had this wonderful brassy voice and I loved the way she harmonized with John Doe, and they both were such great writers. Their lyrics are incredible. The song mentioned in my short story, Johnny Hit and Run Paulene, is about a man who begins attacking women after taking a drug that makes him need to have sex every hour on the hour. It's an incredibly disturbing and upsetting song and, I thought, a great basis for a female revenge story.

NAOMI: Music is a big part of many people’s lives. How about you? Do you have your own personal playlist? Has music ever led you to discover something unexpected in yourself?

Crime Plus Music’s  line-up includes a stellar cast of mystery writers, among them Val McDermid, Peter Blauner, and Erica Wright. And there are contributors who have deep roots in the world of pop music, Galadrielle Allman, (Duane’s daughter), and Willy Vlautin (who fronts the band Richmond Fontaine.)

YOU MUST REMEMBER THIS…

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN:
What was I supposed to do again?

I have lists, I have lists of lists, I have Siri, I have three, count 'em, three calendars.

And yet, and still, I always have this vague disturbing feeling that I've forgotten something.








I remember, I know I do, that I used to be able to remember stuff. One thing I do recall--when I first met Alison Gaylin, at Thrillerfest in New York-she was surrounded by a group of laughing people. I thought--wow. That woman has FRIENDS. And they all seem to be so amused about something! At least, they were all smiling and patting Alison on the back and generally being supportive and affectionate.

I found out later they'd all been at a restaurant, and some stranger had--remember, Alison?-- thrown up on Alison's shoes.

I'd be just as happy to forget that. And I bet Alison would too.

But memory is on Alison's mind a lot these days--her brand new novel of suspense AND SHE WAS--explores what it would be like if...

...well, let Alison explain.

YOU MUST REMEMBER THIS…

By Alison Gaylin

Perfect autobiographical memory. I have to say, the idea of it alone is enough to send someone like me, who has a pretty good -- okay probably too good of a memory of certain events in my life -- into a quivering panic. I first heard about this very real condition – the technical term for it is hyperthymesia -- around five years ago, from a magazine article my husband showed me. The article detailed a man who remembered every single day of his life from start to finish, in perfect detail and with all five senses.

“Could you imagine?” my husband said, his mind going to spy movie plots in which pages of complex codes could be read once by this guy and stored in his mind forever.

“No,” I replied. “I couldn’t imagine.” Because I, on the other hand, was thinking about that time in fifth grade when I ripped my pants. Would I really want to relive, with all five senses, the moment of choosing the ill-fated pants, without being able to stop it? Would I want the shriek of ripping cloth in my ears, the feel of cool air where it shouldn’t have been, the heat in my face, the peels of my classmates’ laughter… Would I want that happening all over again?

And that’s just one of many things I’ve experienced in my life that makes me so grateful, every day, for my ability to forget.

Here’s my theory: As we age, memories shift and shuffle in our minds, kind of like clothes in a washing machine. Some retain most of their color, while others fade and fray – and believe me, that’s good. Our fallible minds give us that aptly named thing called perspective -- the ability to keep the past in its place and move on from sad or embarrassing experiences. Right? If you don’t believe me, just ask the Men in Black.

There are, of course, plusses to having perfect autobiographical memory. You’d win most arguments, you probably wouldn’t misplace your keys, you’d be very well-suited for certain jobs (journalist, lawyer, private investigator… Marilu Henner is hyperthymestic, and I’m sure it served her well as an actress, too. )

But none of that appeals to me, though. If I had to relive, say, recovering from wisdom tooth surgery in exchange for always remembering where I put my keys well, I’d rather go key-free.

Still, the appeal of perfect memory is not lost on me, and there’s one positive aspect that I find too powerful to resist. I thought about this too after reading that article – and ultimately, it was why I decided to make my new series protagonist, Brenna Spector, hyperthymestic.

I would love to be able to close my eyes and fully remember one of the Dodgers games my dad and I used to go to – down to the taste of the hot dogs and the specific shouts of the crowd, the feel of the bleachers under my legs and the sun on my face, to my dad’s patient smile as he taught me how to fill out the scorebook, his eyes aimed at the field. More than anything, I would love to experience that wonderful safe feeling I had as a kid but took for granted – the feeling of everyone I ever loved still being alive.

My dad died ten years ago, and if I could spend one more day with him, even if it was just in my mind, I’d go through most anything for that.

Even ripping my pants. Again.

HANK: So, Reds, how's your memory these days? (Have you heard of any ways to make it better? Love to hear 'em...) Would you like to have perfect recall? Like Alison's baseball games, what do you remember that you know you can't really remember? What would you like to have back?

****************************

Alison Gaylin’s book AND SHE WAS (Harper) is the first in a new series featuring Brenna Spector – a missing persons investigator blessed, and cursed, with perfect autobiographical memory.

(Mary Lou Henner is one – check out this 1992 exercise video. Sixteen seconds in, she remembers the exact date – and day – that she came up with her workout routine! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mojyHlhyyRU) shuffling in our minds as we age with certain events taking precedence over others, which fade and soften and disappear completely. It’s how we get that aptly-named perspective and move on.