HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: One of MY favorite writerly things? I could list them, and will. But topping my
list? Rachel Howzell Hall. (Although she’s less a “thing” and more a “force of
nature.”) (And see below--you could win her book!)
A Few of My Favorite (Writerly) Things
It’s so easy to be
negative. And really, I like
negative—I’m a crime writer living in Los Angeles Can’t get more ‘abandon hope
all ye enter’ than that. And also, 2016 will go down as a year that has sucked
in so many ways. From politics (talk about abandoning hope) to untimely deaths
(Prince and Bowie? Take your drunk
behind home, 2016, cuz we’re done with you running over our heroes), from
cataclysmic storms to the helium shortage, there’s so many opportunities to be
an Eeyore.
Books, though? Books
remain bright spots for me. And so, I shall switch things up and look for the
positive. Herewith are a few of my
favorite writing things:
Someone to Root For
The world loves a
square-jawed hero and a beautiful heroine who knows the Pythagorean Theorem,
rescues poodles and orphans while saving the world from fascist sea-otter
killers. But if you’re like me and have more than 27 pages of book titles on
your Kindle alone, do you want to
read about their perfection every day? I don’t. Nor do I want to always read
about the lone detective who always goes off the grid, always gets the girl,
always drinks whiskey and always listens to jazz.
When I developed LAPD Detective
Elouise ‘Lou’ Norton, I wanted her to win and
to lose, to be adept and clumsy, to follow the rules and still get in trouble. I wanted to see me in the story, and I wanted to wonder what I would do in that situation?
Right now, I’m reading
Road Out of Hell by Anthony Flacco
about serial killer Gordon Stewart
Northcott murdering people at his chicken ranch outside of Los Angeles while
also holding his nephew Sanford Clark captive. It is one of the most
horrific… Every page, I hold my breath and will Sanford to run away, I want him, need him to survive. I want
the happy ending—and I normally hate
happy endings. That’s because the Flacco makes me care so much about Sanford.
In TRAIL OF ECHOES, I
want you to root for Lou, to root for the girls, in such hopeless conditions.
During Chanita Lords’ investigation, Lou visits her old middle school:
Tori
had been missing during my time at this school, and now, standing here, my
hands cramped from remembering the journaling, the crying and the not crying,
the numbness . . . I didn’t want to be at Madison. And as Colin and I walked
those corridors, grief crushed my heart like it had so many years ago.
New Places within the Old
New York is a great
city. But Manhattan can’t be the only place in the world for mystery, can it? Los
Angeles is a great city—more than Hollywood and Beverly Hills. Almost four
million people populate the city alone.
That means almost four million different stories spread out over 503 square
miles. Attica Locke gave me Houston in Pleasantville and Black Water Rising.
M.P. Cooley took me to upstate New York in her June Lyons series.
In the Lou Norton
series, I offer you Los Angeles south of the 10 freeway, south of Hollywood. A
world of never-ending fish-fry and barbecue joints, churches and barber shops,
beauty supply and liquor stores. Black wealth and black poverty within a mile
of each other. In TRAIL OF ECHOES, a Second Line jazz funeral takes place in
the middle of this part of this city.
After
five minutes of weaving in and out for nearly three blocks, and with Angeles
Funeral Home now in sight, I worked my way to the sidewalk. Almost every face
was partially hidden by hats, umbrellas, and handkerchiefs. People crowding the
street. Brass band playing. Mourners singing and shouting. Brass bells tinkling
from push- cart ice- cream vendors.
This random thing really happened in Los Angeles. Seriously:
You can’t pin this city down.
Great Language
Style: not everyone
has it. Some writers consider style to be lists—descriptions of clothes that go
on and on and your eyes blur and you start skipping around the page because you
just don’t care and then, you die.
And then some writers use
words that make you want to read over and over again, and you wish that you had written that. You say, “She had
fun performing that trick. Sat back and nodded, said, yeah, that’s it.’” In
TRAIL OF ECHOES, one of my favorite passages to write was:
Optimism.
For cutters like Brooks and murder police like me, optimism was a condition as
rare as hens’ teeth. Happy endings? What
were those? If I was standing anywhere near you that meant shit had just gone
left, your life had changed forever, and there’d be no happy ending.
I loved writing (then
re-writing) that passage. See, there’s a contract between me (the reader) and
the author. You, Author, will tell me a story. It will be a good story. It will
make me laugh. It will make me cry. I will shout, ‘Amen’ and ‘Gurl, don’t open
that door cuz HE’S IN THE HOUSE!’ At the end, I will sigh and say, “That was
good for me, was that good for you?” And then, I will buy your next book. I want to buy your next book. Help me buy
your next book. Talk pretty to me.
A Mission
I’m not saying that
good books must preach. In my opinion, good books present a problem and enlist
me [the reader] to journey beside the heroine to solve the problem. In Gone Girl, we considered domestic abuse
and false reporting. In All the Light We
Cannot See, we had to reconcile the goodness of a young boy on the wrong
side of World War II. Tell me what you believe, what’s bothering you, what you
want me to reconsider. Everyone’s a hero in her own story. Everyone’s a villain
in someone else’s story. Make me pick the side I thought I hated.
In TRAIL OF ECHOES,
Lou deals with the sexualization of girls, missing fathers, bullies,
gentrification and much more. At the start of the investigation, her partner
Colin Taggert mentions that a girl had been found murdered in the park. Lou’s
response:
Just
last week, over in Inglewood, a teen girl had been abducted from her driveway;
and in Gardena, another teen had been kidnapped by her stepfather. And then
there was Trina Porter, the fourteen- year- old stolen earlier this month from
a bookstore near my old neighborhood. We had no clue where Trina was or if she
was even alive. So again: which girl?
Her mission: winnow
down the list of possible dead teenaged Jane Does. And wonder why so many dead
teenaged Jane Does. Throw in race and class, and she now has a problem bigger
than this one case.
I like caring about
the people in books. I enjoy language that makes me forget that I’m reading. I
appreciate new settings and reasons to care. These are a few of my favorite
things.
What are yours? (Rachel will award TRAIL OF ECHOES to one lucky commenter!)
HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: I have to go back and read this again. It's SUCH a treat. Okay, yeah. All this. And when something isn't what it seems. When you find exactly the right word. When the metaphor creates itself. (Oh--that's META!) When you have the bad guy there all the time--and even you, the author, doesn't see him. (or her.) When you read something and think--oh, I NEVER would have thought of that. Or--when you think of it first.
How about you, Reds?
*****************************************
Trail
of Echoes is the third novel in the acclaimed Detective Elouise ‘Lou’ Norton
series by Rachel Howzell Hall
RACHEL HOWZELL HALL is the author of the Detective Elouise Norton series. The
third novel in the series, Trail of Echoes, will be published this May. Land of
Shadows and Skies of Ash
(Forge) were included on the Los Angeles Times’ “Books to Read This Summer” for
2014 and 2015, and the New York Times called Lou Norton “a formidable
fighter—someone you want on your side.” A featured writer on NPR’s
acclaimed ‘Crime in the City’ series, Rachel also served as a mentor in AWP’s
Writer to Writer Program and is currently a member of the Mystery Writers
of America. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and daughter.
