Cozy or Noir?

RHYS BOWEN:

I’ve just been working on a Christmas short story (or rather very long story) for my Amazon publisher. And my editor suggested that she wanted a happy ending. It was Christmas. People expected happy endings. And I? I didn’t want to make it into a Hallmark movie in which everyone sits around the fire smiling with love on their faces and gratitude that the whole family is together, returned from Iraq and from fighting Ebola and from battling a rare disease to be in the beloved living room of the crusty patriarch who had formerly driven them away.

Actually that wasn’t my story at all. I can’t tell you the details but my two main characters are both offered what they really want for Christmas and both have the strength to reject it, realizing that what they really want and need is each other. For me that was satisfying enough, but I have conceded to make it a little more heartwarming without being schmaltzy.

So this caused me to examine the books I read and enjoy and yes, it’s true. I do like a happy ending. It doesn’t have to have a Disney conclusion with the bells ringing out and the fawns and rabbits dancing for joy as the happy couple go off to live happily ever after, but I do like to feel myself smiling as I close the book. It can be bitter-sweet. A beloved character can have died. But I want to feel satisfied. 

That’s why I’ve never been a fan of noir. Too often a crime is solved but you know for the characters there will still be no peace in their souls.

I suppose that’s why some of us are cozy writers and others are noir writers: it all comes down to the way we see the universe. I write a universe that is essentially a good safe place but is fractured by a violent crime. My sleuth’s task is to make that universe whole again.

For the noir writer the universe is a place of chaos. When one small part of it is healed through the solving of a murder it remains an unsafe place. I don’t want to live in that universe. I want my world populated with people who are essentially good. Who maybe commit a crime because they have been pushed to breaking point. And I want it to end in a satisfactory way. Justice being served. Broken lives healed. This must mean I’m an optimist, right?

 When I started writing mysteries I got all these reviews that said “This charming book. This delightful story. This charming and delightful series….” And I wanted to be taken seriously so I said to my editor, “In my next book there will be cannibalism, Satanism and strewn body parts.” And she said, “And I bet they will be charming and delightful body parts too.”

You can’t fight it. Your nature directs you to which books you read and write. So it’s interesting that I’ve been fighting for a less happy ending than my editor wanted. Oh no—am I becoming more noir in my old age?

And I'd just like to add that I'm not thrilled about being dubbed a cozy writer. That somehow implies lesser, lighter, therefore not to be taken seriously. I don't understand why one would take a murder in an English village or country house less seriously than one in the backstreets of a city. Surely it is all the more shocking because it is unexpected. 

What about you? Do you believe our own basic nature drives us to see the world and write about it as cozy or noir? And what do you feel about the word COZY?

Welcome to our new neighbors!

HANK: So exciting to have new neighbors! And by neighbors, I mean here on the internet, in mystery blog world. 

Dee-lighted to introduce you to THE LIFE SENTENCE, a fabulous new opportunity and meeting place and community and resource for mystery lovers!  It’s the brainchild of…well, let Lisa Levy, editor in chief (who, from her editor "photo" keeps a low profile)  tell you.

Because she admits:

I Was a Secret Mystery Reader!

        by Lisa Levy

Figuring out what to do with your life is a tricky business. After college, I decided to go to grad school in English Literature. It seemed obvious: I was a good student. I liked to read and write. Why not sign myself up for a profession where I got to do both? Spoiler alert: I did not end up becoming a professor, but launching a crime and mystery website called The Life Sentence. This story is how I got from there to here.

At the time I was applying, I was obsessed with the literature of Puritans in America. I have always been prone to a kind of literary hyperfocus, where I suddenly have to read everything about a topic or by an author, but my love for the Puritans went beyond my usual dalliances. John Winthrop (he of the “city on a hill” speech), Anne Bradstreet, Jonathan Edwards and his spider dangling over the fire —  I devoured all of it. I was especially enthralled with the conversion narratives they wrote, recasting their lives as reckonings with original sin and salvation. And I loved the captivity narratives too, especially Mary Rowlandson’s, in which she wrote of her life among the Native Americans who kidnapped her from her Massachusetts home. 

So I went to graduate school, only to find, in the way academic fashions go, that the Puritans were decidedly out. I was pushed into the later works of American literature, and ended up doing a section of my comprehensive exams on Edgar Allan Poe. Now, this would be an obvious segue to me editing a website about crime and mysteries, but it wasn’t that simple.

Rather, I started reading a lot of noir in particular and mysteries in general because I missed the Puritans. I missed their questions about how to live in a world where good coincides with evil. I missed their quest to build communities where righteousness is rewarded. I missed the way they framed their lives as a struggle to live morally in an unjust universe. And I found all of that in Chandler, in Cain, in Woolrich, in Willeford, and in Hammett. The noir universe made sense to me; what’s more, it attracted me in a way that the works I was studying in grad school didn’t anymore. 

If all of this sounds awfully serious, well, I do take crime fiction rather seriously. I was trained as a literary critic, and even though I left before I got my Ph.D. (“went off to pursue ephemera,” as one of my advisors put it after I turned in my first book review to Entertainment Weekly) I can’t turn that critical faculty off, nor do I want to. 

I think crime fiction reflects our concerns about our world and how to live in it, as much as the Puritans’ literature did about theirs. The questions are not all that different, even without God in the equation. We still have to reckon with good and evil, with trying to be righteous, with building our cities on the hill. In fact, I think that crime fiction addresses these issues with a lot of nuance and complexity.

I spent a good many years cranking out ephemera, mainly in the form of book reviews, and have also written a few essays that I daresay will stand up to time and trends. Eventually, though, I started to dream a little bigger: I saw a need for a venue that reflected my thoughts about mystery and crime fiction (as well as true crime, TV, movies, etc.). In looking at the way the genre was covered, I became convinced I could build something better. Maybe it’s my own city on a hill.

Thus with a lot of work and the help of some excellent editors, contributors, and advisors (including a couple of Jungle Reds!) The Life Sentence launched in April 2015. We cover as wide a range of crime and mystery-related topics as we can, and we do so with a rigor and enthusiasm which sets us apart from other venues. I do like to think that we are critics first, and fans second, though we don’t let our fandom color what we cover or how we cover it.

Just a screen shot! But here's how it looks!

What will you see on The Life Sentence? Well, we do interviews (which we call Interrogations) with people like Joyce Carol Oates, Laura Lippman, and Bill Loefhelm. We have a series called 101, where a writer runs down his favorites among the Nero Wolfe books, or Thomas Perry’s thrillers. 

We publish pieces on issues affecting the crime fiction community (and beyond), like Rachel Howzell Hall’s call for diversity. 

We have an amazing Editorial Board of writers (including Hank and Hallie!) who will be keeping us up-to-date about what they are reading, thinking about, and doing. 

And we review books (and give you suggestions about whether you might like them by suggesting other authors in the same vein). Recent reviews include books by well-known writers like Philip Kerr as well as bright new talents like Jake Hinkson.  We are also committed to reviving the reputations of authors lost to thrift stores and library sales, like Don Carpenter and Ted Lewis. And we have lots more planned, including giveaways, TV and movie coverage, and a series on cybercrime and Internet hoaxes.

So my secret mystery reading is now integral to my job, though my job is a lot more than just reading and writing. It’s looking at the whole universe of crime and mystery and deciding what’s worth covering, and how to present this material in a way that’s thoughtful and entertaining.

 I do hope you agree!

HANK: So Reds, welcome to  The Life Sentence! (You can click on any of the links above!)  Reds, what would YOU like to see on the site? Who would you like to read about? And what do you think of the site?

And to all at TLS--congratulations!

Detectives Beyond Borders' Peter Rozovsky and "Crime During Wartime"

SUSAN ELIA MACNEAL: I'm delighted to introduce Detectives Beyond Borders' Peter Rozovsky, writing about "Crime During Wartime," a panel he moderated at Bouchercon 2013 in Albany.

Enjoy!

PETER ROZOVSKY: I changed the name of a Bouchercon panel because of Susan Elia MacNeal. The panel, at Bouchercon 2013 in Albany, spotlighted crime fiction set during World War II and its aftermath conflicts, and I had called it “World War II and Sons.”

“What about daughters?” Susan asked, and I explained that the “sons” in this case were not people, but rather the Cold War and the Korean War, personified as male.  Susan accepted my explanation with good grace. But she had got me thinking about the books our panel would discuss, and I realized these were at least as much about people as they were about fighting. 

When I welcomed the audience, I told them the panel was now called “World War II and Its Offspring” because the stories that Susan told, and those of her fellow panelist/authors James R. Benn, J. Robert Janes, John Lawton, and Martin Limón, were more about persons than about personification, and those persons were, of course, women as well as men.  

Sure, Benn’s Billy Boyle is an aide to Gen. Eisenhower, but he’s also a brash kid from South Boston thrust into a world far bigger than anything he had encountered before, and the passages where he realizes this are some of the most affecting in Benn's books. (MacNeal's Maggie Hope, though brilliant, college-educated, and heiress to an English home, is, like Billy, something of a fish out of water, and a more interesting character for it.)

I told the audience in my (brief) introduction that war was like a magnifying glass, multiplying the real or imagined significance of any action, including “ordinary’ murder, arson, and embezzlement. But it’s really more like a raindrop or a tear. It will magnify a scene, but the lightest touch to the surface on which it rests will set the lens vibrating and hopelessly distort the view.

Among the members of that wartime crime panel, that sense of unease, of the distortions and diffractions war works on the way people see the world and are themselves seen, is strongest in J. Robert Janes and Martin Limón. Janes pairs a German Gestapo and a French Sûreté inspector investigating crimes in occupied France during World War II. Limón’s novels and stories have two American G.I.s in South Korea looking into crimes that involve the U.S. military—two outsiders, that is, poised uneasily between two divided cultures. 

Amid a military hierarchy often more interested in protecting its own brass than in justice, amid a Korean culture sometimes mysterious to Limón's American investigator-protagonists, and always in the face of the looming military menace of North Korea, it is no wonder that the most "ordinary" crime acquires deep and menacing dimensions. And, though a disclaimer that prefaces Janes' Kohler and Sr. Cyr novels claims Janes merely inquires after the way "ordinary" crimes were solved in occupied France, his moral universe is the darkest of any noir I have ever read. Here, too, there are no "ordinary" crimes.

And how about this brilliant dissection of England's national character (and characters) in John Lawton's Second Violin?  Read the passage, then reflect that Lawton sets the scene in an English internment camp for aliens from enemy countries, notwithstanding that some had escaped the terror of what seemed about to happen in those very countries:

"`And I'm Rod Troy ... of Hampstead.'

"`It helps," said Drax, `and it will not detain us long, if we state for the record our city of origin. ... Arthur Kornfeld, of Vienna, keeps records for us. We all feel it helps to know where we all come from. To have something written down by us rather than by the British. Helps us not to ... not to lose touch. A matter of identity. No small matter you will agree.'

"Rod did agree. It was a matter of identity that had brought him here in the first place.

"`In that case,' he said, perfectly willing to play the game, "`I'm Rodyon Troy, also of Vienna. Indeed, I think you'll find more than a few of us are.'

"Drax stuck out both hands to shake one of Rod's, beaming at him as though he'd found a long-lost son. Behind him Rod heard Jacks plonk his gladstone bag on the table and say, `Billy Jacks, Stepney Green.'

"Kornfeld said, `It won't hurt, you know. And we're all in the same boat.'

"Billy shot a surly glance in Rod's direction, looked back at Kornfeld.

"`OK, OK, whatever `Ampstead says. Abel Jakobson, Danzig. Now, where's me bleedin' tea?'"

(Lawton's principal characters are English, but his novel Bluffing Mr. Churchill offers an entertaining version of the American innocent abroad, a young embassy staffer plunged into London in 1941, puzzled by Cockney rhyming slang and staggered by the sight of solitary houses left standing after German air raids.  Are stories about civilians in wartime particularly fascinating to we North Americans, the majority of whom have been mercifully free of such experiences in real life?)

The wars need not be long past. Some of my favorite crime fiction in recent years has come out of Northern Ireland, from authors grappling with the effects and after-effects of a kind of war – the sectarian Troubles – on daily lives.   See Anthony Quinn's Disappeared, for example, or Stuart Neville's Ghosts of Belfast.  I'll leave it to one such author to sum up the appeal of crime fiction set during wartime, of the terror, the exhilaration, and the sheer wonderment that something like ordinary life sometimes goes on amid hellish circumstances.

"I wanted to set a book in this claustrophobic atmosphere," writes Adrian McKinty in an afterword to his novel The Cold Cold Ground, "attempting to recapture the sense that civilization was breaking down to its basest levels. I also wanted to remember the craic, the music, the bombastic politicians, the apocalyptic street preachers, the sinister gunmen and a lost generation of kids for whom all of this was normal."


SUSAN ELIA MACNEAL: Reds and lovely readers, do you read historical fiction? Who are some of your favorite authors? Do you believe, as Peter does (and I do), that "war [is] like a magnifying glass, multiplying the real or imagined significance of any action, including “ordinary’ murder, arson, and embezzlement"?

Peter Rozovsky writes the Detectives Beyond Borders blog. His reviews and essays have appeared in Following the Detectives: Real Locations in Crime Fiction; The Cultural Detective; Nordic Noir: The Pocket Essential Guide to Scandinavian Crime Fiction, Film & TV; Words Without Borders; the Philadelphia Inquirer; and elsewhere. Read Detectives Beyond Borders at http://detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com/

Hilary Davidson's Love-Hate Relationship with HBO's True Detective

SUSAN ELIA MACNEAL: Remember when all the Jungle Reds were sick and I was the one with pneumonia? 

Well, one of the good things to come out of the experience is that I  was able to binge-watch TV in a way I never have time to do. And one of the shows I devoured was HBO's True Detective. It premiered last January and you've probably heard of it — an Emmy-winning crime drama starring Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey. It uses multiple timelines and unreliable narrators (one of my favorite plot devices) as two detectives in Louisiana hunt down a serial killer.

It was fantastic. 

And it was awful. 

I was talking with Hilary about it — and she had the exact same reaction. (So did plenty of television critics as well, including Emily Nussbaum in The New Yorker.) 

Online debate proved problematic as women (me, for one) voiced concerns about the misogyny of the series — that all the female characters were there for sex and/or killing. (And that's really it. Few of them even have names.)

Several men took it on themselves to explain to me "how noir works" — basically women are victims. (I called it "mansplaining" — especially because there was a certain patronizing tone involved). None of them seemed to even notice how the female characters were treated — let alone consider it problematic.

But I wasn't convinced. And so I went to Anthony Award-winning novelist Hilary Davidson, who certainly knows her way around noir, to get her take on True Detective.

And here it is.

HILARY DAVIDSON: I’m shameless about my addiction to certain TV shows. I love The Americans, Sleepy Hollow, Justified, Orphan Black, Scandal, and Game of Thrones, and I’ve recommended each one to people in person and online, at parties and on planes. I’m also quick to make up my mind about shows I don’t want to watch, jettisoning them after one or two episodes.

But HBO’s True Detective, which aired earlier this year, fell somewhere in-between. Watching the first of the series’ eight episodes, I was lured in by the fine performances of the two leads, Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey as police detectives Marty Hart and Rust Cohle. The landscape of backwoods Louisiana was deftly captured in both its lushness and its loneliness. The music that played in the background was a pitch-perfect accompaniment to what was on the screen. I also liked the structure of the show, which cut between a present-day investigation of ritualistic serial murders and a past investigation that estranged the detectives.

Other parts of the episode left me uneasy, starting with the first murder victim the audience encounters. Her name is Dora Lange, and she’s notable for the antlers attached to her head and the designs imprinted on her body. As a crime writer, I’ve got no problem with gory, even graphic, depictions of violence; what I object to are dehumanized victims whose suffering is only so much window dressing. Dora Lange’s body was presented as a fetish object, and what mattered was the ritualistic nature of her death, not the woman herself.

Still, I kept watching. It was impossible to overlook the show’s cartoonish, cardboard depictions of women — including Hart’s wife and mistress — but I had an explanation for that: True Detective was fully aware of how it objectified and exploited women, and I thought it was offering commentary on how stoic men — like detectives Hart and Cohle — could grow obsessive in their hunt for a killer so they could save women, while abusing the women right in front of them.

If you’ve already watched all eight episodes of True Detective’s first season, you know how stupid I feel about this theory in retrospect. (Spoiler alert: I WAS WRONG. SO WRONG.) But, just as many viewers went down the rabbit hole with their Caracosa and Yellow King theories, I clung to mine. Sometimes, I thought the show was winking at me, such as when Hart gives a teenage prostitute some money and Cohle accuses him of making a down payment, and Hart has sex with the girl an episode later. To me, this suggested an arch self-awareness on the part of the show’s writers, a hint that they had some dark tricks up their sleeves. (Spoiler alert: They did not.)

There was no incisive commentary. I know you can’t sue a TV show for false advertising, but there should be an exception for True Detective. “Spread the darkness” urged the show’s clever social-media campaign. “Something deep and dark,” boasted the show’s Facebook page. Here’s the thing: ultimately, the show had the depth of a cellophane wrapper, and what darkness it contained was dispersed in its weirdly feel-good finale. It was, for all intents and purposes, a Hardy Boys adventure that happened to involve a serial killer and philosophical ramblings that wouldn’t be out of place in a college dorm between rounds of beer pong.

What the show did — and did very well — was represent two men and the demons that drove them. Their relationship was the beating heart of the show, and it was fun to watch. Hart’s expressions while Cohle spouted nihilist philosophy were priceless, as were their verbal jousts. I could (and did) watch Cohle make beer-can dolls for hours. As a buddy show about two misanthropes who can’t have relationships with other humans, it gets an A+. 

But it was a letdown on so many other fronts. Strip away the stylish storytelling, and it was hollow at the core. The show hinted at so many intriguing elements (including the possible abuse of one of Hart’s daughters), then pulled away and never mentioned them again. It was frustrating to see so many intriguing layers of the story cast aside without explanation. The truth was that they didn’t matter. It was always about Hart and Cohle. It was only about Hart and Cohle.

That said, I’m curious about Season 2. The show’s creator, Nic Pizzolatto, has stated that it will have a new cast. There are rumors that one of the leads will be played by a female actor. If that happens to be true, I’ll be tuning in again. A female lead won’t erase the missteps of Season 1, but since the show’s strength was strong writing for its leads, I’d be curious to see when it’s going. 

Otherwise, count me out. 

Time may be a “flat circle,” as Cohle claimed while cutting up beer cans, and we may be doomed to do things over and over again, but I reserve the right to make better TV choices in the future.


Hilary Davidson won the 2011 Anthony
Award for Best First Novel for THE DAMAGE DONE. The book also earned a Crimespree Award and was a finalist for the Arthur Ellis and Macavity awards. The sequel, THE NEXT ONE TO FALL, a mystery set in Peru, was published by Forge in February 2012; the third novel in the series, EVIL IN ALL ITS DISGUISES, was published in March 2013. Hilary's first standalone novel, BLOOD ALWAYS TELLS, will be published by Forge in April 2014.Hilary's widely acclaimed short stories have been featured in publications from Ellery Queen to Thuglit, and in many anthologies. She has won a Spinetingler Award for best short story and an Ellery Queen Reader's Choice Award, and she's been a finalist for a Derringer Award. A Toronto-born travel journalist and the author of 18 nonfiction books, she has lived in New York City since October 2001. Visit her online at www.hilarydavidson.com. She also writes the Gluten-Free Guidebook blog: www.glutenfreeguidebook.com.