I’ve had six crime
novels published, seven counting Second
Story Man, out this month. Not bad for someone who had no inkling he’d be
writing about people who break the law.
As a child, I was a voracious reader. I loved the classic
detective novels. Dead body. Suspects. Brilliant detective. It doesn’t get much
better than that.
While I was enjoying Chandler, Hammett, and MacDonald, my
literary heroes were “serious” authors like Bellow, Malamud, Nabokov and Roth.
I was an English major in college and started my first novel, right after my
only year of law school (I won’t count the
roman a clef that I wrote at the age of 12). My intention was to follow in
the footsteps of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner, but somewhere along the
way I got “lost,” and wound up writing about crime.
After reading my first novel, a teacher at the Columbia MFA
program, a minor novelist, asked, “Do you know what a story is?” Of course, I knew
what a story was. I was an English major, dammit. I’d been reading stories
since I was three-years old. What the hell was he talking about? “You write
that Philip Roth, Dostoevsky crap. Have you ever read Chekhov?”
Yeah, I’ve read Chekhov, asshole, but rather than answer I bathed
in his un-meant compliment, comparing me to Roth and Doestoevsky. I mean,
really!
He probably meant I was stronger on character than on plot.
Okay, Mr. Do-You-Know-What-a-Story-Is? I’ll show you. I’ll write you a damn
story, just to prove you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. Oh, and
I quit the class and the MFA program.
The most tightly plotted stories were detective novels. So, that’s
what I’d write. In preparation, I read Hammett, Chandler, Nero Wolf, Ross
MacDonald, Mickey Spillane, as well as pulp writers Big Jim Thompson, Cornell
Woolrich and James M. Cain. Once I “got it,” meaning the basic structure of a
detective novel, I was off and running.
I began with the classic set-up. Down and out skip tracer,
Henry Swann, working out of his dingy Spanish Harlem office, is visited by a
gorgeous, wealthy woman who hires him to find her husband. Simple, right? But I
couldn’t help twisting the traditional detective novel by having Swann find
within a day that Harry Janus had been killed in a sleazy Times Square hotel.
The next day, he’s hired to find the killer.
Only there was a problem. I just couldn’t adhere to the
general formula. As Swann tries to solve the crime, he finds the victim led
more than one life. He was a dealer in antiquities. A rock star. A spy. Swann
winds up searching for the victim instead of the killer. In the end, I broke a
cardinal rule of detective fiction: Swann does not solve the crime. A friend said,
“You’ve written an existential crime novel.” Yeah, like Sartre, right?
Unfortunately, publishers did not see the brilliance in
this, and after praising the writing, the characters, the story which ambles
across the continent, into Mexico, then over to Berlin, before ending back in
New York City, they turned me down.
Twenty years passed. I resurrected the manuscript, sent it
out, and when an editor said he’d buy it if I changed the ending, I did just that
(if you’re interested in the original ending, you can find it in the paperback
and e-book editions, both are included.)
Swann was meant to be a one-off—hence, his last song—then
I’d return to writing that Roth/Doestoevsky “crap.”
Only life rarely turns out how you think it will. Swann’s Last Song was nominated for a
Shamus Award—I didn’t even know what that was. That’s when my life changed (or
at least my writing life.) Not because I won but because I lost. Pissed (okay,
so I’m competitive), I said to myself, “I’m going to keep writing these damned
things until I win something.”
Now three Swanns
later, I’m still writing about crime, not because I have to but because I love
to. But I wouldn’t love to if I had to write solely about murder. That would mean
a lifetime sentence of boredom—no offense to other writers who so brilliantly
do deal with the ultimate crime. So, I decided early-on my crime novels would
rarely be just about murder.
Take Devil in the
Hole, based on a true crime. Man murders his three kids, wife, mother, and
the family dog. The murder takes place before the book begins, the police know
exactly who did it, so does the reader, and there’s never another murder. It’s
not a whodunit; it’s a “whydunit,” as well as a study of how murder affects
everyone around it.
Same thing with the Swann
novels. None are about murder. That’s because I figure most of us will never be
murdered, nor will we be touched by murder. Besides, aren’t there enough
murders on TV, like twenty or thirty a week? There are so many more interesting
crimes to write about: theft, fraud, kidnapping, arson, embezzlement, not to
mention crimes of the heart.
Take Swann Dives In.
You’re not sure what the crime is until halfway through the book, and by the
end of the book, you’re not even sure a crime has been committed.
My latest, Second
Story Man, is about a master burglar, and the two lawmen who chase after
him.
You will find a couple of murders, but they appear off the page. Although
important, they’re not integral to the plot. So, face it, I’m a fraud. I’m just
not one of those writers who kill.
Charles Salzberg is the author of the Shamus Award-nominated
Swann’s Last Song and its sequels Swann Dives In and Swann’s Lake of Despair. He is also author of Devil in the Hole, which was chosen as one of the Best Crime Novels
of 2013 by Suspense Magazine. He
lives in New York City and teaches writing at the Writer’s Voice and the New
York Writers Workshop, where he is proud to be a Founding Member.