Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind

And now I face the final curtain...

As a new forensic thriller writer, I don't have much in the way of great writing advice to give – I'm still trying to hoover up all that I can find. But I can take up Michael Koryta's suggestion that we share feedback of programs that might benefit other writers. Actually, I think Michael suggested sharing the love we had for programs from which we'd benefited; this is going to be a slightly more ambivalent critique of a prominent program.

Robert McKee's book and lecture series on Story have a huge following in Hollywood and elsewhere. The seminar, which runs three days and costs over $500, promises an intensive introduction to the art and craft of screenwriting and story creation, and boasts alumni from John Cleese to The DaVinci Code's Dan Brown. Many rave about the seminar, but my own experience was decidedly mixed.

The biggest problem is that McKee loves to hear himself talk, and fills much of the first day with McKee-related puffery (much as I've done today, to be fair). After that, things get a little smoother and more interesting, and by the time the final, four hour, scene by scene breakdown screening of Casablanca comes around, you're rushing to scribble down as much information as you can - and cursing McKee for having wasted so much time on blather at the beginning when he could have been transmitting the good stuff at a more relaxed pace.

I should admit that I might have had rather specialized issues with the teacher. To recap, I am an English forensic pathologist who writes for Martha Stewart Living; the Venn diagram of Englishness, forensic pathologist-ness and writing for Martha Stewart Living-ness has a lonely overlap – me. So it was with growing surprise that I sat there as McKee roundly and repeatedly insulted the English (perhaps not surprising for a man who claims Irish ancestry; although I suspect that I, with three Welsh grandparents and one Irish one, am more Irish than he is), then continued on to use Martha as a leitmotiv for his japes. The crowning moment came when McKee announced that studies had shown that approximately three quarters of people who work with the dead are necrophiliacs.

In truth, I was more amused than offended. I don't know how much I got out of the program – certainly not as much from reading Stephen King's On Writing, which I found more inspirational than instructional. But part of the problem with the McKee thing may have been that for much of the three day stretch I was trying to figure out who among my twenty colleagues were the fifteen necrophiles…

Anyway, that's me done for the day. I'm slightly sneaking into Thursday, but we went and saw the new Bourne film, so I figure I get a little leeway. Thanks for reading, and please take a look at Precious Blood this autumn – you'll make my dear old mum so proud!

J.

My Favourite Coroner

One of the things I'm often asked is "Just how realistic is CSI?" My standard reply is that CSI is excellent forensic science fiction – it captures the spirit of the work very well, and uses the science creatively. In the real world, of course, it's never quite as glamorous or slick or downright sexy as it is in widescreen, blue-lit high definition.

And that's as it should be: if you want the real deal, watch a documentary. Quite a few people in the forensics dodge snort dismissively about CSI, but the fact is, the real work lives of forensic scientists would rarely lead to compelling viewing, and the stretches that the writers at CSI make are imaginative, and, for the most part, at least half-credible.

The forensic pathologist on CSI – the bearded older man – is a decent type, but sometimes I get irritated when Gil Grissom, a criminalist, schools him on his work. The segregation of responsibilities and expertise in forensics is fairly rigid; few criminalists have solid training in forensic pathology, often relying, instead, on the rich folklore of the law enforcement community. I do like the medical examiner on CSI: New York, although it's a show I don't really watch – it's set where I work, and as such even I can't tolerate the yawning chasm between TV and reality. The CSI people actually came by the NYC ME office back when they were still in pre-production. Hill Harper, who plays their ME, hung out with us a bit; he asked what book he should be reading in bed when his character appears onscreen for the first time. I recommended Russian Prison Tattoos – a little obscure, but cool and advanced; they went with a basic forensic pathology textbook, which I felt was wrong for an experienced, superbright ME.

An excellent suggestion snubbed! I was pleased, then, when I recently saw the trailer for Eastern Promises, David Cronenberg's next film, which features a British forensic pathologist identifying Russian jailhouse ink.

I absolutely don't watch CSI: Miami (I did my forensic training in Miami, but the real barrier is that I can't get past David Carusoe), but I've seen segments of the show where the ME caresses and whispers to the body: that's just gross!

Mostly, TV and movie MEs are forgettable, bland types, usually old and slightly cranky at being called out to examine a body. There's a few I think have been near the mark. One I barely remember: a scene in Hill Street Blues where Captain Furillo chews out the medical examiner for having screwed up royally, the ME defending himself by going on about the unsustainable workload in his underfunded office, and Furillo saying that none of that matters – autopsy results are vitally important, and must always be unimpeachable. I wasn't an ME at that point, but in retrospect, that sounds about right.

Beyond that episode, the most realistic ME I've seen on TV was the guy on (and this hardly surprising – the show is amazingly brilliant, and gets so much right) The Wire. He's a little peculiar-looking, but we're a somewhat marginalized group, and we have a few peculiar-looking practitioners in our guild. The thing is, his opinions are usually within the limits of what we are generally able to say, without distortion or reaching. The British crime shows, too, tend to be closer to the mark than the American, in general.

In the movies, I remember liking Donald Pleasance's philosophical coroner in Woody Allen's Shadows and Fog, but my favourite ME ever is Doc Kennedy, from Robert Aldrich's luridly brilliant 1955 noir Kiss Me Deadly. Kennedy is a weasely, venal little fuck with a voice like Sterling Holloway on a gin bender – the kind of guy who you instantly loathe and who you pray will get a beatdown in short order.

Mike Hammer figures out that the pathologist has recovered a vital clue – a key – from the victim's stomach. The doctor reaches into his desk drawer and produces the key, stretching out his palm to Hammer for a bribe. When Hammer can't pay his asking price, Kennedy starts to put the key back in the drawer; Hammer leans forward, jamming the drawer shut to crush the coroner's hand. It's a monstrous scene, Aldrich cutting from the hand being mangled to Hammer's look of sadistic glee, the doctor howling away in the background. Finally, Hammer just takes the key, letting the coroner fall to the floor to whimper and moan.

I suppose Kennedy isn't my favourite medical examiner, but it's one of the few scenes with an ME who at least has a real character. Even if he does kinda deserve the brutal torture Hammer metes out...

Percy Helton, who plays Doc Kennedy in Kiss Me Deadly

Judge me for what I mean, not what I say/write/do!

Reading over my last post, I realize how snotty my comment about "outgrowing cozies" must have come across. Not that I'm not snotty, but I expressed myself poorly there: it's not a question of "growth", I think, so much as having seen so much of the real thing for so long that I can't suspend disbelief long enough to take the abstracted and polished body-in-the-drawing-room scenario seriously anymore. I admire the craft, I envy the clarity, but cozies: no longer for me!

Here There Be Maltese Falcon Spoilers...

We're in Palm Beach at the moment, where Cricket's dad has a fantastic house – a sprawling white pile with handsome grounds that sweep down to the water, a view consisting exclusively of other houses of the affluent, and a beautiful pool. I'll be hugely disappointed if I don't witness at least one cocaine baron cigarette boat-based firefight from the sunbathing platform this week.

Since this is supposed to be a reading holiday, we loaded up the truck with NoseKote and puggles and whatnot, and I ambitiously packed the following books, either friend-recommended or long on my To Read list:

1. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Agatha Christie
2. The Maltese Flacon, Dashiel Hammett
3. The First Deadly Sin, Lawrence Sanders
4. The Innocent, Harlan Coben
5. Paranoia, Joe Finder
6. The Closers, Michael Connelly
7. The Ruins, Scott Smith
8. Bad Blood, Linda Fairstein
9. The Corpse in the Koryo, James Church
10. The Broken Shore, Peter Temple
11. The Collaborator of Bethlehem, Matt Benyon Rees
12. The Exception, Christian Jungerson

Alas, between recovering from the drive down and having to write Christmas food pieces for Oprah and for Martha, I've only managed to polish off the first two on the list.

When she threw that notorious final twist into The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Christie created one of the most controversial detective stories ever, a novel so divisive that she was almost booted out of the Detection Club for her flimflammery (she only remained a member thanks to the intercession of Dorothy Sayers). It was the first time in a long while that I'd read a traditional (well, genre criteria-satisfyingly "traditional") English murder mystery; for me, the take-home message was that, despite Christie's epic final switcheroo, I have outgrown the cozy.

That sort of background – the manor house, the vicarage, the church fête etc etc – fills me with horror, largely because it brings back memories of my childhood (I went to prep school in Sussex in an old Georgian mansion, then to a public school wedged between Stratton-on-the-Fosse and Midsomer Norton, deep in the Somerset countryside) but also because it's as unreal to me as anything out of Tolkein. I've now been in the murder business for almost 20 years, and there is literally nothing in the typical murder-in-the-vicarage English detective novel that resembles the truth of a killing in the world we live in. Once the initial quick blanching, shriek or swoon is over, the death has no resonance in that tiny little world. And, in a world where even death can produce no emotion, I find nothing there on which I can gain purchase.

Joss Whedon, creator most famously of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, said something to the effect that "It's not about the vampires, it's about the emotions", and I think he's one hundred percent right. For me, the English country house murder mystery fails because it is an intellectual exercise, a crossword puzzle, almost literally bloodless fiction, a kind of word sudoku where the stakes are nominally raised by the feeble invocation of a death.

Of course, that is its primal appeal to many, and the primal appeal of probably the entire mystery/thriller genre: that an individual can impose balance and order on a world out of control. But I find the disorder that murder creates in classic English detective fiction to be so minimal that its resolution brings little satisfaction.

Hammett published The Maltese Falcon in 1929, a couple of years after Christie's Ackroyd, but an ocean and a continent away. What a difference an ocean and a continent make! In Falcon, we find not a tight, immaculate world, but a sprawling modern city, the boundaries of which are repeatedly punctured - ships come in from the Orient, Spade hops into a car and drives to Burlingame. Suddenly, the world is real.

What surprised me with rereading the book was how it's almost entirely constructed out of dialogue. Hammett falters a bit when he hits the descriptions, and uses all too many adverbs and alternate verbs for "he said" (poor, meaty cop Tom Polhaus does nothing but "grumble" this or that), but the spoken language crackles ferociously – one of the strengths of John Huston's superb screenplay for the film was that he relied on Hammett's original dialogue.

Again, in the hard-boiled novel, murder is an incident without true emotional impact – the death of Spade's partner is nothing more than an opportunity for exalted ethical behaviour – but now the murder occurs in a huge, complex world, teeming with amoral schemers. Against this degraded backdrop, Spade's apparent moral ambiguity is enough to make him a saint.

For me, the best part of the book is the emotional gut punch at the end, when Sam lets Brigid O'Shaughnessy know where his allegiances lie. To add to Michael Koryta's noir screenplay thread, here's a snippet from Huston's script, v. close to Hammett's original:

Sam Spade: Well, if you get a good break, you'll be out of Tehachapi in twenty years and you can come back to me then. I hope they don't hang you, precious, by that sweet neck.

Brigid O'Shaughnessy: You're not--

Sam Spade: Yes, angel, I'm going to send you over. But chances are, you'll get off with life. That means, if you're a good girl, you'll be out in twenty years. I'll be waiting for you. If they hang you, I'll always remember you.

Spade sacrifices a woman he quite possibly loved (to the extent that a hard-boiled shamus is capable of love) in the name of principle, avenging the death of a partner whom he despised (and with whose wife he was sleeping). It's a towering, cathartic moment, a moment driven emotionally as much by Brigid's astonished horror as by the implacability of Spade's decision. Spade sheds the cloak of moral ambiguity to reveal himself to be a pure, scrupulously ethical man in a staggeringly corrupt world, a world where it's no longer clear that ethics even matter.

A real world.

Spade and Brigid O'Shaugnessy (Bogart and Mary Astor)

And So the Day of Pathological Oversharing Began...

I figured that, since you don't know me from Adam, I should say something about me.

My name is Jonathan Hayes, I'm English, I live in New York City, where I work as a senior medical examiner and freelance writer. In forensic pathology, I'm particularly fascinated by drug-related and asphyxial deaths. As a freelance writer, I write mostly about food and travel, but also cover pretty much everything from video games to the occasional forensics-related thing. My work appears regularly in the NY Times, New York magazine, Food & Wine, Gourmet and a bunch of other places; there are links to my stuff (plus a zippy little photogallery of photos I've taken while to-ing and fro-ing on other people's dime) on my webpage. I have a contributing editor position at Martha Stewart Living (actual cop joke: "Jonathan Hayes - he spends his days with the dead, and his nights with Martha Stewart Living." Buh-duh-BUMP.).

It's admittedly an odd mix, but I think that balance has kept me sane. When I wrote a bit about my life and some problems I had after 9/11, a friend of a friend, an EMS worker, complained that it was inappropriate that I should be doing the two; that notion still irritates me. Coming home after a long day at the morgue and turning my attention to, say, the pleasures of quince has the same sort of soothing, centering effect I'm told I'd get from yoga, if I managed to do it for more than a week. It took a while, but I've learned to remember that when you peer into the abyss, you turn your back on everything beautiful that's outside of that abyss.

But enough Hallmark Moments [TM]! The reason Sarah invited me is because my first novel, Precious Blood, a forensic thriller, is about to be published by Harper Collins, arriving at bookstores near you on November the 6th; I myself may be arriving at bookstores near you sometime this autumn.

Right now, though, I can no longer ignore the siren call of Maury Povich and some foxy Playmate introducing "Caught on Tape! Shocking Security Camera Video!"

Oh, and one last thing: Libra, baby... Libra all the way.

Your Week's Guest bloggers: Michael Koryta and Jonathan Hayes

Another week in August, and two new guest bloggers taking over. With a brief interruption to add the obligatory BSP link to my review of Mercedes Lambert's GHOSTTOWN in tomorrow's LA Times, they'll keep the place running till Thursday.

Tomorrow brings Michael Koryta, author of the Lincoln Perry PI series, winner of the SMP/PWA PI Novel contest and a man of impeccable chauffeuring skills. The newest book is A WELCOME GRAVE and not only does it take Lincoln to a new emotional level, it really makes me excited for the standalone novel in the works.

Then on Wednesday, Jonathan Hayes, forensic pathologist with New York City's Office of Chief Medical Examiner, frequent freelance writer and a man of impeccable culinary tastes, steps in. His debut thriller PRECIOUS BLOOD isn't out till November but if you, like me, dig your books dark and moody, you'll want to remember to pick this up.

A bientot.

Great Guest-blog month continues: Charles Finch and Nick Stone

This week's guest bloggers occupy vastly different places on the crime fiction spectrum. Tomorrow we'll meet Charles Finch, a young American author clearly comfortable with the Victorian England setting he's chosen for his new mystery series, which began with A BEAUTIFUL BLUE DEATH. It's a delightful throwback to more traditionally-bent tales and I can't wait to see what happens next with nobleman detective Charles Lenox and his lovely sidekick, Lady Jane.

Then on Wednesday, Nick Stone steps up to blog. I read his books in reverse, starting with the Max Mingus prequel KING OF SWORDS that is just out in the UK now, and I knew instantly that this was one of the most vivid, scary thrillers I've read in quite a while. His debut MR. CLARINET, set 15 years later, was a big hit in the UK last year and is just out in the US now. In other words, Stone gets to debut twice, which is pretty cool if you think about it.

Enjoy the show and see you Thursday.

First Word, Blank Page...

Hello!  Robyn Young signing in from Brighton, England...  Oh God.  Already I sound like I'm eighty-nine and have just discovered the telephone.

Blog virgin I'm afraid.

Well, in my defence, as soon as I typed the word BLOG into my computer it (in smug, know-it-all fashion) scored a red, squiggly I-do-not-understand-this line under it, which, come to think of it, is sort of what happened to me when Sarah invited me to be a guest blogger for today.  Just be yourself, she said comfortingly.

Myself, at present, is a jangle of pre-book nerves, so I guess that, as much as anything, is something to share.  Yep, it's that first word, blank page time again.  The first two books of my historical thriller trilogy (try saying that three times fast) are finished and published.  And now there's just the third to write.  Just the third?

Deep breath.

When I started my second novel, Crusade, my UK editor called it "second album time" implying this book would be harder to write, and get right, than the first.  Was it harder?  I expect, when I was rushing to meet the deadline, if anyone had asked - are you finding Crusade harder to write than Brethren? - I would have collapsed in a shuddering heap and shrieked YES! at them.  But now...looking back?  No, not harder.  Different.

I think that's the problem - and I expect any novelists out there who have written more than two could probably give an even more interesting insight into this than I can - it's that the experience of each book seems so different from the last that when it comes to write another it feels a little like the first time again.  Can I really do this? - you ask yourself, staring at the blank page and imagining little black lines of text creeping away into infinity.  And, in fact, how on earth did I do it the first two times?

Brethren began, just over seven years ago, as a single novel in first person and some - I'm still not entirely sure - how ended up as the first of a trilogy told in third person, that would span five decades from the last Crusades in the Holy Land to the fall of the Knights Templar in France, with over one hundred characters and a narrative that is half-fact, half-fiction.  Throughout the early stages I had no idea that it would ever be published - I didn't have an agent.  I also had no real clue as to how to write a novel.  I'd written two before, but I'd finished both with a sense of relief, glad that particular out-pouring was done, and consigned them happily to a sock drawer after a half-hearted attempt at publication.  Brethren was different in that I really believed in it.  But the writing and the research were steep learning curves.  In the end I had eleven versions of the novel on my computer and by the time I was signed up by a publisher, I had rewritten it so many times that the various plot tangles that ensued took me several months to unravel with the help of my editor.

Book two was an utterly different experience.  I was able to put into practise everything I'd learnt during Brethren, which meant Crusade, although longer, took me eleven months to write rather than seven years.  Wary of another tangle I wrote a road map in the form of a detailed chapter breakdown (around 30,000 words) that I kept beside me as I worked.  Some writers I've told this to have shuddered at the thought, imagining it to be horribly restricting. For me it was comforting.  The novel did change as I wrote.  Some characters ended up speaking more than I'd intended them to, others died unexpectedly, certain plot strands were better in synopsis than in reality, others appeared, took shape.  I updated my map every so often to reflect these changes.

I know many writers and our methods are so different I'm amazed how we all end up with finished novels on bookshop shelves.  One novelist I know writes her books utterly painstakingly from first word to last, unable to move forward until each paragraph, each word is perfect.  Another writes his books at top speed hardly editing at all, then goes back through and spends months polishing them.  I guess I'm somewhere in between.

Now it's my third: Requiem.  I've done my research, written my road map and I'm ready to go.  Monday's the day I start and I have another tight deadline in which to finish a journey that by then I'll have been on for almost a decade.  No doubt, come Monday, I'll employ any number of those quirky, novelist avoidance tricks.  I'll do the washing, scrub the bathroom, get drawn into unproductive oblivion by the Internet and probably get as far as thinking about cleaning the kitchen bin at which point I'll hopefully decide that writing is actually more pleasant.  And I'll get on with it.

I opened a copy of Crusade this morning and saw something that made me smile.  It was that page at the front which says: Other books by this author.  And there was actually one listed!  I know why publishers put that page in now.  It's got nothing to do with advertising books and everything to do with reassuring authors.  Well, I like to think so anyway.

In the meantime, I'd love to hear some of your first word, blank page experiences and challenges, and what you do to get over it!

www.robynyoung.com

Behold, Great Guestblog Month Approaches

Starting tomorrow, a slew of guest bloggers will take the reins here in sequence, although my presence won't completely go away - there are Weekend Updates to collate, news to comment on and such. As in previous years, these bloggers are brand-new to the format and run some gamut along the crime fiction spectrum.

Tomorrow's host is Robyn Young, author of the medieval historical thrillers BRETHREN and CRUSADE, with REQUIEM to follow next year. When I read BRETHREN last year, I didn't want to like it - there were so many books about Templars coming out around the same time. But a plane trip beckoned and I took it along, and was very pleasantly surprised at the depth of research, the power plays and politics of the 13th century and the quest of its heroic protagonist, Will. And you have to like someone who ends their bio with "I sing in the shower, still write bad poetry, avoid maths, still drink too much beer, love old folk songs and although being a novelist most definitely isn’t a proper job, or at least a normal one, I wouldn’t do anything else given the choice."

The more things change

Eternal optimist that I am, I had hoped that we were past the time when book pages were axed and book review editors were pruned away like so many dead branches. It's seems that I'm wrong. Just this week has seen the folding of almost all arts coverage at the Dallas Morning News; Charles Ealy and Jerome Weeks were asked to step aside. This morning I received an email from beloved Village Voice book review editor, Ed Parks, and he has not survived their latest round of layoffs, which is more than a huge misfortune for us all.

I won't naively ask why or childishly wonder what people value more than solid and intelligent arts coverage. I'll only, perhaps a little maudlinly, say goodbye. --Kathy