Tell me a Story

and take me somewhere

I’ve wanted to talk about storytelling for a while. Not only because that’s what I spend most of my time doing, but because I occasionally find an unusual book that does the job in an intriguing way.

The book that makes me smile ear-to-ear right now is The Club Dumas, by Arturo Perez-Reverte. It isn’t recent, 1993. I wonder how I missed it when it came out … Anyway, better late than never.

It has everything I like.

First, it’s a book about books—obsessive collectors, insane bookworms, printers and restorers, forgers, a literate detective—and it sparkles with the kind of wild encyclopedic erudition (some of it wonderfully fake) that is responsible for all the Umberto Eco volumes on my bookshelves. It’s also stuffed with plot points, quotes, and characters from the literature that entranced me as a kid (the 19^th century serials of Dumas and Féval, Holmes, and Lupin). It’s like being dropped in a massive library to be fed storylines intravenously.

You may wonder if it’ll impact my own writing. Don’t worry, I’m not going to go all baroque on you. In front of the keyboard, I’m feeling most comfortable with crisp sentences and snap dialogues.

Still, taking a break from minimalist and hard-knocking contemporary crime fiction is good for the mind. When everything I read starts looking too much alike, it’s time for a rejuvenating side trip.

Reading outside one’s genre and style is highly beneficial. It exposes you to different storytelling techniques and narrative structures. Not to copy or imitate, but to find out what can be done.

My stories, the long ones, tend to be linear. Beginning, middle, end. Classical. It’s the way my mind works, I’m an organized person. I might do a flashback or two, have points-of-view running concurrently, play with a side plot that pops into the main narrative, but I don’t do a lot of acrobatics. In short stories, I’m more adventurous. I may start after the action happens, for instance, then backtrack a little, then some more, before snapping back to the present. I don’t think I ever went forward in time, that would be spoiling the ending, and where’s the fun in that.

Which is why I like to immerse myself in books that follow a different route. It jumbles the mind a bit, and I might learn something about what makes a story work.

It cannot be an accident that most of the ‘jumble’ books that give me a kick have a touch of the fantastic or the bizarre, and often feature other books inside them, like nesting dolls.

The first one that comes to mind is The Manuscript Found in Saragossa, by Count Jan Potocki. It dates from the early 1800s, and wasn’t completed when Potocki killed himself in 1815. Imagine a journey in Spain where every character the main protagonist meets has a story to tell that involves other people who are also storytellers. Getting lost? Absolutely, and that’s the whole idea.

Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian doesn’t lose the reader but it travels all over Europe and hops gleefully through the centuries. The blurb says it’s a labyrinth. I find that stuff addictive. And it’s a rip-roaring vampire story …. Enough said.

I expect Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi, that I have on my pile to read, will also take me for a spin.

Another oddity is Dictionary of the Khazars, by Milorad Pavic. Which is, as the title says, a lexicon. Completely imaginary. My copy disappeared during a move, and I don’t remember if I had the male or female version—the book comes in two editions that are identical except for seventeen very important lines. Sounds gimmicky? Yes, but it’s a lot of fun.

In closing, a deep salute to Umberto Eco and his Foucault’s Pendulum that I have read multiple times. If you like playing with words, myths and legends, the occult and the Knights Templar, the book is for you. (Side note: it is not a forerunner of The Da Vinci Code, Eco was a brilliant writer.)

I would not recommend a steady diet of this kind of storytelling. It is extremely rich and should be enjoyed in moderation. Like once a year, maybe. To give the taste buds a jolt.

The Gothic Arch, Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778), from the Carceri d’Invenzione - Royal Academy of Arts

Now back to the “lean and mean”, sort of …

Guilty Crime Story Magazine, Issue 13, Winter 2025, is out.

A few newsletters ago (Sticking the Landing), I wrote about The Ability to Swing, the story that appears in this issue of the magazine. I’m very fond of it, not because its birth was difficult—it’s a myth that the value of a piece increases with the struggle—but because I have warm feelings for the protagonist. I tend to fall in love with my characters ... I hope you will too.

Here’s how the story begins.

Innocence doesn’t do it for me.
If it ever did, it was before I knew what the word meant. Before my eyes considered the difference between good and bad. Before my mind tried to separate right from wrong. I figured pretty fast that these things were not the same, even if there was significant slippage between them. Uncle Early beating up Sam, my little brother, was bad. Despite Early claiming that Sam had done wrong. That was a lie. Another of these choices that seem clear-cut and aren’t: truth or lie. Funny how it’s “the” truth like there’s only one, but it’s “a” lie like it’s one among many. It makes you think that truth is very important but lies are not, because there’s no shortage of them.

You can get the magazine here: Guilty Crime Story Magazine.