The no-rule rules of Crime Fiction

Dead bodies optional

Hot off the presses! Double Trouble (free to read online on Bristol Noir) has been nominated for a Derringer Award (from the Short Mystery Fiction Society) in the short story category. Voting goes on till the end of April. Suspense! Fingers crossed!

In a recent newsletter I wrote about the conventions of mystery/crime fiction. Every genre has its rules that a writer can abide by or not. Some rules you break at your own risk. Don’t kill the dog is the one that immediately comes to mind. Some readers will stop reading and close a book for good the moment a pooch is callously expedited. They may never give that writer a second chance. Not as deadly as John Wick going after lowlifes that do puppies wrong but still …

Dogs, cats, parakeets, hamsters. Pets are off limits. I’m fine with that rule.

This post is about human demises. To have a mystery, you need a dead body, says the code book. It should show up in the first chapters, and the main character better make an entrance soon. The perfect illustration of this rule is the victim with a knife in the back falling through the PI’s office door, preferably one with a glass insert so the name of the sleuth, in gold lettering, can be read on the broken shards. Nice close up.

Seen it? Yes, me too.

Many books in the crime fiction genre follow that rule. It isn’t terribly constraining and there are multiple ways to handle the staging. Sagging library and bookshop shelves prove that authors are infinitely creative in figuring out variations on the concept.

In short stories, however, where you have a limited number of words to play with and can’t afford to waste them on exposition, it’s trickier to pull off. If you have to stick a corpse in there, right off the bat, every time, the stories will start to look pretty repetitive.

Writers of short fiction by necessity, take liberties with the body rule. They also gleefully trample over the other dos and don’ts that ‘authoritative’ authors have come up over time. S.S. Van Dine famously listed 20 rules of detective fiction that make for funny reading. He was writing about books and not short stories, but here are a few examples that make any crime writer, in the long or short form, grind their teeth:

• No love interest - Really? Where’s the fun in that. I should do a post on love scenes some day. One of the best (hottest) I’ve ever read is in Dennis Lehane’s Since We Fell.

• No subtly worked-out character analyses, no “atmospheric” preoccupations - He also detests long descriptive passages and I tend to agree with that, but character, atmosphere? Come on. I love Tana French’s Faithful Place because it drops me in the streets of Dublin.

• The crime must never be an accident or a suicide - Well, we have developed a solid sense of the absurd since Van Dine (before WWII.) Murderers don’t always get caught either. Hannibal Lecter’s having a swell time in Florence.

We can all agree that rules are silly. Crime fiction is fascinating because it’s so flexible. There’s room for everything. Pick up a themed short story anthology and you’ll see what I mean. I enjoyed In Sunlight or In Shadow: Stories Inspired by the Paintings of Edward Hopper (edited by Lawrence Block), and Gone (edited by Stephen J. Golds) a collection of crime stories (full disclosure: I have a story in there).

Over the past five years, I’ve written many mysteries and crime stories. At first sight, they seem to be all over the place but, preparing for this newsletter, I found a couple of trends, and very few rules.

The retro noir tales (San Francisco 1950) all start with a dead body. Considering the main protagonist, Tom Keegan, is a homicide detective, it’s to be expected. The most recent story in the series, Sausalito, has just been published by Guilty Crime Story Magazine (get it here – you’ll find an appetizer under the picture below). These are classic crime in the fedora-trench coat-cigarette mold. I go there when I’m in a romantic mood.

In contrast, the contemporary Harry McLean PI short stories are eccentric, with a touch of humor. The guy is sarcastic and rumpled. Maybe somebody dies, maybe not, maybe the corpses are buried in the past, throwing shadows on the living. A good example is Cottonmouths coming soon from Black Cat Weekly.

Then there’s a bucket of stories without any corpse in them. They’re still crime. Of a different flavor. A safecracking district attorney in Jersey Lily, a thief in Give Away, a con artist in Bathing Beauty, a forger in Signed, Joey. They are mysteries that don’t send anybody to the morgue. Hopefully the readers are not always bloodthirsty. The writer sure isn’t.

When I need to refresh the inspiration fount, I hop to a different genre. I flirt with science fiction, light horror, even (ahem) literary—that’s what I call the atmospheric and hybrid pieces I can’t pin a neat label on. But if you push me, I would contend that all stories are crime-adjacent. Is there a single story out there without a bonehead move, a dreadful mistake, a nefarious act, a sinful thought? And if there is, who would want to read it?

Short Stories

Sausalito is classic noir. It’s 1950, the Marinship yard in Sausalito is abandoned. Decommissioned ferries are left to rot. It’s been raining for days.

Here’s how it begins…

This was not how Tom Keegan wanted to start the week.

Saturday and Sunday had been a mess of crazy calls involving crazy people at crazy hours of day and night. He had managed to catch three hours of sleep, between four and seven on Monday morning, before jerking awake in the middle of a nightmare that played all the events of the past two days in a high-speed film reel worthy of an art-house cinema. Like the one Rachel had insisted on going to a couple of weeks ago. Tom had suffered in silence through a long, also silent, German movie about a freaky killer.

… to keep reading: see Guilty Crime Story Magazine on Amazon – Support independent publications.

Great Music – Sad News

Ryuichi Sakamoto died on March 28. He was 71 years old. A brilliant musician I often listen to when I write. You may know his soundtrack for Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor for which he won an Oscar with co-composers David Byrne and Cong Su, or the score of Nagisa Oshima’s Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence where he also acted, squaring off with David Bowie. He composed more film soundtracks, including that of Iñárritu’s The Revenant. And his albums are fantastic. I have a stack of those.