Pulp Fiction discussion

Like many of us in this group, I am most at home with a noir classic - the harder, the better ("I've met a lot of hard boils in my life, but you, you are 20 minutes!").
The funny thing is, though, that I don't write noir. Funnier, I do write conspiracy/political thrillers but seldom read other writers in that genre (not contemporary ones anyhow).
I was surprised, then, and yet very, very pleased when I got notice of this review to be published in the San Francisco Book Review in December coming.
The gist of it is that the reviewer likes the book and was reminded of Hammett and the Continental Op.

As far as I remember, I made a conscious decision not to attempt to write in the style of my noir heroes (anyway, I drifted towards Cain and Thompson when I had sated my Hammett/Chandler thirst).

I will zealously guard the Hammett comparison, now that it has been made, but I have to wonder if two forces have been at work without my awareness.

One, maybe the San Francisco reviewer is genetically conditioned to divine a Hammett influence on all crime/thriller writing (and I hope those ghosts still ebb around SF, over the Tenderloin and up to Burritt St).
Two, maybe, and without need of my conscious nod, I'm more in debt to the masters than I realised. There is an apt proverb for everything in Irish. This one would be 'Cad é a dhéanfadh mac an chait ach luch a mharú?' - What would the cat's son do but kill the mouse?'
I hope the latter holds some truth, and this certainly isn't an invite to some smart alec in the group to prove otherwise - allow me to glow in their reflection, even if it is an unworthy glory.

Here's the review:

___
‘So you are bringing the package in now, Maknazpy, right?’ Cora said.
A blue light and siren scattered the darkness behind us. Yasmin looked for me in the mirror - okay, just an ambulance.
‘Not yet, Cora,’ I said. ‘Couple of things I want in place first.’
I could feel the frost on Cora’s breath."

And, so, here we are in the realm of tough guys doing tough guy things against other tough guys. That description is not intended to disparage, nor should it. There is something about author Gerard Cappa's style, as well as his hero Con Maknazpy, that carries echoes of Dashiell Hammett and the Continental Op. In the matter of Black Boat Dancing, while Hammett's creation worked for the Continental Detective Agency, Maknazpy truly is continental in the plot's scope.

This being the second book featuring Maknazpy, there is a certain degree of house-cleaning to be done initially. He has retired since his previous adventure, but lost his wife and son to another man. So when his tart-tongued handler, Cora, recruits him for a dangerous mission, well why not? So off our man goes to first Portugal and later China. Maknazpy is on the trail of bad guys who have secret information regarding U.S. financial support of Middle East terrorists. Anyone who has followed the grim tale of the origins of ISIS will know that this is very much fact-based fiction and Black Boat Dancing is all the better for it.

Cappa avoids the trap of many a thriller author in managing to intelligently describe the plot facet of computer hacking without burying the reader in a landfill of gee whiz gadget geek talk. This grateful reader sends his thanks. Beyond that, all the classic elements of the detective crime thriller are there: I've already mentioned the smart-mouthed dame in Cora, and there are, of course, nightclubs, les femmes fatale, and bodies scattered across the pages like raspberries on your morning cornflakes.

Black Boat Dancing is a cracking good tale and will liven up any tablet device on which it is read. -

Review ends.

Still, beauty is in the eye of the beholder and I'll greedily take the comparison as a compliment.

I've met a lot of hard boils in my life, but you, you are 20 minutes

Quoting from Billy Wilder's "Ace in the Hole" ... auspicious beginning to a thread

but (great title, I admit) it is nonetheless, basically another pitch for an ebook ..

I'm disappointed. To my way of thinking if authors want to promote their books they should show themselves to be fabulous discussion-starters all over the internet.
:(

Feliks wrote: "I've met a lot of hard boils in my life, but you, you are 20 minutes

Quoting from Billy Wilder's "Ace in the Hole" ..."

Chuck Tatum is nearly as good a name as Kirk Douglas.

Feliks wrote: "I've met a lot of hard boils in my life, but you, you are 20 minutes

Quoting from Billy Wilder's "Ace in the Hole" ... auspicious beginning to a thread

but (great title, I admit) it is nonetheles..."

Isn't this 'Writer's Corner'? Maybe I am a fabulous discussion-starter all over the internet, maybe not. On this occasion, though, I felt like posting something on 'Writer's Corner'.
What would you prefer me to write about on 'Writer's Corner' if not my own writing? And it is in paperback, if that makes any difference to you.

Regardless of the category. If you want to get people interested in your book; get them interested in your personality. Start interacting with them. A 'pitch' is a closed-ended kind of affair which leaves viewers of the thread, utterly flat. What can we legitimately say in response to you describing what you think of your own book? You started off the topic in an engaging manner...are you honestly saying you don't see how disconcerting it is to suddenly see an advertising spiel creep in? Its absurd. There's plenty of writing topics you could broach without turning down the path you did. I'm sure we'd all be keen to hear your struggles in getting your book accomplished..various aesthetic or stylistic choices you faced...mentors or predecessors you felt you wanted to pay homage to..your influences...how you were attracted to noir in the first place..what you love about it..what satisfaction you feel. A ton of things to talk about. I have no idea why more authors don't perceive this 'gap' they're creating between audience and author.

Thanks for the free advice but I will post as I feel like it, within the stated purpose of each category - and I didn't say anything about what I thought of my own book.

What's that uniform in your (private) profile - higher order of the Thought Police?

"What goes in Writer's Corner?
We are glad to have some authors and writers in this group and we want you to be able to promote and engage others in discussions about your book. So here is a place to do this (in a non-spamming way). If you do start a topic about a book of yours, we would love it if you remained active in that thread so people can talk to you about it.

Knowledge Lost, 7/14/2011
For any other writer related topics; such as blogging, writing processes and even book publications, this is the place for you too."

Key phrase that leaps out to me
"(in a non-spamming way)"

Maybe you see it differently. So be it.

You are free to do as you like, naturally. Post away. But based on your personality I see emerging now--seemingly 'resistant' to any input--I am not sure how far you're ever going to get with people on any message board. If you can't get along with people in an easygoing and informal manner, why would they want to read anything you've written?

You know nothing about me, my personality or my influences but you feel free to offer your inane advice. So be it.

Precisely what I was asking for. Personality. Maybe authors who do their own marketing need to take some kind of adult-ed course in basic socialization. Get out from behind the keyboard more. Again: you started off fine..talking about Cain and Chandler..why did you detour?

Um...Feliks?

Didn't we already have a chat about turning everything into an argument?

This is a thread for writers to promote their books, not debate club.

When you have a book to sell, we'll be more than happy to read your posts here.

Feliks wrote: "Precisely what I was asking for. Personality. ..."

I found all your posts in this thread quite rude; troll-like, in fact. This quote is a direct attack. Were I Melki, I'd ban you from the group next time you made such a remark.

Melki, I realize it's not my place, but Feliks' profile is set to private so I couldn't PM him. Delete this post if you think it best, no hard feelings. I know I'm not very active here, but I like the group & these sort of posts are not conducive to enjoyable discussion.

Thank you, Jim. I've had complaints from other members, as well.

I really hate to ban someone, though group creator, Michael, has no qualms about it. I'll let him be the decider AND the enforcer in this case.

Who is this arsehole Feliks insulting Gerard like that? Off with his head! Out of the group!

He has been warned before and now he is gone.

Also watch it Scott, that is no way to talk about people here.

My first time here and, yes, Feliks was provoking and glad to see him canned. And Gerard, BLACK BOAT DANCING, a great title.

Thanks Linton. The title is derived from the traditional Portuguese song, 'Barco Negro'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hgkow...

This youtube clip is actually from a French film, but the lyric is explained (with English language sub-titles) at 2 minutes into the clip.
As well as being a very atmospheric, very Portuguese, piece, it gave me the sort of imagery I like to use as a thread through the story.

Barco Negro? Are you sure that's politically correct, Gerard? =] Robert Wilson A SMALL DEATH IN LISBON is my favorite novel about Portugal.

It is literally 'Black Boat' in Portuguese (or black barque, we might say) so there are no inherent issues with the title in Portuguese.
That language prism, where something acquires a different sense in another language, is something that interests me, and I often use the English translations of Irish language terms. That is certainly a self-indulgence on my part because I know few if any of my readers will even notice but I think I have to write for myself first - hopefully readers will enjoy the rest.
I agree with you on Wilson. I used to save up his Falcon books until I would have the chance to read them in Spain - even Falcon struggles to lift the temperature of a wet Irish summer!

I'm a writer of crime novels of varying degrees of direness -- my latest is The Sea -- but I am also an academic writer on the genre. In my book The Figure of the Detective published earlier this year by McFarland, I made a strong distinction between noir and hard-boiled. I've had some pushback on this and I wondered what you-all thought. Does this make intuitive sense? My argument is rather long to trace out here. It is based on some distinctions such as: in noir the detective works on behalf of individuals against a corrupt society, whereas in hard-boiled the detective works for himself against the threats of corrupt individuals.

This is not the place to start a grand march through the streets of theory. I just wondered if knowledgeable practitioners saw these as two related but different story forms.

Congratulations to Gerard-who-doesn't-write-noir for a great high-profile review.

Your thesis makes sense, Charles. I probably mash both into an inelegant approximation in my own head but I certainly see what you mean. I would imagine, though, that most people either don't really distinguish between the two or, if they do, each has their own, probably ill-defined, notion of what each term represents to them.
It might help to cloud the issue further, I suppose, where a lot of people experience noir and/or hard-boiled through the medium of cinema, given that directors/producers may not necessarily transfer the novel to screen in a faithful adaptation of the writer's intent.
I'd have to say my own tastes have been moulded by the movies, from anything with, say, Edward G or Mitchum to Chinatown and LA Confidential.
I might struggle myself to place each into the 'correct' category but I recognise the appropriateness of having a defined boundary for each. For one thing, it should surely assist a writer should they intend to write a noir or hard-boiled piece if they know with greater clarity what each actually means (and therefore can choose to adhere to, or breach, the 'rules'.

Prof William Marling's Detnovel.com site is a source I return to often, and it has many fine articles on this and related topics (I swiped a character from there for my first book - an amalgam of Coffin Ed Jones and Rudolf Fisher's early Harlem Detective Dart - and presented him as Detective Ed Dart).

I'd be interested to see how you expand on this, as it is something I think I really should define more clearly for myself.

The way I see it, crime fiction responds to the fears and anxieties of its time. So that toward the end of the Classic period we began to feel, under the threat of another war, that the torn social fabric could not be repaired so easily by solving the crime. After the war, feelings of having fought and won a just war were destroyed by the Cold War and crimes became a matter of bullying and reprisal. The hardboiled detective accumulates clues through persistent, indiscriminate pressure and the criminal is exposed when he gives up and confesses. The noir detective assembles clues through experience and wisdom and achieves a confession when the criminal acknowledges the truth (not the same as acknowledging superior force). The Classic detective acquires clues by observation and confronts the unmasked criminal with irrefutable evidence.

Once established, a tradition continues to be available. So that The Ghostwriter, for example, contains Classic and noir elements, and Mulholland Drive combines hard-boiled and (frustrated) Classic -- the crime is simply not solveable by rationale means.

Maybe that gives some idea of what I'm getting at. All these distinctions are at bottom about how the detective gets knowledge -- in the Classic by reasoning, in noir through intuition and sympathy, in hard-boiled through force.

What I write is more or less the rational Classic because I'm interested in how knowledge eludes thinking, but I'm really drawn to noir because of the emphasis on trying to live honestly in a corrupt world and an acceptance of partial truths of the most that can be achieved.

There's all sorts of weird configurations -- Last Year at Marienbad, Alphaville, Blade Runner, The Singing Detective, Thirteen Conversations About One Thing, The City of Lost Children. Recall Spillane's use of "radiation" at the end of Kiss Me Deadly and the parody of it at the beginning of Repo Man. I always want to do something like these.

Charles, I tend to flit between news channels on TV; the mainstream Irish and British, Russia Today, Fox, Al Jazeera and CNN. Each of them offer various reasons to feel under siege, as if the world has never been worse and can only deteriorate. If the prevailing psyche is obsessed with a culture of fear, if not paranoia, how would you expect that to be expressed in current and future writing?

The very problem -- I don't think it is. We have instead opted for the nostalgia of the cozy, the lost paradise. It's not just the culture of fear, it's the feeling that there are no adequate remedies. Hard relativism forces on us the possibility that we have no common purpose, that every fact is only probable and every conclusion suspect and open to negotiation. The apocalyptic response would be story in which the crime is uncertain, the detective detects nothing and only multiplies the fears he was meant to allay. There is at least one good example: Twin Peaks. In its time it was an oddity. Redone now it could be scary. If the detective genre would grow and respond as it has done, we ought to be seeing stories about how to live and act in such a world. We do see them, but they aren't detective stories. Detective fiction has never been more popular -- last year at one time 7 of 10 books on the bestseller list were detective stories. But we are running from the problem.

I continue to see noir, and the achievements of Chandler and Hammett especially, as the example of what we should be doing. There are some movies of that sort -- Memento. But they're stunts. Nobody has shown how to move the genre forward as Chandler did.

That's probably why I opted against a Detective series. I reckoned there were already just too many alcohol-dependant, rogue Inspectors solving murders by means of their own maverick devices in spite of the bureaucratic interference of their bosses.

Instead, I've condemned my Maknazpy character to lurch through a series of scrapes without knowing why or who is controlling his buttons, and the cause-effect conundrum isn't necessarily resolved in a satisfying climax, either. Like Chandler said in his papers:

"I remember several years ago when Howard Hawks was making The Big Sleep, he and Bogart got into an argument as to whether one of the characters was murdered or committed suicide. They sent me a wire (there’s a joke about this too) asking me, and dammit I didn’t know either. Of course I got hooted at.”

I think Gerard and Charles have brilliant insights that only writers might have about a world where knowledge is a kind of McGuffin -- it is a kind of false goal that cannot be the center of the reading experience. What that experience means may be, now, the neo-liberal politics and robotized military rat race and our part in it. There’s no moral center there—its “Nature red and tooth and claw,” as evidenced by the failure on all sides to see the elephant in the room: not the terrorists (now a cant word) but the control of the world’s oil reserves.

The work of Chandler, McCoy, Goodis, Lawrence Block, Margaret Millar, Patricia Highsmith, and Gerald Kersh has lasting value because of what it has in common with Thompson, and I think Willeford. It touches something feral, in “all of us,” driving us to survive by pure, sometimes tricky, usually sado-masochistic domination. In response to that, the quest for authenticity, or dignity, is inevitable, and yet where is any replica or model for it, or any knowledge of it? Maybe what we need now is anarchistic writing, such as Bataille’s _Story of the Eye_, Richard Godwin’s _Mr Glamour_, Burrough’s _Naked Lunch_, Michael Perkins’ _Evil Companions_, or Bret Easton Ellis’ _American Psycho_. They are about "about how to live and act in such a world" [as we have now].

Can't argue with this. The detective's business is to detect something, for which purpose he needs knowledge, and that is usually something the others don't have. How it's obtained and what it's used for are the business of the genre. What it is, is the concern of the reader.

I think the self-publishing model opens the door for new writing, anarchistic or otherwise, but it isn't a one way street; readers, and especially reviewers, need to join the party.

I know, and was told, my books wouldn't have survived in their current form if I had submitted to a mainstream publisher with the nous to 'curate' my work to pass popular muster. The motor driving my plot is partly fuelled by the 'Pipelineistan' analysis of Escobar and others (see links to relevant articles as a footnote).
Of course, an editor with a commercial eye would be justified in protesting that this class of book can't bear the weight of a discussion of, on the one hand, a Qatari/Saudi ambition to remove the Syrian regime's barrier to piping their liquid gas north to join the Turkish enterprise of supplying gas to western Europe (and thereby bypassing the Russian supply through Crimea and Ukraine), and, on the other hand, the potential for the 'Islamic' pipeline to stretch from Libya-Egypt-Palestine-Lebannon etc through the Gulf to the (now Chinese controlled, bought and paid for) deep sea port of Gwadar, which provides a secure land route through Pakistan into China.

The hard-pressed editor may well have been on the button - it wasn't easy to slip this in to the tale, and especially not when my 'hero' character was completely ignorant of the forces creating the hostile environment I condemn him to. That is the point, though (if I can claim a coherent point) - and how many of us have a clue what lies behind the horrific headlines we watch now on a nightly basis, how many servicemen, hand on heart and saluting whatever flag they were born under, know or knew?

My jaundiced eye probably results from my immediate background. I was 10 years old when the latest round of 'Troubles' re-ignited here in the north of Ireland, and the fracture of civil society is still as deep as ever. However, anyone relying on the mainstream media for an insight to life here would see a different world to the one which has moulded me. Not only the news, but the mundane perceptions and assumptions that pervade 'the civilised view' each carry a loaded cultural palate from which to obscure my viewpoint.

The same hapless editor would have despaired even more of my first book. My ambition there was to show my 'hero' shackled by his inherited cultural baggage, and to dismantle the notion of 'heroism' as received in this particular society, where violence was central to its creation and existence.
My Maknazpy character is a thin facsimile of the ancient Irish hero Cú Chulainn - not unlike Achilles, Cú was a hero precisely because he excelled at butchering foes (and sometimes friends, if he felt like it). He wasn't Chandler's 'Knight Errant', not a man of virtú, in the modern sense, but my experience here is that this feral model of hero isn't so far beneath the surface, and is the one that besieged clans can most easily rally to when the fabric of civil society is exposed.
The funny thing about our ancient Cú Chulainn is that he is represented on the territory-marking wall murals of Belfast - that is, on both the Republican and Loyalist walls, each claiming him, interpreting the hero myth to suit their contemporary purpose, reinforcing their esprit de corps and confirming their own warlike intent (now, that is a very, very long story).

The downside for my story is that I made my Maknazpy follow in the hero's footsteps. The story could probably have been more streamlined, more palatable, if I had just concentrated on the surface plot, and a publisher would have insisted I pulled back from such self-indulgence, but then that wouldn't have been my book, just a watered down version that an editor/publisher had tailored to suit more tastes.

Of course, readers are as oblivious to the footsteps Maknazpy follows as Maknazpy himself is (I don't surrender to blinding revelations or soulful redemptions) but I wanted Maknazpy to be trapped in a treadmill where he mistakenly believes he has free will (I said somewhere else it helps if the reader understands the dynamic of Irish history as being cyclical, rather than linear).
I may be veering more towards predetermination than anarchy here, Jay, but the crux of what I'm saying is that self-publishing allows me the freedom do that.

Where I say reviewers should come to the party, what I mean is that I am often disappointed in the ambition of reviewers here on GR. Now, many people pen reviews more as a note for themselves than anything, which is fine.
Some people would offer themselves as 'serious' reviewers, though, and, despite the mutual back-clapping and prima donna posing (look how smart I am, what an ascerbic comment that was etc), many of these reviewers couldn't write an original thought if you paid them. Mind you, I doubt if many paid reviewers know what to make of a book unless someone else tells them first, and depend on agents, publicists, other reviews to chart their course for them.
So, for my tuppence ha'penny, I'd like to see reviewers on GR being more ambitious, take a chance, review something that hasn't been reviewed 20,000 times already - you really won't have anything new to say about Gone Girl, or Harry Potter or Girl with a Dragon Tattoo.

As for where the Detective goes, I'm not too concerned. I'm not preoccupied with the successful completion of the jigsaw and like to leave a couple of pieces out. Again, I can relate back to Chandler:

"Mystery and the solution of the mystery are only what I call 'the olive in the Martini'. The really good mystery is one you would read even if you knew somebody had torn out the last chapter."

http://rt.com/op-edge/iran-pakistan-s...

http://www.globalresearch.ca/are-syri...

Gerard wrote: " He wasn't Chandler's 'Knight Errant', not a man of virtú "

I have never before heard anyone use that word, much less in its positive, Machiavellian sense as the limiter on the abuse of power -- the knightly part of errancy.

"The really good mystery is one you would read even if you knew somebody had torn out the last chapter."

One of my favorite stories is C.P. Snow's A Coat Of Varnish in which the detective (an amateur and friend of the murdered person) finally gives up an increasingly desultory investigation in favor of being in love.

Another is Gadda's That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana. The crime is solved, but by that time has taken a back seat to a panorama of life in Rome.

What about Carlos Fuentes' Hydra Head?
Durrenmatt's Inspector Barlach books?

I'd be hard-pressed to identify any of these as having been editorially damaged (their authors being probably immune) or as political as you or Jay would like but they have a quality I want. Snow's book is a truncated cozy. Gadda's made Barzun furious as being "literary". Fuentes's is fairly pure noir, I think. Durrenmatt (like Sciascia) is good at hidden menace. All of them are critical of the society we live in, and the powerlessness of ordinary people to change that.

This is rather far from my original question about hard-boiled, and my examples are certainly not pulp but, perhaps obscurely, they are examples of some of the things I look for in noir, including the escape from boundaries. [Blade Runner] The gold standard for me is Spade's final speech to Brigid O'Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon. Pure virtú.

I haven't read any of these but the Gadda was one I always had on my radar.
Rome is one of the cities I most like to visit, so it is about time I treat myself to the Via Merulana.

Group member Scott Parsons signposted this article on Hammett and San Francisco in the New York Times:

"But for almost a century, the city has been indelibly linked with an enigmatic genre that might be considered an antidote to all of that: noir.

Like the characters that populate it, noir can be tough to put your finger on: a fog rolling in from the bay and coating city streets; a lonely sort of glamour perched on a bar rail; a sense of menace just over your shoulder. It is a genre that revels in ambiguity.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/29/tra...

Michael, Melki, Jim, Scott, Linton

I noticed today that Feliks has accused me of colluding with my 'pals and cronies' to interfere with his right to be heard.

He has created a 'wall of shame' on two other groups where he is the Moderator.

As each of you can confirm, I was not in contact with any of you who complained about him, either before or after your complaint. My original contact was to Melki, wherein I sought clarification if I had contravened any group rules, and with the offer to resign immediately if I had.
Melki confirmed I had not contravened any rules but also advised that members had complained about Feliks on previous occasions.
Complaints were registered by some of you on this thread.

By implication, of course, those of you who complained may be wondering if you are the 'pals and cronies' who are alleged to have colluded with me.

I have flagged this to Goodreads as not only an abuse of Goodreads protocol but as a libellous statement against me. I expect Goodreads to address this.

This is a link to one of Feliks' posts:
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

The other is on a group where only members can read the posts.

Sorry to see that Gerard. He PM'd me & said he just found out he'd been banned. No, I'm not friends with you, Scott, or Linton. As I told Feliks, I thought he was rude & came to the conclusion all on my own. He's being kind of a jerk in another group, too. It's a shame. Seems like a bright guy, just doesn't seem to be housebroken. He's probably a teen & just needs a girl friend.