SEE IF I CARE

by Rob Lopresti

When I started the blog Little Big Crimes my mission was simple: say nice things about short mystery stories. That’s why I announced I would review the best story I read that week. What’s the point of criticizing them? Who said “like breaking a butterfly on a wheel?”

But last week before I started my rave I felt obliged to rant a little:

I have been reading mostly web-based stories this week and getting frustrated by them. Here is the plot I seem to read over and over: bad guy meets bad guy. One of them gets killed.

Okay, it’s a story, I guess. In fact it is the plot of “Loaded,” which I reviewed here last week. But by itself, it is not enough. You have to make me care what happens, which bad guy gets killed.

And that is what I have been thinking about ever since: how do we make the reader care about what happens in the story? Here are some methods that work for me as a reader, in no particular order:

Give me the hook. You can rent my attention for a few minutes with a great opening line. “Art Matthews shot himself, loudly and messily, in the center of the parade ring at Dunstable races.” —Dick Francis, Nerve

Make me laugh. Humor will keep reading.

Show me them purty words. What critics call “heightened language,” where the writing does more than just tell the story. Faulkner expressed a view of the world with his long, intricate, stream-of-consciousness sentences. Hemingway did likewise with flat prose and short sentences. Such techniques always run the risk of annoying the reader, but hey, at least you’re trying.

What a concept. Give me a story with a breath-taking central idea. Francis of Assisi as detective (Alan Gordon). Retell Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped (James Lincoln Warren). An armchair detective who happens to be an armchair (James Powell).

Puzzle me. The whodunit is great, but you have to balance between the eeny meeny murder mo extreme and the “this time it’s personal” extreme – the latter being the private eye whose every friend and relative gets murdered in the course of his series. But a puzzle story doesn’t have to be a whodunit. Jack Ritchie won an Edgar with “The Absence of Emily,” in which the narrator tells everyone that his wife is off visiting friends, but acts as if something very different has happened. Whatsgoingon can be just as compelling as whodunit.

Introduce me to your friends. Stories need interesting characters. Not necessarily nice guys, bad guys are fine. But I have to have a reason to root for or against them. Parker: scrupulously ethical thief with no morals whatsover. Keller: amoral hitman who gets strangely fascinated by dogs, stamp-collecting, small towns… James Flood: A ruthless kidnapper with a cunning plan and a twisted need for vengence. All scoundrels, not a one of them dull.

Let’s twist again. A surprise ending can make the whole story look better.

Show me the goal line. The protagonist needs toaspire to something, preferably something I can sympathize with. Has it ever struck you that the essence of noir is the American dream? A nobody, hungering for success, tries to lift himself up by his own bootstraps. Maybe he does it by robbing a bank or killing his sweetheart’s husband, but he wants to achieve, just like everyone in this country is supposed to. He gets squashed like a bug, but dammit, he’s trying.

Show me the pearly gates. Not literally. But the possibility of redemption is a powerful pull. Give the protagonist a shot at fixing the disaster he caused, healing the wound, being a better person than he thought he was. This doesn’t mean the hero has to succeed in being redeemed, of course. And redemption can take all kind of forms. Thomas Walsh won awards for a story called “Chance After Chance” in which (spoiler alert) a washed-up alcoholic ex-priest killed himself because he knew it was the only way to keep from breaking his vows. Redemption by suicide? Absolutely.

So, those are the ones I could think of. What makes you care about a story?