I’ll be back with The Scribbler on Monday, March 7. In the meantime, he-e-e-ere’s Janice! —JLW

JUST THE RIGHT AMOUNT OF REALITY

by Janice Law

My son, who is a professional sportswriter, and I are currently putting together a thriller – the first time I have done any collaborative writing. Since I’ve never even belonged to a writer’s group and am usually in a panic about sharing my work, producing joint chapters has been an adventure.

Fortunately, most of the time we are in agreement – homicide clearly brings a family together – but when we aren’t, the appeal is always to realism. He claims to know how mobsters operate, understandable since he lives in Chicago. I counter that I know how big country houses operate, having grown up downstairs on an upstairs downstairs estate.

Fine. Argument settled? No way, because the disagreeing party now appeals to the Conventions of the Genre, which is the writer’s equivalent of the Way of the Samurai. This in turn leads to the big consideration, how much reality is enough?

That, as Hamlet said, is the question, whether in a full length mystery, thriller, literary novel, short story, or screen play. It is a big question in the short form, as everything must be dealt with efficiently in a few thousand words or less, and it is a really big question in the short mystery story.

Why? Because in real life the motives for homicide are usually boring, and death is horrible but banal: too much liquor leading to bad temper, and bad judgment with firearms leading to disaster. The local papers have this covered, and ordinary crime is not much fun to read.

Or write. What’s the poor writer to do but reach for the Conventions of the Genre and steal as much as possible from giants past? Oh, for the ingenuity of an Agatha Christie, whose murderers spend so much time giving us original means of death and setting up crime scenes with messages. The results are totally implausible but good for exercising the little gray cells, especially as we age.

But as every action provokes an equal and opposite reaction, the Christie school of ingenious murder and elegant detection produced a reaction in the form of the tough guy detective, who kicked the body out of the library and into gritty urban alleys. The so-called cozy, whether in short or long form, has never quite recovered its dominance, on the grounds that it is too “feminine” and not “realistic.”

However, a closer look at what might be called the macho school of mystery and thriller writing reveals that Christie’s ingenuity has maintained a subterranean life in the intricate plots, hidden messages, and esoteric information beloved by any number of best sellers. Herbal poison may have given way to computer hacking, but the wild plots are no less unrealistic even with high caliber weapons and high testosterone protagonists.

As for the gritty urban detective, I fear that he is barely more realistic than Peter Wimsey or Hercule Poirot. With his high alcohol consumption and horrible diet, he would be more likely to keel over with a heart attack than run down bad guys half his age. Even Mankell’s Kurt Wallander, currently afflicted with very plausible diabetes, has not cut back on the derring-do.

But that’s exactly why we like mystery stories. We like to think that nice suburban women can outwit serial killers and that overweight guys of a certain age can save the world. Fiction is how we shape things nearer to our heart’s delight, and in mystery fiction that means bringing most criminals to justice most of the time. It also means, and this is why the mystery is in many ways a hopeful and a democratic genre, that the intelligence and common sense of quite ordinary people can set things right again after evil happens. Nothing wrong with that!

But the Conventions of the Genre will always be to some extent at odds with reality, and the writer has to find a good balance point. This is especially true in genre fiction of every kind. In short mystery stories, surprising twists, always a delight to the reader, almost always reduce plausibility. And as plots become more intricate, psychological realism often takes its leave.

Writers work around this in various ways. Research into background details is one ploy. The hope is that someone who knows so much about French military pistols or types of Japanese pottery will be trusted when plots begin to take leave of the here and now.

Local color is also helpful, whether the setting is the last word in luxury and elegance or down among seedy warehouses and moldering tenements. If you can get the reader to smell the sea air or the mildewed staircase, you’re more than half way home, because we read fiction to be elsewhere. We want to leave the here and now for some place different, even if that some place is unpleasant. Wherever we wind up, the realism of the details lets us know that we have traveled, but the Conventions of the Genre assure that we will enjoy the trip.