AWAY AVEC LE CLICHÉ

by James Lincoln Warren

This past Saturday, Paul Guyot directed me (and a lot of others, including Elaine Flinn, Gar Anthony Haywood, and Robert S. Levinson) to David Montgomery’s blog, Crime Fiction Dossier, where there was a lively exchange concerning clichés in P.I. fiction. Among David’s least favorites were the following:

• The psycho sidekick who does the dirty work so that the hero can keep his hands clean.
• The detective who’s a gourmet cook.
• The detective who drives a flashy car. (Would you really try to tail someone in a Ferrari or Shelby Cobra?)
• The detective as social worker — not only does he solve your case, he heals your soul.
• The detective who’s a gimmick instead of a character: he loves Bugs Bunny, he’s got OCD, he’s a leper, he’s a left-handed transsexual, he thinks he’s from Mars, etc.

The posted comments quickly evolved into a discussion asking when exactly is something a cliché, anyway?

Now, I usually despair whenever somebody pulls out the ancient argument, that depends on what you mean by cliché. The good ol’ definitions game. What the definition of “is” is. Oh, please. Among writers, semantics should never be at issue, because a writer’s job is to express himself as clearly as possible. Anything less is just being lazy.

But it is good to remember that there is more than one kind of cliché. Usually, when one speaks of a cliché, one means an expression, frequently a simile, exclamation, or stock phrase intended as wit: “quiet as a mouse”, “YES!” (accompanied by a fist-pumping motion), “please don’t hate me just because I’m beautiful.” All of David M.’s examples, however, are situational clichés.

David restricted his discussion to hard-boiled. But here are some that apply to crime fiction in general:

• The wife contemplating murdering her husband over their morning coffee
• The detective’s former love interest as victim
• The extremely violent Russian mafioso
• The self-tormented Palestinian hijacker
• The stuffed shirt police supervisor
• The cannibalistic serial killer
• The detective’s interfering but well-meaning and extremely irritating mother or mother-in-law
• The suave burglar
• The heartless and methodical professional assassin
• The nerdy computer criminal
• The kidnapped tyke

Of course I could go on, and I’ve deliberately left out outdated clichés like the bombshell blonde femme fatale and the Oriental diabolical mastermind. Those hoary old ideas creak so loudly even talentless amateurs avoid them.

But when does a stock idea stop being a convention and become a cliché?

My P.I. heroes are all very clever and are prone to expressing their wit, which frequently has an edge. This, of course, is common behavior among fictional private investigators. I consider this a useful convention, and, in fact, it’s one of the things I look for in a good P.I story. But the smart-ass private dick can just as easily slide over into cliché, fall into what Our Rob recently called a “well-marked rut” in a recent Tune It or Die! Where is the boundary?

My Bible, the Oxford English Dictionary, defines a cliché as “a stereotyped expression, a commonplace phrase; also, a stereotyped character, style, etc.”, and further as “hackneyed”. And here we have the crux of the matter.

Making smartass comments is stereotypical of private detectives in hard-boiled crime fiction. But having a stereotypical characteristic does not necessarily make the character himself a stereotype. All of us use, or have used, clichés in our everyday speech, and, in fact, the use of a cliché by a writer can have a distinct and perfectly justifiable purpose — for example, indicating that a character is not particularly bright, or as deliberate parody. But having nothing but stereotypical characteristics crosses the line into cliché with a vengeance. The boundary is fuzzy, but it’s there.

Elmore Leonard’s first rule is never to begin a story with the weather. There can be no doubt that he had Bulwer-Lytton’s famous opening, one of the most trite expressions in all of English literature, in the back of his mind. (I have at one time or another broken every one of Dutch’s rules.) The first mystery story I ever sold begins thus:

The spring of 1771 progressed steadily toward summer. The evening air grew brighter and clearer, and the skies, which until late May had been dominated by billowing white clouds, became increasingly transparent, so that even the bright lights and fireworks of Vauxhall Gardens did little to dim the spectacle of the stars. Morning arrived early, and London awoke to daylight well before seven o’clock, when Alan Treviscoe arrived at the common room of New Lloyd’s in Pope’s Head Alley.

Well, I wanted to establish a couple of things from the onset, one of which is that my story was historical. I also wanted to ease the reader into the periodic sentence, which is a construction essential to the flavor of the Treviscoe series. I thought the best way to do this was to mentally telescope inward from the general to the specific, and you can’t get more general than the weather.

Cliché or not? I leave it to you, Gentle Reader. I’d like to hear about what each of you consider other over-used ideas, too.

Diction City Police Department Interoffice Memorandum

In the original draft of this column, I used the expression “begs the question”. I deleted it when I realized it was unnecessary, and also because it is more often misunderstood than not. So I’m going to take the opportunity here to explain that the expression does not simply mean “raises the question”, nor does it mean “avoids the question”, as so many people assume.

“To beg a question” is the English equivalent of the logical fallacy known in Latin as petitio principii, to draw a conclusion from an assumption which is either implicit in the conclusion, or which itself requires proof, i.e., a circular argument on the one hand, or an argument of many questions on the other.

Example: The creation of the universe proves Brahma the Creator’s existence, because only Brahma the Creator could have created the universe.

This begs the question of Brahma’s existence because it hasn’t been proven that the universe was volitionally created in the first place, and even if it was, who actually did the creating. (My money is on some graduate student working on his doctoral dissertation somewhere beyond Time.) It is merely assumed that if the universe was created by an act of will, it must have been created by Brahma, because the definition of the creator of the universe is Brahma — in other words, Brahma either exists by definition, viz., by circular argument; or because the universe was created, a premise which requires its own proof, viz., the fallacy of many questions.

It does not beg either of the questions, If Brahma didn’t create the universe, then who did?, or Where does Brahma get his ideas? Those are unrelated issues.

Get it? Good. Glad we cleared that up.