WE INTERRUPT YOUR REGULARLY SCHEDULED BLOG …

by James Lincoln Warren

… to bring you this Special Bulletin.

Central Florida has had a massive power outage. Normally, we here at Criminal Brief wouldn’t bother our readers with Breaking News, but in this case, it has broken any possibility for Leigh to post his weekly column.

And this got me thinking about how vulnerable writers are, especially when they are trying to be cutting edge, to the contingencies of fate.

When I got out of the Navy at the end of 1987, I wrote a novel called Warcraft. It was a technothriller, part suspense novel, part science fiction. Essentially what I did was take the plot to Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and set it in what was then contemporary society, the early 1990s. In the original (or more accurately in the original’s sequel, The Mysterious Island), we learn that Nemo was an Indian prince who had lost both his realm and family in the wake of a brutal invasion by the British, although at the insistence of Verne’s publisher, the Brits themselves were never specified. I updated the Nautilus to be a fully functional space craft with a variable-geometry hull called the Proteus, and changed Nemo from an Indian rajah into an Iranian captain of industry displaced by the Islamic revolution, whose mission it was to prevent the military exploitation of space, which he accomplished by anonymously destroying the military satellites of all nations, thereby setting up an international crisis.

I finished the novel just in time for the Soviet Union to dissolve into chaos, which historical event caused the technothriller market to fall through the bottom of a black hole unless the author was surnamed Clancy. Needless to say, Warcraft never sold. (In retrospect, I’m glad it didn’t, because it was very much the product of a tyro and I think I’m a much better writer now.) Some folks have urged me to rewrite it and submit it anew, but I don’t see how I honestly can, and in any case, it’s not a story I care to tell again. In particular, most of the technical parts of the technothriller are twenty-odd years out of date. As an example of how grossly archaic the book is now, at the time I wrote it, I felt it necessary to explain to the reader what this newfangled “internet” thingy was.

Time has a way of making certain things irrelevant.

When I labored for my daily bread at Barnes & Noble, one of my co-workers was a man named Zack. I’m ashamed that I don’t remember his surname, but he was a great guy who had been slaving away for years on a baseball-themed romantic comedy screenplay, at the center of which was the Curse of the Bambino. Any chance he had of selling that screenplay came to an abrupt end in 2004 when the Red Sox finally won the World Series. I felt extremely bad for him—all that love and hard work wasted!

The collapse of the Soviet Union was one of the reasons that I turned my attention to historicals. That, I knew, was a market independent on the headlines.

Rapid advances in forensic science have also made things problematical for writers of crime fiction. There is a plethora1 of clues now available to the mystery writer that were previously unobtainable by anyone, and there are new ones popping up all the time. Even for something as basic as a hard-boiled story, there are literally dozens of pitfalls in potential detection that are the result of the ongoing march of science. For that reason, I always include some fancy tech in my “Cal Ops” series to keep the stories current, while usually not hanging my hat on same with regard to the solution to the mystery.

Forensics stories are now a staple of the genre. I may be wrong, and I trust Jon Breen, Barry Zeman, or Steve Steinbock to put me right, but I think that the first purely forensic scientist to appear in crime fiction as a primary detective was Aaron Elkins’ Gideon Oliver. His antecedents, of course, go all the way back to Sherlock Holmes, who famously wrote a monograph on the different kinds of tobacco ash.

The best way around such problems is to center the story less on the technique of the crime than on its effects on the characters. Whereas formerly a puzzle story primarily featured the cleverness of the detective in assembling the clues into a coherent case, these days it’s more likely to be about the human aftermath of the crime itself. The British are particularly adept at this kind of story, witnesseth whereof P. D. James, Peter Robinson, and Ruth Rendell, to list just a few of the most prominent luminaries of this approach. Stories with desperate characters never go out of style.

Recently, my wife and I have been watching a festival of 70s-vintage crime shows: Mannix, Police Woman, The Rockford Files. They hold up surprisingly well, even if Joe Mannix’s then ultra-cool car phone seems hopelessly dated and Pepper Anderson’s investigations into rape are entirely devoid of the dreaded initials “DNA”. Jim Rockford, of course, gets by entirely on charm, another thing that never pales. All the villains seemed to wear suits and ties, which I find extremely amusing in our age of giant clown shorts worn at the butt-crack and backwards baseball caps over skinhead hair-dos. But the 70s TV bad guys are not any the less threatening because of their period elegance. The strength of these shows is in their depictions of human malfeasance and the dark motives that result in criminal acts.

That, at least, is immune to technology.

Hopefully, Leigh’s battle with the local utilities will end in his unconditional triumph, and “The A.D.D. Detective” will pre-empt tomorrow’s “Scribbler”. If not, I’ll be back tomorrow.

1. This seems as good a place as any for unmasking a common Diction Cop violation, the use of the word “panoply” as a synonym for “plethora”. This arose from the common expression “panoply of stars”—taken purely by its context, “panoply” seems to mean “profusion”. But it doesn’t. A panoply is “a complete suit of armour, the ‘whole armour’ of a soldier (a) of ancient or (b) of mediæval times. (In (b) its brightness and splendour are chiefly connoted)” —OED. In other words, it is the shield of heaven that is being referred to by the expression, i.e., the apparently concave appearance of the brightly caparisoned sky, and not the seemingly infinite number of jeweled lights it contains. [↩]