CHOICE CUT

by James Lincoln Warren

John’s article on Saturday brought up the topic of film composers, and that stimulated a little introspection and reflection on my part. I spent the plurality of my college years as a musician and even attended the Mannes College of Music in New York City as a conducting major for two of them. I left Mannes just before they threw my ass out — actually, they threw my ass out anyway, because I was so angry when I departed that I didn’t bother to tell them I wasn’t coming back. I received notification from Mannes that I was no longer enrolled two weeks into the fall semester at another college. I laughed and cried when I read the letter, hiding in my parents’ garage because I didn’t want my reaction to be witnessed by anybody when I opened the fatal missive.

All that was a long time ago, and believe me, my anger has long since dissipated. One of my best friends is now on Mannes’s faculty. Most (but by no means all) of my failure as a student there was my own damn fault anyway, and holding a thirty-year grudge is hard work. (To be honest, my anger had bid adieu only a couple of years after the event. I visited the Mannes campus shortly after I joined the Navy and was affectionately treated by everyone there as if I were a distinguished alumnus.)

When I have occasion to tell people of my musical education, I frequently get asked why I quit, especially since classical music is still my greatest, albeit avocational, passion. I guess most people don’t realize that this is a deeply personal question, but it is. The closest simple answer to such a complex query is frankly that I lacked sufficient talent to fulfill my ambitions, a fact not all that easy to confess to relative strangers — nobody relishes exposing their weaknesses, and the failure to recognize one’s own true potential connotes other, more profound, weaknesses, among them a lamentable lack of self-awareness exacerbated by an unattractive touch of arrogance. Not that I worry about such things now. It’s a lot easier to face this sort of thing in one’s 50s than in one’s 20s.

And this thought led to another link in the chain of experience, to wit, the realization that life is a mix of the choices we make and the choices that are willy-nilly made for us. Hardly an original sentiment, I know, but it strikes me that an understanding of this essential fact is indispensable to the art of story-telling, especially of the crime variety.

The victim of a crime has no choice, but the commission of the crime may be facilitated by the choices the victim has made, without knowledge or regard to the possible consequences — either it goes to motive or to opportunity. A jealous husband kills his rival because the rival chose to compete for the favors of his wife. A woman is assaulted in a dark alley because she went drinking at the wrong club. An overbearing boss pushes his long-suffering employee beyond endurance. And so forth.

All crime fiction treats with either the application or the deprivation of justice, or with both, in all justice’s variegated forms between legal and poetic. That’s where the drama lies. The drama is manifested in the choices for good or ill that the character makes — it’s a truism in story-telling that the reader should be made more aware of the character’s strengths and weaknesses than the character is himself. When a character makes a bad choice, the reader should feel a sense of alarm, unless the consequences of that choice are intended to come as a surprise or shock. Don’t climb up the stairs into the dark attic! Give the mysterious bag full of money to the police! Don’t ignore the stranger’s desperate plea for help!

Alternatively, a character may be forced into a situation entirely not of his own making. Fate, if you will. This is the classic formula for the thriller — Roger O. Thornhill flags down a bellboy at the Plaza Hotel and is thereby mistaken for government agent George Kaplan by two ruthless spies, setting off a dance of danger and death that eventually culminates in a desperate life-or-death pursuit on Mount Rushmore. The only choices Roger can make in the interim go directly to survival, and you can’t get much more dramatic than that. One false step and it’s adios, amigo. (Speaking of, everyone is relieved when the vile Leonard is taken out by a sniper just in time.)

For years, I’ve been fond of saying with regard to genre fiction that science fiction is a literature of ideas, but that crime fiction is a literature of behavior. That’s probably a tad superficial. It seems to me now that it’s also a literature of principles, of behavior in context. I’ve also said that we mystery writers have only one basic plot, and I still think that’s true, but to our advantage we have a plot that embraces an infinity of personal choices. Maybe that’s one reason why I love to write crime stories. It lets me explore consequences without actually having to live them.

Deborah asked last week, “What if … ?” She was reflecting on the transitory nature of life, but that is the indispensable question that drives all fiction. The important thing is to ask it before it has already been decided.

I was a fair musician, but I was no Arturo Toscanini. I don’t regret leaving that life behind in the least, especially when I think of how rich my life has been since. One of things I learned from that whole life episode is that you are not what you do, and if you confuse being with doing, you’re setting yourself up for a lot of suffering. Another tick in the plus column is that it endowed me with a lot of great stories to tell. If the Gentle Reader ever joins me for a cocktail at the bar, and the Gentle Reader is always invited, ask me about how I met Leonard Bernstein. If that anecdote doesn’t make you laugh and inspire you with wistful imaginings, nothing will.

In other news …

David L. Ulin, book editor for the Los Angeles Times, has a wonderful piece in Sunday’s paper on the challenges facing people who love to read. In the print edition, it was headlined “Finding your focus”, but online it’s led by “The lost art of reading”. In any case, here’s a link.