Last Friday I met up with my
writing Colleagues Liz Hand, Lou Berney, Chris F Holm and Seth Harwood, in Cleveland for our
Bouchercon Panel, a discussion on “Morality in the Crime Fiction Hero /
Anti-Hero.” Considering there were three other excellent panels, as well as
key-note event with Toastmaster John Connolly in conversation
with fellow bestselling novelist Karin Slaughter, we were very
surprised at the turnout. It was standing room only, and for those who
attended, we wish to thank you. As ‘morality in crime-fiction’ is a very broad
and interesting topic, we had far more questions than time’, so I thought it
might be fun to publish my notes and questions that we raised, as well as the
ones we didn’t have time to debate. These points both those discussed and those
not, should provoke thought. This is the pleasure of reading, it engages the
mind and makes us think about life and reality, and the prism of crime
fiction, an excellent way of viewing matters in an existential light. And we all
know it rains on the just and unjust alike.
I would urge you to explore the
panelist’s work, though Wallace Stroby emailed me that afternoon, with an
apology as he was taken sick and therefore unable to participate. In honour of
Clint Eastwood, who played the amoral Dirty Harry, we left Wallace’s chair empty………
Elizabeth Hand In the 1970s, Elizabeth Hand flunked out
of college and became involved in the nascent punk scenes in DC and NYC. From
1979 to 1986 she worked at the Smithsonian Institution's National Air & Space
Museum, and eventually
received a BS in cultural anthropology. She is the author of eleven novels and
four collections of short fiction. Her work has received numerous honors,
including the Shirley Jackson Award, World Fantasy Award, and Nebula Award, and
her novels have been New York Times and Washington Post Notable Books. A
regular contributor to the Washington Post, LA Times, Salon, and The Magazine
of Fantasy and Science Fiction, among others, Hand divides her time between the
Maine coast and North
London.
Her novel Available Dark
[2012] is a foray into crime fiction and a sequel to her highly regarded
2007 Novel Generation Loss, which
received the inaugural Shirley Jackson Award for best work of psychological
suspense. Both books feature her antihero Cassandra [Cass] Neary who she
describes “as your prototypical amoral
speedfreak crankhead kleptomaniac murderous rage-filled alcoholic bisexual
heavily tattooed American female photographer.” Perfect for our panel on
amoral heroes!
Lou Berney is an accomplished writer, teacher, and liar. He is
the author of WHIPLASH RIVER
(William Morrow, 2012) and GUTSHOT
STRAIGHT (William Morrow, 2010). GUTSHOT STRAIGHT was nominated for a Barry
Award and named by Booklist as one of the best debut crime novels of the year. Often
compared to Elmore Leonard with a dash of Carl Hiaason, his short fiction has
appeared in publications such as The New Yorker, Ploughshares, and the Pushcart
Prize anthology, and he has written feature screenplays and created TV pilots
for, among others, Warner Brothers, Paramount,
Focus Features, ABC, and Fox.
Currently he teaches writing at the University of Oklahoma
and Oklahoma City
University. Berney’s antihero
Charles "Shake" Bouchon, is a professional wheel man [aka getaway
driver] and is described as “too nice a
guy for the life he's led, but not nice enough for any other”
Chris
F Holm - was born in Syracuse, New
York, the grandson of a cop with a penchant for crime
fiction. It was punk rock and Star Wars,
two influences that hold more sway over Holm, than perhaps his wife would
like. But it was books [like many of us] that defined his
childhood, from his grandfather’s Wambaugh and Lawrence Sanders paperbacks, to
the timeworn pulps picked up secondhand from the library. Apparently, he wrote
his first story at the age of six. It
got him sent to the principal’s office and he’d like to think that right then
is when he decided to become a writer.
Since then, he’s fared a
little better. His stories have appeared in a slew of publications, including
Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Beat to a
Pulp, and Thuglit. His novella “The
Hitter” was selected to appear in THE BEST AMERICAN MYSTERY STORIES 2011,
edited by Harlan Coben and Otto Penzler. He’s been an Anthony Award nominee, a Derringer
Award finalist, and a Spinetingler Award winner. His Collector novels, DEAD HARVEST [Feb 2012] and THE
WRONG GOODBYE [Sept 2012], recast the battle between heaven and hell as
Golden Era crime pulp. They feature Sam Thornton a
collector of souls from the damned and sends them into eternal misery. So it should
have been straightforward to collect the soul of 17-year-old mass murderer Kate
MacNeil, but something isn’t right; her soul is too pure. The collection of an innocent
soul can throw off the balance of good and evil and spark a chain of events
that leads to the end of the world, biblical style – hence the moral / amoral dimension.
Wallace Stroby – I first met Wallace on a late night drinking binge
at Bouchercon Las Vegas in 2003, in a bar called ‘The Peppermill’, which was featured
in John Ridley’s amoral novel ‘Everyone Smokes in Hell’, and we’ve been bumping
into each other at Bouchercons ever since. Stroby is an award-winning
journalist and the author of the novels
"Kings of Midnight," "Cold
Shot to the Heart," "Gone
'Til November," "The
Heartbreak Lounge" and "The
Barbed-Wire Kiss.".
A Long
Branch, N.J., native, he's a
lifelong resident of the Jersey
Shore. "The Barbed-Wire
Kiss," which The Washington Post called "a scorching first novel
...full of attention to character and memory and, even more, to the
neighborhoods of New Jersey," was a finalist for the 2004 Barry Award for
Best First Novel.
A graduate of Rutgers University,
Stroby was an editor at the Star-Ledger of Newark, Tony Soprano's hometown newspaper,
for 13 years. In Stroby’s latest KINGS OF MIDNIGHT, Crissa Stone, the
cool-headed professional thief from Stroby's acclaimed COLD SHOT TO THE HEART
returns and when reviewed at Kirkus she is described
- "Crissa Stone may be crime
fiction's best bad girl ever."
Seth
Harwood – Boston
born but now residing in California,
Seth is the
author of the Jack Palms novels. In 2005,
Seth Harwood began writing his debut novel, Jack Wakes Up. No stranger to the literary scene, Harwood had
graduated from the prestigious Iowa Writers' Workshop just a few years earlier
and his short stories had been published in numerous literary magazines and
anthologies; getting attention from publishers for Jack Wakes Up, however,
proved more difficult. So in July of 2006, Seth recorded a podcast of Jack
Wakes Up and posted it on his website, SethHarwood.com, for free download. The
podcast was a major hit and the Jack Palms Crime Podcast Series was born. Soon JACK WAKES UP was published by Three Rivers Press Paperback Original [Random
House]. Since then he has written This
is The Life [Jack Palms #2], Czechmate
[Jack Palms #3], Triad Death Match [A
Jack Palms Novella], A Long Way from
Disney [a short story collection], In
Broad Daylight [a Jess Harding FBI thriller].
The Jack Palms’ novels
feature the eponymous anti-hero, former Hollywood one-hit wonder and ex-drug
addict now has cleaned up his act, and is sorting his life out, but aspects of
his amoral past still lay in his mind, and Palms is described by some as “half-likeable
and half-asshole”. Though it is his 2010 novel Young Junius, that is perhaps
his most intriguing, taking the 14 year old Junius Posey, who sets to track
down his brother’s killer in a rundown area of Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Junius ends up a killer, crossing the line but it’s the amorality he’s learned
that allows him to sort out the dangers around him.
Seth teachs English and writing at CCSF [City
College San Francisco] and Stanford University, and previously at UMass Boston and the University of Iowa.
Q Would you agree that the basis of the success of the Crime
Fiction / Mystery Genre is the
understanding of ‘Morality’, and the restoration of order? Unlike in life, in the
crime novel we have the ability to solve the problem,
punish the guilty and restore order, giving the reader a sense of ‘closure’ / catharsis as satisfaction is
often absent in the real world,
due to the random nature of reality
[where the rain falls on the just, as well as the
unjust, in equal measure]?
Q In some crime novels we often have the good guy, who
restores the order but in order to
do so, he has a side-kick [to do the dirty work] so the hero keep his uniform white, eg Bubba works with
Patrick and Angie in Dennis
Lehane’s PI novels, Robert B
Parker’s Spencer has Hawk, Harlan
Coben’s Myron Bolitar has Win, Bob Crais’
Elvis Cole has Joe Pike, while some
writers allow their ‘heroes / anti-heroes to do their own dirty work. What are your thoughts on this matter, should
the hero clean up his own mess,
or have a side-kick? And what do you do in your own writing with this dilemma?
Q Many critics indicated that the
Bond villains were very, very bad because James
Bond was a deeply amoral character himself, so his enemies had to be even
more grotesque, a bit like the Batman villains [as Bruce Wayne was a
psychopath] would you agree that when your character / hero / anti-hero is a
bad-ass, then his foes have to be even more evil?
At
this point the panel were asked “if you were in deep, deep trouble and need to
call upon a fictional character to help you out of a jam, who would you call?”
Seth Harwood asked “…but what sort of trouble?” At which I replied “consider it
a big bloody problem, so big it would take an imaginary character, a real
bad-arse to resolve." The panelists spoke about the character they would call,
and the audience voted for a winner, and it was Chris Holm’s nomination of
Bruce Wayne / Batman that was voted the biggest bad-arse, and the one they
would call if mired in a huge problem, beating Patricia Highsmith’s Tom
Ripley, Richard Stark’s Parker
and Helen Zahavi's
Bella.
At
this point, a giant cockroach fell from the ceiling to much consternation from
the audience, luckily the Editor-in-Chief of Shots Magazine, and
insect-wrangler managed to stamp on it, before it attacked the panel. This was
a good time to open up the panel to the audience, for their questions.
This
left the following questions un-debated, but you might find them of interest
and may provoke thought.
Q When writing a amoral hero[s] / anti-hero[s], how hard it is
to ensure the reader retains
sufficient sympathy with the character[s] so there is a willingness to continue to read, on. What writing tactics do
you deploy with examples to keep
the reader engaged even when the lead has some unpleasant
character traits? [eg Elmore
Leonard deployed humor, Westlake / Stark deployed
violence and an efficiency, sense of purpose in the ruthlessness in Parker, Harris
gave Lecter some very insightful dialogue
and a scary intelligence, Larsson
gave Salander autism linked to her
backstory and hi-tech skills, Fleming gave Bond an upperclass perspective, exotic tastes and locations,
etc]
Q I recall being chilled when I read that Adolf Hitler loved
dogs, as he was a huge animal
lover, this made him [in my opinion] all the more hideous as a monster, seeing that he was ultimately
responsible for the deaths of so
many innocent humans, but loved animals, so how important is it that we show the good and bad natures of our
characters, antagonists and protagonists
as the world is no longer black and white but murky grey?
Q What about the good guys that appear in the genre, how
important is to ensure they have
dark sides to their nature, and not totally good-two shoes types, so there is cross-over to the amoral anti-hero? Or
is there legitimacy in have all
characters with good and bad, and the hero is the one who is least bad?
Q What happens when a writer / creator feels perhaps their
anti-hero has crossed the line
between the fantasy world and become a tool for the mentally unstable in the real world? Does the writer creator
have a duty to society to keep
the amorality behind a line? [Examples being Stephen King withdrawing RAGE, an
early book published under his name Richard
Bachman which allegedly was linked to some school kidnappings / shootings, Stanley Kubrick
withdrawing A CLOCKWORK ORANGE in the
UK as it allegedly inspired anti-social gang violence as some youths copied Alex and the Droogs, now
available again following Kubrick’s death,
and more recently the BATMAN massacre in Denver], so what responsibility does the writer / creator
have when walking the morality line?
He said at the trial “In addition, I will put my iPod on
max volume as a tool to suppress fear if needed. I might just put Lux Aeterna
by Clint Mansell on repeat as it is an incredibly powerful song. The
combination of these factors (when added on top of intense training,
simulation, superior armour and weaponry) basically turns you into an extremely
focused and deadly force, a one-man-army.”
Q Can you go too far in having amoral heroes in novels or cinema
of the extreme, for example has anyone here seen the very disturbing ‘A
SERBIAN FILM’? [show of hands please], where the lead character is a male
ex-porn actor, basically a decent man, forced into some unspeakable acts and
acts of extreme sexual violence. I’m never for agreeing with censorship, but
that film disturbed me deeply, and is one that I think crosses the line. Have
any of you, lines on your own value and moral system that you would not cross,
or is any scared cow fair game?
Q Is there a response to amorality by subversion? When
Austrian Michael Haneke wrote and directed ‘FUNNY GAMES’ in
1997 [which was remade for US audiences a decade later], it was deeply
shocking. I found it hard to watch. Haneke in an interview said that his film
was in direct response to the laughter he heard from a teenage cinema audience
when they viewed some of the random and amoral violence and death in Pulp
Fiction. The teenage laughter chilled him, so in response, he made FUNNY GAMES,
where the two psychopaths that terrorise and torture [and murder] the couple
and their young son, are portrayed as charming, well dressed and their madness
/ amorality masked by their charm and joyful natures. We see that amorality is
not funny, and the camera lingers over the violence and no one laughs.
Other examples of subversion of morality could be Mario
Puzo’s The Godfather, where the cops are corrupt while the mob appear to be the
good guys in the neighborhood, or in ‘Mute Witness’ by Robert Fish which became
Bullitt, or the Dirty Harry Movies the amoral [fascistic] cops are better than
the politicians that should be our protectors - Care to comment about the
subversion of morality?
Q There seems to an issue with regard to the treatment of
morality when viewed through the looking glass of different cultures, as some
‘things’ maybe palatable in one culture but not in another. A case in point is
the amoral ‘hero’ such as Thomas Harris’ 1999 novel “Hannibal” which was lauded
by the British / European critics while on the whole unappreciated in Harris’
native America, and Patricia Highsmith whose work especially the Tom Ripley
novels were critically acclaimed in Europe but only after her passing did they
become more than cult books in her native America,
she even left the US for Norfolk and eventually Switzerland? Would you agree that
an amoral hero is more accessible to a European sensibility than an American
one?
Q What
fictional characters do you consider really special? And why are so many
popular characters amoral with often sociopathic tendencies? Can you pick
examples from the book world, as well as comics, films and tell us about the ones
you most liked and perhaps influenced you eg -
Examples being Silence of the Lambs with
Clarice Starling, and the Dr Moriarty style villain with Dr Hannibal Lecter, Carol O'Connell's Kathleen Mallory,
Larsson’s Lisabeth Salander, Fleming’s James Bond,
Richard Stark’s Parker, Highsmith’s Tom Ripley, David Morrell’s John Rambo and
there are many more, not just in books, but comics, films eg Batman, Catwoman,
The Joker, The Watchmen, Clint Eastwood’s Spaghetti Westerns, Dirty Harry,
Bullitt, The Magnificent Seven, Any Tarantino movie, The Dirty Dozen, et al
We had a lot of fun, and I do hope you explore the
panelists’ work, because they
plough the amoral furrow well, because like in life, it rains on the just and unjust in equal
measure.
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