The Way of the (Detective) World

HANK:  I love Charles Salzberg, and he knows it, and I love his books. But what I didn’t know, until he sent me this blog, was what he had written a non-fiction book with another of my idols, Soupy Sales. I burst out laughing simply thinking about Soupy, and I bet Charles has all the scoop.  But I guess that’s a different blog.

How’d you decide to write crime fiction? I asked him. And, like everything Charles writes, that turned out to be a great story.

How I Became a Crime Writer and Stayed That Way

           --Charles Salzberg

It was an accident. Not the kind of accident where anyone gets hurt. The kind of accident where something happens that’s totally unplanned and unpredictable. It was an accident that changed my life. For the better, as it turned out.

Let’s start at the beginning. Not the beginning like when God created the heavens and the earth. The beginning as in when I had to decide how I was going to make my way in the world.

 First, the decision.

That was the easy part. I was going to be a writer. I was never without a book and as a shy kid, someone who didn’t make friends easily, an unhappy kid who wanted to live in a happier world, books and movies were the perfect refuge.

The only thing better than reading a book, I thought, was creating one.

I even knew what kind of writer I wanted to be. Like Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, Vladimir Nabokov, Dostoevsky, John Updike. The serious literary ones, who wrote interesting characters who led interesting, complicated, often tortured lives.

But making that happen wasn’t so easy.

After tackling my first novel at the age of 12—it was a roman a clef based on sleep-away summer camp (half a dozen single-spaced pages which I still have)—I became an English major in college.

But life got in the way.  I had to make a detour into law school. Then another detour into teaching in a special school for delinquent kids.

One thing led to another and soon, to put food on the table, I began writing nonfiction books. Some of them my own, many of them collaborations, some of them even ghostwritten by me. And all the time I kept working on and finishing novels. But although they were praised for style and the characters, no one wanted to publish them. Why? Because they weren’t commercial. Or, as one professor and novelist not so gently informed me, “You write that psychological crap, like Dostoevsky, Nabokov and Bellow. Don’t you know what a story is?”

I took the first part as high praise. I took umbrage to the second, Of course, I knew what a story was.  But to me plot wasn’t all that important. Maybe that was the reason I wasn’t having any luck getting published. Maybe I ought to concentrate on plot instead of style and character.

So damnit, I’d show them. I’d write a novel and plot the hell out of it. I’d write a detective novel, because I couldn’t think of any genre in which plot was more essential.

And so I immersed myself. I read everything I could: Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Rex Stout, John D. MacDonald, James M. Cain, Mickey Spillaine, Agatha Christie, Charles Willeford, Jim Thompson, Ross MacDonald. I came away in awe and with a newfound respect. There were talented writers in that group, and though their work was carefully plotted, they hadn’t given up style and character.

I was heartened and a little nervous. Would I be able to pull it off?

Then I found there was not so much a formula involved in writing detective fiction, but certain assumptions in the genre.  That the world usually begins as an orderly place. And then a crime is committed and the world is no longer orderly. It’s shaken to its core and becomes downright chaotic. Along comes the detective whose job it is to make the proper connections by following the clues and solving the crime, which ultimately puts that world back into place.

I began by creating a prototypical American detective. Henry Swann is a loner, living on the margins. He carries a heavy burden—his wife was killed in a freak accident and he gave up his son to his in-laws. He’s a skip tracer, even lower than a private eye. And he is low on the moral scale, willing to do just about anything for money. One day a beautiful, wealthy woman (this is the way most classic detective novels begin) appears in his office in a rundown part of town and hires him to find her missing husband. Within a day, he finds her husband has been murdered. So she then hires him to find out who killed him and why.

But here’s where I veered away from the usual detective plot. I created a corpse who had different identities, and Swann has to figure out who this man really was as opposed to who killed him. And Swann does not solve the crime himself. In fact, I turned the detective model on its ear by creating a world that didn’t make sense, where the clues didn’t add up to solving the mystery.

What I didn’t bargain for was that no one would publish the book that way. “People who read detective novels want the detective to solve the crime,” I was told, “and if they don’t they will be disappointed.”  The novel sat in a drawer for twenty more years, before I pulled it out, updated it, and showed it to an editor. He loved it, but said he’d only publish it if I changed the ending. By that point, you might say I’d outgrown my principles and said, “sure.” Thus was Swann’s Last Song born.

As I began to work in the genre I realized crime novels aren’t just about murder. They’re about life and only sometimes death. I was really writing about human nature. And then I realized--all good writing necessitates an element of mystery. If I can’t make you want to turn that page to find out what’s going to happen next, then I’m not a successful writer.

I also made a conscious decision that murder wasn’t going to be the focal point. Instead, I would write about all the other crimes that happen. How many of us are touched by murder? Very few, I’d guess. But crimes of the heart? Theft? Fraud? Lying? Cheating? Aren’t these crimes?

 A whole world opened up to me as a result. I wasn’t a crime writer. I was a writer who happened to write about crime. And if you think about it this is true of all the great crime writers out there. They’re not writing about crime. They’re writing about us. The best of us. The worst of us. Every one of us.

HANK:  Loved this book! So Reds, do you remember the book that hooked you on crime fiction? Either as a child, or a teenager, or an adult?

  

CHARLES SALZBERG is the author of the Shamus Award-nominated Swann’s Last Song, Swann Dives In, Swann’s Lake of Despair (re-release Nov. 2016), Devil in the Hole (re-release Nov. 2016), Triple Shot (Aug. 2016), and Swann’s Way Out (Feb. 2017). His novels have been recognized by Suspense Magazine, the Silver Falchion Awards, the Beverly Hills Book Award and the Indie Excellence Award. He has written over 25 nonfiction books, including From Set Shot to Slam Dunk, an oral history of the NBA, and Soupy Sez: My Life and Zany Times, with Soupy Sales. He has been a visiting professor of magazine at the S.I. Newhouse School of Communications at Syracuse University, and he teaches writing at the Writer’s Voice and the New York Writers Workshop, where he is a founding member.

Website - http://www.charlessalzberg.com/
Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/CharlesSalzbergAuthor/
Twitter - https://twitter.com/CharlesSalzberg
GoodReads - https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/7563.Charles_Salzberg
Amazon - http://www.amazon.com/Charles-Salzberg/e/B001IXO1TE