HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: The world works in mysterious ways, and we are grateful for that, right?
Here’s the scoop. (And giveaway below.)
Some months ago, or whenever, Hallie emailed me asking if I could book an acquaintance of hers on my interview show called CRIME TIME on A Mighty Blaze. His name was David Freed, and his newest thriller DEEP FURY.
(You know Crime Time, I hope: Every Tuesday at 4 PM ET on the Facebook page of A Mighty Blaze, I do a 30 minute live interview with an author, and then the audience chimes in with questions. I have done about 265 of them so far, can you believe it? And we always have a giveaway. We are on hiatus until Jan 7, but see you then.)
Anyway.
Any friend of Hallie’s is a friend of mine, of course, so I said, sure, and gave his info to the CRIME TIME show producer. (She's the one who decides who appears.) And it was scheduled.
Of course, before I do such an interview, I have to read the interviewee’s book, and that is always a treat – – sometimes they are books by author I would have read anyway, and sometimes they are new. This one was new.
So, darling, Reds and Reader. I open this DEEP FURY, and it is instantly, absolutely, terrific! Suspenseful, tense--and hilarious!
(And here is the interview. You will note I was so in control about it that I had no idea what day it was.)
David Freed, (whose bio is below, and it will make you gasp, truly,) has created essentially a genre of his own: a witty and humorous noir.
How can there be a funny noir?
And that is why David is here today. And we are the luckier for it. (And I will give a copy of DEEP FURY to one lucky commenter!)
Laughter and Murder: An Odd Couple of Comedy and Corpses
The legendary comedian and filmmaker Charlie Chaplin was once reputed to have said, “Life is easy. Comedy is hard.” The man knew what he was talking about. Trying to write funny is nothing to laugh at, especially when it comes to murder mysteries.
Trust me. I’ve been there.If you’ve never tried it yourself, you might assume that all you have to do in writing a mystery with comedic elements is to come up with a few well-placed chuckles and—Shazam! -- you’re the next Janet Evanovich or Carl Hiassen. But that’s not how it works.
Not even close.
It’s been my experience that infusing humor in prose can be an ordeal, a chaotic whirlwind of trial, error, and sitting sullenly at my desk, weeping periodically into my coffee cup. And by coffee cup I mean a large tumbler of Irish whiskey. (Just kidding. I’ve tried writing a time or two after having had a wee too much to drink, just to get the old “creative juices” flowing. The results have always been masterpieces of unreadable hieroglyphics).
The fundamental struggle when writing funny, as every stand-up comedian knows, is that humor is highly subjective. What I might consider comedic gold might make zero sense to you, and leave you convinced I’m a few neurons short of a synapse. The good news is that doctors have discovered a medical explanation for this phenomenon, and that is this: the funny bone is not a universal organ.
What makes things even trickier for a writer trying to write funny is the endless sea of humor styles out there. Some readers prefer witty banter. Some enjoy sarcasm or slapstick. Still others find sardonic glee in the graphic spilling of blood and guts and triple-digit body counts. Thus, at that very moment when you think you’ve hit your comedy sweet spot, you’ve likely alienated broad swaths of your potential audience.
Then there is the seemingly dichotomous issue of murder and humor. As anyone who has ever watched Dragnet or NCIS Sheboygan knows, homicides tend to be serious business. A mystery novel centering on homicides can’t be too funny. Or can it? It’s like baking a soufflé. The ingredients must be perfectly proportional and mixed precisely.
Like a soufflé, if the humor doesn’t rise just right, the whole thing collapses into one, big, gooey mess of confusion. One must be ever mindful of the delicate balance between timing and pacing, between being over-the-top too funny and not funny enough. It’s a high-stakes game. Get it right and it and it feels like magic. Get it wrong and it’s like a microwaved burrito from 7-Eleven. It’s either burned to a crisp or cold in the middle. And who the hell wants to eat that?
The next hurdle to overcome when trying to write funny is overthinking it. Humor is a cruel master or mistress. He/she demands that you constantly mull the merits or lack thereof of individual lines, even when you’re not sitting at your desk.
Such times can include staring up at the ceiling at 3 in the morning, taking a shower, walking the dog, and especially when your significant other is reminding you for third time about your social schedule this weekend, but you don’t hear a word she’s saying even if you’re looking straight at her because you’re thinking to yourself, “Hmm, I wonder if that reference to Engelbert Humperdinck is too obscure or too obvious?” or “Gee, I sure hope that line about kinky sex in Chapter Three doesn’t spawn a book boycott in the Bible Belt.”
You find yourself trapped in an endless loop of analyzing and second-guessing and being accused by your significant other of living in your head too much, all of which is the opposite of funny. Congratulations. You’ve now turned a simple thought into a three-act drama, and by the time you’ve worked through your internal monologue, the joke is so far removed from its original form that it might as well be a thesis about the wonders of quantum physics.
But perhaps the most excruciating part of writing funny comes invariably after you’ve set your pages aside for a day or two, then you go back and objectively reread them, only to realize... By the whiskers of Sherlock Holmes, this is just not funny!
Alas, this is the dark moment where every writer’s worst fears materialize: You’ve written something you thought upon first blush worked. It doesn’t. So you rework the bit 17 times and it’s still doesn’t work. All those carefully crafted sentences that you labored over so intently are now nothing more than tombstones of lost laughter. It's at that point that I’ll call it a day, get online, and explore other possible means of employment, like maybe becoming a plumber, because you know what they say about plumbers--when you have a plumbing license, it’s a license to steal.
But, alas, I digress.
Anyway, after I’ve pondered various other possible occupations, I’ll realize that really, I’m not suited to do anything other than be a writer. And so, the next morning, I will force myself to return to my desk, armed with fresh eyes and a clear head, and give it another go. The opening of Deep Fury, my new Cordell Logan mystery, is a good example of such an effort. I’m not exaggerating when I tell you that the first paragraph went through no less than fifty revisions before I was finally comfortable in letting you read it:
Long after the naked man plummeted from the night sky and exploded like a bomb through the roof of Walt and Lena Rizzo’s double-wide mobile home at the Sun Country RV and Trailer Park, Walt couldn’t decide if it was the dog or divine providence that had saved his wife’s life.
Did you smile inside, if only a little? I surely hope so.
At this point, you may be asking yourself, “So, Dave, what’s the bottom line here? Is trying to write funny nothing more than a torturous pursuit that ultimately leads to the gnashing of teeth and wishing you were never born? Hardly.
Writing humor may well be a maddingly frustrating dance between wit, timing, and despair, but when you finally get it right, and a reader emails to tell you they guffawed out loud reading your book on the subway, it’s worth every agonizing second. Because in the end, humor is a gift. It may be difficult to pin down, but when you’ve manage to brighten a stranger’s day, all the struggles are worth it.
And that, my friends, is no joke.
HANK: SO great, Reddies! Do you enjoy humorous mysteries and thrillers? Like what?
And remember, a copy of DEEP FURY. to one lucky commenter!
The son of a cop, David Freed is an instrument-rated pilot, proud aircraft owner, produced Hollywood screenwriter, and a former daily newspaper reporter. He logged nearly two decades in investigative journalism, the majority at the Los Angeles Times, where he covered the military, served as the Times’ lead police reporter, and reported from the Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Iraq during the first Gulf War. Among many other awards, he was an individual finalist for the Pulitzer Prize’s Gold Medal for Public Service, the highest honor in American journalism, for his multi-part expose of ineptitudes within the Los Angeles County criminal justice system, and shared the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Reporting of the Rodney King riots. David was subsequently hired by the Los Angeles bureau of CBS News as an investigator and associate field producer to help cover the OJ Simpson case.
Later still, he worked as a contractor for the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the US Army’s Battle Command Battle Lab at Fort Huachuca, Arizona. He's also written frequently for national magazines, including Air & Space Smithsonian, where he was a contributing editor, and the Atlantic, where his story, “The Wrong Man,” detailing the plight of a government medical researcher falsely accused of murder, was honored as a finalist in feature writing by the American Society of Magazine Editors.
A former special assistant professor of journalism at his alma mater, Colorado State University, David holds a master’s degree from Harvard University and currently teaches creative writing at Harvard’s Extension School. Deep Fury is the long-awaited seventh installment in his Cordell Logan series of mystery-thrillers. David lives in Santa Barbara, California, with his clinical psychologist wife, Elizabeth, and Oz, their brilliant, gentle Australian shepherd. They have two adult children and three grandchildren.
A naked man drops from the night sky and crashes through the roof of a mobile home, nearly killing the elderly couple inside. The victim is soon identified as Pete Hostetler, a well-respected executive at a California-based toy manufacturing company. But detectives are baffled, and there are no leads. Did he accidentally fall out of an airplane or was he pushed?
For Cordell Logan—a sardonic, financially struggling flight instructor and former government assassin—Hostetler’s death is personal. The two men were classmates at the US Air Force Academy and later served together as fighter pilots during Operation Desert Storm, where Hostetler saved Logan’s life during one particularly perilous combat mission in Iraq. Logan is convinced Pete was murdered. But who would’ve killed someone in such bizarre fashion, and why?
Determined to avenge his battle buddy’s death, Logan starts digging and discovers nothing is as it seems, and that he may not have known Hostetler as well as he thought. Soon a vexing trail of clues lead him and his aging Cessna, the Ruptured Duck, across California, deep into Mexico, and relentlessly into harm’s way.
https://www.facebook.com/suspectfreed/
@davidjfreed.bsky.social
Congratulations, David, on your new book . . . I'm looking forward to reading "Deep Fury" . . .
ReplyDeleteI love that there's humor in your stories . . . murder is gruesome and a few chuckles along with the story are certainly welcome :)
It's interesting, though, the balance. And you will love htis book!
Delete