Jangling Jargon

Whilst searching for a displacement activity yesterday (to postpone writing this blog), I was driven to read my University of Washington alumni bulletin.  Most of the time it lets me know what the football team is doing, but lo, this issue featured an article about the English department.

I nearly derailed at the headline: “Composition Research Team Collaborates to Better Understand Student Writing,” and, no doubt, to boldly go where no man has gone before.  But who among us has not split an infinitive?  I plunged in.  It seems a team of graduate students has decided to study freshman comp inmates to see whether they are applying what they learn about writing to other classes–a logical if depressing subject for research.  Their first chore was “to determine a methodology for finding themes and patterns in the data to better understand how … conversations were preparing students to make connections that lead to knowledge transfer.”  Apparently “the nature of the collaborative exchange … plays an important role in getting students to a point where they are comfortable making connections that are nuanced and complex.”  I gave up.  Why does the jargon of writing teachers have to be as ugly and bloodless as a five-day-old corpse?

My thoughts drifted to jargon–that is, to professional dialects like the one I had just sampled.  Fiction writers make a decision early on as to how they’re going to present spoken language.  Very few these days spell regional dialects phonetically, but most find a way to suggest the patterns of local speech.  Margaret Maron, for instance, has a great ear and conveys the speakers’ North Carolina usage unobtrusively and effectively.  Professional jargon is a more difficult problem.

Cops should sound like cops and doctors like doctors, but all of us dread writing the scene in which the medical examiner tells the detective what killed the victim.  The reader wallows in the gabble of two difference professions.  Since most readers aren’t fluent in either coptalk or medicalese, how much jargon should a writer use?  The logical answer is as much as it takes.  I enjoy Kathy Reichs’s novels when I’m feeling bloodthirsty, but there’s a point in almost all of them where the eager reader bogs down in a swamp of pathology.  Sometimes the swamp is two pages deep.  At the end of it, the reader says, “Oh, she didn’t drown.  He whopped her upside the head,” and either forges on or throws the book at the wall.

Police jargon and medical jargon aren’t the only professional dialects to show up in mysteries.  Legalese looms large in courtroom dramas for obvious reasons.  Dick Francis, whom I read compulsively, used the lingo associated with horse racing, but a great many of his books also use the language of other professions effectively–pilot talk, the jargon of banking, even wine selling.

What are the justifications for using jargon at all?  It exists so the pros can exchange precise information economically.  It’s a badge of membership, proof that the speaker is a doctor or a cop.  It also adds an illusion of realism to the story.  It says “this could really happen.”  Less respectably, it’s a slap in the face to non-professionals, in this case readers, to keep them from asking embarrassing questions like “isn’t that a gross coincidence?”

As a mystery reader, I prefer writers who keep the jargon to a minimum.  As a mystery writer, I envy science fiction writers their subversive inventiveness.  A recent article in Yahoo News pointed out that the term “space shuttle” was first used in an episode of Star Trek and that NASA as well as the media then adopted it to describe the vehicle that carries crew and supplies to the orbital space station.  Nor is “shuttle” the only example of professionals mining science fiction for new jargon.  What a pity we can’t invent our own technobabble for mysteries.

For Destruction, Ice

John Ruskin was not fond of poets who attribute human emotion and behavior to non-human phenomena.  He labeled the practice the “pathetic fallacy,” and he was right, up to a point.  It’s certainly a fallacy, that is, not logical, and frequently pathetic when it’s not bathetic.  American law enshrines (note fallacy) at least one pathetic fallacy–that a corporation is a person.  I can just see Enron or Bank of America pouting and stamping its tiny feet as it goes off in a tantrum.

A lot of our ordinary language started out as metaphor.  If we say that the sun sets and the sun also rises and mean it literally, we’re either ignorant or lying, but nobody minds, not even astronomers.  If we go out on a foggy day and say that the fog is choking us, we’re not telling the literal truth.

My husband and I drove from the Portland area to LCC in Colorado Springs, tailed by a snowstorm.  It staked us out during the convention, then moved east and drove all the way to the right coast in pursuit.  We turned south and lost our tail.  Our GPS bickered with us because we had meant to turn west.  This has happened before.  No, not this many metaphors.  Snowstorms.  We drove from Las Vegas to Wisconsin in June one year and hit snowstorms in Wyoming going and in eastern Oregon coming back, on both days the only snowstorms in the contiguous United States.  We are beginning to wonder if we ought to send a warning to the Weather Channel before we travel.

Writers have a lot of freedom to use the weather in a story, whether as a plot element, to complicate the action, to give the characters something to talk about, or just to underline a point.  “It was a dark and stormy night.”  Great opening for almost anything but light comedy.  As a society, though, we are becoming more and more insulated from weather.  We live in weather-proof capsules, our houses and our cars, so a snowstorm or a heatwave often passes by without affecting us much.  It will be a pity when our degree of insulation is so great we no longer have to notice hurricanes and tornadoes.  Some mystery novels seem to happen in that weatherless future.  I find the lack of weather distracting.  I’d rather have symbolic weather than none.  At least in a book.  If the river wants to chuckle, so be it.  When a character dies, let Nature mourn, the rain sobbing convulsively.

In my next mystery (not Beyond Confusion, which is out right now but Hawk Rising, the sequel) my heroine, a painter, lives across the Columbia from Mount Hood.  She observes that, given the right weather conditions, the whole mountain disappears.  Clearly it sneaks off and comes back like a grounded teenager.  If that isn’t pathetic, I don’t know my fallacies.

On the Road Again

My husband and I are about to start off on a leisurely drive to Colorado.  When we get there, I’ll attend Left Coast Crime while Mick explores the countryside.  Afterwards we’re going to see Mesa Verde if possible, then head west through New Mexico and Arizona.  A lot of that will be new country to me at ground level, and I’m looking forward to seeing two of my siblings on the way.  A nice trip.  The prospect does not make my heart go pitty-pat, for a bunch of reasons including sciatica, but it has been ten years since we took a long trip, so we’re almost under an obligation to travel.

That’s a very American conviction.  As recently as the eighteenth century, English sources regarded vagabonds and wanderers with extreme suspicion, and the Irish held wakes for family members who had to travel to America.  Americans, by contrast, are born nomads.  When I was young, I couldn’t wait to travel.  Only recently have I begun to wonder whether it’s always a good thing to be footloose.

From the viewpoint of a writer, a trip is necessarily a good thing, a metaphor for narrative.  Most of the great novels involve at least a short journey and quite a few begin with the hero setting out on a quest–like Tom Jones’s attempt to find his father.  I used to lead study-tours of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, and tour members who wanted academic credit had to keep a travel journal.  Everyone groaned, but most of them found their journals easy to write because they were looking outward and watching the world change.  Today, thumbing through my own journals, I can still call up incidents that happened ten or more years ago in vivid detail.  So maybe I’ll keep a journal this time too.  At my age, anything that sharpens memory is flat out good.

Writers who are thinking of traveling ought to keep in mind that the most productive trips for artists–novelists, poets, painters, photographers, even musicians–are slow trips, not the kind that visit four countries in three days.  On one of our trips to Scotland, the party consisted of me, my husband (a photographer), and two friends (both photographers).  I had a camera but refused to use it because I’m a little apt to photograph my thumb.  Besides, putting a rectangular frame around what I was seeing seemed horribly limiting.  I did keep a journal–another kind of frame.  One day we hopped in the car around nine in the morning and set off, determined to stop whenever we saw anything photogenic.  At the end of a full day of driving, we had covered 43 miles.  American tourists look at a map of Scotland or England and imagine they can cross the country in a couple of hours.  Not.  Nor should they want to.  I must admit that our 43-mile day had me near the screaming point (as the only non-photographer), but the photos were–and are–superb.  And who knows, maybe I saw some things outside the rectangular frame.

So off we go.  Wish us bon voyage.

Can a Heroine be a Hero?

In the mystery I’m currently writing, a German-speaking character complains that English is a messy and confusing language.  He has run across a young woman who was wounded by an IED in Afghanistan but saved people under fire from snipers and was awarded a medal for bravery.  He calls her a heroine, then backtracks and says no, she’s a hero.  My viewpoint character agrees with him that English is indeed a mongrel language, because her German friend is correct.  A heroine may be a hero, but a hero is never a heroine.  The problem is complicated by the existence of superheroes, not to mention antiheroes, athletes, and celebrities.

When I taught literature, I trained myself to say protagonist and antagonist instead of hero and villain.  In Macbeth, for example, the main character is a serial killer, and Macduff is the closest Shakespeare comes to giving the play a hero.  Macbeth is far more interesting.  There is no doubt at all that he’s the protagonist, but I’m damned if I’ll call him a hero.

Some years back I had a moment of derring-do myself.  I came home from school early, entered the house by the back door, and sensed that I was not alone.  I tiptoed through the kitchen and opened the door to the dining room a crack.  Two burglars were rummaging through the silverware.  They didn’t notice me.  At that point, a smart person would have backed out, gone to the neighbors, and called the police (this was before cell phones).  Did I do that?  No.  I threw the door open, yelled “What are you doing in my house?” at the top of my not inconsiderable lungs, and chased them out the front door.  My neighbors were treated to the sight of a plump middle-aged college teacher chasing two big adolescent males down the block and shouting Chaucerian words.  The rascals got away, fortunately.  When I did call the police, the officer explained what I should have done and warned me not to confront villains again.

So was I a hero?  I think not.  I may be a berserker–my grandmother was Swedish–but I was closer to being a fool than a hero.  And that’s the key.  No thought took place.  I just charged at the burglars.  A real hero would at least have been aware that her safety was at risk.  I was aware of nothing but outrage.

Fiction is not real life.  Fiction is a simulation.  Americans don’t have a very firm grasp on the difference, or we would not have elected Ronald Reagan President.  Reagan apparently confused his heroic deeds on the silver screen with the real thing, which should have sounded a warning but didn’t.  We persist in regarding large, quick men wearing shoulder pads and helmets as heroes too.  Where’s the heroism in bashing other large persons for pay?  I admire the skill of athletes, but they’re very seldom heroes.  And then there are celebrities.  Paris Hilton?  Excuse me?  Even Princess Diana.  Rest her soul, she led a sad life, but she was no hero.  She was a heroine.

“Heroine” is a good example of what happens when a noun takes on a feminine ending.  A heroine may spend an entire novel wringing her hands and waiting to be rescued, preferably by a guy on a white horse.  He is the hero.  She is just the viewpoint.  I no more want to be a heroine than I want to be an authoress.

And now we have superheroes.  They come out of gaming via mythology and comic books.  When they go into action, nothing can hurt them.  What they do is exciting in animation or a game, but less exciting than if they were vulnerable to harm.  In a novel they’re boring.

When I write a mystery, I like to include at least one action that strikes me as heroic, an action that comes out of the dynamics of character.  My protagonist is frequently not the “hero” but a witness.  Antiheroes are a dime a dozen, but a hero is worth waiting for.  One question I always have in mind when I write a mystery is who is going to be the hero this time.

School Daze

Among the consequences of the recent school shootings, the NRA-sponsored idea that schoolteachers should be armed with guns strikes me as strange.  The fact that some school districts and some teachers (one state–Ohio) are taking it seriously is even stranger.

In the last thirty years, public education has been attacked from both the left and the right for a variety of reasons, some good, some not.  This latest attack has subtlety and elegance.  Ostensibly, the NRA is showing concern for the safety of schoolchildren.  In reality, it is proposing to turn teachers into armed enforcers, and our school buildings into low-rent prisons.  How many assault rifles do we need this year in our elementary schools?  Right.  Double that number for the higher grades.  Quite a lot of gun-sales there, and for those teachers too delicate-minded to tote an M16 into the first-grade classroom, how about concealed weapons?  More sales.  And all those teachers will need Kevlar vests.  The possibilities for profit are endless.

Now, take it a step farther.  How should we choose our teachers?  For their knowledge of geography and reading and mathematics?  For their empathy?  For their piety?  For their charm and wit?  Irrelevant.  First of all, we need veterans’ preference, especially combat veterans’ preference.  Beyond that, the crucial test must be marksmanship.  That takes Training and Desire.  Get rid of the wimps, if they aren’t already lining up elsewhere to flip hamburgers or mix lattes, and whip the rest into shape quick.  This is a national emergency.  For a modest fee, I’m sure the NRA (or Blackwater) would contract to set up training sessions for teachers in gymnasiums across the county.  As an incentive, tie teachers’ pay to their ability to hit that child-shaped target.

In the recent shooting in Taft, California, the shooter was a child who had apparently been bullied.  He brought a shotgun into the school, went into his classroom, and shot one of the students he thought was picking on him.  At that point, the teacher began a dialog with him, ultimately talking him into surrendering his weapon.  The teacher is a hero, no question, but what would have happened if that teacher had been armed?  Go ahead, imagine it, fiction writers.  In every scenario I can come up with, the results would have been worse.  When the shooter came into the room, the class was already in session, students and teacher absorbed in schoolwork.  The most likely case is that the armed student would have shot the teacher as he reached for his gun and gone on to shoot his intended victims and, quite likely, himself.  As it is, the students in that classroom have a trauma to live down, but they also have an example of courage and clear-minded heroism, and of the importance of talking and listening to people who need help.  Both the teacher and the student who did the shooting are alive and able to talk and learn.

That is my thought for the day.  And also for the New Year.

Braking News

Two days after Christmas, my husband and I will mark our fiftieth wedding anniversary.  Consider another happy bit of breaking news.  Washington voters just legalized gay marriage.  Fifty years from now, gay couples all over the state will be celebrating their fiftieth.  Happy anniversary.

This is my lead-footed way of introducing my unhappy subject–the question of using big news events in fiction.  Last week, a young man, dressed in black and wearing a hockey mask, shot up a mall across the river from where I live.  He shot two people dead, wounded one, and then killed himself.  A certain amount of sick humor circulated.  One wit suggested it was obviously time to ban malls.  A few days later, twenty-seven people, twenty of them little children, were killed in Newtown, Connecticut.  Not killed with swords or poison or blows from a blunt instrument.  Killed with guns.

I hesitate to moralize on this great tragedy.  It leads to very sad thoughts about this country.  In the circumstances, though, I think that the second amendment to the Constitution ought to be a legitimate topic for discussion.  Yet there is very little real discussion–more like a series of slogans shouted by well-defined groups with no movement from one group to another.  Fiction is a powerful way to “discuss” important issues.  Think of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Oliver Twist.  Fiction can provide a forum that allows for compromise and shades of gray, highly desirable IMHO.  As of this morning, according to Yahoo News, the NRA Facebook page has vanished.  My first reaction was “good.”  More serious thought leads me to hope they will moderate their position and use the social media to educate their more intemperate followers, though I’m not optimistic that that will happen.

There’s one clear advantage of topicality in fiction.  If the news story is still hot when the book comes out, it could be a marketing advantage, and authors apparently need gimmicks to sell their books these days.  The roman a clef is a time-honored version of the novel.  In this case, I could not do it.  Too much like exploitation of tragedy.

Another clear advantage of using current news is that it gives fiction an automatic touch of verisimilitude–a touch that works well for unsophisticated readers.  I believe the truth of a fiction has nothing to do with whether or not the plot “really” happened and everything to do with empathy, depth of characterization, and clarity of style.

I have used real events myself, sometimes inadvertantly.  The weirdest case was the big mudslide in my second Latouche County mystery, An Old Chaos.  I live in mudslide territory, so I used facts from a number of different slides, finished the book, shipped it off, and was doing the final edit when a huge mudslide happened in the county seat of Skamania County.  It didn’t kill anyone, thank God, but the physical damage was worse than what I dreamed up–and so was the political fallout.  I have no desire to be considered a prophet, so I was relieved that I had changed all the place names, not to mention the names of county commissioners, when I chose the Gorge as the setting for my series.

With historical novels, most changes in the interpretation of events have already occurred.  Contemporary stories are more problematical.  My second published mystery, Skylark, deals with the Lockerbie disaster, and I wrote the book well before the guilty verdict came down.  I guessed right on that one, but I kept the disaster itself at the periphery of the story, and I was very, very cautious.  It pays to be.  In that same book, I had no idea the Soviet Union was going to collapse before I finished writing.  I was able to include that little change at the end of the book, but I utterly failed to predict the division of Czechoslovakia into two separate countries.

One consequence of using a current story could be a nasty lawsuit.  That’s pretty obvious.  The failure of trust is more insidious.  Readers trust us to write fiction, but when our fictions dabble in fact, we had better be accurate.  If the event is still reverberating, it’s still in the process of happening.  I find that a very scary thought.  I committed myself to this blog topic after the mall shooting and before the Connecticut massacre of innocents.  If I hadn’t said I’d do it, I would have slammed on the brakes.

Have a thoughtful solstice.

Deja Vu All Over Again

I’ve been genre hopping.  In the historical past, I wrote and sold four regency romances.  My editor, Ruth Cavin, taught me a lot about self-editing.  I was happy working with her, and I foolishly assumed that situation would continue.  However, as everyone knows, Ruth gave up regencies, moved to St. Martin’s, and began editing excellent mysteries.

I was downcast, especially since the new regency editor appeared to want me to write in busines English of the American variety.  I used STET a lot on the last book and began to think about mysteries.

I liked them.  I read a lot of them, the British ones particularly, and I really liked working with Ruth, so I decided to write a mystery.  She rejected it (correctly, as I now see), so I wrote another, and that one she bought, though I think she continued to regard me as a strayed romance writer.  So here I am, ten books later, a mystery writer with two series.  I’m not the first fiction writer to jump from one genre to another, but the shift is fairly uncommon, or was when I did it.

Meanwhile I sold the e-book rights of the regencies to Judith B. Glad of Uncial Press, and she’s also in the process of reissuing my first mystery series.  From time to time, she hinted that another regency, a new one, would be welcome.  I finally took her up on it, promising a novella in time for Black Friday.

The Young Pretender started short but wound  up long for a novella.  Judith is going to vend it as a short novel, bless her.  I had several sessions of writer’s bloc when I was working on the regency, but I finished it in August and am happy with it.  Among other pleasures, writing it gave me an excuse to reread the poems of Robert Burns.  Perhaps the greatest pleasure, however, was to move from the focus on death and destruction that’s necessary even in cozy mysteries to a more light-hearted venue.  It was nice not to have to wallow in grue.

On the other hand, I came to a greater appreciation of the mystery plot structure.  I like to think of all my books as character-driven, but without action and suspense a mystery is dead in the water.  Since regencies are terribly chaste as romances go, the need for drastic action isn’t great.  Apart from two dinner parties and a row across a lake in a rainstorm, the most intense action in The Young Pretender comes when the heroine learns to build a fire in the fireplace.  To my surprise, I discovered I really missed writing shootouts, hostage crises, and high-speed chases.

I also missed the security of the mystery plot-structure.  All novels are puzzles in the broadest sense, but the tropes of the murder mystery supply the writer with most of the plot, right from the beginning.  With a regency, since graphic sex was out of the question, I had to keep groping around for something my people could do before the final clinch.  They talked a lot.  In two dialects.

Well, I’ve had my vacation.  I’m back looking at corpses and suspecting innocent bystanders of Evil.  It feels good to do that, especially in American English of the twenty-first century Pacific Northwest kind.

Poetic License

Taffy’s fascinating and useful post on audio abridgements led me sideways to the question of sound patterns in prose fiction.  I had a blind student in a long-ago science fiction class.  At that time, few genre works were available on talking books.  We could have hired a reader for her, but I decided to read two of the assigned works to her myself, Frank Herbert’s Dune and Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness.  The experience was good for me in a lot of ways.  For one thing, it reminded me that novel-reading used to be a matter of families reading books aloud in the evening.  It was social.  For another, it said a lot about the writers.  I have great affection for both books, but LeGuin is undeniably a better listening experience than Herbert.  Herbert’s prose moves along in a stolid, workmanlike way, but it doesn’t sing.  My student, who was a very sharp observer, heard things I had never noticed, though I had read the books silently several times.

Language was auditory well before anybody thought of writing it down.  Each language developed auditory memory devices so bards could remember prodigious documents.  It took seven or eight years of rigorous training for a would-be bard to achieve journeyman status in Irish culture, and I’m sure that was true for other societies as well.  These people were considered historians, propagandists called on to celebrate kings and new heroes, and all-around advisors.  Every king had a resident bard whose status was only slightly lower than the king’s.

Like all other languages, English had its own mnemonics.  As anyone who has wrestled with Anglo Saxon knows, apart from set-phrases called kennings, those auditory tricks boiled down to carefully limited alliteration (only three of four stressed syllables per line could alliterate), carefully varied mid-line pauses, and a limited number of stresses per line.  There were other rules, but those carried over into Middle English, despite the shock of collision with French at the time of the Norman Conquest.  French, reinforced by Latin, led to counting the number of syllables per line and the emphasis on end rhymes.  English borrowed the ballad from French as the folk form of long narrative, though great adventurers like Chaucer dared longer lines, and medieval drama began to play around with unrhymed dialogue.  It’s not an accident that unhappy students, called on to write a poem, will almost always write in ballad format unless some kind teacher liberates them from from rhyme and rhythm.

The printing press freed writers from all that poetic stuff, of course.  We’re talking fifteenth century, but the work of our greatest writer was still so loaded with mnemonics in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries that actors can recite great hunks of Hamlet from memory with relative ease.

So what does that have to do with modern writers and readers?  I think most readers can spot a writer with a tin ear, though very few know why.  Obvious poeticisms like rhyme or too much alliteration, which is a form of rhyme, can be irritating.  They pull the reader out of the story.  It’s strange to realize that, even when we’re reading silently, the language continues to hum along.  A full rhyme in a line of prose is like somebody singing high C without warning in a silent room.

The writer’s problem with poetic intrusion is more complicated.  I’m convinced that good writers hear what they write at some level.  I do an auditory check whenever I edit and usually get rid of rhymes, alliterations, and other obvious echoes like too many words that end in -ing.  That sounds negative and is.  A mystery ought to read quickly, with nothing between the reader and the action.  Language that pulls the reade out of the plot had better say something important.  When it doesn’t, it sounds pompous and political (note alliteration).  If it’s metrical, it sounds like a cheap advertising jingle.

So when can prose writers use poetic sound effects?  The only answer that makes sense to me is when they do it consciously, as a form of emphasis.  Take a look at two of those effects, the pause and the spondee.

The closest prose writers come to the carefully manipulated Anglo Saxon pause is the paragraph break, and some of those are obligatory.  We paragraph to indicate a change of speakers in a page of dialogue.  Making a paragraph break

emphasizes the first word of the new paragraph, and it also calls attention to the ideas at the end of the previous paragraph.  It’s a breath pause stronger than a comma or a period.  Kurt Vonnegut used frequent paragraph breaks for dramatic effect.

A spondee is a heavy stress–two stresses in Greek prosody.  It has the weight of a full poetic foot (usually two or three syllables).  In “Break, break, break/ On thy cold gray stones, O Sea…”  (Tennyson), the first line is just one syllable hit three times with a hammer.  Bang, bang, bang.  Thud, thud, thud.  Whatever the attached meaning, the sound is ominous.  Hush, hush, hush, for example.  Try that trick the next time you want to create a moment of fright.

There are plenty of other sound effects.  I’m fond of assonance myself, echoing a vowel sound in stressed syllables.  Ahhhh–satisfied.  Ohhhh–alarmed.  Eeeee–you saw a snake.

Happy prosody.

Taking the Amateur Out of Sleuth

Somewhere in the middle of Dick Francis’s second career, his heroes started taking on jobs other than horsy jobs.  They were suddenly professionals but not professional cops.  Among other occupations, his sleuths made their living as bankers, wine dealers, painters, photographers, and pilots.  I remember thinking it was a nice change.  The hero’s work was well-researched and always useful to the plot.  Since most of Francis’s mysteries were standalones rather than series books, he could change the sleuth’s occupational obsession with every new book, and I think he probably had fun doing the research.  I hope so.

Amateur sleuths had always had obsessions.  Miss Marple and Miss Silver could knit for England, and Lord Peter Wimsey collected incunabula.  Still, there was, in the British mystery particularly, the feeling that the amateur sleuth ought to be a gentleperson of leisure who would never (gasp) take money for services rendered.  The American insistence on greedy, boozy private eyes and lowlife scenarios seemed a bit silly in a genre that was fantasy at the core.  Still, the private investigator was probably the first non-cop detective whose job could drive the plot.

Now we have a huge list of occupations for the amateur who just happens to stumble on a corpse.  Some of the jobs make immediate sense.  Journalists, for instance, certainly investigate mysteries.  So (ahem) do librarians.  Prosecutors and defense lawyers do, and so do bone doctors and medical examiners.  Priests, rabbis, and preachers investigate the mysteries of the human conscience.  But wedding planners? Chefs? Fishermen? Dog trainers? Gardeners? House cleaners (my favorite)?

The problem with the above occupations does not arise with a standalone mystery.  Sooner or later, a dry cleaner or a chef may stumble across a corpse, and, if ordinarily observant, may detect.  The problem lies with series books.  The ecdysiast with a talent for detection can only come across a few naked corpses (or naked murderers) before verisimilitude raises its ugly head.  Even when we’re willing, as readers, to accept yet another dead body, the amateur detective’s expertise ought to help solve the puzzle–or at least complicate the plot.  It has to have a function other than simple backstory.

Of course, with the current job market, one solution does suggest itself.  The amateur could be constantly retraining owing to serial unemployment.

One other point.  Many of the colorful new occupations listed for amateur sleuths joined the list because the authors wanted female protagonists.  Dick Francis’s heroes were always men.  That is not now the case in mysteryland.  One reason I’m fond of the housecleaner-sleuth is that that is an arena in which I have involuntary expertise owing to my gender.  I’m delighted that these new sleuths are, by God, paid to clean houses, even if they’re not paid to solve mysteries.

Back Story Blues by Sheila Simonson (Buffalo Bill’s Defunct)

I tend to get interested in back story to the extent that I lose track of the main plot.  I do this both as a writer and as a reader, but it’s obviously more of a problem for me as a writer.  Right now I’m stuck in a novel in which back stories have overwhelmed the simple plot I had going and are taking that plot off in four directions at once.

The aggressive back story problem is solvable to some extent in a series that has recurring minor characters.  The bios those characters haul around with them can often provide the main plot of the next book.  All the same, the magnetic pull of assorted back stories can slow things down.  We are told that the reader needs a crisp, fast-paced narrative.  I don’t, but then I read too fast.

When I’m writing a novel, I think hard before I introduce a named character, because naming them seems to make them people, “rounds them out.”  Once my characters are named, they develop back stories almost by magic.  In Aspects of the Novel (old book), E.M. Forster talked about round characters and flat characters.  Round characters are like real people in that they always have the ability to surprise you by what they do and what they have done, whereas flat characters are utterly predictible.  Sometimes flat characters like Mr. Micawber can be summed up in a single phrase.  Dickens used flat characters very effectively, but, according to Forster, Jane Austen created nothing but round characters–always three-dimensional, always capable of surprising the reader.  Miss Bates in Emma, for instance, is as close to a cartoon character as Austen gets, but just when Miss B. seems to be summed up by her own silliness, she has a moment of great dignity that makes Emma (who is downright spherical) look bad.

Most mystery writers who do series novels lean heavily on back story.  Dorothy L. Sayers springs to mind.  In contrast, most of Dick Francis’s books have been stand-alones, and the back story didn’t carry from one book to the next.  Some series writers seem to have a template paragraph they pull up and insert to remind the reader of what went on in other books.  I find that clumsy, both as a writer and as a reader, so I try to avoid referring to my earlier books and to make each story readable on its own.  However, I’d welcome suggestions from anyone on how to handle the problem in other ways.

What should be done about bodacious back story?  Chop it out or let it develop?  A novel is a thought experiment, a virtual society.  As Benedick says in another context, the world must be peopled, and my feeling is that each new book in a series should introduce more new people than recurring people–not to mention fresh conflicts and ideas.  But the back story is always there.