Tag: mysteries

Writer’s Desk: Write Like Westlake

On By chrisbarsantiIn Books, WritingLeave a comment

Donald Westlake (1933–2008), whose birthday was last week, was one of America’s most prolific writers, publishing over a hundred novels. Like a more creatively flexible Elmore Leonard, he published mostly in crime. Like any good overproducer, he concocted a number of pseudonyms, most famously Richard Stark, and even got an Oscar nomination for his adaptation of Jim Thompson’s The Grifters for film in 1991.

In 2006, Westlake was interviewed by The A.V. Club, and dispensed some great notes from a productive career:

  • “Years ago, I heard an interview with violinist Yehudi Menuhin. The interviewer said, “Do you still practice?” And he said, “I practice every day.” He said, “If I skip a day, I can hear it. If I skip two days, the conductor can hear it. And if I skip three days, the audience can hear it.” Oh, yes, you have to keep that muscle firm.”
  • “I know people who have suffered writer’s block, and I don’t think I’ve ever had it. A friend of mine, for three years he couldn’t write. And he said that he thought of stories and he knew the stories, could see the stories completely, but he could never find the door. Somehow that first sentence was never there. And without the door, he couldn’t do the story. I’ve never experienced that. But it’s a chilling thought.”
  • On who reads his books: “…back in the ’60s and ’70s, the criminal class was still literate, so I would get letters from people in prison; they thought that I was somebody whom they could shop-talk with, and they would tell me very funny stories. I got a lot of those.”

Reader’s Corner: Women and the New Noir

On By chrisbarsantiIn BooksLeave a comment

meganabbottIt used to be that mysteries were a particularly men-centric corner of the publishing world. You had your Agatha Christie and later on Janet Evanovich and Patricia Cornwell. But while those authors could sell in the millions, the authors that many literary types preferred tended toward the male: Raymond Chandler and the like.

But more recently, in the post-Gone Girl era, that seems to have changed. Not only do female readers appear to be taking up more of the audience, and women authors occupying more of the bestseller positions in the genre, but the books are increasingly being critically recognized.

There’s good reason for that, argues Terrence Rafferty:

The female writers, for whatever reason (men?), don’t much believe in heroes, which makes their kind of storytelling perhaps a better fit for these cynical times. Their books are light on gunplay, heavy on emotional violence. Murder is de rigueur in the genre, so people die at the hands of others—lovers, neighbors, obsessive strangers—but the body counts tend to be on the low side. “I write about murder,” Tana French once said, “because it’s one of the great mysteries of the human heart: How can one human being deliberately take another one’s life away?” Sometimes, in the work of French and others, the lethal blow comes so quietly that it seems almost inadvertent, a thing that in the course of daily life just happens. Death, in these women’s books, is often chillingly casual, and unnervingly intimate…