It was Mae
West who once said, in a context other than literature, “I like a man what
takes his time.” That used to be true in literature as well; readers
appreciated authors who took their time to describe people, settings and
situations in a way that made them come to life. Think of Dickens’ London.
These days,
not so much. Or so it seems.
In the past
month I’ve read two mystery-thriller novels by two different best-selling
contemporary American authors, and what struck me about both of them was the utter
lack of description. One book was set in New York and the other in San
Francisco, but neither gave the least bit of feeling for the city in which the
story took place. Either book could easily have been relocated to Cleveland
simply by changing some place names.
It was not
always thus. Dashiell Hammett made you feel San Francisco; Raymond Chandler and
James M. Cain caught the spirit of Los Angeles; and Ellery Queen captured the
unmistakable aura of New York in the Twenties and Thirties.
Plot Coming; Outta The Way!
All the
aforementioned authors wrote pretty hard-boiled, fast-paced stuff, but they
were still close to and felt bound by the older literary traditions that
required a scene to be properly set and a character to be properly established.
Those guys didn’t dawdle, but they colored in the picture well enough.
I got to
thinking about this on a more personal level lately when I went back and
re-read the reviews on Kindle for my first mystery novel, The McHenry Inheritance. The book was generally well received by
readers and is averaging a bit over four stars, but several reviewers,
including some who rated the book highly, complained that there was too much
description of fishing in the book.
As a matter
of objective fact, there were two detailed fishing scenes in the book, each
about three pages long. One scene introduced the story’s antagonist and the
other established the time of death in the murder.
And, to be
fair, a number of readers praised the descriptions in the book, so who do I
listen to? At the moment, I have to feel the complainers are so used to books
that don’t pause to convey detail — books that race from chase to chase and
killing to killing — that they don’t know what to make of a story that
stops to smell the flowers occasionally.
Authors What Takes Their Time
And there
certainly are successful mystery writers who do take the time to develop
character and atmosphere. Benjamin Black and Louise Penny come to mind. But
then, one is Irish and the other Canadian. The list of leisurely Americans is
short indeed.
I
personally enjoy the writer who takes the time and effort to establish a
setting, develop a character more fully, let me know what time of year it is
and what the weather is like, and who even might interrupt the narrative flow
of the book to tell, as an aside, a good story that may or may not have
anything to do with the matter at hand but is interesting in its own right.
Those are the details that make a book more real and memorable.
That’s the
way I try to write my mysteries, and if there’s a smaller audience for that
sort of book than there is for the slam-bam-thank-you-ma’am thrillers, so be
it. Authors and readers relate to each other as lovers, and I’m content to find
the lovers — book lovers, that is — that like a man what takes his time.
