J. B. Rivard - Scuttlebutt

Scuttlebutt

How I Wrote Squeeze Plea
by J.B. Rivard

As best as I can reconstruct it, planning for the first Brody Carlisle mystery, Squeeze Plea, began early in 2000. I considered Handful of Air finished and had decided the follow-on would feature a professional, rather than an amateur sleuth (Kingsley in Handful). My reasoning was simple: A mystery series with a returning amateur protagonist strains credibility -- how many average guys stumble regularly onto murder scenes?

I once served on a murder jury. And later I'd written an eyewitness account of a lengthy fraud trial of two brothers. I'd also been close to several defense and prosecuting attorneys, as well as to a couple of uniformed cops. These events and connections informed my choice of a legal investigator as a protagonist for the series, beginning with Squeeze Plea. Legal investigator Brody Carlisle, I figured, would have freedom to choose varying crime situations (by contracting his services with different legal firms), yet would become intimately involved in the intricacies of each chosen case.

By the time I attended the Book Passage Mystery Writer's Conference in Corte Madera, California, in 2002, the plot of Squeeze Plea was set, a rough draft was nearly finished, and I thought I had it whipped. Speakers and leaders at the conference included such luminaries as Michael Connelly, Joe Gores, Laurie King, George Pelecanos and Sheldon Siegel. I was lucky enough to meet one-on-one with Sheldon Siegel, and he gave me significant insights and encouragement (he later read a revised draft manuscript). I came away from the conference realizing I still had much work ahead of me to bring Squeeze Plea to its fullest potential.

By the summer of 2003 I'd finished a smooth draft of the novel. Copies were made and distributed to more than half a dozen readers. By the time they'd read the manuscript and returned their comments, months had passed. Each reader's comments were then evaluated, prompting corrections and some revisions to the text. Early in 2004, Part I was restructured to accelerate story momentum.

Finally, the long process was finished. The slog had been worth it. Squeeze Plea had evolved into a tightly written suspense story with a host of entertaining characters and an unexpected finish.

Read Synopsis of the novel

Chandler on Hemingway

"Having just read the admirable profile of Hemingway in the New Yorker I realize that I am much too clean to be a genius, much too sober to be a champ, and far, far too clumsy with a shotgun to live the good life."

--- From Fighting Words, James Charlton, Ed., Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 1994, Chapel Hill, NC

Why Spokane?
by J.B. Rivard

On August 4, 1898, a disastrous fire reduced the two-dozen blocks of what was then called Spokane Falls to smoky embers. The city that became Spokane quickly rebuilt, erecting structures of brick and granite along its main roads. Today's aging architecture, barely more than a century beyond ashes, is not just a testament to the quality of rebuilding, it establishes the metaphor defining the city as adolescent: i.e., not new, not really old.

Transportation realities illustrate this in-between quality. The Northern Pacific Railway's main line arrived in 1883, and even before the nineteenth century faded, Spokane was a hub with more than a half-dozen rail lines. Tracks traverse many neighborhoods today, despite the decline of railroads during the last half-century. An aging freeway (I-90) splices east and west together while north-south auto traffic is forced into twisted urban streets that bottleneck onto the few bridges spanning the Spokane river.

The city is not only geographically distant from Seattle; in most ways it's at opposite poles from the coastal giant. In contrast to Seattle's oh-so-Microsoft skin, Spokane is surfaced in rawhide; it's a place where even sunlight wears a five-o'clock shadow. By day it's Comfort city. Festivals, fairs and athletic events fill the local calendar. The dull reds and ochres of its brick and terra-cotta-faced buildings form an inviting background for shopping, dining, or strolling the park next to the river. But the wristwatches worn here are Timex, not Rolex; PhD degrees are rarer than a full house in five-card stud. While its suburbs sprawl and glitter with the usual trendy homes and gated communities, most residents live and love in too-small bungalows shaded by old trees in neighborhoods with dirt alleys and parked cars that haven't run in months.

By night, the city is transformed. Street lights drench arterials with a sickly sulfur yellow, while Don't Walk signs flash at empty sidewalks. In the harsh zigzags of its knife-edged shadows, blinking light strings and lurid neons urge nightwalkers to eat, drink, gamble, spend. A too-fast car hurtles toward a corner, turns, spins, wraps around a utility pole and kills two, while atop a graffiti-sprayed viaduct the rumble of diesel locomotives and the screech of steel wheels on iron rail play a psychotic, dissonant accompaniment.

New-old, retro-modern, friendly-frightening -- the opposing faces of Spokane yield perfect parallels for the touchstone of all truly gripping drama: that ancient pair, good-evil.

What a perfect place to write of -- this city as apt for urban nightmares as for urban salvation.

From Casablanca, starring
Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman:

Yvonne: Where were you last night?
Rick: That's so long ago, I don't remember.
Yvonne (after a pause): Will I see you tonight?
Rick: I never make plans that far ahead.

Four Lines

"Four lines of dialogue from Silver Blaze. . . burn themselves into our memory and never lose their impact, however many times they are read."
-- Theodore Dalrymple

The four lines:

"Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?"
"To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time."
"The dog did nothing in the night-time."
"That was the curious incident," remarked Sherlock Holmes.

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Sherlock Holmes, Bungler?

by J. B. Rivard

(Adapted from the original as published in issue 46 of Sherlock Holmes Detective Magazine -- now called Sherlock magazine)

Sherlock Holmes wasn’t very good.

So says Marcel Berlins recently in The Times of London. And Holmes’ spectacular deductions about a person’s occupation and life gleaned from a few seconds of observation? According to this British journalist, author, broadcaster and former lawyer, they “don’t stand up to a moment’s scrutiny.” Furthermore, “[Holmes] methods of detection veered from the merely unscientific to the ludicrous.”

Berlins was spurred to these remarks by the centenary of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles, in an article titled “Not So Elementary, My Dear Watson.”

Admittedly, methods of crime investigation have changed in the 100 years since the Holmes classic was published. The FBI didn’t even collect fingerprints before 1924, and DNA analysis was unknown until the late 20th century.

But Berlins’ complaints go beyond quibbling with the skills and methods attributed to Holmes in Doyle’s tales. Of Doyle’s 56 short stories and four novels featuring the famous detective, Berlins says, “[They] have far-fetched plots and utterly unconvincing characters.”

Holmes-bashing -- and even Doyle-bashing -- is a time-honored tradition. More than fifty years ago, Raymond Chandler administered both glove and champagne when he wrote, “Conan Doyle made mistakes which completely invalidated some of his stories, but he was a pioneer, and Sherlock Holmes after all is mostly an attitude and a few dozen lines of unforgettable dialogue.” The author of The Big Sleep and creator of detective Philip Marlowe was tough on other fictional detectives, as well. He called S.S. Van Dine’s Philo Vance “the most asinine character in detective fiction,” and even took fellow Briton Agatha Christie’s Belgian detective Hercule Poirot to task for “breaking the [investigative] process down into a series of simple operations, like assembling an egg beater.”

But when asked to name the top mystery novels of all time, the professional writing members of the Mystery Writers of America voted the Sherlock Holmes canon number one (Chandler’s The Big Sleep came in eighth in the list of one-hundred). Doyle’s novels and short stories were proclaimed “the most consistently brilliant … works of fiction ever produced.”

And no less than Ross Macdonald, creator of the Lew Archer series, saw the Doyle detective as larger than life: “ … Holmes is very much the scientific criminologist. This hero of scientism may be in fact the dominant culture hero of our technological society.”

Even Berlins, in the Times article, awards Doyle a dollop of respect. “[M]ore than a century after his creation,” he says, “Holmes is still the only fictional detective with an international reputation, his name instantly recognized -- and the books read -- from Beijing to Bogota.” But then he says “We revere Holmes today not for his skills, but as a symbol of a nostalgically attractive bygone age” (emphasis added). Is not such faint praise less than the whole truth about Doyle’s protagonist, not to mention the novels and short stories that have brought Doyle a century of acclaim?

Critics’ concentration upon the detecting skills of fictional investigators presupposes the worth of what is called “realistic” in the narrative’s presentation, as popularized in the promotion of today’s crime/mystery novels. It’s true that an aura of realism is created, for example, for Patricia Cornwell’s fictional medical detective Kay Scarpetta, in this exchange with forensic anthropologist Dr. Vessey (they are examining a murder victim’s finger bone in All That Remains):

Vessey: “I can tell you without hesitation, Kay, that this is not a postmortem cut … The way the lip of the cut is bent back tells me this wasn’t inflicted on dead bone. Green bone bends. Dead bone doesn’t.”

Scarpetta: “A defensive injury?”

Vessey: “A very unusual one, Kay. The cut is dorsal versus palmar.”

While it may be true, as Berlins complains, that Cornwell’s novels feature “ ... every gruesome scalpel cut of an autopsy,” the technical patter used confers a realistic patina to the story, thanks largely to the authority Cornwell conveys as a result of her years as a computer analyst in the chief medical examiner’s office in Virginia.

It should also be said that the intuitive brilliance, investigative skills and criminological arcana displayed by fictional detectives from Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade in 1929’s The Maltese Falcon to Kinsey Millhone in the latest of Sue Grafton’s mysteries are frequently effective in lending believability to their stories. As John M. Reilly remarks in his preface to Twentieth-Century Crime and Mystery Writers, “With all narrative, mystery and crime fiction shares the necessity of supplying the illusion that the story conforms to a reality other than the text.”

But to identify these trappings of reality -- generically termed verisimilitude -- as the backbone of the fiction is to confuse subject with treatment. The idea that the Sherlock Holmes stories -- or any other fiction, for that matter -- should be valued based on the adequacy of skills displayed by its protagonist is less an insightful leap than a baby step toward an appreciation of a single aspect of the writer’s skill.

Ruth Cavin, senior editor at St. Martin’s, says of the mystery genre: “Today’s mystery writers need an absorbing plot, real and complex characters, fresh and accurate writing, [and] a well-defined and believable atmosphere, both physical and psychological.” Parenthetically we may add that she might as well have been identifying the components comprising every worthwhile fiction.

This brings us to the crux of the matter. While fictional detectives’ intellectual gravitas and investigative schemes on display in nineteenth- -- and even early twentieth-century -- stories may today strike us as ineffective, quaint, or even laughably unscientific, we may always turn to the Sherlock Holmes canon to witness not the ineptness of a bungler, but rather Arthur Conan Doyle’s first-rate integration of plot, character and atmosphere into a fluent display of virtuosity that defines masterful storytelling -- regardless of the century in which it appears.