I recently read three books in succession that got me
thinking about Elmore Leonard's famous dictum about cutting
the stuff that people skip over. The books were Jean-Claude
Izzo's Total Chaos, sandwiched in between Duane
Swierczynski's The Wheelman and James Sallis's Drive.
The latter two largely follow Leonard's rule (in fact,
Washington Post thriller critic, Patrick Anderson, brought up
the rule in his vey positive review of Wheelman). They are
both stripped down to the essentials, mostly action with
little explicit description of weather and setting,
psychological motivations, etc, beyond the specific turns
made by the drivers.
Jean-Claude Izzo's Total Chaos is almost exactly opposite in
its approach. In fact, the convoluted plot would probably
have some holes in it if it were stripped of everything
interwoven into it. I say probably because all of that other
stuff kept me from breaking it down. All of that other stuff,
the descriptions of weather and setting, psychological
motivations, etc, is at least as much what this book is about
as the plot. The many descriptions of Marseilles (the trilogy
this begins is called the Marseilles trilogy), its
inhabitants, its bars, its men and women, even cooking (this
is a French novel, after all), are totally interwoven into
the political and sociological themes of the book. It's as if
Izzo's intent was to explore society through the individuals
who inhabit it, and vice versa.
These are all great books that I recommend wholeheartedly.
This kind of undercuts Leonard's rules, if not the whole idea
that there can or should be rules for writing good crime
fiction. Like many rules, they were probably formed in
retrospect, divined from what worked for Leonard in the past.
They can probably be a great help for a beginner, forcing him
or her to focus on what is important.
However, after the fundamentals are in place, it all comes
down to good wirting. And that good writing may or may not
contine to fall within the accepted (not to say Leoanrd's
rules are accepted) rules. In fact, although I am using
Sallis here as an example of the stripped down approach, I
could just as easily use his Lew Griffin novels as examples
of the more meandering path here taken by Izzo.
Mark
RARA-AVIS home page: http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/
Yahoo! Groups Links
<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/rara-avis-l/
<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email
to:
rara-avis-l-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com
<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 13 Jan 2006 EST