Point and Shoot, FL (YU)—The opening line of Red Harvest, by Dashiell Hammett, is, “I first heard Personville called Poisonville by a
red-haired mucker called Hickey Dewey in the Big Ship in
That’s
two lines.
Not
if you use a semicolon instead of a period.
I
thought I’d write a mystery set in
I
had submitted A HANDYMAN PAST HIS PRIME:
THE BLACK HEART’S-TRUTH to the Pottersville
Press noir novel writing contest, and won.
I
decided the book was more about why I couldn’t write a noir novel—it was a noir
memoir—than it was a noir novel, and withdrew it.
I
didn’t want someone to buy it, expecting a noir novel, and be disappointed, to
find it was a book about why I couldn’t write a noir novel.
Some
time later, I decided to try again. I
wrote BLACK HARVEST.
I
liked how it read.
I
liked the characters, the setting, and the theme.
But
I wasn’t happy with the plot.
The
events seemed random. Inexplicable.
There
was vandalism, an accidental murder, an intentional murder of two people, who
might or not have been involved in the vandalism, and the intentionl murder,
but that wasn’t clear, and the person who murdered them, you couldn’t figure it
out from the clues that were given. It
wasn’t clear what his or her motivation was.
Why would he or she do what he or she did? What drove him or her to it?
So
I didn’t submit the book anywhere.
Although I did post it online as I wrote it. And publish it in the paper I was writing for,
at the time.
The
hero wrote a column for a weekly paper.
He
wrote more than one column a week.
He would send the publisher what he had and the publisher would print as many columns as he had room for, in the paper.
If I want to sell a book, why don’t I take BLACK HARVEST back up and fix it. Revise it. Add things and take things out. Polish it.
Do it again. Rewrite it.
I can’t. I have moved past that. I can’t go back and write it again.
What? You write the same book, again and again, all the time. Why can’t you go back and rewrite BLACK HARVEST?
It would be like interfering with the source. Like questioning the source. You don’t want to ask where it comes from because you might not like the answer. Writers are superstitious about questioning where it comes from. It might stop coming.
If it comes, just accept it.
Don’t ask questions.
Press on to
As Tristram Shandy says.
Onward.
Don’t look back.
They might be gaining on you.
Who?
A hellhound on your trail.
And stones in your passway.
That’s the ideal circumstance for a novel. Stones in your passway and a hellhound on your trail.
Robert Johnson.
We watched Amelia last night.
It wasn’t any good. Or didn’t hold our interest.
Balder said Hazel Schlueter and Uncle Potter were the only two people he knew who sang “Happy Landings To You, Amelia Earhart,” and Potter would deny he knew it.
He’d day, “I don’t know that one.”
If you said, “I’ve heard you play it,” he’d say, “No.”
Larry and Hazel
celebrate the day she disappeared.
Who killed her? Was there foul play?
Was it mechanical failure? Did she buck a headwind and run out of gas?
Were the Japanese involved?
Our little brown brothers, the Filipinos?
Richard Speck? Travis Bickel?
John Wayne Gacy? Gacy painted clown pictures.
In The Director, Richard Hudson finances his movie by hocking his father-in-law’s clown picture, by Rouault.