Missing Information

Trying to do research into daily life in Chicago in 1885 without spending a ton of money. It’s hard! I’ve spent a couple of hundred on books so far. Ran into another one tonight that looks essential, but it’s $55, so I’m going to resist for a week or two.

There’s lots of good stuff at university libraries, but they won’t let me into the stacks at Stanford without a student ID card, and I’m not about to fly to Illinois to try to sneak into the University of Chicago library.

Tonight I was looking into the question of indoor plumbing. Or trying to. If you’re going to include a scene in your novel that’s set in a kitchen, you’d like to know whether there are faucets above the sink, or a pump handle, or whether the pump handle would have been outside the kitchen door. In that era, a lot would have depended on whether the inhabitants of the house were wealthy, middle class, or poor. Also, perhaps, on the neighborhood. I know Chicago had water mains, but I don’t know which outlying districts were supplied. And I don’t know whether houses would have had wells, because Chicago was built on land that had been a low-lying marsh. What happens if you dig a well in a marsh?

I’ve read that by the 1870s, a hot water tank would likely have been mounted above the back of the stove. The stove would probably have burnt coal, but perhaps gas — that’s another detail I don’t know. I know there were gas lines running under the streets, because when Chicago was digging trenches for cable car lines in 1881, rerouting the gas, water, and sewer lines complicated the process. But what were the gas lines feeding? Street lights? In-home lighting, or only lights in the business district?

And the big steam engines that provided power for the factories — coal or gas? It makes a difference, because coal smoke was a major pollutant at the time. When not choking on the coal smoke, however, Chicagoans in 1885 rode bicycles. The high front wheel bicycle was the latest fad. Citizens were sometimes arrested for speeding on their bikes (the slang term was “scorching”), because of course the bikes were the fastest thing on the street, short of a galloping horse.

And yes, there were a lot of horses. They pulled streetcars, private wagons, and so on. I found a wonderful little 30-second clip of a film of a Chicago street, made in 1897 by Thomas Edison (or someone in his employ). Amazingly dense crowds, and horses in the foreground.

What I really want is a time machine!

Reading: The Thin Man

Having absorbed a few recently published mystery novels, I thought it would be fun and possibly instructive to compare and contrast them with one of the old masters. So I pulled out my copy of Dashiel Hammett’s The Thin Man. I have no memory of ever having read it; quite likely I picked it up on a book-buying binge. I mean, how can you be a mystery fan if you don’t own Hammett? That would be like being a Christian and not owning a Bible.

The plot is full of twists and turns. The reader gets smacked in the face with a couple of tuna-sized red herrings, but even the parts that do relate to the central thread are nicely tangled.

Just as interesting, the book is pretty much all plot. The trend in recent years has been strongly toward mysteries that include lots of schtick — the sleuth’s family life, details of horse racing or life in a Medieval monastery, whatever. Hammett has a deft touch with schtick, but he tosses in a line or two and then gets on with the story. Asta puts her paws up on Nick’s chest. Nick pours himself another drink. That’s about as deep as it gets, except for one wonderful facet of the book: It’s clear that Nick and Nora love and trust one another. He can come out of a female suspect’s bedroom with lipstick on his mouth, and Nora doesn’t feel a need to say anything. Not only does she not say anything, she doesn’t even react. It’s not important to her because she knows perfectly well that Nick is not fooling around.

Not only does she know it perfectly well, Hammett feels no need to rub our faces in the fact that she knows it. Given the same incident, the average modern mystery writer would feel compelled to riff on the subject of marital trust for at least two long, utterly tedious paragraphs. Hammett just lets us glimpse their marriage in action and then goes back to spinning out the plot.

After reading several mysteries that dwell lovingly on the details of cuisine, I was especially delighted by one particular sentence in The Thin Man. Can’t find it at the moment, but somebody or other is visiting Nick and Nora’s hotel suite at meal time, and room service has set up a table in the suite. The sentence is, “He put a forkful of food in his mouth.” That’s the entire description of the dining experience — bam. I loved that sentence. Hemingway couldn’t have done it any better.

Reading: Oh, Faye

Elmore Leonard has said that when writing his novels, he tries not to write the parts that people skip.

Yesterday the mystery novel at the top of my stack was Faye Kellerman’s The Burnt House. I found myself skipping large chunks of it.

It’s a police procedural, but not all police procedurals are so strikingly devoid of action and suspense. Reginald Hill, for instance, is capable of turning out a stylish procedural whodunit. I expect I’ll try another Faye Kellerman novel, but maybe not this week.

The Burnt House starts with a bang, literally — a commuter flight from L.A. to San Jose loses its hydraulics (or something — the details hardly matter, except that it’s not terrorists) within 30 seconds after takeoff and slams into an apartment building. But that’s the only real excitement that Kellerman deploys, and of course it’s over and done with on page 2. The rest of the book sees the cops plodding through a couple of convoluted investigations, a process leavened (if that’s the right word) by

Reading: Hunt Sharp

Grabbed a stack of mystery novels from the library. Quickly absorbed Twelve Sharp by Janet Evanovich and The Hunt Club by John Lescroart. They couldn’t be more different. About all they have in common is nasty crimes and the obligatory Thrilling Climax in which the main Good Guy is face to face with the main Bad Guy.

Also, both authors seem quite concerned about food — a feature I noticed in a recent Kate Wilhelm mystery as well. Maybe this is a trend; do you suppose?

Evanovich writes fast-paced humor, and there’s lots of wiggle-wiggle-wink-wink sex. The heroine, Stephanie Plum, works in a bail bond place, and her main job is tracking down lowlifes who didn’t show up for their court dates. But that’s the fun part. She spends most of the novel being stalked by a psycho, which is less fun except that she’s well protected by her two boyfriends (that’s right, two, and she sleeps with them both in the course of the book, though she only actually has intercourse with one of them). Twelve Sharp is not a whodunit — any doubt about who done it gets erased very early on. It’s a crime suspense story.

Lescroart (it’s pronounced “les-squah,” by the way) writes in a slow-paced but absorbing style. The action in The Hunt Club, which is a whodunit, is utterly serious, though it’s leavened by the obligatory private eye/cop repartee. There’s only one sexual encounter in the book, and it’s

Not Fiction

I’ve been toying with the idea of writing another novel — poking at a few plot outlines, drafting a few scenes. Today I’m coming, reluctantly, to the conclusion that I’m not likely to be able to pull it off.

Technically, I could do it. I know how to sit down and write 500 pages of characters, action, and dialog, and because I’m a professional, they would be of publishable quality. The lurking problem is that I just don’t like people enough. Novels are about people, and I no longer care about people — neither my characters nor my (possible) readers.

The Rush Limbaugh/Sarah Palin Republicans have soured me pretty decisively, that’s part of it. I’ve also been musing lately about a few failed romantic relationships. (The failed ones would amount to precisely 100% of the ones I attempted.)

And then there’s the amateur music on Broadjam. I got a free membership to Broadjam laid on me (I may be doing some writing for the site), so I’ve been listening to tracks uploaded by other musicians. Now, these are the people who care enough about their music to record it, to finish recording it, to join an online site that provides networking with other musicians, and to upload their recorded tracks to the site — presumably with the idea that someone may want to listen. So basically, they’ve self-selected as the upper 50% of aspiring musicians.

Unfortunately, the distribution of clues among the participants is haphazard. Very few of them are entirely clueless: To paraphrase Lincoln, many of them

Reading: Whodunits

Being on vacation, I wandered into the local library and grabbed a couple of whodunits — Kate Wilhelm’s A Wrongful Death and Aimee & David Thurlo’s Red Mesa. I was up ’til 1:30 this morning finishing A Wrongful Death, and then I sat down after lunch and read all of Red Mesa.

The fact that I now have a headache is probably only coincidental.

Wilhelm’s Barbara Holloway mysteries are low-key, and involve frequent discussion of what the lawyer and her friends are having for dinner. (At a guess, Wilhelm is a foodie.) Red Mesa is a police procedural, and ramps up the violence a little further, though not to a gruesome extent.

About 50 years ago, the mystery novel genre was cross-bred with the soap opera. If you read series mysteries, you know what I’m talking about. In one novel, the sleuth develops a new romantic interest. In the next volume you pick up, the two of them are ex-lovers, and there’s heartbreak. It’s amazingly tedious.

The Thurlos spend page after page detailing policewoman Ella Clah’s care and concern for her infant daughter. The tribal gossip on the Navajo Reservation also gets a workout, even though its connection to the plot is strictly tangential. Wilhelm crams in a tedious subplot about her sleuth’s love life, and makes sure we know a great deal about what winters are like in Eugene, Oregon.

This makes the books faster to read, because you can skim those bits without losing anything essential. But it also leaves me with the suspicion that the authors were padding because their stories were on the thin side. Raymond Chandler’s and Ross MacDonald’s detectives didn’t have nosy downstairs neighbors (Sara Paretsky), gay sidekicks and a fishpond (Jonathan Kellerman), a friend who bathes dogs for a living (Lawrence Block), or orchid farms on the roof (Rex Stout). They just waded in and solved the case. And I say that as an admirer of all four of those writers.

The climax in which the sleuth faces down the villain in single-handed combat is an awful but apparently unavoidable cliche. It can be amusing to watch the contortions the author goes through to prevent a sleuth who is also a police officer from getting on the radio and calling for backup. Sometimes the radio malfunctions, or is stolen; sometimes the cop who gets the radio call turns out to be one of the villains; sometimes the cop is simply in too much of a hurry to rescue Little Nell to have time to grab the radio. It’s always some damn thing.

Other plot elements are slightly less predictable. In a curious coincidence (SPOILER ALERT!), in both of the books named above, the supposedly murdered person later turns up very much alive. The corpse turns out to be someone else.

Writing mysteries is probably fun, but I’m such a stickler for accuracy that the need to understand every detail of police and legal procedure would drive me nuts. I admire writers who can pull it off, though. Michael Connelly’s The Lincoln Lawyer, for instance — brilliant book.

Reading: The Dragons of Babel

Elves, centaurs, dragons, trolls, witches, hippogriffs, and other creatures even more fantastical throng through Michael Swanwick’s The Dragons of Babel. But it isn’t what you’re thinking. Swanwick has taken classic fantasy and mythology and done a cheerfully brutal mash-up with the seamier elements of our own modern world. There’s plenty of technology (from cigarette lighters to subway trains with electrical third rails), explicit sex, and casual profanity, not to mention overt references to actual historical figures like Mozart and Flaubert.

The first 2/3 of the novel seems almost picaresque — young Will is wandering through the world without much direction, falling in with whoever he meets, getting into trouble, falling in love, and so on. But Swanwick has a deeper design. Eventually the story is revealed as a modern expression of one of the timeless fantasy themes.

I’m not even going to tell you which theme, because that would spoil it. This book is a winner. If you’re looking for something fresh in the fantasy genre, you won’t want to miss it.

Feeling Good

People create stuff because they enjoy creating stuff. That’s a truism, so let’s be a little more specific. When an artist creates a new work of art, what’s going on is that the artist’s brain is producing some sort of chemical, or perhaps a pattern of synapses firing, that causes a feeling of pleasure.

This response is probably learned. Put a child in a family where being creative is rewarded, and the child will learn to produce an internal pleasurable stimulus in anticipation of a later external stimulus, such as praise.

Maybe some people have a greater natural capacity to give themselves this jolt of pleasure. We’ll leave that question for the neuroscientists to puzzle out.

I don’t think it matters much what creative medium is involved. Some people get enormous pleasure from

World-Building

Writing science fiction is enormously difficult. If you cut corners, it gets easier. Cutting corners is always a temptation, because (a) if you don’t, your whole story may collapse, and (b) your readers or viewers probably won’t notice or care.

Quick example: Last week I watched an episode of Dr. Who called “Daleks in New York.” It’s the 1930s, and the Daleks are doing something to the spire atop the Empire State Building in order to capture the energy of what is clearly described in the dialog as an impending “solar flare.” Solar flares can’t be predicted, and not much of their energy reaches the surface of the Earth (for which we can all be thankful), but never mind that. As the climax of the story nears, the “solar flare” has transmuted into a simple bolt of lightning emanating from a thunderstorm.

I’ll bet not one viewer in ten even noticed the switch.

A reader named Conrad Cook has been grilling me about my unflattering view of Riverworld, by Philip Jose Farmer. I was critical, among other things, of

Up a Creek

Jean-Paul Sartre’s aphorism, “Hell is other people,” keeps drifting across my mind as I wade through Philip Jose Farmer’s Riverworld saga. Right now I’m halfway through volume 2, The Fabulous Riverboat, and I’m rather distinctly unimpressed with Farmer’s view of human nature.

The story, in case you’re unfamiliar with Riverworld, is that every human who ever lived has been resurrected, in the flesh, along the 20 million miles or so of a great planet-girdling river. (Children under 7 years old are not resurrected, probably because it would have been inconvenient for Farmer to have a lot of toddlers underfoot. What happened to the children, we’re not told.) Everybody starts out naked, healthy, and physically young, but their whole lifetime’s memories are intact. Food is provided, but nothing else. So they have nothing to do for amusement except make knives, spears, and axes out of flint and bamboo and start stabbing and bashing one another.

Their compunctions about doing so would seem minor enough in any case, but are soon erased by the discovery that people who are killed in Riverworld only pop up again somewhere else along the river. Effectively, everyone has become immortal. So there’s no reason not to bash someone’s head in or rip their guts open, if it suits you.

There’s more to the books than stabbing and bashing. There’s also a lot of slavery, some highly unlikely metaphysics, equally unlikely biology and planetology, sophomoric philosophizing, authorial intrusions, Esperanto, five hundred novel uses for bamboo, and a great deal of name-dropping. The major characters in the first two books include Sir Richard Burton (the explorer, not the actor), Sam Clemens, Hermann Goering, Cyrano de Bergerac, King John, and Alice Pleasance Liddell Hargreaves (the real Alice after whom Alice in Wonderland was named). Nobody who was nobody in their Earthly life counts for much except as a sidekick; it’s the Great Man theory of history run amok.

The writing is sometimes adequate, but not, on the whole, very good. Farmer seems to relish the scenes of hand-to-hand combat, but tends to fall back on narrative summary at other times – possibly in order to keep the sprawling story from developing a monstrous word count, or possibly because he knew his primary readership was made up of teenage boys.

There’s no music in the writing, and none in the story either. Nobody makes a flute out of the ubiquitous bamboo. Nobody makes any sculpture. Nobody dances. It’s all hacking and stabbing. Wheeee….