Reading: Strangers

Stayed up ’til 2 in the morning finishing J. D. Robb’s Strangers in Death, so I may as well admit it was a good story. The plot is borrowed from an old Hitchcock movie, but Robb (Nora Roberts in real life) has the good grace to admit it.

About halfway through the book, police detective Eve Dallas figures out who done it, and of course her gut instinct is on the money. The tricky bit is getting enough evidence to nail the ingenious killer’s hide to the wall.

The packing material, which is plentiful, is less satisfying than the story. Robb is writing exclusively for women: There are at least four long, steamy scenes (one in a swimming pool) in which Eve has enormously satisfying sex with her husband. Male genitalia are referred to again and again and again, in a variety of contexts, including castration with a carving knife. We might imagine the howls of protest from feminists if a male author wrote about women’s anatomy for a male readership with such unabashed gusto.

Eve’s husband is straight out of a romance comic book. He’s phenomenally good looking, extremely rich, macho enough to scare off muggers, sensitive to Eve’s every mood, and — for dessert – an expert computer geek who cheerfully pitches in to help her solve her cases.

The main characters are all more or less romance staples. Most of the men are rich and good-looking (though not as rich or good-looking as Eve’s husband). The women, likewise, tend to be rich, good-looking, and virtuous, except for the murderers, who are suitably creepy. There are two virtuous poor women. One bakes Eve a lemon meringue pie, the other is a hooker who is turning tricks to pay for her daughter’s ice-skating lessons.

Let’s just say Robb’s moral universe is not extremely nuanced, and leave it at that.

The Eve Dallas books, of which there seem to be quite a number, are nominally set in the future — 2060 or thereabouts. But science fiction writers have nothing to fear. Robb isn’t even trying to write SF. Except for a couple of androids stacked in a closet and the notion that the killer will be sent to a prison “off-planet,” the whole book could have been set in today’s world by using a word processor to search-and-replace “link” with “cell phone” and “glide” with “escalator.”

As a sometime SF writer myself, I’m a bit offended by this, but I think Roberts has made a smart marketing move. Mysteries sell better than SF, and the average mystery reader would undoubtedly be baffled by half a dozen elements that SF readers not only take for granted but demand. The future is just another exotic setting to Robb’s mystery fans. It’s entirely on a par with Ellis Peters’s Medieval monastery and Lindsey Davis’s Rome, though not as well fleshed out as either of them.

The main reason I’m reading books like Strangers in Death is not, in any case, for the unalloyed pleasure that it affords; I’m researching the marketing decisions various authors are making. Robb’s decisions (cross-breed the police procedural with the explicit romance novel, stake your claim to an exotic setting that no one has used yet) are entirely sensible.

And on the bright side, there are no vampires.

The Middle 8

In jazz parlance, the middle 8 is the B section in a 32-bar AABA song form. In the middle 8, the chord progression turns a corner and the song moves off into a different space.

I’ve been working on a plot outline for a mystery novel. Like many mystery plots, it has a middle 8.

Or we could look at it as the second act of a three-act play. Crime caper novels and police procedurals sometimes have more complex structures, but a great many mysteries can be analyzed well as having three acts.

In the first act, we meet the main characters, and Something Awful Happens. In the second act, the sleuth Trudges Around, Interviewing Suspects and Following Clues. In the third act, the Truth is Revealed, the Culprit is Unmasked (which often leads to a Thrilling and Suspenseful Chase), and Virtue Triumphs.

Most mystery writers can come up with Something Awful. And Unmasking a Culprit isn’t that difficult either. But watching over the sleuth’s shoulder as he or she trudges around interviewing suspects can be fascinating and fun for the reader, or it can be deadly dull. That distinction is what I’m meditating on this morning.

In the classic Agatha Christie model, there’s not much action in the middle 8, although Christie’s formula relied on a second murder (usually the death of the person you think is the most likely suspect) along in there somewhere. Mostly, Hercule Poirot just asks questions and uses his little gray cells. In Christie’s capable hands, this formula worked well enough, or at least it was viable 75 years ago, when she wrote her best stories.

Another writer of the same period, Erle Stanley Gardner, probably offers a better model for the modern mystery writer. Gardner was, by some criteria, a dreadful writer. His characters were cardboard, his prose bland and pedestrian. But he sold millions of books — by some estimates I’ve seen, more than 100 million. He got his start in the ’30s and ’40s, before television really took off, and he was supplying for readers

Advanced Techno-Babble

Poking around in craigslist tonight, glancing at ads for writer/editors. A company called Sybase is looking for a writer. I don’t think it’s me, but I was curious about what they do. Their home page is designed with all kinds of little pop-up widgets — very sexy. One of the widgets says “Afaria.” I had no idea what that word might mean, so I clicked on it. Figured I might learn something.

Here’s what I learned:

“Afaria provides comprehensive management and security capabilities to ensure that mobile data and devices are up-to-date, reliable and secure.”

Mobile data — there’s a concept to make your head swim! What I think maybe they’re talking about is, your CEO is using his Blackberry while on a flight to Singapore, and Afaria makes sure he can access an encrypted database. But that’s a pure blind guess on my part.

“With Afaria,” the body copy goes on, “IT has the level of control and visibility required to proactively manage and secure multiple device types, applications, data and communications critical to frontline success, regardless of the bandwidth available. By putting control in the hands of IT, frontline workers are freed from the burden of management tasks, which increases user adoption and productivity. Afaria uniquely combines mobile device management and mobile security from a single console, providing the best protection against security threats and compliance issues.”

I think I’m getting a sense of why they need a writer. Not that I’m tempted to apply. What does any of that goop mean? I have no idea what a frontline worker is, but it seems clear that Afaria is going to ensure that they remain peons, “freed from the burden of management tasks.” And I guess we’re talking about orphaned frontline workers, probably under-age ones, if they’re in need of adoption.

Mobile security, that’s another interesting idea — now your security is here, now it’s gone somewhere else. And compliance issues are something a psychologist would have to sort out, right?

Teaching cello can be frustrating at times, but it has the enormous advantage that I’m dealing with utterly concrete matters. “You used your 3rd finger instead of your 2nd finger.” “You skipped ahead during that rest.” “You’re lifting the bow from your shoulder. You need to learn to use your wrist.” I seem to be on an entirely different planet than Afaria. And frankly, I’m very happy about it.

Author! Author!

Both Inform 7 and TADS 3 are very, very powerful authoring systems for interactive fiction (i.e., text-based games). What’s odd, if you think about it for a minute, is that the authoring systems are so far out in front of the work that’s being written. Why don’t we have ten or twenty times as many talented authors laboring away over great new works of IF?

If it weren’t for the hard work of two dedicated software designers, Graham Nelson and Mike Roberts, we’d have no decent authoring systems at all. So maybe it’s just the luck of the draw. I’m not too sure about that, though.

I did a quick, informal survey of the games released by some well-known IF authors during the past decade, and found rather a dearth of gung-ho activity. Yes, new games are being released, and yes, a few authors are very active, but many others release a couple of games and then fall by the wayside.

An earlier version of this post (which I have now completely revised) sparked some discussion on rec.arts.int-fiction. That discussion highlighted several reasons why IF authors may fail to follow up their early successes by writing more games.

First, there’s no money in IF. A novelist whose first work is published, reviewed, and admired will have a big financial incentive to continue. Not so with interactive fiction. It’s a hobby.  And however passionate people may feel about their hobbies, after a few years the passion may settle to a lower level.

Second, writing IF is harder than many people realize. They may tackle writing their first game, buckle down and fight their way through the unexpected difficulties, release a very good game, and then be reluctant to put themselves through the wringer again.

Third, lots of people first try writing IF when they’re in college. By the time they’ve written one or two games, they’ve moved on to a new stage of their life — a job, a family, and so on. Time-consuming, unpaid hobbies tend to take a back seat.

Fourth, some people remain involved in the IF field but devote their time to other activities than writing new games. Mike Roberts, for example, has put a lot of time recently into the Interactive Fiction Database (IFDB).

Fifth, as Emily Short pointed out, developing a game that will unfold as a satisfying story is quite a conceptual challenge. Not that writing novels is a paint-by-the-numbers activity, but the parameters are pretty well understood. Not so with IF. Some authors undoubtedly have games that they’ve been working on for an extended period that they’re not ready to release because something about the project hasn’t yet jelled.

Sixth, some authors may have gone on from IF into the world of paid game programming. Why on Earth would they want to come home and write games for free in their spare time?

Thanks to everyone who contributed to this discussion — and my apologies to anyone who felt that my off-the-cuff survey was ill-considered or overly negative.

The comments contributed to the original version of this post are no longer relevant to the updated version, so I’m deleting them. However, I’ll keep Adam Cadre’s comment on the original version, since it illustrates the issues discussed in the new version.

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

Bibliophilia

I wish I had a lot more time to read. I own hundreds and hundreds of books, some of which I’ve been carting around for 30 or 40 years. Don’t remember a thing about some of them except that I enjoyed them. It would be nice to sit down for a few years and just read.

And not just the old books, either. I’d love to buy lots of new ones.

I generally read the Resnick/Malzberg column in the SFWA Bulletin, and this month they were talking about specialty publishers — small houses that are supporting the history of science fiction by keeping classics in print. So today I have an itch to rush out and buy all the science fiction I can find. It’s a mild form of mania — a raw desire to buy thousands of books simply because it would be so cool to own them! Complete collections of Heinlein, Sturgeon, Poul Anderson, and a host of other visionaries. I’ve got most of the Philip Dick paperbacks … but maybe I’m missing a few!

I won’t do it, of course. I wouldn’t have time to read them all, and I’m not rich enough to indulge such whims purely for the sake of having a well-stocked private library. Besides, a lot of the old science fiction wasn’t actually very good. Reading it would be in the nature of a research project – to find out what ideas were amazing or trendy in 1950, and what cultural blind spots the writers wallowed in without knowing it.

Some of the cultural blind spots are interesting. In the late ’60s and early ’70s, there was a lot of SF in which everybody was having happy sex with everybody else (or at least, with everybody else of the opposite sex). STDs weren’t even a blip on the radar, and nor was the importance of long-term pair-bonding to emotional health.

But I’d still like to own all those books!

Little Things

I’ve been wondering why I enjoy something as bizarre and pointless as writing interactive fiction. But ultimately it’s no different from a lot of other creative hobbies.

There are people (mostly men, I imagine) who build quite elaborate model train layouts for fun. Such a train layout might fill an entire bedroom. In the evening you might find the guy building a trestle out of popsicle sticks and then painting it rust-red so it looks authentic.

In each case, what’s fun is creating a tiny model of the real world — a model that has light and color and sound in it, and where things move around. The human brain seems to like building models.

A community theatre performing Shakespeare is the same thing, isn’t it? There’s more social collaboration than if you’re building a model train, but the result is a tiny model of the real world (the life of Richard III, for instance) that includes color and sound and movement.