A Classic Misdirection

I was still with Jordan Baker. We were sitting at a table with a man of about my age and a rowdy little girl who gave way upon the slightest provocation to uncontrollable laughter. I was enjoying myself now. I had taken two finger bowls of champagne and the scene had changed before my eyes into something significant, elemental and profound.

At a lull in the entertainment the man looked at me and smiled.

"Your face is familiar," he said, politely. "Weren't you in the Third Division during the war?"

"Why, yes. I was in the Ninth Machine-Gun Battalion."

"I was in the Seventh Infantry until June nineteen-eighteen. I knew I'd seen you somewhere before."

We talked for a moment about some wet, grey little villages in France. Evidently he lived in this vicinity for he told me that he had just bought a hydroplane and was going to try it out in the morning.

"Want to go with me, old sport? Just near the shore along the Sound."

"What time?"

"Any time that suits you best."

It was on the tip of my tongue to ask his name when Jordan looked around and smiled.

"Having a gay time now?" she inquired.

"Much better." I turned again to my new acquaintance. "This is an unusual party for me. I haven't even seen the host. I live over there—" I waved my hand at the invisible hedge in the distance, "and this man Gatsby sent over his chauffeur with an invitation."

For a moment he looked at me as if he failed to understand.

"I'm Gatsby," he said suddenly.

— The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

"Subverting expectations."

That's the flashy new phrase all the cool kids are using these days, when in truth what they're referring to is your basic old-fashioned misdirection. And it's been with us at least since the Greeks invented drama.

So. You know. Thousands of years.

The excerpt above highlights one of the best examples in modern literature of this sort of thing. And linked here is a mashup of this very scene from the novel portrayed in five different film adaptations done between 1926 and 2013. And each of them plays the scene a bit differently. The best of them build up the anticipation of the first appearance of the novel's mysterious titular character.

And when Gatsby does make his first appearance, it's practically anti-climactic. In person Gatsby is so unassuming as to be nearly forgettable, at least at first blush. The mundane reality crashes hard into the soaring fantasy of the Gatsby of rumor, of myth, of legend.

With the advent of Summer, Gatsby has been very much on my mind. This happens with me every late Spring. Maybe it's because Gatsby is in so many ways the ultimate "Summer Novel."

As such, I'll be reading it again, as I have done every Summer for the past twenty-five years. Every reading brings me delight.

A large part of the enjoyment I get out of Gatsby is from the way the reader's expectations are continuously "subverted."

Gatsby, while nothing like the legend which had grown up around him, is ironically the most honest person in the novel. Furthermore, every other character takes a cue from Gatsby in one regard: none of them is as they initially seem.

Not Gatsby's lost love, Daisy. Not her husband, Tom. Not her cousin, Nick. Not her friend Jordan Baker.

So here's my question for you, the reader: which novel have you found to most consistently subvert expectations? Give your response in the comments. and let's get to talking about it.

Next time around I talk about real life subverted initial impressions of real life individuals, how those worked out, and how these real world experiences informed my fiction in the best possible ways.

See you in the comments, and in two weeks!

Beginnings

"Mighty oaks from little acorns grow." 

                                                            - Fourteenth century English proverb










 "A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step."                                                                     

                                                                                       - Laozi, Tao Te Ching

"'The cat sat on the mat' is not the beginning of a story, but 'the cat sat on the dog’s mat' is."
                                                                                              - John LeCarré









Last week I had both the honor and the pleasure of attending Left Coast Crime just down I-5 in Portland, Oregon ("Crimelandia"). While I was there I crossed paths with many old friends, and made some new ones. Attended some panels. Moderated one on novellas.

Learned a lot.

Had some fun.

Experienced one of the luckiest days of my life (behind, of course, the day that my wife agreed to marry me and the one when my son was born). Cleaned up at poker (got cleaned OUT the next night) and won a signed, inscribed copy of Steven Saylor's latest book!

You know, like you do.

One guy I ran into at this year's LCC Vancouver native Sam Wiebe. We originally met at last year's Bouchercon, and I liked him, so I picked up a copy of his novel Last of the Independents.With this, his debut novel Sam has penned one of the truly unforgettable opening paragraphs in modern crime fiction. It is by turns profane (and potentially offensive) and uproariously funny, which in turn also renders it completely subversive.


If you're interested in reading it, take a look at the sample offered here. And then do yourself a favor and BUY HIS BOOK!


Talking with Sam and a host of other friends/authors in (would you believe it?) the event bar about favorite books and the ones that pack an opening gate wallop like Last of the Independents does got me to thinking about beginnings. Specifically, about openings, and about how a story opens.

With all of the current emphasis on pacing, plot, character and a whizz-bang ending, the need for a solid opening scene for today's attention-challenged literary audience sometimes gets short shrift. And while I can recall terrific ending lines from some of my favorite novels, ("And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." comes to mind.), I can recall a lot more great openers.

(Note that distinguished between "opener" and "opening line" here. More on that in a bit.)

Take this one, for example:

It was about eleven o’clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard

wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.

Most people who read and write crime fiction recognize that opener right away. It is, of course, from The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler's first novel, which introduces his famous private detective, Phillip Marlowe.

Chandler had a way with openers. Take this other one from his short story "Red Wind":

There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge.

Now that is what I call a "table-setter"!

Your opening paragraphs are your first, best and really, only chance to set the scene, establish character/tone/setting, and do it all quick, before your reader loses interest. Looking at The Big Sleep again, it's readily apparent that Chandler does all of this with two short paragraphs. The first one quoted above, in which he memorably establishes his protagonist's personality and voice, and in the next one, where he sets the scene:

The main hallway of the Sternwood place was two stories high. Over the entrance doors, which would have let in a troop of Indian elephants, there was a broad stained-glass panel showing a knight in dark armor rescuing a lady who was tied to a tree and didn't have any clothes on but some very long and convenient hair. The knight had pushed the vizor of his helmet back to be sociable, and he was fiddling with the knots on the ropes that tied the lady to the tree and not getting anywhere. I stood there and thought that if I lived in the house I would sooner or later have to climb up there and help him. He didn't seem to be really trying.

And just like that your scene is set, complete with a stained-glass window that serves as a ready-made metaphor for the book's action that is obvious, without hitting you over the head.

So good it's been imitated a million times since, up to and past the point of parody.

How about you? Feel free to scroll down to the comments section and use it weigh in with your favorite opening lines/paragraphs/scenes, and what makes the special for you!

The Minister and the Choir Singer

This summer, among other things, I read Sarah Churchwell's "Careless People: Murder and the Making of The Great Gatsby". Very well written, very well researched. Churchwell says that The Great Gatsby was influenced, and borrowed from, the Hall-Mills murder case, which captured everyone's imagination from Damon Runyan (who was one of the reporters on the spot) to James Thurber ("A Sort of Genius") to William Kunstler ("The Minister and the Choir Singer"). The case was never solved, for a variety of reasons ranging from incomprehensibly bad police work to, as David Gates put it a while back, "a lack of any practical forensic approach", to the wholesale swamping of any reason or fact by a media storm that most people don't think existed until O. J. Simpson.

Eleanor Mills

On September 14, 1922, in New Brunswick, NJ, the bodies of Eleanor Rinehardt Mills and the Edward Wheeler Hall were discovered lying side by side under a crab-apple tree. They had been shot, and the bodies carefully arranged so that her left hand laid on his thigh, and his right hand on her neck. He had a hat over his face, and his calling card placed at his feet. Torn love letters were strewn over them. He was an Episcopal priest, and she sang in his choir. In the words of The New York Times, although both were married to other people, Hall and Mills "had long been friendly."

It was obvious they'd been shot, but the investigation was... unbelievable. According to Churchwell, the first doctor to look at Mrs. Mills body didn't even do an autopsy, since it was obvious she was dead by foul play; and it took two more autopsies to discover that Mrs. Mills had been shot three times, her throat cut, and her tongue cut out. There was no police cordoning of the area, and, as publicity blazed ("Priest and choir singer slaughtered in New Jersey!"), people came and went freely. It became such a tourist destination that, by the time of the 1926 trial, the crab-apple tree was entirely gone, hacked away by souvenir hunters.

Frances Noel Stevens

The prime suspects never changed: Hall's wife, Frances Noel Stevens (1874–1942), and her two brothers, Henry Hewgill Stevens (1869–1939) and William "Willie" Carpender Stevens (1872–1942). (James Thurber's essay was primarily about Willie Stevens, who was an odd duck all the way around; probably high-functioning Asperger's, in his world, he couldn't hold a job and spent most of his time hanging around the local fire house.)

The prosecution's key witness was Jane Gibson, a pig farmer on whose property the bodies were discovered. She would be known throughout the next few years as The Pig Woman. Because she was poor, uneducated, and highly "colorful", people quickly took sides regarding her story: she was either the bearer of ultimate truth or a crazy woman trying to get attention and money. Her first story was that her dog got her up and out around 9 on the night of the murder. She saw a man standing in her cornfield, so she got on her mule and rode towards him. As she got close, she saw four people by the crab apple tree. Then she heard gunshots, and one fell to the ground. She heard a woman scream, "Don’t", repeated three times. She said she turned her mule in the opposite direction, heard more gunshots and when she looked back, saw a second person fall and heard a woman shout "Henry".

Over time she saw more people; she saw fewer people; she heard more sounds; she saw a black man; she didn't see a black man. At the trial, she was a great sensation, rolled in on a hospital bed to give her testimony.

The trouble was, there was no proof, no evidence, and even if Mrs. Hall had arranged and/or participated in the murders, her husband was an adulterous pastor. The Hall/Stevens family were all acquitted, even though most historians and students of the case believe that they were guilty. (William Kunstler was the exception: he posited that the KKK committed the murders. Most people disagree.)

But the case captured the imagination of the day, especially since it was never solved. It held primacy in the public imagination until the tragic Lindbergh kidnapping of 1932.

Churchwell links this murder to The Great Gatsby, for a variety of reasons. For one thing, everyone was talking about it during the time F. Scott Fitzgerald was actually living in Great Neck ("East Egg" in the book). The novel takes place in 1922, the year of the crime. And there are patterns throughout: Hall gave Mills a novel - Simon Called Peter - (racy for the 1920s) that Fitzgerald has Nick Carraway read while Tom Buchanan and his mistress, Myrtle, romp in the back bedroom. Myrtle and George Wilson are supposedly based on Eleanor and James Mills. George was a mechanic, James a janitor. Tom Buchanan describes George in the novel as "so dumb he doesn't know he's alive", and one of the reasons James Mills was never a credible suspect is that he first appeared to be so dumb he didn't know his wife was having an affair, and he didn't have the "manliness", apparently, to do something about it. Meanwhile, Myrtle and Eleanor were both sleeping above their station, desperate for another life, away from their boring, working-class husbands.

I don't know if Churchwell is right in all her surmises, but it's a fascinating case, and a great book. Start off slow: read Thurber's essay and/or Gatsby to whet your appetite; then go to Churchwell and discover the whole cast of characters. And let me know who you think did it.

(NOTE: I am, hopefully, in Quebec. See you in a week…)