Stay Out of my Head

photo by Peter Rozovsky

 You have probably encountered Anthony Horowitz in one format or another.  He is a master of television, creating Foyle's War, being one of the first writers of Midsomer Murders, and so on.  His Susan Ryland novels and Alex Rider young adult books have been filmed for TV.

Recently I have been listening to audio versions of his Hawthorne novels.  They are deliberately odd books, featuring a narrator named Anthony Horowitz who writes novels and TV shows, and plays reluctant sidekick to Daniel Hawthorne, a former cop who was kicked off the force because he may (or may not) have thrown a pedophile down the stairs.  They are delightful fair play mysteries.

 Each book plays with the genre in different ways.  In the fifth book, Close to Death, Horowitz is on deadline to write another book but there are no convenient crimes to work on so he attempts to build a volume out of one of Hawthorne's former cases.  This means that big chunks of the book are in third person, since our narrator (Horowitz the narrator, not the audiobook's narrator.  Got it?) was not present for the events.

And that's where I got a big surprise.  At one point we are told that Hawthorne looked off and noticed something.  I don't have the exact wording because, as I have said, I was listening to an audio-book and it wasn't convenient to go back and find it. But I actually jumped a little when I heard that sentence.

Because we have never been allowed into the detective's head before.  That made even this tiny excursion there seem like a violation.  From then on I was paying attention and was able to copy down another example: "He didn't like to be close to people he didn't know." That is not narrator-Horowitz speaking but the omniscient third-person narrator, and it just felt like a violation.

The reason is that Hawthorne himself is a mystery (each book reveals a bit more about him, not all of it necessarily true) and also he is the detective.  We are not allowed to get into his head, because if we knew what he knew, the mystery would be over long before the end of the book.

This reminds me of something Mick Herron said at a Bouchercon I attended a few years ago.  He was talking about his Slow Horses series and he said he could never let the reader into the head of the main character, Jackson Lamb.  If he did we would know how much of his vulgarity, insults, racism, misogyny, etc. was real, and how much was put-on to annoy people.  So while we can get into the skulls of his other characters, Lamb must remain sphinxlike.  

I planned to end this there but I have been reading The Night the Rich Men Burned by Malcolm Mackay (what a title!) and he brings up a slightly different issue.  This Scottish author has a unique style.  I would guess that each of his books has almost twice as many words as another novel with similar page count, because there is almost no dialog.  Everything is happening, present tense,  in the heads of the characters.  If we learn that it is raining it is because a character notices it.

And he is quite casual about head-hopping, moving from one person's thoughts to another as easily as changing paragraphs.  Usually this would drive me mad but Mackay makes it work.  

So how do you feel about writers prying too closely into their characters' skulls?

There's only one rule

At Left Coast Crime in Portland back in February I scooped a bunch of interesting books off the swap table.  The first three, after a few paragraphs or a few chapters, wound up on the swap shelf at the library where I work.  But number four was definitely worth a read.

My first surprise was that How A Gunman Says Goodbye by Malcolm Mackay is actually the second book in his Glasgow Trilogy.  I figured I would give it a try without worrying about the first book, and that worked out fine.

But the second surprise came halfway through the book when I happened to glance back at this blog I wrote about Long Beach Bouchercon last year and discovered that one of the freebies I scooped up  there was the first book in Mackay's trilogy.  Maybe at this year's Bouchercon I'll get volume three.

At the center of the trilogy (said the man who has only read the second book) is Peter Jamieson, who runs a criminal organization in Glasgow, Scotland (mostly drugs).   He wants to take on one of his larger rivals but first he has to flatten Shug Francis, a pretender to his throne.  (Little fleas have lesser fleas to bite 'em...)

And that requires the help of Frank MacLeod, who may be as close as Jamieson has to a friend.  In Britain where guns are not as prevalent as here, criminal outfits may only have one or two hit men, and Frank is one of longstanding.

But longstanding is exactly the problem.  He's getting old and just had a hip replaced.  Can he still do the job?

Without giving away too much of the plot, it becomes clear he can't, and for the rest of the book everyone has to debate the question: how can a gunman be allowed to retire?  This is a guy who literally knows where all the bodies are buried. 

That's enough about the plot.  What I want to talk about is something quite different.

First of all, the book is in present tense.  Generally I don't like present tense fiction at all.  It gets annoying pretty quickly.

Second, the book is multiple point of view, and entirely POV.  I don't think there is so much as a "It was raining" that doesn't come strictly from inside the skull of one of the characters.  That's not itself a bad thing, but-- Well...

My new book, out this summer, is multiple point of view.  Originally I planned to write a lot of short chapters, alternating between viewpoints, but I realized some of the chapters might be only a few paragraphs long.  So I opted for longish chapters, with different viewpoints carefully separated by spaces.

Mackay scorns such things.  When the action gets going he is happy to follow a paragraph from A's point of view with one from B's POV, and then back again.  It can be confusing.  There were a few points where I couldn't tell who's eyes I was looking through.

Here, for instance, is a meeting between a cop and a killer:

Fisher's gesturing for Frank to take a seat at the table.  To his relief, Frank does.  If this was a fix and he was going to kill him, it would have happened by now.

'Can I get you a cup of tea, Frank?" he's asking.  Being friendly with this old murdering bastard. 

"No thanks."

He can see that Fisher's making an effort.  He can see the strain that it's putting on the cop, too...

Highly unusual way of writing.  But - and here's my whole point - it all works.  Those other three books that I dumped on the swap table were much more traditional narratives, easier to follow, but they didn't keep me glued to the page.  Mackay did.

It turns out that all those writers who helpfully provided us with Ten Rules For Writing Great Fiction were lying.  The fact is there's only one rule: Keep the reader turning pages.  Mackay does.


 One more thing.  Last year I wrote about one way to deal with cliches in your writing.  Essentially, when you spot one you back up and choose a different direction.  It feels like Mackay does that.

You see, there are two hitmen in the book.  Calum is younger, an up-and-comer.  Naturally he is jealous of the more senior Frank and looking for ways to undermine and replace him--

New choice!

That's the cliche and Mackay dodges it.  His Calum is a free-lancer being reluctantly dragged into Jamieson's orgaization, who would much prefer for Frank to stay on as gunman-in-chief.  So his problem is: does he lie to protect the other man?

I recommend the Glasgow Trilogy, but you might want to start with the first book.  But that's not a rule.  There's only one rule.