Deadlines

Somebody famous, Sir Walter Raleigh, or one of those guys, on his way to the block, said there was nothing like a date with the headsman’s axe to sharpen your wit.

Which got me thinking about deadlines.

Both literally, and otherwise.

For instance. We here, at SleuthSayers, all collaborated on a mystery anthology last year – titled Murder, Neat – with each of us contributing a story. I, of course, dragged my feet until the last minute. I had a title, and the set-up, which is nought but bare bones; I didn’t have a clue what kind of pickle I planned to put my guy in, let alone how to get him out of it. And then, the deadline loomed, and it was like that old joke, “With one tremendous leap… Off to the races.

In another case, though, I missed the deadline for the Black Orchid submission, at the end of May, this year. I think I can explain the difference. With the Murder, Neat story, “Shuffle Off to Buffalo,” I had a tight internal timeline – the arc of the story itself is only a couple of hours – and a single setting. It was a physical trap, with the clock running out. In other words, writing the story was like winding a watch. But the Black Orchid novella was a bigger, shaggier animal. I wanted the story to open up, across a wider canvas, I wanted you to breathe in, and fill your lungs, to feel the whole of a landscape. I wanted that room to breathe, myself, to give the story interior space, as well as outside. From my immediate perspective, I don’t know whether I’ve pulled it off, I’m still too close, but my point is that one kind of story benefits from pressure, and another doesn’t.

Harper Barnes

It’s partly about narrative compression.

What is it you want to say? Say it, and get it done. This is what newspaper people always tell you. Lead with a jab, soften ‘em up with some combinations, finish with a roundhouse punch. Decades ago, I wrote a movie column for an alternative Boston weekly, the Phoenix. Often as not, I was turning in my material right as the paper was going to bed, locked in for the press run. I remember, one night, I was there in the empty offices, in the Back Bay, me and my editor – Harper Barnes, a real newspaper guy, who’d made his bones with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch – with me at a borrowed desk, pounding out copy on a big Royal manual, the floor shaking, I was punching the keys so hard. Typing MORE at the bottom of each page, full caps, yanking them out, never a backward glance, and on the last page, typing em-dash, 30, em-dash. Old newspaper thing, from the days of movable type, to let the typesetters know they’d hit the end of the copy. (Even if the Phoenix was photo-typeset.)

Were those columns back then any good?

I’d like to think they were literate, at least. I’ll tell you this. Banging on that typewriter, handing my pages across the desk to Harper, no hesitating, no second thoughts, no sucking on my knuckles for inspiration, nothing but my ass in that hard chair, I felt like I was Jimmy-God-damn-Breslin at the New York Post taking on Carmine DeSapio and Tammany Hall. That good. Never be that good again.

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The Novella

As a form, the novella attracted me early.  It didn’t have the capaciousness of a novel, or the tight rising action of a short story, but it promised both a wider canvas and the close reading of character.  In time, I came to realize how near it was to a screenplay, the economy of depth.

My parents had some John O’Hara titles on the shelf.  I don’t think they were fans of the later novels, which were heavy-duty door-stoppers, but they had all of the story collections – his stories from the 1960’s are terrific, and invite reappraisal – and a trilogy of novellas called Sermons and Soda-Water.  That book became my model for what a novella ought to be, rigorous and intense.

I didn’t see anything to match it for twenty years, and then Jim Harrison published Legends of the Fall, and that book had me seriously re-thinking what you could maybe accomplish in a hundred-odd pages.  (I have to say that the movie adaption is execrable, a subject for another time.)

Much influenced by Legends of the Fall, I wrote a bounty hunter novella called Doubtful Canyon.  I discovered, to my chagrin, that it’s an awkward length, too long for most general-interest magazines, too short for book publication.

Then I did a spy story, called Viper, and put it up as an Amazon e-book.  I did the same with another, The Kingdom of Wolves.  I love the form, but the issue is marketability.

We come now to the Nero Wolfe Society’s Black Orchid Award, which is specifically for novellas, written after the manner of Rex Stout.  This doesn’t mean a pastiche, like a Sherlock Holmes and Watson; in fact, you’re not supposed to use Nero and Archie at all, or their ecosystem.  It means, in the spirit of.  I read a couple of Wolfe novellas, to get the flavor, but I found them dated and contrived, and I read one of the recent winners, “The Black Drop of Venus,” which appeared in Hitchcock, and a mystery I found original and ingenious.  The obvious question: could I write one?

I don’t know the answer, but I’m taking a crack at it.  The trick, of course, is how to do Nero-esque without the tiresome Nero himself, the misogyny, the hothouse flowers, the bloviating condescension.  Archie, let’s face it, is by far the more attractive (and authentic) personality. 

A bigger question is how to address the basic gimmick of the Nero stories.  He never leaves the house.  Archie does the legwork and reports back.  Nero reads the runes and fingers the villain.  How do you repurpose this, without falling into inert convention?  “The Black Drop of Venus,” manages to solve the problem convincingly, with a good deal of wit.  I hope to follow suit.