 |
James Lincoln
Warren
(photo credit: Reinhard Kargl) |
by James
Lincoln Warren
On the evening of December 3, 2011, the Wolfe Pack, the
international Rex Stout fan organization, gathered for its annual Black
Orchid Banquet in New York City, this year celebrating not only his
works, but also his 125th birthday.
One of the events during
the banquet was the presentation of the Black Orchid Novella Award, or BONA,
given to the winner of their annual competition for an original novella
written in the tradition of Rex Stout. This year, I was honored to be
its recipient for my story Inner
Fire.
Here are my prepared
remarks for the banquet.
The old saw that being a writer is the most solitary of occupations is
completely wrong. Honestly, I can’t think of a more social activity,
because a writer is nobody without readers, and readers form a
community, as this gathering tonight so clearly demonstrates. Along
those same lines,
Inner Fire would never have succeeded without
the advice and feedback of several advance readers, most of whom are
accomplished mystery writers themselves. The fine writers who provided
that advice were Melodie Johnson Howe, Nora McFarland, Robert Lopresti,
Steve Steinbock, and John M. Floyd. Additional thanks are clearly owed
to Linda Landrigan, editor of
Alfred
Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, the members of the BONA selection
jury, and to my wife Margaret. It would also be utterly remiss of me
not to express my gratitude to the founder of the literary feast, the
great Rex Stout.
When the BONA was first established a few years ago, Linda invited me
to submit something for it. At the time I declined because I couldn’t
think of anything good enough, but I paid close attention to the
results of the competition in subsequent years. Although the rules of
the competition state that the story shouldn’t be derivative of the
Nero Wolfe milieu, I found the idea of writing a story using the Nero
Wolfe/Archie Goodwin model patently irresistible. (I note that it was
irresistible to previous winners, too.)
I realized I needed my own spin on the Wolfe/Goodwin paradigm. So I
asked myself, what if I Nero and Archie were women? And what if,
instead of living in New York, they lived in my town, contemporary Los
Angeles? I thought this concept was brilliant, and I was right to think
so. It was so brilliant, in fact, that it had already been done twenty
years before.
I mentioned that Melodie Johnson Howe was one of my advisors. In 1990,
Melodie gave the world her first novel,
The Mother Shadow,
featuring Claire Conrad, her Wolfe character, and Maggie Hill, her
Archie equivalent, the story taking place in L.A. It’s such an
excellent book that it was nominated for the Edgar Award for Best First
Novel by an American Author.
Knowing this, especially as Melodie is a dear friend, you might wonder
how I had the gall to proceed with my own women-in-L.A. take. Well, I
don’t know how I did, except to say that once I got my teeth into the
idea, I couldn’t
not write it. There could be no question,
though, of not bringing Melodie into the loop, because I felt I needed
her permission to carry on. So I enlisted her to advise me, hoping she
would perceive that my story was almost as much an homage to her as to
Rex Stout.
In the sequel, my female Nero and Archie weren’t much like Melodie’s.
Erica (that is, my girl Archie) is younger and less cynical than
Maggie, and Miss Enola (my female Wolfe) is not at all like Claire
except in her analytical genius and immense self-confidence. It wasn’t
difficult to separate my creations from Melodie’s at all.
No, the tough part was to make Erica and Miss Enola as credibly and
convincingly female as the original Nero and Archie were so steadfastly
male. I’m the the kind of guy who likes smoking cigars, watching
football games clutching a cold beer, and occasionally playing dealer’s
choice low-stakes poker with my friends, so writing male characters is
easy for me. Female characters are hard. One of the characters in
Inner
Fire expresses my conundrum. “The biggest difference between men
and women,” he says, “is that women think they understand men. Men
know
they don’t understand women.” So you can see that given my limitations,
I had set myself a daunting challenge.
I began by assuming a new identity. The byline on the story is “Jolie
McLarren Swann”. That is ostensibly the name of a woman. As you have
probably observed, I am not a woman. But if you look carefully at the
name, you may discover that if you rearrange the letters, one of the
possible results is “James Lincoln Warren”. By an amazing coincidence,
that happens to be my name.
Inner Fire’s narrator is a callow and attractive young detective
named Erica H. Wooding. By the same amazing coincidence as the byline,
that is an anagram of “Archie Goodwin”. The senior stateswoman in the
story is named “Enola Fowler”. The letters in her name can be
rearranged to read “Nero Wolfe L.A.”
I thought that the anagrams would please the puzzle-minded of the
tale’s readers, as well as serving to pay direct, if mildly covert,
tribute to Rex Stout.
Erica and Miss Enola are not carbon copies of their progenitors,
though, and I worked hard to give them their own voices. I have to say
that I am especially proud of Erica, since I am categorically
not
a 23-year-old woman myself, and personally have very little in common
with 23-year-old women, but I think she comes across as who she is. I
confess I’m in love with her, but I honestly can tell you that having
standards of her own, she would never be in love with me.
I’m more in tune with Miss Enola, a woman of my own age who shares many
of my more pronounced prejudices about the world. She’s not so lovable
as Erica, but in many ways she’s more interesting. Nora McFarland,
another of my readers, pointed out to me that her first name taken by
itself is an anagram of “Alone”, and that this is a quality essential
to her character.
But of course Miss Enola is not alone. She has Erica to keep her
company, even if she spends most of her time in her own head. Mostly,
though, she will never be alone as long as there are people who love to
read detective stories. I hope that when
Inner Fire is
published in
Alfred Hitchcock’s Mysterty Magazine this coming
summer, you will all have the opportunity to read it. I wrote it for
you, and I am deeply and humbly grateful for the honor you have done me
in granting me this award. I tell you from the bottom of my heart that
it is one of the brightest highlights of my career as an author of
crime fiction.
