Summer Musings (and Excursions)

This summer, I’ve traveled to Tampa, Fla., Bozeman, Mt., Millinocket, Me., and Old Orchard Beach, Me.; and soon I'll be in Richmond, Va., and then Fitchburg, Mass.

Summer is a time to recharge and move forward. I usually work on a new book –– jotting notes, outlining, and getting the project off the ground. But this year, I’m trying to finish a book, writing and rewriting. A lot. I began the book a year ago. It’s taken much longer than anticipated (and much longer than it typically takes me). I had a hard time finding the voice. I wrote the opening 50 pages three times, changed point of view and tense each time until I got those right. Now I’m 250 pages in. Jogs and long walks are helping me plot (“I’m going writing,” I tell my wife). I started with an eight (or so)-page outline, which I’ve followed somewhat. But the story usually knows where it wants to go, and I learned a long time ago to get out of its way and try to solve the mystery –– in a logical manner –– with my sleuth. If the book stalls, I missed a clue, and I go back and reread what I’ve written. This will keep me busy until the school year starts up again –– and well into the fall.

I hadn’t planned on all the travel, but some educational consulting opportunities arose –– and I enjoy working with teachers who take their craft seriously enough to give up a week in the summer –– so I’ve mixed work and play. The result has been a lot of time in the car or on a plane with books (both audio and print). My reading list to date is The Sympathizer (2015), by Viet Thanh Nguyen; Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014), by Bryan Stevenson; Passing (1929), by Nella Larsen; and Here First (2000), a collection of biographical essays by Native American writers. All are highly recommended. But if you’re reading this blog, you probably know that The Sympathizer won the Pulitzer and the Edgar, so I’m not going to plug that book –– you’ll read it anyway.

And, if you’re reading this post, you probably know of Bryan Stevenson’s incredible humanitarian work on behalf of the oppressed in the criminal justice system, so I’ll leave that one alone, too. I will, however, plug Nella Larsen’s hundred-page gem that speaks of race as a currency, and of Here First –– you know of Sherman Alexie’s work; reading this will allow you a chance to meet a variety of other native American writers. The collection is both fascinating and compelling.

Right now, I’ll be in Richmond, Va., watching my daughter play lacrosse and listened to Passing (more than once) on our 10-hour drive from Maine.

I hope you’re getting as much reading and writing done as I am this summer.

Going Places

One of the great things about the crime fiction genre these days is that it is so diversified readers can both see themselves in books and experience (virtually) societies and people who live in worlds far from their own.

Therefore, when I buy a crime novel, I’m more interested in character and setting than I am in crime and plot. I want a novel to take me to a real world I haven’t explored yet.

Naomi Hirahara gives me this. She explores the Vietnamese-American culture in Los Angeles in a fascinating and interesting way in her Ellie Rush series. (SJ Rozan, who does New York City pretty darn well herself, suggested Naomi’s books to me.)

Hirahara’s parent-child relationships illustrate the potentially-tense dynamics among a generation that wants for their children all that America offers but also needs for those same children to appreciate their Vietnamese heritage. A familial conflict is always simmering, ready to boil over.

Similarly, I’m rereading A Corpse in the Koryo, by James Church, who according to the author bio on his books was "a former Western intelligence officer with decades of experience in Asia." That’s about all I can find on the guy. No pictures. No further info. Church offers North Korea in a way the makes his respect and love for the citizens their obvious. Here’s a teaser: “Trees are not like people.” His lips tightened, and his cheeks lost their color. “They’re more civilized. People lose someone, what do they do? Nothing, they just keep going. Some people lose everything, everything. They lose everything, they keep going. Not trees. Trees don't do that. They live together, they don't move away, they know each other, they feel the wind and the rain at the same time, they can't bear it when one of them dies. So the whole group just stops living.” He paused while the train went past a patch of open ground with an abandoned log cabin. “Don't listen to anyone who tells you about loyalty to an idea. You're alone,” he said. “Without your family you're alone.” (101)

Wonderful metaphor. Fascinating illustration and exploration of culture and society. Church is an impressive prose stylist who offers North Korea (in a novel written in English, no less) in a manner similar to Dostoyevsky's handling of Russia (in translation). North Korea’s people, politics, and landscape are presented in a nuanced and subtle way that only decades spent on the ground observing can provide. Will I ever get to North Korea? I bet most of us won’t, but Church takes us there.

And, finally, there’s The Sympathizer, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the Edgar Award, written by Viet Thanh Nguyen. This book is a huge step forward for crime fiction. It wasn’t too long ago, after all, that my grad school professor told me that if I wanted to teach at the college level I needed to “write a mainstream novel.” (I asked why if I wrote a mainstream novel, I was doing the acceptable thing, but if he wrote a crime novel, he was becoming a commercial sellout.) I never got an answer that day. The Sympathizer shows a great crime novel can be a great novel.

So many contemporary crime novels offer setting in rich and interesting ways that plot really does become secondary, at least for me. I’d love to hear what my Type M colleagues are reading and what they and others look for in contemporary crime-fiction novels.