Phoney.
Am I the only
person who immediately thinks of Holden Caulfield every time – and that’s every
time – I hear the word ‘phoney’?
I doubt it.
The Catcher in the Rye seems to have fallen out of favour with the
cognoscenti these days, so I guess I can only give thanks that I read it long
before I understood that you were only supposed to like books the cool people
liked. And maybe, okay, if was to read again now, it mightn’t have the same
impact. At the time, though, I was absolutely blown away by Holden Caulfield –
the way he dropped in “all that David
Copperfield crap” in the very first sentence spoke absolute volumes about
who and what he was.
‘Spoke’ being the mot juste.
Because The Catcher in the Rye was, at the time, easily the most
compelling voice I’d ever heard in books. I was in my late teens, and a
voracious reader, but until then I’d pretty much always read for story. Now,
here was a story that was utterly compelling not for what was happening but for
how it was told.
The next time I
can remember being gripped that way was the first time I read The Big Sleep.
When Marlowe told me that he was “neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I
didn’t care who knew it”, I keeled over right onto my fainting couch.
What a voice. Not only that, but there was a hell of a lot going on, too. All
writers are readers first and foremost, readers so deranged by what they read
that the only way to cure the fever – temporarily, and on a daily basis – is to
write it out of their system. The Big Sleep was the book that so
deranged me that I finally sat down and started typing. The result, eventually,
was Eightball Boogie (2003), a Chandleresque homage (koff) set in
contemporary Ireland, but I honestly believe that if Raymond Chandler had
written romances in that voice, or science fiction, then I would today be
trying to write romances, or science fiction.
The same principle applies to Elmore Leonard, who heavily influenced The Big
O (2007) and my new book, Crime Always Pays. The first Leonard I
ever read was Freaky Deaky, which may not be his finest moment but
certainly danced rings around anything else I was reading at the time, mainly
because it all seemed so deceptively, casually conversational. “Chris
Mankowski’s last day on the job, two in the afternoon, two hours to go, he got
a call to dispose of a bomb.” Boom! And we’re off …
Leonard, of
course, wrote westerns before he turned to writing crime, so had I read an
early rather than a mid-career Leonard, The Big O and Crime Always
Pays could just as easily have been westerns (or romance and / or science
fiction).
Of course, it’s
not just about the voice. As with The Big Sleep, and Chandler’s novels
in general, Freaky Deaky – and all Elmore Leonard’s novels – combined a
masterful voice with a hell of a lot going on, story-wise.
If you’re an
aspiring writer, that’s really all the advice you need. ‘A masterful voice with
a hell of a lot going on, story-wise.’ It really is as simple, and almost
impossible to achieve, as that.
Declan Burke’s Crime
Always Pays is published by Severn House. He blogs at Crime Always Pays.
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