That Irresistible Stream of Words: Three Great Stylists by Robb White

I didn’t start writing crime fiction until 2011. Nothing significant about that; it happens to be close to the time of my retirement, which should tell you that I’m not a “serious” writer. A serious writer doesn’t get a job and procrastinate 30 years to begin writing. However, I can modestly brag to being a lifelong reader of crime (true and fictional), suspense thrillers, mysteries of all kinds (except the cozy), espionage (Deighton, a favorite), horror, fantasy, and sci-fi (not much of the latter three). I’ve spared what time I have from my writing hobby to read fewer writers nowadays. Three, however, hold a favored place on my shelf and when word arrives through the ether that one of them has published again, I feel like a kid at Christmas. I’d like to offer some reasons why stylistic elegance matters as it does to most editors I submit to. (“There is no distinction between style and substance,” a recent one opined in from the site’s masthead.)

First, all three are terrific stylists and long since appreciated for their talents with millions of sales and numerous awards and distinctions. All true. I’m banging away at the keyboard for no reason, you might say—old news. But many readers (and writers) affirm that style, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder—in this case, the inner ear and mind of the reader, which truism just isn’t true—for me. And I’d like to gently disagree with some proof from these favorites in the mystery/thriller genre. Plot alone is never a good reason to read a book. Style or better, stylistic finesse, is the shibboleth upon which there can be no adequate substitute—not even the most engaging, empathetic characters or hair-on-fire plot can make up for a lackluster style. 

Martin Cruz Smith, for example, has a sure hand at settings of historical significance, such as in in Wolves Eat Dogs (2004), where a post-Chernobyl Ukraine is complemented by the post-Soviet era of Moscow corruption with its billionaires and criminals, often the same thing. In Red Square, for another example, Arkady Renko returns to Moscow from Berlin during those historical few weeks of the August Coup of 1991 to join the protesters at the Russian White House. Joe Peña is at Trinity, New Mexico as the A-bomb is being detonated in Stallion Gate (1986)—very literally at Trinity. Harry Niles is attempting to escape Tokyo in the hours and minutes before Pearl Harbor is announced to a shocked world in Tokyo Station (Dec. 6, 1941, being the American title). Best known among Smith’s protagonists is chief investigator Arkady Renko.  Arkady is the son of a Red Army war hero, the sadistic Kirill Renko, a Stalin favorite, which says it all. Arkady blames him for his mother’s suicide. Himself suicidal after his beloved Irina dies in a horrible accident, Renko makes an attempt in Havana Bay (1999) but is thwarted by the mistimed attempt to kill him at the very moment he plunges the needle into his arm—saved by attempted murder, in other words, a use of mordant humor Cruz is admired for by critics and readers alike. In truth, Renko is one of the most underestimated,  physically pummeled, suffering male characters in literature, whose physical wounds include a bullet to the brain.

Cruz Smith’s own jazz family background must have played a part in the characterization of his  prizefighter-piano player, the Native American G.I. Joe Peña. Another is Harry Niles, a rapscallion missionary couple’s son who grew up in militaristic Japan, became more Japanese than American in the process, and plays the dual roles of businessman, club owner, and con man in his novel.

These characters are wonderful, maybe not altogether unique in the history of literature—but they come close enough. Each is a fascinating composite of contradictions, resilience, wit, and charm. A good example is the malarial engineer Jonathan Blair in Smith’s Rose (1996), who is almost overshadowed by a bundle of minor characters like the arsenic-ingesting, sadistic nephew and heir to Bishop Hannay, the Bishop’s independent daughter Charlotte, who plays at being a “pit girl,” and even the missing John Maypole, the cleric whose mysterious absence from Wigan sets the novel in motion. No Dickensian sentimentality or silly coincidences here at all with its gritty, hard-nosed, realistic portrait of life in a nineteenth-century mining town in England.

Surely, no reader of crime fiction needs an introduction to the six-fingered, maroon-eyed Dr. Hannibal Lecter, whose IQ rivals John Stuart Mill in intelligence and Attila the Hun for murderous proclivities against those who offend his refined sensibilities. Although David Lindsey has a fine percentage of malevolent types in his series of Stuart Haydon novels, his characters from Mercy stand out for the sheer brilliance and complexity of Lindsey’s psychological plumbing of their maladies and tendencies, especially the damaged personae of that novel:  the shrink Dominick Broussard, the low-class sado-maso panderer to a clientele of lesbian demimonde, the ex-Vietnam sniper-turned-businessman, and the promiscuous Bernadine Mello. That list doesn’t include the major characters we root for—the minor character Sander Grant, FBI profiler, and the novel’s real protagonist, Det. Carmen Palma, every bit as resilient, smart, and tough as Harris’ Clarice Starling.

Smith, Harris, and Lindsey all have characters that rival Shakespeare stretching between the arc of good and evil, and each novelist takes meticulous care with sentences, images, word choice—getting the right word—that the reader’s pleasure is multiplied with all the rest going on in their books. I’m no reader who waits patiently through the “dark and stormy night” descriptiveness of writers who seek to impress with adjectival lushness—a terrible self-indulgence of some writers. You wonder if those writers are attempting to compensate for weakness in other areas of their craft that they have to try to overwhelm the reader with a sensory onslaught. For the reader, it feels like stumbling off a dirt track of pedestrian prose and falling headfirst into a dank patch of rotten weeds.

A sampling of sentences (albeit out of context):

Harris:            “He was waiting for her body to become a ceremonial object apart from him, separate from the person he had held upon the bed and separate now from the life’s companion he held now in his mind” (Silence of the Lambs, 1988).

Lindsey:          “He stirred his coffee casually, looking into his cup, and Palma watched as the side of his face  began to burn with a soft gold light that grew brighter and harder until exactly half his face, until the median line following the crooked course of his broken nose, was frozen in molten gold like the mask of Agamemnon” (Mercy, 1990).            

Smith:              “Some men staggered back with sleeves on fire, and as the crowd spread and Arkady pushed through, he saw Rudy Rosen riding a blazing phaeton, upright, face black, hair aflame, hands clasped to the wheel, brilliant in his own glow but motionless within the thick, noxious storm clouds that whipped from the interior and out the gutted windows of the car” (Red Square, 1992).

First, there’s a pleasing balance of sentence elements involving imagery and structure in all three despite the very different circumstances. In Silence, Jack Crawford, the hard-nosed FBI supervisor and mentor to Clarice Starling, is described as being “as sensitive to signals as the dished ruff of an owl and as free of mercy.” Yet his beloved wife Bella’s death has almost unmanned him in these tender moments of contemplating her on the bed in repose—this in the midst of the hunt for “Buffalo Bill,” the serial killer who skins women.

Lindsey’s sentence-passage is typical of his dense, cumulative sentence style and masterful use of allusion and metaphor within a realistic description of the authorial point of view contemplating a man’s face—here, Sander Grant, Carmen Palma’s mentor in the art of catching a serial killer among the entitled gay women of Houston—while he “casually” stirs his coffee in a diner. Yet with the freighted “molten gold” passages and reference to the tragic king Agamemnon, the reader is steeped in classical tragedy and familial betrayal so well suited to the novel as the reader discovers in Mary Lowe’s sexual abuse by her stepfather.   

Finally, in Smith’s depiction of a Russian mafiya accountant surrounded by his wads of foreign cash (rubles worthless in Russia then) being blown up in his own vehicle, we have a sophisticated tightening of the camera lens from the crowd that Investigator Renko pushes through in the moments after impact to the car’s interior, blown literally into the air like a fiery “phaeton,” a word choice that mocks the hideous reality of the dead man clutching the steering wheel with his burning hair illuminated by the roiling black smoke of the detonation. Each fragmented description creates its own staccato effect in the reader as the out-of-nowhere horror of a man being blown aloft in his car comes together. The chapter ends with another striking visual image of Arkady plucking foreign currency of differing denominations from the air as they float back down “all lined with worms of burning gold.”  

Violence, death, betrayal, money, sex—these plot components are of course present in every other pulp thriller, noir or crime novel. They comprise the staples of this subgenre of mystery fiction. As Cruz Smith writes at the conclusion of Tokyo Station, plucky Harry Niles has survived his biggest threat only to find himself caught up in the swirl of the mob rushing madly into the streets to hear from loudspeakers on poles the “triumph” of the Japanese Navy’s bombing of Pearl Harbor—“and in every step Harry was swept along by the bright irresistible stream.” In the hands of a masterful stylist, the reader gets a feast for the eye and the brain along with the suspense of the chase thanks to their skillful use of the bright irresistible stream of language hard at play. 

About Robb White: 

Robb White lives in Northeastern Ohio. He has published several crime, noir, and hardboiled novels and published crime, horror, and mainstream stories in various magazines and anthologies. He’s been nominated for a Derringer. “Inside Man,” a crime story, was selected for Best American Mystery Stories 2019. His new hardboiled series features private-eye Raimo Jarvi Northtown Eclipse (Fahrenheit Press, 2018). Murder, Mayhem and More cited When You Run with Wolves as a finalist for its Top Ten Crime Books of 2018.

 

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