"The fuck'm I doing here?"

[John McFetridge]

This is from a discussion about Elmore Leonard, but it seems to apply to all noir/hard boiled fiction (or it wants to, anyway) and I wondered what people thought about it:

"Though pioneered a century ago by the English dandy Ronald Firbank, and then popularized by a man whose first name was Evelyn, the technique of letting conversation carry a story is regarded in America as the tough guy’s way to write a novel, and Leonard makes no secret of his pride in it. Unfortunately, it compels him (as it did Firbank and Waugh) to stick to talkative characters. This excludes the true professionals on both sides of the law, leaving us with small-time cops and ex-cons who rarely keep quiet long enough to seem cool. They’re street-smart for sure, but although the recurring interjection “The fuck’m I doing here?” certainly puts Sartre in a nutshell, no one seems to think about anything, at least not anything interesting."

The discussion cane be seen here: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004908.html

It seems to me that maybe noir fiction is a little too subtle for this guy and that he needs all the "thinking" to be spelled out so clearly most of us would find it boring.

What do you think?

[John Dishon]

It seems like you're only concerned with the first red-lettered paragraph in that article you linked to, because the rest of that article talks mainly about Western novels and Leonard's adverb usage. And judging by the examples given, I'd agree with the author of the article, that Leonard does break his own rule, and he does cheat on the emotion ("despair in her voice" just takes all the drama out of it).

But regarding the part you quoted above, I can only say that, though I have not read any Elmore Leonard books, I have seen the movie versions of Get Shorty and Be Cool, and I thought the characters were good, but maybe that was because it was John Travolta.

[John McFetridge]

Yeah, I'm mostly interested in the line about no one thinking about anything interesting. I think this is more a "literary" vs "genre" discussion, even if a particular sub-genre, the character-driven, dialogue-heavy noir that is popular these days.

Personally, I like the style of writing in which the characters tell the story, where every scene is from a particular character's POV, rather than all from the same narrator POV.

But this is often the difference between literary (or so-called literary) and genre that is more plot-driven -- the lack of introspection or Sartre-like "big questions." I think this guy's wrong, though, I think those things are there in lots of crime fiction -- especially Elmore Leonard's -- but you have to look for it a little more.

[John Dishon]

I think you could use Hemingway as an example. Dialogue usually doesn't run his stories, but terse prose does, which is what dialogue often is. I don't know, maybe I'm not making sense, but Hemingway always tried to say more with less. Then again, I think Hemingway is gimmicky. He uses the same symbols over and over again, and really, how many stories about a couple drinking in a cafe, unable to say what the had planned to, do we really need? But that's a whole other discussion.

[Jack Getze]

I love Elmore Leonard. I love his rules.

[terry bowman]

I like Elmore Leonard's rules as well, and I love some of his older stuff, but I haven't read him in probably five years. I follow Leonard's rules like I follow the speed limit, vaguely (sorry for the adverb) in the same ballpark.

[Eric Christopherson]

I've lost my copy of John Gardner's The Art of Fiction for the second damn time in a recent move, but remember him writing that a writer can get anything at all across through action and dialog and that a writer shouldn't simply tell the reader what characters are thinking because showing what the character is thinking--and here he used an action from a Chekhov short story to illustrate this beautifully--is so much richer and more dramatic and more complex than telling, that telling the reader what a character is thinking is "thin gruel, hence boring." I agree with him in theory but in practice I break down and share a character's thoughts whenever I can't think of a way to get them across any other way.

[John Dishon]

That's a good book.

[terry bowman]

Agreed. I'm dabbling in trying to find that happy marriage between literary and noir. There are a couple of good discussion groups on Yahoo right now dealing in that very thing. Rara Avis (rare birds) and Hard-Boiled (as in detectives and not eggs).

[Barbara Fister]

Try James Sallis. We're reading the first three books in his Lew Griffin series over at 4MA. Lew will get roaring drunk, track down a missing girl, blow off the class he's supposed to be teaching at Tulane, beat someone up, and then pause for a bit to make a cup of coffee and think about Queneau. Tough Guy dans le Metro.

It doesn't hurt that he writes beautifully.

[Barbara Fister]

Definitely - gotta read Sallis. He's going to get a lifetime achievement award at B'Con. But hell, he's already famous - he made it into the funny pages at Unshelved.

[John Dishon]

Natsuo Kirino and Kenzo Kitakata do it quite nicely.

[terry bowman]

Andrew Vachss Burke is as good as it gets these days.