Style in Crime Fiction, What Value?
Robert White
There are some words in the English-speaking world that can still stop conversation cold. Murder, Kill, Rape—to name three. Unfortunately, given the prominence of vulgarities in our society from top to bottom, one cannot even name the dreaded words that stand-up comedians alone risked using in public without fear of reprisal. The all-too-frequent f-bomb and most racial epithets still have clout but nothing like what they used to possess. Style is one of those ambiguous words that seem to have shed power and meaning rapidly in our time. Like “beauty,” style today is deemed to exist in the eye of the beholder. If you like Linda Fairstein’s or Lisa Scottoline’s fiction, you say that those authors have great style and you can point to the volumes that stretch from one end of a public library’s shelves to the other. “Count ‘em,” you say, and there’s your evidence. Or check the Times bestsellers list and there you find the usual suspects like James Patterson and Clive Cussler.
At some point the notion of style as being more than personally argumentative becomes necessary if you are to be inclusive in your definition and you find yourself veering helplessly toward the metaphysical. If a physicist hands you a red ball and asks, “What color is it?” and your reply is immediately to say, “Red”; you feel the rightness of your response without demur. If that physicist places the ball in the yard at midnight and asks you the same question, can you so confidently answer “red” when you can’t see anything out there at all?
That’s the problem with “style,” it seems to me. It becomes personal extremely fast and you are tempted to become overly assertive in your particular defense of the word. No one wants to go on record to say Shakespeare’s has no style. But how far would you get arguing for that lush Elizabethan prose in our slang-riddled, monosyllabic era? Is there a TikTok or Instagram influencer who doesn’t think everything is “awesome”? That word used to be restricted to quaking-before-the-throne-of-God circumstances only. Today it flutters from every teenager’s tongue. Not that word choice and word meanings are the essence of style. (I once read Roland Barthes’ analysis of Balzac’s Sarrasine, and I beg you, do not open up that can of structuralist worms.)
So how do we get such a critical term away from the flotsam and jetsam of criteria that issue from personal subjectivity? Not for the sake of mere semantics but to get a better understanding of why certain writers from the dilettantish drabble writer through the pedantic critics and scholars with their weighty tomes to the writers we read for pleasure in all genres. There’s no yardstick I know of that applies in all cases and situations.
A better way to start is by example. I recently came across a passage in Martin Cruz Smith’s Havana Bay who described the sluggish water flowing beneath a Moscow bridge in turgid brown folds. The imagery of that brief, incisive description stopped me short and it stays with me, even though I can’t quote the exact words he used. I remember savoring it before continuing. In fact, it’s a rare page of his in any novel that doesn’t have at least one example of that kind of striking blend of the familiar grappled to the exotic in such a way you know exactly where you are in time and space. Does that move the plot? Not incrementally but it holds you in the author’s grasp and, unlike so many bestsellers we could all name, doesn’t allow you to wander off to the next sentence or skip like a goat to keep the plot moving in your head. Less is more.
Smith’s ability to toss a passing glance like that, one of many taken by the seeing-eye narrator, held me in its grip throughout the novel and every one of his Renko books. The accretion of those diamond-sharp images hits some chord in the neocortex, or wherever delight comes into contact with cognition, that enables me to pass a value judgment: Damn, I say to myself, this guy is good . . . But assessing the great from the good and the good from the mediocre isn’t as formulaic as I and other readers would like it to be. There are so few descriptive references to Arkady Renko that you could cut-and-paste them in a paragraph: he’s too thin, smokes like a chimney, is dismissed by cretins and his enemies too easily, loves with passion. It’s not him we need; it’s the mind behind him.
So, to sum up with a fatuous cliché, we know what we like, we say, to our opponents who champion other writers or, worse, are blind to the greatness in style we see so plainly. Shakespeare certainly had that, even though his contemporary Ben Jonson, who claimed to love him ”this side of idolatry,” wished his greater contemporary had revised “a thousand times” when told Shakespeare never revised a line of his plays. He didn’t like Shakespeare’s mixing of clowns and kings. He had a “magic touch” but he lacked “art.”
When we talk about the contemporary murder mystery, we are talking more clowns than kings. But if “art” is to be equated with “style,” how can anyone claim that the best writers in the genre do not have it because they deal mainly with clowns/murderers? Of course, murderers can be well-spoken, possess degrees from an ivy league college, but those are minor features of killers and victims alike unless you insist on an all-egalitarian approach of killers, victims, and gumshoes alike.
I can’t settle the argument but I can offer three criteria for a
definition of good contemporary style across the board. My first
criterion is simple: a writer can’t use ten words when one or two
suffice. Second, a writer cannot violate the boundaries he or she
establishes at the outset that include point of view’s restrictions on
mind-hopping.
When I first began reading the Henning Mankell series, I thought the translator had taken too much Ambien at night. Then I got hooked on the catalog of the mundane and the seemingly trivial. I couldn’t wait to grab my next Wallander volume from the shelves. My knowledge of Nordic crime-fiction writers is too thin to allow a comparison other than a brief contrast with the grim landscape in Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy. (Note to David Fincher, director of Girl with the Dragon Tattoo: Casting Daniel Craig was not breaking a rule to avoid the awkward; it sacrificed verisimilitude for the bottom line.) Two hugely different styles albeit in translation from one language.
Which brings me to that third rule about greatness in style, something I lifted from a freshman handbook on composition, The Elements of Style by William Strunk and E.B. White. simple word title: Style. It offered rules for everything in good writing and concluded with this rule, which I’m paraphrasing: “Break any rule rather than say something awkward.” It seems to me that the best writers know exactly where and when to break rules, when to follow them, and to do so in a way that creates their own unique signature as writers. Of one thing I am sure, no writer writes not to be read, no matter how skimpy, precious, or elitist the readership. All writers need it the way fish need oxygen passed through their gills. When I ran this essay through the grammar checker, it told me to eliminate a couple uses of “very,” which I did. I did, however, draw the line at ejecting “flotsam and jetsam” for the substituted “miscellaneous items.” There’s a hill I’ll die on. Jonson was right about Shakespeare: he had the magic touch. He could make you see a red ball in a black night.
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