Literary folk have had plenty to say about truth’s relation to fiction. Ernest Hemingway expressed his sentiments this way: “All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened.” This, I believe, is the primary aim of writers. To write truthfully under fictional circumstances. To transport the reader into a story that feels more real, more acute, than the actual world that surrounds them. This sounds straightforward, but as anyone who has ever written a story knows, accomplishing this task is anything but.
For starters, every reader has what I think of as a bullshit meter. When something happens in the story that breaks the reader’s trust, that sets their bullshit meter right off, and it is nearly impossible to get them back. This could be anything – a false line of dialogue, overuse of simile, inconsistent style, strange word choice – anything. When I’m reading a book where a character makes a foolish decision that doesn’t track with who they’ve been to that point and seems to be made for the sole purpose of getting to the next big plot point, I’m out, they’ve lost me. The kicker is, every reader’s b.s. meter is set to a different frequency. What doesn’t bother one person may make another hurl the book into the fireplace, and vice versa.
So how can these barriers be overcome? It is a truth universally acknowledged that when someone picks up a book they are, to some degree, ready to suspend their disbelief, or at least give it a shot. But suspension of disbelief is not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about authors breaking into a reader’s psyche to lower the gates of their imaginations. So how can that tacit agreement to suspend disbelief be transformed into an active willingness to believe? Getting the reader, as they flip the pages, to give themselves over to the story and think yes, that had to be the way of it. It’d have to be just like that.
There are, of course, a myriad of ways. For fun, I’m going to start with a couple that I call truth-hacks. I mean no disparagement by this term, some of my favorite books and writers employ these methods. One tried and true truth-hack is for the author to conflate their own persona with that of their fiction. It is much easier to slip into a narrative that seems to hew closely to the writer’s life, or their experiences, because you believe they’re reporting the truth as they know it. Hemingway himself was famous for it. Dashiell Hammett’s career as a private investigator burnished an air of truth over all his stories, much as John Le Carré’s time in British Intelligence did for him. Everybody thinks the character of Scout in To Kill A Mockingbird was Harper Lee. You get where I’m going. Writers have been doing this, purposefully or not, from the beginning. Another example, The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, made me feel as though I understood my father’s experiences in Vietnam more than any documentary or non-fiction book ever could.
In maybe the most remarkable conflation of an author with their fiction is Irene Nemirovsky and her novel Suite Francaise. Here we have a Jewish woman writing about the Nazis’ occupation of France during World War II, and the subsequent fleeing of Paris, as the author herself was living out these events. It is impossible to separate Nemirovsky from this work, and who would want to? The book is phenomenal in its own right, but written under such circumstances, it is nothing short of a miracle.
The last author I’ll mention with this topic is, to my mind, the biggest literary flex of modern times – Elena Ferrante. By never revealing her identity we as readers are free to let our imaginations run wild with what may or may not be true in her writing. Her Neapolitan Quartet is so enchanting on every level it feels as if every word must have taken place. But those aren’t crime books, you say? Maybe not, but murders, riots, underground rebellions and gangsters swirl all around Lenu and Lila.
Truth-hack #2 is setting your story within the context of a well known historical event. No historical fiction exactly, but stories that use, say, WWII as a backdrop that weaves throughout the narrative and sometimes dictates plot. James Kestrel’s crime novel Five Decembers, which begins on Oahu on the eve of the attack on Pearl Harbor, is an excellent example of this. The possibilities with this hack are endless: The Troubles in Northern Ireland, Philippe Petit’s walk across the wire between the World Trade towers, the JFK assassination, the L.A riots…If a writer can get the period elements correct, it is a much smoother slide into the reality of the world they’ve set up, at least for me. Side Note: It is much easier to pull this hack off if the event in question has taken place within this lifetime, or close to it, rather than, say, the fall of Rome. End Side Note.
Another means of mining the truth is the concept of writer-as-thief. Of course, this is not advocating for one to steal material, or plagiarize, but rather it is a catchy way to say the writer must take a keen interest in their own lives, the lives of others, and absolutely everything that transpires around them. You never know what will spark an idea, or what little detail will help round out a character, or description, or line of dialogue. When I’m actively writing (and I suspect this happens to most writers) I go into a state of hyper-awareness, whether I want to or not. The story I’m working on constantly churns in my mind and every conversation, everything I see, hear, say or do, gets put through this filter in my brain that wonders, “Can I use this? How can I use it? Where can I use it?”
My hometown, Huntington, West Virginia, has always held a fascination for me. It’s a unique place, Huntington, and more diverse than outsiders think. It’s a college town and a river town, situated at the crux of West Virginia, southern Ohio, and Kentucky. And though the population sits at a tick below 50,000, the city serves as the metropolis for the greater region. The opioid epidemic hit everywhere in our country hard, but it seemed to hit this area of Appalachia first, and hardest. The fallout from which is documented in a fantastic short film called Heroin(e) that was nominated for an Oscar. The epidemic ushered in an era of high crime, the likes of which the people who lived there felt they’d never seen. This was the spark for my three Cain City novels.
Before I get into some of the things I did to ground my novels in reality, here’s a listicle of a few crime books I’ve enjoyed recently (I limited my list to recent reads because otherwise this thing would get unwieldy), and what elements in their stories made me feel as if they were truer than if they’d really happened.
First person narration is not really a hack (but also, kinda it is). What it allows for is a reader to more easily identify with the character and align with their point of view and all that. That’s not to say it is an easy thing to pull off. With first person there’s no cutting away. That voice has to carry you through. My first two books are first person jobs. I was enamored with the old noirs of the 20’s, 30’s 40’s, and thought it’d be interesting to bring a voice like that, with it’s iconoclastic, cynical worldview, acerbic wit, but also fundamental decency that just can’t be shaken, much to the character’s chagrin – to bring that voice into a modern setting with modern problems.
These first couple on the list are books with rich, potent, and simply undeniable voices.
True Grit by Charles Portis
I was late to Charles Portis’s True Grit, maybe because I’d seen the movies and felt no reason to read the book, but man would I have been missing out. Fourteen year old Mattie Ross, on a quest to avenge her father’s murder, is a protagonist for the ages. Very rarely have I come across a character and voice that startles and thrills me the way this book does with its purity of language, regional dialect, humor and quirk. Not to mention the fact that every character in this book feels as though they had to have really existed. Some have called True Grit one of the few perfect books ever written, and while I don’t know if such a thing exists, I wouldn’t argue with those that hold that opinion.
Bonus note: Acclaimed author Donna Tartt narrates the audiobook to perfection.
Cherry by Nico Walker
This book isn’t for everyone. But it was for me. It’s a blunt and devastating portrayal of a young man’s decision to go to war and his subsequent spiral into addiction and crime. Walker definitely uses hack #1 here, conflating his real life with the character, and we’re all the luckier for it. The narrator’s voice is unsentimental, honest (brutally so), tragic, and often hilarious. I’m speaking for myself here, but when I’m done with a book, especially a crime book, I don’t really remember the plot. In the end, I really don’t care whodunit, etc. Sure, you need that and you need it done well, it keeps me turning the pages to find out what happens, but when the book is finished the plot fades from my mind. What sticks are the characters and the feeling the book gave you. And this one will stick with me forever.
The Violin Conspiracy by Brendan Slocumb
The story of Ray McMillian, a world class violinist whose priceless violin is stolen in the lead-up to a career defining competition, and his quest to get it back, has many things going for it, but the element that whisked me so fully into the world of the novel was the wonderfully evocative writing about music. Now, I don’t know jack about music other than I like it, and I believe it is the one artform that goes straight to the vein. But the way Slocumb describes the music, how it works, moves, changes, how the instrument feels, how it is played, and the life of a professional musician, is just so damn good I felt like I could hear the pieces out loud. The way in which he details Ray’s passion to be the best at his craft, and the reasons why he is so attached to the violin – in most cases I don’t get an attachment of such magnitude to an object that it ruins your life, be it a car or a relic or whatever, that just doesn’t pass the b.s. meter for me – but the way Slocumb lays it out, with the violin being a link to who Ray is, who he strives to be, and how it is the physical representation and connection to the only person who truly loved him…it’s just very powerfully done.
The Sean Duffy Series by Adrian McKinty
McKinty employs hack #2 to perfection in this series, transporting us to Northern Ireland during the height of the Troubles. His lead, Sean Duffy, is a Catholic cop in a Protestant-heavy police force. Every book has a different kind of classic crime set-up, but the navigating of such a complex (to put it mildly) socio-political time and place is the throughline that I loved about these books. Duffy fits the mold of a regular person in extreme circumstances, as he attempts to balance his personal life with the commitment to try and make a difference in the world. And McKinty throws true-to-life events into the mix throughout the series in wonderful ways. Just writing this makes me want to go read them again.
Bonus Note: The non-fiction Say Nothing, by Patrick Radden Keefe is the perfect companion piece to this series.
Razorblade Tears by S.A. Cosby
S.A. Cosby burst onto the crime fiction scene with Blacktop Wasteland and Razorblade Tears, and with good reason. His writing is thoughtful and evocative, while also being fun and fast moving with heavy plots and huge set pieces. But what carries the day for me in Razorblade Tears is the relationship that develops between Ike Randolph and Buddy Lee. These are two men diametrically opposed in almost every way possible, race, class, worldviews, prejudices, but they share in a grief for their murdered sons, and come together for the common cause of retribution. What happens over the course of the novel however, during the quiet in between bits, are two men who, pulling, bending, stretching, find the humanity in each other. Who challenge one another to confront their own demons and find forgiveness, understanding, and perhaps even redemption. The arc of the relationship from a begrudging union of shared purpose to the respect and care they feel for one another at the end never strikes a false note. And the dialogue between the two, tinged with the modern regional dialect of the place, is phenomenal. It feels as if the conversations between these men have been had before, and Cosby was just jotting it all down.
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Here are some of the things I did to lace truth throughout my novels. The first book, Cash City, centers around Nick Malick, a knockaround private investigator who is biding his time, waiting to enact his revenge on the person he believes murdered his son. His latest case exposes a link between corrupt police officers and a new big-city gang who’s taken over the drug trade in town. Cain City explodes with mayhem and Malick finds himself smack in the middle of the proceedings.
With this first foray into the fictional Cain City, I wanted the town to be as much a lead character as the flesh and blood varieties, so I grafted characteristics from my aforementioned hometown of Huntington, West Virginia onto it, sort of like a shadow city. Streets, neighborhoods, locations: the train tracks that split the north side of town from the south side, and the viaducts that dip beneath them, connecting the two. The hazy dive bar with sticky floors and a shuffleboard table right in the center of it. The hill where all the money lives, and the housing projects where it does not. The illegal strip club so seedy you’d have to see it to believe it. The hundred-year-old high school, abandoned after a school consolidation, now repurposed for other means and where Malick scrapes by from case to case, living out of an old classroom that serves as his office.
These locations and many more were inspired by real places. I did this with the thinking that, if I could properly convey the way these things looked, felt, smelled, that maybe the reader would sense the truth of them. And then allow the story to seep in. Similarly, many of the crimes depicted in the book were inspired by real events, this done to imbue the plot with that same sense of underlying authenticity.
For the second installment, Hum Little Birdie, all I knew going in was that I wanted Malick to find himself in better circumstances than he was in Cash City, and I wanted the impetus of the story to be a white collar crime that peeled back the corroded layers of the city. An old high school classmate who works as a lawyer in Huntington turned me on to the case of Eric Conn, a lawyer in the region who conducted the biggest social security scam in the history of the United States, defrauding the government of somewhere upwards of 550 million dollars. It’s an absolutely bonkers case, there’s been a documentary series done about it now, but at the time of the book’s writing I’d never heard of it. The fictional case inspired by the scam is not the main focus of Hum Little Birdie, but it was just the type of white collar crime I needed to kick off the proceedings. The type of thing that could snowball and uncover layer after layer of corruption. I used these true-to-life details, once again, in hopes that they would ground the story both for me, as a writer, and for those who read it.
The third book, Bad Men Will Come is the first to expand on the world outside of Malick’s purview. He does not appear, though many of the supporting characters in the first two books take a more prominent role. The main protagonist of this installment is Ephraim Rivers, a struggling single father who works the graveyard shift at a local Carbon plant. When a man with a bullet in his gut stumbles in, whispering of stolen money, Ephraim sees an opportunity to alter the course of his family’s fortunes. Of course, the money belongs to somebody, in this case some very bad somebodies, and they too are on the hunt for the loot.
Getting the details of your character’s job correct is another integral component for weaving truth into a story. This is why you see so many stories where the main character is…a writer – or, whatever the writer’s day job may be. I’ve never worked in a Carbon plant, as Ephraim does in Bad Men Will Come, but I have a very good friend who did. This is the main reason I placed Ephraim in this job and setting. I knew I could get the skinny on what it was like to work there. I bugged and cajoled my friend for every detail he could give me: the different jobs in the plant, the minutiae of what those jobs entailed, the layout of the buildings, how the locker room smelled, the schedule, the meetings, the paperwork, workplace anecdotes, what people did for lunch, literally everything I could think to ask that might help me convey the specificity of the place. Done well, this enables the reader to either recognize the truth of their own experiences, or more easily believe a setting foreign to them.
At its core, Bad Men Will Come is about the lengths a father will go to in order to help his ailing son. To try to give him a better life than the one that’s been slated. And it is about characters who were never fortunate enough to be loved in such a way. This is something I know a little bit about, fathers and sons, and if you happen to read the book, I hope that aspect of the story is part of what makes you think to yourself, yes, that had to be the way of it. It’d have to be just like that.
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