“When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.”
The Last Good Kiss by James Crumley
When I was teaching creative writing at Hofstra University or giving a class at Mystery Writers of America University, I would often use the above quote from the late James Crumley’s novel as an example of a great first line. It is all of that. It’s beautifully crafted and attention grabbing. It’s funny—an alcoholic bulldog named for a famous race car driver, indeed. It begins the narrative. It establishes setting. It introduces a featured character. And after reading the book and knowing about the author’s struggles with alcohol, I came to view the line as both close to perfect and incredibly sad.
Since I began writing the Jesse Stone novels for the estate of the late Robert B. Parker, I cannot tell you how many emails I’ve received from readers complimenting me on how authentically I’ve written the experience of an alcoholic like Jesse. On how I’ve gotten it just right—the thirst, the obsession, the ritual, the initial warmth and spreading slow burn, the self-recrimination and guilt, the excuses, the denial … Many readers are convinced I too must be an alcoholic or a recovering alcoholic. Well, no. The flip side of this, of course, are those readers who gift me with bottles of expensive scotch because they are sure anyone who writes about scotch with such romance must love scotch. Well, no. I am neither an alcoholic nor do I like scotch. I wish I did, but I’m a red wine and beer man and I almost never drink to excess nor am I likely to have a drink on consecutive days.
All of this is to say, I must be doing a good job, at least of portraying Jesse Stone’s ongoing battle with alcohol. But I am only a small player in a long tradition in crime fiction of relating hard drinking to the virility of the male protagonist. And for those of us, like Bob Parker and myself, devotees of Chandler, it was an easy trap to fall into. I could say we were only doing what readers expected of us, that we were simply continuing the tradition. That’s too facile, too much like an alcoholic’s cop out response. For Bob—funny, I call him Bob, though I’d only met Robert B. Parker once for five minutes at a bookstore party years before anyone could ever conceive of me taking over the series—it is more understandable. He was of a generation steeped in the myths of alcohol. Me, not so much. My generation was steeped in the myths of drugs.
In classes, during talks, at panels, even at meals with friends, I have been asked about the connection between alcohol, authors, and the characters they write. I can only speak with any real authority about myself and the authors I consider intimates. But I have some theories about where this relationship sprang from. One, the Volstead (Prohibition) Act, misguided as it was, wasn’t simply an idea sprung out of gossamer and duck feathers. It was, in part, a reaction to the shocking levels of alcoholism, domestic abuse, political corruption, poverty, and a host of other interconnected social ills. There were many unintended consequences of Prohibition, not the least of which was the emergence of American organized crime. I also believe the “Roaring Twenties” gave rise to our enduring romantic connection to alcohol. To drink during Prohibition was a paradoxical act of defiance and conformity. In a single act, it was a way to thumb your nose at the law and authority and yet belong and be cool. It was, in fact, a crime. Though I doubt most people of the time thought of it this way, drinking was a declaration of individual freedom and independence.
What qualities do we associate with the classic PI who rose out of the Prohibition era? He was once a low level part of the machinery of the government or big business, but is now independent of it because he chafed under the yoke of authority and couldn’t stand the hypocrisy of it. He works with it now only when he must and against it for the benefit of his clients. He is the one against the many, the individual against the State. He stands up for the little guys against the system. Is there an actual connection? Of course it’s easy to find connections in retrospect when you can pick and choose what factors to consider.
Some might point to the nature of boys and men as measurers and competitors. Not to get too Freudian here, but men are always measuring themselves against other men in a futile attempt to find their place in the world. Hence men can turn anything into a competition. Pissing contests are the least of it. And there are sacred things to men as competitors—toughness and endurance. More than what men can dish out, we admire how much we can take. How much pain. How many punches. How much punishment. How much you could drink counted for a lot. It is no wonder to me that hard drinking as a measure of toughness became part of the mix of the crime fiction formula. So much so that following generations perpetuated the cliché along with all the others about the white Christian male, ex-cop loner, living case to case who was good with his fists, quick on the trigger, irresistible to women, yet unable to have a long term meaningful relationship. Have I missed any? Writers repeated the clichés in the same unthinking way they repeat phrases such as “bleeding like a stuck pig.” I wonder how many people who have written those word have ever actually seen a pig stabbed and bleeding.
And for the record, I have witnessed childbirth twice at very close range. My wife is tougher than I will ever be.
For me, the more interesting aspect of this has less to do with the protagonists and more to do with the romantic notion of the drunken author. Frankly, I get asked more frequently about drunks writing books than drunk characters in books. I have known an alcoholic author or two, but it’s not a prevalent condition as far as I can tell and I’m not sure their drinking is actually connected to the work. In the past, however, I suspect that drinking was more closely associated with the writing process and that it was inevitable for alcohol to leak out of the writers’ lives and into the lives of their characters.
With all due respect to Norman Mailer, today in America we live in a culture more readily accepting of the fact that even tough guys dance. But it wasn’t always so. An aspect of writing that surprises readers about the process of creation is the level of a writer’s own emotional involvement in the emotional lives of their character. I was surprised, too, at how intensely mining my own feelings was necessary as I transitioned from poetry to crime fiction. It seems self-evident to me now. How else could one’s characters seem to be alive if the author could not or would not plumb his or her own emotions? While we can observe how other people react to what they feel, we can only know what we feel. Jesse Stone’s pain or Moe Prager’s elation isn’t my pain or elation, but that their feelings seem real is because I know what pain and elation feel like. I am good at accessing my emotions on demand.
When I’m asked about the drinking habits of Chandler, Hammett, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, or whomever, I say that it’s about emotional access.When I’m asked about the drinking habits of Chandler, Hammett, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, or whomever, I say that it’s about emotional access. My theory—and it is just that, a theory—is that these men used alcohol in two ways: to either ease the process of accessing their emotions or to self-medicate after the experience. Is there any validity to it? Probably some, but maybe not. What makes sense isn’t always so. It sounds good at speaking engagements and the audiences like it.
Recently, I grew tired of writing about Jesse Stone’s drinking. Tired because it is a challenge to drag a character over the same hot coals for several books and keep it interesting to readers and myself. Tired also because, although I didn’t create him, Jesse is very real to me. And I have grown to respect Jesse Stone. I realized that Jesse would come to see that enough was enough and that I had to get him to a point where he would take that big step into rehab. It was the right thing for Jesse and Jesse is all about doing right. It was the right thing for me and for the series. Did I have Lawrence Block’s Matt Scudder’s journey into Alcoholics Anonymous in the back of my mind? Maybe. Was I thinking it was time to get rid of the cliché of the hard drinking male protagonist? No.
I don’t do message books and that’s not what the estate hired me for. However, I don’t think reflecting on or reconsidering the use of tropes and clichés is a bad thing. What I hope is that I write as convincingly about Jesse’s struggle with recovery as I wrote about his struggles with Johnnie Walker Black Label.
