04/10/2005 - 04/16/2005

Oh! Here's a Bill Monahan story I can tell that is probably fine for public access.

When I was living on West 10th Street, and Bill was staying in an apartment on the west 30s, we would often meet at an Irish bar on 7th Avenue and (I think) 25th Street. It wasn't our regular, but it was the most convenient halfway place.

The second time we met there, I couldn't remember the name of it. Bill, between puffs of a Marlboro Red, shouted, "Who the fuck cares about the name? You know where it is! It's just another Fergus McDingus!"

"A what?"

"Finn MacCools's, Paddy McGillicuddy's, some fucking Mick name. They're all Fergus McDingus. Let's get a goddamn drink."

After that, every time we talked about meeting for a drink, we called the place Fergus McDingus'. Sometimes, I would even play dumb about the name of the place, and Bill would reliably rant about generic mick names for bars. How they were all called Fergus McDingus, as far as he was concerned. Never failed to crack me up.

Even now, as other pals can attest, I still use the name Fergus McDingus to refer to any Irish bar. And it never fails to crack people up -- especially people who are Irish by background, in any bit.

So I was thinking today about all the damn things that get in the way of writing

It started with seeing the name of an old pal in the credits for a movie ad. Bill Monahan, who I haven't spoken to for a few years, wrote the new Crusades movie that's coming out, Kingdom of Heaven. All the contact info I have for Bill is out of date, so itracked down his current agent and sent off a note. Stamps! Post office! Good lord!

So that's amusing. Figured I'd write a little thing about it. That's why I started doing this thing, to get the fingers stretched out and bumping across the keyboard. And I've got a bunch of funny Bill stories from back when I was living in NYC, and he was yanking back and forth between New England and NYC. Maybe I'd tell a couple.

But then I thought about some of the pages I had run across on the Internet, already talking about Bill. And I figured, why put out stories for them? No need. Who needs some creep grabbing up personal stories about Bill without him knowing?

So I wasn't going to write anything. Until I thought of one Bill story, one that's about not writing. Which seemed awfully appropriate.

Bill spent a lot of time working on his novel Light House, making it good and funny. But Bill is a goddamn artist, you know. So when it made the initial rounds, it didn't sell because of the art. I think at least three editors, and Bill's agent, told him: "If you cut it in half, we'll buy it." But the half they had in mind was very specific. The original novel alternated the more-or-less straightforward funny story with beserk , highly stylized chapters about an organization that went back in time to change the world to their liking, but continually failed to do so. I may misremember those details, because I only heard one chapter at a KGB reading. The point is, Bill was told if he cut out the beserk chapters and kept the funny story, the book would sell right away.

It took Bill a year and ten minutes to make those cuts.

The year was:
to try and sell the book again, as-was;
to mull about whether he should just write a different novel;
to debate whether cutting the chapters would be a sell-out.

All that kind of nonsense. (I've rewritten my first novel three times, and still haven't made it more saleable, so I know about that nonsense.)

After that year of Hamletting, it took Bill ten minutes to cut out all the beserk chapters and change one sentence in the funny story. I think Light Housesold about two weeks later. The movie rights sold a bit later, and now Bill's name is appearing in TV ads for Ridley Scott movies.

Writing is a weird gig. And not writing is even weirder.

In August, I cruised through just about all the Harlan Coben books involving Myron Bolitar. May I mention a couple of great things about series? First of all, when you find an author who has written a bunch of titles about the same characters, it means you have a bunch of reading to enjoy. No worse than watching CSI every week.

Even better, you can crank through a bunch in a row and get a panoramic view of a character. A lot of time, the characters are so simplistic, or the authors are clearly feeling their way, so that it takes four or five books for the main characters to really develop in interesting ways.

I guess Travis McGee is the paradigm for that. MacDonald wrote some great books, but McGee has an essential sameness for decades, even after everything he goes through. But the cool thing is that when that pattern has been established, when it has been hammered into your understanding, it makes books like The Green Ripper explode into you like fascination grenades. For at least two books before that, McDonald was setting up McGee for a pleasant and satisfying happy ending, and then he blows his whole life up.

Fluctuating between leaving the characters happy and blowing up their lives seems to happen to a lot of series writers. McGee is one example, but I can spin off a bunch of examples right away.

Like Spenser. Robert B. Parker's Spenser is a more interesting, weird character than McGee from the very first book (The Godwulf Manuscript). And things happen to Spenser, he evolves. But he hits the life blows up part of his over all arc in the 12th book in the series, A Catskill Eagle. And since then, he's gone through 20 more books. Some good, some only OK, but the stakes have never seemed as high as in Eagle.
Back to Coben. His hero Myron Bolitar blows to pieces around book six, I think. Part of the problem is that, I can’t tell the books apart by just their titles.

If I remember right, Dennis Lehane went five books before he blew up his Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro characters. Maybe just 4, with 5 being chock full of aftermath

Michael Connelly's Harry Bosch hasn't blown up yet, but I think that's because he's got so little to blow up. I mean, if Bosch were living in an SRO like Lawrence Block's Matthew Scudder used to, with nothing more than a few jazz records and suits, I don't think the novels would be significantly different. Though having his ex appear with a kid is at least changing things somewhat. Reminiscent of Travis McGee’s suddenly appearing daughter in The Lonely Silver Rain, a book only worth reading because it clearly seems to be heading toward McGee's suicide until his never-before-hinted-at daughter appears. Though since Connelly is alive, Bosch gets to keep evolving.

I have to note a nice reversal of the Blow Up, in the Jack Reacher series by Lee Child. I can't say as I liked these novels too much, because reading them in about a week was a bit too relentlessly the same old thing. And the book that is most different from the others is the first one I read, The Enemy, which is a flashback to Reacher's days in the Army. And that's where he had his Blow Up, form which the series is basically aftermath.

All these guys are working the Chandler street (except for Child, who feels more Spillane and Ian Fleming influenced): "But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid." Fine with me. I personally think The Long Goodbye is probably the most important American novel of the 20th Century, and would be willing to argue it's also the best. But that's another day.

John D. MacDonald: Travis McGee, Ft. Lauderdamndale houseboat living, "recovery expert" and ladies' man.

Harlan Coben: Myron Bolitar, hyper sports agent.

Michael Connelly: Harry Bosch, depressed LA cop

Dennis Lehane: Patrick Kenzie/Angela Gennaro, Boston PIs with lots of personality

Robert B. Parker: Spenser, one-named immortal Boston PI

Lee Child: Jack Reacher, drifter and killing machine

Lawrence Block: Matthew Scudder, NYC alcoholic detective

Other readable series:

John Sandford: Lucas Davenport, speed crazed Minneapolis cop
(Prey) novels

Robert Crais: Elvis Cole, LA private detective with lots of personality

And didn't that work nicely?

Let's see. The last few in front of me:

Cold Service / Robert B. Parker
The Motive / John Lescroart
Blink / Malcolm Gladwell
Shadowmarch, Volume 1 / Tad Williams
The Pentagon's New Map / Thomas PM Barnett
Shadow of the Giant / Orson Scott Card
All the Flowers Are Dying / Lawrence Block

I have no useful thoughts about Blink. Very, very superficial, but interesting in a popcorn kind of way. Gladwell kind of lost me when he took on the Diallo case and determinedly refused to present any point of view about it.

Pentagon's New Map was by far the most optimistic foreign affairs book I have ever read. I don't want to go into his entire argument -- though I find the overall concept pretty compelling. Core States are stable, the States in the non-integrating Gap are unstable and are the source of much of current turmoil and violence. Integrating those Gap States is a goal that can be achieved through many means, including trade and war, but the idea is to give them clear views of evolving futures instead of constant instability. Frankly, Barnett probably had me convinced when he presented Core v/s Gap as Locke's hopes versus Hobbes' nightmares.

Two thoughts I had when reading it. Not issues, not arguments, but concerns based on my own knowledge and experience.

1-- I am not clear on how Barnett sees the Leviathan and SysAdmin forces being comprised, but he seems more sold on the capabilities of Special Forces than I am. That said, he only covers force composition briefly, and I feel like I'm setting up straw men even thinking about this in detail.

2-- Barnett's description of the free flow of capital around the globe -- especially from the Core ito the Gap -- feels like the right idea, as does the free flow of Labor -- especially from the Gap to the Core. But the model he describes is prone to the basic drawback that Walter Reuther would recognize: Capital unfettered abuses Labor.

Are there ways around that? Sure. But I distrust that corporations, left to themselves, will make much effort to improve the lives of those in the Core.

But again, Barnett sees economic transformation as just one of three ways in which countries can evolve. So I am curious to see his full view expanded upon.

As I look over both these points, I suspect that both of them come down to my reaction to Barnett's language. On the Gap enforcement force, he sounds remarkably like the counterinsurgency advocates who talked Kennedy into a viewpoint on how we could fight in Vietnam. And his language about economic transformation sounds too similar to the dot com bullshit that I worked through from '95 to, uh, now. Doesn't make him wrong, just makes his language trip the wrong levers in my head.

...some crapper and bedtime reading. Nothing huge to write about any of the last few items, though Feet of Clay is probably my favorite of all the Discworld books. Just a great, great ending for the Golem Dorfl. I also enjoy it because I was working at Harper Collins in 1996, and happened to pick up the book in uncorrected proofs, which is a nice, random souvenir of that gig.