Today, I'm privileged to be hosting the Absolution Blog Tour
featuring an Ebook Giveaway and Guest Post
Louis Corsair is the author of urban fantasy crime novel, Absolution:
In 1947, a gangster murders private investigator Raymond Adams.
In 2011, he’s
brought back to life for 24 hours to solve the supernatural murder of
a
Hollywood Adult film star.
When the son of a Pit Lord is murdered in
Hollywood, the celestial beings in charge of the Four Realms ask Raymond Adams
to figure who did it and find the victim’s missing soul. Without memories of his
life, he accepts the case to gain eternal peace. But the job is
daunting:
24 hours to nab a killer...
24 hours to find a missing
soul...
24 hours to unravel the victim’s exotic private life...
24 hours
to stop a plot to send the universe into chaos...
With only the help of a
possessed cop and a medium, Adams must trek through a Hollywood underground
filled with pornography, prostitutes, the homeless, and sadists, along with
supernatural monsters. But can he solve the case when his own haunting memories
keep surfacing, telling him exactly what kind of man he was in life?
To win an ebook copy of Absolution,
leave a comment in the box at the bottom of this post.
Easy peasy!
Here's Louis' thought-provoking post on crime fiction:
Shalini was kind enough to let me use up
some of her space for my thoughts. Particularly, on something that was related
to my novel, Absolution, a detective
mystery and an urban fantasy. I begin:
These days, playing the news on the
television is an invitation to writing crime fiction. Not a day goes by that
someone here or there wasn’t murdered in the most heinous way. The murder of a
wife, family, self, strangers, permeate and fester in our society. Anger
seethes in these stories and it bothers you to some degree that they are real
and not the stuff of fiction. All writers of crime fiction, mystery, etc.
attempt to capture the reasons behind these grotesque acts. I did too.
Simple as it seems, I mean there are
murders galore each day here in Los Angeles, this is not so. Trying to work out
a murder in fiction is counter-intuitive. You write a story as if you didn’t
know who committed the crime and why, but of course you do. Somehow you must
forget. You lay out the clues, present the witnesses, the victims, their lives,
hoping the reader will follow along; the smallest glitch leaves a reader
stranded, unable to make sense of the rest of the action. To say that writing
mystery is easy is the biggest lie there is.
I read the essay “The Simple Art of
Murder” by Raymond Chandler after finishing a draft of Absolution. Needless to say, it influenced the drafts that came
after it. In it, Chandler criticizes authors of the classical mystery novel for
lacking realism. There are puzzles the reader must solve, the whodunit, which
turns murder into a game. I agree with him that these authors do not give the
act of murder enough respect. But let me explore what these authors were trying
to do.
Agatha Christie and others like her,
tried to tackle the problem of mystery writing by bringing the reader into the
action. Instead of just having her detective figure things out, she wanted the
reader to put things together too. In one of her best known novels, And Then There Were None..., her
detective leaves it up to the reader to figure out who the culprit is. So that
in the end if you can’t figure it out it really is because of your faculties.
As Hannibal Lecter said, everything you need to solve the murder is right there
on those pages.
Like I said above, to make a game of
something like murder is just not right. It makes murder detecting a fun
activity so that by the end you feel like you earned a reward for solving the
crime. In real life, detectives rarely ever feel like this and each new murder
disgusts them. Their minds suffer. How does Poirot stay so un-changed by the
multiple murders he has had to solve in Christie’s novels? It’s just too
fantastic to believe.
Let me move on to the hardboiled guys,
the best known are Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler--though there are
numerous others. They gave the act of murder its due respect and each crime
revealed some of the dark nature of humanity.
These writers attempted to solve the
problem of mystery writing by not worrying about it. In a Chandler novel, you
get a mini puzzle, but he drowns it in the complex nature of the crime. In the
end, the puzzle doesn’t even matter, just what it says about human beings--The Big Sleep famously leaves one of the
many murders in its pages unsolved and without any clues as to who might have
done it. The detective too is changed by each new crime. They become jaded,
cynical, wondering why humanity is the way it is.
Between the two, I think that Hammett
succeeded at creating a real human being in Sam Spade, than Chandler did with
Marlowe. Phillip Marlowe is too good to be true. He always follows his moral
compass. He never leaves a dame without protecting. He’s a knight in shining
armor, smoking a cigarette. Sam Spade would screw you over if the circumstances
were just right.
Do you see the problem with this type of
mystery fiction? Marlowe and his contemporaries are just not believable enough.
Their treatment of murder is excellent, but the protagonists lack something. I
would have enjoyed Marlowe more if he had been a divorced man with children
trying to understand him and a wife who sometimes loved him but felt mostly
that he was a lost cause. Detectives have wives in real life. They have
children. Some have substance abuse problems. They have racial prejudices even
though they are, deep down, the “good guys.” They are all around human beings
with enormous flaws.
And besides that, don’t the plots of the
hardboiled novels seem incredibly fantastic? The crimes reported on television
lack this air of fantasy. Some crimes, the most difficult to hear about, occur
to satisfy urges and many times without any real reason at all. This is an
observation, not true criticism. I would rather read any Chandler novel than
watch the news if you gave me the chance. The complexity of the plot is
permissible and necessary when you compare it to the simplistic nature of some
mystery fiction.
So we come to our modern era of mystery
writing. Today’s writers have overcome the problem of the loner detective who
seems to have no life except detecting. In the novel, A King of Infinite Space (in the top ten for the Kindle UK Amazon
list), the author, Tyler Dilts, has Detective Beckett trying to solve a murder,
nothing different here--Dilts was one of my teachers so don’t mind the plug for
his book.
But this detective has lost his wife and
his existence seems meaningless after the fact. There is a murder, treated with
due respect, and a puzzle that drives the plot. But the story lacks the
fantastic nature of the Marlowe novels--ultimately, the crime was committed for
a simple reason. The concern in A King of
Infinite Space is with the individual who struggles to find meaning.
Ah! Existentialism in mystery fiction.
This is an evolutionary step. The writer solves the problem of mystery writing
by looking at the crime through a different lens. You don’t have to follow
along. The crime is secondary.
It is now that I finally come to the
Urban Fantasy Mystery novel. This sub-genre has been popularized and re-energized
recently thanks to writers like Jim Butcher. But because it is a budding genre,
it’s leaning on its predecessors heavily. Marlowe returns in these novels
because he’s so easy to get behind. The plots are mostly simple, saving the
complexity for the magic system. The whodunit element is not hard to figure
out, but it seems inconsequential when compared to the fantasy elements. We
have not reached the place that current non-urban fantasy mystery writers have
reached. We look at the darkness of things, except we mean it literally.
In fact, I could say that this type of
Urban Fantasy is just another form of Epic Fantasy. But we who dabble in this
type of fiction are not just wasting our time. We do have some relevance. These
novels look at the dark nature of human mythologies, which is why you sometimes
find Angels and Demons in them and gods and demigods. But this is an
investigation for another day. I have rambled on enough.
I hope that if you do try Absolution, you will try to fit it into
the categories I’ve created here.
Thank you, Louis. I really enjoyed your post. It made me think - which is quite something for a friday morning!
You can find Louis Corsair in the following places:
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