OK, let’s talk about this knight errant thing

In thinking about a follow-up to my “why I write this stuff”, I kept circling back to the idea of the knight errant.

I’d certainly heard the term, maybe even as a kid when I was geeking out on all things Arthurian – as in Mary Stewart’s the Crystal Cave, which served as kind of a touchstone when I finally was old enough to understand (and laugh my ass off at) Monty Python’s Holy Grail. So I figured this knight errant thing had something to do with that, though it always seemed like a weird term – shouldn’t it be the other way? Errant Knight? And how did Don Quixote fit into all this? And Batman?!! Wait, I’m confused.

Chill. All we become clear... enough.

So the term translates as: “a medieval knight wandering in search of chivalrous adventures.” Simple enough, Arthur and his pals, doing good deeds, slaying dragons, saving damsels, eating whole turkey legs and drinking a lot of mead. Oh, and patrolling the streets of Gotham to search for, and beat the hell-crap out of any hoods and ne'er-do-wells. I for one wish for the word ne'er-do-well to return. 

Anyway – how did we get from Lancelot to Batman? And what about Quixote again? (Ok, ok, I’ll return to him.)

The answer for me lies in the reason I write this stuff.

Bad shit goes down in our broken world all the time. Some writers have taken this bad shit, and made epic tales of good staring down evil – and this often goes down in a whole different world (think Tolkien and Lord of the Rings), or a very similar world (think of Stephen King’s, The Stand). A question, to stay with those 2 books for a second, is who stands up to the evil? Well, Frodo, Sam, and quite a few others in LOTR, and maybe Tom, Nick and Stu Redman in the Stand. I use these not as examples of knight errants, but more as showing those people that stand (get it?) in the way of evil, and say, uh-uh, not today mo-fo! 

Why do they do it? Because it is the right thing to do. Because they are inherently good people. Because truth, justice, kindness, and chocolate must prevail! Ok, maybe not chocolate. Fuck it, why not CHOCOLATE?!

At the heart of this is this question, “why right the wrongs?” In acting speak (2/3 of my kids are actors), “what’s the motivation, man?” Like why should I right the wrong? Like what for man? And why am I talking like a 70s druggie surfer from a bad B-movie? Man.

The question of why right the wrongs fascinates me. It is why I love John D MacDonald’s Travis McGee. He is out there righting all kinds of wrongs, and pocketing a tidy bit of change for himself (after solving complicated financial schemes that really only high level CPA’s and maybe Macdonald himself understands… maybe!). And lest you think old John D. didn’t mean for McGee to be a knight errant, he only mentions it about a half dozen times in every book. 

“a knight in rusty armor with a broken lance and swaybacked steed, fighting for what he fears are outdated or unrealistic ideals” John D.

Of course Travis is called a modern-cynical knight errant (maybe it’s the cash he keeps for himself, or it could be the buckets of gin he drinks onboard the Busted Flush with his buddy Meyer.) 

(That's him above in the movie poster for Darker Than Amber, a film I have a fondness for, as one of the few made out of the McGee novels.)

But I love this sort of knight even more. Go back some decades and you have Chandler’s Marlowe striving to bring justice to a “wronged and fallen universe” – or push the cynicism, the alcohol, and the bad-assery further and you get C.W. Sughrue (James Crumley). Sughrue might do the right thing eventually but not until he’s outdrank, outsmoked, outsnorted, every asshole in the room – chivalrous? Um… sure.

I could go on about my favorite knight errant duo, Joe R. Lansdale’s, Hap and Leonard - but I’ll save that for another post.

For me, exploring crime fiction and the creation of my own knight, Luke Fischer, has brought me back to the question: why make wrongs right?

Maybe that’s too simple of a question, but then ask yourself, who do you know who is out there tilting at windmills? (See, told you I’d come back to it).

"Fortune is guiding our affairs better than we ourselves could have wished. Do you see over yonder, friend Sancho, thirty or forty hulking giants? I intend to do battle with them and slay them. With their spoils we shall begin to be rich for this is a righteous war and the removal of so foul a brood from off the face of the earth is a service God will bless."

"What giants?" asked Sancho Panza.

Okay, this post is getting long, so I’ll wrap up. But don’t you love Sancho here? Um, Don, I know you’re all quixotic and shit, but, uh those giants are actually in your imagination.

I had a great reader for my new Luke Fischer novel (you know who you are), and they kept asking me the same, and valuable, questions  – so why does Luke want to help, why does he want to make things better, what drives him?

A short answer is: restoration. At the centre of every great story from crime fiction to fantasy to the Bible... things need to be restored. And we need someone to do it. We need the foul brood removed from the earth (or the shire perhaps), so we can restore the world… get it back to normal… or the new normal.

You know what we need? We need a knight errant.

Thanks for reading, love to hear your comments on your favourite knight errant.

Why do you write crime fiction? Isn't it all just guns, blood, and violence?

Over breakfast, I was chatting with my wife saying how I was dealing with more dead bodies in that morning's writing session.

Her: Why do you write stuff like that?
Me (after I got over my defensiveness): Um, uh… well, cuz… FLANNERY O’CONNOR.

I didn’t even try to explain the blurted remark. She’s heard me wax on about O’Connor before. She is a wonderful patient woman (my wife I mean. Reading her correspondence, I got the sense that Flannery didn’t suffer fools, or critics, much... and would tear a strip off of any one that gave her a weak argument. A writer not to be trifled with.)

But it did get me thinking about why I love writing and reading crime fiction.

I really don’t like violence. The last fight I got into was in Grade 4. And I got my ass handed to me thank- you very much. I stopped watching horror movies in my early 20s because I just couldn't hack the blood and gore. (Haha, hack, get it?) I remember the movie - Cat People, the Paul Schrader remake, where someone gets their arm ripped off. And blood gushes out and out and out… okay, I feel woozy writing this. But I got up, said, ok, enough of that, and left the theatre.

So why in the hell write crime fiction queasy-boy?

Well, did I mention Flannery O’Connor? Oh, I did? Have you talked to my wife?
Anyway, here is what the master said:

I have found that violence is strangely capable of returning my characters to reality and preparing them to accept their moment of grace. Their heads are so hard that almost nothing else will do the work.

Now, don’t get me wrong... the crime fiction I write is not worthy to tie the sandal strap of the brilliant and fierce FOC. But her work, and reading other writers I admire, got me thinking about what my characters and stories are telling me. Why am I writing this stuff?

For starters, I learned over the years not to being with, or forcibly inject theme into a story - and thank God I learned it. Because when I look at some of my early work it was all shouting and pointing: hey, over here, major moral lesson!!!
The didactic lessons that I doled out would make Aesop blush. (Dude, a bit more subtly, old Aesop would say. Cuz, he was like from California or some tripped out place. Talking animals? Point made.)

But stepping back from my own crime fiction, I realized that I was pushing my characters into violence. I pushed them into situations where their heads were so hard that nothing else would work on them... and by work, I mean have them show their true character, and if I got incredibly lucky, expose a moment that espouses the human condition.

YES I SAID ESPOUSED THE HUMAN FUCKING CONDITION.

Relax. I say shit like that.

Growing up I read a shit-ton of science fiction and fantasy (you want morality plays? Read a couple of space operas and one dragon slayer to go please.) But I also loved the mysteries, as a kid it was the Three Investigators more than Encyclopedia Brown (because who could figure out that shit?) And later in my teenage years, I discovered a guy named Donald Westlake. In some ways his work was above me, I didn’t really understand what he was doing. But now, as a sort of adult, reading him, and especially his writing as Richard Stark, I was drawn into the darkness, into a place where violence happened, and things changed.

I’ll leave this for now, and say more in the next post.
But to say this is a lead up to what I am trying to do in the crime novels with Luke Fischer.

Thanks for reading, and please comment.

Illustration above by the late and very great Darwyn Cooke - illustrating Stark’s The Outfit.

Okay, so apparently I am now a crime fiction writer…

 

It happened so fast that my unfocused eyes barely picked it up, but somehow Sam got a knee up and slammed it under his chin. Then she sprang up like a slinky on acid and gave one of the prettiest spin kicks I’d ever seen. Like a jolt of the best coffee, my world sharpened, and when Mr. Freight Train turned to give me another swing I came up and gave him one of my Montreal specials. I don’t think I broke his jaw, though back in my sparring partner days in Belle Province, I’d been known to do that. He timbered straight back, I’m sure unconscious before he hit the floor. Lydia kept screaming. I seriously didn’t know when she took a breath.

Last year with the release of my literary fiction novel, Fall in One Day, I entered the world of publishing as a literary writer. Heavily influenced by writers such as, Richard Ford, Don DeLillo, Raymond Carver, and Jennifer Egan, this all made sense.

But here is my dark, not so secret, secret: I love good crime fiction.

I am shifting the focus of this blog towards talking more about crime fiction, including some of my favourites, new and old—and I want to broaden it out to include films and anything else I think will fit the theme.

I call this my not so secret secret, because if you have read my two self-published novels, Correction Line, and Surf City Acid Drop, you might already know me as a crime fiction writer. And to be honest, there were elements of suspense in Fall in One Day that also emerged from these stylistic patterns.

So why is it that I think so much of Gene Hackman’s meandering journey in Night Moves, or Elliot Gould as the perfect Marlow in Altman’s the Long Goodbye (it’s okay with me), or my fascination with James Crumley’s bad ass detective, C.W. Sughrue, or especially Joe R. Lansdale’s Hap and Leonard novels (as well as most of his work)?

I’m going to answer some of those questions in this blog. I also want to look at why some crime fiction writers are more literary than others, and what the hell does that mean anyway?

A motivation for returning to this theme on woofreakinhoo (a theme I’ve talked about before) is that I recently completed the follow up to Surf City Acid Drop. The new novel is called Manistique (an excerpt starts this post), and yes, it is another Luke Fischer novel. I really enjoyed getting to know him at a deeper level, and I think a bit stronger skill set to this new book.

Also, because I love the craft so much, I am going to talk about some of the things I've learned over the last years. Stuff like: So how do you write violence (and why)? What creates suspense? How do you research?

Lastly, I'll do my best to increase the frequency of the blog.

I look forward to any of your comments.

Cheers.

 

OPBA Interview - Truth Through Scandal and Conspiracy

Over at the Open Book website, catch me talking about truth, scandal, and conspiracy.

Here is a taste:

Open Book:

Tell us about your new book and how it came to be.

Craig Terlson:

The impetus of Fall in One Day began with the idea of hidden truths. I have always been fascinated by stories of conspiracy and intrigue, as well as the paranoia that comes out of not knowing who is telling the truth, and what remains unknown. Growing up in the 1970s, I knew that Watergate was a watershed moment not just for the United States, but Canada, and really the whole world. In the novel, I wanted to explore these ideas of hidden truth and subversion in the era of Watergate, but in a more intimate, family situation—because families also can hide the truth.

OB:

Is there a question that is central to your book, thematically? And if so, did you know the question when you started writing or did it emerge from the writing process?

CT:

Ultimately the question that drove the novel was, “Is it better to know the truth, even if it is painful?” As teenagers navigate adolescence they experience this wondering about truth-telling in a profound way. Other themes emerged as the novel developed, but at the centre of the story was the question of who can be trusted.

I didn't know this when I started writing Fall in One Day. The writing began by following the main characters, and listening to where they were going. I know it sounds a bit odd, or mystical, when writers say that, but I've learned that you can't force a story where it doesn't want to go. Writing under the constraints of theme is a recipe for a novel that becomes an overlong Aesop's Fable.

read the whole interview here:

http://open-book.ca/News/Craig-Terlson-on-Exploring-Truth-Through-Scandal-and-Conspiracy

And stay tuned for new developments here at the blog.

Shhh... writing

Yes, the old woofreakinhoo is taking a bit of a hiatus - I am busy working on a new novel, and I only have so much time to commit. Feel free to poke around. There's 10 years of stuff here!

And yes indeed, Luke Fischer is coming back.