Sailing from "Inner Harbor" to Crime Fiction Writing

Since 2010, I have written a blog called "Inner Harbor." The posts tend to be a vehicle for my reactions to current events. I typically comment on issues or incidents promiscuously discussed in social or traditional media. Certain posts involve episodes whose root was either an immediate, personal incident or a reflection on some aspect of my own life. In some cases, I comment on people or contexts which aroused my curiosity, but were otherwise unknown to me.

"Inner Harbor" began when my wife, the fine art photographer Amy Becker, suffered a serious illness. My posts were intended as a daily commitment to our love and firm belief in each other's talents. Every post offered an opportunity for her to hear my voice and witness its growth. Without Amy's strong encouragement and visceral commitment, I would not have developed "Inner Harbor," nor used that blog as a vehicle to generate a style and voice suitable for a creative journey.

I believe I have now achieved "Inner Harbor's" purpose. This summer, I stopped writing in "Inner Harbor." At that time, I came around to the notion that nonfiction could not adequately represent contemporary issues. "The rule of law" crowd, through its ruthless use of intimidating litigation and restrictive legislation, made nonfiction writing a debilitating exercise in risk management. Having people speak "on the record" has become an excruciatingly difficult task for even the most skillful or highly placed writers. Public discourse became a realm where spin doctors, investigative wolves, and data "scientists" commanded the media's high ground. Entertaining distortions took precedence over intelligently presented fact, something exploited most shamefully via "reality TV" and political propagandists.

This degradation of rationality compelled my move into writing mystery/detective stories. This pulpy world has historically, successfully been viewed as a portal into depictions of contemporary reality. Fiction allows the weaving of character, context, and motive in useful, and yes, entertaining ways. Coinciding with ceasing "Inner Harbor" posts, I read a number of Italian crime novels. The ones I have read embrace a mixture of reportage and fiction -- exactly the formula I wanted to pursue. Their sharply drawn characters struck me as entirely, unsentimentally real. And the books integrated current events, such as human trafficking and institutional corruption, with men, women, and children whose flaws and strengths displayed the writer's and audience's interest in humanity that no software wizard could "engineer."

I look forward to the challenge of creating work worthy of these Italian writers, along with iconic American detective novelists whose work I admire. Whatever I do, I will have also fulfilled advice my father offered me on his deathbed. He held me hand firmly and asserted that I should pursue fiction writing.

It took me a generation to embrace my father's perspective. I'm ready now to begin that journey to create work into a world Raymond Chandler aptly characterized as one where "the streets were dark with something more than night..." To that end, "More Than A Fresh Corpse" will be a blog/sketchbook for this effort.

I Want to be a Crime Novelist

Writers, like all artists, are concerned with representing reality, to create a more absolute and complete reality than reality itself. They must, if they are to accomplish this, assume a moral position, a clearly conceived political, social, and philosophical attitude; in consequence, their beliefs are, of course, going to find their way into their work. What artists believe, however, is of secondary importance, ancillary to the work itself. A writer survives in spite of his beliefs.

From the Paris Review "The Art of Fiction No. 6" interview of Alberto Moravia.

Since mid-June, I thought about Moravia's observation. At times, my locations shaped my considerations of his assertion. I thought about them while at a trade show in Las Vegas, a photography opening in Houston, sales meetings at a Club Med, along a beach on Florida's Atlantic coast, in hotel rooms outside Chicago, at a friend's home in Los Angeles, with my wife over dinner in hipster Brooklyn, and in bluntly unfashionable Newark. Understanding these environments became quickly challenging without what Moravia characterized as a "moral position." Since I lacked such a foundation, writing about them became an elusive endeavor.

This realization deeply bothered me, and connected with my deep dissatisfaction with the current unwillingness of most Americans to plainly and honestly consider what's happening in their own country. That reticence became most striking to me while watching TV in airport waiting areas. I came to the conclusion, from the mindless entertainment programs and shallow broadcast news reporting, that people just don't want to know very much. They may demand reinforcement of their prejudices, but that's a long way from a commitment to clarity, reason, and action. One of the few chinks in this armor is the crime novel, which retain a mass popularity with American readers and which can dive deeply into America's dark side.

Currently, I'm reading a Leonardo Sciascia short story collection titled The Wine-Dark Sea. He was the first significant Italian author to break silence about the Sicilian Mafia. Sciascia did this, not out of some desire to create lurid novels and motion pictures, but to address the reality of Sicilian lives. Other Italian novelists have created detective or mystery novels in which Italian society's contradictions and darker side can be usefully explored. Some of these novelists have quite interesting backgrounds, at least from my initial investigation of their work and biographies. (One respected crime fiction writer is an active jurist.) However, I'm just learning about them, the variety of their work, and their respective "moral positions."

While I was brooding about Moravia and Italian crime fiction, my wife and I began to discuss the possibility of a trip to Rome. She wants to photograph there. I've been hesitant to visit; I lived there over thirty years ago and contemplating a return stirred up a number of questions and personal history I simultaneously dread and cherish. Breaking that admittedly harmful psychological chain required something more than a walk down the Eternal City's memory lane.  Seeing the Roman settings for spaghetti mysteries (thank you, Sergio Leone) will help drive me, inspire me toward the type of fiction I am committed to creating.

My conclusion led me to contemplate writing Italian-style crime novels as a way for me to express our national reality from a Moravian perspective. I find America having much in common with Italian-style corruption. That realization is one reason why I so admire The Wire, which depicted urban reality with a clear perspective. Unsurprisingly, the series never won a major award. However, it's notable that Mad Men and Sex and the City, two popular TV series about New York-based "reality," were necessarily classist fantasies that lacked any "moral position." And yes, they won lots of awards.

I'm looking forward to writing about the real world, although I don't have any idea how it will evolve or become tangible. It's surely better than fantasyland.