Drood: What Is Good Mystery Writing?

Photo: Charles Dickens


See below for the 5th and last part of my short story, "Shadows."  I hope everyone's liked it.  I have been away for a few days; an immediate family member has been diagnosed with an advanced form of cancer--in five different areas.  This is bad enough, but there's also a major deadline at work: tons of things due this coming week.  Of course.

So what does one do when faced with all this?  He escapes!  He reads!  I finished Dan Simmons' Drood--all 771 pages of it.  It's taught me a few things about mystery writing, and maybe writing in general (I warn that there may be some spoilers below):

1.  It starts with a quick introduction by the narrator (Wilkie Collins) and the main mystery of the whole 771 pages.  Why did Dickens perform a "murder" of one of his characters that so engaged--and horrified--his pre-Victorian audience?  This was apparently opposite his normal character.

2.  Did Dickens murder someone?  The method is explained in one sentence.  Very specific detail.

3.  Did Dickens become obsessed with a person/thing named Drood?  (Avid readers will know that Dickens was in the middle of a masterwork when he died, titled The Mystery of Edwin Drood.)

4.  The main settings are described in very specific detail--good writing, never boring--by the end of page 2.

5.  The style, tone and mood of the narrator are established by then as well.

6.  The famous Staplehurst train wreck that Dickens was a part of about 5 years before he died is used as a springboard for the whole novel, and is very well-written and well-used.  This starts on page 3 and ends on page 11.

In short, this bestselling novel does what mysteries should do, what agents want mystery manuscripts to do: it poses the mysteries immediately.  It advances very interesting questions that readers would want answered: Did Dickens kill someone?  What was that Drood business?  It sets Dickens up as the focus of the novel, despite Collins being the narrator--which astute readers will realize as another point.  Collins should be the main character of Collins' narration/memoir; he is, perhaps, but Dickens is definitely the focus.  This establishes another huge theme: Dickens overshadowing Collins in life, as in this "memoir."  Again, this is established immediately and solidly by page 11.

Main characters; main themes; main settings; main mysteries; main questions--in short, everything, established in the first few pages, and then springboarded tremendously well using the train accident Dickens was in--with his young mistress and her mother, by the way, and not with his wife.  By page 11, the reader wonders a ton of interesting things and has no choice but to read on.

Agents have mentioned this time and time again.  Do this, and do this well, and they will represent the work and it will get published.  Dan Simmons had 771 pages to work with--and an already-impressive bestselling status--so he could have done whatever he wanted, at whatever pace he wanted.  He still did all of this by the first 11-15 pages.

It isn't selling out.  It's good writing.

We're All Characters for Someone Else's Fiction

Photo: Grave of Wilkie Collins, from his Wikipedia page.


As I read books of real-life people from the past--both non-fiction and historical fiction--I've been wondering lately how the descendents of these real-life characters feel about how they're being portrayed.  For example:

--In Undaunted Courage, Meriwether Lewis is depicted as a manic-depressive, or, at best, a sometimes-unreliable depressive and melancholic.  This is as of page 300 or so.  I know that later the book will tackle his really violent suicide, and I know that the author, Stephen Ambrose, will go into greater detail about how Thomas Jefferson wrote about Lewis' manic depression; about how his father and other family members suffered from it, and showed characteristics of it; about how Lewis tended to shun socializing, sometimes, but at other times was a manic socializer; and about how his moods, frankly, ran the gamut from A to B in just a few days.  As great an outdoorsman as he was, he is depicted as, honestly, a bit of a nut when he wasn't exploring.  He was uncontrollably impulsive in everything--especially financial and emotional--when he wasn't exploring; when he was exploring, he was as meticulous and reliable and thorough--and brilliant--as one can be.  Very resourceful when in the middle of the Missouri River, or the Rocky Mountains, but he often couldn't function normally in the middle of society.

How could his descendents, if any, be taking this?  Isn't it absurd, in a way, that we must bear a thought not only of how we are to be perceived in our own lifetime, but also hundreds of years afterwards?  His outrageous suicide will be described for all the world to see.  The most personal, in some ways, of all acts, will be the least personal thing about him when the book is fully read.  And before we say that we are not as famous as he, and so don't have to worry, I should point out that his exploring companions are also mentioned by name.  More than one was a deserter (It was considered an army expedition, so they were technically AWOL, brought up on charges and put on trial by Lewis and Clarke, etc.)  They drank too much; got lusty for the female Native Americans; were at times cowardly; at others, gossipy.  You get the idea.  All for the world to see, including their descendents.  And they are important to no one in the literary world outside of Stephen Ambrose.  Yet, on this expedition, we know all about them.

In Dan Simmons' Drood, we learn that Dickens and Wilkie Collins unabashedly cheated on their wives all the time.  Dickens lusted after a girl younger than half his age; Collins is constantly described as piggish, and overweight, and full of himself, and he lusted after everyone, especially widows and prostitutes.  He says he had a light meal, and that meal is described as a feast for five or more--but it was "a light meal" to him.  So he was overweight and didn't seem to know it.  He was unreliable in terms of his own character, and his own weight.  All this took place just 140 years ago; there's surely someone of his lineage alive today.  What could they be thinking?  And who's Wilkie Collins outside of literary enthusiasts today?  The Moonstone, anyone? 

I looked up all of the things these two were said to have done in the real world, and it's all true.  Their characterizations are not made up for the sake of selling copies.  I take a little umbrage against this today because it already seems as if nothing is ever private anymore.  Someone can type something bad about you, and post it, and it's on the internet forever.  Numbers we call, people we email, sites we go on--everything has an electronic trail and is forever if it's electronic.  (Detectives call it our electronic fingerprint, just as we have an environmental fingerprint in terms of the energy we use, and a consumer or economic fingerprint in terms of the goods that we purchase and/or consume.)

We are all characters for someone else's fiction--now, and 140 years from now.  That's always been the case--"All the world's a stage," after all, and Shakespeare said that circa 1600, over 410 years ago--but that has never seemed more the case than it is today.

My gorge rises at it.  Though I myself have never done anything so wrong to worry about it, we're all far from perfect, and it's the point of the thing.  That's my biggest misgiving of historical fiction and nonfiction: Even the best-written of them contain elements of the unforgiveably slanderous "unauthorized" biographies.

Two Books and A Rejection

A few quick things about what I'm reading:

Undaunted Courage

It is amazing what these guys could do in the outdoors.  Make cabins, make canoes, hike thousands of miles, ride the rapids, cross the Rocky Mountains and the Bitterroot Mountains, make peace with the Native Americans they found, document every new species of animal and plant, coordinate their location by the stars, write all this in their journals, kill all their food, skin and cook all their food, cure the sick and injured--and face their fears of the unknown.  All of this, for years.  Away from their families and friends.  Despite all this, Meriwether Lewis, after conquering all of these obstacles, after camping on the Pacific, took a look at his life and didn't like what he saw.  Said he hadn't accomplished enough, done enough for the general good.  Considered himself a failure.  (Stephen Ambrose, the dedicated author, concludes that Lewis had been a manic-depressive.)  I cannot imagine this; I'm proud of myself when I walk a few blocks with my greyhound.  There probably aren't a hundred people in the country today who could do what Lewis and Clark and their men did.  I'm almost 300 pages in.

Drood

Author Dan Simmons has created an already-moody (after just 30 pages) telling of the last few years of Charles Dickens' life, as told to us in an unpublished document penned by contemporary author (and still known amongst English majors) Wilkie Collins.  Very atmospheric, and shockingly good writing.  A very memorable scene in the beginning: It's well-known that Dickens was in a train wreck five years or so before he died, and that his much-younger mistress and her mother--and not his wife--were with him on the train.  He got out of the carnage mostly unscathed--although headaches, backaches, and what we know now are PTSD-related symptoms dogged him the rest of his life--but the people he saw and tended to would remain with him, buried undead in his psyche, until he died.  The description of these people, and their severed arms, sliced-open heads, fractured skulls--and the mysterious Drood (who could've whispered his name as "Dread"), who was but a shadow with a long black cape, two slits in a skull that passed as his nose, and razor-sharp little teeth--was extremely well-done and clearly in my head as I type this.  It is this writing, this atmosphere, and this narrative sophistication that helped this novel sell well and become Dan Simmons' breakout work.  (Though his previous, The Terror, also garnered great reviews.)

I recommend both of these books highly.  I usually read one non-fiction and one fiction work at the same time.  You're not always in the mood to read just one type all the time, right?

Upon my research today, I came upon these two tidbits from two separate agents' websites:

--Query with SASE...No snail mail.
--Prefers to read material exclusively...Only responds if interested.

And I received the shortest rejection ever just under an hour ago: "Not for me--thanks anyway."