A fine example of this cropped up just now as I was reading “The Defector,” an excellent spy novel by Daniel Silva. Silva is describing the people who work in the Mossad’s Special Ops department: “Its operatives were executioners and kidnappers; buggers and blackmailers; men of intellect and ingenuity…”

Now it could be that Silva paired the word to which –– as I’m sure you’ve guessed –– I refer with “blackmailers” for a reason. Perhaps the dark arts of the Mossad, whose main office is a modest drive from where I live (though unmarked on maps, of course), include buggering people and then blackmailing them. They’re known to have used female agents as a “honey trap,” after all. Why not add to their repertoire the “chocolate come-on”? Or the “bronze bait”?

More likely, I’d concede, is that bugging someone qualifies one, in spy parlance, as a bugger. And I’d certainly agree that maybe this jumped off the page only because of the little bit of Benny Hill that lives on in me…

But it highlighted to me how a writer can be ambushed by words in many different ways.

Needless to add, for those who know Silva’s work, it didn’t put me off “The Defector,” which is a superb example of classy writing and thrilling pace.

Still the rules have been turned into a book and are quoted with something a little more mystical than simple reverence by crime writers when I go to crime conferences.

Some of the rules are pretty silly. No adverbs? Well, if you’re a crappy writer who dumps adverbs all over the place, then you ought to get rid of adverbs. But someone who writes well ought to be able to use all the tools of language. Would you tell a great composer not to write in B minor? Or not to use C sharp?

When I mentioned this on stage with a couple of other writers earlier this year (just after the pro-Elmore symphony had been sounded) I registered a degree of hostility on the part of at least one of the others on the panel rather akin to my having told a bunch of Orthodox Jews that they ought to expand their palate to include pork.

When Elmore goes deeper into his rules, he usually says something like “Don’t do X unless you’re Margaret Atwood [or some other writer], who can do it without sounding like shit.” In other words, if you’re a good writer, don’t follow Elmore’s rules for writing.

But what about breaking them all at once? The National Post has a competition running in which it asks readers to write a single sentence that breaks all Elmore’s rules.

It’s a little tricky, because some of Elmore’s rules (eg. Avoid prologues) aren’t really sentence-specific. But here’s my attempt:

Rain threatened suddenly, as it had for days and would go on doing, over the art-deco red-brick main street with its hardware store, candy store, video store and tattoo parlor, no matter how much the delicately featured red-headed woman with the up-turned nose opined tartly that the weather “would turn out just ticketty-boo, bejasus!” while she was on a visit from Ireland to complete her studies in a subject irrelevant to the book or her role in it.

I think that also proves that Elmore’s rules aren’t rules for good writing. They’re just rules to avoid being totally crap. Which is worthwhile…he said, hopefully.

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However, it included a number of details which I find encouraging. First, I was one of the people duped by the bad guy. Second, I was fired from my job because I was blamed for the scam. Third, I didn’t care about the job, because it had been a good thriller.

So let’s unwind that a little. Or, as we’re talking about a thriller, let’s make it more complicated.

The bad guy turned out to be not so awful. Even though he was based on a popular and execrable English comedian of the 1980s (Bobby Ball, of the awful Cannon and Ball duo, who have both apparently become committed Christians…which is a lot funnier than their act ever was.) He was a pimp in the dream and ended up getting millions of dollars out of the big corporation for which I worked.

Well, the plot isn’t so important…. In fact, it’s more significant that I was rather sanguine about losing my job and being taken away in handcuffs. You see, I’ve been fired four times in my life, as far as I recall, and I’m pleased to have come through this fictional/dream firing unscathed.

The first time I lost a job was from a Saturday job at Sainsbury’s, because I had been eating too many pork pies in the storeroom. I wasn’t very upset. (No, actually, the first time was when I was a school milk-monitor at the age of five and Margaret Thatcher, then Education Secretary, cut free school milk, thus making me the first of her four million unemployed.)

As a journalist, the three times I’ve been canned could be put down to booze in the first case, working for nasty office-politicking shitbags in the second case, and not actually doing any work in the last case.

Each one left me with differing degrees of anger and self-hatred. But in my dream I feel no such emotions. Rather I admire the aplomb of the canny pimp and the thriller plot which has unraveled in my head.

In other words, writing (developing a plot) is better for me than working in an actual job where some fat asshole can kick me out on the streets.

That may not seem like a huge insight, but it took me a long time to learn the lesson so deeply that it entered my subconscious dreamscape as it did last night.

In any case, this is only a blog. If you want real wisdom, get off the internet and go kiss your kids. (That’s something to develop in another post.)

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The opening of “Saint Fiacre” (I’m going to look at the opening, rather than the opening paragraph, because the paragraphs are short, staccato) is laden with the strangeness of waking up in an unaccustomed place, and most of all the dismal return to a place whence one has fled. Here it is:

A timid scratching at the door; the sound of an object being put on the floor; a furtive voice:

“It’s half past five. The first bell for Mass has just been rung…”

“Are you taking communion?”

All this is a re-creation of the small village atmosphere Maigret believed he had left behind him when he went to Paris as a young man to become a police officer. It’s a very meaningful atmosphere for me. For a couple of decades now, I’ve lived around the world as a journalist and writer. It’s been 22 years since I quit the backwater where I grew up. If I’d been a happy kid, I’d probably never have left. So whenever I go back for a visit, I become quiet, silenced by a bitter nostalgia and regret. Maybe that’s why I love this somber, atmospheric early episode featuring “le Commissaire” going back to his childhood village.

Maigret appeared in so many movies and television adaptations–for Saint-Fiacre alone there are a 1959 French-language movie with Jean Gabin and two British TV versions–that it’s easy to think of him with the familiarity we often ascribe to endlessly reproduced old-timers like Miss Marple. But Simenon had a lot more in common with his great U.S. crime-writing contemporaries. In Saint-Fiacre, he makes the lugubrious Raymond Chandler look like a breezy teenager skipping down a sunny small-town street in her bobby socks. Imagine that.

Simenon’s first editor wrote to him: “Your books aren’t real police novels. They aren’t scientific. They don’t play by the rules. There’s no love story in them. There’re no sympathetic characters. You won’t have a thousand readers.” Well, 550 million copies printed shows what that guy knew about potential sales. But he was right about the way the Belgian writer’s books worked. No real good guys and nothing–certainly not love–untainted by the grasping desire to escape a society of dying traditions and internal immigration.

The Saint-Fiacre Affair begins, then, with Maigret waking up in the inn of the village of Saint-Fiacre. At first he doesn’t recognize where he is. As it dawns upon him, he’s flooded with a heavy sense of darkness. He has returned to the village where he grew up to investigate a crime which is about to happen. (His office in the Paris police headquarters received a note saying that “A crime will be committed at the Saint-Fiacre Church during the first mass of the days of the dead.”)

As he strolls through the village, people glance at him curiously. They seem to recognize him, but can’t place the face of the son of the former steward at the local château, a face that left their community 35 years previously to pursue a career in the capital. All other traces of Maigret’s family are gone from the village and he wanders it sensing somehow that its very stones are unwelcoming.

When characters eventually recognize him or when he owns up to being from Saint-Fiacre, they seem to wonder what the hell could’ve brought him back. It’s clear they don’t trust him. There’s no hale slap on the back or curiosity about what he’s been doing all these years. Simenon captures the isolation and suspicion of the French peasant for the big city perfectly. What these people are signaling to Maigret–and what he instinctively realizes–is that he may have been born in Saint-Fiacre, but the moment he left he ceased to belong to it. They owe him nothing. He’s on his own.

If you’ve ever been back to a place where you weren’t happy as a kid, a place from which you wanted to escape, you’ll feel as though you’re reading your diary, not a detective novel.

At the first mass, the Countess of Saint-Fiacre dies of a heart attack. With his crime delivered as promised, Maigret uncovers a clue at the scene and tracks the killer. But it’s really his own despondent sense of alienation that’s at the heart of this novel, and it’s there right from the first paragraph.

If that sounds like a spoof, you surely know who I’m caricaturing. We decided last week that you couldn’t do much better than the opening paragraph of Hammett’s “Red Harvest” for an introduction to the narrative voice, narrator, place and tone of the entire novel. But if anyone could beat it, we’d have to look at Raymond Chandler.

The grumpy god of the gumshoe genre claimed not to have much time for the
idea of a classic in crime writing. In one of his essays, he wrote that contemporary writers who aimed for historical fiction, social vignette, or broad canvas would never surpass “Henry Esmond”, “Madame Bovary”, or “War and Peace”. Crime writers, on the other hand, would easily be able to
devise a better mystery than the ones detailed in “The Hound of the
Baskervilles” or “The Purloined Letter”. “It would be rather more difficult
not to,” he wrote.

Still, the poet with the pipe (okay, no more quirky names for Ray) proved
himself wrong. Or rather he proved that he was right not to focus so much
on the mystery element and, instead, to build a mysterious atmosphere and a sardonic sense of humor. From the opening paragraph.

This is how he starts a long 1950 short story called “Red Wind”:

There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry
Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair
and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every
booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving
knife and study their husbands’ necks. Anything can happen. You can even
get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge.

Like the opening paragraph of “Red Harvest,” this gives us all the elements
we’d expect. It also tells you a lot about the narrator and his lifestyle.
The booze parties, and the sense of being gypped at the cocktail lounge.

But the opening paragraph which might be said to define an entire genre ––
and the sub-genres of attempts to copy the true representatives of the
genre, and also to parody it –– starts Chandler’s 1949 novel “The Little
Sister”:

The pebbled glass door panel is lettered in flaked black paint: “*Philip
Marlowe…Investigations*.” It is a reasonably shabby door at the end of a
reasonably shabby corridor in the sort of building that was new about the
year the all-tile bathroom became the basis of civilization. The door is
locked, but next to it is another door with the same legend which is not
locked. Come on in –– there’s nobody in here but me and a big bluebottle
fly. But not if you’re from Manhattan, Kansas.

That’s now a staple of the genre and, just as much, of its parodic/iconic
avatar –– the detective innocently awaiting the moment when the lady arrives (or in this case, telephones) his shabby office. But what makes it so compelling is the voice of Marlowe, with its sense of regret at having become involved in the story and its unspoken acknowledgement of the inevitability of a repeat performance. After all, if Marlowe truly learned the lessons he claims to have taken on board, he wouldn’t be who he is. He’d be corrupted or cynical. Of course he’s neither.

It’s this subtext of honor (the knight in shining armor element of Marlowe’s character, as Chandler called it) that allowed the Epistolarian of Evil (sorry, I said I wouldn’t do that again, didn’t I) to elevate himself above the many who have copied him.

Music is notoriously difficult to capture in prose; Matt Rees tries valiantly, elegantly, and for the most part successfully to do justice to a composer who is regarded — and not just by me — as a deity. Rees himself comes off in interviews as gently eccentric: “I write standing up, doing yoga stretches, and listening to Mozart,” he confides. I think Wolfgang would have liked that.