Mysterious Matters: Mystery Publishing Demystified

Bill Pronzini: An Appreciation

Bill Pronzini:
An Appreciation

 

I always knew, but was recently reminded, that the longest-running series in mystery fiction is Bill Pronzini's Nameless series. It began in 1971 and continues through today. The most recent title is BETRAYERS, and I understand that the next installment, HELLBOX, will be published this summer.

Over the years, we've watched Nameless age and take on partners in his San Francisco-based detective agency, including the stoic Jake Runyon, the enterprising Alex Chavez, and the sassy computer expert, Tamara. While I haven't read every book in the series over the past 40 or so years, I have ready many of them, and I can't remember a clunker in the bunch.

How do I like Pronzini? Let me count the ways.

First, Pronzini makes everything look so effortless. The books, which sometimes have a hardboiled element to them, are as smooth as cream. Pronzini knows how to pack meaning into each and every word, so readers never find themselves wading through endless verbiage to get to the point.

Pronzini also keeps in mind what so many other seem to have forgotten: Longer isn't better. He's like the writers for the old Crime Club, who told their story, turned their characters upside down, and threw in a twist every couple of chapters for 180 tight pages. As a result, the books are extremely fast reading, made all the more enjoyable by the multiple plot strands Pronzini tends to weave, especially in later books. 

I think crime fiction, especially first novels, tend to suffer from the "anxiety of influence" that Harold Bloom talked about. Many writers (admittedly, not all of them, but those who are more serious about their careers and success) ask themselves how they are going to make their mark. A lot of them think it's going to happen with some wacky character or a series of punning titles. As a result the books can get loopy and forced - or, on the other side of the coin, pretentious and ponderous. Pronzini has never been a show-off; he does what he does with consummate skill, even when he's pulling off some really twisted plot turns (I particularly like FEVER in this regard).

I think I've said in the past that I like to see themes explored in crime fiction, but not in a heavy-handed way. For me at least, this is the sign of someone who thinks a lot about his or her writing. I'm all for escapism, and I publish plenty of it, proudly. But I like when books make you think just a little bit beyond the last page. And Pronzini's themes are there, proudly and overtly, in his one-word titles. In FEVER, for example, he explores different types of fever, including gambling, series of extramarital affairs, and others. In CAMOUFLAGE, his theme is the unseen camouflage people wear to hide their true motives or personalities. SCHEMERS and BETRAYERS are pretty self-explanatory...and I can't wait to see what HELLBOX is all about. 

Finally, I like that Pronzini has written books outside the Nameless series - books like THE OTHER SIDE OF SILENCE, which are just as good as the Nameless books.

I think the new generation of aspiring writers can learn a lot from Pronzini - about jumping into a story immediately, about making characters tough but real, about plotting, about not writing the same book a dozen times. He's a passage from FEVER:

The big hype is that cell phones are one of the wonders of the modern age. Bells and whistles galor. You can talk to others, receive voice and text messages, send text messages, take photographs, play music and games, access your e-mail, and, for all I know, track the progress of herds of elephants on the African veldt. All in one self-contained little unit that fits in your shirt pocket and the palm of your hand. Some people seem to worship the things; they're the ones you see every day on streets and highways and sidewalks and in public buildings with cells guled to their ears and rapt, satisifed expressions on their faces. Instant telecommunication orgasms delivered by your choice of jaunty, sappy tunes and other fun electronic noises... A phone, in my old-fashioned world, is an instrument that provides necessary--emphasis on the word necessary--access to another person for a definite purpose. IT is not a toy. It is not a source of public auditory (or visual) masturbation. Above all, it should not be, but too often is, an annoying, attention-distracting, accident-causing, self-indulgent plaything used at others' expense... [But] once you give people a fancy new toy, you'd better not try to take it away from them; it produces tantrums, and in adults tantrums can sometimes be accompanied by guns, knives, and other deadly weapons. (pp. 182-185).

Right on, Bill.  If, someday, this blog goes blank, you will know it is because I have been killed by someone who is texting while driving. I see that every single day of my life.

Rant to Department of Justice: Get a Life

OK, so let me get this straight.

The airlines just get bigger and bigger. Continental merges with United to create the world's largest airline. Ticket prices go up. Services goes down. WAY, WAY down.

Banks keep getting bigger and bigger, with colossi buying up independent state or regional banks. Fees go through the roof while interest rates on savings go through the floor.

Investment firms are declared "too big to fail" (as a result of merger after merger) while hard-working people lose their retirement funds.

Mrs. See's candies, those wonderful San Francisco chocolates, are now a part of Berkshire Hathaway.

Speculators continue to drive up the price of crude oil, making gasoline prices skyrocket. But that's OK.

In a nutshell: Huge, powerful companies are merging, acquiring, eliminating jobs left and right, sending work overseas, and the Department of Justice's Antitrust Division nods sagely and with delighted approval. No, the Antitrust Division has much bigger fish to fry. Why hold banks accountable for ruining people's lives when you can sue the publishing industry for price fixing?

For those of you who don't know, it is likely that the Department of Justice is going to sue Apple and the large publishers for attempting to fix prices, especially the new ebook model. What a great use of the taxpayers' money! Last time I checked, people don't take out mortgages to buy novels. The publishing industry doesn't foreclose on their homes or charge them $5 when they use an ATM outside their network. Our products sell in the $5 - $30 range and are completely discretionary purchases. Nobody is holding a gun to anyone's head saying, "Buy this book or I'll blow your fucking head off."

What are publishers doing, you may ask? We're simply trying to establish a model that does not devalue our products to the level of mass-produced Chinese garbage. We're trying to prevent Amazon from ITS predatory practices of using our products as loss leaders and its many other questionable (and borderline unethical) business decisions.

And what do we get for trying to protect intellectual property - and to protect the industry that is responsible for world literacy from going the way of the music business - and for our attempts to find a fair model that compensates authors and agents while not sending us into bankruptcy? A proposed lawsuit for "price fixing."

Department of Justice: I hereby declare you the biggest bunch of morons, imbeciles, and shitheads on the face of this planet.  Let's hope your government pensions remain intact when one bank runs the United States, gasoline costs $10 a gallon, and one mega-airline has swallowed up all others. Then you'll get to read your $2.99 paperback or .99 ebook on a flight to Chicago that has cost you $4,000.

Is a Sociopath Living Next Door?

I don't venture into nonfiction too often - there's too much crime fiction to keep up with - but every so often a book grabs my attention. A few days ago I finished Martha Stout's THE SOCIOPATH NEXT DOOR, pubished a number of years ago (2005). The cover, which I find eerily effective, is reminiscent of the frontispiece of my copy of Truman Capote's IN COLD BLOOD, of which I am lucky enough to own a first edition. I've always believed you can tell a lot about someone by looking into his/her eyes.  Of the three pairs shown at left, I'd trust the top set of eyes the least.

I write about the book here today because I think it would be of interest to readers and writers of crime fiction. I had an epiphany as a result of reading this book, but more on that later.

Stout's primary thesis is based on the rather shocking statistic that 1 in 25 people, or 4% of the total population, is a sociopath. Stout cites the DSM's definition of the multiple criteria that help psychologists identify a sociopathic personality, but for her a sociopath comes down to one simple criterion: a complete lack of conscience. The book provides composite portraits, based on real people, of sociopaths, and it was a relief to discover that not all sociopaths are crazed murderers. They're all manipulative and all without a conscience, but some have no grander ambition than to destroy the lives of people they're jealous of, or to find a spouse who'll support them.

I'm not a psychologist, so I don't have the credentials to really evaluate this book. I can say that the author is a marvelous writer; her case studies of sociopaths read like good thrillers. I can't help but question her primary assertion - that 1 in 25 people is a sociopath - which doesn't seem to be supported by any specific data. She also seems to equate sociopaths and psychopaths, and yet I had always understood there to be a difference between the two. I thought a sociopath was more of antisocial personality, while a psychopath is truly incapable of understanding the difference between right and wrong. I looked in my copy of the Penguin Dictionary of Psychology, and there I see that the editors do draw a distinction between the two types, considering psychopaths more extreme than sociopaths.

Within the pages of her book, Stout not only describes the way sociopaths behave, she also talks about how to spot them. The key, she suggests, it to look for someone who is consistently manipulative and who constantly plays on people's symapthy to make it seem as though s/he is the victim. That was an eye-opening discussion for me, as I'd worked with a woman a number of years ago I had never liked. She came across as a sweet, hard-working, long-suffering professional who just wanted what's best for everyone. And yet I'd always thought she would have ripped the spines out of anyone who stood in her way. I'll never know for sure - she disappeared into the Midwest a number of years ago - but now I think I understand her better...

But time for the epiphany. I'm not much of a reader of thrillers or serial-killer books. Part of the reason is that the former often seem contrived to me, while the latter often seem like the work of lazy writers who couldn't be bothered to come up with something original. But, thinking about it more deeply, I realized that these books often feature sociopaths as their villains/drivers of the action. And those characters have just never seemed quite believable to me. The men always seem like versions of Dick Distardly tying the heroine to the train tracks, while the women always seem like a version of Natasha Fatale (cohort of Boris Badenov on the old Bullwinkle cartoons). I make these comparisons to cartoons for a reason: The "bad guys" of thrillers and serial-killer books often seem like over-the-top, cartoonish versions of human beings. I just can't suspend disbelief that far to see them as versions of "real people."

And yet, as I learned from The Sociopath Next Door, socipaths are exactly like the bad guys we often see in thrillers and other crime fiction. Stout makes the point that people who have a conscience have a hard time conceiving of anybody not having one; a conscience, she argues, is such an innate part of being human that normal human beings just can't make the leap into thinking that another person would be completely devoid of conscience. Aha! And right there Stout opened my eyes to what happens when I read a certain type of fiction: I can't believe the villain because I can't accept that such a type of person exists. But they do exist, Stout argues; and after reading her book, I believe her. And I am venturing to guess that this newfound realization will affect how I react to villains from now on.

That said, I probably would take the book with a grain of salt. In addition to her primary thesis about 4% of the population being sociopathic, she makes some other questionable assertions. For example, she suggests that Western/U.S. society, with its sense of individualism, is more prone to producing sociopaths than Asian/Eastern culture, because those cultures inculcate a sense of community/ collective responsibility in their children from birth onward. Thus, Stout suggests, while Eastern cultures may have just as many sociopaths, those with sociopathic tendencies may remain on the straight and narrow because society prevents them from blossoming into full-blown sociopaths. The argument here doesn't sound particularly strong to me, but then again I'm not qualified as a psychologist, except an amateur one who likes to make sure that the books I acquire and edit are populated by believable characters who are driven by a set of needs, motivations, and personality traits.

 

Agatho, You Cheapskate!

A famous businessman (I forget who) once said, "I know half my advertising dollars are wasted. I just don't know which half."

Wise words, indeed. And said quite some time ago, in the days before advertising-based business models (think newspapers, magazines) started experiencing some major challenges. I recently picked up a copy of Time magazine - once replete with ads - and was moderately shocked to see how thin the publication has become. Now it's mostly content, not something I would complain about, since who buys a news magazine for the advertisements?

Fortunately or unfortunately, the book publishing business hasn't relied on advertising (within the pages of the books themselves) to support itself. So, I do think we are a step ahead of newspapers and magazines in that regard. (And, honestly, I don't think magazines and newspapers would be in their current pickle if they hadn't all been in such a rush to provide all their content for free online. What sort of bubblehead ever thought THAT was a good idea?)

As we watch markets adjust to new conditions, helping to craft them in the tiny ways over which we have some control (for example, my publishing house refuses to ever offer its books for 99 cents online), all of us are forced to examine our operating assumptions and to think about ROI (return on investment), the acronym we can't get away from. Before we spend any money, we have to ask ourselves: Will this help us sell more books? Will it help us increase our profits and keep us in business? Or will this send money down a sinkhole?

With that in mind, I've compiled a list of the things I will pay for, and the things I will NOT pay for.

THINGS I WILL NOT PAY FOR:

1. Reviews.  I will never, and I do mean NEVER, pay anyone to review any book we publish. Paid reviews don't matter and don't affect sales. They are a waste of time, a waste of money. Nobody takes them seriously. Most pay-for-review sites are taking advantage of those who take part in vanity publishing activities. Kirkus (shame on them, but heck--they DO have to pay the bills) now has a pay-for-review part of the magazine; nobody even looks at those reviews. ForeWord magazine occasionally sends our publicist an email saying that one of our books hasn't been chosen for review, but it HAS been chosen for the privilege of our paying them to review it. We laugh and wonder if they think we're some vanity publishing outfit. The only reviews that matter are those that you get for "free," because all others are paid advertising, pure and simple, and we know what most people think of THAT. I will pay people to review my books when three conditions are met: (1) Pigs fly, (2) Hell freezes over, and (3) Snowballs stand a good chance in the aforementioned Hades.

2. Author "tours." I know that many writers dream of the days when publishers sent them on book signing tours. And if I was with one of the big houses who is lucky enough to publish guaranteed best-sellers, I might spring for one. But from where I sit now - we just can't do it. Have you looked at the price of airfare, hotel rooms, and meals lately? Do you have any idea how many books we have to sell just to cover the cost of one night in a hotel room? Sadly but truthfully, people just aren't going to turn out to hear some author they've most likely never heard of and buy their book. We have better ways to spend our money.

3. Advertisements in the popular media. We simply can't afford advertisements in popular magazines and newspapers; and even if we could, the number of books sold as a result would not cover the cost. I think many writers think that advertising is the key to getting readers; it isn't. I know people who take out ads with their own money, post on every listserv known to man, and blog themselves silly who still can't sell more than a couple of thousand copies of their book. This isn't to say that I have the magic formula for making a book successful, as there's plenty of garbage that does quite well and plenty of wonderful books that get remaindered almost instantly.

4. Overnight mail. Was there ever a greater waste of money and resources than overnight mail? Listen, I love what I do, but most people can wait 2 or 3 days for their books without dying. In many cases, the cost of shipping is the single largest chunk of book revenue - it can even exceed the book's unit price (i.e., the printing cost per unit). Media Mail is what it's all about. I shudder to think what would happen if the USPS ever got rid of Media Mail. So let's not even go there.

THINGS I WILL PAY FOR (OR CONSIDER PAYING FOR):

1. Good cover designers.  I'm shocked by the really awful cover designs that I see (sometimes, but not always, done by small presses). In our visual and shallow age, there is no more important signal of a quality-published book than a good, creative, interesting cover design. Look at the best-seller list: Rarely do you see a terrible cover. Nothing makes a book look more cheap, or more unprofessional, than a poor cover design. I'm afraid that this comment will now make the self-published spend lots of money on cover designs; but please know that a good cover alone is not enough to make a book sell.

2. Bookstore placement. It isn't cheap, but I am willing to pay for book placement at Barnes & Noble and a couple of other large book retailing outlets. To do this, I would have to have the utmost faith in my book, as well as an aggressive author who is as much a self-marketer as s/he is a writer. No human being can go into a B&N and look through all the books in the stacks, their spines facing outward. Being on display says "Look at me," and it can be enough to turn a casual browser into a book buyer. Of course, the book has to have a great cover, a whammo opening page, and an attractive author (which is why you see so many author photos that have been Photoshopped into Hollywood-style images).

3. Quid Pro Quo. While I don't believe advertising works (except library advertising, and then ONLY if your ads are backed up by good reviews in LJ, PW, Kirkus, or Booklist), I can and do advertise in those magazines as a way of supporting them. And while subscriptions to each of those publications is a burden, we need to support them, their staffs, and their missions--so each year we shell out the annual subscription fee. In other words, if you want my scant advertising dollars, your best bet is to review a couple of our books, which then creates a sense of obligation in us to support you in return. (As I say this, I am glad that I do this blog anonymously.)

4. Google AdWords. What a terrific waste of money. I speak from experience. Never again. Maybe for yachts; not for products, like books, with razor-thin profit margins.

What about the Internet, you ask? Well, the jury is out. We do cautiously try things out every now and again; results have been mixed (the 50% to which the first line of this post refers). We're in the process of trying out a few Amazon programs - we'll see how those turn out. I do worry about Amazon and its predatory practices; we've seen what happens when a company becomes the only game in town (Microsoft, though it's only a matter of time before Apple eclipses them, and it may have already done so). But just as B&N is still the best venue for book lovers at a physical level, Amazon seems to be the best Internet space for book lovers, so I bow to pragmatism and do what I must.