BRUCE DESILVA
Scene of the Crime
BRUCE DESILVA worked as a journalist for forty years, most recently as a writing coach for the Associated Press, before retiring to write novels full-time. His reviews of crime novels have appeared in The New York Times Book Review. His first crime novel, Rogue Island, was a Publishers Weekly “first fiction” selection and won the Edgar Award for Best First Novel of 2010. He and his wife, Patricia Smith, an award-winning poet, live in New Jersey.
The most memorable mysteries, thrillers, and crime novels transport you to interesting places and let you see, hear, touch, and smell them. Dennis Lehane’s books, for example, take you on a hellish journey through the working-class neighborhoods of Boston. Daniel Woodrell’s best novels drag you through the underbelly of his native Ozarks. Read James Lee Burke’s Dave Robicheaux novels and you have been to New Iberia, Louisiana, even if you’ve never left your house.
Choosing the right setting is essential. As a great crime novelist named Thomas H. Cook once said, “If you want to understand the importance of place, imagine Heart of Darkness without the river.”
One of the places I know best is Providence, Rhode Island, the setting for my first crime novel,
Rogue Island. When the main character is forced to flee the city, he takes a few words to tell readers why he misses it, providing one of the book’s establishing shots:
I missed the scent of salt, spilled petroleum, and decaying shellfish that rose like Lazarus from the bay. I missed the bellowing of the parti-colored tugs that bulled rusting barges up the river. I missed the way the setting sun turned the marble dome of the statehouse the color of an antique gold coin.
When he pays a visit to the city’s arson squad, the description moves in closer:
From the outside, the drab government building looked like randomly stacked cardboard boxes. Inside, the halls were grimy and shit green. The johns, when they weren’t padlocked to save civil servants from drowning, were fragrant and toxic. The elevators rattled and wheezed like a geezer chasing a taxi.
You probably noticed that these descriptive passages are short. Yours should be, too. Crime fiction readers crave action and dialogue. They get bored by long, descriptive passages, no matter how well written. You can keep your details short simply by not telling readers things that they already know.
If you read novels written in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, you can’t help being struck by the length of the descriptive passages. Sometimes they go on for pages. For example, when a writer like Herman Melville wanted to take his readers to a village on Nantucket, he felt that he needed to describe everything—the architecture of the stores, churches, and dwellings; the rigging on the ships in the harbor; the cries of the swooping gulls; the stench of smoke and blubber rising from the whalers; what was hung in the shop windows; what the men and women on the streets were wearing; the bridles on the horses; and even how the streets were paved. Those details were endlessly fascinating to the readers of his day because it was all new to them. Few had ever been more than fifty miles from their homes, and there was no mass media to bring the outside world to them.
Today’s readers are different. They have millions of images stored in their heads from movies, TV, photographs, and their own real-life experiences. Now just a word or two is enough, sometimes, to convey an image that would have required Melville to go on for pages. For example, he would have needed a lot of words to describe the 1,063-foot-high, iron lattice tower erected on the Champ de Mars in 1889. Today, all I have to write is “Eiffel Tower,” and I’m done. Even if you’ve never been there, you’ve seen pictures and video of it. You already know what it looks like.
Suppose, then, you’ve decided to set a scene in a dentist’s office. You don’t need to describe the dental chair, the tray of gleaming steel instruments, or the dentist’s white smock. Just write the words “dentist’s office,” and today’s readers will picture all of that in their heads. What you should describe, however, are the things that make this particular dentist’s office different from the typical one. For example, if the out-of-date magazines in the waiting room are Guns & Ammo and Soldier of Fortune instead of the usual Newsweek and Sports Illustrated, you will want to mention that.
In
Rogue Island, part of the action occurs at Providence’s old city hall. Since most readers can conjure an image of a traditional city hall without my help, all I had to do was add a bit of detail about how Providence’s city hall differs from the norm. What I wrote was this:
City Hall, a Beaux-Arts atrocity at the southern end of Kennedy Plaza, looked as if a madman had sculpted it from a mound of seagull shit.
And that, I think, was enough.
When you write your descriptions, don’t limit yourself to visual details. Smells, sounds, and touch are often more powerful than visual descriptions.
Go back to that dentist’s office for a moment and picture only what you see.
That wasn’t so bad, was it?
Now listen to the whine of the drill. Didn’t it immediately get scarier?
Now fill your nostrils with that burning-tooth smell as the drill does its work. Still scarier, right? And I don’t even want to think about how it feels.
Physical descriptions are important, but they are not sufficient to create an effective setting for your book. In fact, they are the smallest part of the job. You must also understand your setting’s history, its culture, and its people—how they talk, what they value, and what it is like for them to live and work there.
Unlike big, anonymous cities such as New York and Los Angeles, where many fine crime novels are set, Providence is so small that it’s claustrophobic. Almost everybody you see on the street knows your name, and it’s almost impossible to keep a secret. Yet the city is big enough to be both cosmopolitan and rife with urban problems. Like some small people, the little city has both an inferiority complex and a chip on its shoulder. And Providence has an enduring legacy of organized crime and political corruption that goes all the way back to a colonial governor dining with Captain Kidd.
This is the milieu in which the plot of Rogue Island unfolds, and it influences the way every character thinks and acts. For example, my protagonist is an investigative reporter. It’s his job to expose corruption. But he also grew up in this place; it’s a part of him. So he sees nothing wrong with placing a bet with a bookie or paying a small bribe to keep his decrepit Ford Bronco on the road. As he sees it, graft comes in good and bad varieties, just like cholesterol. The bad graft enriches greedy politicians and their rich friends. The good graft supplements the wages of low-paid state workers, making it possible for them to start college funds and put braces on their kids’ teeth. Without it, the protagonist says, not much would get done in Rhode Island, and nothing at all would happen on time. It is unlikely the character would have held such views if he had grown up in, say, Portland, Maine, or Portland, Oregon.
EXERCISE
Pick a place you know well, because, first of all, you are going to have to describe it; and you will have to do this in more ways than one. You will need what movie directors call an “establishing shot” that shows what your city or town looks, sounds, and smells like from a distance. You will also need to move in closer to put your readers on the streets and in the buildings where the action unfolds.
1. Write an establishing shot of the city or town where your mystery, thriller, or crime novel is set. Don’t just describe what you see. Use all of your senses. When you finish, it will be too long. Cut it in half. Then cut it in half again.
2. Visit a location—a street, a bar, or maybe a house—where one of the scenes in your book will take place. Take notes on everything you see, hear, smell, and touch.
If it is a bar, for example, does it serve draft or bottle beer? Shots of whiskey and rye or fancy mixed drinks? Is it dark or well lighted? Are the bar stools new or old and battered? Do you see polished brass rails and ferns in ceramic pots, or is the main decoration a ten-year-old girlie calendar hanging from a nail? Is there a jukebox? What kind of music is on it? Does the bathroom smell of pine, disinfectant, or urine?
Does the bartender wear a jacket and tie, or does he have a white apron over a T-shirt and jeans? Is that an iPhone or a .45 clipped to his belt? Is this a pickup spot, a place where young professionals socialize, or a hangout for serious drinkers? Is the floor freshly washed and polished, or can you feel the grit under your shoes?
Using your notes, write a vivid description of the place. When you are done, cut it in half, eliminating unnecessary details. Then cut it in half again, leaving only those details absolutely necessary to give readers a good feel for the place.
3. Write a thousand words about how the history and culture of your setting affect the values and attitudes of your characters. If you don’t know enough about the place to do that, read a book on local history and then sit down with a local historian to discuss what you’ve learned. This thousand-word passage will not appear in your story, but it will inform much of what your characters think and do.