KEN KUHLKEN
Crime Fiction—What For?
KEN KUHLKEN’s stories have earned a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. His novels are Midheaven, a finalist for the Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award for Best First Novel; The Loud Adios (Private Eye Writers of America Best First Mystery Novel, 1989); The Venus Deal; The Angel Gang; The Do-Re-Mi (a finalist for the Shamus Award for Best P.I. Novel); The Vagabond Virgins; and The Biggest Liar in Los Angeles. In Writing and the Spirit, he offers a wealth of advice to writers and everyone looking for inspiration.
I mean, why do we write this unsavory stuff?
I suppose it’s because we try to write the kind of stories we find most engaging. Why waste our efforts on anything else?
In college I majored in literature and became familiar with many great poets, dramatists, novelists, and short story writers. Though I admired and learned from writers of many stripes, the ones I returned to wrote about crimes.
It wasn’t so much the crimes that intrigued me, but the characters involved in the crimes.
Knowledge usually reaches me best through stories, especially knowledge about human nature, what I and all those other strange people care about beneath our masks, and what we are capable of.
Perhaps no truer lines have been written than these Noah Cross speaks in the film CHINATOWN: “You see, Mr. Gittes, most people never have to face the fact that at the right time and right place, they’re capable of anything.”
The summer after high school I read Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Raskolnikov, a young man tormented by poverty and his own cynicism, becomes obsessed with what nineteenth-century thinkers called “a fixed idea.” The idea and its implications compelled him to murder a pawnbroker.
While reading I felt as obsessed by the story as Raskolnikov was by his idea. The experience somehow deepened my spirit, my intellect, and my passions.
In a college English class we read Flannery O’Connor ’s short stories. The violence in them disturbed me. She made brutality so real, some years would pass before I could reflect and recognize that when the Misfit, a serial killer in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” says about the grandmother, “She would of been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life,” he might’ve said the same about any of us.
We humans are deep and mysterious creatures, capable of great good and even greater evil. And we are masters of self-deception, not only capable of anything, but also capable of rationalizing anything. Stories about crime, about people in circumstances that send them to extremes of all kinds, are simply the best place to learn about us.
EXERCISE
Good crime novels feature characters whose motives we can grasp. As each of us writes a novel, if we are doing justice to our characters, we will allow them to grow. But they can’t just grow every which way.
The most compelling characters begin, in the writer’s mind and often on the page, with a trait that can be described in a single word that describes an emotional state. Lonely, haunted, loving, vengeful, bitter, desperate, soft-hearted, and lost come to mind.
Of course this one-word description is only the beginning. It gives the character direction and requires that he or she act in consistent accord with this trait.
Pick out a few of your characters and describe each of them with a one-word emotional trait.
Then write a few scenes in which the traits become exposed. In one scene, try to blatantly expose, while in at least one other, subtly expose.