Good Women are Hard to Come By

There’s been a trend the past ten years or so for successful male mystery writers to create female protagonists. Since women supposedly read far more books than men, it makes dollars and cents. Some men have a very good grasp of what makes women tick, and create great characters. Others just put a skirt on a male and turn them loose. They just don’t seem to get what makes women different from men.

Michael Connelly, one of my favorite mystery writers, has not yet created a woman character that has seemed real to me. In his Lincoln Lawyer series, the women in them just lack something. They just don’t come alive in a way that defines them. When Connelly writes about Harry Bosch, he’s on home territory and is great.

The problem is probably worse in action movies which have a female lead. The women are all lethal weapons, adept at the martial arts, tough as nails. Hell, some eat nails! I’m bothered by the trend in movies in which some talented young actresses who made sensational acting debuts, were quickly turned into action heroes because they had the “misfortune” to be very attractive (re: hot). Michelle Rodriguez comes to mind. Her debut was in a small, wonderful movie called Girlfight. Her acting was great. She took six months of intensive training at the famed NYC boxing gym, Gleason’s, to land the part. In the movie, she really can box, and being a boxing writer for HBO’s website I think I know what I am talking about.

The plot involves her character falling in love with a male boxer. In a gender blind amateur boxing tournament, she is forced to fight him. She goes through emotional hell. Really poignant stuff. Of course it wasn’t long before her agent got her a big part in the hyper-action flick, “The Fast and the Furious,” and since then she’s been predominantly an action heroine. (BTW, Girlfight is a far better movie about women and boxing then Clint Eastwood’s hokey Oscar winning “Million Dollar Baby).

I’ve been thinking for awhile about writing a mystery with a woman protagonist. I’m told I have a strong feminine side, and while not bragging, I do seem to grasp what makes women different than me. Many years ago, I was in a mixed group therapy, more women than men. It was illuminating to hear how they felt, their thought processes and what kind of men they found attractive. Quite a revelation. And here I had always thought the only difference between the sexes was anatomical. I was most intrigued by the way women sized up potential mates. Most men look at face and body. If it’s good, they’re attracted. If the sex is great, nothing else seems to matter. Don’t have anything in common? Worst possible mates? Who cares, man, the sex is great, I’m in love (re: in lust).

I was guilty of many such “romances” in the past. One gal, we dated nine months, sex was super. But I had no clue who she “was.” This hit home hard when a few months after we broke up, I decided to make her character in a film I was writing. I realized I didn’t know anything about her. So I had to call her and ask her all the questions I had failed to do in the relationship. Pretty ironic. Some would say pathetic.

Women seem more interested in a man’s emotional makeup, his sensitivity, and ability to love and be vulnerable, things like that. And oh yeah, they do like hot men and good sex. But when it comes to long term relationships, sex and looks are not enough. (all you women readers of mine out there, feel free to rip the hell out of me for any misconceptions I might have here)

I think I could pull it off, a woman lead. Problem right now is I am four books into a mystery series, and I would have to put it aside and write what they call in the series industry, a “stand alone.” Lots of mystery writers of both sexes do. Right now I would just miss my characters too much. I guess I am not ready to step away from them for any period of time.

I do have an intriguing young woman character in my fourth book in the series, “Kill and Let Kill.” She is not ready to be a co-lead with my main men, Frank Boff and Danny Cullen. She has a lot of rough edges and growing up to do. I plan in Book 5 to start her growth cycle, and perhaps by Book 6, she’ll blossom. As it is now, she is a court and crime reporter for the Brooklyn Eagle, a graduate of Columbia J school, and the protégée of a retired former star tabloid columnist for the New York Daily News, modeled after the great Jimmy Breslin. He has taught her a lot about investigative reporting, but alas he cannot teach her street smarts. Those are acquired by actually walking them, as Breslin did.

Megan Riley is arrogant, brash, disdainful of the very uneducated people Breslin called his friends, the cops, firemen, sanitation workers and tunnel rats who became his best sources. I plan on putting her through some rough experiences which will gradually enlighten her to the way of the street, and then perhaps even give her a “stand alone” novel. For now, she is a supporting character. In the best mystery series, major and supporting characters constantly evolve and change, and so do the relationships they have with each other. This is what real life is like. Although it should be said I have known many people of both sexes who manage to go through life and never evolve. Sad, makes them very uninteresting.

All right ladies, let’s hear what you have to say on the subject. And don’t spare me the sting of your whips. I can take it. Educate me. I want to learn more about women so I can become a better writer. Writing is a craft you don’t stop learning until the day you die.

I once read an interview with the great actor, Lawrence Olivier. He was 80 at the time, and making a movie. The person doing the interviewing asked him: “You have won every award there is in acting, why do you still do it?” Sir Lawrence replied: “Because there’s still so much to learn.”

Stranger Than Fiction: The Evolution of a Novel

The journey of writing a novel is much like traveling through life, a strange tour, with many unexpected twists and turns, often having to take the road less traveled. Help comes from surprising places. The first novel in my mystery series, “The Hurting Game,” was a pretty wild ride.

The impetus to write the book came from a column I read in Newsday by a boxing writer. His father had been a well-known fighter and wanted his son to follow in his footsteps. The son had his mind set on being a writer, but was hesitant to disappoint. He agreed to give it a try.

The first time he stepped into the ring with his father to take lessons, he freaked. He felt incredibly overwhelmed. In the column he would write many years later, he told of feeling like his father was ten feet tall, and how diminished he was by his powerful presence. His arms and legs felt frozen with angst. After the lesson, the son knew he was not cut out to be a fighter, let alone follow in the huge footsteps of his father. He told his dad so. It was, he recalled, a very emotionally-charged moment, hard on both of them.

After I read the column, an idea possessed me. I was intrigued about writing a book where the son of a famous boxing father deals with living in his prodigious shadow. Me being me, I couldn’t write a straight novel, there had to be dead bodies, lots of blood and intrigue. I also wanted to finally find a way to write about my very strange, close friend, who is a former DEA agent, turned private investigator working on high-profile felony cases.

Fred’s stories about his days in the DEA and bizarre exploits as an investigator were amazing. So was he. A man of mass contradictions, Fred lived in the suburbs with his lovely wife of twenty years and two kids. He was a great father and husband, an ordinary Joe at home who barbecued on the deck, watched sitcoms and ate the God-awful worst fast food. In his work life, he was on a first name basis with mobsters, drug dealers, snitches and every other kind of unsavory person.

I spent many hours debating with him, trying to get Fred to see that defending the felons he took on – most of whom were guilty as sin -- was amoral, and totally at odds with his family life. Nobody wins arguments with Fred. He’s infuriatingly clever, and can parry every thrust you take at him. Finally I gave up, accepted him for what he was, and came away determined to one day immortalize him in fiction, warts and all.

So when the idea came for The Hurting Game, I used Fred as the model for my PI, Frank Boff. The son of the boxer I called Danny Cullen. He was an adult now in his mid-twenties.  Cullen’s dialogue with Boff is based loosely on my many hours of debate with Fred. In the book, Cullen’s best friend, a middleweight champion, has been murdered and the case has gone cold. Boff is hired by a mystery person to find the killer. Meanwhile, Cullen has been doing an investigation of his own. I eventually force them to team up, and what an odd couple they make! Always in conflict. Boff disdainful of Cullen’s amateur investigative powers; Cullen repulsed by Boff’s lack of morality and indifference to following the rules.

I wrote the book. It took twenty-one drafts. I submitted it to an agent who worked out of La Jolla, CA. She liked my writing and characters, but was having personal problems at the time and said she couldn’t take me on. She did offer me some great insight. She said the book would be more effective if written in a standard mystery style. That’s when it hit me. I had created a hybrid, part character study, part mystery. I had to make it a pure mystery, and Cullen’s back story about his famous boxing father should be just a small part of it. Nineteen drafts later, the new version was done. Again, I had to find an agent. I decided to enlist an HBO broadcaster/friend.

I write for HBO’s boxing website, and over the years first as a reporter and then HBO writer, I had come to know the dean of all boxing TV analysts, Larry Merchant. Larry had published non-fiction. So on a whim, I wrote him and asked if he knew any agents. As fate would have it, his son-in-law was a book agent for the high-powered ICM. Larry put me in touch with son-in-law. He asked if I would like to submit my novel for “coverage,” meaning an agency “reader” would go through the book and either recommend ICM get involved, or pass, giving reasons why.

The reader wasn’t all that kind, but then wouldn’t be a reader if he/she was. Among the reader’s criticisms was that I had created this intriguing odd couple, then had dropped the ball, keeping them apart for a good half of the book.

The reader was right! Back to the drawing board. I did an extreme makeover, putting the two of them together much earlier and keeping them that way for most of the book. Another sixteen drafts! Finally I had gotten it right, some fifty-six drafts later. Then I made the awful rounds of agents, most of whom either rejected with form letters (emails) or just didn’t bother to answer. Some took months to get back to me, if at all. I hated sitting around waiting, so I wrote the sequel. Still no bites on the first novel, so I wrote the third book in the series.

Finally Dawn Dowdle, a former freelance mystery editor, agreed to represent me. She had a one-woman firm, The Blue Ridge Literary Agency, which had been in existence only since January of 2009. I went onto writer’s forums to learn all I could about her before accepting. I had serious reservations about her lack of agent experience and track record of selling many books to publishers. But the writers who knew of her on the forums said wonderful things, primarily how great she was to work with, how much time she spent marketing and hustling for her clients. I realized I would be better off with a hungry agent, than some fat cat in a big New York agency. I signed on board. But the journey was not over.

Dawn made more suggestions about how to make the book better, and sent me her editing rules, which she gives to all her clients. She did a sample editing run on the first twenty pages of my book. I saw immediately how I could make the novel read so much better following those rules. I did (gulp) 16 more drafts, cut 11 pages and over 7,000 words. She has it now for her final edit. In the meantime I have begun to apply her brilliant editing rules to my second novel in the series, “Punish By Death,” which of the three finished books, moved a bit too slowly. It was overwritten. After just three drafts of Book 2, I have eliminated a total of 19 pages, chopped out nearly 12,000 words. Yikes! Still not done, but it reads so much better now.

So as I continue on the journey, I am reminded of the Grateful Dead song, “What a Long, Strange Trip It’s Been.” It certainly has.

Losing it at the Movies

I have a confession to make: I cry a lot at the end of movies. Even ones I’ve seen over and over. Romantic comedies slay me. I’m a mess at the end of Jerry Maguire. Right on cue, when Renee Zellweger says, “You had me at hello,” I lose it. Dirty Dancing is another one. Rips me up. So is Pretty Woman, Ghost, For Love of the Game and too many others I am embarrassed to mention. I’m also a sucker for well done, believable feel-good movies.

I’m not sure this means I’m more emotional than other people. I think it has something to do with my ability to immerse myself in a film, to believe that it is really happening and I’m there witnessing it. I shut out my own world for the duration of the movie, give myself up to it.

I trace this back to my introduction to art movie theatres in New York City.  Back in my twenties, the city had seven or eight of these specialty theatres. Most played double features. The Elgin on Hudson Street in the West Village--later converted to a ballet theater--was one of my favorites. The funky Thalia on West 95^th Street and Broadway was hands- down my venue of choice.  This classic art house opened in 1931. It appeared in Woody Allen's Annie Hall, and remained popular until it closed in 1987.

The Thalia was incredibly small, maybe 60-70 seats. The floor was concave. Starting at the last row, the floor rolled down to a valley midway, then curved up. In all the years I went there, I don’t think the floor was ever cleaned. Decades of dried, sticky soda, beer and other fluids grabbed at the soles of my shoes.  I can remember wine bottles coming downhill to bang against my feet.

I was around 23 when I caught the cinema bug. I had vague illusions (delusions?) of becoming a film director. One entire summer I went to double features five days a week at the Thalia. I always sat in the first row, right up close – I mean really close – to the screen, maybe five feet away. That way I could be inside the film, no people in front of me to distract me from inhabiting it.

At the Thalia I saw probably every classic foreign film ever made. All of gut-wrenching Bergman’s early films, Rossellini, Fellini, Truffaut, Godard, Renoir--to name just a few--and a little known director (at least to the general cinema public), Marcel Pagnol. He was a French novelist who filmed his own books, most taking place in the French countryside of Provence. His stories unfolded at a leisurely pace, heavy with  country characters. The black and white images of Provence made me want to be there so badly, the beauty, the simplicity of the life style, picnics in the tall, flowing grass. The bread, cheese and wine they ate in the hot sun made me famished. Harvest, Caesar, Marius, Fanny, The Well Digger’s Daughter and The Butcher’s Wife transported me to a better place.

It was Bergman, though, who had my number. Morbid young man that I was, starving for love, I was blown away by his movies, and especially his recurring actors, Liv Ullmann, Bibi Andersson, Erland Josephson, Ingrid Thulin and of course the great Max von Sydow. I fell madly, deeply in love with Liv Ullmann. I leaned toward the screen for her emotional close-ups, penetrated her eyes, was pulled in, hopelessly enraptured. Her scenes with van Sydow in Shame gutted me.

An all-time favorite was Truffaut’s Jules and Jim (1962). I believe it was the first movie to depict a loving relationship between men. Jeanne Moreau was incendiary. She must have been the inspiration for the Rolling Stones song, Ruby Tuesday. I will never forget the scene where she decides to race Jules and Jim across a bridge. She is wearing man’s clothing, with a fake mustache. They line up to run. She jumps the gun and takes off, cheating. They try to catch her. As she realizes she will win, she bares her teeth, her eyes ablaze with triumph. She is all about winning and never giving in to men or anything. The ultimate liberated woman, I guess. Sort of.

Today I watch all my Netflix movies on my 19-inch, high def computer screen, which is even closer to my face than the screen at the Thalia, roughly twelve inches. I turn off the lights. Again I’m back in the movie, part of it. I must watch 300 movies a year. Obviously my social life is a bit weak. Ha! Ha!

(While I was writing this, my son just called. He was staying with his mother to help take care of her. She is going through her fifth bout with cancer. Somehow she survives the operations, the chemo, the whole terrible ordeal, and fights on. Strong woman, my ex. My son is very emotional. Unlike me, he experiences his feelings in real life, not movies. He has had a rough life himself, yet he motors on and seeks better things. Alex is incredibly perceptive, always has been, way beyond his years. I asked my son how he’s handling his mother’s latest illness. He said, “I just learn to deal with it. You take what life gives you.” Wisdom he got from real life, not movies. I guess there’s a lesson in there for me. I need to let more people into my life. I’m taking steps to do so. Honest.

My son, though, is way ahead of me. Ironically, my fondest memories of him when I was living with my wife (for seven years), were of taking him to the movie theater. He loved movies, especially action ones. He was a bit hyperkinetic, and would bolt from me if I didn’t hang on to him. Everything attracted his attention. He would run to see it. So when we got to the suburban cinema parking lot, I had to hold his hand tight, always fearful he would run off and get hit by a car. The walk from the car to the theater was stressful, and the return trip, too. The fun came once we were inside, sitting up close (he preferred much further back, but gave in to my needs), sharing a monster box of popcorn. I am reminded of the film critic Pauline Kael’s book title, “I Lost it at the Movies.”

I have always believed in reincarnation. I am aware of two past lives--as a film director in Hollywood in the 1930s, and a ballet dancer in Paris in the 1800s. If I die, I think I would like to come back as a character in a movie that becomes a classic. I would no longer be watching from a seat, but part of it, forever and ever, viewed by fans, over and over.  I kind of hope it’s a romantic comedy. Please don’t tell anyone I said that.