Why fiction?

On January 18th, I had occasion to chair a meeting of Mystery Writers of America’s Midwest chapter while chapter Prez Julie Hyzy met with MWA bigwigs in New York. Our guest speaker, Daniel P. Smith, is a freelance journalist and author. Smith said he got the idea for his book from a ride-along he’d done with his police officer brother. One of the first calls of the tour was a homicide, a man shot by his 17 year old stepson. The scene had a transforming effect on Dan. He and his brother spent the rest of the shift searching for the shooter, leaving to Dan wonder how officers deal with their feelings when they have almost no downtime between calls. The result of that wondering was On The Job: Behind the Stars of the Chicago Police Department.

After the meeting, Dan stayed for an impromptu discussion with—among others—authors Sam Reaves, Tom Keavers and Centuries and Sleuths owners Augie and Tracy Aleksy. One of the subjects that arose was why we write fiction when real stories are so compelling and exciting.

A consensus seemed to be that we write fiction because we love justice and closure—things life rarely gives us between the parentheses of birth and death. In fiction we can explain the inexplicable, weave in all the stray threads, punish the guilty, and reward virtue and bravery and cleverness in ways that rarely occur in life. Fiction has a beginning, a middle and an end. Usually. Fiction enables us to know our heroes and our lovers far more intimately than in real life—don’t writers usually provide us with their thoughts and feelings, uncensored in moments of peril and loss?

Our discussion left me thinking about the subject the next day, and I recalled a philosophy course I took in college. The instructor told us that no one—this was forty years ago, mind you—writes philosophy any more, at least not the way Plato and Hegel and Marx did. Today’s philosophers are writing novels, plays and movies. (And, yeah, essays on in the commentary pages of news papers and publications like the New Yorker. But who reads those?) Modern mainstream philosophers are telling it like it is in fiction, unhampered by the need to be fair or to get the facts right. My instructor assigned J.B. by Archibald McLeish, Catch 22 by Joseph Heller, and Nikos Kazantzakis’ Last Temptation of Christ. I hadn’t thought about that class in many years, but the instructor was right, I think. He may not have anticipated blogs, and perhaps bloggers are today’s philosophers, but blogs are so ubiquitous and diverse that most serve specialized and largely convinced audiences. The big time philosophies are still being advanced by art.

That’s my take. What’s yours? Whose ideas are you listening to? Any straight philosophers we should know about? Where do we find them?

Sam Reaves Sings the Mean Town Blues

by Libby Hellmann


Sam Reaves, aka Allen Salter, is, quite simply, one of the best crime fiction authors in Chicago. I’ve been reading him since his Cooper MacLeish series,and continued with his Dominic Martell and Dooley books-- he just keeps getting better. I love his prose. His plots and his characters aren't half bad, either. His tenth novel will be out soon, and I'm thrilled he's stopping by The Outfit to talk about it… and more. Both he and I will be around to check comments, so feel free to post. Welcome, Sam!

Some books are easy to write, others are tough. Sometimes a book just fights you from beginning to end; sometimes you start out like a house afire and get bogged down in the middle; sometimes you careen along having fun with the story and then when it’s time to wrap things up you realize you have so much going on you’re going to have the devil of a time making it all come out right, with no loose ends dangling.

Most of mine seem to be tough. Looking back, the easy ones stand out: Fear Will Do It practically wrote itself; Dooley’s Back took eight months from conception to completion, the fastest I’ve ever done a book. Homicide 69 was a lot of work from a research point of view but the writing mostly went pretty well, and I had a great police consultant, the late John DiMaggio, looking over my shoulder. But both Bury It Deep and Get What’s Coming gave me fits. I was struggling with the awkward nature of the Cooper series (essentially an amateur sleuth but stylistically closer to a P.I.) and having trouble getting a handle on the stories. I have bad memories of those books, though I think they came out all right.

Under my Dominic Martell pseudonym, Lying Crying Dying and The Republic of Night went well, making me think I had it down, and then Gitana twisted totally out of my control and wound up being the toughest to finish of all my novels.

Mean Town Blues was one of the easy ones. The premise is simple: we’ve all heard about a woman being persecuted by a stalker and thought, “Somebody ought to just shoot the son of a bitch.” (Admit it, you’ve thought that.) Well, what if you did? And what if when you did, you found out that you’d killed somebody with some very heavy connections? You’d need to be a fairly steady hand yourself to deal with the consequences. And there’s my novel. Tommy McLain, a Kentucky boy just back from a rough tour in Iraq, finds out that Chicago can be a mean town indeed.

Basically I just wound up the story and let it run. And because I knew who Tommy was, knew where he came from and what had forged him and how he thought and talked and reacted, the book pretty much wrote itself.

I wish I could figure out what I’m doing right on the easy ones, so I could do it every time. If I’ve learned anything, it boils down to keep it simple, find the right voice and take care of the prose.

I hope I can remember that when I start my next book.

Sam

PS You can celebrate Mean Town Blues with Sam at his launch at Sheffields on Wednesday, November 12 between 7 and 10 pm; 3258 N Sheffield, Chicago.

My Fate Is Sewn Into the Hem of Her Failings

By Kevin Guilfoile

The August issue of Chicago magazine includes a lengthy update on the fate of Jeanette Sliwinski, the model/stripper who killed my friend Doug Meis and two other Chicago musicians three years ago. Incredibly, although she was sentenced to eight years last November (far less than prosecutors sought in a bench trial) due to incomprehensible prison math, she's likely to get out of prison in just a few months:

[A]round Thanksgiving this year, [Sliwinski] will be asked to gather her things and prepare for her release from Dwight Correctional Center. The announcement will probably come on the day before her sentence officially ends: Jail officials say they time it that way so nothing holds up the inmate's last obligation—a meeting with a prison counselor. In this meeting, Sliwinski will receive a check from her "trust fund," the bank account that holds the prison wages she has earned since her first day in jail. The counselor will then describe the conditions of Sliwinski's parole, likely mentioning whom she'll report to and how she will be expected to conduct herself. Before she's set free, Sliwinski will likely learn that, in two years' time, she can petition for the return of her driver's license.

Depressing as that thought is (and perhaps nothing will anger you more than reading about the violence done to her victims in Noah Isackson's account and then glancing at Sliwinski's unblemished, unemotional DOC mug shot), there is a light at the end of the weekend. Doug was a drummer in several bands. One of them, Exo, disbanded after his death--the thought of playing those songs on stage without Doug's exuberance behind them had become unthinkable. But this Sunday night (August 10) at Schuba's in Chicago, Exo is reuniting for an acoustic show, with all proceeds being donated to the Doug Meis Gifted Artists of Tomorrow Scholarship Fund. It will be intense and it will also be great fun, an emotional gathering of musicians and friends honoring Doug and John Glick and Michael Dahlquist, as well. Absentstar will open the show and the terrific Coach K, who nearly ten years ago DJ'd the infamous McSweeney's event at the Ethiopian Diamond restaurant, will man the turntables starting at 7PM.

I hope to see you there. I hope to see lots of people there.

-----

Simon Baatz's For the Thrill of It is out this week. The extensively researched non-fiction account of the Leopold and Loeb case is reviewed in this weekend's Trib and I have a short piece on the legacy of that murder (featuring comments from novelist and Friend of the Outfit Sam Reaves) in Saturday's book section. I commented on L&L just a few weeks ago so I'll leave it at that post and this weekend's essay, but frequently when I read a book like this it helps me to make a map of the events. And since I'm much more familiar with Chicago's north side than I am with the south side, it was particularly helpful for me in this case.


View Larger Map

This was a working map I slapped together as I was reading and I make no warranties to its accuracy. But it really struck me as I followed the geography of this case that, sensational as it was (and still is), this really was a neighborhood crime. The murderers lived within blocks of each other and Richard Loeb lived right across the street from their victim, Bobby Franks. (The fact that Kenwood is now Barack and Michelle Obama's neighborhood adds an irrelevant yet irresistible contemporary twist, of course.)

History has dwelt on the existential evil of the case, but the real horror of this particular Crime of the Century was a timeless one--the fear of the devil who lives next door.