Hey, You Talkin' to Me?

by Libby Hellmann

The following is part of a conversation for the PWA (Private Eye Writers of America) newsletter between author Kent Krueger and me. You can read the whole thing in a month or so in the next PWA newsletter, but I thought you might like a sneak preview.. as well as a chance to join the conversation.

William Kent Krueger, as many of you know, is a fabulous author and story-teller. He has 9 or 10 books out, all but one featuring Cork O’Connor, who is sometimes a PI and sometimes a police officer in the fictional Minnesota town of Aurora. Kent has won the Anthony Award (as well as a bunch of others, such as the Minnesota Book Award) probably more than anyone I know, and when you read his books, you’ll understand why. Visit him at his website.

Q: Why did you start writing PI crime fiction?

Kent: I started out by having Cork step back from law enforcement, then becoming involved in law enforcement again, and then stepping back once more, mostly to maintain credibility in the things that drive our plots. The “PI” was a convenient way to do that, rather than the “accidental” sleuth.

Libby: “Accidental”, not “amateur”?

Kent: Accidental.

Libby: My transition to PI was for much the same reason. My protagonist, Ellie Foreman was an amateur sleuth, and I kept wondering how many more times she could come up against dead bodies without stretching credibility. After the fourth book, when I was scraping the ceiling for a rationale, I realized something had to change. Happily, Georgia Davis had already been introduced, and I knew I wanted to explore her further. So she, rather conveniently, became a PI.

Q: How familiar were you with the “PI” tradition, and how did that influence your decision to make your protagonist a PI?

Kent: My first entrée into the genre was Philip Marlowe. My next reading jag was Robert Parker and Spenser, so I pretty much knew what the subgenre was about. But I didn’t want to do a traditional noir PI type of book, because that wasn’t the character of the series. When Cork became a PI, he was a different sort of PI.

Q: How was he different?

Kent: He has a family for one thing, so he’s not a loner. He also has a significant network of friends and people that he’s known his own life in this small town. That’s another thing that’s different: Cork operates in a small town. He’s a guy who has fairly middle-class values: he’s Catholic, he practices his religion, he’s a father, and who knows -- he might even be a member of the Lions Club one day.

Q: Sounds like you’re describing Kent Krueger.

Kent: I’m not a member of the Lions Club. What about Georgia?

Libby: She’s more the classic noir PI, but a female version. I read Chandler and Parker, but it was Sara Paretsky, Marcia Muller, and Sue Grafton, as well as the “second generation” of PI writers like SJ Rozan and Laura Lippman who influenced me. Georgia’s more of a loner. She’s got baggage, which I’m still discovering. And she’s not afraid to put herself out there, regardless of the danger. She’s still honing her skills, though, and that means she makes mistakes, some more serious than others.

Q: Why did you become a member of PWA?

Kent: The truth is I got tired of watching all these PWA members sneak off at Bouchercon for their secret dinner, and I wanted to know what that was all about.

Libby: I even learned the secret handshake.


Now, it's your turn...

Why do you like PI crime fiction?

Describe the perfect -- or your favorite -- PI.

What would you like to see in PI crime fiction that hasn’t yet been done?


Happy Holidays, everyone.

The Long Goodbye

by Michael Dymmoch

My first encounter with Philip Marlow was in school. Chandler’s work wasn’t on any reading list, and I didn’t know crime fiction from newspaper filler. But I knew I liked the prose. I was an ugly duckling of a writer then, wondering why I wanted to hang out with art majors instead of other science geeks. I didn’t know a simile from sansemilla or a metaphor from a metronome. I still thought writers were inspired by God.

Years later, when I discovered I wasn’t a duck at all—or a chemist for that matter—I read Chandler again. And as a writer, I like the prose even more because I know how hard it is to write well. And to write beautifully. And to say more with metaphor than with mere description. Now, I know Chandler should have been on my schools’ reading lists.

Take, for example, his description of a man too far gone into the bottle: “He was leaning against a store front. He had to lean against something. His shirt was dirty and open at the neck and partly outside his jacket and partly not. He hadn’t shaved for four or five days. His nose was pinched. His skin was so pale that the long thin scars hardly showed. And his eyes were like holes poked in a snowbank.”

After Marlow rescues and feeds this individual, “His face now had a little color and the eyes were not so far back in his head that you had to grope for them.”

The beauty of metaphor is that it says so much more than the literal meaning of the words—paints the story and the subtext. Chandler was the master. His prose is elegant the way a great mathematical proof is elegant, or a tersely written bit of computer code. It does what’s needed without wasted words. And what a pleasure The Long Goodbye is to read.

Chandler was pretty good at suspense, too. Take the opening of chapter five: "The gun wasn’t pointed at me, he was just holding it.” Or the ending of chapter eight: "'Guess you won’t be with us long, if you’ve got Endicott,' he said pleasantly as he locked me in. I said I hoped he was right." Chandler was, after all, the man who advised, “In writing a novel, when in doubt, have two guys come through the door with guns."

While it’s true the plot of The Long Goodbye rambles a bit, it covers a great deal of ground. Chandler managed to get in social commentary, a great shot at corrupt cops, and a portrait of California that made me feel I’d been there.

For the reader who loves words, following the story is like discovering wonderful sights when you’ve strayed from the Interstate.

A Long Hello to The Long Goodbye . . .

by Sean Chercover

"Everything a writer learns about the art or craft of fiction takes just a little away from his need or desire to write at all. In the end he knows all the tricks and has nothing to say." - Raymond Chandler

That quote always kills me. Sad as hell, and although I don’t think it is necessarily true, it was true enough about Raymond Chandler’s writing life.


THE LONG GOODBYE (TLG) is commonly regarded as Chandler’s finest work – the apex from which he descended very quickly. With this book, he’d mastered the “art or craft of fiction” . . . and after this book, it seemed that he had little else to say.

I first came to Raymond Chandler as a teenager. Already a fan of Dashiell Hammett and Mickey Spillane and John D. MacDonald, it was Chandler’s use of language that first knocked me back on my heels. Those magic similes; those perfect observational paragraphs. Upon later readings, I was taken by the strident (and often prescient) social commentary.

And those preeminent qualities still jump off the page and grab me by the throat . . .

But THE LONG GOODBYE now also moves me as a novel of naked self-assessment. Not only was it Chandler’s last great work, but it foretold his sad decline.

Much has been made of TLG’s value as a work of social criticism, and I do think that is where its major strength lies. (I also recommend Chandler’s previous novel, THE LITTLE SISTER in this context.) The Long Goodbye and The Little Sister both take on the big issues that previously had been almost exclusively the domain of literary fiction.

And both books display Chandler’s breathtaking use of language, at a time when his skills were at their peak. The masterful similes and perfect paragraphs that have been noted in previous Outfit posts (scroll down for more on this).

No, plots were not Chandler’s forte (to put it very mildly). And I agree that he did not write women well. But damn, did he ever give us a couple of complex and damaged men in The Long Goodbye.

It is clear that two of the major characters – Terry Lennox and Roger Wade – are Chandler himself, at different points of his life.

Terry Lennox is a damaged war veteran, drinks too much and doesn’t like himself much at all. He is pathetic and ineffectual, but he hasn’t given up, not completely . . . and despite the wreck that his life has become, he is still looking for a chance at reinvention. We like him for that, and Philip Marlowe does too. Marlowe is uncharacteristically sentimental about Lennox and sacrifices a great deal, to support the man Lennox could’ve been / should’ve been / could’ve become.

Like Terry Lennox, Chandler was a veteran of WWI, left scarred and insecure by his war experiences, who lived the high society life of big money and fancy cars and marital infidelity . . . before he burned out and lost his job in the oil industry and reinvented himself as a writer of hardboiled detective fiction.

The other major autobiographical character, Roger Wade is a bestselling novelist struggling to finish his latest novel, struggling with alcoholism . . . and losing. Marlowe bristles at Wade’s ego and self-pity.

Chandler, like Roger Wade, had become a bestselling novelist who felt that he deserved more respect than he got. Like Wade, he had a complicated marriage, no children, many readers, and a growing problem with booze.

Philip Marlowe is the lens through which we see these very different self-portraits. Marlowe clearly favors Terry Lennox – Chandler’s younger self – and who wouldn’t? But he also comes to acknowledge a redemptive quality about Roger Wade.

To Eileen Wade, Marlowe says, “Your husband is a guy who can take a long hard look at himself and see what is there. Most people go through life using up half their energy trying to protect a dignity they never had.”

Reading THE LONG GOODBYE, one might say the same thing of Chandler.

If THE LONG GOODBYE is Chandler’s last great work, it is also his most complex, and it rewards multiple readings. Every time you read this book, it reveals more of itself. This may be, in the end, what marks it as literature.