Sunday, September 27 2009

I’m reading an old mystery novel these days; a ratty old paperback called The Hollow Needle by a man called George Harmon Coxe. As far as I can figure out, it was published in 1948. It’s about a newspaper photographer who gets caught up in a murder.

I love these old mystery yarns; American hardboiled private eye stuff most of all, but I remember even liking Agatha Christie way back when my Mom would bring them home from the library and I would steal them and read them up in my room. It’s something about the setting and the emphasis on setting and atmosphere, I guess. Also, the old stuff in the books fascinates me. What the hell is a lowboy? What did the Packard two-seater look like?

Anyway, reading this book is a lot of fun, but now that I’m trying to write a bit myself, I find that the experience changes somewhat. I can spot things in the story that don’t work too well, or that I don’t like.

My main problem is with the progression from plot point to plot point. The character discovers a murder plot by doing something that he’s told not to simply on a whim. Then, instead of going to the police, he comes back to the scene of the crime and confronts the people connected to the crime. They are shocked and try to solve it, but then somebody else is murdered. The photographer discovers the body when he’s snooping somewhere he isn’t supposed to go.

The hardest thing in writing a story is to logically progress from point A to B. It’s hard to make your character seem like a real, normal human being and do logical things when the situation he’s in is by definition abnormal and illogical; if it wasn’t, there wouldn’t be a story to tell.

That’s the problem the writer grapples with here, and he’s not completely successful. In fact, the photographer comes off as an unsympathetic snoop, poking his nose where he shouldn’t.