Compelled to show you more real WRITING
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OK, many people have favorite crime writers. But I think they overlook one great one:
John D. MacDonald.
I won’t bother to describe his prolific output of novels. I’ll just give you lines from them:
“The only thing that prisons demonstrably cure is heterosexuality.”
“He had detected a certain sensitivity, a capacity for imagination, in the girl in New York. But the years and the roads, the bars and the cars and the beds and the bottles—they all have flinty edges, and they are the cruel upholstery in the dark tunnel down which the soul rolls and tumbles until no more abrasion is possible, until the ultimate hardness is achieved. So here she sat, having achieved the bland defensive heartiness of a ten-dollar whore.”
“Three cents’ worth of squeeze bottles, plus two cents’ worth of homogenized goo, plus prime-time television equals 28 million annual sales at 69 cents each. This is the heartbeat of industrial America.”
“A devoted technician is seldom an educated man. He can be a useful man, a contented man, a busy man. But he has no more sense of the mystery and wonder and paradox of existence than does one of those chickens fattening itself for the mechanical plucking, freezing and packaging.”
“Only a woman of pride, complexity and emotional tension is genuinely worthy of the act of love, and there are only two ways to get yourself one of them. Either you lie, and stain the relationship with your own sense of guile, or you accept the involvement, the emotional responsibility, the permanence she must by nature crave. I love you can be said only two ways.”
“They have been taught that if you are sunny, cheery, sincere, group-adjusted, popular, the world is yours, including barbecue pits, charge plates, diaper service, percale sheets, friends for dinner, washer-dryer combinations, color slides of the kiddies on the home projector, and eternal whimsical romance—with crinkly smiles and Rock Hudson dialogue. So they all come smiling and confident and unskilled into a technician’s world, and in a few years they learn that it is all going to be grinding and brutal and hateful and precarious. These are the slums of the heart.”
Sometimes MacDonald paints in a touch too sentimental for me, but most of the time he delivers on the nose. He’s propelled to write by what he sees around him. You read his books and you know that.
Now, have a bit of this, by someone else (name withheld). It’s far from the worst piece of prose I’ve ever read. But you sense the writer is sitting at a table building a little prop to set up the intro to the story. A way in for the reader. Something clever. It doesn’t work. It’s clumsy. The artifice is obvious. In the process, the historian brought into the piece to make a crucial point comes off as a clueless doofus:
“On a recent Tuesday morning I found myself two kilometers from Gaza. Every few minutes we could hear the boom of a 155 mm howitzer sending fire across the border, but I was trying to focus on the historian Michael Oren, who was talking to me not about the war raging around us but about Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, a Roman general who walked the world 500 years before Jesus was born, some 200 kilometers from the spot we were standing.”
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