Guest post by Tim Hallinan
Tim declaiming to an eager audience |
The
only time William Shakespeare almost loses control of his most sublime comedy,
“A Midsummer Night's Dream,” is when a group of “mechanicals” assembles in the
forest outside Athens. They are there to
rehearse a play they plan to present at the nuptials of the local aristos, and
they nearly walk off with Shakespeare's whole show.
They're
called “mechanicals” because they work in trades that involve skilled
labor—including a tinker, a bellows-mender, a carpenter, and, last but
certainly foremost, a weaver named Bottom, who has quite a night in front of
him.
Some
420 years later, “mechanicals” are, to me, the characters I need for
essentially mechanical reasons – to move the plot along, to fill in some
exposition, to shoot someone, whatever.
They present a real challenge. If
they're not interesting, their mechanical function is obvious to the reader. If
they're too interesting, they distort the story's focus. The challenge, as I see it, is to make these
“mechanicals” individuals without wasting a lot of the reader's time to build
them up and explain them, since we'll probably never see them again.
The key
to maintaining this balance (for me, anyway) is to remember that every
character in a book thinks the story is about him or her. Your hotel clerk may have twelve words with
the protagonist and then disappear, but in her world the protagonist was
a twelve-word intrusion on her continuing story. Like everyone else, she's come from
somewhere, she's going somewhere, she's where she is for a reason, and she
wants something.
A
couple of examples.
In the
last Junior Bender book THE FAME THIEF, Junior questions an old-time director
named Douglas Trent about the book's primary victim, a former actress named
Dolores La Marr. The purpose of the
scene is just to give the reader some info from La Marr's career in the 1940s
and to introduce a couple of suspects from back then. From the moment Trent appeared on the page,
he was alive to me:
Doug
Trent had been a very good-looking young man,
and he was doing everything money, medical science, and a high pain threshold
could contribute to the cause of making him a very good-looking old man. His skin had the fraudulent flawlessness of a
wall that's just had graffiti sandblasted off it. And if that wasn't enough to put me off him,
his naturally silver hair was as blue as a delphinium . . . . To make it a
trifecta, he was also wearing an ascot, tucked into the open neck of a loose
white shirt.
“Yeah, yeah, Dolly,” he said. He touched the tips of his fingers to the
corner of his right eye, as though checking to make sure the masonry was
holding. “Terrible, terrible thing, what happened to her. Beautiful girl, just beautiful. Couldn't act for shit, of course, but it
didn't matter, as long as she hit her key light. Light went right into those pale eyes, and
the audience just filled them in with whatever emotion the background music had
to offer. Do you know how Mauritz
Stiller got those long, heart-wrenching close-ups of Garbo?”
“No.”
“He got the light exactly right, put the camera a foot
from her nose, and told her to count to ten.”
I said, “In Swedish?”
Trent, who had moved on to
patting the skin beneath his eye, stopped and gave me a first-rate cold
look. “How would I know? The point is that a lot of what an actress
gets credit for is actually due to the director.”
“I'm sure,” I said. “I mean, makes perfect sense.”
“Trust me,” Trent said. “I know actresses. I married six of them.”
“What was it like, being married
to six actresses?”
“Like being married to one of
them. They're all pretty much alike.”
“Why'd you keep doing it, then?”
“'Hope is the thing with
feathers,'” Trent said, “that tickles your scrotum at the moment when you most
need a clear head.”
Junior
starts out not liking Trent, and for good reason, but becomes more sympathetic
toward him over the course of the conversation, and so did I. I wound up giving him what I think of as one
of the book's pivotal lines:
“For a few months there, and then again after the scandal
broke,” Trent said, “you'd have thought Dolly was a real star, not just one
more girl who'd accidentally made a good movie.”
“Was that what she was?” I said. “Just one more girl?”
“Honey,” Doug Trent said, rubbing his eyes, “there are
thousands of them.” He looked around the
room again and cleared his throat.
“They're the fuel that Hollywood burns.”
To me,
Trent had been waiting in that crummy apartment for weeks, a man who used to
matter in Hollywood, hoping for someone to talk to. He opened himself to me
(and the reader, I hope) with a minimum of resistance.
One
more, and I'm done.
In the
most recent Poke Rafferty book, THE FEAR ARTIST, there is a trio of former
European spies, all in their seventies, who hang around in an actual Bangkok
bar where ex-spooks who would have killed each other on sight in the 1970s buy
each other drinks and re-fight the old battles.
One of them, a Russian named Vladimir, is essential to the story.
But
Vladimir needed a couple of foils to challenge him, tease out information. One of them might be named Janos, and he's
one of my favorite things in the book.
He has the spy's ultimate attribute: he's completely forgettable. Here's how we meet him:
Two
men wait in the final booth, the one to which the Russian leads him. Rafferty's eyes are adjusting to the
darkness, and as he sits he sees that one of them affects the ever-stylish Dr.
Evil look, with a shaved head, a mustache, a goatee, and a single earring above
a pale garment that might be the grandchild of a Mao jacket, while the other is
simply part of the scenery, a man with no distinguishing characteristics
whatsoever. A written description would
read, medium everything.
Rafferty slides in beside Dr.
Evil as the man with the Russian accent says, “You buy, yes?” and shouts
something to the bartender without waiting for an answer.
“Vladimir,” the Russian man
says, pointing at himself as he sits.
“Pierre,” he says, indicating Dr. Evil.
“And, um . . .”
“Janos,” says the man without
any characteristics.
“Always I forget,” Vladimir
says. “This is why you genius.”
Janos nods modestly, and
everyone waits, looking at Poke.
I liked Janos so much that I
used him in a couple of scenes, and in the last moments of his life, the man
who will shoot him says, “I'm sorry.
I've forgotten your name.”
Sorry to go on at such length,
but I wanted not just to talk about what I believe but to show you a
couple of ways (maybe not very good, but there you are) that I tried to solve
the problem.
Visit Tim's website to learn more about all his terrific books.
No comments:
Post a Comment