Quantum Storytelling

Despite a nasty cold making a zombie out of me, I’ve been getting some work done on my outline for the November death march known as NaNoWriMo.

Already encountered situations where my knowledge as the author tips in favor of the characters when it shouldn’t so I’ve had to do some pretending, feign ignorance, and put myself in the shoes of the characters and think “What would I do?” It’s a fun excercise and one that every author has to go through at some point.

It’s even more important in a detective story where the plot is so strongly tied to the information the characters have.

On top of that though, you still want it to be mysterious so in many ways you have three sets of information: Character information, Author information, and Reader information.

I noticed in both Hammett’s work and Chandler’s that the main characters would arrive at a conclusion earlier than the reader, and thus would set about a course of action that perhaps didn’t make sense to the reader at the time, but made perfect sense in hindsight.

I have mixed feelings about that. On one hand it makes the hero seem really smart for figuring out something that the reader couldn’t, or wouldn’t, until later. On the other hand you’re cutting the reader out of the deductive process that the character is going through and being presented with a passive conclusion–a conclusion the reader had no part in figuring out for themselves.

I think it’s possible to leave a few more clues or allow the reader to predict a few things on their own. This is not to say that the writer should make things obvious, but how things are made known is equally important.

Personally it breaks my immersion a bit when the main character seems to have figured out something ‘magically’ that I had no clue about. It raises an interesting question;

How much of the hero’s actions should be a suprise to the reader?

I’ve been working on my outline for the Quantum sidestory based on my previously mentioned Secret Weapon. There are only five days left til the NaNoWriMo contest begins!

I managed to squeeze in some of my noir detective research by blazing through Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett and The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler. I’m about midway through a quantum physics pop treatment called Hyperspace by Michio Kaku which isn’t providing me much inspiration because it’s mostly about the concept of parallel dimensions.

Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett – This one gave me a real taste for what noir was all about. Almost everyone in this story is corrupt or on the take, including the hero The Continental Op who often has to compromise his situation in order to make progress in the case he was hired to do. The story is aptly titled as many people die throughout the course of the tale.

I’ve heard that Basin City, a.k.a. “Sin City” by Frank Miller is inspired by Personville, a.k.a. Poisonville of Red Harvest.

The idea of giving town names clever nicknames or monikers is interesting to me, and something I might look into. Another nugget of appreciation is the towns are almost like characters themselves. Rather than just a backdrop for the milieu, there are signature histories or elements of the town often involving the characters. These are things I definitely want to keep in mind for my city.

The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler – I’ve read some comments to the effect that Hammett’s plotting is weak. Granted I’ve only read Red Harvest so far but at first I couldn’t really see it. After reading The Big Sleep I have a little better handle why some might think this…

Red Harvest was indeed very willy nilly. The Continental Op was very much flying by the seat of his pants. This is ok for a character, as Philip Marlowe of Big Sleep very much does the same thing.

But there’s a difference between a character flying by the seat of their pants because the author wants them to and on the flip side a character flying by the seat of their pants because the story itself flies by the seat of its pants. In contrast The Big Sleep is a bit more solid. There is more a rhyme and reason to everything that happens and the story unfolds in a much less hasty and more logical fashion.

Where Red Harvest’s characters are more caricatures, Philip Marlowe and the cast in The Big sleep are much more coy. The way information is revealed or held back is very interesting. The interactions of the characters seem more genuine, and relationships more strained. It’s a bit difficult to pin down but there is a more realistic quality to the social tensions in The Big Sleep.

All this has me thinking…

What would a detective of the future be like? What tools would they use? How would computers or even things that haven’t been invented yet change the perspective of the classic noir detective?

Hank Quinlan from Touch of Evil is one of the more memorable villains I’ve ever seen in a movie. Orson Wells looks pretty different as Hank Quinlan than Citizen Kane, but he did a great job.

Touch of Evil got me thinking about memorable villains. Having recently finished Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammet and Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler, I started thinking about the villains in these books.

In Red Harvest you have Max ‘Whisper’ Thaler, a thug who only speaks in whispers which is certainly interesting if not memorable. In the Big Sleep there is Canino, a cold blooded hired gun who only wears brown, drives a brown coupe. Canino = Canine?

Because both Hammet and Chandler had roots in serials like The Black Mask, perhaps their work is a little closer to comic books than traditional fiction. It certainly reads that way, which is a good thing in my book.

Of course if you want memorable over the top just look at any James Bond film. Superhero comics are another place to look, although I’m a little tired of traditional superheroes.

All this has got me thinking about my villains and how they might be memorable.

Who are your favorite villains?