In forty years of reading Elmore Leonard, and of surfing along on his stories—tense as they are, and yet so wickedly relaxed—I found myself moved by a letter that he wrote to one of his grandchildren, who was departing for Los Angeles in 1998. This is how it ends: “One thing I’ve noticed, especially in the movie business, the girls are smarter than the guys. But the guys have the power. Really all you have to do is be yourself. Be cool. Go with God, Grandfather Elmore.” Makes you weep. I mean, Jesus, a great writer who was also a good person? Whatever next?
Slow books. Long-haulers. Glacial-pacers. Forever-endeavors. Determine the quickest, most efficient way of writing a book, and then do the opposite: That’s me. Besides sleeping, there is no activity to which I have devoted as many hours of my adulthood as researching and writing three of my five books. As writerly processes go, this one has zero professional benefits and can be murder on the ego, too. Nonetheless, I’m five years into the research of my fourth long-hauler that’s shaping up to be my slowest yet.
Why do I write these sorts of books, repeatedly?
Canada has always grappled with its relationship to the U.S.: how similar we are, how different we are and how much we need one another. What is Canada without America? For Windsor, such speculation has always been sharper: without Detroit, would Windsor even exist?
While it’s less hyperactive than some of its book-fellows, Susan Choi’s Flashlight still has the wide-legged feel of turn-of-the-century fiction: domestically sprawling, geopolitically bold. Stretching from a strawberry farm in Indiana to the North Korean border, Choi’s sixth novel reckons with the lies that undo families and underpin empires.
The Peepshow, Kate Summerscale’s latest true crime book, goes beyond the gruesome details of serial butchery, with corpses stashed under floors, behind walls, and stuffed into sheds. That display of London low life titillated the millions who bought the newspapers that sensationalized the details for their circulation wars. But Summerscale, who could have outdone the British journalists of the 1950s, isn’t satisfied with sex and gore. Her goal is Dickensian, to reveal the parallels of decadence and shame that still ran through all levels of British society a century after Dickens. Unlike Dickens, she does not put her outrage into words [“Dead, your Majesty. Dead, my lords and gentlemen. Dead, right reverends and wrong reverends of every order. Dead, men and women, born with Heavenly compassion in your hearts. And dying thus around us every day”], but instead she lets the facts of the situation speak for themselves.
The seven stories in Monsters and Dogs were written over a long period, their composition interrupted by Haddon’s triple heart bypass. That time span may be the reason they are each so different even though most have their origin ideas in classic myths. Yet despite that similarity, each story is a unique creation, a fully imagined narrative that transforms the source myth into a distinctive reality as richly developed as a detailed novel. The fundamental reason for that is the writing. Few authors have Haddon’s command of language. The words covey much more than information, building a complex reality alive with emotional resonance.