26Apr

The Masters of Narrative Drive

• Saved in: Craft, Writers
• by Chris Orcutt
• with Comments Off on The Masters of Narrative Drive

Over the past year, I’ve become obsessed with the writ­ers of paper­back noir/crime/sleaze nov­els from the late 40s through the 60s.

Hav­ing now read at least 100 of them (no small feat, con­sid­er­ing how dif­fi­cult they are to find), I can say with author­i­ty that these guys knew bet­ter than any oth­er authors of their time (and today, for the most part) how to hook the read­er and keep him hooked.

And yes, the cov­ers were eye-catch­ing, but as tit­il­lat­ing as they were, they weren’t enough to keep men read­ing if the sto­ry sucked.

This skill of keep­ing the read­er read­ing is known as nar­ra­tive dri­ve or, as Lar­ry Bein­hart says on page two of this book, it’s “the promise—or threat or tease or suggestion—that some­thing is going to hap­pen.” Giv­en the num­ber of titles that came out around this time, it’s amaz­ing that these authors achieved such vari­ety with­in a fair­ly com­mon frame­work.

The gen­er­al plot struc­ture, which each author tweaked depend­ing on his style and the quirks of the sto­ry he want­ed to tell, was as fol­lows:

A com­pe­tent man, usu­al­ly with a drink­ing prob­lem, is either a stranger to town or stum­bles into an unfa­mil­iar sit­u­a­tion.

Usu­al­ly on page one, he meets a femme fatale, a sexy and often younger temptress. The woman draws him into her web with a tale of how she is trapped by her cir­cum­stances, but with his help, they can kill the guy in the way (the over­bear­ing hus­band) and keep the loot (a bag of mon­ey, gold, or an insur­ance pol­i­cy like in DOUBLE INDEMNITY by James Cain).

The two of them then engage in crazy ani­mal sex in every place imag­in­able. The man is now hooked on the woman and will do any­thing she wants. He con­vinces him­self that he’ll be able to get the mon­ey and the girl, if he can only com­mit the mur­der per­fect­ly.

Most of the time, though, the guy’s drink­ing gets in the way, and there’s always some annoy­ing twerp/blackmailer that catch­es on and comes in towards the end to foul things up, so they have to kill him/her as well and screw it up.

The temptress then dou­ble-cross­es the com­pe­tent man who helped her and absconds with the mon­ey, some­times killing the man her­self.

As I said before, that’s the frame­work. There are dozens of vari­a­tions on this struc­ture. Mind you, I’m not mak­ing fun of it; in fact, I’m work­ing on a nov­el of my own that fol­lows a sim­i­lar struc­ture.

What amazes me is this: even though I’ve read dozens of these sto­ries and know how they’ll end, every time I find myself hop­ing, and in some cas­es believ­ing, the pair will get away with it—that they’ll have each oth­er and the mon­ey and get away with killing the schmuck who usu­al­ly deserves it.

And every time, it ends bad­ly for them.

The fact that I con­tin­ue read­ing when I know, every time, that it won’t end well, is a tes­ta­ment to the skill of nar­ra­tive dri­ve these authors pos­sessed. I can’t tell you how many nights I’ve lain awake well up to 2 or 3am read­ing one of these sons of bitch­es. Here are my favorite authors in this genre:

1. Gil Brew­er
2. Charles Williams
3. Har­ry Whit­ting­ton
4. Jim Thomp­son (his work went well into the 70s)
5. Hank Jan­son

And in case you were try­ing to think of a nice lit­tle gift to buy me (friends & rel­a­tives, lis­ten up), I’m look­ing for the fol­low­ing titles to add to my col­lec­tion:

TALL, BLONDE AND EVIL by Greg Hamil­ton

SNOW BUNNIES by Joan Ellis

NAKED ON ROLLER SKATES by Maxwell Boden­heim

NUDE ON THIN ICE by Gil Brew­er

SATAN IS A WOMAN by Gil Brew­er

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to get back to my nov­el, in which a com­pe­tent stranger shows up and a sneaky vix­en tricks him into killing her hus­band…

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