Norman Green

Murder By the Book review: OregonLive.com

I’d like to thank Barbara Tom, from the Oregonian, for her kind words about ‘Sick Like That’.

Norman Green is probably the best author you’ve never heard of. Until this book, his mystery novels have been stand-alones, not part of a series. How to classify his work? Noir-ish perhaps, with a big nod to redemption as a theme. It’s never too late in Green’s world for his characters to salvage some grace before they bite the big one.

You can read more on Murder By The Book Review: Norman Green’s Sick Like That [oregonlive.com]

Tags: barbara tom, murder by the book, oregonlive.com, sick like that

NorthJersey.com reviews Norman Green

An interview with Mike Kerwick from NorthJersey.com.  You should read this.

North Jersey.com: Life’s street corners are full of characters for Westwood writer

Tags: interview, Mike Kerwick, northjersey.com

INERTIA

It’s what keeps a freight car from rolling away of its own volition.  It is also what keeps my fat ass on the couch watching the Mets when I should be working on my next writing project.  Don’t get me wrong, I like a little downtime between projects, it gives me a chance to unwind, to handle things that I can’t deal with when I’m in the middle  of a manuscript, and I even get to read a little bit.  I got some of the kinks worked out of my new computer, and I read a couple of books by Jim Butcher (the wizard ones), one by Richard Morgan and another by Malcolm Gladwell.  I like the way Gladwell thinks, I like Butcher for pure escapism, and I like Morgan because he goes places I would never think to go.  I envy those of you who can read whatever you want, whenever you want.  For me, reading hasn’t been the same since I started working on my first book.

But you know what?  That freight car is still sitting there, it ain’t going anywhere on its own, and it’s damned heavy.  The thing is, one man can move an empty freight car all by himself, as long as he has a Johnson bar.

I don’t know who Johnson was or what he did to get his name appended to that particular implement of torture, but a Johnson bar is basically a huge lever, generally about six feet long, most of it made out of thick, hard wood.  It has a steel lip on one end, and the thing is so heavy it has a pair of metal wheels near the steel lip to help you hump it from place to place.  So what you do, you jam the lip under one of the freight car’s wheels and then you jump up and hang all the weight of your aforementioned fat ass on the other end of the bar.  If you do it right, the freight car will move.  Not a lot, but it will move.

That’s the easy part.

Next, and quickly now, you dolt, before the car stops moving, you shove the bar back underneath the wheel and you give it another yank.  And as long as you have the technique, the strength and the stamina, you can keep the car moving.  I know because I’ve done it, when I was young and ignorant and newly arrived in Brooklyn, the Johnson bar was part of a job that I was unfortunate enough to find.  Okay, it wasn’t exactly a job, it was more like a situation.  A predicament, you might say.

Anyhow.

Inertia is keeping my next writing project sitting perfectly still, and sometimes it seems about as heavy and reluctant to move as that freight car.  I have budged it once or twice but I couldn’t keep it going…  But I like writing.  It is one of the best things I have ever given myself, and one of these afternoons I’m gonna get that sucka going.

I promise.

Say What?

‘Out of the heart’s abundance,’ the good book says, ‘the mouth speaks.’  As a writer, it is part of your job to both see and hear your characters clearly enough for that to happen when you write dialogue.  If your hero is a generous person, the ghost of his generosity should glimmer faintly, now and then, in his speech.  If he is tortured by regret, that spirit should show itself too, through the hint of a shadow and only on occasion, but still, present.  Your character’s history is in his voice, his education, background and sense of humor all show themselves in the patterns of his speech.  This makes your job easier as well as harder, because while you must listen carefully and pick up on the way we reveal ourselves in conversation, in writing you will no longer have to tell us who your characters are, they’ll do it for you if you let them speak.  Be they wit or half-wit, they’ll show us and we will understand.

Another important point about dialogue is how rarely any of us speak the King’s English correctly in life and how often characters do it in print.  In New York City, for example, the question ‘would you care for a bagel?’ will often be abbreviated to ‘you want?’  It may seem an obvious point but a great many writers, myself included, lose track of it as they wrestle with the other tasks and problems of writing, such as theme and plot and just how long does this effing thing have to be before I can tie a bow on it…  But if your characters all speak correctly, they will seem flat and two-dimensional.

Another thing that can be fun to play with is accent, but here you must exercise caution.  In Huckleberry Finn, Twain gives Jim a distinctive and distinctly American voice, but I have read more than once reviewers who carp when contemporary writers try to do the same thing.  ’Dese and dose, does anyone still talk like that?’  Yes, Virginia, they do, however un-PC it may be to observe the fact.  Just tune your AM radio to 660 WFAN in New York most any weekday morning and listen to Joe Benigno for a while.  To Joe there are three kinds of men, dese guys, dose guys and dem guys.  The major-league baseball team in Detroit is known as the Tigiz, and there exists, somewhere out in the vast middle-American wasteland, an institution known as ‘Notta Dame.’  Now I love Joe and I sincerely hope he never takes an elocution lesson, but you can’t keep that up throughout an entire novel, it would be maddening.  You can, however, sprinkle in just enough for your characters to maintain their uniqueness, their humanity.  Think of it as the spice in the stew.  Yeah, I know you gotta saute the beef and chop the veggies and like that, but if you don’t get the voices right, it’s all fa nuttin’.

Capisci?