Dialogue in Crime Novels; Daisuke Matsuzaka
I said, dialogue in crime novels.
Are you still with me? Good.
I'm probably not very strong on visual cognition, because the lavish, loving, detailed descriptions of landscapes, houses, rooms, or whatever visual fetishes some authors indulge in quickly lose me, and I am thinking, come on, get on with it… And I don't do much better with a plot either, where three threads is usually one too many for me to handle. Instead, I am a sucker for dialogue, and that's why I still mourn G.V. Higgins' passing away, though he did seem to fall into self-parody in some of his later work. (Dialogue does not travel well, which I think is why his books were hard to find in Japan, even before his death.)
Of course nobody does self-parody better (or worse) than Robert B. Parker in his later Spenser novels. There, the dialogue went from intriguing to scintillating to… Really, to ask us to suspend belief and pretend that people talk like that is pretty thick in the first place; but that people who've been around each other since the Nixon administration will is simply mind bending. To his credit, Mr. Parker has realized this, and invents new protagonists from time to time, and seems come back refreshed by this. Still, I can remember a time when I could truthfully say I'd read every one of his novels in print. Not any more.
Dialogue doesn't really have to be natural to be believable. I doubt the people in Botswana, even private detectives, talk like the people who inhabit the world of the fabulous, traditionally built Precious Ramostwe. But we do believe in it, because we know there's an alternate universe out there somewhere, where people really do talk and act like that, and we are privileged to visit them every other year or so. Alexander McCall Smith writes other novels, and I'm sure they're delightful too. But I refuse to read them in the fear that such an act will break the magic of this other world beyond my event horizon.
But my all-time favorite dialogue writer is Elmore Leonard. The murderers, the conmen, and the really bad guys, as well as the good guys ("good" is extremely situational in LeonardWorld), talk the talk like trisomes, a cut or two above the rest of whatever mediocre or worse specimens of humanity Mr. Leonard chooses to make them.
On a totally unrelated matter, the Red Sox seem to be having trouble signing Daisuke Matsuzaka. No wonder; he'll be 27 when he starts next season, right? That means he'll be 28 when he can go into the 2008 season as a free agent, right? So why does Mr. Matsuzaka have to leave 50 million dollars on the table for the Seibu Lions to take home, when he can grab that for himself a year later? It's not as if he'll have to pitch for free next year if he sticks around. There's that nagging matter of injury, but Lloyds will insure him against it; besides, he has an extraordinarily flexible body that allows him to use a fluid, almost languid delivery that looks injury-resistant.
Do you think the Seibu Lions will offer a rebate? Do you think the Red Sox bid Mr. Matsuzaka up, just to keep him out of the Yankees' clutches?
Are you still with me? Good.
I'm probably not very strong on visual cognition, because the lavish, loving, detailed descriptions of landscapes, houses, rooms, or whatever visual fetishes some authors indulge in quickly lose me, and I am thinking, come on, get on with it… And I don't do much better with a plot either, where three threads is usually one too many for me to handle. Instead, I am a sucker for dialogue, and that's why I still mourn G.V. Higgins' passing away, though he did seem to fall into self-parody in some of his later work. (Dialogue does not travel well, which I think is why his books were hard to find in Japan, even before his death.)
Of course nobody does self-parody better (or worse) than Robert B. Parker in his later Spenser novels. There, the dialogue went from intriguing to scintillating to… Really, to ask us to suspend belief and pretend that people talk like that is pretty thick in the first place; but that people who've been around each other since the Nixon administration will is simply mind bending. To his credit, Mr. Parker has realized this, and invents new protagonists from time to time, and seems come back refreshed by this. Still, I can remember a time when I could truthfully say I'd read every one of his novels in print. Not any more.
Dialogue doesn't really have to be natural to be believable. I doubt the people in Botswana, even private detectives, talk like the people who inhabit the world of the fabulous, traditionally built Precious Ramostwe. But we do believe in it, because we know there's an alternate universe out there somewhere, where people really do talk and act like that, and we are privileged to visit them every other year or so. Alexander McCall Smith writes other novels, and I'm sure they're delightful too. But I refuse to read them in the fear that such an act will break the magic of this other world beyond my event horizon.
But my all-time favorite dialogue writer is Elmore Leonard. The murderers, the conmen, and the really bad guys, as well as the good guys ("good" is extremely situational in LeonardWorld), talk the talk like trisomes, a cut or two above the rest of whatever mediocre or worse specimens of humanity Mr. Leonard chooses to make them.
On a totally unrelated matter, the Red Sox seem to be having trouble signing Daisuke Matsuzaka. No wonder; he'll be 27 when he starts next season, right? That means he'll be 28 when he can go into the 2008 season as a free agent, right? So why does Mr. Matsuzaka have to leave 50 million dollars on the table for the Seibu Lions to take home, when he can grab that for himself a year later? It's not as if he'll have to pitch for free next year if he sticks around. There's that nagging matter of injury, but Lloyds will insure him against it; besides, he has an extraordinarily flexible body that allows him to use a fluid, almost languid delivery that looks injury-resistant.
Do you think the Seibu Lions will offer a rebate? Do you think the Red Sox bid Mr. Matsuzaka up, just to keep him out of the Yankees' clutches?
posted by Jun Okumura at 9:01 PM
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