You are viewing your 1 free article this month. Login to read more articles.
I was asked to write an essay about crime fiction in the United States, a sort of geographic guide in a couple of hundred words.
Here’s the problem: the USA is rather large.
I discovered that in college. I had a battered old Chevy LeBaron, a rust-mobile with bald tyres, and I drove that creaky piece of garbage all over the country. Most weekends, my road buddy and I would pile in and just pick a direction. Drive all night in a fugue of energy and junk food.
At first, the destination was the destination. We’d hurtle along, propelled by a vision of walking Boston Common in the rain, or watching the sun rise behind the Washington Memorial. Feasting on crabcakes in Baltimore, or pressing against the glass atop the Sears Tower in Chicago. But soon the voyage itself became the point. Camaraderie and open windows and loud music, yeah, but also joy in the subtle cross-fade of scenery, the way trees and signs changed, the shifting quality of light, the variance in accents. The simple everyday things that to me were exotic.
All different places, all possessing an essential sameness.
That’s what makes setting such a powerful factor in fiction. The best stories are fundamentally human ones, stories that reveal something about our life, stories that form a direct communicative link between author and audience. That’s the sameness. Setting is the difference. The world not your own into which you are drawn.
But the problem with talking about setting in American crime fiction is that America is, as previously stated, very large. Even limited to crime fiction, you’re faced with a dizzying array of flavours. LA noir? Southern gothic? New Jersey mafia fiction? Fuhgeddaboutit.
So what I’ve done is touch on a handful of authors that are not only favourites, but who replicate that road trip vibe. It isn’t conclusive or exclusive or any other–usive. It’s just a few who put me back in that old Chevy Shitbox; who remind me of that magical difference in the essential sameness.
Ready to go? Fire up the engine and pass the beef jerky. Let’s go clockwise.
One of the oldest American cities, Boston is a blend of blue-blood and blue-collar, an immigrant’s town where swagger and humour are currency. It’s a world Dennis Lehane captures perfectly. If you want to get a sense for the world of contradictions that is Boston, I’d recommend The Given Day. It’s an epic love letter to the city, a sweeping historical thriller with characters big and small, legendary and forgotten.
Next, hop on I-84 and head southwest to New York City, perhaps the most written-about city in the world. But nobody has the abiding hard-on for the place that Colin Harrison does. For him, the city is always a protagonist; in fact, his characters often feel like dreams the city is having. I’d have a hard time choosing between Manhattan Nocturne and The Havana Room; happily, since I’m at the wheel, I don’t have to.
Not all of Baltimore is as gritty as the portions David Simon writes about. But on a literary level, you can’t beat the world rendered in Homicide and The Corner. The non-fiction stories of dope slingers and murder police, of crushing poverty and gallows humour are as compelling as any thriller.
Elmore Leonard is not a guy generally associated with setting—a side effect of his dialogue-heavy, description-light style—but I’ve always found that I can picture his worlds perfectly. Especially Miami, which he populates with ex-cons and idle millionaires trying to hustle one another. For my money, it’s a much more interesting town on paper than it is in person. Anyway, I’ve devoured most of Leonard’s stuff, but the very first I read was Stick, and it’s, well, stuck.
Nest stop, Appalachia. Can’t recommend leaving the vehicle. Daniel Woodrell’s Winter’s Bone. ‘Nuff said.
Moving on. There are plenty of books set in the American heartland, but few that give it the feel of a world apart. It may be because of the nature of the land itself: nondescript, gentle, carpeted with farmland and crisscrossed by interstates. But Gillian Flynn’s Dark Places leaves the highway for a small town in rural Missouri, and tells a tale that is neither gentle nor nondescript.
If you want to get a sense for the contemporary American west, from the loneliest desert to the most vicious peak, Blake Crouch is your man. He’s also likely to warp your head and give you night sweats. Blake’s books are brutal and bloody and relentless, dark fairytales written in prose as spare and beautiful as a Western sunrise. I recommend Abandon or Run.
The US/Mexico borderlands are a realm all to themselves. In case you haven’t heard, Mexico is having a few internal squabbles at the moment—for “internal squabbles” read “brutal drug wars”—and ripples from them shapes that region. T. Jefferson Parker vividly recreates the borderlands in Iron River, a ripped-from-the-headlines thriller about an undercover operation to stem the flow of gun-running to Mexico. You’ll have sunburned cheeks and dust in your throat by the time you’re done.
At last we come to sunny Southern California, home to Don Winslow, one of the more exciting writers working today. His best book, in my humble, is The Power of the Dog, a sprawling epic exploring every facet of the War on Drugs (see “Mexico’s internal squabbles” above). However, a close second is his incendiary Savages, about a trio of beach bum pot magnates in Laguna Beach.
Finally, last but never least. Los Angeles is a town the whole world knows; hell, it’s been exporting itself for decades. Even if you’ve never been, the vision you have is fairly accurate—it’s just not complete. LA is more than the sum of Entourage and Training Day. In truth, it’s too big and complex a city to belong to any single writer. But one guy has the best claim staked: Michael Connelly. Year in, year out, this guy turns out a great book, a book that lets you smell the smog and drive—nobody walks in LA—the pavement.
It’s a fitting way to end this literary road trip. So now, as the sun drifts below the horizon and sets the waves aflame, it’s time to head back to your car. Roll the windows down. Smell the night air.
Then crank the music and head for the next destination.
The Two Deaths of Daniel Hayes by Marcus Sakey is published by Bantam Press.