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One evening a couple of weeks ago, I made the always-to-be-avoided trip from my home in Brooklyn to one of those white-wine, chat-and-circulate functions with which the literati punish themselves for some notable success or another. The secret to parties like this is that everybody wants to have been there; nobody actually wants to be there. I think I went for what Saul Bellow called 'a humanity bath' – a biological need for human contact. After months of chuffing and chugging on a novel in my New York writer-sized apartment, I needed to give myself some perspective, to remind myself that as crucial as every sentence and plot nubbin in my book is to me, plenty of people – most people – don't really care. I took great comfort from this; I walked myself back from the ledge.
I believe we were celebrating a magazine's anniversary. The function lacked the focus and good cheer of a book-publication party, and had a suspiciously high ratio of glossy, chipper publicists to grumpy, booze-sucking writers. Either that, or the former just did a great job of defending the open bar from the latter. Anyway, having ducked, dodged, and barreled through enough terrifyingly professional white-toothed grins, there I was, a plastic cup of room-temperature vinegar in one hand, munching on something skewered and grilled that had allegedly, at one time, lived in the ocean but which in fact tasted exactly like a piece of filleted racquetball, explaining myself to a guy in chunky black glasses who had buttonholed me by the drinks table. He asked what I wrote, and I told him.
'Mysteries,' he said, in a descending tritone of condescension. 'Cool. Really great. So stuff for the masses – like, popular stuff? – more than, you know, real literature?'
It wasn't the first time I'd heard this kind of sneer, and I'd love to be able to tell you that I had a riposte – or at the very least a quick left – at the ready, but in fact I never quite know what to say. I'm sure this same guy would have been able to parse the minutiae of whatever rock band was enjoying its fifteen minutes; I'm sure if I said I had written a biography of, say, Charles Mingus he wouldn't have looked down his nose and said, 'One of those popular musicians, is it? Josquin and late Beethoven are beyond you?' I'm sure, too, that he's watched the films of Martin Scorsese, Ang Lee, and Michael Winterbottom, no matter how many suburban multiplex screens their films have graced. I would even guess he could discuss 'American Idol' – with the requisite ironic detachment, of course, but that fools nobody. And yet crime fiction and mysteries, at least in the United States, especially within the self-selected guardians of literary culture (who would, of course, never admit to being anything of the sort) still has to fight for respect.
And yet, I'm aware as I write this that I'm preaching to the converted, selling snake-oil to oleaginous ophidians, carrying coal up Tyneside-way. If you're here you swallowed the Kool-Aid. Really what I wanted to do was to write the above scene – the party, the snob, the grumpy solitary author – which is all, of course, fictional. I wanted to write that scene because it seems to me typically, archetypically, New York, and I believe crime writing at its best serves a more sociological function than traditional literature. At its best what one takes away from a good crime story are not the details of the crime itself, but the details surrounding the crime, the way the author brings to life the milieu in which the crime occurs.
Of course, I'm not the first author to say this; Ian Rankin once said that before he visits a city for the first time, he tries to write a crime novel set in that city. And though our styles and subjects matter differ, I doubt I could have begun writing had I not first read the novels of George Pelecanos, which bring Washington, D.C. – the city where I was raised – to vivid life. Pelecanos – like Connelly, Mosley, Chandler, Hammett, and Conan Doyle: the masters – both creates an imagined city at the same time he painstakingly describes an existing one, in a way nobody before him has. Just as Conan Doyle, in creating London, brushes up against the world of the powerful but focuses with zeal and sympathy on the underworld, so Pelecanos's Washington is composed not of politicians but of the working people – mostly but not exclusively black – who comprise the real Washington, which begins where the news cameras' halos end. This was the city I had grown up in but had never seen portrayed in fiction. Chandler's Los Angeles, Rankin's Edinburgh, Hammett's San Fran, Conan Doyle's London: all of these were fictional constructs to me, because I didn't know the landmarks, the smells, the vistas, the rhythms. But Pelecanos's D.C. was his, but also mine; I finally saw how to translate from eye to page.
This is not to imply, of course, that the Wickenden or Lincoln I created in my first novel (fictional cognates of Providence, Rhode Island and Washington, Connecticut) are as deeply or skillfully portrayed as Pelecanos's D.C., nor to claim our goals or legacies are totally parallel: the grime on his shoes is real and hard-earned; for better or worse, I'm a little more comfortable in a library carrel. Still, however divergent our styles or books, I still would not have understood the process of literary translation without him, and his mission – shining a light on the complex web of social networks in which people actually live – seems to me crime fiction's cardinal mission. It differs from what we could call – for better or worse, and however sloppy the category – 'literary' fiction in focusing on the rich, multivalent surface of life shared by many characters (those in the story and, by implication, many more) rather than the interior life of a limited number of people. To put it more simply: crime fiction glides above a city; literary fiction delves deep within the residents of a single apartment.
And after moving to Moscow, I had to glide, as best as I could; I wanted to write my way out of Rankin's Rule: that is, if reading a crime novel set in any given city allows you to better understand that city, surely writing one would do the same. Right? Yes/no/maybe? Anyway, that's more or less what I had hoped. The Geographer's Library was an attempt – however feeble, however error-riddled, however misguided – to understand something about the ruined, glorious country in which I was living. It was also a long valentine to Providence, Rhode Island (incarnated in TGL as Wickenden), the best and weirdest of American cities. It was also an attempt to say something about the evils we permit ourselves to do in the name of a good cause, in Hannah's case, in the name of belief. It also... well, who cares about any of this really. The only thing that matters is: was it a good story? Did you live in Paul and Hannah for a while; did you care about them? Do you remember them? That's the only metric for a story, crime or otherwise; anybody who writes for any other reason – therapy, revenge, the edification of others, vanity (well, it's perhaps not such a bad thing to have a little bit of this) – is asking for trouble.
That's what I would have, I hoped, told the guardian in guardian glasses, had he existed. That the social novel, whose disappearance everyone laments, did not die with Tolstoy, Dickens, or Balzac; rather, novelists rose in prestige and education; they became college-educated and usually graduate-schooled; and society expanded, doubled back on itself, expanded again, and – through technology, migration, and travel – kept on expanding. That the crime novel is as valid a means of understanding what happens in the world as any other novelistic form. And that what matters is the story, not where you find it on the bookshelf. I would have said all of this if I'd left Brooklyn that night. Instead I had a beer on my roof and watched the sun set over lower Manhattan.
The Geographer's Library by Jon Fasman is out now in Penguin paperback Read more
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