{"id":853,"date":"2012-01-10T06:50:51","date_gmt":"2012-01-10T11:50:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thomaskaufman.com\/author\/?p=853"},"modified":"2012-01-10T06:58:30","modified_gmt":"2012-01-10T11:58:30","slug":"jazz-and-the-art-of-the-detective-novel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thomaskaufman.com\/author\/jazz-and-the-art-of-the-detective-novel\/","title":{"rendered":"Jazz and the Art of the Detective Novel"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"John<\/a><\/dt>\n<\/dl>\n<\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

I love jazz.<\/p>\n

From Dixieland to Django to Miles and Monk, from Coltrane and Bill Evans to Herbie and Chick, I love it all.\u00a0 As a kid I found a stack of 78s my dad had purchased. I heard Count Basie, Lester Young, Louis Armstrong, and even Big Bill Broonzy sing about movin’ to the outskirts of town.<\/p>\n

Yeah, I listened to jazz as a child, a young adult, and right now while writing this blog. When I was writing DRINK THE TEA, I discovered something: that jazz and detective novels have a lot in common.<\/p>\n

You could be reading “Hard Revolution,” a Derek Strange novel by George Pelecanos. Or Chandler’s “The Big Sleep.” Or Hammett or Willeford or Lawrence Block.<\/p>\n

The “who” of what you’re reading doesn’t matter.<\/p>\n

What matters is the “how.”<\/p>\n

The delivery system.<\/p>\n

I’m talking about an American invention \u2013 the private eye story, and how it gets written.\u00a0 Baltimore is the birthplace of Hammett, and also a lad named Poe. In 1841 Poe dreamed up the first private eye in his “Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Creating the first detective story is kind of like creating a new kind of musical instrument.<\/p>\n

But the history doesn’t matter as much as the form, the delivery system. How do the books get written? And the form is jazz.\u00a0\u00a0 I’ve only been on book tours a short time, yet many folks seem interested in how I wrote DRINK THE TEA. The process. Did I use an outline? That gets asked a lot. And I always give the same answer — no.<\/p>\n

I think outlines are great, I just stink at making them. And the writers I named above have written books without outlines.<\/p>\n

How is that possible? Because telling a story is a way of thinking. And the more you do it, the better at it you get.<\/p>\n

Now think about this: jazz is an American art form. For years it was our only music that didn’t stem from European traditions. And jazz is spontaneous.\u00a0 Jazz is improv<\/strong>. Jazz is creation in real time. Jazz is extemporaneous.<\/p>\n

Jazz is.<\/p>\n

And that is why I listed the writers above — these guys improv their way through the telling of their story.<\/em><\/p>\n

Chandler freely admittedly that plot was not his strongest point. In THE BIG SLEEP he never names Owen Taylor’s killer. And Chandler gives all of us writers an invaluable tool: if a scene starts to drag, have a guy walk in holding a gun.<\/p>\n

The great private eye writers improv<\/strong> their way through the telling of their story. And that’s why detective stories are a kind of jazz. Because jazz and the detective story are both American art forms, and both improvisational.<\/p>\n

Now, in a song you have chord structure, harmonic melody.\u00a0\u00a0 These are like the rules of the song. And just as you need to know the rules of a playground to ave a good time there, the musician needs to know the limits. Even if s\/he intends to overstep the limits, it’s good to know what they are.<\/p>\n

A detective novel is part of the mystery genre. It too has rules. You break them at your peril.\u00a0 What are the rules? Not that many. There’s a crime, perhaps a murder. The detective gathers clues and speaks to suspects. By the end the blame is placed on the guilty party.<\/p>\n

There are endless variations, but those are the basic expectations of anyone who reads the genre. Like jazz, the detective novel is a fun place to play. It’s fun to make things up as you go along.<\/p>\n

And it’s good to know the rules.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  I love jazz. From Dixieland to Django to Miles and Monk, from Coltrane and Bill Evans to Herbie and Chick, I love it all.\u00a0 As a kid I found a stack of 78s my dad had purchased. I heard Count Basie, Lester Young, Louis Armstrong, and even Big Bill Broonzy sing about movin’ to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":857,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-853","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thomaskaufman.com\/author\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/853","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thomaskaufman.com\/author\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thomaskaufman.com\/author\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thomaskaufman.com\/author\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thomaskaufman.com\/author\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=853"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/thomaskaufman.com\/author\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/853\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":865,"href":"https:\/\/thomaskaufman.com\/author\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/853\/revisions\/865"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thomaskaufman.com\/author\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/857"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thomaskaufman.com\/author\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=853"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thomaskaufman.com\/author\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=853"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thomaskaufman.com\/author\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=853"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}