Praise for Purple Pros

Almost twenty years ago, I was invited to join a writers’ group that met in Beverly Hills (Michigan). Most of the other attendees where published, although I only knew the woman who invited me, Annick Hivert-Carthew.

When one of the others started reading, I was floored. I felt I was in the presence of greatness, like Papa Hemingway had sat down next to me at a bar.

His name is Loren Estleman. At last count, he has published over forty books, some westerns like Billy Gashade, the one he was reading from, but mostly noir. His writing is crisp and poetic. It never fails to delight me.

Another author who read that night was Sarah Wolf. At the time, she had two mysteries in print, and was working on a family saga about the Turkish massacre of Armenians in the early 1900s. Her writing was equally beautiful, on the order of Maeve Binchy’s work, but she couldn’t find a publisher.

I was mesmerized by both of them.

On the other hand, much of what I read, especially among thrillers, is very badly written. I often wonder how an author ever made it out of the slush pile, but there he (or she) is in hardcover.

I am not enamored with most literary fiction. I recently picked up a book that was being praised to the heavens. Against my instincts, I persevered for two hundred pages, then skipped ahead a hundred pages at a time. I never finished it. It was boring. The characters were boring. The story lacked a plot. Okay, maybe it was character driven, but I wouldn’t drive those characters to the end of my driveway.

This from someone who stays up past bedtime reading about complexity theory.

Let me be perfectly clear. While I have a Ph.D. my education hasn’t been the slightest bit liberal. The closest I got to the humanities was philosophy. I am, however, a voracious reader. I read everything: hard science, social science, history and fiction. I read the Iliad and Odyssey for pleasure before I could drive.

I think I know good writing when I see it, and I think I can tell if my own writing is okay. I adore writers like Nevada Barr, who effortlessly capture place, personality and plot. But this is a point of departure with some of my current writing friends. One of them, I’ll call her Ann Rant, scrupulously avoids reading fiction. She is deathly afraid she’ll unintentionally plagiarize some famous author, thereby missing her one chance at stardom.

Maybe I have an advantage because I remember much of what I read. I can usually place a phrase or situation with a particular author, and often to a particular book. I can usually tell by the first paragraph if I’ve read a book before, even if it was twenty years earlier.

I believe all that reading enriches my writing. If an exquisite remembered phrase comes to mind, I can turn it into something new without treading on the original. The greatest writing I’ve read scans like poetry, and on the rare occasions when I achieve that effect, I can see it.

My friend Ann Rant is a beautiful writer. Her characters are full of vivid integrity to the point that I can tell when she writes something her character would never say or do. Despite this, Ann remains tentative and uncertain. She has toiled over her manuscript for years. It remains unfinished, in a constant state of flux. She should be on a book tour by now.

Back to purple prose.

I like alliteration. Some of the best phrases I’ve enjoyed are built from similar syllables tied together like matched pearls in a necklace. Beauty calls from nature, from music. Beauty speaks its own name in literature, too. Even in murder mysteries, if they are ever allowed into the hallowed halls of literature.

I can murder my characters without murdering the language, too.